Hatred

by M J Dees

  “Walker is a babbler,” the man said. “He has no thoughts of his own. He has no future. Hughes is the name you ought to watch.”

  “How do you think Walker came to power, then?” Jim asked.

  “Westminster brought themselves to ruin.”

  “How?”

  “They abandoned us after the floods. Alba is tired of Englishmen telling them what to do.”

  “But Walker was born in England.”

  “And that’s why he will fail.”

  “But you should have heard the crowd cheering for him.”

  The man laughed.

  “That was all Scottish fun,” he said. “It won’t last. I need to get out of the country for a while.”

  Chapter Three – 23 years and 9 months before the collapse

  Jim dedicated himself to preparing the lectures he would have to deliver when the university resumed after the New Year.

  For Christmas, Dan and Scarlett Knight had invited him and Annabel to have dinner with them. They had also invited Sam Patel.

  Patel was drinking whiskey like it was going out of fashion, and Jim asked him if everything was okay.

  “Writer’s block,” Patel lamented. “I used to write a good lecture. You know that feeling that you used to be able to do something?”

  “Don’t worry, Sam,” Jim said. “It’ll come back. It always does. You’ll be back in the swing of things in no time.”

  Patel seemed to brighten a little at this.

  “How are you getting on with your lectures?” he asked Jim.

  “They’re getting there.”

  “Well done. I wish you the best of luck. Not that you’ll need it.”

  “Thanks, Sam.”

  “How did you like today’s meal?”

  “It was nice.”

  “Synthetic meat.”

  “What?”

  “Synthetic meat, grown in a factory, fed some kind of grain and electricity.”

  “I’ve heard about that. I couldn’t tell the difference.”

  “Well, it is real meat after all.”

  *

  In the new year, as Annabel and Jim walked to the polling station, they discussed the riots in London and the emergency powers the Government had given itself. The Army was on the streets and the deaths of some key opposition figures had sparked rumours that the Government was murdering its opponents. The bush fires, floods, drought and famine in Africa didn’t seem so important anymore.

  The deaths had also sparked protests in Edinburgh, and protestors had caused more damage.

  Jim watched Annabel as she went into the booth, and she waited for him as he posted his slip in the ballot box.

  “Do you think we are wasting our time?” asked Annabel.

  “It’s never a waste,” said Jim.

  When they arrived home, there was no power again, and they had turned the water off.

  “Do you think it’s another strike?” Annabel asked.

  “No, just lack of capacity I imagine.”

  Besides the lack of power, they had no water in the kitchen. To ration water, the water company only turned on the supply between 6am and 6pm. In the flat, the water tank would fill, which served the shower and taps in the bathroom, but the taps in the kitchen, which were connected directly to the mains, stopped working in the evenings.

  Jim showed Annabel a cartoon on his flip showing Walker having calluses manicured into his hands to make him look more like a worker.

  After Jim had given his first lecture, he felt a tremendous relief from all the worries which had been surrounding him. He felt freer and calmer.

  However, when he browsed the online library, his anxiety soon returned. The range of specialist literature intimidated him with the apparent gaps in his knowledge. He felt uncomfortable with so many unfamiliar titles.

  He retreated to the staff room, but his heart sank when he saw Joe Wood there.

  “I can’t believe it,” Joe said, seeing Jim enter. “They’ve moved the complaints tablet.”

  Joe always had something to complain about.

  “What are you going to do now?” Jim asked.

  “Look, this is where it should be,” Joe pointed to an empty plinth. “I’ve left a post-it note. Lecturers may not move the complaints tablet from its usual place.”

  Jim had contemplated working from home rather than the staff room but as he and Annabel were renting a room in the house of an interfering elderly landlady who rented rooms to other house guests in her large terrace house together with her noisy granddaughter. The complaints of Joe Wood seemed the lesser of two evils. Annabel spent her days at the music academy for the same reason.

  The landlady would cook an evening meal for her guests, but it never satisfied Annabel and Jim. There were still shortages in most of the shops, and the price of coffee had become exorbitant. They would buy what they could find and then barter with the other tenants in the house.

  “Live well,” Dr Baker would say as they sat down for dinner and everyone surveyed the paltry spread. “We will live well again.”

  “Do you believe that?” Annabel would ask.

  “Oh yes, and I am going to run a hospital. But it won’t happen with just knowledge and competence. Connections are important, maybe the most important. Though I wish I had the musical talents of you, Annabel.”

  Dr Baker would argue with the bad-tempered John Morgan, though the two men liked each other, and it always amounted to harmless banter. The two were in contrast to the soft Wyatt Harrison, whom Carter had introduced to the house.

  Annabel and Jim couldn’t work out what Wyatt did, but from his connection with Carter, Jim imagined he might be a smuggler. Wyatt told Jim that he had served in the army as an interpreter and that the authorities had denied his wife and child visas to enter the country. How much of what he said was true, Jim could not tell, but sometimes Wyatt would cry as he told his stories, lamenting his failed life. No-one knew where his money came from but claimed he often played online chess with Dr MacDonald, whom he described to the rest of his housemates as depraved.

