Chalcot Crescent

by Fay Weldon

  So far as I could remember the Redpeace circular had contained the usual stuff about genetic engineering, cruelty to animals and something about the liberty of the individual. Nothing unduly contentious, which was why I had chucked it. We all go on about these things. But what was perhaps strange was that Redpeace had been allowed to go on for so long. Or perhaps it was a way to keep all the discontented in one place, the better to keep an eye on them. After the charities united under CiviKindness there were a lot of disturbed souls from the anti-GM food lobbies, animal rights groups, global warming deniers, homeless activists, organic prose-lytisers and every good cause you can think of, all with a grievance against NUG, who would find Redpeace their natural home. And now perhaps, finally, NUG had had enough. Delete! But surely not the living actual people, just the concept? As money had become after the collapse of the banks – a concept, a lot of noughts on computer file, not an actuality.

  A Visit From An Ex-Husband

  Someone came to the door, and used the knocker, not the bell, just as the power was cut and the computer winked out. I knew at once who it was, from the pattern of knocks: imperative but light. It was Edgar, my ex-husband, the one before Julian and the Czech invasion, the one I divorced for excessive right-wing thinking. I was in two minds whether or not to let him in. He came round every few months. I would like to talk to him but he would want to sleep with me and I was not sure I was up to it. There are good female equivalents to Viagra these days which he brings round – sex goes on to the grave if you can be bothered, and doctors recommend it – but I am too distracted by my family’s goings-on to concentrate and you readers won’t want to know about it. Too much information.

  You shall have a bowdlerized version of the meeting in script form. I’ll write it up roughly now and later edit and refine and put it on my laptop. Julian got the laptop for me, a 2008 model, a Sony, before they had to start laying off workers, and computers, or those available here, have hardly got any better since CiviSoft took over. I love this laptop of mine. It has my life on it since 1985, when I stopped writing by hand and went over to the computer. A pity, but you have to keep up with the times. I write less implicitly, more explicitly, if you understand the distinction, but not so well. That’s the way it is; progress is much the same as entropy.

  Imagine this man Edgar: he looks rather like Jerry Garcia in his later days, hairy and benign. He is hungry. I give him some rice and a slice or two of National Meat Loaf. Everyone likes National Meat Loaf; it is our current staple food, replacing bread, pasta, rice and potatoes. Venetia called round recently with the rice: it is hard to come by for most of us, though at least there’s a trickle into the Grade 1 CiviStore. According to Victor, we produce ideas, plots and characters for computer games – the rice-producing countries have the technology, but are not hot on inventiveness. And Europe is no longer a source of food imports: everyone has their own people to feed. The European Community is in disarray and, though not formally disbanded, might as well be: it can no longer enforce its rulings through financial penalties, and has no other means of doing so. It had its own parliament and its currency all right, but had neglected to organize a proper army. Consensus is fine in a time of plenty, but collapses under stress.

  Edgar: You know they put something in NML that makes it addictive?

  Me: I’m sure they do. Just as well.

  Edgar: Why call it Meat Loaf when it says ‘suitable for vegetarians’?

  Me: Everything’s so convoluted these days, it’s true. I’d just assumed it had so little meat in it lately it wasn’t worth mentioning. Its consistency does vary –sometimes it carves smoothly, like pork; sometimes – if the oat content’s high – it crumbles like a haggis. But it always tastes good. I’m sure they’re doing their best. They’ve an awful lot of mouths to feed.

  The more Edgar badmouths NUG, the more I find myself supporting them, trying to redress a balance that existed only in my head. I remember that’s why we divorced: I would end up spouting views that were not my own, but simply the opposite of his. It was too confusing for everyone, since occasionally our views did coincide. It was just exhausting separating them out. In bed, where politics seldom entered in, we got on just fine.

  Edgar: Because they’re on track to ban vegetarianism, the same way they did smoking. [He had been a forty-a-day man, until put on an obligatory aversion course] Fertilizers have to be imported, vegetables are uneconomic and pills will do as well. Notice how the ads show vegetarians as weedy figures of fun?

