If Then (8 page)

“Of what?”

“Of shipping out. We’re under orders although who knows where to. They issued us with pith helmets so perhaps Egypt. Or India. Joe Smith heard a rumour about Japan. What do you think?”

James did not know whether to play along with the delusion or to confront the soldier with the reality that he was out of his time.

“The Dardanelles,” said James, remembering what Alex and Omega John had told him about John Hector’s service record.

“The Turk? I must read the Koran. But you didn’t answer my question: are you afraid?”

James thought of his old life. “I was afraid for so long because I believed fear was a way of controlling the future. But it’s just a way of holding onto the past.”

“You sound like my father,” said Hector.

“If your father is a pacifist, then I am nothing like your father. Did you see the armour?”

“The ironclad? I did. Like something from HG Wells. Does it go?”

“It goes. I can’t exactly think straight when I am connected to it.”

“I don’t imagine any of us are thinking straight. What is its purpose?”

“It’s our weapon.”

“Why does the town need a weapon?”

“The armour replaces the police. It responds to the will of the people. It is a kind of democracy.”

“Democracy is a swizz,” said Hector. A disc of river light glinted within each of his pupils.

James went to check the thawing of the tallow. He turned off the armour engine, swilled the fuel around with a stick to aid the melting of the fat crystals, then climbed down into the cage and felt the armour hum around him. The vibration of the engine made his teeth chatter and the mechanical noise was annihilating in the close underground chamber. He slid his arm into the exoskeleton and twitched a fingertip but the mechanical finger did not respond, and that was how it should be. The armour was not his to command. It was the instrument of the will of the Process. He checked the coolant levels, the ventilation and the heat sink, ran diagnostic tests on the electrics and picked brick from out of the pedrails. Maintenance complete, he shut the armour down, slid the roof back into place, and secured the bunker.

Hector was still at the river’s edge. He stepped lightly around the frozen mud to peer into a drainage ditch.

“See, down there, a pair of gadwall ducks!” He squatted down to get a better look at a wading bird with long red and orange legs. “And a red shank. The floodplain is a good breeding ground for them. Look at his great dipper’s beak!”

From his pack the soldier took out a flat tin of watercolours, a sketchbook, some HB pencils and a nimble sable brush.

“When we were out in the Clare Mountains on training days, I’d always find something picturesque to paint. I could stalk a heron for hours.”

He sat cross-legged on the snowy bank, overcoat underneath the seat of his trousers, sketching the red shank as it walked alone through slime and the buttery mud.

“Why is democracy a swizz?” James asked.

Hector concentrated upon his drawing. “I simply do not believe in the idea of the nation. Democracy invariably leads to war because politicians stir up patriotic feeling to get elected. I will serve my fellow man but I will not serve the nation.”

The young man drew nature deep into his lungs.

“This will be your first time in combat?” asked James.

“Yes. My soldiering has been endless drill at Basingstoke and Limerick. This will be my first time out.”

“Do you remember the day that I found you on the wire?”

The soldier did not respond. The question was not part of the pattern.

The men walked upriver. Hector enthused about the wildlife; at Halmsey weir, watching a swan’s glacial drift against the speeding current, he remembered a day out at Lake Windermere, when a swan had attacked a chocolate-coloured Labrador.

Friesian cows milled in the low, boggy plain between the river and the raised earthwork of the railway line. Upriver lay the chalk pit of Offham, the gatehouse of the
douanier
, and the town perimeter. They stopped at an islet in the river. It was riddled with warrens. Under the trailing skirts of a maudlin willow, dun rabbits nibbled and loped, enjoying the protection of the river’s course.

“I grew up in Levens,” said Hector. “Just before sundown, I’d take a boat out to watch the light break on the mountain’s edge, and feel alone on the water. I was a lone wolf, still am really. There are too many people in the army for me. I don’t mean you, old fellow. I respect you. It’s the commonplace man of the barracks who bores me: the office boys and the city clerks and the shop assistants. Little chiefs in suburban villas brooding on kismet, asking themselves: will I die on the battlefield? What will become of little me, will it matter when the sorry lot of me – all my ideas, because people are just a collection of ideas, aren’t they? – soak into the earth?”

He stopped. At his feet there was a dead rabbit, its skin sunken and sallow, the legs and paws lying at full stretch as if the animal had taken one last leap.

