Not From Above!

by Alexander Mayor

  •

  That morning we’d all assembled in the clearing where the helicopter had crashed back at the end of the times-before. Edged by thick foliage and on a slight promontory, it had become known as ‘Breeze Top’. The broken rotor blades that thrust up out of the sand added a sort of dystopian call-back to things we would only revisit inwardly. Plucky rescue attempts. Summer blockbusters. Will Smith.

  Breeze Top was our religious totem, our dignity in adversity, providing a small sense of historical mastery over nature. I joked to Jacqueline that perhaps one day they’ll erect a gift shop where you can buy printed copies of our founding documents. She failed to laugh. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  The insects were at their most insistent that week, so proclamations would be punctured by the sound of cursing and slapped flesh, but that had probably also been true back in that other time, that other country. All eyes and ears were facing forward. Fittingly, it was Hark, the day of listening, which comes after Rea, the day of rest.

  The general idea had been for everyone to take a bit of time to go off and come up with ideas for our new governance structure, then bring them back to the group. Exciting times. It’s not often you get to be in on the ground floor of a civilisation. A chance to be a Washington. A Jefferson. Who was the guy that ran New York? Oh yes. A Bezos.

  Although the sun was blazing, I spotted Jules, a silhouette moving by the tree line. He seemed to be reciting to himself, no doubt preparing his contribution. He moved his palms upwards, outstretched in an expansive gesture; perhaps he intended a spiritual focus for our founding documents? That gave me pause, but Jules was always all positives, so I just smiled and walked on.

  Cross-legged on a broken plastic palette at the other side of the clearing were Eleanor and Paul, deep in discussion. They’d bonded early over previous careers in political social media, and the way Eleanor held Paul’s hand as she spoke showed a deepening bond. In another time and place it would have been an unremarkable scene, enacted in a thousand public parks every summer. But I ground my teeth. We needed to legislate as individuals if we were to make rules fit for a group, not a group of dualities. I’d been hoping everyone could rise above their own narrow interests, on this of all days.

  An hour or so later, as the sun’s intensity started to weaken, Georg blew the emergency whistle that regularly summoned us all to Breeze Top. Alannah joined him, a pile of sun-blanched leaves in one hand. She hadn’t been long out of university when this change of scene had befallen her. Some joked that she’d become Georg’s intern, unpaid but keen to learn, picking up some of the island admin that filled more and more of every day.

  I could just about make out a few words scrawled on the top leaf, probably using charcoal from last night’s fire. So this was it. Our visions recorded, now to be shared. The end of the beginning, but would this lead to the beginning of the end?

  •

  Georg began to speak, awkward and faltering at first, but Jules, who was standing by him, stepped forward and laid a brotherly hand on his shoulder. ‘Let’s all pay attention to Georg – he’s worked hard to bring all our ideas together. I can’t wait to hear them and I bet you can’t too!’

  Jules beamed, his face its own little sun as Georg began again, this time a little louder.

  I looked around. Mostly rapt attention. Thirty or so people who’d unwittingly found themselves founders, agnostics in charge of a creation myth. There was excitement in those faces, but also a kind of weary horror. A sense that the appearance of formal rules might bring change in status for some.

  Jacqueline was wearing the red sash that she washes clean for important occasions, but as she approached her smile was tight, her face unreadable.

  Georg began to read from the submission finalists.

  As I’d feared, the first few proclamations were more rites than rights. True, you can’t spend six months searching for food and sleeping under the stars without becoming thankful for the basics. So yes, now we pledge a kind of allegiance to the sun – I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over that. Plus a lot of people did yoga first thing anyway, it might if anything make mornings a bit more social. One down.

  The next four suggestions were on their surface about the preparation of food – well, the killing of things that might or might not constitute food. This was firmer terrain. Always good to know what’s up for grabs… and what isn’t. Boundaries.

  Next, a couple of obligatory bits of score-settling dressed up as turbo-charged etiquette for a brave new society. Could it really exercise one of our number so greatly that what passed for soup was swallowed mouth-open? I’d always followed the Asian logic that you took in more oxygen. But then a small island necessarily connives at quibbles.

