The Power

by Ian Watson

  And Gisela was bloody abrupt. Maybe not her fault-she was wrestling with a foreign language.

  Jeni sat on a copy of the Guardian on a tree stump and waited. Gisela produced a notebook and biro as if to take dictation.

  Five

  Jeni took a last swallow of Jack’s strong tea. Since Nell and Andy still hadn’t turned up, she emptied her envelope on to the table.

  “Right. This has all been hushed up till now. Hospital administrators were told nothing. Even the government’s own health service defence planners were kept in the dark. That’s just for starters. Government ministers have deliberately misled Parliament about the Emergency Powers Bills. ‘Who can predict what these might contain?’: that’s been the official line. It’s a lie. The three bills are already in print, stockpiled in safes in Whitehall and all the regional offices. Luckily we had a mole-for-peace in the Cardiff office.”

  “Wey man, this could torn oot to be Cardiffgate!” Jack exchanged glances with Gisela, for whom he had also made a cup of tea, and been rewarded with a smile.

  Mal shook his head. “Us Brits don’t have the calibre of journalism the Yanks have. Most people are too busy goggling at Sammy Fox’s tits on page three.”

  “You don’t have the American Freedom of Information Act,” said Gisela. “Can we please have the details?” Pen poised.

  Jeni shuffled pages.

  “In the event of crisis the first bill is to be rammed through Parliament within twenty-four hours. This bill lets the Secretary of State designate half the sodding country as ‘ground defence areas’ – where everybody and everything is subject to the military, whether British or American. Householders can be kicked out, their homes bulldozed for free-fire zones. Roads closed. Any quote subversive protestors can be rounded up without charge or trial….”

  “That’s worsels,” said Jack. “So we’ll aal be stuffed behind wire at gun point, to wait to be incinerated.”

  “It means almost anyone you please! Labour Party members, union convenors, half the electorate.”

  “Half?” Mal laughed harshly. “You could be in for a sad surprise. Would your own good neighbours lift a finger?” He wagged his own plaster.

  “I know! I’ve thought of that. Cowardice. Latent fascism.”

  A squirrel scrabbled half way down an elder. At once Bess rushed over, barking. Foiled by the squirrel’s instant vanishing trick, the labrador sniffed the air then trotted off up the trail.

  “Can we proceed?” asked Gisela.

  “With the second bill, the entire country becomes a GDA. Total control of transport, fuel, and food. No strikes; wider internment powers. Full censorship.”

  Mal raised his finger again. “Who needs censorship? There’s already a secret agreement between Government and the BBC.”

  Jeni nodded. “Bill number three will be made law by Order in Council. Piss off, Parliament. This brings absolute rule by decree. Bye-bye, British Medical Association. Bye-bye, Law Society. Anything can be requisitioned. Summary death penalties. Conscription of adults and children into labour gangs. Detention for so-called suspected disease carriers; that’s a good one! Permanent imprisonment for protestors. And they’ll set the normal criminals free.”

  “Knaa who yor friends are, eh?” Jack nudged Gisela.

  “They’d put criminals in the labour gangs,” Mal said to Jack.

  “Wey aye, as overseers.”

  “This whole package is a lot more swingeing than when Hitler was poised to invade the UK,” Jeni went on. “Now here’s the jolly jackpot. While all this is going on, the whole British army – Territorials included – gets shipped to Europe, and massive American forces arrive to take over.”

  “Where do these Americans arrive?” asked Gisela.

  “Merseyside, Clydeside, Barry, and South Wales. A joint logistic plan signed secretly in ’83 agrees to hand over most British military and civil resources.”

  Mitzi smiled in a sickly way. “Child labour gangs included.”

  “Up to thirty major hospitals will have to empty all their beds for possible American casualties – much to the surprise of those hospitals.”

  “What if the nurses threaten to strike?”

  Jeni told Gisela, “The UK and USA haven’t quite yet decided whether to force doctors and nurses to stay on, at gunpoint, or simply bring in US medical reservists. Oh, and the US National Guard have tickets to this hoe-down too – every redneck sheriffs deputy from Alabama. With absolute power of life and death, plus total immunity from British law. That’s what’s known as a host nation support agreement.”

