by J. T. Marsh
Along the streets never come relief from the constant terror and the lawlessness that pervade life for the working man, the threat of his livelihood being taken, the threat of eviction from his home, as those tall, thin, glass and steel monstrosities replace the short, square blocks once built for men like him and in so replacing transform the character of his city beyond recognition. The streets are in crisis, in a state of never ending crisis as the forces of the wealthy class muscle their way across the city, not with the truncheon but with the fountain pen, taping notices to the fronts of doors, erecting chain-link fences around closed and darkened apartment blocks, before bringing the working man in to tear it all down and put up in its place something meant for someone else. It’s one of the cruel ironies of our time, that the working man should be made to become the instrument of his own demise. As he works for the profit of another, his body is like a machine, his mind reciting a routine from memory, his body executing its routine in a series of smooth, well-rehearsed motions, his muscles expanding and contracting like the pistons of an engine firing in rapid succession.
But it’s not their fault. The streets never lie idle under the hot summer’s sun, nor do they meekly consent to the trundling of a thousand footsteps along their black surface, instead fighting as it only knows how. Even in these times of immense hardship and deprivation, there are little moments of warmth and happiness, when the working man comes home to see his children at the end of a long, hard day. It’s never easy. The working man watches, feeling stationary in a world advancing by leaps and bounds every day, feeling as though it’s leaving him behind, trapping him in a little cone of his own silence. Crossing the end of the world would but leave him further in a little box of his own malfeasance, as he makes home at the end of the day his life having changed little, as he climbs the stairs to his little cube of an apartment his time having yielded only more sweat, blood, and tears. He looks out the window and into the half-darkness of the alley behind his home, and for a moment he wonders if the night might conceal within its expanse the very force which could deliver him from evil and into his own personal salvation. Not in those words, of course. The working man doesn’t think in these terms. Instead, he thinks in terms of his own future’s end, that he must work towards this end each day, with every foot brought down on the ground in front of him, every breath drawn in and pushed out, every heartbeat pushing blood through his veins bringing him closer to his own victory.
After ending its last shift ever, this factory is to be shut down, like the factory on the other side of the street to fall dark, some of the workers to return tomorrow to put up the fences and the razor wire that’ll guard the factory’s empty shell. It’s a final indignity, that these workers should be put to work one last time caging in the remains of his livelihood, at the behest of his former paymaster ensuring that no one will ever return to work here again. The working man will find something to do, somewhere to go during the days to earn some modest wage; resourcefulness and resiliency are the values of his class. Still, he knows this to be a seminal moment in his life, as history runs its course all around him the aggrieved injustice of it all striking him in a way instinctive, almost guttural. Should he be so inclined, this would make for a perfect moment to fight back; at the moment, though, he’s not so inclined, thinking as he is of ways to feed himself. He returns home to his small, hollow apartment, sparsely furnished, with dishes piled in the kitchen sink and clothes in a laundry basket square in the middle of the living room’s floor. Though he’s tired, the working man sleeps little that night, in a hundred other such apartments the same scenario playing itself out a hundred times, the working man’s little apartment never a real place but instead a place imagined, unreal, even esoteric in its unreality, the war against the working man having visited upon him hopelessness and poverty. With the world wallowing in crisis and with conditions there to breed a smouldering discontent, we must be careful not to allow ourselves to be governed wholly by the passions of the moment. Our struggle, you see, demands of us a focus on an ultimate end, one which can only be reached should each of us conserve our strength for decisive action. The working man, tired, can only yield to the banalities of life, to the hard work for little pay, to the small, run-down box of an apartment, to the small but widening holes in his jeans and to the ever-present threat of losing that which is the envy of no man but which is better than having none at all. In this state of mind he is trapped, needing as he does his own to take on the burden of shaping these vague impulses and these subversive urges into something more. In the world at large, there’s trouble afoot, working men like Valeri in the other empires agitating for their own future. While the screens fill with news of foreign armies moving this way and that, never fighting but posturing for a fight, it may yet take only the slightest provocation for all of these troubled empires, filled with restlessness and agitation, to set themselves on one another in a bid to relieve themselves of their own troubles.
