by J. T. Marsh
After the failed uprising fifteen years ago, the union is full of mainly ill-tempered but otherwise harmless layabouts. But like everyone else, the war fifteen years ago struck Jeremy at exactly the wrong time in his life, not when he was capable of taking part. It might seem men like Jeremy are the flotsam and jetsam of life, the degenerate criminals living on the margins. But while Jeremy Washington may well be a degenerate criminal, his whole life having come to revolve around drugs, but it’s in exactly his sort of person the future lies. The way men like Valeri will achieve their own liberation is not by the learned wisdom of the academic, nor by the charity of the sympathetic elite, but by the hopeless causes, the most pathetic and degenerate among the vast ranks of the deprived. Although Jeremy had not taken to the streets in the war fifteen years ago, men like him were rounded up and sent back to prison again, randomly selected in the wave of terror that swept across the country once the war had ended. He was taken in not because he’d committed a crime, though he’d done that; the troopers took advantage of an opportunity to purge the streets of men like him. He’s only just been released from prison when the current wave of unrest begins in earnest. He doesn’t think much of it, as the smoke rises from the fires burning in the streets, but while he falls in with his old habits he secretly hopes the troopers who beat him within an inch of his life all those years ago are out there again to be killed in the unrest. But not all is lost.
5. Adrift and Powerless
Soon Valeri and Murray march in the streets along with the thousands and thousands of their brothers and sisters, singing songs, holding signs, denouncing the attacks on them. “All power to the people!” shouts Valeri. “All power to the people!” shouts the crowd. It’s times like these Valeri feels his boldest, times when he feels utterly confident in the fate of the working man to seize his own destiny. The storm troopers are there, but they do not attack, under orders only to look on; they know what’s afoot. “This is only the beginning,” Murray leans in and says, his normal speaking voice barely audible against the din. “And what a beginning it is!” Valeri replies. The demonstration was called to protest rising prices of food, fuel, rents, but right now all that matters is the rage vented in the streets. (Valeri had invited Hannah, but she’d declined, opting instead to spend what precious time she has between shifts for some much-needed sleep). As the revolution forms, working men realize on their isolation; but the revolution itself may yet acquire a bloodlust that could drive it to do things it might’ve never thought possible. At the shop, Valeri’s nemesis Ruslan works, having refused to take part in this demonstration for fear of provoking the managers to get rid of him. But when Valeri comes in the next time, Ruslan says to him, “you should know I’ll report you if you don’t pull your weight today.” But Valeri’s in no mood to put up with his tricks. “Why don’t you get your nose out of the manager’s rear for once?” he asks, then says, “I do more work in a day than you do in a week. You only have it in because the managers use you to spy on all of us.” Later, Valeri’s alone with another worker named Albert Nelson. “You shouldn’t talk like that around him,” says Albert, “you know he’ll report you.” “Let him,” says Valeri, “I can’t hold my tongue. Whether I’m punished for it or not, the truth is plain and obvious. What kind of cowards can see the way of things but choose to speak as if the opposite is true?”
The next time Valeri and Ruslan cross paths that day, Ruslan is chattering with Harpal after having done little work, and the three of them exchange a look. Harpal looks at Valeri with a slight grin. Already Valeri’s tired and sore all over from the day of work, and in his tired state he can’t keep up pretences. He says, “I see you’ve decided your dignity is worth whatever little extra they pay you.” Ruslan says, “at least I’m not the one about to lose his job.” Harpal says nothing. The better part of Valeri knows Ruslan is only toying with him. Still he can’t help but let the notion of impending unemployment nagging at the back of his mind. In the streets hidden under the venting of rage there’re whispers of what’s to come. “It’s not yet time,” says one man to another. “It’s exactly the time,” insists the other. “And if we fail we’ll lose everything,” says the first. “We have nothing to lose but our selves,” declares the second. The men talk of war, confident in the righteousness of their cause; this is the fertile ground in which the current rebellion could soon escalate into revolution. In Britain, the current order which has lasted for hundreds of years teeters on the brink of a spectacular collapse, needing only the gentlest of nudges to send it tumbling over.
