People
Hsiao May was hungry. Her supplies were limited, but the time had come. She reached over into her cool bag and brought out a brown paper packet. It was weighty and springy, a wrapped chunk of flesh in her cupped palm. A crackle of excitement ran through her at the capacity of the contents to change the world for ever, as well as its unavoidable taboo. Already she could hear her mother’s voice, and she hadn’t even opened the bag. What you doing, Hsiao May? What you got in there? What? You come here home and let me make food for you. I have rice cooking now, and chicken leg. You don’t need to go so low as eating those things.
She sat with the packet in her lap and started slowly, with the very tips of her fingers, to unfurl its scrolled mouth. Then, before slipping her hand inside, she glanced over at the camper van. In the light of an overhead lamp, Harold was reading something balanced on the steering wheel, from time to time passing his hand across his bearded cheek. He glanced up, briefly, the sort of look one might give someone making too much noise in a library, and returned to his reading. Then he raised a mug to his lips and drank, gingerly, from something hot. The steam misted his glasses; patiently, he perched the mug on the dashboard, removed his glasses, wiped the lenses individually on his jumper, replaced them. Then he carried on reading. Come on, she thought. Don’t stalk.
But as she weighed the paper bag in her hands, she knew that she wanted somebody to share it with. If truth be told, she wanted someone to share her life with, someone other than Mama, Baba, Lulu, Lulu’s kids. People, it was all about the people. Here she was, the answer to the biggest question of our times wrapped in paper in her hands, and she, the bearer of the knowledge, was alone and obscure in the world. She had her work, she had her passion, but without people to share it with she was like a woman without a reflection. She was dead space, a statue whose face had been worn smooth by the elements. She looked up at the man in the camper van again. She couldn’t very well knock on his window and demand that Harold share her life. But if she offered him a snack? That would be a test of his open-mindedness, his intellectual curiosity, his ability to carry out rational analysis regardless of his culturally constructed preconceptions. It would be a meaningful topic of conversation, one which usually she could not introduce. But with him – potentially a fellow independent-minded academic – it might be possible. If he clicked, they could be friends, and if not, perhaps acquaintances. Either way, it would be a start. But dare she?
What was she thinking? She could not. She had noticed Harold once at an inter-faculty meeting, he had spoken with some passion and bravery against the commercialisation of higher education: against the rise in tuition fees, and against the university’s policy of recruiting Chinese students indiscriminately in pursuit of their parents’ wallets. He had also argued eloquently against positive discrimination, reasoning that a quota for state school children was nothing but a fig leaf for the failings of state education. She had been impressed at the time, she remembered. She saw his eyes flick up, scan the motorway for a moment, then return to his papers. She turned off the light above her head, put her paper bag away. She closed her eyes.
She just wasn’t very good with people. What was the phrase? She wasn’t a people person. And truly it is all down to people. The whole swarming edifice of human endeavour serves but one aim, that of the happiness, freedom, and fulfilment of people. The obstacles are produced by people. The solutions, where they exist, are made by people. But now there are so many people, and year by year so many more, that without radical thinking, humanity will buckle and collapse.
She traced with her fingers the contours of the buff folder on the passenger seat. She did not need it to be open. She could draw on it as she pleased; using only her mind, she could surround herself with the landscape of the world’s problems as they are today, coupled with a vision of how these problems could be solved tomorrow. It is imperative, she thought, that people – all people – began to share her vision.
Ten thousand years ago, she thought, there were maybe five million people walking the earth. Each, if truth be told, probably harboured concerns and desires which in the final analysis were not that far removed from our own. Certainly they desired sex. By the time of the First Dynasty in Egypt, the global population had trebled in size; and by the time Christ’s birth established, albeit in a retrospective sense, our Common Era, as many as two hundred million people were daily drawing breath. From five million to two hundred million in eight thousand years.
