by J. T. Marsh
“Come on, put your back into it!” shouts the boss at Stanislaw and the rest of the workers. Halfway through the night perhaps ten migrant workers, Stanislaw among them, have been mustered to put up fortifications around a police station not far from Victory Monument. “We’re already four days behind! Work faster or you’re all fired!” shouts the boss. Though it’s dark, floodlights mounted on tripods make the street outside the station bright as day. Stanislaw erects fencing topped with barbed wire while others assemble walls from cement panels. But when he stops to mop his brow he thinks of his wife and children here in England and the rest of his family still living in a small town outside Krakow, Poland. “You there!” shouts the boss, “I’m not going to tell you again!” His rebellious instinct stifled for a moment, he turns back to the fence, fumbling with it while looking out of the corner of his eye at the boss, unsure how much longer he could stand the man. In the morning Hannah ventures into the street, finding the crowds dispersed and a sense of normalcy returned. For all the screaming and the shouting, still the way of things remains firmly lodged in place. Factories close, then reopen, the closed and the open occupying the same time and space. Hannah is an oddity, a woman who sees the best outcome among a sea of equally unpalatable possibilities. “We’ll be all right,” she says, “as long as we stay together.” She’s talking to Whitney, each smoking a cigarette while on break. They lean against a brick wall and look into the dimly-lit haze of the late-summer’s night. “We’ve spent our whole lives preparing for a future that can never be,” says Whitney, “and now we have a choice to make.” Hannah draws the last drag off her cigarette and then flicks it away. “I’m very tired,” she admits, to herself as much as to Whitney. Hannah thinks to tell Whitney of her budding affair with the stranger named Lawrence, but decides against it. With power failures common, bombs exploding and gunfire rattling in the streets, and the smashing of windows and the shouting of angry voices, practical concerns demand full attention. In the middle of the night, the women see in themselves what they want to see, if only for this rare moment of honesty. But events are mounting, quickly, quietly in the background yet soon to surge forth. In the meanwhile, always in the meanwhile we wait, Hannah and Whitney tending back to that rare slow night in the A&E, like everywhere else in the world today a place where crisis could erupt at any moment. But we’re not there yet.
After this latest demonstration the working man returns to work, in the morning the streets cleared of debris, the few patches of dried blood mopped up to make way for the trucks and buses that trundle along these roads every day and every night. At work, this day, the working man works a little slower than usual, not enough to be noticeable at a moment’s glance but still enough to be measurable by the programs used to maintain a steady watch over him. Nerves rattled, many of Valeri’s friends and colleagues talk. “Not so far as you think,” says Murray, talking to Valeri in the aftermath of this latest strike. “How can you say that?” Valeri asks. “Things can only get so much worse,” says Murray. Having returned to work, Valeri finds himself dispirited. The days seem slower and longer, more tiring. Even the noise and the bright lights of the floor seem to have dulled. It might seem Valeri’s too tired to give much of himself, and it’s true. Even as he’s too tired to move, he moves. He knows how to do nothing else. Still he wishes only to return to the street for one more chance at venting his anger. “Are you sure you can see through this?” asks Murray, looking Valeri in the eye.
“I may not know much,” Valeri says, “but I know silence will help no one but the rich.” And Valeri is not alone. In truth, the working man knows that he must work harder than he does, not for his own benefit nor for the benefit of his wealthy paymaster but for the benefit of us all. Every day he works advances him towards his fate. Every day he fails to work delays the advent of his fate. Acutely, this struggle against the self has become like a fight. In times like these, Valeri finds the fight to push forward and reach for the new day. From the floor, he sometimes looks up and catches the eye of the company’s owner, a bald, fat man wearing spectacles. His name’s Noel, but most refer to him as Mr. Kennedy. Although Valeri has been working diligently and quietly through the day, the momentary glimpse exchanged between them from this distance makes clear the burning animosity between them. Mr. Kennedy doesn’t know Valeri, probably doesn’t even know Valeri’s name, but that’s not important. As Valeri has come around to realizing his place in the working man’s rising consciousness, he sees in Mr. Kennedy something he’s never seen before even as he’s seen it all along. The boss is still here. The boss rarely comes around, but when he does his presence is felt by the pair of eyes looking down from that office high above the floor.
