Two Tribes

by Chris Beckett

  ‘You okay, bro?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  Birds squawked and fluttered in the tree above their heads in a dispute over the ownership of a roost, and a single feather came drifting down on to the lawn.

  ‘I wish you’d stop smoking,’ Ellie said as she sat down beside him. ‘I don’t want to lose you before I have to.’

  ‘I know. I really should. I’ll tell you what: I’ll make this my last packet.’

  ‘That would be good.’

  They sat in silence for a while, these forty-six-year-old twins, watching the aerobatics of the little bats. Then Ellie looked round at her brother. ‘Jesus, Richard is a bit bloody full-on, isn’t he, when he gets a bee in his bonnet? And he always gets Phil going too.’

  Harry took in another delicious draught of smoke. ‘To be fair, Ellie, Phil’s always been quite capable of having a good rant without anyone’s help. And there are a lot of people ranting about Brexit just now.’

  ‘Not surprisingly.’

  ‘No, of course not. I don’t think we’ve seen anything like it in our lifetimes.’

  ‘I guess it gets a bit wearing, though, when you’ve got other things on your mind.’

  ‘It doesn’t bother me at all. It’s not as if I don’t agree. I just thought a little break would be nice. It’s one of the best things about smoking, actually. You’ve got a reason to go off by yourself from time to time and take a break from human company, without it seeming standoffish or rude. A non-smoker couldn’t just say, “I’m going to go and sit by myself for ten minutes.”’

  ‘You need to start moving forward now, Harry. Come back into the world. It’s been a good many months, and I know I keep saying this but things really weren’t great between you and Janet for a very long time.’

  He smiled. ‘I really am fine, Ellie.’ Drawing one last tarry lungful, he stamped out his cigarette and turned to face her. ‘I’m not just saying that! In fact, I’m more than fine. I feel absolutely great.’

  This took her by surprise. ‘Seriously? Do you honestly mean that?’

  He laughed at her bewilderment. ‘I really do. Janet was, of course, absolutely right to leave. Absolutely right! Things weren’t good between us at all. In fact, we’d had an absolutely miserable marriage, ever since . . . well, ever since, you know . . . ’ He flagged momentarily under that old weight of grief but managed to shrug it away. ‘And you’re quite right, even before that, it wasn’t great. We’d wasted more than enough time on it. It just so happens that Janet had the courage to face that before I did, and that was hurtful to my pride. But she was right and I ought to be grateful to her. I’m finally looking forward to the future.’

  Ellie took his hand. ‘That’s amazing, Harry. I’m so pleased. I’ve been really worried for you.’

  ‘You know how it is when there’s been a persistent noise going on in the background and suddenly you notice that it isn’t there any more? It was like that driving over here. I started out every bit as miserable as usual and then, along the way, I suddenly noticed that the misery had gone! I’m sure it will come back. In fact, I think it’s quite likely that tomorrow I’ll be as miserable as ever – there’s so much to do still, so much to rebuild, so many things to grieve over – but this is a start, isn’t it? This is my head telling me it doesn’t always have to be grim. Remind me about it, won’t you, if I seem to forget?’

  ‘I certainly will. I’m very happy for you, Harry, very happy, and very relieved.’

  ‘You go back to the others, dear sis.’ He kissed her on the cheek. ‘I’ll be along in a minute.’

  *

  The others were still talking about Brexit when he rejoined them, obsessively going over and over what had happened like (as Harry puts it) ‘the dazed victims of a car crash’. Richard was holding forth about the contempt for experts that had been evident in the ‘Leave’ campaign. This had become a major strand in the emerging narrative being constructed by the ‘Remain’ half of the population and it was something that troubled Harry too: he had written in his diary only a couple of days before about ‘the sheer pig-headedness of climate change deniers who think they know better than people who’ve dedicated their whole lives to researching the subject’.