In the night, the police move. In cities across Britain, they raid randomly-selected apartment blocks in working class districts, breaking down doors and barging into bedrooms, rousing families from their sleep. Stanislaw’s left out of these raids, but he turns up for work the next day to find some of his fellow workers absent. Immediately it occurs to Stanislaw that the ones who’ve disappeared were the ones who’d complained most vociferously about their stolen wages in the months before. “Did you enjoy yourself last night?” he asks the manager. “Why yes,” the manager says, “I did.” But the manager has a sneaky, almost impish grin as he speaks, and Stanislaw thinks not to press the matter. Later, he recalls the faces and the voices of the disappeared migrant workers and he feels pangs of regret at his failure to learn more about them than he did; but the police may yet come for him. As the consequences of this current round of police raids continues to bear itself across the country, it doesn’t yet occur to men like Stanislaw Czerkawski these are among the first, restrained gasps of a regime in its death throes.
Still Valeri can’t escape the hollow feeling whenever he marches with his brothers and sisters in union. It’s a feeling of intense loneliness; but there’s an essence lurking, far above the crowd Valeri marches in. This essence watches as men like Valeri walk along the path laid out for them, through this darkness nearing the light with every step. The immigration raids have no effect on Private Craig Thompson’s life, none that he’s immediately aware of, confined as his concerns are to the narrow cone immediately around him.. “Don’t tire yourself,” says Colonel Cooke, “I don’t want you to have much use of yourself in the day after tomorrow.” Craig says, “understood, sir,” but wonders why a colonel would come around to inspect the troops. It’s still the early morning, and the armoury’s silence is deafening. The colonel’s uniform is impeccable, and his gait is smooth and well-rehearsed. Even so early in the morning and Craig is already dirty from cleaning the battery’s guns. Still Craig must consider the raids, as they’ve become a fact of life for us all, the disappearings of among the poorest and most vulnerable in the night discussed by the men in the mess hall but never fully understood.
Random conversations intersperse the days. “I don’t know much about these parties,” says one man. “But if there’s help needed,” replies another, “can we count on you?” The first man says, “you can.” These workers are but a small part of the ferment. Valeri and Maria soon meet again, like the first time in the streets but unlike the first time in more amicable circumstances. Holed up in a one-room pad (not much smaller than the little apartment Valeri shares with his roommate), she sits on the edge of the bed while stands, afraid to sit down. “It usually dies down pretty quick,” she says. “I know,” he replies, before quickly adding, “thank you.” But she says nothing more, only nodding, herself apprehensive about letting him into the one space where she can feel something at least vaguely resembling the feeling of being safe. Not long into the current crisis and Garrett Walker sees his work interrupted by the raids, at the warehouse where he works no one taken in the night but several workers connected to someone taken. At his station on the dock, he says to another worker, “all this business about catching criminals has got to be a sham.” And the other worker, the son of a pair of migrants who came to England from India decades ago, only nods his agreement. “If I knew someone who’s caught up in this business, I’d shield them from the police,” says Garrett. Again
his fellow worker only nods. They’re walked in on by a manager who shoots them a sharp glare but says nothing, a sharp glare enough to compel them back to work, harder than ever. On this day, Garrett works himself tired and sore, only to go home and find his young daughters tending to themselves, his wife still working herself tired and sore. But he finds a notice posted to the door of their flat announcing their impending eviction, the notice with no date. Outside, there’s screaming and shouting, noise flooding in through the broken windows in the little apartment Maria calls a home. In the night, news breaks, news that’ll embolden the working man even as it’s meant to scare him into giving up on his cause.