At night, it’s still too hot out for the working man to bear, these heady summer days concealing a frustration and an antipathy from within which there can be drawn the steely determination and the straight-faced strength needed to win through this most difficult time, this tentative early stage where nothing seems certain but continuous defeat. At night, the streets become shrouded in darkness, the sickly, pale orange light of the streetlamps casting an eerie glow on the road. Though we’re in the midst of a mounting crisis, I hope you’ll join me in admiring the beauty of these streets, these rivers of amber and golden light coursing through the dark, its life-giving brightness an anaemic imitation, a caricature of the brilliant radiance of the sun’s natural light. It’s in these troubled times that we learn to find that kind of small beauty wherever it can be found, for without it we might be tricked into thinking the world we live in to be black as the night itself. If we don’t take advantage of these last opportunities to savour what few pleasures are reserved for the working man, then our history’s future may yet take them away from us forever. But as the fires of history burn, the working man still lives his life, working in the day, tossing and turning at night, all the while recalling the sight of so many columns of smoke rising from the city’s streets, imagining himself drawn to the fight for history’s future.
Nevermore lacking in spirit, we take what’s happened so far and we look at it in sum. As the working man makes his meagre wages stretch further than ever before, the wealthy man continues to parcel off the land and sell it to the travellers from halfway around the world, the whole lot of them conspiring against him whether they realize it or not. Then, the working man adapts, as he is so accustomed to adapting, to making life work with a steadily shrinking wealth, space, energy, life. Each time, this sequence of events repeats itself, each taking less time than the last, each forcing the working man to subsist on less than he’d subsisted on before, the vicious cycle reducing itself until there should come a time when it can reduce no more. What happens then will leave all of our lives changed forever, in ways we’d never thought it possible for them to be changed, in the darkness of the night all bearing witness to the deception in all our histories combined.
14. In the Trenches
Although classes are suspended at the polytechnic, Sean Morrison and some of the more committed students continue to spend much of their days on campus. For the student, the battleground has always been in the study halls, fighting not over territory but the consciousness of men, his weapons not guns but ideas, words marshalled in their service like a rifle’s bullets. Still in his formative years, Sean must learn to temper the lofty expectations of youth for short term gain in order to harness the passion burning with the fire of a desert’s sun. After he’s given a speech to the small crowd of gathered students, he yields the steps outside the polytechnic’s main hall to another, then listens all the same. “…And our memories of the war fifteen years ago shall never be forgotten,” the speaker declares, “for so long as we keep the fires of liberation burning the l
ight they provide shall never be extinguished.” In the time left before this current crisis escalates dramatically, the students have much to learn. For the working man, work has become like warfare, a constant struggle with an overwhelming force for the right to what’s his. As his world crumbles all around him, the working man drives over the same ground rhythmically, compulsively, in a ritual familiar to him from hundreds of years of experience. For the working man, work is like warfare, every day his struggle one for a steadily shrinking sustenance. Even before the working man fashions for himself a means of finally seizing that which is rightfully his, his is a constant war, in the act of going to work and submitting himself for exploitation at the hands of his wealthy paymasters he commits an act of war, just as his wealthy paymasters themselves commit an act war in taking from him his labour and giving him, in exchange, his pittance, this sort of mundane struggle over the expropriation of wealth at the centre of daily life for all. A bomb bursts, blowing out a storefront, mangling bodies and spilling blood. When the police arrive, gunmen attack, the tell-tale rattling of gunfire chattering across the street while the policemen take cover. It’s all a confused and disoriented mess, men shooting at nothing, nothing shooting back, stray rounds burying in concrete while voices shout. When it’s over, two rebel gunmen are dead, one policeman wounded. With nothing gained from the attack, it seems the rebels have sacrificed two men for nothing. But not all is as it seems.
