Two Tribes

by Chris Beckett

  ‘I read somewhere,’ Lucy said, ‘it may be apocryphal, that the state of Indiana once tried to make a law setting the value of pi at 3, in order to simplify mathematical—’

  Michelle scrunched up her face. ‘The value of pie?’

  Lucy glanced at her father and, just barely perceptibly, she sighed, as if, just by asking the question, Michelle had made her point for her. ‘Well, okay, let’s use another example. Suppose someone wanted to make a law to say that a circle was the same thing as a square, and suppose they won a referendum in support of that. Would that make it true?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Lucy,’ Harry said. ‘That’s not a fair comparison at all. Even if some of the claims made by the Leave side were untrue that doesn’t mean that wanting to leave the EU isn’t valid. There are loads of imponderables. How large and how porous can a community be before it stops being a community at all? How wide is it possible to make a pyramid before the top loses all sight of the bottom? There’s no incontrovertible answer to these things! People are—’

  But Michelle interrupted him. ‘So you lot should make the laws about the important stuff, is that right? And just leave the easy stuff for us chavs?’

  Lucy shrugged. ‘I’m sorry, Michelle, but that’s just silly. It’s not a question of “our lot” or “your lot”. It’s a question of what is factually correct.’

  ‘And who decides that, then?’

  ‘I think anyone can, can’t they?’ Phil suggested. ‘But they need to look at the evidence.’

  ‘We were lied to in the referendum, Michelle,’ Karina said very gently. ‘We really were. We were told it would be easy. We were told we’d get back three hundred and fifty million pounds to spend on the—’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ Michelle interrupted her. She had preferred Lucy’s contempt to this. ‘What do you think we are, Karina? Babies? Of course people lie in elections. They all promise everything’s going to be different and it never is. Everyone knows that.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Harry said. ‘I mean, we all love Obama, don’t we, but he promised he’d shut down Guantanamo Bay, and eight years later it’s still—’

  Michelle dismissed him with a wave of her hand. ‘What really pisses me off is that you lot seem to think none of us had any opinions before all this. Do you actually think we were just sitting there thinking about nothing at all until that red fucking bus came around?’

  ‘I work in the City,’ Richard said. ‘My job is looking at risk. I make a lot of money because I’m very good at it. And I’m telling you that leaving the EU will be a disaster. That’s not an opinion, it’s a fact.’

  ‘How do you know until you’ve tried?’ Michelle said.

  ‘How do we know we’ll get wet if we go out in a rainstorm?’ Phil said.

  Lucy sighed. ‘Well, okay, let’s start with supply chains. We’ve been part of the EU for forty years and our economy is closely integrated with Europe’s. A large proportion of British manufacturers have factories all over the Continent, and they depend on frictionless borders to be able to shift components back and forth between one factory and another precisely when they’re needed. Put in tariff barriers and customs checks, and their costs will go up. And since they have to compete against the rest of the world, those additional costs will make it harder, and in many cases impossible, to stay ahead of the game. So they’ll have no choice but to close down the parts of their operation that are now in the UK and move them across the Channel, which means that people will be put out of work. It really isn’t rocket science.’

  Lucy shrugged. Those were the facts and Michelle could take them or leave them. She’d be perfectly happy to go back to talking to Phil and Richard if Michelle preferred not to engage with them.

  But Michelle’s bloodstream was full of adrenalin and ethanol, and she had no intention of leaving it there. ‘We’ve got through worse, haven’t we?’ she persisted.

  Richard and Phil exchanged glances. (‘We’ve got through worse’ was an emerging theme on the Leave side which the Remain side found particularly exasperating.)

  ‘You mean, like the Blitz?’ Lucy said, glancing round the rest of the company with a small knowing smile. ‘Or Dunkirk, or the Great Depression? Sure. But nobody voted for those things to happen, did they? It’s not as if the Germans said, “We’re thinking of firebombing London, how do you feel about that?” and we held a referendum and told them it was fine and they should go ahead.’ Again she shrugged. ‘Look, we probably won’t starve after Brexit, I’ll give you that. But so what? Why would anyone choose to do something that will manifestly make things worse?’

  ‘Because they don’t agree it will make things worse,’ Michelle suggested.

  Lucy made an exasperated noise and turned away.

  ‘It will make things worse,’ Richard said. ‘It will make things worse, period.’ Presumably unconsciously, he had dialled up his voice to the poshest register available to him. ‘I’m sorry if you don’t like it but it’s just a fact. Like the fact that you’ll get burned if you put your hand in a flame.’ He shrugged. ‘I mean, if you want to run after unicorns, be my guest. But there’s no point in even talking about this if we can’t base our discussion on some kind of—’

  ‘Michelle is your guest, Richard,’ Harry told him. ‘How about you treat her that way?’

  ‘Harry’s quite right,’ Karina said. ‘You need to apologize.’

