On the Heroism of Mortals

by Allan Cameron

  She switched the engine on, pulled out of the lay-by, reached the T-junction and swung to the right, as though it were just one motion. “The bastard can take the bus,” she muttered to herself. And so she reached the end of all those forks in the road. Decisions still had to be made, but none so crucial as that series of difficult choices between unpalatable opposites that opened up entirely different lives. And up and down the country, many others faced similar choices and still do. Many not so lucky or so determined once the choice was made.

  In That Moment

  In that moment, he was running. The balls of his feet were pounding so hard on the tarmac, they began to hurt. His heart was a frightened animal leaping in the cage of his chest. He was aware of that sinewy pump accelerating as it fuelled on adrenalin. Fit to burst. To break. To let him down. Why? Why was he here? Frightened. Gasping for breath. Why here? Giancarlo del Padrone. Thief. Petty thief. Father. Father to three kids. Short prison terms. Misdemeanours. Always just a couple of weeks. The careless slips. Slips that poor men make. Now he’s dead. Shot on the roof. Shot for a protest. What about? More time in the exercise yard. So little surely? Keep running. Don’t think. The jeep’s just behind you. So little to concede. Exercise. Try this for exercise. Too much. Exercise. Too much. Fit to burst. And fear. Such fear he’d never known. His heart. Giancarlo. Del Padrone. Padrone. Del. Del. Del. Run. Run. Run. Stop! The jeep has turned off in pursuit of others. Catch your breath and relax. You’ve made it, have you not? He stopped and drank in the air in great, unmannerly gulps. He bent double and his legs turned to jelly. He rested his hands on his bent knees, and continued to gasp at the air like an animal in the wrong element. But he laughed, glad to have avoided a beating. He’d done his bit and he’d made it. And then the laughter drained from him, as he became aware of the risk he’d run and pictured his bleeding body on the cobbles. They could have broken arms or, worse, his head. For what? Did he think he could bring Del Padrone back to life? Did he think he could make a difference in a game in which only his kind pays any price? Would Del Padrone’s widow get better compensation if they cracked his head?

  Then he heard it – another police jeep rounding a corner, screeching metallic anger. He had to run. He turned and saw two grim, humourless faces – their concentrated expression betrayed another harsh reality as terrifying as the machine they drove; these men were well practised in what they did. More training meant less humanity. More training meant that man and machine were more fully fused into a whole – metal and flesh were now of one substance. One policeman was grossly overweight and the other slim and bronzed. One to catch him and one to break his ribs with a boot whose persuasiveness came from a hundred and twenty kilos of fat. Others were already running, panicked like sheep, but his muscles were loose, failed to harden and spring. The jeep sounded its horn and urgency once more took hold. Those hamstrings started to pull, his heart began to beat. Right or left? Left or right, or go straight on for another block? Was it best to go with the crowd or for him to be alone or with one or two?

  Take the right, take the right and stay with the melee. He turned at a fast jog and saw with a quickness he didn’t think he had that three policemen were giving a young girl a good three weeks in hospital. The left, the left, it should have been the left. Panicked, he turned again and no longer sought safety in numbers. The road he took was empty. An abandoned newspaper kiosk had been hurriedly closed and the billboard announced the “tragic death” of Giancarlo del Padrone, father of three, and showed his mother’s weeping face. An accidental death, they said. The public should await the investigating magistrate’s report. He allowed his feet to stop running but forced them still to walk.

  They had shot not once, but several times to terrify the prisoners into submission. The neighbourhood was restless…

  The prison roof was not just any roof; it was just three blocks up the road where he lived. He knew Del Padrone vaguely and had been at school with his younger brother. What did “Del Padrone” mean, if not that one of their ancestors had been the illegitimate child of his mother’s boss or landowner – the kind of person who doesn’t belong to either class and is rejected by the church. He knew Del Padrone and he perceived the prisoner’s death as an attack on his world, his part of the city. He was not alone in this: during the riot, old ladies had handed down slices of lemon and orange to counter the effects of teargas.