  He joined up as a volunteer police officer and returned almost every day with stories of how the police force was becoming more and more xenophobic.

  “What’s that got to do with me?” Annabel asked. “I was born here.”

  “But your parents weren’t, and that’s what matters,” said Wyatt.

  “Then they’re racist, not xenophobic. My father was British.”

  “Whatever.”

  Jim saw Carter every day. Carter was still a big supporter of Walker, even though the distributions of seats in the new assembly were not in Walker’s favour.

  They went for a drink together and ended up at the same table as a young man who was unwillingly dragged into one of Carter’s rants.

  “This country has its roots in many places,” Carter argued. “You might see artists, writers, musicians and athletes from many backgrounds but they still belong to this country.”

  The young man nodded.

  “Why is it then,” Carter continued. “That the media questioned the President’s heritage because his mother was foreign and his father a communist? Walker himself admits he was born in the south and yet even those in his own party seemed to have turned against him. His opponents are no more Scottish than he is.”

  The young man agreed with Carter, but without conviction.

  “Duncan, whose journey began in Peckham, illuminated The Calders with his presence, but his roots were in Peckham,” Carter was picking up steam. “Then there is Dr MacDonald, who plays the most serious role in the assembly and who takes the side of the strikers in London. Arrested and released again after sizable protests. The Government does not want any martyrs. He refutes any claims he is a foreigner. True, he was born on foreign soil but to parents that weren’t foreign, and he served his country in the Middle East in a conflict that left him wounded.”

  The young man didn’t know how to react to this statement, so he just looked non-comm
ittal.

  “The inhabitants of this country are so proud of their heritage, so averse to all things foreign, in particular those areas with the most refugees.”

  This, the young man agreed with. He knew Carter was referring to the gammons and not to him.

  “Scottish politics is like Scottish sport,” Carter continued. “You need not be Scottish to take part. And in Alba, sport, religion and politics are the same thing.”

  The young man wasn’t one for sport, but didn’t say so.

  “In other revolutions, at other times and in other places, the leaders have come from the streets, now sports people, artists and musicians become politicians and they are just as interested in profiteering and backhanders. Does Walker not consider himself to be an artist, a writer as he insists?”

  The young man shrugged. He didn’t know.

  “I’m sorry,” Jim interrupted Carter’s diatribe. “You must think us rude. We haven’t asked you anything about yourself. What is it you do?”

  “I’m living on a commune,” said the young man. “We bought a farm near Loanhead to prove that we can live an idyllic life in a community without money.”

  “A communist!” Jim exclaimed. “I thought they had become extinct. How do you join? Do you have to contribute to the investment costs? Kind of buy your way in?”

  “Oh no, you can’t buy your way in.”

  “Then how can you join?” asked Carter.

  “We’ve borrowed the land, we don’t own it ourselves, we’ve been friends for a long time and if someone has a benefactor, they help everyone else.”

  “Are there any farmers in your group?” asked Jim.

  “One woman is a gardener and the rest are students, a couple from retail and a couple that are... well... or... that have alternative lifestyles.”

  “Do you have married couples?” asked Carter.

  “Oh no, we consider marriage to be nothing more than legalised prostitution.”

  Jim raised his eyebrows. Carter smiled.

  “There are two schools of thought in our community,” the young man explained. “One is that couples should cohabit freely without the institution of marriage, the other is that we should overcome sexuality, it won’t be important anymore.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “We all live in friendly unsexual fellowship. If the beast stirs in two people, they feed the beast and everything goes back to the way it was.”

  “The beast, eh?” said Carter. “And where do the women in your community stand regarding these two views?”

  “They are divided.”

  “What you need is to give the power to the working classes,” said Carter. “It just requires a little educational work.”

  “Walker has already shifted to the right,” Jim began again, “So as not to ruin his chances of maintaining a government in the new assembly. He better be careful he doesn’t go too far. He’s only in power because people hate Duncan and MacDonald even more.”

  “Now that I agree with,” said Carter.

  The young man nodded his agreement as well.

  “I think he can hold his ground as President and not just because he’s perceived as the lesser evil. Duncan and MacDonald won’t attack him, they are brothers, hostile brothers but brothers all the same.”

  Jim and Carter attended the memorial service held for the independence activists whom the rumour mongers and conspiracy theorists claimed the Government in Westminster had murdered. The crowd was modest, and there was a speech by a short man who spoke as if he was a prophet. He was Jack Allen, the self-styled apolitical politician, and he talked about the victims as if they had been personal friends whom everyone should hold up as martyrs to the cause.

  “If we had listened to them,” he said. “The country would not be in the situation it now finds itself in and the only authentic way to honour their memory is to carry through Walker’s work, work that they, the fallen heroes, have started. The country will rise like a phoenix from the ashes of the current troubles, but to achieve this resurrection, everyone must work.”