After this latest demonstration the streets are reclaimed by the way of things, the current order seizing them anew from the temporary occupation by the angry crowd. Still war rages that we can’t see, lying beyond the sight of men like Valeri. Every minute of every day we are immersed in a sea of grey from top to bottom, the firm, steady scrutiny of a tight fit strained across his broad, powerful back. In some visceral way it’s never seemed right, the fit and the strong working men like him answering to the authority of a balding man who grows fat off the work of others even as he’s never done a day of honest work in his life. But Valeri doesn’t know the bosses like Mr. Kennedy have been nursing a bitter hatred for the men and women who took part in the failed rising fifteen years ago. It’s only Mr. Kennedy’s ignorance of Valeri’s mother and father having taken part in the failed rising that keeps Valeri employed. This is not because Mr. Kennedy lost much of anything; a few profits can’t compare to the loss of loved ones. But hatred and recrimination are the way of the wealthy, something Valeri has come to learn at some great cost. It matters little, though, who the individuals are that may yet achieve the advance of our history from one page to the next. Whether Mr. Kennedy has his way or not, the sort of person he is will have their way with the future.
A young man named Sherman Ross has little to lose, in seemingly forever without even a pittance to sustain his hopes for the future. He hasn’t worked a steady job in many years, sometimes given the chance as a day labourer selected only when needed to tear down working class apartments or put up in their place luxury quarters for the wealthy bankers who never seem to come around. His muscles and lean and sinewy, and callouses cover his hands and feet. The clothes he wears have holes, some of the holes small but grouped together in clusters, others gaping wide but lonely. His stomach sometimes growls, but he silences it with a glass of water and an unfiltered cigarette with nothing but Chinese characters all over the package. Twenty-seven is too young to have lost hope, yet here he is, made to watch as screens boldly proclaim the rising in value of some imagined figure making them all wealthier than ever before. Sherman Ross is much too young to be so jaded, so cynical on his lot in life. But Sherman sees the gleaming, glass and steel towers reaching for the sky in the distance and feels an instinctive anger rising from his heart. Sherman sees on his screens triumphant declarations of new projects built, promises of lavish new quarters of the city to be built, even fanciful proclamations of a bold, new vision for the city marked by gleaming spires and a dazzling array of multi-coloured lights. It’s all a fraud. Sherman can never know belonging in this new world taking shape all around him, something he realizes in a purely instinctive, guttural way, like an animal sensing the gathering storm. Out of work, he looks on the unrest in the streets and he joins in, not to further a cause or help wage war but to vent his rage, in hurling bricks and smashing glass adding his own voice to the chorus. Though young men like him can’t know it, limited as they are in their vision to the ground right in front of them, their undisciplined and misguided outbursts are like the sowing of the fields, with the reaping to come only when enough blood has been shed to make the land fertile again. Already at war, we see the fires of liberation burning into the night, accompanied by the intermittent rattling of gunfire and the muffled thud of bombs going o
ff.
Still one event has transpired that gives us a glimpse of the very near future, in the time it’s taken for one moment to yield to the next a sense of impending doom invading the streets like a thick fog seeping in from the sea. As night falls, the flashing lights and the wailing sirens sound out through the darkness and pierce the restless murmur of the thousand-and-one voices lingering in the background. In the midst of a planned power outage, one young man cast out on the street takes his last breath before his now-lifeless body slumps over. A life extinguished, one of so many, in the darkness of the night a banner flying, invisible to all but the few among the working man’s ranks who’ve read the forbidden book, acquired the forbidden knowledge, soon to be given the opportunity to put it to good use.