  Jack thumped his fist into his palm. “The enormity of it! We’re no more than a pinch o’ shit.”

  “Meanwhile,” said Mitzi, “there are more than twenty American protestors actually in US prisons already. The Plowshare People. One fellow in Connecticut’s serving eight years for banging on a Minuteman silo lid. Another is locked up for eighteen years.”

  “Never mind about those,” snapped Gisela.

  “But I do mind. That’s pretty permanent imprisonment, happening already in the land of the free.”

  “It is irrelevant when we are discussing the British situation. Naturally I regret for those people.”

  “That’s generous,” said Mal. “Seeing as you aren’t British either.”

  “In Germany the terrible battles will be fought.”

  “Not the way the news is gannin’ noo, pet. But ye might be right.”

  “Using Britain as the fortress. So peace must be international.”

  “Quite,” said Mitzi. “There are the American peace heroes too, braver than us.”

  “They had no chance. Here is different.”

  “A pinch o’ shit,” repeated Jack. (Could Gisela really follow his dialect?)

  “I’m sometimes ashamed of the little we do,” said Mitzi.

  “Never act out of shame! That’s bourgeois. Act out of –” Gisela didn’t say what.

  “You all do an enormous amount,” said Jeni. “You devote your lives.”

  By now the sky was clouding over thickly and rapidly. It might snow heavily. It might sleet, to make some nice slush. But it probably wouldn’t hail bullets of ice to beat up the camp; hail liked to crash down by surprise out of bluer skies.

  A jet up aloft on exercise sounded as though it was skidding across the clouds, actually squealing along them. Every time an F-111 took off, the operation cost over £30,000. High technology, indeed. Expensive technology, all designed for death.

  Yet there were idiocies about the base too. Despite all the wire and floodlights, dogs and armed guards, five wimmin from Greenham had virtually strolled inside a few months earlier. Technicians servicing an F-111 in one of the sacred hangers finally noticed the wimmin decorating another jet with peace messages in felt-tip pen. Result: an absurd trial in Churtington Magistrates Court for criminal damage amounting to exactly £343 and one penny, being the cost of special chemicals used to remove felt-tip graffiti. Not eighteen years in prison. Mitzi had a point. Maybe Gisela did, too; more was possible here.

  Again, only last autumn Nell had found a detailed military plan of the base in a dustbin by the bus stop near the main gate. And earlier, a sergeant with a sixteen letter Polish name, all “C”s and “Z”s, had dropped his passport in a gutter in Kerthrop village; this had been returned to the base commander via CND with ironic comments.

  And the campers had torn down whole sections of the fence, which remained unnoticed by the eagle-eyed guardians for a day or two.

  Also last autumn, to Jeni’s chagrin a class of catering students from the John Clare School had paid a visit to the base. The teacher who led the outing, Brenda Galloway, was no left-winger but she related afterwards to the common room how sloppy she thought security was. This was after Libya, so she needed an escort to take her troop, in, but no guard ever bothered looking in the luggage boot of the minibus which could have been filled with banners – or bombs. What most amused her, and curled her lip, was the array
of gambling machines in the Raven’s Nest pub attached to the Officers Mess – “Raven” was the codename for the EF-111 electronic radar jamming jets which also flew from Kerthrop, just as the ordinary F-111s were “Aardvarks”.

  “Walk into any pub in England,” Brenda had said, “and what do you see? Machines that you almost need a research degree and a course in touch typing and an elephant’s memory to play. And what do you have there in the Raven’s Nest? – which is for top brass, the brains of the USAF! You have one-armed bandits where you can only stick you money in and jerk a handle. No holds or nudges or spins or gambles or whatnot. They were brand-new machines too – built like 1950s Cadillacs with great chrome bumpers. I do wonder about our allies’ intellect at times!”

