Hatred

by M J Dees

  The police officer handed Jim a tablet. It was a declaration stating that Jim was aware of the curfew for those with refugee heritage.

  “I also need you to answer a few questions,” he said, taking the tablet back from Jim. “Where do you do your shopping?”

  The police officer changed apps on the tablet to one which had a survey which Jim had to complete.

  “We do most of our shopping here in the village,” Jim explained. “The bus service is so unreliable now that we can’t guarantee we can get back from town before the curfew.”

  “Are you also aware?” the police officer continued. “You must move your bank account to a restricted account at the central bank?”

  “We have little money,” Jim laughed with embarrassment.

  “Even so.”

  “We’ll have to take these,” the fat police officer entered carrying an armful of books.

  He was holding Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and The Colour Purple by Alice Walker.

  Jim wasn’t sure whether he was taking them because someone had banned them or whether the fat police officer just wanted to read them.

  Both officers’ radios buzzed, followed by unintelligible chatter over the static. The officers seemed to understand and glanced at each other before telling Jim that they would leave but that they might be back.

  The young officer handed Annabel and Jim their stretches back. The devices were vibrating before Jim had closed the door on his unwanted guests.

  “There’s been a bomb in London,” said Annabel. “Another attempt on Roberts’s life.”

  “He survived another?” Jim asked as he scrolled through the news story.

  *

  Because of his bank account being restricted, Jim had to get a bus to the council offices to pay his tax.

  The clerk on the screen in the finance department said there was a flag on the system, and he would have to talk to someone in housing.

  In the housing department, they led him into an interview room where a grey man in a grey suit who looked so typical of council employees soon appeared on the screen.

  “Mr Smith, we will inform you in the next few days by writing but, seeing as though you are here anyway, we need you to move out of your property by 1st April.”

  “What?”

  “You can sell it, rent it out or leave it empty, that’s your business, but you must be out by 1st April.”

  “Where am I supposed to live?”

  “You are entitled to a room and, because you are not completely foreign, you and your wife only have mixed heritage, we may get you two rooms. The British Refugee Association will manage the process.”

  “This is wrong. I have a ten-year-old daughter.”

  “I understand this is difficult for you.”

  “Who benefits from this?” Jim ranted. “No-one if the house remains empty.”

  *

  “It will be impossible to live here come the new year,” the young police officer explained on his next visit to Jim’s house. “From January you will need to collect your shopping from a special shop in the city just for those with foreign heritage. People don’t want to queue with immigrants, it’s causing trouble.”

  “What about our furniture?” Jim asked Annabel when the police officer had left.

  Jim got on his stretch and sent a message to Aiden Hernandez of the British Refugees Association. The reply arrived almost straight away.

  “Don’t lift a finger,” Aiden wrote. “Wait and see what happens. I’ll keep the matter in hand, defer it as long as possible, perhaps until May or even June. By that time, I will get you two rooms. It’s such a long time till June. Have hope.”

  Jim showed the message to Annabel and then slumped back on the sofa. He felt so tired.

  Chapter Twenty-Four – 12 years 10 months before the collapse

  “I hear you’ll have to move out of your place,” said the owner of the general store, Wyatt Reed, as he handed Jim his rations.

  “How did you know that?”

  “Word gets around. I might be interested in renting it,” he leaned closer and spoke at a whisper. “If you rent it to me at cost.”

  “I can’t let you have it till April 1st,” said Jim. “And I can only rent it to you for as long as this regime survives.”

  “That might be tomorrow. But it might be 20 years.”

  “As long as you keep the garden in good condition.”

  “Look,” Wyatt looked through Jim’s ration allowance. “You have nothing for sweets, have this for your daughter.”

  He reached under the counter and brought out a box of chocolates, which he handed to Jim.

  *

  “I’m sorry, Jim,” said Aiden Hernandez of the British Refugee Association. “If you want to rent your house, then Unity will supply the tenant.”

  “Why?” asked Jim. The idea of renting to Wyatt had reassured him.

  “You know there’s a housing shortage. This is part of the Government’s solution.”

  Jim sighed.

  “Also,” Aiden continued. “You should know that, from 15th February, you will need to do your shopping in the refugee shop in Burnley. You can no longer use your app at the general store in your village.”

  *

  A council employee arrived with a prospective tenant for the house but, fortunately, they found the property to be unsuitable for their needs.

  Wyatt from the general store called not long after, bringing Jim and Annabel a sack of vegetables.

  “I’m afraid it’s a poor gift,” Wyatt apologised. “I’ve just received a notification that they have approved my request to rent your house and that it will come into effect on June 1st.”

  “Oh? Nobody told us.”

  “I thought as much, that’s why I came up. Call the council.”

  “But they’ve just been here,” said Annabel. “They brought a prospective tenant round. He didn’t want the place.”

  “I know. The council officer stopped in my shop on the way past to give me his decision. I thought I’d better let you know as soon as possible. At least you know I’ll look after the place.”