  But now, as he settled himself back among them, he was struck by something quite different: everyone around the table was an expert. Karina was an expert on food (and also, incidentally, a qualified barrister). Phil was an international authority on land tenure in late medieval Europe. Ellie had trained for seven years to work as a GP. Richard had a Ph.D. in probability theory and advised financial institutions in the City of London on their actuarial strategies. And Harry himself was an architect, which had also taken seven years of training, even if all he seemed to do nowadays was to design people’s kitchen extensions. And that was what made this so personal. Comfortably off as they might be, none of these people were barons or oligarchs, living off the rents from accumulated assets. They earned their living by knowing things, and they were dependent on people listening to them. There had been a rising tide of irrationality around the world – religious fundamentalists, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers – and Brexit was part of this strange new assault on what lay at the core of their standing in society.

  ‘You’re very quiet, Harry,’ observed Richard.

  Harry shrugged. ‘Well, I’m sad about it all, obviously. I’ve always been very pro-EU. That little circle of stars on my number plate has felt very reassuring somehow: a collection of countries working together in a big bad world. In fact, I like the EU so much I’d have been happy for it to become a single state.’

  ‘Not sure I’d go that far,’ Richard muttered.

  ‘But I will just say,’ Harry said, ‘that I can sort of understand why people might be sceptical about economic experts, or even experts in general, after what happened to the financial system in 2008. That was a fairly major failure on the part of experts, wasn’t it?’

  For a moment, they all glared at him. It wasn’t that they couldn’t see his point. What jarred was that Harry had unilaterally changed the rules of the conversation. Up to now this had been a collaborative endeavour, an exercise in mutual reinforcement, but he had turned it into a debate. They were reasonable people, though, and quickly swallowed their irritation, conceding in various ways that there was some truth in what he said.

  ‘No, that’s a fair point,’ Karina said, standing up to go and fetch the dessert. (A curious feature of early twenty-first-century British English was that people often said ‘No’ to signify agreement.) ‘I’m sure a lot of people wanted to stick it to the system.’

  ‘And the geography’s interesting, I think,’ Harry went on. ‘It’s almost like nationalists and unionists in Belfast. In one area it just seems obvious to most people that we belong in the EU. A few miles down the road it seems equally obvious to most people that we don’t belong there at all. I mean, here in the east of England, for instance, Norwich and the area round Cambridge voted Remain, but everywhere else voted Leave, regardless of whether you’re talking about Tory toytowns like Southwold or Saffron Walden, or rough working-class towns like Stevenage or Yarmouth.’

  ‘But it’s those working-class towns that are going to suffer the most if this—’ Richard began.

  ‘You were at Cambridge, weren’t you, Harry?’ interrupted Karina, who had returned with the pudding.

  ‘I was indeed,’ Harry said. ‘And of course Ellie and I grew up in Norwich.’

  The little group moved into the living room for coffee and tea and Karina’s handmade chocolates, and then gradually made their way upstairs. The only one sleeping alone, Harry sat up in bed for what must have been at least an hour, meticulously writing up the day. The window was open. He could hear those big trees where he’d gone to smoke swaying and rustling in the darkness, and from time to time a night bird of some kind gave an odd tremulous cry from a wood beyond the pasture. A car came past at one point and, in his notebook, Harry imagines it out there in its own littl
e pool of light as it moves through that gently undulating landscape, further and further away from him, until it’s swallowed up by the quietness of the night.

  I run my fingers over the page. I feel the indentations and the tiny tears in the paper that he made as he pressed down with his nib, and for a moment I can almost sense the coolness on my skin of the night air around the cottage as if I was actually there, and hear its silence, and smell its earthy smell.

  TWO

  The day after my return to London, I walk, as usual, the three miles from my watery home to the offices of the Cultural Institute where I am employed as a historian and archivist. In my small, stuffy cubicle with its yellow cardboard walls, boxes of old notebooks are stacked on the floor and the desk. They are a collection of old diaries from the early twenty-first century, assembled many years ago by another historian for a project he never completed. The entire collection was recently sold to the Institute by one of the historian’s grandchildren, and I have the task of going through them and recording the dates they cover, the circumstances of the writer, a summary of their contents and an assessment of their authenticity. (It seems the historian paid quite generously for these old notebooks at a time when many people were struggling to find enough to eat, and there are a number of obvious forgeries among them.)