“Look there, in the eye sockets, ladybirds! Isn’t that the strangest thing?” The eyes had rotted away and in each of the gummy orbits, two brightly coloured, spotted bugs turned this way and that, seemingly confounded by these bone craters. Hector crouched to peer closer, then offered his index finger as a way out. They were not ladybirds. Their antennae were too long, and the head was an array of lens and grille.

If Hector noticed the manufactured quality of the bugs, he did not admit it.

“Are ladybirds lucky, do you think? Two of them.”

The ladybirds relayed data back to the drone birds, which fed into the tree routers, from which the numbers were cast up into the Process; if a phenomenon could not be measured by the Process, then, effectively, it did not exist.

Hector fell silent beside the river. James took his arm. “Come,” he said, “there is someone we have to meet.”

The two men retraced their footprints in the muddy slush. Downriver, snow-covered roofs gathered in the lee of Lewes Castle. Overlooking the river crossing at Pells, a church tower, a steep terraced street, and a child’s playground. The river’s course, tamed by sedge and bullrush, diverted into a lily pond. They passed the lido and then across icy fields around the back of the allocation point. Hector had reverted to his default silence.

Children were out on the streets of the lower tier of the Malling Estate, and at the bailiff’s approach, they scampered away from their creation: a snowman with square armoured shoulders and a horned head.

The men walked up the steep Malling Hill until they reached the outlying terraces of the town flanking the road in from the east. James found the house he was looking for: the house of the Bowles family. Friends and neighbours milled outside with parting gifts of food and equipment. He watched from across the road. Chests and boxes of possessions had been loaded upon a cart, a sign that the family were not intent upon resistance. He wondered if they had made contact with outsiders, if they had a plan for what would happen once they passed through the gatehouse of the
douanier
. He steadied himself against a lamppost. Around its trunk and overhanging broken lamp, the Malling residents had strung dead mobile phones and broken pieces of circuit board, a superstitious offering to disrupt the Process. He stood across the road in a brown windcheater and ancient combat trousers, an unarmoured and untethered man. A snowball scuffed the lamppost. He looked around for the person who had thrown it. No sign.

He crossed the road. The line of well-wishers cringed and averted their eyes at the approach of the bailiff.

“Is the family home?” he asked. A second snowball arced through the air and popped against the side of Hector’s head. Suppressed laughter from the line. The soldier took a step to balance himself.

The man of the house came to the door. He was tall, wearing a blue linen shirt under dungarees, with brown curly hair, powerful long limbs and the taut skin of an outdoor worker. The round grey frames of his glasses were created by the Process as was his belt of titanium tools. Over his shoulder, the narrow hallway contained more boxes and a little boy curious to discover who had come to the door.

“I am the bailiff,” said James.

The carpenter was appalled. Then angry.

“Why are you here?”

He should have known the name of the carpenter. Ruth had mentioned the names of all the family. But when he reached into his mind for the names and came back empty-handed, he felt an unpleasant greasy sensation in his stomach and fingertips.

“I came to offer my sympathies. And to hear what plans you have for living outside.”

The carpenter’s hands were large and rough. He took hold of Hector’s collar and, striding out of the house, dragged the light lithe soldier over the yard and into the road, then threw him down onto the frost.

“Why him? Why does this thing stay and my children go?”

The carpenter kneeled beside Hector and gripped his skull. “The soldier is an error message. And yet not only do you ignore this evidence of malfunction, you take it into your house. You choose this error over real people.”

The carpenter released Hector’s head. The soldier dragged himself to the gutter, rolled over, and got slowly to his feet.

The carpenter came up close to James’ face.

“The Process issued me with a new set of tools only a month ago. Why do that if I am dispensable?”

James waited silently. He would never attempt to justify an eviction.

“You want to know my plan? I’m staying. I have a role to play in this town.”

“Never make the mistake of believing you are indispensable,” said James.

The carpenter did not expect to be criticized. He rounded on the bailiff. But James could not be intimidated.

“I’m sorry. I really am.”

“Give me one reason why it should be us?” The carpenter gestured back to his family and there, stood in his door, was the girl Agnes. James recognized her. She was the girl who had spoken to him when he found Hector on the barbed wire, the girl who did cartwheels first on one hand then on two. Before the Seizure, he and Ruth had planned to have children. After the implant, it couldn’t happen. Children were strange to him; he knew that he was meant to feel something for them, that the young were more important than the old.