  “They’re trained for one thing,” Jeni had said. “Otherwise they get confused. And their war computers crash every fifteen seconds on average. Roll on Star Wars – that only needs one jerk of the handle. By the machine itself.”

  And what did the USAF think was the use of an exercise pretending mortar attacks on Gate Ten? Who was going to attack with mortars? CND? Special Russian spetznaz saboteurs disguised as local yokels? The Libyans? When any terrorist could drive right through the centre of the base and lob grenades at the main Exchange?

  Perhaps one day the British army might have to attack, if a British government disagreed violently enough with what a US base was about to be used for – and the US didn’t like being disagreed with?

  Bess returned back down the lane at an ungainly lollop. Behind strolled Nell and Andy. Plump, gold-pigtailed Nell in duffle coat and wellies, and black lace fingerless gloves. Tall, trim Andrew Lascelles looking smoothly well-bred in dirty trainers and a frayed donkey jacket, even with the butt of a roll-up stuck between his lips like a displaced tooth. Andy waved a casual hand, and Nell beamed.

  “Hi, Jen,” said Andy. “Your very own hunt’s out, other side of Hobby Hill. Charging around like the old SS on holiday.”

  Six

  A sunny afternoon in Oxford. The chestnut tree outside Donna’s window was lavishly in leaf, with candles of waxy pink blossoms uplifted. Birds twittered and warbled.

  As Jeni sat there on the sofa, wondering whether anything unusual was ever going to happen or if Donna had only given her a joke cachou to swallow half an hour earlier, the effects washed over her symphonically, bejewelled, and for some reason tasting of glycerine of thymol mouthwash which her Mum used to give her when she was a toddler to gargle with for a sore throat. _

  That long-lost taste linked her intimately to childhood, as though childhood had never been lost, but only occured the day before. From then until now her life was suddenly whole and continuous, joining up uninterruptedly by way of some shortcut through time and memory so that she felt like weeping and giggling at paradise regained – there outside the window in the midsummer Christmas candles of chestnut blooms that multiplied and copied themselves across her vision like a wallpaper design by Laura Ashley, but larger.

  So the window was a wall, yet the wall was also a window: profound insight. Words were walls and windows too, since they all began with W-S, just as her own name of Wallis did….

  Time drifted away. She shut her eyes. Her own personal windows became walls, of eyelid skin. Yet still throughout that tree, as in a cabbalistic Tree of Life, walked and waltzed all sorts of W-S, pink and green and golden. Just as in a kid’s first spelling book these letters were shaped from dozens of little whales. Then dozens of wagtails. Then wheels, then whips. She felt a surge of paranoia, terror. Wellington boots – more fear and excitement. Wasps and witches and wine bottles. And witches.

  But that was only the very beginning. She lost count of how many times she had lost count. Of what? Of each high wave of amusing weirdness – the amusement always teetering on the brink of some cold abyss, like a gaudy clown capering Blondin-style over Niagara. Of the troughs where she remembered herself – before she remembered a previous remembering and thus lost herself again.

  When the strongest effects were subsiding an hour or more later, Donna took her out for a walk to the Parks, holding Jeni’s hand while they crossed the zebras at the top of St Giles. How patient of Donna.

  But no. Donna wasn’t the patient. Donna was the nurse, the matron. Jeni was the patient. Keble College with its brick patchwork seemed to be a hospital. A don in a penguin gown, a doctor. Some wit had chalked on the hospital wall, “This isn’t a collage; it’s a Fairisle sweater.” This cosmic truth filled her with hilarity. Hospitals knitted bodies back together, stitching with needles. Everything connected. She had a bad cold; her nose was running. No, it wasn’t. She was merely aware as never before of her normal nasal mucous.

  At the Round Pond squabbling mallards quacked at her, knowing in their bird brains that her brain too was flying high.

  Along she and Donna went to Parson’s Pleasure, where nude men might be skinny-dipping in the willow-curtained Cherwell behind the high fence. They watched a punt race down the rollers bound for Mesopotamia. Poles splashed in the glycerine water; angrily a swan shook out its wings.