People continued to fall in love, to have sex, to have children, to have more. At the cusp of the nineteenth century, when the inhabitants of the world numbered – for the first time – one billion, the economist Thomas Malthus argued in his famous Essay on the Principle of Population that human proliferation would be self-regulated by plague, by famine, by war. This marked, at least in Hsiao May’s mind – which, though she was a scientist, was drawn to glimmers of poetic irony – the moment things really took off. People everywhere, meeting, loving, fucking, breeding. Fighting, starving, dying from the plague. Meeting, loving, fucking, breeding. By the nineteen twenties, the population had doubled. Two billion. And it only took forty years for the next billion to arrive. Eight years later, when the German Nobel laureate Paul Ehrlich announced that the books would surely soon be balanced by the starvation of hundreds of millions, there were three-and-a-half billion people on the earth. From then until now, a billion newborn eyes have peeled open every twelve or so years.
On 12 October 1999, the world’s six-billionth person, Adnan Mević, was born in Sarajevo. (His birth was celebrated with a visit from the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, who forgot to bring a present.) On Halloween 2011, the world welcomed its seven-billionth person: Danica May Camacho from Manila in the Philippines. The UN, realising that something had to be done, revised its previous forecast that the global population would plateau in 2050 at a level of nine billion. Instead, it suggested that by 2100 there would be ten billion people on earth. And this was by no means definitive. The more people there were, the more impact small inaccuracies would have; if families on average were to have, say, an extra 0.5 of a child, by 2100 the global population would be sixteen billion.
At this point in her discourse, Hsiao May would quote the American myrmecologist Edward Osborne Wilson, who said that the pattern of population growth in the twentieth century was ‘more bacterial than primate’. According to most estimates, in about a decade there would be eight billion souls on this earth, with the brunt of the growth occurring in the poorest regions. India would overtake China as the most populous nation on earth. And here she would come to the point: shortages would be rife.
There were no two ways about it. This plundered planet, its water supply desiccated by rising temperatures, its verdancy and munificence faltering, would be unable to provide the oil, water, arable land, crops and livestock to feed such a massive quantity of humans, all vying for their sustenance, their lives. Bill Gates argued that if humanity is to survive, a second ‘green revolution’ would desperately be needed. The first, which occurred between 1950 and 1990, had increased global grain yields by eighty per cent through the widespread introduction of phosphorus-rich fertilisers. Even this had become unsustainable: phosphorus supplies were now being exhausted, which had been called ‘the gravest natural resource shortage you’ve never heard of’.
This was the question, the biggest question of our times . . . and the answer lay in rethinking the human food chain.
But now her mind was buzzing again. She leaned over and replaced her notes in her briefcase. Then she looked out once again at the road. Most engines were off; most car lights were out. The occasional car door was open, the occasional figure was leaning against a vehicle, drinking, smoking, stretching as if getting out of bed. On the other side of the motorway, people were even playing football; this had given her a little thrill of delight at first, before it too became familiar, unremarkable.
This was no longer a traffic jam. The cars had shed
their attribute of mobility, their function as methods of transport. They had become temporary homes. Individual bases of existence, units in an accidental society. Seen in a certain light, there was something almost utopian about this vehicle village, she thought. This autopolis. All divisions of race, class, and wealth had been done away with by the hand of randomness; fate had netted several thousand people and bunched them together, without the slightest concern for their social instincts. How else would a species collect so randomly, with no ordering principle?
Out of nowhere, a pale face appeared framed in her car window, followed by a torso. It floated there like a glow-worm while her eyes focused. A stocky, rough-looking man, wearing a T-shirt with a faded soft drink logo on the chest; a face that looked roughly hewn from a block of lard. He was motioning for her to wind down the window. After a moment of consideration, she did so.
‘Sorry to disturb, Miss. I just wondered if you have any information?’
‘Information?’
‘Information.’
‘What sort of information?’
‘You know. About hold-up.’
‘No idea.’
‘Right, right.’
His accent, though she could not place it exactly, was certainly Eastern European.
‘It’s just that I am on job right now. That is my lorry there.’