The carpenter turned to accuse the line of neighbours outside his house.

“Can anyone give me a reason why it should be us?”

Every face held a reason why the Bowles should be evicted although none had the courage to speak it.

Turning back to James, the carpenter put his hand to his chisel.

“What if I were to kill you now? It’s not like I have anything to lose?”

“You have nothing to lose,” admitted the bailiff, “but they–” and he gestured to the line of friends and neighbours “–would lose everything if they did not stop you. And someone else would take my place, and they might not be so honourable as to come up here, unarmed, to tell you to your face that I hope you leave us without violence, that you understand that your best hope is to conserve your energy and keep our goodwill for what awaits you outside. So I ask you again: what plans have you made for after the eviction?”

“My wife’s brother lives in Saddlescombe. And the rest of the family are in a reservation in Wales.”

“But you plan on staying.”

“Even if you drag me out of here by my hair, I will come back for you.”

James was indifferent to the threat. “I only evict people. Exclusion is a matter for the
douanier
.”

He was done. With Hector trudging after him, James walked back down Malling Hill, paused, then lashed out an arm at an incoming snowball.

7

E
viction Day began
with the firing of a maroon rocket from the turret of the castle. The detonation echoed down the narrow twittens, scared the rooks from the tall trees, and sounded deep within the fathoms of ten thousand dreams.

In the bathroom, he turned his head to the profile and shaved the hair that had grown around the puckered canyon of the implant, shedding tiny brown and grey snippets of hair across the curvature of the porcelain sink. The tattered collar of his boiled vest, the tooth powder of chalk and peppermint oil followed by a mouthful of salt water – these were good clean habits. Solitude was a virtue, friendship was a vice.

In his gut, he felt a twinge for the armour, a craving that was almost ulcerous. The pain passed quickly. The urge was reminiscent of the restless desire of Saturday nights and he returned to Ruth in search of distraction.

“I went to see the Bowles family. The carpenter attacked Hector and called him an error message.”

“What else could he be?”

“Hector is significant. Hector spoke to me.”

“He hasn’t said a word to me.” Ruth lay still under the covers. “He looks so fragile.”

“From his point of view, he hasn’t been to war yet. He’s not a soldier, just a lad.”

“He’s a machine.”

“I don’t see him that way. Maybe I’m too close to the Process.”

James took down a transparent box from a high shelf and put it at the end of the bed. Inside the box was his second skin, his private armour. The iron exoskeleton locked up in the underground cylinder belonged to the town; this armour, a tough flexible vest of scales, had been tailored to his body. The exterior of each scale was a ceramic plate of silicon carbide which rode on a supple, tough internal layer of collagen fibres. Each fibril of collagen was bound into a doweling and then stacked in cylinders resembling the densely packed bundles of collagen fibres in the connective tissue between muscles and organs: the fascia. If a knife or bullet cracked the tile it would not penetrate the collagen layer. And if they came at him with hammers, the impact from blunt instruments would be absorbed by shear thickening fluid, a mixture of nanoparticles of silica in polyethylene glycol which would be transformed by the energy of a blow into a rigid shield. Also in the box, a cushioned helmet that had been moulded to the shape of his skull. The helmet of the iron exoskeleton was decorated with the colours of the districts, and bore the dents and burns of the Seizure. That armour performed a social function. This more intimate armour – crafted in one piece, and modelled upon the arapaima of the Amazon, a giant fish that in the dry season was forced to bask among piranha – was a supple love letter to him from the Process.

Ruth hitched her knees up under the blankets.

“How are you feeling?”

Acid scorched his stomach lining. His temples were urgent poles either side of an unpleasant lightness of mind.

“I just want to get it started,” he said.

“What are you going to do about the children?”

“I will evict them as I evict everyone whose names appear on the list.”

“If you evict Agnes, it will be difficult for me.”

“At the school?”

“It will be difficult for me to love you.”

He laid the vest of scales upon the bed, and ran his fingers over the individual ceramic plates to check their integrity.

Ruth looked closely at his face, reading the impulses distorting it.

“I love you, but what you are about to do is evil.”

There, she had said it: evil.

