Chalcot Crescent (2 page)

Amos may be right about NUG but such is the pace and nature of the new legislation I suspect much of it gets forgotten accidentally on purpose.

When people complain that I am cynical, I say, but I am not cynical, I am just old, I know what is going to happen next. That is what experience does for you. Mind you, there are still surprises, like my friend Cynthia falling out of the sky. The plane broke up in mid-air, and many on board were returning from the Paris fashion shows. Beautiful girls showered down from the skies, still strapped to their seats. Cynthia was no model – indeed my mother spoke of her ‘having an unfortunate face’ – but it did not stop her having an emotionally tumultuous life. Some people are born to it.

There can be good surprises, in case you think I am a miserable person. I am not. This grandson of mine, Amos, the one the family had given up as a hopeless case in his teen age, a drug addict, a
drop-out and a disgrace to the family, who’d even at one time joined the BNP – even though, or perhaps even because, he has a Jewish stepfather – is prepared to sit on the stair below mine and offer me help and company in this my hour of need and distress. That’s a surprise. I don’t see Venetia or Polly, my daughters, sitting here. Perhaps they’ve given me up too as a hopeless case. It is not a pretty thought. I have lived and breathed for my children, or so I tell myself. They may see it differently and probably do. ‘Bailiffs at Mum’s door’ will not sit well with them. It smacks of mismanagement, and they are both very managing girls.

Astonishing how Karl and I, with our lovers and divorces and dysfunctional carryings-on – though I am sure we never failed in love towards our children, just each other – have produced such functional children, so ready to condemn. ‘Mother, a store card? You have a store card? Nobody with any sense has a store card! A store card up to its limit?’ Gasp.

Yet they are the generation, not me and mine, who have brought this country to its knees. We brought freedom of thought, sexual liberation, imagination, creativity, wealth – they just spent. Well, true, I did too but they did it worse.

On cue, bang, bang, bang-de-bang – the very stairs tremble, the paint on the porch will flake. Authority has a heavy knock. They use their fists – they do not even bother with bell or knocker, though the knocker is antique and heavy, a brass fish with a curly tail, overlooked by my husband Karl when he stripped the house of his belongings, long ago, in revenge for my daring to buy him out of a property he felt to be intrinsically his, although the law disagreed. Work that sentence out for yourselves. The memory of these events makes me breathless. I will not rewrite it.

I would normally have had the front of the house repainted this
year had the bank not decided to call in the overdraft and my mortgage not gone into arrears. Bang, bang, bang-de-bang. Come out of there, you cheat, you wretch. Show yourself, antisocial element that you are! Oh, I am, I am; forgive me, NUG.

‘Fucking banksters,’ Amos had said when we fled our lunch – National Meat Loaf and the last of the tomatoes from my window box – for the stairs, where we couldn’t be seen. ‘They still own us and control us. NUG will never get them under. Their scabby minions will forever be banging on the door.’

Amos has an admirable way with words, laced through though they may be with profanity. Literacy is in his blood. Am I too not a writer, albeit a forgotten one? Frances Prideaux, CBE? Remember? And Amos’ great-aunt Fay, though she was reduced to cookery books, and his great-aunt Jane, the poet? And his great-grandmother Margaret Jepson earned the family living through writing, and Margaret’s brother Selwyn and her father Edgar as well. The particular talent seems to have bypassed Venetia and Polly altogether, which may be why they live such settled lives. Venetia paints, but I sometimes think it is an affectation rather than the real thing.

‘It is in the leech’s nature to go on sucking blood,’ I respond, ‘until the last possible moment.’

The bankers serve very well as scapegoats, but what can they do if the world turns out to be bipolar; if one day the sunspots flare again, the polarity reverses, the nations of the world shut up shop, put up the barriers, each looking after their own as best they can? One day mania switches to depression; in individuals it can last years, on a global scale how long? It doesn’t bear thinking of. Our currency under NUG is so without value not even food can be imported; let alone oil, let alone electricity from France. North Sea gas has finally gasped its last. And were not those whom Amos
insults the cream of our youth? They too are victims, lured into a world of money which represented neither toil nor value. Bound to fail: bribed, used, betrayed, and then ruthlessly discarded. I speak strongly because Ethan, Amos’ young half-brother, my other grandson, with his First in History, bright and innocent, was one such. He is a Ministry chauffeur now: at least he had a father, my son-in-law Victor, well up in NIFE, the National Institute for Food Excellence, to pull strings.