  And then there it was. The gear shifter. The promised premise. The moment we knew we’d broken new ground and perhaps left behind our past selves forever. Instead of murmured assents and mumbled exceptions, just… silence. A moment of shared realisation and beauty.

  Perhaps in a way it actually was ‘self-evident’ that we would eventually have to go to war. After all, no one had ever really dealt with the particularly modern variant of PTSD that being abandoned in the middle of a television pilot really represented. We’d focused on staying alive at first, no shame in that. But in our new founding, we found that there was an animating anger after all.

  Because eventually your expectations shift in nature and scale. You go from expecting to be rescued to wanting to learn about hut design. You stop obsessing about mortgage payments on the flat in Worcester Park and get anxious about whether you’re bringing in enough fish with that sorry excuse of a spear you fashioned. Not: ‘When will the boats come?’ but ‘Surely coconut milk can be fermented?’

  As Georg continued with his toneless recitation, I felt stronger than ever. This was right. We would form a standing defence force. We would regard off-comers as secondary. We had the right to arm bears. (There are no bears, but this was a great joke from Paul; we all shared a conspiratorial smile.) They’d left us here for sport, taken our once considered lives and discarded them. But together, we’d found a nature that was stronger than theirs. We had been militant in our creativity, our resourcefulness, but you can’t live in metaphors when your very survival is at stake.

  The wind whipped up and we huddled a little closer. I noticed a few held hands. Lovely. I liked this new direction, I have to say. And Jules as King? Fine. It’s not like anyone lives forever. You need structure, authority and, yes, charisma. When the others came, as eventually they surely would, we would be ready.

  Week Two

  The towpath on the Regent’s Canal between Camden Town and Stratford offers the newbie cyclist a tempting alternative to the angry mêlée that fills London’s roads. You usually have to spot the entrance, then negotiate a short obstacle course of railings or gravel or cobbles down to the level just below ground. An escape, of sorts.

  The government-subsidised bike-to-work scheme, mysteriously still operating in an era of gung-ho austerity, was made much of in your ‘Week 1 Welcome Pack’. Turns out a pretty capable two-wheeler is yours for about 250 quid. Thank you to the mandarins down the hall who’ve somehow not nixed that one, and I’ll take the black roadster with the quick-release wheels. Very nice.

  First weeks are always a bit overwhelming. Open-minded attempts to soak up roles, rooms and rubrics whilst not falling into the trap of befriending the wrong members of the hierarchy. After such a week you’d normally nip to one of the decent boozers near the Old Vic or across to Borough and catch up with friends, but this isn’t that kind of job. You’ve been assailed by downloads and datasets, appraised of regional dangers, up-to-speeded on evolving threats.

  Still, it’s week two and there’s a call from the loading-bay guy: your new bike has arrived. And so three, hours-long, full-immersion meetings duly completed, you descend in the secure lift to the concrete bay to meet your company wheels. An anonymous black bike for an anonymous new career. Its lightness is
pleasing as you wobble out onto Vauxhall Bridge in the sunset. The speed is another unexpected, but then you are the youngest of the new intake, so let’s be at ’em.

  Twenty-five minutes later and you’ve crossed the water north through the shabby quiet of Pimlico and somehow navigated the Brownian motion of Oxford Street. You cross round the back of King’s Cross, making a right by the headquarters of the nemesis newspaper and lower yourself onto the towpath.

  The water’s stillness seems to add to the quiet as you pedal along, and although the light is weakening behind you, the warmth of the ride gathers as you propel yourself along the towpath. It’s six-something as you pass the fashionable lights and sounds of Broadway Market, the food- and book-stall owners now disappeared below decks.

  In the gathering gloom, it occurs to you that your new bike’s lights are a bit unimpressive, and a couple of times you’ve realised you’re not as noticeable as some of the professionals. Still, early days. And quite a workout, this. You’re getting a little heavy-legged as you take another narrow under-bridge turn and spy the start of the now closed Victoria Park to the left. The air is clean but your head is full, after six hours watching detailed presentations about former satellite states, republics gone awry, overlays of oil movements, docked fleets and changing boundaries.