“Are we evil?” he asked. “Is this what evil looks like?”

He turned the vest over and tested the fibrils of collagen by stretching them.

“Could you stop the eviction of Agnes, if you really wanted to?”

“Could you, when you are swimming underwater, force yourself not to surface for air? Yes, in theory. But in practice, you give in to instinct for an instant, and then you are on the surface, gasping.”

“It’s very Old Testament. The sacrifice of the innocents. I wonder if we are being tested like Abraham with Isaac?”

“Alex Drown says that we must be wary of projecting our old ways of thinking upon the Process. It is not God. It is not our father. It is not government.”

She got out of bed. She wore a long flannel nightie and her dark hair was tied up so that he could see the discoloration of the stripe at the top of her spine.

“I wish I could argue with someone about this. With you.”

“We’re not responsible for this, Ruth. We can only be human, and try to survive.”

In the living room, the grime on the windows softened the morning light. Hector was waiting for them at the dining table. James inquired if he slept well. No answer. They ate porridge together, and the elevation of his blood sugar alleviated his physiological cravings for the armour.

On the table, James spread out a map of the town marked with the locations of the houses of the twelve evicted. In preparation, he had visited each of them to gauge their resistance. Most assured him that they were resigned to their fate and would be joining the procession. But Francis Sacks was going to be trouble. The Von Pallandts had never forgiven Sacks and his family for their takeover of the allotments in the early days. No doubt Sacks had plans for his eviction. Hiding places. Ambushes. Homemade explosives and hostages.

He was restless to go out but it was not safe for him to do so. Not without his private armour. Something nasty might be planned for him. A knife in the back at the market stall. The carnival atmosphere of the day encouraged people to behave as if their actions had no consequences. Alex, travelling into town over the Downs, would have to take precautions too.

“Do you feel it?” he asked Hector. “The anticipation. The fear.”

Hector ate porridge methodically, silently.

His cravings for the armour came in waves; the peaks tightened his throat and made him feel like he was not inhaling enough oxygen, and in the troughs he was weak with relief. The implant was a silvery presence at the back of his mind.

Ruth put her hand on his wrist and stopped him from scratching at the portal.

“Oh Ruth. Is it always like this? I’d forgotten. Why do I always forget?”

“Try to remember what it was like before you were the bailiff,” she whispered.

His old self had been deluded and self-important, and then he had been redundant. A greasy cautious silence met his pleas for work. Everyone could see the collapse coming but no one spoke of it. The truth was considered to be pollution. The economy exhausted its most vital commodity: the future.

No, he would not remember it.

The Process took care of him now. His craving peaked again.

“This addiction to the armour is cruel,” said Ruth.

“I could ask Alex to cut the implant out of me.”

A look of fear crossed Ruth’s face.

“You said that I’m evil.” He looked to her to tell him how to behave, how to be comfortable among people. His upbringing had been deficient in socialization. He had been son to a mother who hated men, and he had never known his father. When he was informed that his mother was dead, over the phone, by an estranged sister, Ruth had to persuade him to attend the funeral. Without social instincts, he relied on systems to tell him how to behave.

“It might be evil,” admitted Ruth. “Or it may serve a greater good. How are we to know?”

He needed her because he was incapable of acting according to a moral sense. His pragmatism was, in turn, a quality she relied upon. If James refused to perform the evictions, the implant could override him anyway, and they would lose everything for nothing. Like last time. But to cast out children – she would never forgive him.

He said, “The children are just being put outside of the Process. It might even be for their own good.”

“If you had ever spent time with children, then you would not be so phlegmatic about it.”

“I’m the bailiff, Ruth. The system was designed so that I have no choice in my actions.”

Ruth washed, dressed and quickly put on her coat. She was late for school. She kissed him on the forehead, and said, “When you get to the Bowles house, look for me.”

Hector’s silent face tracked her exit.

Their flat was the upper floor of a converted nineteenth century needle factory, allocated to them for its centrality, overlooking the winged angel of the war memorial. The rest of the building was a communal kitchen. Below, across the cobbled factory gate, trestle tables served bread and soup for the workers securing the town for the eviction.

The caretaker, Terry, supervised a large crew of men, women and children as they boarded up windows and put buckets of sand along the parade route in case of fire. Posts and string marked out where the crowds could stand, leaving plenty of clearance for the armour to pass through the narrow streets.