‘I see.’
This was the point at which he would have been expected to thank her and be on his way; but he just stood there, half bending over, peering in through her window awkwardly.
‘Was there something else?’ she said at last.
‘From what I hear, there’s been massive pile-up three miles down road,’ he replied. ‘Maybe two. Two lorries. Or one lorry. One lorry and van. One lorry and large van.’ He glanced around nervously, then looked back at Hsiao May.
‘That’s . . . sad,’ she said. ‘Well, I hope they get it cleared quickly, whatever it is.’
To her surprise, the man straightened up. ‘I’ll carry on down line,’ he said. ‘And keep you posted.’
‘Thanks,’ said Hsiao May, uncertainly. The man nodded and, at last, moved on. She wound the window back up and made sure that the doors were locked. Then she sat back for a few minutes, eyes closed, until her emotions settled. Anything could happen out here, anything. Hush. I could be killed or raped or kidnapped. Hush. Kidnapped? How would they make their getaway? Hush. Finally, once she had composed herself once more and her mind had quietened, she opened her eyes again. The world had returned to normality. It was a traffic jam, that was all.
But now it was raining again. Not hard, slanting rain like before, but a wet, cloudlike mist that settled on everything like cobwebs. Involuntarily she shivered. Would this night never end?
A movement caught her eye. On the hard shoulder a police car was approaching, with flashing lights but no siren, and at a reasonable speed. It slowed, then came to a stop by the emergency phone. The door opened; out stepped a burly policeman, protected against the elements by a tent-like yellow jacket. The collar was raised around his chin, and a cap in a plastic cover sat low over his eyes. He was recognisable as human by form alone; barely any skin could be seen.
She got out of the car and hurried over to the policeman through the rain. By the time she arrived at the hard shoulder, she was soaked. The policeman, who had opened the emergency telephone box and was fiddling with something inside, did not appear to notice her approach. She plucked at his slippery sleeve and he looked at her over his shoulder.
‘What’s going on?’ she said, shielding her eyes from the rain. ‘We’ve been here for hours and hours.’
‘There’s been an incident, Miss,’ he said and returned to the phone box.
‘What kind of incident? Do you know what’s going on? I mean, can you tell me?’
‘An incident of an emergency nature,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘involving a number of individuals further along the motorway. The emergency services are attending the scene.’
‘Can’t you tell me anything more?’ she said, shaking the rain from her hair. ‘Anything? It’s awful being stuck like this, not knowing.’
The policeman concluded his task in the phone box and slammed it shut. As he turned to face her, a layer of rainwater slid from the peak of his cap. ‘Sorry, Miss,’ he said. ‘We can’t release any further details of the incident at the present time.’ He strode back to his car, Hsiao May trailing in his wake.
Then, through the shimmering moisture came Max, charging like a bull. His shoulders were hunched, and he wore no coat. ‘Officer! Hello, officer!’ he called. ‘Any idea what the hold-up is?’
The policemen regarded him perfunctorily, his hand resting on the door handle. ‘An incident, sir,’ he said, ‘involving a number of individuals.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Sorry, sir. It’s part of an ongoing investigation.’
‘Ongoing investigation? Into what?’
‘Sorry, sir.’
‘Christ almighty. Can’t you at least give us an idea of how long we’re going to be here?’
‘Anyone’s guess, sir, I’m afraid.’
‘What about supplies? Where can we get water, food? I have a young daughter in the car, and she’s starting to run a fever.’
‘If you’re in urgent need of assistance, sir, call the emergency services.’
‘But you are the emergency services.’
‘Sorry, sir. I’m from traffic.’
‘You mean you’re the wrong sort of policeman?’
‘Sir, the best thing would be for you to return to your vehicle now. Just calm down and return to your vehicle.’
‘But I am calm,’ said Max. ‘I’m . . . perfectly . . . calm.’
‘Then return to your vehicle, sir.’ He lowered himself into his car and drove away.