  You’ve slowed to a gentler pace and the chill of the evening is more pronounced. Summer isn’t here yet, that’s for sure. Where does the urban heat dome end anyway, zone 2? You hear the distant rattle of a bike frame that’s just hit the cobbles, at some speed. No bell, though. Someone’s keen to get home too.

  The social housing styles that line the canal accelerate through the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s as you power along. Differing takes on what to do with people, balconies replacing gardens, Juliet gates stapled to third-floor windows, but then no one has children any more, not at these prices. Some lights are on, but despite the jumble of styles, community seems to have taken the night off.

  The towpath’s a little less maintained this far along, and the paved bit narrows. You manage a backwards look over your right shoulder for the split second that this is possible when travelling just 2 feet from water. It could be a combination of the temperature and the light, but for a second you have the impression that the cyclist behind you is moving at a speed for which the adjective ‘interceptive’ might be coined. Alone, yet racing. From? To?

  You push up from pootle to purposeful. There’s that form of thought where the surely ridiculous and the tangibly certain coexist. Good old fear of the dark. And then there’s your new career, with its emphasis on a professional pre-emption in the face of regrettable possibilities. Insights mean incisions. Maybe you’re just being thorough, as per bullet points 2 through 17 yesterday, but you start pedalling like billy-o.

  Approaching the uplift at the edge of the park, the towpath forks – straight on takes you down to Canary Wharf, left is a switchback that hugs the east side of the park and drops you back near Old Ford. It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine, as up the cobbled hill we climb. A stop and a breath, slowed by the barriers, but it’s quiet enough to hear. To hear a bike also turning right and down onto this side of the canal.

  Your colder blood says let’s get zoomy and fifth gear-y and how it’s only a short trip home from here. Ricocheting around your head: will it be like this every week and is this what a really significant career change actually feels like? Privy to privileged information; always basically ‘on’?

  As you pass another identical sandy-bricked housing development, you risk another look back over your shoulder. A mistake, a surging panic up both sides of your neck. A terror occasioned by the fact that even in low temperatures, London’s style-conscious cyclists don’t normally don balaclavas.

  The front light of the pursuing bike is eye-like, focused and bright in this, the darkest stretch of the towpath. You decide to focus by blotting out, and hitting play on your phone brings up something randomly pumping. But then it would be awful to spend your last moments in an attempt to soundtrack your own exit. Bourne versus Born to Run?

  Nearly, now, nearly, now, whirring feet that power round. As you barrel along towards Hertford Lock you manage to widen the gap a little. Just long enough to evaluate possible scenarios. You’re supposed to be a good interpreter, a scene-reader, an opportunity-spotter. Are complex, guilt-ridden fears a side effect of highly irregular exercise? Or is this, in fact, ‘a practical’? Part of the induction programme? What must be understood, analysed and acted upon? What, in short, must you be prepared to ‘get done’?

  The training slides were clear. Actions steeled by the grim-faced adoption of the passive voice. ‘A response was actioned by the engaged units.’ ‘Steps were taken pursuant to standard protocol.’ ‘Cover was afforded by the bridge’s supports, during the unit’s armed response.’

  Too flowery. Imagine the press release and work backwards. No, it’s only week two.

  ‘Establish three facts about the suspect, wordlessly.’ That was fun on a pub-based training jolly, all that let’s-use-Sherlock-as-a-verb cold-reading stuff. But now your fact-free fear is real, if powered only by the circumstantial, the animal.

  ‘Analyse, recognise, neutralise,’ the growing awareness that for all the high-power devices you’ve been issued with, that real intelligence isn’t reducible to words on screens. It’s something bodily and partial, a rapid build-up of facts that stimulate action or overwhelm.

  Fifth gear starts to feel too heavy. Worse, those bike-traffic-calming metal barriers ahead are going to collapse the tensed space between you.