  Richard chewed on his lip for a second, then nodded. ‘I apologize, Michelle,’ he said, though he was barely managing to suppress a shrug. ‘I have strong feelings about this as you can tell, but I shouldn’t have made it personal.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Michelle said and Harry was surprised by how calm she seemed. ‘I’m used to it. You should see my brother when he gets going.’

  Karina laughed. ‘Maybe we should put your brother and Richard together and leave them to it! Why don’t you clear the plates, Richard? I’m just going to check the dessert and we can perhaps have it in about ten minutes.’

  Richard stood to stack the crockery with his big red paws. Lucy got up to help him and they both withdrew to the kitchen with Karina. Harry squeezed Michelle’s hand. ‘You did really well there.’

  ‘You certainly did,’ Ellie said. ‘I never even try to argue with Richard.’

  Michelle shrugged. She actually wasn’t calm at all. She was just intensely focused, like a tightrope walker on a high wire. ‘It wasn’t a problem,’ she said. ‘When you’re the baby of the family you get used to standing up for yourself.’ She didn’t remove her hand from Harry, but she didn’t squeeze him back either, just let her hand lie limply in his until he chose to let it go. She could feel herself trembling, just like Kath used to tremble in the aftermath of one of her husband’s blasts of sarcasm.

  ‘Richard was out of order,’ Harry said. ‘And Lucy was too.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Michelle said. ‘I mean, I was pretty harsh with Karina, wasn’t I?’

  But she knew they could all see her trembling.

  ‘I’m just going out for a minute,’ she said.

  ‘I feel badly about this,’ Phil said when she’d left the room. ‘Poor Michelle. It was wrong to gang up on her. We need to keep right off politics for the rest of tonight.’

  ‘She actually has a point,’ Harry said. ‘People like us do tend to assume that, just because we know a lot, what we happen to want must be what’s right for everyone.’

  Phil smiled and gave the little sideways tip of the head that means, I don’t agree with you, but there may possibly be something in what you say.

  He asked Harry about his work, and whether he still wanted to have a change of career.

  ‘No, not really,’ Harry said. ‘I think it was just that I was just aware of a hole in my life, and now . . . I wonder if Michelle’s okay. I’ll just go and check.’

  Michelle had put on her coat and left the flat. She was waiting on the landing by the lift. The river glowed beneath them.

  ‘
Oh Michelle, don’t go! Richard and Lucy were totally out of order, but they won’t do that again, they really won’t!’

  She frowned at the button that summoned the lift, wondering if she’d pushed it correctly. ‘They don’t like me, Harry. You know that. They think I’m thick and ignorant and boring. Maybe they’re right. But there’s no point in my being here, is there?’

  The lift arrived with a ping. The door slid open. She stepped inside and pushed the button for the ground floor.

  ‘Please, Michelle!’ He put his arm in the door and followed her into the lift. The brilliant city shone all round them as they descended.

  ‘This isn’t going to work, Harry,’ she said as they passed the concierge’s station. ‘We need to end it now. You’re a nice man but, like you said yourself, we haven’t got time to keep on trying if we can see it’s not really going to happen.’

  ‘Michelle, I love you! I want to marry you! I want to have babies with you!’

  ‘You like the idea of it, Harry, but you know I won’t fit into your world.’

  ‘Fuck my world!’ he told her. ‘Fuck them all. I don’t even fucking like Richard and Karina and their ghastly stuck-up daughter! I don’t even like my own tribe. If you don’t want to live in London, that’s fine. I don’t want to live in fucking London. I’ll come and live in Breckham instead!’

  They were outside the building now at the top of a short flight of marble steps. The city hummed all around them. An emergency vehicle rushed along the north side of the river, its siren sounding, its light casting brilliant splashes of blue across the water, so that a solitary seagull flying just above the surface turned from shadowy silhouette to neon blue, and back to shadow again.

  Michelle smiled and shook her head. ‘Oh come on, Harry. You wouldn’t last a week in Breckham. I saw how you were at my mum’s. You looked like you were being very good and brave and grown-up while someone pulled your teeth out one by one. It’s like you’ve always said: we come from two different tribes.’

  *

  Michelle started down the steps. She badly wanted to be alone so she could find somewhere dark and quiet to sit down and work out what to do next. She was full of tears, but she was determined not to let them out until there was no one there to see them.

  There were late trains, she supposed. If she got a move on, she could be back home by the early hours.

  ‘Please don’t do this, Michelle,’ Harry begged her. ‘It really is completely crazy! We get on well together, you know we do.’

  ‘You’ll be all right, Harry,’ she told him. ‘I guarantee that in six months’ time you’ll be wondering what the fuck this was all about.’

  THIRTY-THREE

  The woman in the Mao suit climbs back into her eight-wheeled car and, having settled into her seat, she turns to the window to wave goodbye. Then her driver releases the brake and the vehicle begins to move off towards London, soundless but for the soft crunch of its tyres.