  Me: Well, yes, yes, it’s true, I have.

  Edgar: And thanks to your son-in-law in NIFE the vats will soon be producing protein from unknown sources of origin. But least said soonest mended.

  Me: But Edgar, surely not like that old film Soylent Green? The sci-fi one where it turns out all the old people are being processed for the food factories?

  I laugh but I do feel a little shivery. In these days of necessity anything can happen. Perhaps the knock on the door yesterday was not the bailiffs after all, but men coming to carry me off as an edible over-eighty. A tough old boiler. More wishful thinking. No such luck: it was my money they were after, not my meat.

  Edgar: No need for that. Easier to grow human meat-mass in vats. That’s what Victor will be doing, why they co-opted him. He has a background in stem-cell technology.

  Me: Yuk.

  Edgar: Not necessarily. Why not? It’s not people. There’s no brain or consciousness involved. It’s just good protein. As suitable for vegetarians as Marmite.

  Me: It goes against nature.

  Edgar: Spoken like a Redpeace veteran, my darling, but not exactly rational. Still, one doesn’t expect rationality from a woman. That’s why I love you.

  Yes, he really did say that, nor did I show him the door. Edgar is one of the sexiest and brightest men I know, but does have a hard time keeping up with the niceties of contemporary thought. It’s not that he can’t, he won’t. It’s nothing to do with age: he’s twenty years younger than me. He really does believe that men are rational, and women are not, and that it is for their weakness that men love women. And if he believes it, it is practically his duty to speak the truth. Why should he say anything different? He does not believe in social lies. Poor Edgar, he had a terrible mother, and needed to keep women in their place. I’d always felt the urge to somehow make up for the unhappiness of his childhood. But of course one never can. What usually happens is that the man who hates his mother tries compulsively to turn you into her and, when he’s succeeded, doesn’t like what he sees and wanders off with someone else and starts the whole process again.

  ‘Well, I don’t love you,’ is all I say.

  Really, I could be twenty again. Edgar always brings out the teenager in me, which is why I put up with him. I make him Grade 1 CiviStore coffee. The rare, delicious smell fills the room. I am in two minds whether or not to tell Edgar what is going on next door, now the subject of Redpeace is on the agenda. I decide no. There are police postboxes all over the country (labelled Working for a Safer, Satisfied Community), inviting people to report suspicious activities, and dangling a reward for information acted upon. Edgar always saw my family as a gaggle of what he called touchy-feely lefties, even Ethan the ex-banker. When we parted he blamed them for influencing me though this was not the case. Families tend to settle down to the status quo, and they thought I would probably only choose someone even worse in the absence of Edgar. When Julian and his relatives moved in they were proved right. I do not think for one moment Edgar would report my grandchildren, but he might tell someone who would. It would make too good a story to miss.

  Me: Anyway, why bother with human meat? What’s the matter with beef, pork and lamb?

  Edgar: Disease.

  That was convincing enough. All three short-term governments we had during the Recovery, before the sociologists formed NUG and took over – one hopes, rather more intelligently – had moved too far and too fast in their attempts to make the nation self-sufficient in food.
It had become clear we could no longer depend upon European trade. Brussels was by now in total disarray, rather as the banks had been some five years earlier, before they were allowed just to go bust, and was no longer able to enforce its rulings through financial penalties. (There’d been talk of creating a Defence Force to subdue a recalcitrant Portugal but it never materialized.) So we were all independent nations again, protectionist, and feverishly looking after our own. A six-month period of extreme food shortages (known by some as the Great Hunger, though this was something of an exaggeration: nobody actually starved) meant that of necessity farms were privatized and were replaced by CiviAg communal farms. The sudden expansion had its problems. A CiviPedia page from Google, contrary to management expectation, was not enough to communicate everything there was to know about animal husbandry. Nasty epidemics of the diseases stock is heir to ran rampant through herds and flocks, and would presumably through the vats Edgar spoke of.

  Me: So that’s why National Meat Loaf sometimes carves like a leg of pork and sometimes like a haggis. It’s Victor, trying to get things right.