Whenever Darren Wright looks to the pulpit for guidance, he finds only a vague and empty devotion to tradition and ritual. The priest, after Sunday’s sermon, stays behind as always to counsel the faithful. “We should open the church as a sanctuary to those fleeing arrest,” Darren says, sitting across from Father Bennett in his small office. “We must minister to the needy,” says Father Bennett, “but we must also remember the powers that be were put in place by God. We must never endeavour to upset the law.” The conversation leaves a bitter taste in Darren’s mouth. It’s not the first time Darren has questioned the church’s teachings, but it is the first time his questions have come out. The episode doesn’t shake his faith but reaffirms it, for Darren’s spirit is governed not by tradition but by his smoldering, yet burning belief in righteousness amid a world listless and corrupt. In the meantime, conversations abound. “I can’t afford my child’s medication,” says one woman. “I haven’t bought new clothes for my children in three years,” says another. “I feed my child instead of myself sometimes,” admits a third. Each works, cleaning clothes, washing dishes, waiting tables, sorting through bottles and cans at the recycling depot, and more. But shortages are common, highly localized, sometimes confined to a single household, a single cupboard, a family left to hunger. A family left to hunger multiplied a million times over makes for shortages unlike those the world has ever seen, shortages in a land of limitless plenty, all while the screens are filled with cheerful advertisements for jewellery, luxury apartments, expensive vehicles, vacations to tropical islands, mocking the hungry with the sight of an unlimited feast. And it’s been this way for as long as anyone can remember, long before the war fifteen years ago. Too late will the purveyors of these lies realize their power to deceive is waning in the face of a steadily mounting anger.
Among the students at the polytechnic there’s a broad consensus in opposition to the police raids, but too many diverging ideas on how to proceed. “We learn much theory in the classroom,” says Sean Morrison, “but what good is theory if we choose not to put it to work?” He’s not in class but outside the polytechnic’s main hall, discussing the raids with concerned students. They stand in the thick, humid outdoors and pause only to mop the sweat from their brows. Another student, a young woman from Wales agrees, saying, “we can’t allow ourselves to become another generation who failed in aspiring to their ideals. We must be the generation that finally turns the page.” They hatch a plan, one of many, to march in the streets, with the support of faculty. Although they may be united in spirit, they are a ragged, disjointed mess, acting out not on ideas but on feelings ill-conceived. And they are one small group of many, the totality of them a huge group of people in dire need of coherent form. Already Valeri has come to see through these lies, and he looks on his screen with the kind of hard-fought and scarcely-won sense of disdain. As this current demonstration has its way with the streets, Valeri waits. Maria would offer him food, but her cupboards are bare. Her bedspread is worn, dotted with little holes along its edges, its colour faded, yet neatly and carefully laid. A stuffed bear sits on her pillow, missing an eye and patches of fur. Conspicuously absent are any needles, drugs, or empty liquor bottles. As this current demonstration dies down, its screaming and shouting slowly dulls to a distant murmur, but Valeri doesn’t leave right away. He sits with Maria, and they talk for a while, each in the middle of their own personal experience with the rest of all our lives. Not unlike the world’s impending descent into chaos and open war, each of them lies in their own misery, left dazed and confused, but not without a certain clarity allowing either to see in the other a fraternity that will soon grow into something neither could’ve ever expected.
In the streets, there’s talk. “This is serious business,” says one man, “it seems like yesterday we could expect our children to grow up in a better world than we’d grown up in.” Another man nods, and says, “but now they will grow up to have their wages stolen from them even more than we’ve had ours stolen.” A third says, “and if we steal them back then we become the criminals.” This discourse winds its way through the streets, emanating from the alleys, the pubs, and the train stations, all the places where working men gather to trade subversive thoughts. “This keeps happening to us,” Valeri says to Maria not long after they’d come across one another a third time in the street, surrounded as they are by the impending rise of the next way of life. He doesn’t tell her of his labour, and she doesn’t tell him of her past. “Strange how that happens,” she’d said that third time before walking past him and on down the street. They both see themselves as fighting a hopeless cause, but for different reasons. They both avoid the demonstrations running wild through the streets even as they both secretly long to see those very demonstrations amount to something more. Suddenly, it’s as though Valeri and Maria see each other everywhere they go, imagining in the faces of strangers the look of one another, not unlike the hallucinations of a drug-induced stupor, the quixotic and ill-advised chance encounter on the street late that night proving to have connected them in ways neither could’ve ever hoped for, neither could’ve ever imagined. In time, as she continues to work the streets of the city at night and as he continues to work the floor of the factory in the day, theirs will be a friendship sorely tested but never broken. But when the storm troopers move in, they unwittingly expend what remaining goodwill they have in an attempt at smashing apart the beginnings of something more.
