West of Brent Cross lay an area of marginal bushland separating the asylum from a considerable extent of gangster petty domains. These petty domains ran as far as the eye could see to the north and west. They were clearly prosperous, featuring groves of redwoods and absurd toy castles streaming banners. In the Public Era, this land had been tiled with the suburbs of the Fatted Masses, however, that old, ordered landscape of houses and tarmac roads had vanished into strip fields and pastures within a couple of generations.
The marginal land was itself home to ‘marginals’, a shadowy population formed of surplus resourceful enough to survive without land or passports. Their paths threaded through the bushland. The whole area was speckled with their settlements of canvas tents and wooden crates. In exploring the network of paths, Lawrence encountered numerous locals, few of whom paid him any attention. They were like him: burly young men in dirty clothes who left a wake of neglected personal hygiene. These marginal locals had their own ways into Brent Cross where there was plenty of casual labour for them to do, such as odd jobs for market traders or one-off jobs for the ultramarines when there was a lack of Night and Fog. The problem was, all the paths disappeared into the back-lanes of workers’ districts; not places where dirty, low-life strangers would have a happy time. There must be some accepted ritual by which groups of marginals could pass through the workers’ districts at specific times. Perhaps they got met by an escort. Lawrence would have to get into the society of the marginals to find out. That was the dangerous part. Even this far from Peterborough, it was possible the ultras had put about a reward for Lawrence’s recapture. With his pierced ear and privileged accent, he would not make a hard ID.
He found a thicket close to where one of the paths entered Brent Cross and settled down for the night, hungry and cold and hoping it did not rain. It was rain that woke him up. He spent miserable hours curled in a ball under a bush, trying to laugh at the ample food he could have had back in the Value System. In the morning the sun rose and a balmy southern wind cheered him up. It could be worse. Blizzards were not unknown in November.
Footfalls, voices, the swish of branches on clothes, a stream of shabby, bearded men trooped past on the path. The amount of them surprised Lawrence. The stream thinned to some final lazybones running to catch up. Lawrence ran after them to find a crowd of perhaps a hundred pooled at the edge of the asylum houses. None of them looked twice at him. There was a core of old hands who joked together, while the rest gave all the appearances of being in the same boat as Lawrence; strangers hoping to hitch a ride. He made sure his hat was pulled well down to hide his pierced ear. Unfortunately he had no way of obscuring his blond stubble.
The escort arrived. A hard-eyed man of about forty in a black leather jacket and gleaming black leather boots stood up on an old stump. He was backed up by four Neanderthal body guards rattling bicycle chains, obviously hoping, oh so hoping, there were troublemakers in the crowd. What he needed was twenty strong men for a day’s hard work, three square meals in return. Most of those who stepped forward got dismissed: I said strong men, not girls. Lawrence tried his luck and got the nod without a hitch. He was in.
Fifteen minutes later, he was following his new gang across a great expanse of gravel and scattered birch copses, surrounded by chimneys and the soul-crushing black sheds of industry. Man-hauled ultramarine wagons came at them from all directions, women lugging canvas shopping bags tottered past in waves, barrows pulled by skinny teenagers dodged about. This appeared to be the heart of Brent Cross asylum. Up towards the northern end were the tents and stalls of a market, one much larger and more varied than at Camden. You could buy rusty old sheet metal motor cars from the Public Era. A prominent bill at the back of the market proclaimed “Get Spayed and Get Paid”. It had been defaced: “Get Paid and Get Laid!”.
Their gang master lead them across the great market place to a brick office building, which faced directly onto the open gravel. In this respect it was unique, since otherwise the entire market area was surrounded by the tall brick walls of factory premises, or the ragged profiles of workers’ districts. The office building was a neat two-story structure. It looked brand new. What especially distinguished it was that the bricks were mortared, rather than being piled up dry as had been typical practice since the Glorious Resolution. Above the door a familiar motif had been painted, an orange circle on a dark green rectangle. Lawrence picked up some murmuring about the National Party. Their gang master addressed them. He explained they would be working for the National Party this day, helping put the finishing touches to this, its new headquarters. They would now receive breakfast in the canteen and then get to work carrying large items of furniture into the building.
