Actually, I can answer that question for you. Maude likes to think she has these big social skills but it’s not true. What Maude has is a Body – and boy, does she know how to use it! You should have seen that little group sitting around waiting for their blow on the spliff. Or should I say, just waiting for their blow? They were all sneaking admiring glances at Maude, but they were wasting their time. Know why? Because only one of them was a tank commander. See?
‘Negotiations.’ Hmm. Prostitution is the correct word, if you want to be polite. I said that to her once, and she wasn’t happy.
‘You are so full of prejudices, you ought to put them in a bag and sell them down the market,’ she told me. Her attitude to it was like, she was some kind of artisan? You know? ‘Some people work with their hands, I work with my vagina – get over it!’ she said. She had a badge that said that for a while, but she soon got rid of that once the Christian militias started up. You can get thrown off a building for that sort of thing.
She spent quite a bit of time in and around that tank after that. There were three crew, all guys. I didn’t like to ask, but somehow she picked up what I thought was going on, and told me it was just her and ‘Don’, ‘having a thing together’. Which I may or may not have believed. And which may or may not have been true. So what? It’s none of your business anyway. Or mine, come to that.
8
Anyway. While Maude was off having a fortuitous fling with a tank commander, I was having adventures of my own.
I was sitting with Rowan on the tarp making up a story for him, cos he’d fallen out with some kid and came home crying, when this car came revving not so far away. So I got out to have a look, and guess what? There was an FNA Jeep about twenty or thirty metres away, and guess who was in it? It was only Tariq! Tariq, an old mate of my dad’s. Big hairy Pakistani guy. He used to be always round at our house. Him and Dad would sit down and polish off a few bottles of wine and talk politics, and then as soon as Tariq left, my dad would moan about how much wine he’d drunk, and what a big hangover he was going to have the next day. We hadn’t seen him for ages and here he was. What about that? In all that chaos.
The Jeep had stopped and there was a crowd growing around him – as soon as people saw someone official-looking they were all over them, trying to find out what was going on, I suppose. I made a beeline for him, shouting and yelling and waving my arms. It was just as well he had the engine off – there were people shouting, and he was in the middle of it with his hands raised, trying to calm them down. He’d just about done and was getting his driver to start up again when I got to the edge of the little crowd.
‘TARIQ!’ I bellowed.
He turned round and stared at me for a moment, then he shook his head like I was some kind of a circus act. I was still dressed in my gladrags. I’d have been offended if I wasn’t so relieved.
‘Marti!’ he yelled, and he jumped out the Jeep to give me a big hug, while all the Asians stood round looking at us, like, What in the name of Allah is this freakery!
So while useless Maude was having a wank in a tank with a yank (sorry, I couldn’t resist it), I was actually being useful making important contacts. I don’t call her Rubblehead for nothing.
Not that I imagine there was much actual wanking going on in that tank, mind.
Tariq drove me and Rowan to the FNA command building, in an old pub on the Didsbury Road, (which was very appropriate for a man who used to drink two bottles of wine a night), and gave us tea and sandwiches and cake. Cake! I hadn’t had cake for ages. Rowan was gobbling it down like a pig at a trough, and I tried to stop him, but Tariq just waved a hand. ‘Let him eat, let him eat, there’s plenty more where that came from.’ Which was great, except it never came after the little piglet had troughed the first one.
People are like that with little kids. And then as soon as you get to thirteen, they stop thinking you’re all cute for gobbling all the cake and they think you’re greedy.
Tariq hadn’t changed – scoffing cake, drinking beer and complaining that his wheat allergy was making him bloat. He was quite high up in the FNA, which was a bit of a joke, because the FNA was pro-EU, pro-Western, pro-democracy and pro-free market, and Tariq was a diehard old anticolonial communist. My dad used to call him the last communist in Manchester. He’d been in Bradford for the past couple of months, but they’d recalled him because of all the refugees turning up in Manc. He could speak about eight Asian languages.