  Although time had melted, somehow it became evening. Jeni was back in Donna’s room, curtains closed against the gloaming. She balanced on Donna’s bouncy bed. For hours she’d been aware of cramps in her stomach, though the stained-glass illumination of the outside world had distracted attention from these. The cramps weren’t severe, just noticeably present. Maybe she should eat? Go out to the Dildunia for a cheap egg curry? The Dildunia seemed ten miles away. She’d never find her way there, or be able to read the menu inside of an hour.

  ‘I’ve a pain,” she told Donna, who’d been her companion all her life.

  Months later Jeni would realize that the tab must have been bought from a dealer, not filched from a hospital drug cupboard. Thus the acid would be cut with a pinch of strychnine.

  “Ah!” exclaimed her nurse. “That’s the armour in you. You must relax. I’ll massage you.” Bustling Donna pressed Jeni back upon the bedspread.

  “Hey!” Jeni flailed.

  “Don’t fight me!” Donna pinioned both of Jeni’s wrists in one strong hand. Muscular from restraining homicidal loonies. All built like a beautiful tug-boat.

  “Don’t resist. I’ll soften your armour.”

  Donna’s free hand was massaging, groping up Jeni’s legs, rucking up the Laura Ashley. Firm fingers between her thighs. (“Dress light and loose,” Donna had advised.) “Let me bring you to orgasm,” the heavy nurse ordered.

  Jeni could only remember fragments of what happened after that. Donna … staggering aghast as though she’d been struck by a plank. Her nose blooming blood. Donna’s eyes had gone mad: bulging, piggy eyes. The woman crouched into a wrestler’s stance, rocking to and fro. Panting, “You’re insane! Dangerous! You should be locked up!”

  As Jeni hauled herself from the bed … how had she thrown Donna off? Donna flinched as Jeni darted to the door. Jeni escaped, fled along corridors, locked herself in her own room. She sat up wide awake half the night with her light on, confused and mortally scared. Of what Donna had done. Of what she herself had done – but what was it?

  Plainly she was in imminent danger of burning her fuses just like the Whipmaster. At this rate she’d take her degree in the Warneford.

  So she quite the SLL and joined the Labour Party – one must still do something. She collected her Third, and moved to Reading for the next eight years.

  During her stint at that city school occasionally she went out with fellows – aside from union or Labour activity – but she never committed herself to a man. Maybe a woman needs a man like a fish needs an umbrella.

  Besides … something awful had taken place that evening in Donna’s room, although she wasn’t sure what it was. Something to do with domination and refusal and the mind unbound. Something violent from the depths – over which the clown danced.

  Finally she needed a change. She was tired of graffiti and smashed windows, condoms in the corridors, juvenile dope pus
hers in the toilets, pregnant schoolgirls, delinquents from broken homes. A friend and comrade, Nancy Abbott, had reached the same decision – along with her live-in boyfriend Gareth Jones. Nancy and Gareth both taught sciences and didn’t believe in getting married.

  A school in a rural area ought to be less hot-wired to heroin and crime and violence. Nancy and Gareth both netted posts at the John Clare School in the market town of Churtington. Nancy told Jeni of an upcoming opening in the history department there. While house hunting, she and Gareth had fallen in love with a cottage in some village called Melfort Parva. The property included a stable converted into a spanking new granny flat. Even with two salaries and no pressing desire for kids, Nancy and Gareth would need to rent out the granny flat to afford the mortgage. Why not rent to Jeni who needed a change of air, if she could snare the history job?

  Jeni weighed the notion of paying a slice of her comrades’ mortgage for them. A naive move, perhaps? On the other hand, she’d always rented. She had no ambitions to be responsible for bricks and mortar.

  So she hauled out a road atlas, found the right page for that county, and closed her eyes. Briefly she had experienced a flash recall of a huge chestnut tree aflower with furled whips and wellies and comic witches. Opening her eyes, she found that her finger had descended within an inch of Mel-fort Parva. A sign – to the unsuperstitious. That decided her. She even felt an uplifting sense of mission: time to export a dose of socialism from the city to the fields.