So it was that Lawrence found himself indoors, warm, under electric lights, at a polished wooden table sitting on a chair—not a bench—gulping real fresh coffee, porridge, fried oats and boiled eggs. No one said he could not get seconds, so he helped himself. As with the previous day, he feigned a speech impediment to cover his accent, still managing to achieve some communication with those near him. They thought he was called Horace due to his impediment. Around the huddle of marginals moved slick-looking people in dark business suits, all bearing the orange and green emblem on their lapels. These must be Party officials. Some of them glanced with contempt at the unwashed labouring gang. Others came over and chatted like old friends, asking about the gangers’ lives. One of these officials made a rousing impromptu speech about how the Party would gather all the marginals, house them, feed them, give them real work constructing the new nation state. The gangers stood and cheered him. After that they had to earn their food.
Lawrence worked in his usual gutsy way, losing two partners as a result. His third partner was a jaunty character called Bob. Whilst lugging desks into the headquarters, the blatant impudence of the National Party stirred Lawrence’s curiosity. It was clear that far away in Oban, he had been out of touch with the growth of radical politics down here in the south. Five years ago, any radical party opening its HQ inside an industrial asylum would have been wiped out—the factory owners would have put down good gold for glory trusts to clean their dustbin. However, the factory owners must now support this so-called National Party. That meant a political rift existed between the industrial asylums and the sovereign landowners. Lawrence had never heard of such a situation before.
It did occur to him the National Party would leap at news of the Value System (to put it mildly). No doubt they would dismiss him as a lunatic to begin with—but he could prove everything he said. He had the pouch of fiat fingernails safe in an inside pocket. He could stab a map and state: that is where the abomination can be found.
The potential started to stress him. He was exceptionally lucky to have access to the National Party HQ building. It was a privilege he might never again enjoy. One who fails to grab good luck deserves their fate. Every time he lifted another desk up through the building, he could see into offices busy with clacking typists and officials poring over paperwork. Should he just walk in and start talking to them? A certain social restraint held him back, or perhaps his subconscious sensed a danger he could not articulate in logic. The gang knocked off to have lunch. Now Bob was becoming friendly, badgering Lawrence with all sorts of questions and offering his own tale of woe. He once had a good job in the ZEEBRI industrial complex here in Brent Cross as a sheet-metal beater, until he had one too many arguments with his chargehand and that was the end of his good job. Lawrence maintained the non-committal pose of a simpleton.
Perhaps it is a law of life that extreme bad luck is balanced by ridiculous good luck, or at least, it looks good luck at the time. After the shock of encountering Master Sergeant Ratty on his motorbike in Camden, life owed Lawrence some good luck. An hour or so after lunch, he hefted one end of a filing cabinet off the back of an ultramarine wagon. He was pre-occupied with the vague unease of being near the two ultramarine crew of the wagon. Although they paid him not the least attention, he s
till experienced a visceral reluctance to be anywhere near them. As he was approaching the steps of the headquarters building, one of the dark-suited Party types was descending with a measured elegance to his litter and its four carriers. Lawrence almost dropped his end of the filing cabinet. It was Kalchelik of all people. There was absolutely no mistaking those hooded, cold eyes or the limp from childhood polio despite the grey hairs and facial lines acquired in the last decade. The limp was worse than it had been in his glory trooper days. Kalchelik settled himself in the litter and rapped its side. His bearers lifted him and off he floated across the market place, winning right of way over ultramarine wagons, which had to veer or stop altogether to permit him to pass.
Lawrence set down the filing cabinet and ran, leaving Bob standing there baffled still holding his end up. His indignant yells faded into the general clamour of the market—it was, after all, a place naturally full of people yelling.
