Intrusion (14 page)

Geena couldn’t imagine it, but she laughed to show she’d got the joke.

‘Oh, the horror!’

‘I’m not being ironic,’ Ahmed said. ‘The economy and the environment are in such a precarious balance, it’s like we’re riding a unicycle on a tightrope over a flaming abyss while juggling chainsaws. The last thing you want in that situation is some clown bounding along behind you and contesting the saddle. So … the question becomes one of maintaining control
over the underlying population. Here’s where what they did to you and what they didn’t do to me comes in.
Over there
, well, I’ve told you what they’d have done to me. What the cops would have done to you – a student fleetingly suspected of not being fully on-side – would have been to beat you black and blue, taking care not to mark your face or break bones or cause internal injuries, and either arrest you or send you on your way, lesson learned. And you come crying into the office of your supervisor, and she, or he for that matter, gives you a hug, and a coffee or something stronger, maybe even offers a cigarette, and a spiel that would be nothing like as direct as the one I’ve given you. If you were to read a transcript of such a conversation in Moscow University, you wouldn’t know what they were talking about. But they would.

‘Whereas
here
, it’s a sterile pin, a sticking-plaster, a helpline to prolong your feeling of being a victim, and no hug from me. Contrary to received wisdom that control over there is physical and over here it’s ideological – hegemony, false consciousness and all that Critical Theory 101 guff – it’s almost exactly the other way round. Ordinary, non-political, everyday life is far more regulated here than it is in Russia or India. Why else do you think we maintain the low-carbon regulations, the holiday-flights ban for instance, and all the preventive health measures, when syn bio has cracked the carbon problem and fixed cancer and heart disease?’

‘That sounds kind of … Foucauldian,’ said Geena, trying to keep her mind on an academic track. ‘Like, it’s all about control over bodies? Biopower? But isn’t that already part of the critique?’

Ahmed laughed. ‘Exactly! Bloody Foucault’s where they got the idea from!’

‘There’s just one problem with what you’re saying,’ Geena said, leaning forward. ‘The unicycle thing, yes? It seems to me there are
two
unicycles on this rope, and they’re heading towards each other.’

‘Yes,’ said Ahmed. ‘Hence the overwhelming importance of delay. They might just slow down and meet in the middle, instead of colliding. And then we have a chance of, maybe, heading in a common direction,
off
the rope.’

‘But meanwhile, the flames from the abyss are reaching the rope, and the Naxals are busy trying to saw through it.’

‘Yes,’ said Ahmed. ‘Speaking of which.’ He jumped up, looking unexpectedly cheerful. He took his glasses off and slipped them in a shirt pocket, behind the obligatory row of pens. ‘Here, let me show you something. Could you give me your specs for a moment?’

She dug the glasses out of her bag and passed them over. Ahmed synched them with his desk screen, rotated the screen so that they could both see it.

‘Nothing private when you last wore them?’

Geena shook her head. Ahmed began rattling his fingers on the desk.

‘OK,’ he said. Scenes blurred past on the screen as he spoke: Dawley Road, Hillingdon Road, the aircraft … ‘I’ve skipped back to yesterday evening, about teatime, scrolling forward, slow down – ah! Here we are! That little bit of graffiti. The source of all your woe. Now … let’s just open that up, see the projection raw.’

A sudden flourish of the fingertips,
fortissimo
. The corner-ofthe-eye glimpse of wall and lettering gave way to a screenful of letters and numbers that seemed to Geena pure gibberish. Ahmed scrolled.

‘See that string?’ he said, pointing and highlighting. ‘It’s an IP address, which … ’

Another flourish, another screen.

‘ … just happens to be the IP address of your glasses. The graffiti could be seen by you and nobody else.’

‘Shit!’ said Geena, heedless of speech codes. ‘The cops planted it! For me!’

Another rapid-fire rattle, and the screen went blank.

‘Uh-huh,’ said Ahmed, handing back the glasses.