  Who’s got your back, as it were? The real higher-ups never put their names on the organogram. ‘For fuck’s sake tidy up, Harris!’ Assuming that still is your name. ‘Housekeeping – end of a job, and make it quiet, would you?’ Give precedence to form and procedure, in everything. Last acts hopefully imbued with some minor poetic indication. ‘The civil servant is thought to have disappeared beneath the waters that were once the city’s industrial livelihood.’

  You’re a bloody company man now. Make no mistake, this is a role for the ambitious, but everyone knows they’re plausibly deniable at all times – it’s the dark matter holding the whole thing together. The remote kill switch glows in a drawer disguised as a different drawer, somewhere in the doorless room at head office. But I don’t yet know anything… All that stuff about the launch sites in disputed border territories? You’d watched that on Russia Today’s YouTube channel, eff eff ess.

  ‘Your back light’s off!’ breathes the eye-rider as he zips by, a motive mass of middle age, ziplocked within Lycra.

  The solid emptiness arrives in his wake, a block of air dark and forceful. You exhale, imagining the graceful aerial pull-out of a mapping application on a tiny touchscreen, peered at in the half-light of a forest somewhere near a border crossing. A blue dot, a tiny potential, a heat signature, precise coordinates with imprecise motivations. Stay on it, we want updates. It could almost be someone heading home.

  Stagecraft

  The room was a bright white, with the composed atmosphere of an art gallery. My shoes made an imperious tapping sound on the polished wooden floor. High above, subtly recessed lighting bathed everything in an unshowy luminance. It was the full experience, one had to admit.

  The body-length box dominated the middle of the room, but it was only when you got up close that its human scale really became obvious. It was what, 20 steps from the gallery’s opening to the plinth it sat on? It prepared the visitor.

  I walked towards it, a keening sense of excitement building as I stepped forward on the polished wooden floor. This was absolutely going to work.

  Standing alongside it, the workmanship was clear. Thank you, Morrell Art Productions SW14; never a duff job, those guys. A mahogany frame holding four lightly tinted reinforced glass sides, with a wooden base inlaid with memory foam. Plenty of room for one’s arms, and a spare 6 inches either side with raised squares for the display of key objects. Lovely. Two
beautifully drilled and finished holes in the top glass panel for that all-important oxygen, ensuring this was not, contrary to initial estimations, a coffin.

  ‘All good?’ hollered Alan from Morrell, appearing in the entrance.

  ‘It’s amazing,’ I replied, giving him a wave.

  We stood together looking at it.

  ‘Reckon you’ll be alright in there?’ he asked, passing me the bag of decorative and storytelling items for the case.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said, all eagerness and enthusiasm. ‘Well, thanks to you I shall!’

  As we stared at the box a little inward giggle scrambled up the back of my throat. The very thought of it. And even then this was only one part of a much, much grander strategy. This day was already a good day.

  On Tuesday morning, there was a knock at around 10. Majid the postman smiled as I opened the door.

  ‘Morning… Big one to sign for…’

  And so it was. I scribbled onto the screen with one hand as I took hold of the 4-foot-long tube, like grasping an awkward dog. Even in this digital era, architects seem still wedded to the drama of printing things out on massive sheets of paper. Perhaps it helps justify the costs, which had similarly scaled ambitions. But I didn’t mind. There’s something exciting about rolling out 2 square metres of paper plans on the dining-room table, weighing down the corners with glass ashtrays. The game is afoot and all that.

  It took a few minutes to fathom how to read the plans, even with the centre-light blaring down. There was a key to the symbols in the corner, but I’m new to all this really. Eventually I twigged. Once you found the high street at the bottom, it all made – I want to say, ‘sense’?

  My first foray into the property game, this, and nothing so dull as some forgettable one-bedroom flat in a borough no one’s ever heard of. Oh no. The coffee shop had closed down with three months left on the lease, so I’d nabbed it for a song, which freed up some cash for the architectural adjustments that would make the plan work. It must still resemble a coffee shop, of course, otherwise people wouldn’t come in. But the alterations I’d brainstormed with Storm and his team were an absolute kid’s book of delights.