  [I laugh, but Edgar doesn’t]

  Edgar: What they’re after is a firm, pinkish meat, suitable for vegetarians, with a sprinkling of a substance, like oxytocin, that makes the people docile. And does no harm, or not much. Do you read Redpeace?

  Me: No.

  Edgar: They’ve got it in for Victor. They named him Dr Yuk in their last issue. NIFE is one of the most secretive of the Ministries. God knows how they found out.

  Well, I think, no end of the ways they could have found out. There’s Henry in NIFE’s Registry, on the top floors of the old Banqueting Hall in Whitehall, where Charles I was executed, and which NIFE have taken over – that, and a great chunk of the old Ministry of Defence down the road – and Ethan in the drivers’ pool, in the warren of subterranean rooms below. The Hall itself is two storeys high and for all one knows may have been converted to some great chemistry lab where any amount of pink flesh can be grown and processed, and Henry or Ethan have made it their business to investigate. Victor’s laudable attempts at nepotism may have rebounded. Henry could be an agent provocateur; it would not surprise me. If he was once a pig farmer in Ireland and NIFE have put him out of business he may have latched on to the family the better to destroy it.

  People talk. People are neurotic. And Victor’s ‘family feeling’ may not be requited. Betrayal can come from inside the home. Amos is a disenchanted stepchild, and that’s just for starters. Perhaps Venetia tells Polly too much and Polly spreads the word and her children find out, and that is why they are giggling their way across the potato patch even now. Then there’s pillow talk. Ethan and Amy. Perhaps that’s why Amy is with Ethan in the first place: to subvert Ethan to get to Victor? What kind of extremism runs in Amy’s veins? Amy is the daughter of Florrie, Venetia’s friend, who once committed patricide; though I’m sure I have no proof of it, only the admiral’s word, and the admiral may have been mistaken, and hysterical in defence of his friend, and why one should assume admirals speak the truth I don’t know.

  ‘Friend’ can cover a multitude of complexities. Ex-friends can have any kind of dangerous motives. And perhaps Venetia and Florrie are at odds and Amy has some motivation we know not of. Perhaps Victor has the drop on NIFE because what he knows about growing human nutritional protein is irreplaceable. If I was NUG I’d be looking very hard at a whole lot of security issues arising from Victor’s rise to be the ‘face of NUG’ – and of course I have only deduced this from Polly’s statement that a film crew are going round to film Victor at Shabbat and her talk of increased security. I could have imagined the whole thing: the bailiffs’ knock can have wholly disturbed my mental equilibrium. I am beginning to feel too old and to want to go to sleep. Perhaps Amos is about to come down and tell me he is forming a breakaway branch of Redpeace – Blue-peace, say – because they don’t agree with the attack on Victor. Victor’s security has been enhanced, according to Polly – even leaving out my elaborations on the subject.

  I can hear movement in the room upstairs: they are dragging furniture. My furniture out to thwart the bailiffs, or bomb-making equipment in? Or just, again, the paranoia of old age in me? Mind you, ‘the paranoia of old age’ is just as likely to be the fruit of experience – a vivid understanding of Murphy’s Law: if things can possibly go wrong they will – as deterioration of the brain. I think I recognize Henry’s footsteps. They are like Karl’s, quick but heavy, determined. I still love Karl. Why didn’t I leave Edgar the minute Karl called? If I’d known what a fine figure of a man the baby Henry was to turn out to be, I’d have taken him on. Too late. Everything is always too late.

  Me: [coolly] I’m surprised Redpeace were allowed to print it.

  Edgar: It was just a small paragraph on the second page, halfway down. Where the newspapers used to print the real news in the Soviet Union. Those in the know would ignore the headlines and go straight there. The censors only ever read the first page.

  Me: But why would Redpeace object to protein cloning anyway? No-one’s suffering. It’s only science.

  Edgar: The nature of the agitator is to prove other people wrong in order that they can be right. It’s the old irrational anti-GM argument resurfacing with Yuk added. Meddling with nature. Unknown forces unleashed. Who owns body parts? The citizens’ right to benefit if their stem cells are used. Etc., etc. They’re all Gaia nuts.

