by Ian Mcewan
The prime minister, still in the Christmas spirit and looking rakish in a pink paper crown, sprawling shoeless in an armchair, neat whisky in hand, watched, along with a few of his staff, helicopter shots of mile-long queues along Oxford Street. He would have liked to say it out loud, but he let the words murmur in his thoughts: it was over; his job was done. Soon he would assemble his colleagues and inform them that it was time to begin the long march to the palace and be welcomed as heroes by their tribe.
* * *
*
In the afternoon, before the last Cabinet meeting, the PM sent all the staff home and arranged for the policeman on the front door to keep it ajar. All Cabinet members were to leave their borrowed bodies tidily at their ministry desks, ready for the return of their rightful owners. Jim left his own body on the bed upstairs. Thus, for the meeting itself, he imposed a strict dress code: exoskeletons. He had thought it would be fitting to convene on the Cabinet room table, but once they had assembled in the room, it looked an awfully long way up and rather tricky, since the table legs were highly polished. So they gathered in a corner of the room behind a wastepaper bin and stood in a proud circle. The PM was about to launch on his opening remarks but was cut off by a rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’, sung in lusty unharmonious chirrups. Afterwards they looked nervously towards the door. The duty policeman had not heard them.
The Cabinet meeting was conducted in pheromone, which runs at ten times the speed of standard English. Before Jim could speak, Jane Fish proposed a vote of thanks. She praised the PM’s ‘single-mindedness coupled, unusually, with rambunctious charm and humour.’ Britain now stood alone. The people had spoken. The genius of our party leader had got them over the line. Their destiny was in their hands. Reversalism was delivered! No more dithering and delay! Britain stood alone!
As she called out the beloved slogans she was overcome with emotion and could not go on, but it did not matter. Rising applause, an earnest susurration of carapaces and vestigial wings greeted her words. Then each Cabinet minister added a few words, ending with the new foreign secretary, Humphrey Batton, recently promoted from the Ministry of Defence. He led everybody in a round of ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’.
To give his speech, the PM stepped into the centre of the circle. As he spoke, his antennae quivered with passion and he rotated slowly on the spot to catch everyone’s attention.
‘My dear colleagues, thank you for these kind thoughts. They touch me deeply. In these closing moments of our mission, our duty is to the truth. There is one that we have never concealed from our brilliant citizens. For the mighty engines of our industry, finance and trade to go into reverse, they must first slow and stop. There will be hardship. It might be punishing in the extreme. I don’t doubt that enduring it will harden the people of this great country. But that is no longer our concern. Now that we have cast off our temporary, uncongenial forms, there are deeper truths that we may permit ourselves to celebrate.
‘Our kind is at least three hundred million years old. Merely forty years ago, in this city, we were a marginalised group, despised, objects of scorn or derision. At best, we were ignored. At worst, loathed. But we kept to our principles, and very slowly at first, but with gathering momentum, our ideas have taken hold. Our core belief remained steadfast: we always acted in our own best interests. As our Latin name, blattodea, suggests, we are creatures that shun the light. We understand and love the dark. In recent times, these past two hundred thousand years, we have lived alongside humans and have learned their particular taste for that darkness, to which they are not as fully committed as we are. But whenever it is predominant in them, so we have flourished. Where they have embraced poverty, filth, squalor, we have grown in strength. And by tortuous means, and much experiment and failure, we have come to know the preconditions for such human ruin. War and global warming certainly and, in peacetime, immoveable hierarchies, concentrations of wealth, deep superstition, rumour, division, distrust of science, of intellect, of strangers and of social cooperation. You know the list. In the past we have lived through great adversity, including the construction of sewers, the repulsive taste for clean water, the elaboration of the germ theory of disease, peaceful accord between nations. We have indeed been diminished by these and many other depredations. But we have fought back. And now, I hope and believe that we have set in train the conditions of a renaissance. When that peculiar madness, Reversalism, makes the general human population poorer, which it must, we are bound to thrive. If decent, good-hearted, ordinary people have been duped and must suffer, they will be much consoled to know that other decent, good-hearted, ordinary types like ourselves will enjoy greater happiness even as our numbers grow. The net sum of universal wellbeing will not be reduced. Justice remains a constant.
‘You have worked hard on our mission these past months. I congratulate and thank you. As you have discovered, it is not easy to be Homo sapiens sapiens. Their desires are so often in contention with their intelligence. Unlike us who are whole. You have each put a human shoulder to the wheel of populism. You have seen the fruits of your labour, for that wheel is beginning to turn. Now, my friends, it is time to make our journey south. To our beloved home! Single file please. Remember to turn left as you go out the door.’
He did not mention it, but he knew that every minister in his Cabinet understood the perils that lay ahead. It was just after 4 p.m. on a cloudy afternoon when they slipped through the open door and past the duty policeman. They welcomed the winter gloom. Because of it, they did not see the little creature scurrying towards Number Ten to resume its life. Within half an hour Jim’s group was passing under the gates of Downing Street into Whitehall. They crossed the pavement and climbed down into the gutter. The mountain of horse dung had long gone. The moving forest of rush-hour feet thundered above them. It took ninety minutes to reach Parliament Square and it was here that tragedy struck. They were waiting for the lights to change and were preparing to make their dash across the road. But Trevor Gott, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, got ahead of himself, as he sometimes did, and ran out too soon and disappeared under the wheel of a rubbish truck. When the traffic stopped the entire Cabinet ran out into the road to help him. He lay on his back, truly two-dimensional. From under his shell, there was extruded a thick, off-white creamy substance, a much-loved delicacy. There would be a heroes’ banquet that night and what fun it would be, with so many extraordinary stories to tell. Before the lights changed again, his colleagues had just enough time to pick him up and place the extrusion reverently on his underbelly. Then, with six ministers each taking a leg, they bore him away to the Palace of Westminster.