Chapter 17
Lawrence tailed the litter up a wide boulevard between smoking, thumping industry. Gruesome noises emerged from the sheds to both sides, smoke rolled from two impressive octagonal brick chimneys on the right. A massive load emerged from the ornate cast-iron archway of that factory, some sort of long steel pole or pipe supported at each end on a wagon. Its train of Night and Fog haulers keeled forward as if fighting a gale-force wind, struggling to win every pace until their load gained momentum. Even Kalchelik’s litter had to stop while the train completed a ponderous turn and crawled on its way. Lawrence guessed it was the boom of a large schooner, although it seemed bizarre to produce such a thing here, miles from Woolwich. He grabbed the chance to get beside Kalchelik whilst the litter rested on its legs.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said. Kalchelik’s eyes flashed and scanned him up and down.
“How can I help you, young sir?” he asked. Lawrence caught a whiff of after-shave and mint mouthwash.
“May I ask you to cast your mind back ten years to your latter days as a section leader?”
Now Kalchelik’s eyes hardened. He frowned at Lawrence.
“You may indeed—but why?”
“I served in your section. You may recall Wee Larry Aldingford.”
Kalchelik stared at him. It was impossible to judge his mood. In the ten years since they had worked together, his face had lost its animation. Now, whatever went on behind those black pupils was a hidden world.
“You transferred up to Peterborough to hunt fenland bandits.”
“That’s correct.”
“Ah well…” He sounded relieved. “That’s just fine. You look—and I might add, you smell—down on your luck. Come along with me, it’s only another hundred yards.”
The bearers hefted the litter and it floated on, through a set of cast iron gates into a factory premises. To begin with, they proceeded up a brick-paved roadway between warehouses. In each warehouse was an apparent rabble of families pulling apart, carrying, heaping things that were metal, other things wooden, lumps of sodden paper and dirty shapeless things. A smell of rottenness hung over all. Kalchelik looked back and beckoned Lawrence.
“Let me briefly explain our family business. We’re miners—do you know what that is?”
“Extracting coal?”
“Not quite. We mine for rubbish buried by the Public Era. The Fatted Masses were devoted to waste, as you know, so we make our living today from their middens. You would never believe how vast the resource is. I’ll tell you all about it. My point is that you don’t need to worry about having a place here if you want one. We old friends must stick together.”
Lawrence appeared enthusiastic, whilst inwardly growing alarmed. Such largesse to a stranger of the past was not the behaviour of an honest man. A sick feeling took root in Lawrence’s guts, the feeling of having taken a gamble he could not afford to lose, and lost. The litter passed through an arch in a thick hedge of Leyland cypress to emerge in a different world. They were in a long garden at the front of a row of attractive terraced houses preserved from the Public Era. The garden flourished with winter flowers, white, red and purple, infusing the air with scent to relieve the reek of mining. The family and its business occupied the row of terraces. Kalchelik dismounted at the porch of a house near the middle, thanked his carriers and told them they were free. He took Lawrence by the arm and led him inside.
“Times have changed a great deal since we served together, I’m revelling in just how fast the National Party are driving reform. It has become my whole world. Solidarity, unity, nation and all that. I must give you fair warning I’m a true believer, Lawrence! I have forced swingeing reforms in our conditions of work. Our staff only do a fifty-hour week now, with two weeks’ paid holiday, sick pay and assistance in medical expenses. We’ve a long way to go to match the glory trusts of course—there’s no way we can afford to offer schooling and pensions—but then, we don’t have sovereign customers filling our pockets with gold. Ah, may I at this point tactfully suggest a shower and a change of clothes?”
Lawrence had no urge to expose himself to the total vulnerability of standing naked in a locked shower. However, he could not retreat now. He just had to smile and say how kind and get on with it.