  “Yes, thanks for coming to tell us, Wyatt,” said Jim. “I’ll call the council.”

  Jim attempted precisely that as soon as Wyatt had left, but he was told that the council officer he needed to speak with was not there. Instead, he called the BRA and asked to speak with Aiden.

  “You must get out,” Aiden said after Jim had explained the situation. “I can’t see any possibilities. We don’t have enough resources to meet demand.”

  “But you have to help us, Aiden. We’ll be out on our ears in about ten weeks.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. Maybe two rooms and a kitchen, but I have nothing like that at the moment. I’ll call you back.”

  Jim worried Aiden might not be completely on their side, but he could see no alternative but to trust him.

  *

  Annabel and Jim met Aiden in the city, where he had promised to show them some rooms. The rooms were in a flat in a sizable house and it surprised Jim how pleasant they were, but they had also meant to meet the woman who was renting the rest of the flat and she was not there.

  “What do you think?” asked Aiden at the end of the tour.

  “The rooms are very nice,” said Jim. “But we need to meet the other tenant, and this is the first place we’ve seen.”

  “You should be grateful,” Aiden snapped. “You should thank me. Decide now, we can’t wait for this woman.”

  “What?” said Jim. “I won’t be bullied into a decision.”

  “Then all you’ll get is a single room.”

  “But can we not meet the other tenant?”

  “Do you want the place or not?”

  Jim
and Annabel conferred.

  “We would like the rooms,” said Jim in a conciliatory tone. “But would it be at all possible for you to arrange for us to meet the other tenant?”

  Aiden sighed and pulled out his stretch and had a brief conversation with the woman, which neither Jim nor Annabel could hear.

  “She’s on her way,” Aiden grumbled. “You know, people have been begging me to give them this place, and I turned them away for you, and you are so ungrateful. The council was right about you. Just because you’re a scholar, you think you’re better than the rest of us. But I have an official position, and if I had not reported positively...”

  The arrival of the woman interrupted him.

  “He does not know how lucky he is to get this place,” Aiden told her.

  “I am grateful,” said Jim. “I just didn’t want to feel bullied.”

  “I’m used to ingratitude,” Aiden continued. “I’m not a bully, I’m just a decent bloke trying to do the right thing for others, but I suppose I have to make allowances for those who don’t live in the actual world.”

  Jim and Annabel chatted briefly to the tenant who had two rooms to herself and seemed friendly and sensible, and she seemed happy to have Magennis in the house.

  “That concludes our business,” said Aiden. “I doubt our paths will cross again.”

  “It was a pleasure doing business with you,” said Jim, hoping his sarcasm wasn’t too obvious.

  Jim didn’t want to talk to Aiden anymore, but he still wanted to find out about possibilities for emigration, so he emailed the BRA and hoped they wouldn’t pass the email onto Aiden.

  “The situation is hopeless at the moment,” came the reply. “You could try China. From there you might make enough money to buy yourself a visa for the US, but I doubt it.”

  On the way home, they collected Olivia from school. Olivia was very upset about the prospect of having to move, so they said nothing about their day when they collected her.

  When they reached home, Wyatt was waiting for them with a jar of synthetic honey.

  “Are you okay?” he asked as they approached.

  “Yes, thank you,” said Annabel.

  “As good as expected under the circumstances,” said Jim.

  “There was a bomb in Manchester,” said Wyatt. “It worried me it might have caught you up in it.”

  “A bomb?” asked Annabel, checking her stretch.

  “Where?” asked Jim.

  “At the university,” said Annabel. “But it injured no-one, just broke some windows.”

  “There was an assassination attempt on Hughes,” said Wyatt. “Be patient, things still might still work out in your favour.”

  “Thanks for the honey,” said Annabel.

  “Make sure you destroy the packaging,” said Wyatt. “I’ll be in trouble if they find out I gave it to you.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Annabel. “We’ll destroy the packaging.”

  “Thank you,” said Wyatt with a sigh. “You know, we all have our problems now. They have fixed the price of products but if I don’t pay the wholesaler extra, I get nothing. And the locals are going to the farmers to buy the produce I can’t get delivered. And then I did a delivery for a friend, an entire van load of chocolate. Where was all that going to?”

  *

  Annabel and Jim went to visit the rooms they would have to move into.

  The other tenant, Mila Rivera was busy moving in.

  Annabel measured the walls to work out which furniture she could take and what they would have to put into storage.

  “I’m sorry about dragging you here the last time we met,” Jim told Mila. “I was just worried Aiden was trying to pull a fast one.”

  “You are right to be wary,” said Mila. “He told me he didn’t want to give you the rooms. I had to pay him and give him clothes and toys for his boy. But there’s no use complaining, they’re more likely to detain you than him.”

  Having found out the dimensions of the rooms, Annabel went to collect Olivia from school while Jim returned to the house to pack and sort out what they could take and what they would need to store. As Jim viewed the contents, he realised most of it would have to fall into the latter group.