  Don’t stop. Don’t relax. He had slowed to a saunter along the pavement, deep in thought and certain that now he was simply a citizen walking the streets of his city. Then another jeep came round the corner; it was the same one, circling around in search of quarry increasingly difficult to find as the demonstrators dispersed. He turned and recognised the two policemen, one fat and one thin – an odd couple despite their professional verve. He froze and saw the jeep ride up on the pavement without breaking its speed. He had time enough to see his killers, a luxury Del Padrone had not enjoyed. He noted the blankness of their expressions, although there was perhaps a hint of contrary emotions, as though they were already inventing their vindication while savouring a moment of heightened existence through violence.

  The impact was sudden and devastating. He was lifted off his feet and projected in space, while the driver hit the brakes. He might have survived had he not collided with the metal pillar of a road sign. He bounced off and fell close to the pavement: it appeared that he was already dead. The fat man lifted himself out of the jeep slowly and purposefully, with the air of someone who has been distracted from more important things.

  “Che bello spintone gli hai dato! That was a nice little shove you gave him!” the thin man said as he sat immobile and apparently a little bored. After his inspection, which included a quick look at the front of the jeep, the fat man went over to his colleague and said more quietly, “He’s dead.” They both adopted a look of insolent defensiveness – perhaps the expression Giancarlo del Padrone wore when he appeared before the magistrate, but not likely. More likely would be that he was apprehensive in court and intimidated by the trappings of authority. Surely he was more anxious over his misdemeanour than these men were over a killing, but rightly so: the policemen acted with a wide, albeit not boundless, margin of impunity. They immediately set about a few precautions. The thin man moved the jeep off the pavement and parked it a metre in front of the cadaver. Of course nothing would add up, if there were a thorough investigation. The fat man walked up and down the street, looking to both sides. He noticed an old woman’s face in the window, but did not see her for long enough to register her features. He went over to the entrance to the flats and made a mental note of the number. He returned to the jeep, by which time the thin man was looking peeved. After all, he hadn’t been driving at the time. They then stood by their vehicle and waited for the authorities to come and investigate the authorities.

  His body lay twisted in a small amount of his own blood, a victim of his own compassion, a symbol of the heroism of mortals, or perhaps the randomness of human lives, just as pebbles lie in a stream and slip over each other, making their erratic way down a hill’s irresistible declivity.

  The Selfish Geneticist

  Dick Chomley is the energetic purveyor of a threadbare philosophy, which has the merit of reassuring the spirit of our conformist times. Every now and then we citizens of mature democracies who benefit from a high standard of living, good education and utterly free and reliable news media, wake up and have this scary moment of doubt: Are we selfish? Do we need all this stuff? Do we know what’s going on? Are we perhaps less skilled than our forebears? And, most distressingly, is there any point to this life? At this stage, our perfectly balanced market economies provide us the necessary balm: the Panglossian works of Professor Dick Chomley – Egotism is Nature, Anything You Do Is DNA-Driven, Religion is a Madness and God Got Lost on the Way to the Toilet, all translated into every one of our European languages and many more besides.

  He is very prolific but does everything he can to prove his theories wrong
. Instead of desperately pursuing his instinctive urge to procreate, he spends most of his time closed up in his study – like a monk in his cell – writing the same book with a different title in the company of two busts, one of Voltaire and one of Einstein. Now you and I, who don’t have a grounding in modern philosophical thought and its various subtleties, think that Voltaire and Einstein were very intelligent men, but Chomley has demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt that they weren’t that clever, because they said they were Deists, when they really meant to say atheists. Nor does it occur to our dear Panglossian philosopher during his tirades against religions that, if Voltaire believed in anything, he believed in the absolute tolerance of other people’s religious views.

