by Claire North
Very much in love. It is important you understand this too.
Of course I had a duty to perform here, at Danesmoor. Jeffrey knew I understood what these things meant. I valued family as much as he did. It is incredibly important that these things are preserved, it is as vital as any library or work of art. We are the history of this nation, we hold within us part of its culture, which if it is destroyed is the death of a piece of Britain that everyone, no matter what, loves for its beauty and its charm and its essential Britishness. These things must be protected, and to do so, of course, I had to have boys. The line passes down through the boys, not because of sexism but because that is the culture, the history, the truth of who we are. I will not say anything else on that.
I had two sons and two daughters. My youngest daughter is married. My eldest died. My youngest son runs a trekking company in Arizona. My eldest is Philip. He inherited Danesmoor when my husband died, eight years ago. You will know him, of course. He is the minister of fiscal efficiency. He owns an island in the Mediterranean. He doesn’t use his title. Everyone calls him Mr. Arnslade, because if he was Your Lordship it might seem elitist. People are very anxious about that sort of thing in government. They don’t want to draw attention.
I am the only family left in Danesmoor, but the estate is run by a steward called Fish. Fish isn’t his real name. I don’t know his real name. He never told me. He arrived a few years ago and took over everything, and I caused a fuss because the estate had been a thing I managed, and it was going well, but Philip said …
There wasn’t much for me to do after that.
Fish wasn’t a bad manager he just didn’t
I felt like a foolish old woman and I was being treated like …
Do you know a man called Simon Fardell? He’s an old school friend of Philip’s, and they went to university together. They went to Oxford do you know
you do.
Simon is a shit.
I’m not saying this to excuse my son. My son is also a shit. But Simon was the shit that blocked the toilet, if you’ll pardon my saying so.
Naturally he assumes he isn’t. Most people assume they aren’t shits. It’s just good business. That’s what it amounts to. Business is good. Good is business it is
Anyway.
They would meet in Danesmoor. They’d have long weekends together, there’d be drink and I’d sit with their wives in the other room, that’s how this works. Philip is married to a useless trophy creature. I know that I’m his mother and it’s my job to dislike anyone my son marries, but she really is a vacuous little nothing. I quite like her, in a way. Being so empty-headed means that, unlike my son, she isn’t a shit. She’s just too useless to be anything better. Simon’s wife is far too good for him. Her name is Heidi. I think he hits her sometimes, but she always says … when it’s good, it’s really good, and when it’s bad, he always says sorry afterwards and that’s how she knows he loves her. I always thought I’d tell her to run away. It’s a very easy thing to say, much easier than anything that matters—but I never mustered the courage. We’d sit, us women, and drink tea and read magazines about holidays and handbags, and in the room next door the men would carve up the country and that too was just part of … how things are. How they have always been.
And one weekend I walk into the room while the men are talking to look for my mobile phone, which I’m always putting down somewhere, and they’re talking about mass graves.
They don’t call it that, of course.
They use the words ‘excess labour reallocation,’ and I think well, excess labour reallocation isn’t it wonderful if a little sad when your boys are all grown up.
But then they stop speaking when I enter and I wonder why, surely reallocating labour isn’t that bad after all, but they’re now pretending they were talking about anything else. Anything else at all. And I’m a little bit curious, I’ll admit, but don’t really think about it, except I do.
I do.
Because I know Philip’s face.
I know when he’s …
Once, when he was a young man, he got into a duel at university. He shot another boy. Killed him. I was mortified, but all he could talk about was the cost, and Jeffrey indulged him of course, paid the indemnity because it was that or let his son go to the patty line, so of course he paid but …
There was a look in Philip’s eye, a thing that reminded me of that day he came home with an indemnity and blood on his shoes, and I thought … hello, I thought. Hello, my boy. What have you done this time?
It didn’t take long to find out. I wasn’t being nosy, not at first. I was just … drifting into the study. Then I was just sitting at his desk. These actions I could explain as being casual deeds on an innocent afternoon. Even when I started rifling through his files, I thought, this is just a mother being interested in the son who she loves.
Which of course was a lie.
I knew he’d done something, and I wanted to know what, needed to know how bad things were, without ever admitting this to myself. When I found the files, I was almost disappointed at how easy it was. In his own home he hadn’t bothered to hide anything. Numbers of beggars rounded up from Birmingham city centre and sent without trial to the recycling yards for ‘rehabilitation through labour.’ Number of illegal immigrants caught on the last sweep, divided by age and gender, sent to the patty line for ‘indefinite reintegration.’ Companies who make dangerous products—chemicals, oils, fuels—don’t like to pay for their workers. Patty labour is much cheaper, but sometimes it’s hard to find. And when the patties can’t work any more, they sell them off cheap to another company, which is owned by a company which is owned by a company which is always owned by the Company. And when you can’t sell them, when they’re too broken to buy, you have to find an economic use for them.