Of course he wanted to know what was going on, so I told him a pack of lies. I can admit it to you, can’t I? Why? Because I trust you so much? No. But what can you do? Sitting there with a book in your hand and thinking you know it all. Well, you don’t.
So I told him that Maude had gone off to join the FNA and me and Rowan were trying to head off east to Hull, to get a ferry towards Amsterdam, where my brother was. But now we were stuck! And I was soooo worried about my little bruv. And he was a man with contacts... an important figure in the local FNA... could he help us in any way? Poor Rowan, getting headaches and having nightmares from being under the rubble for three days... Boo boo hoo!
Dad’s software? Tariq knew all about that, he was on to that pretty quick. No! Tragically lost in the bombing. Yes, all of them. We searched and searched but we never even found them.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, what a cow! Deserting her best mate! Dumping her dad’s life’s work. Well, I’m so sorry, but that’s the sort of person I am. Hard as nails. Get used to it. Dumping Maude – you think that was wrong of me? Listen – if she’d got her hands on Tariq first, I’d be on my way south to get my brain turned into a Salvation Army pamphlet and spit-roasted by priests down in the ERAC before you could even spit. I was actually cursing myself that I’d brought Rowan along or I’d have said Maude was off with him. He was just another burden as far as I was concerned. Really. Like I say, that’s who I am. Live with it, cos it ain’t gonna change.
It was going so well. Really well. He was sucking it up. We were actually at the point where he was starting to organise things like a car to carry me east towards Hull, how far he could get us, what the dangers were, that sort of thing. Then he began shaking his head. ‘Your dad!’ he said. He got all teary, and to be honest so did I. Then... ‘And your dad’s stuff – all that work he did. Gone. What a terrible waste!’
Then he looked at me all crooked and wet-eyed and he said... ‘He’s been seen, you know. Your dad. Yes, he’s still alive.’
I froze. I was so shocked! I just stared at him like a beast in the fields. I could hardly speak. Alive? I was so sure he was dead, I knew in my bones that he was dead.
I was going, ‘But, but, but...’ as if I wanted him to be dead because... because... I suppose because I’d got used to it like that.
‘But where?’ I said.
‘The ERAC,’ Tariq was saying. He nodded. ‘But it’s not good news, Marti. He’s been rewritten. He’s on the other side now. One of them.’ He pulled an ugly face. ‘Better off dead. If he knew what he’d become...’
And I was like, What are you saying? That my dad’s a Blood? That can’t be right. He was always an enemy of the regime! He hated racists, he hated everything they stood for. They could never turn him into one of them. He’d die first!
Tariq came around the table and gave me a hug. ‘I know how hard this is to accept,’ he said. ‘I never thought I’d say this, but it would have been better if they’d just killed him, because at least he would have died as himself, instead of living as a monster they invented for their own purposes. But we mustn’t give up hope, Marti! The technology they use, it’s new, it doesn’t work very well. They have him now but that doesn’t mean they have him for ever.’ He shook his head again. ‘It had to be your dad of all people! He was the best hope we had of reversing the rewriting technology. If only that software had got into the right hands, if only we still had it, maybe we could actually get him back.’
I wasn’t really taking
in what he was saying at that point. I still couldn’t believe it. In fact, I refused to believe it, so in the end he pulled up a video he had on his computer.
‘Prepare yourself for a nasty shock,’ he said.
It was an interview with my dad. And you know, it would have broken my heart to watch it if I’d still had one. He didn’t look like he used to, but it was him all right. He’d lost weight, he’d gone grey – even his skin looked grey and he was always quite dark, my dad. He kept squinting and frowning and glaring. He kept losing his temper and shouting, like some kind of nutjob.
But it was what he was saying that really did my head in.
How the Bloods were right. He could see that now. Yes, of course Black people were inferior to whites. It was obvious when you thought about it.