Even so, Ethan was angry. He is a young man. He lost his Porsche and his string of girlfriends. He blames the bankers of the past – thus letting himself off the hook – the Bilderbergers and their kind, for setting up a universal Ponzi scheme and knowing very well what they were doing. He joined Redpeace, an angry Greenpeace breakaway group, and through its webpage circulated the facsimile of a letter written in 1838 by Amsel Rothschild to his New York agents, introducing the idea of ‘the mortgage’. The letter turned up on my computer, I am on Redpeace’s mailing list but do not download – it seems dangerous.

The few who can understand the system will be either so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class, while, on the other hand, that great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that Capital derives from the system, will bear its burden without complaint and, perhaps, without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.

Well, well, he was right, we did not suspect. But it’s not, I think, that we are mentally incapable. We would just rather not comprehend,
and spent the money while we could, in our two-hundred-year patch of mania.

As it happened, Ethan’s moment of anger and indignation quickly passed: he unsubscribed from Redpeace. Their missives still come through to me, but mostly I delete them unread as they arrive. I cannot bear a screen cluttered by irrelevancies. One day, one day, when I have the time to work out how it’s done, I will actively unsubscribe.

Ethan likes being a Ministry driver, he tells me. You get to speed down the centre lane in cars not quite as good as the old Porsches – after the Volkswagen takeover they are not quite what they were, being more sedate and social – but good enough. The VIPs he drives confide in him. And he now has a less glossy but far nicer girlfriend in Neighbourhood Watch, whom I have not met but of whom he speaks in admiration, and only one, and so no longer has the emotional strain of juggling his affections as once he had to, checking over the Porsche for stray thongs in case one of the others found out. That kind of thing.

Take no notice of me. I was pretty smart in my heyday, I daresay, but thinking Amos has left me on the stair just to roll a spliff is as likely to be the paranoia of old age – the carer is a thief; someone is trying to poison the cat; my metal fillings are broadcasting messages – as a rational judgment.

What continues to worry me is why the men at the door don’t go away. Why are they so sure we’re in here? Why should they be so interested anyway in an aged lady novelist has-been? I got a glimpse of them as they arrived and got out of their car – two guys in a grey executive Lexus – a sure sign of an authority about its righteous business. One was large, young, black and handsome, shiny as a panther, the other small and white and undernourished. They wore suits and ties – almost as if they were in fancy dress, bringing a kind of bizarre
Clockwork Orange
formality with them. But you, dear reader, will be too young to remember that prophetic Kubrick film, and the sense of menace, of frightening times to come, of a world barely in control, that it brought with it.

Bang, bang, bang-de-bang. I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.

My home, which I always thought so charming and so very me, so very much mine, so redolent of cultural superiority, turns out to be just a house of straw, built by selfish little pigs who once lived off the fat of the land, and need now to be brought to justice. See how
I veer between a helpless defiance and an acute sense of guilt? Mea culpa, me and mine. Amos may be right: the admen have brought us to this state, where we side with those who have taken us hostage. The Stockholm syndrome of the debtor. I am on the side of those who persecute and damage me. Many a wife, of course, is in the same state.

Outside the street lamps flicker on, and go out again. The light on the CiviCam at the end of the street stays off: that means it isn’t functioning. We’re meant to report it but nobody bothers: it’s a concrete monstrosity, quite out of keeping with the original Victorian gas lamps – which the Crescent is lucky enough to still have, albeit converted to electricity. This is a conservation area, and posh, or at least was, until a couple of years ago. Now pavements are beginning to crack and rats come out and stare at you, and no-one bothers to hammer out the dents in the Saabs and Mercedes that still line the street. Most turn out to be in negative equity, like the houses behind them, and there are no buyers. For years pundits kept saying things would pick up, that people were postponing buying until prices came down, but the fact turned out to be that people had just lost interest in buying things they didn’t need. Consumerism just went out of fashion one day, like the hula hoop – one day everywhere, the next nowhere, for no apparent reason, and after that there was no going back.