  Needless to say, this cache is where I found Harry’s diaries, the most comprehensive and articulate in the collection. But what has really captured my imagination is the discovery that, by an extraordinary stroke of luck, one of the other diaries actually overlaps with his, so that I have two accounts – both genuine, as far as I can tell – of some of the same events by two people with quite different backgrounds. My colleagues were very excited when I told them this, but they all lost interest when they learnt that neither of these diaries is a chronicle of major events and neither of the diarists could be described in any way as a significant player. For myself, though, I’m still excited.

  I work hard from seven thirty in the morning till six in the evening, keen to prove that my trip to Suffolk has not affected my productivity, then I head downstairs and along a corridor to the cubicle of my friend Cally who works on the records of the Warring Factions period.

  ‘Hello, Zoe!’ She greets me with a kiss on the cheek. ‘I didn’t think you were back until tomorrow!’

  ‘Well, here I am. I’ve been working on those diaries all day and I’ve had a brilliant idea. Fancy a glass of Shaoxing?’

  We emerge into the intense heat of a London summer. The air is thick and treacly, with a strong whiff of drains and rotten fruit behind the cooking smells, and the street is a chaotic mass of barrows, bicycles, traders and beggars. Two militiamen ride by on an electric cart, both of them wearing shiny white helmets and those big hemispherical goggles that show them things that mere eyes would miss. (A black arrow jiggling up and down above a person’s head indicates a criminal record, or so I’ve been told, a flashing red arrow that they aren’t carrying valid ID, a blue arrow that they’re currently under surveillance.) I wait for them to pass. It’s said they have directional microphones inside those helmets that enable them to home in on conversations and my instinct is to let them know as little about me as possible, even if what I have to say is completely innocuous.

  ‘So let me tell you my idea!’ I say, as we launch out into the crowd. ‘You know I told you about two of the diaries linking up?’

  Across the road, on the wall of the old Borough Council offices, is one of those murals from the days of the Protectorate, faded and flaking now, but with the usual stencilled portraits of the Eleven Great Sages still just about visible: Confucius and Marx at one end and Hu Shuang, the Great Synthesizer, at the other. ‘Support the work of our Guiding Body!’ says the caption beneath the picture, in English and Hanzi characters. ‘Study and apply the Nine Principles!’

  ‘Yeah, of course. What a coincidence! When you think of how many people there were in England even back then, and what a small proportion of them would have kept diaries, and what a tiny proportion of those diaries would have survived long enough to be collected by that historian guy.’

  ‘I know. It’s absolutely amazing. On the way back from Suffolk I was thinking about how to make the best use of them. I’ve spent all these years on the news media and social media archives, and recently all this time on this cache of diaries, but what’s the point of collecting information if we don’t process it into something meaningful? And I thought, those two diaries might not deal with the kinds of events that historians normally talk about, but they do tell a story. Why don’t I make them into a sort of . . . well, a historical novel, I suppose you could call it? Obviously I’ll have to add stuff to fill in the gaps, but I could use the diaries as the basis of it, and draw on all the work I’ve done on the archives to provide an authentic background.’

  We steer round a hawker who’s sidled up to offer us black-market cheese.

  ‘That’s a bit deviant, though, isn’t it, Zoe? A novel? That’s definitely not what they pay us to do!’

  ‘They pay us to reconstruct the past. And that’s what I’d be doing, isn’t it? A reconstruction, based on the diaries, but also drawing on all I’ve learnt, to create a kind of snapshot of that early period when things began to unravel.’

  ‘But also drawing on your own imagination, which is not what we—’

  ‘I’ll need to flesh it out, yes. I’ll fill out the dialogue a bit. I’ll add some detail to the scenes. I might make up a story or two about minor characters to help the reader understand the historical context. But, you know, without imagination, history is nothing.’