9. An Intemperate Nature
A knock on the door in the middle of the night wakes the working man suddenly, and he leaps out of bed at the sound. Another knock, then another, then another, while the working man pulls on clothes and makes good his escape through his bedroom’s window. This is not what’s happened here today, but in another time, another place, leaving the working man alone and confused as storm troopers sift through his things in search of something that isn’t there. After a traumatic day, the working man ought to have a peaceful night, his peace interrupted by the braying of horns and by the wailing of sirens pouring in through his open window. Not entirely unaware of what’s going on in the streets below, the working man thinks to fight back with whatever means he has; it’s in this mindset that men like Valeri find themselves longing to lash out. In Valeri’s little apartment block, the storm troopers move, barging through doors, knocking down old men and frightening little children in search of something that isn’t there. Moving floor by floor, flat by flat, the storm troopers soon make their way closer to Valeri’s. Roused from bed, he crouches half-naked, Sydney at his side.
At the police station it’s to take weeks for Stanislaw and the rest of the crew to fortify the place. In that time Stanislaw sees the police lorries go out empty and come back full of prisoners many times. The nights are long and made longer by the gnawing guilt in the back of his mind. At home, he tells his wife, “I feel guilty for working to help the police become stronger while they keep going out and arresting ordinary people.” In the dining room, she passes him a cup of coffee before pouring her own. He says, “I know we have to make ends meet and we can’t afford to upset our pay. But how I’d like to put that ruthless boss in his place.” His wife sits next to him, and reassures him simply by resting her hand on his and giving a warm but firm touch. But the storm troopers pass him by, and he looks out only when the morning has come and the last of the troopers has left. In their wake they leave shattered glass, holes punched in walls, and broken bones. This attack, this current wave of invasions into the working man’s homes in an attempt to root out subversive elements is but the instinctive reaction of the wealthy man and his political apparatchiks against the burgeoning movement which should one day seize what’s rightfully his.
After the inspection, Private Thompson and the rest were punished for their show of insubordination further by confinement to their barracks and a stricter than ever regime of marching and mustering in formation. But it does little to quell the tensions. “Tell you what,” says one of the soldiers to Craig Thompson at night, “if that Colonel thinks we’re going to be his playthings so he can get some glory he’s sadly mistaken.” But Craig only murmurs something in response. In the early morning the whole brigade musters, then piles into the backs of their lorries, guns in tow, and makes for the range. But hardly a hundred yards out of the motor pool the first lorry breaks down. A few hundred yards later, the second breaks down. Less than a mile from the range and two more break down seemingly at once. These lorries haven’t been taken out of the motor pool in several months. The truck Craig’s in suffers mechanical trouble but doesn’t break down, the driver able to get back on the road and limp along in first gear, painfully rolling into the range’s garage two hours later. It’s deeply degrading for Craig and the rest of the troops to stand at the side of the road while the mechanic tinkers about in the engine, the scene playing itself out in the shadow of the small but still looming threat of war. In the midst of all these strikes, the shop where Valeri works can hardly stay open. Still petty concerns dominate. “If you keep on talking then everyone will hear,” says Ruslan, taunting Valeri with a wry, sly grin. “Let them hear, I’m going to wind up leaving this place anyways,” Valeri says, “I’d rather take my chances in the street than hang around this den of jackals. They spy on us, they threaten us, they treat us like dirt. And it’s always been this way. What good is staying around to earn enough to keep on starving for one more day.” By now, a few others are listening. “Keep talking,” Ruslan says, “and you’re going to get exactly what you want.” It’s a tense moment, and Valeri can hardly feel his face for the rage surging in him.