Every citizen wore their district colours and conversation thrilled with the sense of occasion. A rumour spread that the
douanier
had already sighted the distant progress of the totem from Black Cap. The rumour drifted across the town, to the workers of the Paddock, overseen by a rueful pair of piebald horses, and up the avenue of grand Edwardian houses, past the blackened gap where the Walington sisters had torched their home rather than give it up. Here three or four young families, strong and simple yeomen, now occupied each house in return for working and protecting the paddock, the largest of the town’s dozen allotments. With the thaw came wheelbarrows of contorted squash, bags of strong mustard leaf, and the unearthing of parsnips and artichokes.

R
uth ran
down a steep twitten as the church clock chimed nine. The sound of children singing from the nearby school house. Her class ran through their lamentation rehearsal as they waited for their teacher.

In the playing fields, under the shadow of the kiss-kiss tree, Sylvia, a tall girl on the cusp of adolescence, read out her essay on eviction to the youngsters:

“Once upon a time, the grownups used to go far away every day to earn money, for without money you did not have a house or food or clothes. As time passed, the grownups went away for longer and longer and the money they brought home was less and less until finally there was no money left. Where did it all go? Money wasn’t a thing like clothes or parsnips. Money was a promise. And too many people broke that promise so people did not believe in money anymore. The grownups everywhere realized they had been cheated but even the cheats lost out when no one wanted to plough the field or teach the class or even stop the bad men. All over the land, grownups argued about what to do. Except here. In Lewes, the grownups had a plan because they were the first to know that change was coming.

“Every home used to have a window into another world. A wicked monster took over that world and so we had to close it off forever. But before the gate was shut, we rescued the angels of that world and put them in a special place so that they could watch over us from the kiss-kiss tree, and help us with our school work, and to make sure that everyone gets what is fair. We have to work hard, and do our bit, and stick together. But every day cannot be a happy day. The frost comes late and kills the vegetables. People get sick. People get cross. We can’t hold onto everyone. Sometimes we have to let people go. And it’s alright for us to be sad that they go. And they will be sad too and sometimes very cross. We make sure that we say goodbye and they are sent away to help other people make places that are as safe and beautiful as Lewes.”

The children listened to her with serious little faces, and then asked questions about the monster and the other world, and whether they would be sent away, and why the angels chose one person and not another. Sylvia, the best student in her class, answered each question as truthfully and tactfully as she could.

The kiss-kiss tree had been a pine tree planted at the beginning of the Process, one early January. The branches shed their needles and became brittle and bare. Then, in spring, a miracle: new sap flowed through the tree, its viscosity glinting with information. New branches sprouted quickly from old, an array of smooth wooden rods gently piercing the sky. The trunk accelerated upward. The bark grew thin and torn. Roots broke the earth in every direction, some as thick as fibulas, others tendrils forming a skein of interconnections laced through the top soil: all were warm to the touch.

By late May, the tree was as tall and wide as a house. The pine needles glinted like filaments. The children liked to play near it. Ruth watched them flock to the kiss-kiss tree during break, and the birdsong provided individual counselling from the Process. Classes were easier to manage than they used to be, the children got on better, although this could equally have been due to their parents being around more, the tighter community bond, the change in diet and exercise.

Ruth arrived at the school. The grass was long, the markings of the football pitch stirred in the breeze and distant trails of vapour rose from the root system of the kiss-kiss tree. The morning dew evaporated, the moisture hissed and the soil charred. She noticed that the structure of the branches had changed: the radial spokes emerging horizontally from the lower part of the trunk had fallen away, with the growth clumping in the higher upper third of the tree. This central growth was a misshapen pentagon of livid green webbing, and branches radiated out from each of its points. Suspended in the heart of the webbing was a woody nucleus. The children climbed the mutant branches of the kiss-kiss tree and played games in its shadow.

Ruth took the register. She skipped over the name of Agnes Bowles. The class spent the morning finishing their costumes for the eviction parade. Sylvia asked her teacher if she had heard about this year’s totem. The question attracted the general curiosity of the class.

“What has been made for us this year?”

“The farmers say the totem is very big. Much bigger than in the past.”

“How does it move, miss?”

“It moves in the same way that a tractor does, Maisie, and it is controlled by the Process.”