  *

  Jim had asked Carter whether he would introduce him to Walker, more to call his bluff about his so-called connections than anything else, so it came as a surprise to Jim when one day Carter came to see him and said that the Walkers were going over to his place for coffee that evening and why didn’t Jim and Annabel join them.

  They went over to Carter’s full of expectation and were a little disappointed to discover that only Walker’s second wife and the daughter from his first marriage were there.

  “I’m afraid it is impossible to tear my husband from his work,” Walker’s wife apologised. “But his efforts are rewarded.”

  She spoke of him more like a missionary than a politician.

  “Nobody who hears him speak can resist him,” she continued. “Even the most hardened of strikers have wept at his words.”

  Jim remembered the cheers he had heard at the meeting where he had seen Walker speak, and he could not disagree now that Walker could move people.

  “I would love to meet your husband at some point,” said Jim.

  “My husband is a big friend of Carter,” she said. “I am sure that he will make up for having missed today.”

  Despite the disappointment of not having seen Walker, Annabel and Jim enjoyed the evening at Carter’s and went home speculating about a possible next occasion where they might meet him.

  “I’m sure it’ll happen,” said Jim. “Are you okay?”

  Annabel was clutching her cheek.

  “I think I have an abscess.”

  “What? You need to go to the dentist.”

  “I will.”

  A few days later, Jim was trying to make progress on his lectures in the university staff room when the door swung open and a security guard burst in.

  “Please stop working and leave the building,” he said in agitated tones. “We are closing the university; they have assassinated the President.”

  There was a commotion among the staff and a barrage of questions directed towards the guard.

  “I know nothing,” the guard protested. “I’ve just got my orders to clear the building so if you could please all leave so I can lock up, thank you.”

  Jim garnered what he could from the gossip in the corridors, which was that a student had shot Walker, so it was understandable that the university was going into lockdown.

  As Jim made his way through the city, stores and restaurants were already closed, expecting the, now all too predictable, riots. The clusters of people Jim had seen when he arrived in the city were forming once more.

  A procession of adults and adolescents was already marching towards the centre shouting: “To the square” and “Revenge for Walker”, but the atmosphere was not tense and no-one was carrying weapons. The mood soon changed, however, as the police vans arrived.

  In St Andrew’s Square, the crowd was smaller than Jim had imagined, and both protesters and police remained calm. Police drones flew overhead, filming the gathering.

  Around the square, he saw the adverts encouraging people to inform on illegal immigrants.

  SMS messages lit up the protestors’ flips, appealing for calm and announcing martial law. There would be a curfew at 7 pm.

  Deciding nothing more would happen, Jim returned home. The city became calmer as the streets emptied.

  There were shots and looting in the night, according to the news sites. The news that the European Bank had failed and that monkey flu was on the rise again hardly got a look in. It was at times like these that Jim wished the old BBC was still around.

  Chapter Four – 23 years and 8 months before the collapse

  The next day, messages on social media filled Jim’s flip, calling for a general strike for suppression of the corrupt media and even for a revolution. The unrest wasn’t limited to Alba; they had banned journalists from Downing Street following accusations of corruption in the press.

  Jim walked through the city and
found that almost everywhere was closed. He went to see Carter and found him with some men Jim did not recognise. One was a journalist and the other two Carter introduced as members of the Assembly. They all looked very grim.

  The journalist was rambling about taking control of the situation, and they all agreed that Dr MacDonald would need to become the acting president and the Assembly should grant him emergency powers to take control of the situation.

  Jim mused on how senseless the assassination had been. Walker had wanted nothing for himself, and even if his sudden ascent to power had filled him with self-confidence, he lacked the vanity of others and wanted nothing to do with money or corruption.

  Walker’s death seemed to have gained him more followers than he had enjoyed when he was alive.

  Walking back home through the city, Jim overheard Walker described as a martyr and that, had he lived, he might have been able to calm the political situation and brought stability to the Assembly. Now, the only certainty was that everything was in doubt.

  The next few days passed without a major incident. There were night-time shootings and daytime strikes, but these had become the norm even before the assassination.

  Posters appeared of Scott, Walker’s deputy, with the words ‘Walker’s Legacy - everyone Unite’. The student who shot Walker had affiliations with the right-wing, so the prospects of unification seemed unlikely. Talk on the streets was for vengeance and for doing away with the Government altogether, and the Assembly members were conspicuous by their absence.

  Dr MacDonald replaced the Assembly, in the short term, he said, by an emergency committee comprising 11 members led by himself.

  Jim mused that unification in fact meant dictatorship, and he wondered how the people who had elected their representatives for the Assembly did not revolt against it. He wondered what the Government in Westminster might do. After all, this made a mockery of democracy and freedom. Rumours spread that Assembly members opposed to Dr MacDonald were being taken into protective custody for their own safety.

  A post was circulating on social media, encouraging people to sign their name if they supported Dr MacDonald.