When the timing’s right, we’ll all think ourselves on the right side of history, not merely the winning side but the moral side as well. When the timing’s right, it’ll all come crumbling down, and when we’re left standing in the rubble of the old way of things, it’ll still be unclear, to some, just who among us was truly in the right. Ours is a whole made from the many, a cause that capitulates only to the idea of the great international, and in so capitulating we find unity in strength. Ours is no colour, no creed, and ours is a production that seeks its own love. It’s all a fraud, though. Stuck as we are in the grips of a mindless decay, we are made to be maligned as we put one foot in front of the other and pull ourselves through the day, we are declared lazy, shiftless, lacking in ambition even as we arrive home in the evening tired, sore, dirty all over, and we are, above all, forever consigned within the way of things to the ideological margins, forever, until we learn to take it upon ourselves to fight back. Still yet we’ve not arrived at the precipice of the revolution, despite all the indignities and all the injustices visited upon the working man. Still yet all the acts of resistance blend into a rising action that escalates through our shared history and which must surely lead to something, anything at all. The first acts of resistance, centuries ago, were ill-advised, over before they began. Each successive act, though, was a little bit better planned and executed and lasted a little bit longer.
A young woman, perhaps in her mid-to-late twenties, named Isabella Bennett works as a maid in a luxury hotel not far from the city centre. Every day she changes sheets, cleans floors, and washes linens and clothes for the wealthy guests who come here from around the world. Every day she earns her own pittance, supplemented with what meagre tips the hotel’s wealthy guests give her. And every month, she sends a sum to relatives living in their home country, keeping for herself only the minimum she needs to survive. But the sum she sends has been shrinking for a
while, each month the remittance a little less than the last. In the streets, she sees anger, and in the moment of weakness she gives in to her anger, pocketing a watch she finds among one of the rooms. In an age where hardship is made to be experienced alongside abundance, women like Isabella do what they must to make ends meet. Every day Isabella Bennett changes bedsheets and washes floors for wealthy guests who think nothing of spending on a night’s entertainment more than she makes in a month. She comes to work in clothes clean, skin without a blemish, and in hair perfectly bound in a ponytail reaching halfway down her back, chosen to serve the hotel’s wealthy guests because she is pleasing to the eye. One night, near the end of her shift when there are few other staff on this floor in the hotel, she finishes folding towels in the bathroom of the wealthy guest’s suite, the one she’d taken that watch from, turning to find standing in the door that very wealthy guest. “I know you took my watch,” he says. He steps towards her and shuts the door. It’s over quickly, but for Isabella it seems to last an agonizingly long time. When it’s over, she leaves the room and makes her way to fire escape’s stairwell, letting the door shut before sitting on the steps and crying softly into her hands. The night, for her, soon ends. Even as she’s been punished for her act of theft, hers has not been an act of theft but an act of return, this small piece made of the exploitation of labour and now made whole by its return. And so is visited on her punishment for her act of liberation. It’s a small act, one lost in the disorder slowly extending through the streets, but in smallness lies the essence of our times.
That night, Isabella heads down through the stairwell to the laundry room in the basement, there telling her co-worker what’s happened. Nothing comes of it. Of course nothing comes of it. The next day she returns to work, able to compose herself by forcing a friendly look onto her face and by working her way through the day by reciting from memory a series of motions as is the way of people like her. But inside she’s changed. When she next comes across the wealthy man who’d taken her, she can’t look him in the eye, walking past in the hall quickly and quietly. At the end of the hall, she looks back and sees the wealthy man looking right at her, a wicked look on his face. All through this time she continues to wire her wages back to her family abroad, seeming to find the wherewithal to keep sending the same sums by cutting back on her own, sewing up torn clothes in strategic places so no one can see the stitches, still looking like the perfectly-kept young woman the hotel’s wealthy, foreign guests expect. But she’ll get even. Although she’ll never be the same, although she’ll always have the memories of being so violated, she’ll never lose the will not only to live but to survive through it. As she is of the working man’s stock, she doesn’t know how to do anything else but survive. Like all working men and women, Isabella Bennett is infinitely strong, in her resiliency lying the future.
