by J. T. Marsh
4. Ensemble
At the polytechnic in Brentford, Sean Morrison studies the social sciences. Born and raised in Derry, Northern Ireland, he came of age in the time after the failed revolution fifteen years ago. His parents, Irish nationalists, found themselves in the midst of a pogrom when the chaos of the revolution unleashed long-simmering tensions. They survived, but their home was burnt. Fleeing the province, they moved into a working class block and found just enough work to raise their son. Now in his second year of undergraduate studies, he marches in the streets with the thousands of others, always out of control, but never out of hand. “Never in our name!” he shouts, marching in lockstep with a thousand other students. His feet strike the pavement in strong, confident motions, and he hurls his voice as far as he can. They protest the raising of fees, or so they think; truthfully, they protest only to strike out at the vague but certain perception of injustice, wherever it might be. “Never in our name!” shouts another student. “Never in our name!” shout the thousand others, all at once. The police watch, but don’t intervene. Sean Morrison and the others from the polytechnic are emblematic of the intellectual character of the working class, and they’re courageous in asserting the superiority of their collective knowledge. They revolt against the hierarchical knowledge of the wealthy class as dispensed by the wealthy man’s apparatchik, the teacher.
At the Anglican Church there’re more parishioners than ever, the war fifteen years ago having made many believers. Darren Wright’s been coming to this church all his life; still the same meals are served to the needy, though the soup’s thinner than it’s ever been. He serves the food, hands out blankets in the colder months, and bottles of water in the warmer months. Though the priest, Father Bennett, purports to teach compassion for the poor, but his is a church steeped in a tradition of closeness with the way of things. Darren thinks it wrong the church amasses wealth and power for itself, but he hasn’t yet come to take it on himself to change the church’s course. As it is written in Proverbs 15:27, ‘He that is greedy of gain troubleth his own house; but he that hateth gifts shall live.’ Still, the act of challenging the wayward church’s dominion over his own faith is but a critical step in the parishioner’s revolt against the hierarchical faith of the wealthy class as dispensed by their apparatchik, the priest.
A gruff, older man named Garrett Walker used to work in a factory somewhere in the North of England, a factory that stayed open by all rights far longer than it should’ve. When the factory closed and its new owners moved operations to a city in Bangladesh and another in Poland, Garrett and all the others were thrown out of work. Left to fend for themselves, some took up work at much lower wages as servants, others turned to drugs or alcohol, and at least a few committed suicide out of despair. Garrett, though, moved with his wife and two young daughters into London. Now, he and his wife work night and day to provide for daughters who will soon have their chance taken away for good. As he languishes in unemployment and despair, in Garrett’s mind there’s already flipped a switch from open to closed, his mind hardening against the wealthy man’s dominion. The act of his mind hardening and his heart rendering itself immune to the lies of the managerial apparatchiks is the decisive, critical step in the worker’s revolt against the hierarchical control the wealthy man exerts over all our wealth.
In the British Army serves a young private named Craig Thompson, who joined only a year ago. Stationed at a base not far outside the boundaries of Greater London, he spends his days cleaning the guns and scrubbing floors, on his rare days off spending what little money he earns on booze. It’s a miserable life. But Craig is like so many others in the Army, drawing his pittance on the expectation he’ll never be sent to war. The Army, these days, is a pathetic imitation of its former self, its weapons outdated, its soldiers poorly trained, its officers spending most of their time imagining themselves as inheriting some grand legacy from an empire that no longer exists. On this day, Craig’s cleaning the barrel of an artillery piece older than any of them, winding up dirty, tired, sore, only to look on the officers in their clean, finely-pressed uniforms; he feels the slight tinge of revulsion towards them, but most of all towards his commanding officer, a colonel named Charles Cooke. This army’s a shadow of its former self. The act of recognizing this, of turning his mind against the allure of tradition is that all-important choice the soldier is made in turning against the hierarchical authority the officer exercises over the vast crowd of men.
When he was a younger man, Stanislaw Czerkawski emigrated from his native Poland to England, and found work among many others in shops cleaning floors. By day he cleans, and by night he cleans, always tired but never angry. Sometimes his employer cheats him out of wages, taking off sums for taxes and fees Stanislaw is sure don’t exist. But whomever he and the others complain to, they’re met with racist insults, mocked as dirty Polacks who aren’t worth the wages they’re paid. This, while he cleans human waste off the floor for his wages and lives in a little, one-room flat infested with bedbugs and mice. Too late has Stanislaw realized there’s no place for him in this present-day England. In the meanwhile, like so many other working men mired in poverty and despair he’ll survive despite the indignities meted out on him, and in surviving he’ll learn at some great cost to place his faith in the certainty of the working class struggle. Each of these five men will find their place in the burgeoning resistance, still carrying itself out in the shadows but sooner than any man thinks to step out into the light.