  But of course we are talking of a higher truth here, and the higher truth is a scientific one, even when science has absolutely nothing to say on the matter. The history of life is the history of the perfect mechanism of self-interest, and while we might have some sympathy for the deification of Chaos, who previously had a rotten press, are we happy with the deification of Over-Simplification?

  Some might find Chomley’s professional life and routine a little dull, but he always appears to be a little excited and desperate to proselytise. His lecture at Oxford University a few months ago was quite typical of his work, but it furnished the opportunity for him to rekindle his acquaintance with Lord Hexham, the remarkable geneticist who studied under Crick and Watson and did so much to establish Britain’s leading role in the field. He continued their work and became something of a populariser during the New Labour years: hence the peerage. This is good for you the reader, and for me: on his own Chomley would provide little entertainment.

  There they were: the serried ranks of the fior fiore of British academe, well dressed much as the middle classes were when they went to church in the nineteenth century. Suits were worn, dresses were long, noses were lifted, smiles were well exercised, voices were exuberant, or, to put it in our modern tongue, there was a buzz about the place. Not, I should add, because anyone expected anything original to be said; this was one of those opera houses where the audience is more important than the opera.

  Someone very important came on the platform to introduce the speaker. He looked like a boy on his birthday, which must have been exhausting; this effusion is now de rigueur – today, tomorrow and the bloody next day. Whatever happened to old-fashioned English grumpiness? “Your speaker, who is now a household name, is perhaps the academic I most admire in the world,” he said, which left open the possibility of rivals on other planets in our solar system. To be fair, he didn’t use this accolade before every lecture he introduced but he had used it five times in the previous twelve months. “There are several reasons for this: the thoroughness of his research, the impartiality of his analysis, the exquisiteness of his prose, the generosity of his spirit; but, ladies and gentlemen, fellow scientists and fellow academics, surely it is his intellectual integrity that most impresses us.” The applause was rapturous. People discreetly looked around to assess the enthusiasm of the audience, and more than one heart was touched by the silliest of all emotions: envy. “I have known Dick for many years – long before his rise to fame – and I can say without fear of contradiction that his good nature remains entirely unspoilt by success. You see, what’s special about Dick is that he is completely unaware of how much influence he has on the intellectual life of Britain today. I could go on but I won’t, because Dick is quite capable of speaking up for himself. So without further ado, I hand you over to Dick Chomley!”

  At that moment, Chomley walked on, nonchalantly grinning at the very important man. They both embraced like old friends who had not seen each other in years, while in fact the same scene had been played out not an hour beforehand in the very important man’s spacious study and followed by fine wines and hors d’oeuvres in the company of the fior fiore of the fior fiore.

  Chomley then walked to the lectern. He reverently placed his heavy tome of Darwin’s Collected Works on it, and opened the work at the first coloured marker. He looked up, catching the light from the stained-glass windows of the old university. He stared fixedly as though gathering his energies for an onerous but unavoidable task, and then started to read in a slightly monotonous tone. The lesson for the day was from The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex:

  “Darwin was quite specific about evolution within the human species, and I think we should be bold enough to take note of this. We live in a highly civilised era and sometimes we are overly sensitive about some issues. This is what he wrote, ‘Nor is the difference slight in moral disposition between a barbarian, such as the man described by the old navigator Byron, who dashed his child on the rocks for dropping his basket of sea-urchins, and a Howard or a Clarkson; and in intellect, between a savage who uses hardly any abstract terms, and a Newton or Shakespeare. Differences of this kind between the highest of men of the highest races and the lowest savages, are connected to the finest gradations. Therefore it is possible that they might pass and be developed into each other.’

  “Clearly we are an evolving species and we need to help those who are not the ‘highest of men’ and are not from the ‘highest races’, although we would prefer to put it less starkly: ‘those whose cerebral functions are not so highly developed’ and ‘those whose ethnic DNA types present some limitations’. In other words, we have to have concern for the genetic health of our populations.”