Across the city, there’s action. “Nobody move!” It comes without warning, the doors to the underground church broken down, following it a series of troopers rushing inside. There’s no gunfire, only the sound of voices shouting at the troopers, men and women clutching their Bibles. The troopers go round, demanding the identities of every parishioner, frisking them for weapons, finding none. It’s a fruitless search, these troopers acting on an exaggerated report of illegal firearms stored somewhere on the premises. Darren Wright’s there, but his younger friend Sheila has found herself work for the night, sparing her the experience. In the heat of the moment Darren loses sight of himself, looking for something that isn’t there, the sanctuary that is his underground church violated like the rough and coarse action of a man having his way unwanted with a woman half his size. This is only one of many ill-timed raids the police stage, on this night, on many nights past, on many nights to come, but it’s this night that brings the raid Darren will remember much longer than he should. After Valeri picks himself up off the ground, he turns and comes face to face with a storm trooper, a young man who seems frozen in fear. Valeri looks the trooper in the eye and is about to say something when another explosion bursts in the street, sending him running, sending all of them running, the young trooper a little slower than him but running for his life all the same. They leave the sounds of disorder and confusion behind, drawing away from the scene; not far away the young storm trooper’s radio starts squawking, but he gives it a moment before answering. It’s a hard day for everyone, but by nightfall only two have died, with the hundred injured drawing the care and the concern of the world’s screens. Meanwhile, elsewhere in London a pair of rebel gunmen happen across a convoy of police armoured cars, in the night a confused exchange of gunfire burying bullets in the pavement, shattering glass, and puncturing tyres. But most rounds fire at shadows, at flickers of light in the night, at something imagined where there’s nothing at all. The rebel gunmen are shot dead. A couple of policemen are injured, but both recover in hospital.
It’s not fair, it’s never been fair for men like Garrett Walker to languish in the misery and shiftlessness of unemployment while half a city away the wealthy live in luxury despite having never broken a sweat. Still he senses the impending disaster, in the primal, instinctive sort of way all such men can, in the street telling a neighbour, “I’m sick of the way they talk about us.” His neighbour agrees, as have many in England since the failed rising fifteen years ago, and many more in the years before. “They close all our mills and shut down all our factories then pin the blame on us for not being able to find work,” he says, “and then they raise the rent!” This, as news breaks of the latest rise in rates, in charges and surcharges which’ll send prices climbing ever higher. Soon he learns the lesson generations of working men have each had to learn for themselves. But while Garrett and his neighbour agree on their state of affairs, in the background events continue to mount. As the wealthy man’s campaign of construction reaches its fevered pitch, the working man’s aching and sore muscles become used to the unending exertion even as his mind, free to wander as his body moves rhythmically like a machine, tempts him with fantasies of joining the scattered, disparate crowds gathering in the streets. At work, his muscles contract and expand, the same routine performed on command a thousand times over to make a day, working himself tired, earning himself his daily pittance while enriching the wealthy man many times over. But as the working man looks aside and casts his silent sympathies in with the rabble rousing trouble in the streets he allows his mind’s eye to fill with quixotic fantasies of raising his fists in anger right alongside they who would have nothing left to lose. In the night, another pair of gunmen ready themselves for action, this time not lying in wait but striking out. Staking out positions near a police station, the gunmen open fire, cracking holes in the station’s red-brick façade, shattering glass, sending policemen diving for cover. There’s screaming and shouting, the light, erratic gunfire of the rebels soon met with the chattering of the policemen’s rifles. The gunmen die. Three policemen are wounded, and one later dies of wounds in hospital. Between these three attacks, six rebel gunmen dead for one trooper dead and another wounded. Other attacks take place throughout Britain, the rebel sacrificing what few men he has in these tentative, early attacks. These seem a fool’s exchange, but the rebel leaders are no fools.