‘Why?’

Ahmed shrugged. ‘Fishing.’

‘It’s that specific?’

‘It’s that specific. Let no one say the state is not concerned about the individual.’

Geena smacked a fist in her palm. ‘We’ve got them!’

‘What do you mean?’

Geena stared at him. ‘I mean, we’ve got a legal case. Entrapment, provocation, whatever, it can’t be legal, can it? I was going to ask … a friend about all this, get some advice, but … I couldn’t because … well, I named her and … anyway. So I came here to ask you, and you’ve … This is brilliant! Thanks, Ahmed! I knew you’d help me.’

‘This never happened,’ Ahmed said.

‘What?’

‘I’ve wiped the record of our little investigation. You won’t find a trace of it on your glasses, or on mine, or on my desk.’

‘Why?’ Geena asked, dismayed.

‘It’s better not to talk about these things. Better for you. Just ignore it, say nothing, and, believe me, it’ll be like it never happened.’

‘It won’t be to me!’

‘No, and I’m sorry about that, but it will be to the police and all the rest of them. They’ve made their point. As long as you don’t take it further, they’ll leave it at that. But if you do … well, that’s … I was going to say rocking the boat, but what I should say is,
shaking the rope
.’

‘In other words,’ said Geena, ‘all that you said, all that sharp criticism, it doesn’t
mean
anything.’

‘It means everything,’ said Ahmed. ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to explain, dammit! It’s
all
conscious. Including, you know, this.’

‘This … what?’

‘This conversation. This moment. Everything I’ve said. It’s
all understood
. It’s understood because I and people like me have explained it to them, in the same terms as I’ve explained it to you. With footnotes, references, bibliography … ’

‘Oh,’ said Geena, in a dull, flat voice, feeling that she too had understood, at last. ‘They got to you, too!’

‘They got to me a long time ago,’ said Ahmed, in a tone of mild regret. Half-smiling, he drew his glasses from his pocket and put them back on. He waved into the corner to the right and above, and snapped his fingers. ‘Surveillance on.’

He walked around her to open the door, returned to his desk and sat down, then leaned forward, elbows on the desk, and smiled brightly.

‘Right, that’s the personal matter out of the way. Hope our little chat’s been helpful. Any time, my door’s always open. Now, about your thesis … ’

Around mid-morning, Geena walked off campus, up long paths among green meadows, feeling quite cheerful. Spring was definitely in the air. At the edge of the campus she swithered about walking to Hayes, and came down on the side of catching the bus from Kingston Lane. As she waited at the bus stop, she mused over why she felt so much better, despite the anger that seethed inside her. Birdsong and blue sky had a lot to do with it, she decided, but underneath all that was a solid foundation of understanding, of acceptance. The world was what it was. Critique had always left her with a vague sense of obligation to find fault with the world. Now she understood it as
part
of the world, a spinning flywheel that helped keep it upright and rolling along. It was all right to enjoy the world. She always had, but she’d always had the nagging suspicion that intellectually it was hard to justify uncritical enjoyment. Now that suspicion was gone. Everything was as it had to be.
Amor fati
and
carpe diem
, that was the ticket.

And what she was enjoying right now was her rage. She accepted it. She let it flow through her. She observed her hands shaking. She noted with interest their spontaneous
self-positioning into strangulation mode: open, mirroring each other, fingers and thumbs curled. She could very easily imagine them around Ahmed Estraguel’s neck. Deliberately she let them relax, and stuck them in her pockets.

It was the betrayal that did it, she thought, the blatant way in which a man she’d have expected to be outraged at what had happened to her had been merely sympathetic. And the way in which all the techniques of critique she had so painstakingly learned had turned out to be an instrument of the very systems of domination they anatomised. It was as if she had been naive. Ahmed had explained it as something that should have been obvious all along. There was no going back from that, she realised. From now on she was inextricably in a different subject position. She understood.