  Me: Nobody will take any notice of them. Times are too dire.

  Edgar: Don’t be too sure. If the discontents are gathering, NUG will act. Secretly and furtively, after the manner of governments, but act they will. So, alas, will Redpeace. All the hatred of the nutters has to go somewhere, it’s been thwarted for so long. I hope Victor and your Venetia understand the importance of security, or are they too we-love-everyone-therefore-everyone-loves-us for that?

  Now I don’t know who to be most worried for. Forget Polly and the platform; forget my bloodline next door; how about Venetia? Victor, Dr Yuk, may be providing her with goodies, and she may be passing them on to me and Polly – the coffee will be smelt down the street, I swear, and that’s not safe – but he is surely putting my daughter in danger. And the past keeps catching up with me. Any minute now I am going to have a knock on the door and it will be some child of the baby Fay once gave up for adoption – was it a boy or a girl? I can’t remember – demanding attention and with some grievance against me. She will insist on the family having DNA tests and it will be discovered that she and Venetia are half-sisters, that her birth-mother and birth-aunt each had a child by her father and Venetia will take her in as she has taken in Henry, her half-brother on her father’s side, and then Venetia will be angry with me, because she doesn’t know the true facts of her parentage – a deceit I have maintained all this time simply for Fay’s sake. And Fay will find out too and speak to me even less. Life was so much simpler before the State decreed back in the nineties that every child should be able to find out their true parentage: it has caused a great deal of grief and embarrassment to many, many people. I do not think it is particularly helpful to know one’s genetic history: it is usually bad news.

  It is normal for the child, especially the girl child, to believe she must surely have been switched at birth, and her parents are lying and she is really a princess, but it seldom, on investigation, turns out to be true. What you discover is not better than you hoped, but worse than you have.

  I need time to absorb all this. I have a niggling feeling there is something yet to be revealed. Something about Polly. I will walk over to Mornington Crescent tomorrow, eighty-plus knees not withstanding, and see her and advise her not to go on the Underground for the time being. Also that she needs to tell her daughters to steer clear of Redpeace in future. It would be easier to phone but I am getting a ‘no network coverage’ message from my mobile phone. That usually means a power cut is on the way within the hour. The mobile masts go dead in advance. I don’t know what this particular strategy is ab
out: NUG’s mind works in a mysterious way. When the ads aren’t badmouthing vegetarians and threatening them with anaemia they’re talking about the increase in brain cancer due to the use of mobile phones. Probably their plan is to wean us off their use altogether. The argument from health is one of their control strategies.

  I put all these facts on the back burner of my brain to simmer away and come up with the answer in its own time, and tell Edgar about the time I went to a Conference of World Intellectuals in Moscow, hosted by Mikhail Gorbachev, in the summer of 1989, just before the end of the Cold War, when Gorbachev told the delegates that war was no longer to be seen as ‘revolution carried out by other means’ – and so declared peace, and the end of the Cold War – news I took home to the Foreign Office only to be ignored.

  Edgar: You’ve told me that a hundred times. You were married to me at the time.

  I tell him again, with the added fact that I spent most of the week in bed with an Italian journalist – this is the purpose of conferences – whose sexual skill rivalled Edgar’s own, and was the real reason my return was delayed by a week. I passed out on the bathroom floor of the Hotel Sovietski, so arduous had been my pleasures. The medical staff were called; I was roughly laid on my back, naked, jabbed with a thick, blunt needle in the buttocks and didn’t regain consciousness for twenty-four hours: during which time the KGB had ample time to interrogate me, or so the Foreign Office assured me. Mind you, the FO were angry with me, having warned me off going in the first place. ‘Mir, mir, mir,’ they’d said, ‘peace, peace, peace, when all they mean is war, war, war. Iris Murdoch isn’t going, and Graham Greene is, and he runs a whisky factory,’ which is old Foreign Office speak for being a hopeless alcoholic.