Max and Hsiao May exchanged a glance. ‘Fucking unbelievable,’ said Max venomously. Hsiao May didn’t have the words to reply, and could only watch as he slunk away into the darkness. She felt on the verge of tears. As she returned to her car, the mist billowing around her, she thought again of Harold.
Evading Tomasz
Shauna’s hangover, which by rights should have been dissipating by now, was deepening. Her head was throbbing to some satanic rhythm, her brain pulsating in its bony case. She had relieved herself of the discomfort of a full bladder, but this had merely allowed her to become aware again of the potency of her hangover. It hadn’t seemed so bad earlier, when she was speaking to the people by the Waitrose van. But now that she was alone once again, and sitting in her stuffy car, it had reached truly epic proportions.
The problem was that when she had sat down at the table for the wedding breakfast, and sensed immediately that people were treating her oddly, she had hit the bottle with a vengeance. This, come to think of it, was typical; whenever she felt intimidated, or knew she was making a fool of herself, she would react by talking more, courting attention more insistently, yes, drinking more, all the time dying inside. By the time pudding had been served, and the speeches had commenced, she was so drunk – so drunk – that the scene was set for what was to happen next. And the hangover was inevitable too.
She sat in a zombified state for several minutes while a fine rain fell. As soon as it relented, she swung her feet out of the car and into the wall of chill night air. Action had to be taken. Her head swam and she had to pause before standing up. The sky was murky and solid, yet at the same time seething, different islands and continents of cloud overlapping and obscuring one another. The acrid taste of wine was still in her mouth, unholy fumes rising from a dark heat within her. She got to her feet, felt a pang of nausea, let it pass. Now that she was out of the car, standing with her feet planted firmly on the tarmac, it struck her how dwarfed the human being was by his own creation. Here were thousands of stationary vehicles, tens of thousands, each one of them stronger than fifty men, and here was their highway, their temple. Here was her hangover, imposed upon her by a cul
ture more powerful than she was, using a poison more powerful than she was. What was left?
These were the sorts of thoughts she would have from time to time, after particularly heavy sessions. (At uni she had written a book entitled Heavy Sessions, a compilation of drunken stories of herself and her friends.)
She turned slowly through 360 degrees, trying to discern where the nearest outpost of civilisation might be. She had no idea where she was exactly, at what position on the M25, though she thought she could recall passing the Dartford Crossing not all that long ago. Perhaps it didn’t matter where she was, since this road was circular. God, she was shit at this kind of thing. Why couldn’t everything just work as it was supposed to? Then she would be at home in her bath by now. She knew what her father would say. He would say: Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σíβα тí θέεıς; respondebat illa: άΠОθα∨εî∨ θέω. This was his set piece, the only passage of Latin (and Greek) he was able to remember. Did she know what it meant? She did not, regardless of the fact that she got a C at Latin, and regardless of the fact that her father had explained it to her many times. She vaguely knew it was taken from The Waste Land; she vaguely knew it had something to do with a goddess in a bottle living out some bleak and awful existence; she vaguely knew it had to do with wanting to be dead.
A man up ahead was windmilling his arms in the air. At first she thought he was in some kind of trouble, but then he gave a final stretch and disappeared back into his car. Everybody was contained within their little pods, unable to look beyond the tiny fragments of their lives. She had thought that Londoners would step up in times like these, start banding together and sharing resources. That was what was supposed to happen, wasn’t it? Like when there’s a power cut or a flood or a strike. Had the human spark been finally obliterated? The spirit of the Blitz? Was all that was left an endless system of machines and concrete, populated by bodies, not people? Either way, she knew that shortly after the camaraderie came the time when people would start eating each other. She was growing maudlin, she knew that, and she knew it was the hangover. She was a fool. Still, she wished that someone would dash off and get her supplies, her paracetamol and water, and perhaps a nice box of chocolates, and come back and make her feel as if everything was going to be all right. They would stay in touch, fall in love, build a life; they would have babies, and together, eventually, grow old.
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