At the police station, Garrett Walker’s young daughter is already out of the cells by the time he arrives. It’s an outrage, and Garrett feels his anger rising with every step that he takes forward into the future. “It’s enough that we spend all our lives working to put up the palaces these parasites live in,” says Garrett, “they live off our backs for so many years while they let us keep only just enough to ward off starvation. It’s all a criminal act.” The other unemployed workers shout their agreement. A strange man near the back of the room looks on, silently measuring the mood of the workers. In the darkness of the night the passions of working men are roused, in ways they’ve not been since the failed rising fifteen years ago. And the rolling hills of Surrey have seen much bloodshed in that time, along with wailing and the gnashing of teeth. In the night, tonight, the unemployed workers assembled accomplish little but to vent their rage, each of them returning home to find their families in full agreement with the emerging consensus, soon their moment to be at hand. As an interim measure, the wealthy man arranges his holdings through a series of complicated measures meant only to conceal his crimes. But it’s more than something so simple as the concentration of power in the hands of a small group of people. It’s the way we’re all taught to look at the world. It’s the way we’re made to expect certain urges, certain thoughts and feelings whenever we look on our own that put in our minds certain ideas about how the world ought to work. It’s the way we’re built by those who were built before us, in turn by those who were built before them, given a set of instinctive ways of thinking by something larger than any of us, something that, itself, does not think or feel, and seeks only its own survival. “Valeri,” says Harpal, the two running into each other when next he arrives at the plant, “I hope you’ve learned your lesson. I expect you to be here every day.” The act of the plant’s resuming operations and taking back what workers who will come is meant not as an act of reconciliation but as an act of humiliation, clearly signalling to Valeri and the others on the futility of their struggle. Strike all you want, Harpal seems to be saying, but you’ll still wind up working here, enriching us. And so it is; with every smooth, rhythmic contraction and expansion of his muscles, that first day back and every day thereafter, Valeri surrenders a piece of himself to the day’s labour and in so surrendering allow his flesh and his spirit to be torn asunder. At the shop, Valeri says, “I go home tired and sore every night and still I get threats every day. I won’t sit still. We won’t live like this forever.” “You might,” says Ruslan, “however long forever might be for people like you, if you’re not careful.” It’s clear to both Valeri and Ruslan they’re talking about much more than the job in front of them. But then Ruslan strikes a nerve, saying, “you’re going to wind up just like your parents.” But this is said with deliberate intent, although Valeri can’t see it for the anger that seizes control of him and compels him to lash out.
At the Anglican church which Darren Wright still attends, Father Bennett is acutely aware of the secret sermons held by the rogue church, though he knows not how many of his flock have
been drawn to them. He stands at the pulpit and declares, “and in the Book of Matthew, chapter five, verse seventeen, Christ said ‘Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.’ And in the Book of Romans, the epistle Paul wrote ‘the powers that be are ordained of God.’ My children, this is why we must turn away, even in these trying times, from the temptation to disobedience and rebellion.” There’s more, but Darren, Sheila, and the others hear little of it, after the sermon is over confusedly making for the across the vestibule and out into the street. But on his way out Darren spots the Father looking downcast, almost lonely. As it is written in 2 Corinthians 11:13-15, ‘For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works.’ In these trying times, men like Darren and women like Sheila have come to see Father Bennett as in service not of God but as a false apostle whose works are made of fraud.
It’s a troubling sight, with the tapping of the thousands of boots against the asphalt lending the scene a surreal mood. After Ruslan invoked the memory of Valeri’s dead parents, it was a step too far. Before he knows it, Valeri’s clenched fist shoots for Ruslan’s jaw, Valeri stopping himself with his knuckles just centimetres away. But Ruslan doesn’t flinch. It’s a seminal moment in Valeri’s life, one of many, but one which will only gain some significance in his own mind with the passage of so much time. Already it occurs to Valeri he’s lost his job, but he can’t simply walk away. He must make the managers take every painstaking step in forcing the inevitable, as the managers must resist every step forward for the workers against them. In the morning when next he turns up at the shop, Valeri’s hauled in for an interrogation, with Mr. Kennedy himself present. While Mr. Kennedy watches silently, the managers recall Valeri’s every sin, whether real or imagined, reaching back as long as he’s been working at the shop. He’s made to confess to them all; he refuses, then storms off, his intemperate nature giving him to an open display of melodramatic fury.