  Some of those whose cerebral functions were highly developed were finding it difficult to follow Chomley’s argument. One man scratched his thigh vigorously. A prim lady with round glasses coughed as she tried to follow the journey of a ladybird around the velvety collar of the man sitting in front; was there a point to all this expenditure of energy? she asked herself. A stout and jowly man kept slipping into the most pleasurable sleep and subsequently snoring, while his wife used the sharpness of her elbow to wake him temporarily. A serious-minded scientist who had pumped Chomley’s hand vigorously and repeatedly when they met over the fine wines and hors d’oeuvres could not keep his eyes off the clock. A young, obese woman was fidgeting in spite of her cumbersome frame, because she felt sure that she had detected a significant flaw in the great man’s argument. The immensity of this truth was agitating her and she wanted to communicate it immediately to everyone else in the room and indeed to all humanity. Various other manifestations of restlessness and inattention were occurring around the room, but the speaker seemed unaware as he leapt erratically from one obsession to another. Sometimes there seemed to be little connection between them, but everything he said led to one great truth: we are all perfectly made machines that are constantly evolving and designed not by God but by survival of the fittest, or rather we are constructed by the perfectly made machine of natural selection, which surely must be one of our new gods. Perhaps amongst that crowd of well-protected and, some might say, highly pampered genes with good chances of selection as their bodies warmed the cold and ancient stones that, over the centuries, had heard all manner of fashionable truths, whilst the faces of the speakers never seemed to change, there lurked a murderer, but I doubt he had a murderous face. The man in the tweed jacket and designer glasses, with an air of studied nonchalance, the academic smile of knowing appreciation and the stare of utter absorption in the arguments expounded by Dick Chomley, was probably thinking about his lover or whether he could keep up with the mortgage payments. He played the part too well. So what could natural selection do with this lot? It no doubt worked quite well, when we were all hunter-gatherers or when we were our missing ancestors, competing in the same way within the same environment, but now? It would require omniscience to understand this wonderful, talented and idiotic jumble of humanity. We need a little more than is dreamed of in your philosophy, Dick Chomley.

  “Michelangelo may well have been a Christian – there wasn’t really any choice at the time – but his Christianity did not create his art.” Dick Chomley must use the same history consultants as Hollywood:
Michelangelo was not only a Christian, but one of the fanatical “Spirituals” who caught the attention of the Inquisition. Some felt that his art reflected his heretical views. But if Christianity, according to Chomley, can take no credit for Western civilisation, it seems a bit unfair for him to argue that those great works of art the Church didn’t commission would have been ruined by their commissioning of it.

  He furthered his attack on the monotheist religions by quoting particularly bellicose adherents from each one; the more peace-loving and just loving examples were not referred to. He ended his speech with a fine example of his sophisticated rhetoric: he invited deluded believers everywhere “to dream on”.

  As soon as that injunction was made to no one in that room, because it was directed at the stupid who live elsewhere, the very important man returned to the platform, hugged Dick Chomley again and, turning to the audience, lifted Chomley’s hand in the air as though he were a prize-fighter. And the prize-fighter was ecstatic. Ecstasy, however, did not cloud his intellect; even as the applause lifted him on a wave of joy, he scanned the crowd for faces he might know. He found them, but his vision leapt on past them: he wasn’t fishing for tadpoles. Then he saw Lord Hexham and immediately he left the platform and pushed his way through the pressing throng, one part of which was heading towards him loud with congratulations while the other part was heading for the exit. Regrettably Lord Hexham was in the second category. Clearly he would have to be a little rude if he were to catch up with his prey. “Thank you, thank you, I’m in a bit of a rush, I’m afraid.” An elderly woman with a sad and reflective expression was gushing her praise: it appeared that she was no longer afraid of death after having heard his lecture. He never grasped the content of her words but pushed her gently aside, while nodding his regrets. Fortunately she took no exception to the idea that this modern thinker had no time for her; that seemed entirely understandable to her, even proper. As a pilgrim might stare at a holy man, she rapturously focused on his back whilst he struggled with the scrum.