It’s not that they’re shot.
Lined up against a wall.
They’re just starved to death.
Or set cleaning radioactive equipment.
Or beaten because they can’t work a seven-day week.
Or locked in solitary confinement until the noises stop.
It’s not murder.
It’s corrective rehabilitation integration. It is the individual repaying their debt to society through labour. Labour benefits business. Business is society. That is all.
These things take some time to contemplate.
And there were the documents. Paper, files, I even used the computer. A doddery old woman like me, fancy that I can click on ‘Yes’; Fish would be amazed.
When my son sold the government tax service to the Company, a lot of people got extremely rich. I’d say there were over a hundred people who became billionaires overnight, and another thousand or more who are now millionaires courtesy of their shrewd investments. But that’s all. A thousand people enriched and the Company now owns the country. A single stroke of the pen and they own everything. They own the law, the judges, the hospitals, the schools, the roads, the police, the army and the government. They own it all, and maybe that’s good, maybe that’s what we need, to be efficient to be …
But it’s not.
There are the obvious signs, of course. The mass graves behind the prisons. where they bury the ones who never got to see a lawyer before they died, whose sentences were always extended, always, because the paperwork went astray. The company that handles the paperwork is run by a company which is run by a company which …
The enclaves levelled because the people couldn’t afford to pay their corporate community tax. The homes destroyed, the migrants who died on the side of the road, villages and towns wiped out because they didn’t produce a decent profit margin for the Company. And then there’s the rest, the casual murders that aren’t even part of the plan, just happen on the side. The old people dying of cold in winter, heat in summer, because they can’t afford to pay their energy bills and the Company doesn’t make a profit on relief for that sort of thing. The dead in the hospitals. The dead in the cells. The p
olice needed to save money to turn a profit, so the Company took over responsibility for reporting fatalities. The hospitals didn’t have enough money for the morgues, but the Company owns a company which owns a company which …
We all knew, of course. Everyone knows, but no one looks. We don’t look because if we look it makes us evil because we aren’t doing something about it, or it makes us sad because we can’t do anything about it, or it proves that we’re monsters when we always thought we were righteous because we won’t do anything about it. Either way, safer not to look.
I couldn’t stop myself; it was my son. I needed to know, to see. I spent so long trying to find a way in which he was doing right. Trying to find something which said that this was good. Of course it’s so hard to prove anything now, it’s so hard to find anyone who doesn’t just look at the facts and say that she who wrote this is a liar, there is no room for reason there is only …
Family is the only thing that matters.
My children are having grandchildren now. There will be more to carry the family name. Family is safety. It is love. It is a thing that you defend because it is the one thing which matters more than anything else, it is love in adversity, it is giving, it is that which lifts us up. It is the trust that spans the generations. It is the young who look to you to do them right. It is the old who look to the young to make a newer, faithful world. We carry humanity it is …
I bugged my son.
He’s got security teams, of course, but in Danesmoor they left us alone, didn’t bother to do any real checks inside the house, not when the threat was clearly going to come from elsewhere.
I stole documents, copied them, made a file.
Filmed his meetings.
No one suspected me—I am the lady of the house. I recorded everything. For three years I recorded everything, and didn’t know what I could do with it. That’s not true. I knew what I could do with it. I just never had the courage to do it. Maybe that’s love. Maybe that’s what it was.
They caught me, in the end. A man called Markse found one of the cameras I used, started a manhunt. I knew that he was going to fingerprint it and I hadn’t used gloves because the idea was ridiculous.
All of it was just so ridiculous.
This was … a month ago, perhaps?
There was a do scheduled, all of Philip’s Company friends, Simon fucking Fardell and his battered wife, all the best people, the mass murderers, out for a bit of a laugh, the shooting, the sport, Pimm’s on the lawn. I knew they were going to catch me, and that would be it. I felt like such a stupid old woman. I had all the proof in the world, and I hadn’t had the guts to do anything with it. Even with them closing in I couldn’t decide, couldn’t act.
Then I found my miracle.
Not a miracle, in fact. Not at all. There was a woman indentured to the catering company. I caught her trying to break into my son’s study and I was angry, instinctively, my house, I was the lady, I was furious and then …
Then I thought for a little moment longer, even in my panic, and I realised—she was trying to break into my son’s study.
And perhaps there was a reason.
I told her to come upstairs with me. Informed her, in my most imperious way, that if she didn’t obey I would report her instantly and she’d go back to the patty line. She came with me, she was so angry and scared. I sat her down and made her tell me why she was trying to break into my son’s study. I was trembling with excitement, but maybe she thought it was rage.
She refused to answer at first, but I could see it in her, the desperation, I saw the mirror of myself in her and finally she said, ‘I think your son fucked the fucking country.’
I was relieved. To hear her say those words, I was desperately relieved, and I think she saw that. ‘Your son fucked us,’ she repeated. ‘He’s gotta pay.’