  The people around us look at each other but remain oddly silent, glancing uneasily at Cally and me. There are things they’d be saying to each other, I realize, if there weren’t two strangers present whose role they’re unsure of, but whose allegiances are almost certainly different to their own.

  ‘Chinky!’ the little boy calls out after the car in his loud cheerful voice. Which seems a little ironic, given that his own features are quite definitely more Chinese than those of the woman in the back seat. But of course these days the word is not so much a racial epithet as a general-purpose term for members of the regime that our Chinese liberators helped to put in place.

  The little boy’s grandfather reproaches him, sharply, but a little theatrically, with an uneasy glance in our direction: not so much telling off the child, as performing the act of telling him off for our benefit. ‘That’s a bad word, Arnie. Your mother will be very angry with you.’

  I shrug and smile to show that I’m not in the least troubled, and, thanking them for their time, Cally and I pass back out through the gate and on to the road along the riverbank.

  We continue our walk along the edge of the camp. Parrots screech above our head. Boats pass by on the water. As we brush away the flies from our sweaty faces, Cally talks about the final stage of the battle, when the Liberal besiegers suddenly found themselves hemmed in by new Patriot fighters, and realized they were very close to defeat.

  It was at this point that they struck the historic bargain under which Chinese forces would invade, establish a Protectorate, and then help them put in place the self-perpetuating Guiding Body of qualified, able and scientifically minded people that the Liberals now regarded as the correct way to govern a country. You can see why the Chinese found the idea congenial. The Guiding Body as an idea was really quite similar to what China’s ruling Party had become, and it fitted well with Confucian notions of order and hierarchy that had been reintroduced in Shuang Hu’s Great Synthesis.

  After striking the agreement, the Liberal leadership withdrew all their forces from the area. Imagining that that they’d won, the Patriots celebrated in their towers, hanging out St George’s flags and their own Three Lion emblem, until Chinese jets came in from the east, wave after wave of them, to pound the towers and their garrison into the expanse of rubble that formed the base of the huge refugee camp beside us.

  ‘I suppose China was always going to back the Liberals in the end,’ I say.

  Cally’s not so sure. ‘They did have talks with the Patriots as well, you know. I wonder what things would have been like now if they’d taken the Patriot side?’

  I’m about to answer when two armed militiamen stride out from the warren of the camp, so suddenly and unexpectedly that we both gasp. Their goggle eyes linger on us for a moment. They can see your heartrate if they want to. They can see where you’ve been over the past month, or year, or decade. They can call up a list of all the people you know. And they don’t just see; they record as well. They’re part of a unified system that, whenever you come to its attention, notes down where you are, who you’re with, and all the various metrics that indicate your current emotional state, so that the next time a pair of goggles looks in your direction, or someone in authority chooses to look up your name, that new information will have been added to your file. It was the Chinese authorities’ parting gift when they finally handed over to the Guiding Body.

  The militiamen head east along the river. In subdued silence, we walk another kilometre in the opposite direction until we reach the first building to the west that wasn’t destroyed by the Chinese onslaught. The paintwork is fading and most of the faces are barely visible, but on its east-facing wall is the faint remnant of one of those old stencilled murals from the days of the Protectorate. Charles Darwin, Marie Curie and Isaac Newton can just be made out looking down with wise serenity at the sprawling shanty town stretching away in front of them to the east and the south.

  ‘Support the work of our Guiding Body!’ they are saying. ‘Study and apply the Nine Principles!’

  ‘In answer to your question,’ I say, ‘it would have been absolutely awful if the Patriots won. They didn’t really care for the poor; they just cynically exploited their tribal instincts for their own ends. So there’d be a ruling class living in comfort in gated areas, with the poor left to fend for themselves, and some sort of Chinese surveillance system watching over them to be sure of keeping them in their place. It really is too painful to contemplate.’

  Cally laughs at this, and then she stops and takes my hand. Her eyes search my face for a moment, and then suddenly she pulls me against her and kisses me on the mouth.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I particularly want to thank Sara O’Keeffe, who has been my editor since Mother of Eden but is now moving on to other things. She is very good at what she does and I will miss her.

  I would also like to thank:

  The copyeditor, Alison Tulett, for so skilfully decluttering my prose.

  My friends Tony Ballantyne and Sarah Brown for reading and
commenting on an early draft of this book.

  My daughter Poppy who helped me think about Michelle’s clothes.

  My old schoolfriend Jonathan Charteris-Black – and his friend Paul Harley – for football advice.

  John Jarrold for being my agent, and Kate Straker for working so hard on getting me and my books out there.

  My friends Ian Pinchen, Peter Scourfield, Clive Seale, Pam Toussaint, David Howe, Rowlie Wymer and Alison Warlow for indulging me in long conversations about some of the topics of this book. Also my son Dom, for the same, as well as my daughter Nancy and my dear wife Maggie.

  Chris Beckett, Cambridge, 2019