  *

  Jim washed plates while Annabel tried to put their clothes back into the wardrobes, which they had to disassemble and reassemble to negotiate the narrow stairs in the new building. Jim was worried that his plant might not get enough light in this new flat.

  Mila fussed over Olivia and Magennis, and the feeling of affection was mutual.

  “She’s a tart,” said Jim, referring to the cat.

  It was only after they moved in that Annabel and Jim met the owners of the building. The house was owned by a man in his sixties, Christian Allen, who used to be a bank manager and lived on the floor above with his wife, whom Jim reckoned must be at least fifteen years younger than her husband. She seems upset at having to share her house with people of foreign heritage, although her husband fell into that category.

  “What’s it got to do with me?” they could hear her grumbling.

  “We think we live in a world that no longer exists,” her husband told Jim. “Britain is now just a small island state and when Europe gets what it wants, they will line up those with foreign heritage like us against a wall and shoot us.”

  His widowed sister-in-law lived on the floor below with her son, Hunter. According to him, they had spent time in a detention centre. They shared the floor with a fat business executive called Eli Armstrong who, like Jim, served as an officer in the military.

  “She should get a divorce then,” he said to Jim when Mrs Allen marched past them in the hall grumbling about it being nothing to do with her.

  Mila was around all the time from the moment they got up and at every meal time until they put Olivia to bed. Often playing cards with them in the evening.

  Wyatt arrived with a notice from the council.

  “It’s the roof,” he said as he handed the letter to Jim.

  “I’ve been through this before with them,” Jim said as he read the letter. “We can’t afford to re-roof the house. It’s part of their plan to confiscate it from us.”

  *

  There was a knock on the door of the room Annabel and Jim used as a living room.

  Jim opened the door to find Mr Allen Sr. stood in the hall brandishing the water bill.

  “You are using too much water,” he said in a raised voice. “I will have to increase your rent to cover the difference, you know how precious water is at the moment.”

  The argument didn’t have time to develop because there was another knock, this time on the front door.

  “What has all this got to do with me?” said Mrs Allen, marching down the stairs.

  Mr Allen forgot about his grievance with Jim long enough to peer over the banister and see Mrs Allen open the door to two police officers who entered the hall without waiting for her to invite them.

  “We have come for your stretches,” said the most senior looking officer, handing Mrs Allen a piece of paper which was apparently a warrant.

  “What has all this got to do with me?” said Mrs Allen, marching back up the stairs.

  The police officers didn’t follow her but turned their attention to Mr Armstrong, Mr Allen’s sister-in-law and Hunter. who had all come out of their rooms to see what all the fuss was about.

  Having relieved the occupants of the ground floor from their stretches, the officers ascended the stairs to claim Annabel, Jim, and Mila’s devices.

  “But what about our food and travel apps?” asked Jim. “They’re on our stretches.”

  “You’ll use these now,” said an officer, handing them plastic cards. “You’ll have to register them, then they’ll be charged with your credits.”

  The officer smiled before ascending the last flight of stairs to take the stretches of the protesting Mr and Mrs Allen.

  The senior officer bid Jim a good day as he passed him on the landing,
and Mr Allen stayed upstairs in his rooms in heated debate with his wife. He forgot the subject of the water bill for the day.

  The intrusion frightened Olivia and Magennis, but the most distraught in the household was Mila, who was accustomed to spending most of the day on her stretch chatting to friends or relatives.

  Jim and Annabel took Olivia out for a walk to calm down and take a break from the wailing and gnashing of teeth.

  “These walks are all we have left,” Jim complained.

  They noticed that new advertising hoardings had gone up, hailing Roberts, the ‘creator of a New Britain’.

  Jim overheard some conversations which suggested that children of foreign heritage were no longer being admitted to secondary schools to free up valuable spaces for true Britons who otherwise were forced to send their children to pure schools many miles from home. This concerned them, as Olivia was just about to start her final year at primary school.

  They returned to the house to more unwelcome news. They had reduced shopping for those of foreign heritage to only an hour a day. Also, Wyatt had left a handwritten note to say that the council will settle for a cheaper roof, but Jim and Annabel would still have to pay for it.

  Mila invited them for a cup of tea and Thomas Honeyman, who had lost his job at the British Library, joined them.

  “I’m thinking of moving to London,” he said. “There are rumours they will evacuate everyone to internment camps. 120,000 refugees in London are much harder to move than 20,000 in Manchester.”

  “I think the end is close for Roberts,” said Annabel. “Don’t you think it’s better to wait it out?”

  “I hear a lot fewer people saying ‘Welcome Unity’ and a lot more saying ‘hello’,” said Mila.

  When Mila left and Olivia was in bed, Annabel spent the rest of the evening playing patience with a deck of cards Jim bought her for her birthday.

  “Such a pleasurably objective activity,” said Annabel. “I don’t have to think about anything else.”

  Jim mused on the fact that Annabel no longer made or played music. He observed how pale she was and how much she seemed to have lost weight. It made him feel very sad.

  “Are you cold?” Jim asked after a long, uncomfortable silence.