He knew it was going to be a shock to look in a mirror. Even having braced for it, the gaunt face that stared back fixed him rapt for long seconds. Mechanically, he washed his face and shaved off the blond stubble. The stubble was dangerous, as few men were blond—it made him memorable. While shaving, he had time to get used to something unexpected, something unwelcome. He looked old. Lines cut his forehead and clustered around his eyes. He was already middle-aged. The Night and Fog had burned years from his life in just a few months.
Half an hour later, Lawrence relaxed with a pork sandwich and glass of beer, in woollen trousers and a corduroy shirt borrowed from one of Kalchelik’s cousins. Despite the luxuries of the first hot shower in five months, a clean body and fresh clothes, sombreness haunted him. That forty-year-old face kept staring back from his mind’s eye.
Kalchelik sat opposite, talking and talking. He always had been the centre of attention, entertaining his section with smutty jokes and yarns. As Lawrence was munching through the sandwich, Kalchelik sustained a monologue about the family business. They had close ties to gangster clans miles out on the Great North Drain, so far out that the area had never been built over even in the Public Era. The slaves of the gangsters excavated the vast middens left by the Fatted Masses. He described them as “beyond comprehension, lakes you could sail a ship on, the whole bottom pure rubbish for the dredging”. The rubbish got loaded on ultramarine wagons and drawn down the Great North Drain to the Kalchelik business, where the ‘staff’ pulled it all apart and sorted it. The metal things got sold straight to the factories. The plastic got heated and rolled into sheets, which made it valuable to truck builders. The paper got shredded, bleached and made into paper again. Most paper and cardboard from the Public Era had rotted long ago, but this midden was sodden enough that cellulose had been preserved. Lawrence listened whilst refining what he was going to tell Kalchelik.
“Tell me, Andrew, what made you join the National Party?”
“The nationalists are the future, Lawrence. The sovereigns just sit on the world to keep their privileges. They have to go.”
It was an interesting worldview from Kalchelik the dedicated killer of infestations. Under the circumstances, it would have been indelicate to point this out. After all, Lawrence had served in the same unit.
“What do you do in the National Party?”
“It’s a bit secret, but seeing as you and I are bound by our past, there’s no harm in your knowing. The National Party has finally been persuaded to investigate atrocities by the glory trusts. Even glory officers are joining the Party now and they’ve been pushing for action. You know how it is: if you want rank, you have to be a top killer. The decent ones who never got rank are bitter. They want revenge, that’s all there is to it.”
“What
about the things we did?”
“They aren’t after low-grade stuff like that. They certainly aren’t interested in your work against fenland bandits, that was legitimate protection of the cosmos. It’s the big stuff, the massacres on the public drains, bombarding the asylums, the preventions at sea—especially those killers on the barges.”
“That’s all just talk, surely?”
“Ladbroke fort shelled Brent Cross not three weeks ago. Killed more than a hundred folk in their own homes.”
“That would never have happened six months ago.”
“The glories were making a point because the National Party is opening its new headquarters here in Brent Cross. We’ll get the last laugh, though. We’ve got testimony from multiple witnesses of exactly which officers gave the orders. When we track them down, they’ll hang.”
“I’ve been far from the south for years and all of this drama is a shock.”
“Tell me what you’ve been up to then.”
Kalchelik sat back. His dark eyes rested on Lawrence’s face.
“I worked my way up to first sergeant in Peterborough. The account-captain kept pestering me to apply for officer training. I wasn’t all that keen, but on the other hand I didn’t want to be a first sergeant for the rest of my life. So I took the Securitician A at Camberley College and actually did pretty well—”
“You would. You’re a literate chap, Lawrence.”
“I got posted to the Reading Garrison and then went up to a town on the west coast of Scotland called Oban. There my good fortune came to an end. I got fogged—some local merchants didn’t like my face and they put together a scam. Down I went for eight years.”
Kalchelik’s eyes bulged.
“Eight years? What did they get you for?”
“I was set up—”
Sovereigns of the Collapse Book 2 Page 19