She also understood Hope Morrison, no longer an enigma, and she knew what she could do – the only thing she could do, and the thing only she could do – to help.

Back at the lab, Geena made her usual discreet notes on the behaviours of Brian, Sanjay, Michael and Joe, added a page’s worth of text to her thesis draft, and then turned to doing a little research of her own.

As an accredited postgrad at Brunel, she had management-level access to public-health databases. And as a participant observer at SynBioTech, she had the same kind of access as the research teams: to data for specific individuals. It was taken for granted that she wouldn’t combine these permissions on her
own behalf. She had them solely to observe the work of the researchers. To use them for research of her own would be considered unprofessional. But that restriction was entirely in her head – or, to put it more scientifically, in her socialisation into the subject position of a social science researcher.

Well, fuck that. They’d pissed away twenty-three years of socialisation in the second it had taken them to shove the pin under her fingernail.

She called up the genetic profiles of Hope, Hugh and Nick Morrison, and began poking around.

Hope stood in a side street in Finsbury Park clutching one pole of the North Islington Constituency Labour Party banner and ducking into a flurry of apple blossom and snowflakes. With her free hand she held on to the crown of her broad-brimmed straw hat. Her long blue serge skirt kept her legs warm, but her pin-tucked muslin white blouse felt far too thin for the wind, even with a wide green-and-purple satin sash across it. The look for the day was suffragette. Hope had pinned the sash into place with the new retro repro Party badge that had been enclosed in her welcome pack, and criss-crossed it with the strap of her shoulder bag. The red banner, gold-fringed and heroically embroidered, flapped and strained like a sail in the chill breeze. Bloody global warming, Hope thought, wishing she’d complemented the look with gloves.

There were scientists who claimed to have evidence that the
climate was changing under the impact of human activity. They were called deniers. They argued that the New Trees and other engineered organisms were removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere far too fast, and that this – along with the increasing use of non-fossil-fuel energy sources – risked tipping the planet into a new ice age. Their work appeared only in the unregulated wilds of the internet, beyond the firewalls and filters that kept most discussion relatively sane. But even that was hardly necessary – it was generally taken for granted that the deniers were beholden to the polluting industries of the smokestack states, Russia and India, where denial was policy.

Hope was only sporadically aware of the deniers’ existence. In her mind, as in the online world, they inhabited the same spaces as people who posted bomb-making instructions, Naxal agitprop, and child-violation videos. But some days, such as this first day in May, she had the fleeting thought that they might have a point.

The street was one of the narrow residential streets like her own, ribs to the spine of Stroud Green Road, in which tall apple and cherry trees vied with New Trees to half-hide the pinched, overgrown front gardens and the frontages of three-and four-storey houses in which two or three families lived on top of each other. For about a hundred metres the carriageway was crowded by rank upon rank of May Day marchers. Although, now she thought about it, ‘marchers’ didn’t seem too apt a word for the few hundred people here, diversely clustered under union branch, community group and peace campaign and Woodcraft Folk as well as Party banners. The
mood, as far as Hope could judge it, was more festive than militant.

Not that militancy had anything to do with the Party. Hope had been to two branch meetings – the date of the first had come up a few days after she’d joined – and had found them somewhat dispiriting affairs. The meetings were held in one of the junior classrooms of the primary school at the other end of East West Road, the very one Nick was due to start attending next September. Hope had found it difficult to take seriously a two-hour-long, procedure-dominated agenda earnestly discussed and minuted by people sitting on bright-painted wooden chairs designed for five-year-olds. It hadn’t helped that the third item discussed had been about the importance and urgency of getting the Council to close down the very same open-air back-yard smoking café where she’d talked with Maya. Hope had sat on her hands and kept her mouth shut through that one, and the following morning, after dropping Nick off – as always now, without any trouble – at the nursery, had nipped straight round to warn the shopkeepers of the exact time of the likely visit from Environmental Health.