She’d found something, working at the Ministry of Civic Responsibility. Some sort of documents, she’d been stealing for months. Someone had asked a question, spotted that there were figures not adding up, that the number of patties going to a sewage treatment facility in Cambridgeshire was greater than the number being released, and wondered where the discrepancy lay.
She’d been on the patty line. She’d seen friends vanish, and when the patties asked they were always told ‘reassigned’ and no one questioned it because if you asked questions, you might get reassigned too.
But she’d begun to question. To suspect. That’s why she’d come to Danesmoor. Blackmailed her own supervisor to do it. I was impressed, I liked her at that moment, I thought her supervisor sounded just like Fish.
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘You’re nobody. If you find proof of anything, what do you think you can do?’
‘I can get my daughter back,’ she replied. ‘I can make them give her back to me.’
My heart fell.
I didn’t need an amateur blackmailer. I needed a firebrand, someone who would save my family name, protect it, go out into the world and do right, right as the family should have done, right as is the right that is the responsibility of this place of …
But she had lost her daughter.
Family is everything.
Family is everything.
To lose a child, it is …
When my daughter died I spent so long trying to make it my fault, because if it was my fault it wasn’t just luck. It was the action of man, it was fate, it was God, it wasn’t just a faulty car brake on a rainy day it wasn’t just that it wasn’t
and she isn’t
sometimes I still think maybe it was a trick, and she’ll be there
and sometimes in my dreams she is a presence who sits by me and is warm and kind and says that she loves me and I cry when I wake
and sometimes I spend days and weeks without thinking about her, and I am simply a woman without children.
That is who I am now.
I knew they would come for me, so I gave this stranger, this woman in prison clothes, a copy of everything I had.
I gave her everything and told her to run away.
The next day, after the party was over, Philip had breakfast with me. He hadn’t had breakfast with me for months, maybe even a year. He was so important, always so busy, but that day he made time to have breakfast and I thought … this is nice. This is nice. He loves me. Maybe it’ll be all right, maybe there’s something I don’t know. And he was charming, the brightest and kindest I’d seen him for years, he really seemed to want to know how I was, said we should go walking together by the lake, like we had when he was young, that it’d been too long since we’d just talked.
There were sedatives in the tea, of course. I thought I was having a funny turn, but the turn never stopped. Next thing I knew Philip was nowhere to be seen, and Fish was at my door telling me I had to take my medicine, and I said that’s stupid that’s absurd I don’t need any medicine
and he said yes, yes, your medicine your medicine
They put it in my food, in my water. I could taste it, occasionally, the bitterness of the powders masked by too much chilli.
They weren’t poisoning to kill.
They just took away my mind, my intelligence, my freedom and my will.
I haven’t seen my son since that morning. It was a beautiful morning. We ate in the eastern rooms, where the sun comes in. It was the perfect day I’d always thought my days were meant to be when I was a girl.
Sometimes friends would come over—Kirsty came a lot. They told her I’d had a stroke.
They told her that.
And they kept me alive.
I suppose that’s Philip’s thing. He stopped short of having his own mother killed when he found out what I did. I never found out what the woman did with the file. I assume she got her daughter back. But if she did, why would you be here?
Mr. Miller?
Why are you here?”
Time is
Neila gunned the engine and it refused to tick over, cursed and muttered and opened up the cover and in the end ha
d to put a hot-water bottle on the blasted thing before it would start.
In a stranger’s house in the Cotswolds the mother of his enemy sat quiet before him, Theo pinched the tips of his fingers together beneath his bottom lip and tried to find words.
“I … there was …
… sometimes pieces come together and it’s …
So I used to be an auditor and while I was working on the job there was
Dani is dead.
Her name is Dani.
The woman who
her name is Dani.
She was murdered.
She was my friend.
Her daughter is my daughter. Her name is Lucy. Dani went to a journalist called Faris, I think she tried to … But they got found out. His daughter was Company and she told them and that was … They killed her, Dani, I mean. And I audited her death. Her life is worth £84,000. She left me a message. ‘Save the mother.’ So I came to Danesmoor and saw you and certain things fell into place and
here we are.
Here we are.
I have Dani’s information now. I have her copy of your file. She sent it back to the town where we’d grown up, so I could find it. She knew she was going to die, I think. She used me as a back-up plan.
I think you should understand that my life has been cowardly, futile and empty. You tell me that family is the most important thing in the world. You should understand that when I was a boy my father was arrested for theft, and died on the patty line, and I hated him because he wasn’t there for me and never gave me anything to believe in. And my mum sort of … faded out, and when I was given a second chance, I blew it. I went to university and realised that all the dreams which I thought were mine were just some fantasy that couldn’t ever come true, so I took the identity of a boy who I got killed—I killed him, I didn’t pull the trigger, but it was me, it was my fault, he died because of me. I took his identity. I became Theo Miller and with that opportunity, that amazing chance …