A load of stuff about how the arts and sciences and industrialisation in Europe was by white people, whereas Black people never did any of that...
‘All they ever did was bang drums and live in mud huts,’ he said.
Tariq put his head in his hands and groaned.
‘It doesn’t mean we all have to become agricultural workers and factory fodder,’ my dad was saying. ‘Things have moved on. The most able can still rise in a modern society. It doesn’t mean Black people are stupid – just that they aren’t usually as bright as white people. That their natural urges are less controlled. Less civilised. Individual Blacks can move to good positions in society if we behave ourselves and study hard. Some of us have got the talent. It’s just that, well, most of us haven’t.
‘We need to accept our place in the natural order which God created. It’s His wish. To each his own station, to each his own estate. We have to learn humility again. All this equality nonsense! Black lives matter, yes, of course they do, but not as much as white ones. Once we submit to our true place in their world, once things get back to where they should be – to where God intended them to be... then, who knows? Maybe...’
And my dad actually got all teary about this bit.
‘Our Heavenly Father might even send His only begotten Son back to Earth and then, brothers and sisters, at the end of days – hallelujah! – Heaven will come to Earth and mankind will live in...’
‘Turn it off!’ I cried. It was unbearable. My dad was always the proudest man who ever walked this Earth. Look what they had done to him!
Tariq terminated the wretched thing.
‘Dad would never say that!’ I howled. ‘It can’t be him, it must be some kind of fake.’
Tariq nodded. ‘You’re right. It’s not your dad. It is a fake. It’s some miserable fiction written by those bastards down in Huntingdon. Your dad is just the medium through which it’s played. I’m so sorry, Marti. I’m so, so sorry.’
I felt like my whole world had been blown away. I loved my dad so much! I loved my mum, too. Look, I stayed in Manchester for her – there was no other reason. But me and my dad – we had a special connection. We were like... I don’t know how to say it. We were like it should be between a parent and their child.
Let me tell you about my dad.
His skin is beautiful – the colour of old pine. I used to tell him he was the colour of antique furniture, and he would say that was because he was an antique. He’s handsome. His hair’s in neat little dreads, some of them going grey, and he has a high, wide forehead, and inside that is his marvellous brain. You think I’m just saying that, but you have no idea how clever my dad is. He is so clever! He used to tip his head back to look at you when he was talking, following his thread, and then you’d see his eyes go off into the distance, because he’d forget who he was talking to. He’d go off into some theoretical stuff I never could follow, but he always came back and remembered who he was talking to, and translated himself into simple things I could understand. Yes, he was away a lot, but he was never distant, he was never patronising, he always engaged with you. And yes, he had a hard time accepting me for who and what I am, and yes, that did change things between us a bit. But he never stopped loving me and trying to help me. And he was fun – so much fun! We were always laughing together, I think he lived to talk and to laugh. In many ways, he was the best dad in the world, which is why I hated him when he went away so much and left me with my crazy mum.
He has the most beautiful fingers – long, neat active fingers, tapering towards the end. Look! Like this. I have his fingers. They’re my best feature. And he always looked good, whether he dressed in his suit or jeans and trainers. My dad looked so good, even in his pyjamas, he still looked good. He loved me and I loved him. And he was still alive. Still alive. But...
Tariq was going on about how there was still hope, how we could still save him, how they had their best people working on how to gain control of the mainframe at Huntingdon and put all the rewriting they did there into reverse, to find a way to undo it to give them themselves back.
‘Because they can’t get rid of your old self without completely destroying your mind,’ he said. ‘If they’d done that to him, all he’d be doing is grinning like a zombie and praising the Lord. If they want you to talk like he does, they have to just block off your access to your old personality, not destroy it. Your dad is still in there somewhere, hidden inside his brain, cut off from his own mind. If only his work had survived, we could have got him back. Such a shame! But other people are working on this as well...’