A black sky hides all motives. A dark room bares all thoughts. At the armoury, things have taken a turn for the worse. All the days spent cleaning the guns can’t make up for the steadily growing dread that’s invaded every moment of every day. For Private Craig Thompson, this means little changes but for the imposing sentence of confinement to the barracks. With the rest of the troops he learns of the unrest despite the strict controls on the flow of information into and out of their base. When Colonel Cooke learns of their subterfuge, he has the base thoroughly searched and every unauthorized screen destroyed. No one knows yet what’s happening, why it’s happening, and as Private Thompson looks over the guns just after the day’s inspection it occurs to him something must be coming, the instinct in him taking over even in the presence of a suffocating information blackout. “Don’t feel too bad for yourself,” says the Colonel, suddenly standing above and behind him, “it’s not for men like you to worry about the grand scheme of things. It’s not even for men like me, to be frank.” Private Thompson snaps to, but takes a half-second too long. Soon, he’s in the stockade. Over the next several weeks, these attacks occur sporadically, leaving the troopers confused and disoriented. On the face of it, there seems to be no motive, no coherent organization to these attacks. Naturally, men like Miguel Figueroa and women like Rose Powell understand; word spreads through the working class apartment blocks and the shantytowns that a resistance is afoot, years of neglect and abuse rendering them a sympathetic caste to the lashing out against the symbols of power. At a meeting of concerned citizens, held in a church not long after these street attacks have begun, Valeri takes the pulpit. “Brothers and sisters,” he says, “we have stood by and watched the theft of our homes for too long. Some of you might still believe in the power of compromise, but I tell you this: any compromise between right and wrong is a moral fraud. We want only dignity, and they want only to take away our dignity. Do we compromise and offer to surrender to them only half our dignity? No!” A raised fist prompts shouts of agreement from the audience, in turn a smile on Valeri’s face. “We are not animals,” he continues, “and we are not objects of theirs to be manipulated, to be traded for the profit of another.”
It’s a rousing speech, but one which fails to command even Valeri’s full attention, thoughts lingering in the back of his mind of the things he’s done to Maria, these thoughts struggling with themselves in a confusing mess of guilt and pride, arrogant pride. You see, Valeri’s a much more complicated figure than our history has chosen to remember, and he’s yet to reach his destiny.
After finishing one set of fortifications Stanislaw Czerkawski can have only one night’s rest before made to head out for the next. He hardly sees his wife. In the night he sleeps patiently, dreaming of the day when he’ll become master of his own destiny. For so long as his half-second of peace endures Stanislaw’s he can count himself among no master’s slave, no bossman’s plaything. In the morning he sees through the brightened darkness of the dawn and into the next day over, imagining only peace where there’s war. But imaginings aren’t enough. Arriving at his worksite, he finds there’s no work for the day, the foreman telling him to beat it. But then the foreman says something that pushes Stanislaw the wrong way; the foreman yells, “you dirty Polacks can find someone else to bother today!” By the time he’s collected himself, Stanislaw’s in cuffs, piled into the back of a police lorry along with the rest of the ne’er-do-wells, trundling along the streets of the working class neighbourhoods heading for a police station to sit in a cell. They don’t know the true purpose of their labour, but soon enough they will find out. After things have begun to fall into place, Valeri steps up his efforts, meeting with his fellow workers at the plant, one at a time, gathering pledges and signing men, in his dreams building a grand coalition that could topple even the mightiest tyrant. But it’s not that simple. It’s never that simple. In the union hall that night, no agreement is reached, the skeptics still outnumbering the hawks, for the moment Valeri bitterly accepting their work must continue. Though the vote has turned against action, Valeri knows not to accept this vote, for he has come to appreciate, in the way that he has, that consensus is not measured; it must be forged. “Don’t worry,” says Murray, “we’ll be there.” In the night, it’s always in the night, Valeri arrives home to find Hannah asleep, still in her scrubs, dried blood stains and all. He thinks not to disturb her, and toes gently past the door to her bedroom. But just when he thinks he’s made it, he hears her voice. “Water’s out again,” Hannah says. “You would be better to tell me when it’s on,” Valeri says. “You can’t be serious,” Hannah says. “Why can’t I?” Valeri asks. Hannah sighs. “I wish you would become more cheerful in my company,” she says, “what’s the point of fighting if you don’t take the And Valeri doesn’t reply to that last remark, simply reaching for a bottle of flat beer on a shelf and taking a swig. It’s dark, with only the hall’s dull light to cast a half-illumination on the scene, making it look like they live in a world where up might be down, where right might be wrong, where black might be brighter than the brightest of whites.