Economists presuppose a population ruled by the rational self-interest of individuals, but alas, it is not the case. Societies are no different from the individuals that compose them, and are as likely to be ruled by Thanatos as Eros, to be periodically seized by the urge to self-destruct; just as the sun is given to a plague of sunspots from time to time for no apparent reason.

There was a brief period, some three years ago, when deflation
began to flatten out, hailed as the Recovery, but it was short-lived, and merely triggered off inflation.

And inflation no longer had the charm it once had in making light of what one owed. The small print at the bottom of the credit agreements, by which everyone lived and no-one ever read, gave an option to whoever bought on the debt – ‘the banks, the banks,’ as Amos would cry in triumph, ‘the blood-sucking scum’ – to index-link existing debts. A rare person it was who could live free of debt, free of anxiety, free of fear of the future. The dread of nuclear war back in the sixties and seventies was nothing to it. But perhaps every decade chooses its own anxiety.

Amos wriggles up with the blanket and tucks it round me. I had misjudged him. He loves his old gran.

‘Do you think they have heat sensors?’ I whisper.

‘The filth do,’ he murmurs, ‘so these shits will be next. All the agencies are now one and the fucking same.’

Now I too had fallen for the attraction of bad language in the sixties, when the hippie classes associated it with the vital primitivism of the working classes, and envied it, and stole it as our own, along with people power, long unwashed hair, torn jeans and other accoutrements of poverty. For some reason we believed the non-thinking classes were more highly sexed than the bourgeoisie. My family complain I am foul-mouthed, and I do try not to be. A fuck or a shit when I drop something on my toe is about as far as I go. But I wish Amos wouldn’t do it: it somehow undermines his cause, his complaint against society.

‘But we’re still all right so long as we don’t open the door,’ I say. ‘They’re not allowed to break in, are they? It’s only if you let them in the first time they can come in any time, break the door down if necessary.’

‘Don’t fucking bank on it,’ says Amos. ‘Debt collectors now have powers once reserved for the police under the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005.’

This child knows so much. He spent a year in prison for drug dealing, and was lucky it was not longer. I paid for the best lawyers, the best barristers. Ten years back I was wealthy. Now I live as others do. I can no longer protect my family. Nor could Victor at the time: he was then a scientist working with Cancer Cure and did the job for love rather than money. If he said the boy should face the consequences of his actions, it was because tough love was the prerogative of those with no money to spare, rather than from conviction, and both, I believe, were glad when I stepped in and helped. Venetia loves her son and Victor did his best to do so, though I daresay Amos was not the easiest of stepsons. We all love our children when they are born, sometimes quite passionately. I know I did. I know Venetia did. Yet so many children complain so bitterly about how their parents failed in love. I don’t know where it goes wrong.

Victor is one of the few people I know who is flourishing under the new NUG regime: he is no longer a struggling research scientist but works for the National Institute for Food Excellence: his salary is inflation-linked. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. He is in a position, thank God, to help his family face bad times, as I no longer am.

But it’s no use bleating to Amos about mother love. He has resisted all society’s attempts to feminize him: he is a triumph of testosteronic impulse. He was always the bad boy of the class, the one who fought in the playground, dealt in football cards, buying cheap and selling dear, for all his gentle looks. He may have a girlfriend but if he does he does not mention her.

‘Amos,’ I say now, or words to this effect – ‘we are not terrorists, simply law-abiding citizens hiding from our creditors. A civil offence, probably, but hardly criminal. It is not as if I am a non-entity. Am I not Frances Prideaux, a declared national treasure – albeit some time ago – her plays in the West End, her popular novels translated all over the world? I am not defenceless. I have the power of public opinion behind me. I could ring
The Times
if the landline hadn’t been cut off, and they’d have their people round in no time, to watch another national treasure bite the dust of bankruptcy.’