At the general strike that’s about to unfold, coordinated not by months of careful, deliberate planning but by the passions of the moment, memories of the failed uprising fifteen years ago will rule the day. Still Valeri will be there, there to witness history in the making. But among the crumbling walls and the rusting metal beams surrounding him whenever he walks the floor, there’s the spirit of no surrender, the instinctive need to act against the way of things, before this current chance is lost. At night, one night, while Hannah and Valeri sleep, in the alley behind their little apartment there’s a rusty, old pipe, one of many, this pipe springing a leak in just the wrong place. In the morning, Hannah wakes up first, discovering the water shut off. There’s a note slid under the door. ‘A pipe burst. Going to be 2 weeks until the parts get in. No hot water until then. – Graham.’ Hannah swears, then leaves the note on the counter. Valeri finds it, swears again, then leaves it on the counter. The next time they see each other, a few days later, with still the water shut off Hannah has already decided to fix the water herself, heading down into the basement with little more than a few pieces of rubber tubing and a toolbox half-filled with old tools. At the end of the day, Hannah wipes the muck and grime from her hands and heads back to the apartment, turning the tap on and running her hand under the stream of water, warm, then hot, feeling satisfied. Even as this minor victory is won, there’s a thousand defeats handed down on people like her, in secret, in offices and in boardrooms men in suits and ties cutting deals to trade off entire city blocks at a time. These acts of war are interspersed with the attacks of the policemen on the streets here in London, all over England, too, though the policemen’s attack can no longer succeed in terrorizing into submission the policemen carrying their attacks out anyways. As the working man acts, so must his opponents react, compelled as all are by greater forces to play their roles to the end.
But on the streets at night there’s an odd peace. Amid the gradual disintegration of the current order, things seem to have a permanence that grows stronger and stouter with each passing day. As one factory shuts down, another opens somewhere else in the world; it’s a pattern that repeats itself a hundred times over with the passing of each and every year. After closing his shift at the plant in the industrial district, Valeri leaves as he always does, walking the same street, he comes across a young woman he’s never seen before, no one’s ever seen before. She’s sitting in the dark, her whole body seeming to crumple in on itself, her hair a mess, her face bruised, blood trailing
from cuts on her cheek. He stops, just close enough for her to see him, and after a moment or two she says, “please.” Valeri wants to keep walking, but his instincts overpower his good sense, and he approaches her and offers a hand. Outside, the troopers circle round the block, prowling the city’s streets at night, looking for trouble. There’s the usual riffraff milling about, the odd homeless person sifting through a dumpster, bored youths sitting on the steps of apartments while smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap beer. In the distance, the sound of sporadic gunfire pops like a firecracker, while sirens wail high and low. Already the fighting has started; still the order prevails against the random, disjointed outbursts directed against it, in the middle of the night Valeri suddenly emboldened to take his own personal crusade and make it into something vastly more than what it is. Risking a beating and arrest at the hands of the police, Valeri seizes on the boldness inside him and shelters the woman for the night, the working class slums all around them burning tonight brighter still than ever before. Under the cover not of darkness but of the fire’s light, they leave.
At night, tonight, Hannah tires quickly, but keeps a smile on for the overdoses and the gunshot victims, through the night keeping on her feet thanks not to caffeine but to a well-practiced gumption. As she works, the pipe she’d fixed holds but some of the water leaked pools and drops onto an electrical circuit, shorting the circuit and cutting power to the whole building. She’ll come home that night, tired, and she’ll fall into bed without thinking much of the darkness, across the city trouble brewing in the streets. At night, tonight, the homeless, the prostitutes, the usual flotsam and jetsam of the city take up their usual spots around Victory Monument deep in the working man’s territory. At night, tonight, there’s no crowd of demonstrators, and the only troopers are a pair of junior officers who come around every once in a while to walk the beat. At night, tonight, when no one’s looking and when the passions of the restless have taken respite to lick their wounds, it’s almost time for Valeri to live up to his promise. At war almost continuously since the failed uprising fifteen years ago, the streets in the working class neighbourhoods are dangerous at night, in the darkness lurking the impending dawn.
In the industrial district where the trains often come through so late at night, the three or four or five men have made good their meeting and have gone their separate ways, leaving only a few bootprints and discarded cigarette butts as evidence of their meeting. In the morning as the working man rises to have at the day, the latest acts of dissent lay themselves bare for all the world to see, if only anyone should look. Things are as oppressive and ascetic as they are not because of some new law which declares who may and may not speak but because of the constant threat of deprivation, a threat which insulates us all from each other. In the meantime, Valeri’s fate lies not in the past but in his own personal future, and it’s a chance encounter with the troopers in the streets that’ll soon send him on a journey careening headlong into a collision with the rest of the history binding us all to the same fate. Valeri to pick up the tools of his trade and use them to fight back. He thinks of Sydney, and after leaving for the night he calls her. He speaks in an almost-hushed tone, holding the phone close. “Come to the hall,” he says, and she reluctantly agrees. In these times of radicalism and imminent war, the lives of ordinary workers like Valeri become lost in an ever-escalating storm of death.