  (I really believe that, by the way. You get things wrong if you make guesses, but why collect these fragments of bone if not to try to imagine the living creature they came from?)

  Cally laughs. ‘That sounds very unorthodox, Zoe. You want to be careful. Our workscreens are their property, don’t forget, and they can look at them whenever they like.’

  Another pair of militiaman pass by, this time on foot, on the far side of the road. One of them looks in our direction. His goggle eyes make me think of those huge praying mantises I keep finding on my window ledge. It’s impossible to tell if he’s focusing on us or something else, let alone what arrows he sees above our heads, though I know that over both of us there hovers the modest white star that signifies a Level 3 Associate of the Guiding Body. (It confers a bit of status, but also makes us more visible.) In any case, he turns back to his colleague and they carry on.

  ‘I thought the idea would appeal to you,’ I say. ‘Life is all about guesswork, isn’t it? Everyday life, I mean, not just history. We create the world from fragments all the time. We get it wrong, of course, but if you’re not prepared to make guesses, there’s hardly a world left at all.’

  THREE

  On Monday morning, as Harry was getting ready to drive back to London, Charlie Higgins left his parents’ house on the outskirts of the town of Breckham, and walked to the Heath Road to be picked up from his usual spot opposite the empty brick shell of the old suitcase factory. He was twenty-four, a kind young man, good with animals, loved by his little nephews and nieces, popular with elderly neighbours, but he wasn’t particularly bright or good-looking and he had no special talents apart from being big and fairly strong.

  He climbed into the minibus and it moved off again, burning up diesel oil inside its four cylinders at about five or six litres an hour. ‘All right, Jake?’ he called out to the driver. ‘All right, everyone?’

  ‘Morning, Charlie,’ Jake said. The others grunted.

  Ben, Brett, Tom and Mac were already on board, along with the two Polish guys, Clem and Alex. And today, as on every other day, Charlie braced himself for the teasing he would have to put up with on the six-mile journey, and for the things which he suspected were teases, but wasn’t quite sure. He’d never been good at detecting irony.

  It wouldn’t be quite true to say that Charlie was picked on. A lot of teasing went on between the other
men too – it was the main source of entertainment on this daily commute – and the two Poles in particular had to put up with a good deal of banter, but (at least from Charlie’s perspective) everyone else, the Poles included, gave as good as they got, while he could never find the right tone, the right mixture of playfulness and aggression. His attempts at jokes usually fell flat, and even when he did get a laugh, he was uneasily aware that the others were probably laughing at him rather than with him. Yet if he abandoned altogether the exhausting many-layered game of male verbal jousting and tried to be straightforwardly friendly, that didn’t quite work either.

  ‘How was Thailand, Mac?’ he asked one of the older men, who’d been away on holiday the previous week.

  ‘Thailand was shit, mate,’ Mac said. ‘Or at least the bits of it I can remember. Can’t speak for the rest.’ Charlie thought that Mac was making some sort of joke, but he wasn’t sure if he understood and had no idea how to follow through. It was as if Mac had deliberately made it impossible for Charlie to continue the conversation.

  Charlie’s biggest conversational successes were on the subject of Brexit. There were certain verities that you could express on that topic, without any irony, and still be sure that everyone would agree (or everyone except the Poles, who usually remained silent on the topic, though Alex would occasionally mutter at the Englishmen that they were all bloody idiots). ‘Why can’t they just get on with it?’ Charlie would say, for instance, or ‘Just fucking leave!’ and nine times out of ten he would earn growls of assent, or even have the gratifying experience of having started a conversation.

  So he tried it again this morning. ‘What the fuck’s happening with Brexit?’ he said. ‘It’s doing my fucking head in. Why don’t we just walk away?’

  But it didn’t work this time. The others liked to go over Brexit fairly regularly, rehearsing and refining the various articles of their steadily hardening tribal creed, but there were limits all the same and Charlie had said something quite similar on Friday.