On he rattled. And... I couldn’t do it, could I? My dad’s work. Think about it. Tariq was telling me that my phone could actually save him. I’m not a good person. I do bad things. I could let Maude down, I could let Rowan down. But not my dad. I could never let my dad down.
I started crying properly then, and Tariq came to comfort me. I was saying, ‘What have I done, what have I done?’
And he was saying, ‘You mustn’t blame yourself, Marti, you did your best, there’s nothing anyone could have done, it’s this bloody war.’
And I was saying, ‘No, you don’t understand, it really is my fault.’
And I told him the truth.
Tariq looked utterly astonished. He listened carefully to it all and then he said, ‘And Maude?’
‘Still at the camp,’ I sniffed. I had my head down. I couldn’t look him in the face. It’s so hard when you get caught out.
He went round behind his desk and sat down.
‘So, when did you become such a little shit, Marti?’ he said quietly. ‘Lying about the software that so many people depend on. Dumping your friends? You and Maude are practically sisters.’ The bastard was actually leaking tears. ‘You weren’t like this when you were young. Is it the war? Is this the way young people are turning out? Because if they are,’ he said, ‘we have no hope left.’
‘It’s the war,’ I told him. ‘I’m not like this really.’ Although I knew I was. I was so ashamed. Even he was embarrassed. That’s how bad it was. He was right of course. There was no hope. But not because of my generation. Because of his! His lot brought us to this, brought me to this. That’s the truth, isn’t it?
I wish I’d thought to say it at the time, but I couldn’t even speak. All I could do was sit there and bend my head and watch the tears dripping off the end of my nose onto my lap. I was so ashamed. Being a bad person is much easier if no one ever finds out about it.
9
Yes, I was given a hard time by Tariq about trying to dump Maude and lying about the phone, which I suppose I deserved. Not that Maude seemed to care all that much. It was hard to make her out sometimes. Sometimes it was like she’d lay down her life for me, whereas I wouldn’t’ve given up a packet of bread rolls for her. But she always took it on the chin. She’d get cross for about ten minutes, then calm down and we’d be mates again. If that were me, I’d never speak to her again.
But all that was besides the point. The point was – my dad was alive! That changed everything. Like I say, I’m hard and cold, a heartless bitch. But I wasn’t always like this. I was never exactly what you’d call a sweet kid – p
eople like me don’t get away with sweet. But I did love someone and that person was my dad. Yes, I loved my dad. It used to break my heart when he went away. Really, it killed me over and over again. And he loved me back. He did. He adored me. My mum always used to say how much he adored me. When I was a baby, as soon as I was born, he plucked me up off her breast and wouldn’t give me back until the midwife told him off. She told me that story a hundred times. I used to make her say it two or three times in a row, I loved it so much.
In the end, I did get a bit more used to him going away. He used to talk to me about how it would be if anything happened to him, so I suppose I must have been preparing for it because when finally he did disappear, I hardly cared. Funny, eh? I never felt a thing.
But now that he was back – bam! I was... I don’t know what I was. I was delighted, I was dancing! I was angry, furious with him for going away and then furious with him again for coming back into my life like this, in a way that stopped my ideas of escape dead in their tracks. I was ashamed. I was jubilant! No way could I abandon my dad! No way.
I let Maude and Tariq tell me off for being mean – why should I care what they think? – and then I went outside and I found a big lump of mud and I smashed it up, I punched it and I kicked it and I gouged its eyes out. I wished it had been a baby I was doing it to, that’s how angry I was. Because now I was actually going to have to do it. Go to the ERAC, after all. You see? That’s how I am. I could happily do over Rowan, eat his sweets, steal his blanket, leave him out for the dogs and still have a good night’s sleep. I could sell Maude to a travelling brothel and eat out on the proceeds for a week and it wouldn’t have bothered me one bit. But I could never, ever leave my dad to be a racist bastard working for the Bloods. It was impossible for me.
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