But if you look very closely, you can see the beginnings of dissent. True, there’s always been dissent, in one way or another. Whenever the way of things imposes its will on the working man, it necessarily empowers him by implicitly creating its own counter-will, its own anti-will, and in so creating unleashes a sequence of events that will surely bring about its own downfall. This time, though, the dissent might yet bear fruit. All the way down the street, the sound of sirens seems to chase Valeri and the woman (her name’s Maria), even as it’s just the background noise that’s come to fill the nights like a subdued soundtrack. In his apartment, Valeri says to the woman, “you’ll be safe here.” Quickly he adds, “for now.” She looks up and says, “thank you.” He gives her food and water, some rice and beans is all he can manage so close to payday, which she gratefully accepts. Once the adrenaline wears off, though, he’s confronted with the fact that there’s a strange woman in his little box of an apartment, and he hasn’t the slightest idea what to do next. But in death, there’s the promise of rebirth, the imminent war to clear the way through the future.
In his apartment sometime later in the night, Valeri offers to take the woman to the hospital or to the police, but she insists against it. Naturally his first instinct is to suspect she’s a drug addict or a prostitute beaten up by some john, but even this suspicion makes him feel guilty. He supposes she’s an attractive woman, with deep blue eyes, long blonde hair, and a gently sloping face that seems sculpted rather than grown. He suddenly realizes he’s been staring when he notices her staring right back, halfway through a mouthful of rice with a single grain sticking to the edge of her lip. “I’m sorry,” he says, before standing and starting towards his bedroom. “Wait,” she says. He turns back. “You don’t know what you’ve done for me,” she says. “No,” he replies, “I don’t,” and then turns in for the night, half-expecting her to still be there when he wakes up, but half-expecting her still to be gone with what little he has gone with her, she, on the other hand, half-worrying through the night that he might, at any time, have himself at her. In time, both he and she will come to realize the folly of their mutual distrust, even as they’ve already come to rely on one another in ways still yet they can’t begin to fathom. “Oh, well he was frightfully stuck up about it,” Hannah says, later, describing an encounter with her roommate to Whitney, “and he told me not to waste so much time on it. There are more important things to worry about, he said. In times like these we need to help ourselves.” In the hospital moments later, they receive the first of a new batch of casualties from the latest takings to the street, Hannah half-wondering in the back of her mind if her roommate might be among them. Working frantically, she can hardly spare the thought to glance at every bloodied and bruised body brought in to check and see which one could be him. As for the poor and the distraught, well, from the colours of the shirts they’re wearing she can tell they’re agitating for change, and from the broken bones and gunshot wounds she can tell they’ve not yet made much progress.
In this, the working class part of town, sometimes it seems we’re all dying a little bit each day. No, as the buses trundle along the pockmarked streets flanked by shuttered shops and burnt-out apartments, we look to the skies and we see pillars of smoke rising, not from a mob of angry workers but from the burning of a chemical plant’s tanks and the expulsion of toxic gas into the air mixing. In the darkness of the night war does not stop, breaking only for a few hours; the bodies will be left until dawn. In the morning, Valeri rises to find the woman still asleep on his little couch, clutching a pillow tight against her stomach. “What were you doing out there last night?” he asks later, after she’s woken up. “I was…” she starts, but can’t finish. “Yes?” “You don’t have to interrogate me, you know.” “Seeing as you’re in my apartment I think I’ve got the right to know why.” “You know why.” “I suppose I do. Should I be regretting it?” “That’s for you to decide.” It’s a futile exchange, but one which will, in its futility soon prove to make all the difference in the world for them.
One of the other residents in the building Valeri lives in, a black man around his age named Jeremy Washington, came from a background of lies, deceit, and betrayal, all help denied him by the way of things which deems him of no value. But he’s survived this long by way of the instinctive will to live which powers us all through even the darkest times of our lives. But events are afoot. Men like Jeremy Washington, though, learn to carefully navigate through their lives, dodging drug addiction, muggings, but most fearfully of all the troopers who stop them for the most frivolous reasons, sometimes for no reason at
all. It’s one night, many years before Jeremy came to work at that plant with Valeri, when he was stopped by troopers outside a convenience store and beaten to within an inch of his life. The troopers take him and dump him on the side of the road a few city blocks away, an old, white lady waiting until the troopers had driven off before she helps Jeremy into her home and tends to his wounds as best she can. In the morning, she offers to take him to the local hospital, but he declines. For Jeremy Washington, the brutal beating at the hands of the troopers had a lasting effect on him. His family, his live-in girlfriend and their two young daughters, watched as he fell deeper and deeper into despair. The beating left him with a limp, making it hard for him to work. He used drugs, partly to cope with the pain, but also because they were cheap and readily available on the streets where he lived. He lost his job. He lost his family. The courts, an adjunct of the troopers who’d beat him, took them from him and made him pay for it all. When he couldn’t pay, they put him back in jail. This time, he emerged toughened by the experience, in the confusion his family scattering while he found his way into the building he now lives in. Still through the first years Jeremy Washington lived in this apartment block he kept on using drugs, eventually resorting to selling them to help make ends meet while still he can’t afford the medication he needs. Strange men came to visit him at all hours of the night, cash in hand, no questions asked, the troopers who patrolled the streets keeping an eye out but never seeming interested. All this had happened before Jeremy had even turned thirty years old. But now, for men like Jeremy, the promise of a new uprising offers him redemption and with it rebirth.
