“Boo hoo hoo kill my friend; well bugger me, Hamlet.”
Theo smiled at nothing much, nodding into the mesh of his fingers. Without rancour: “I don’t think bodies pushed into a field are enough to make people care. Or maybe… maybe that’s unfair. Maybe they care. But caring isn’t the same as doing something, and doing something is hard. It’s very, very hard. But the Company is made of people, and people are weak. They are cowards, like the rest of us. They wear a nicer suit. I’m going to destroy them all, one at a time, until there is nothing left, and the cities can burn and the sea can turn red with blood, and when it’s done I will make a better world for my daughter.” Thought through those words, looking to see if there was anything wrong with them. Couldn’t see it. “That’s all.”
In the room where they keep the children before they’re strong enough to be useful or pretty enough to sell, Lucy Rainbow Princess clicks through to her next review. “Came in perfect condition and is everything I wanted. Would 100 per cent recommend.”
Pauses, head on one side, thinks for a moment.
Types at the bottom: “Until it broke, 24 hours after opening the box. Fucking shit.”
Hit send.
She’d be punished later. The night would be hungry and cold. Someone had said once that her sentence was nearly up, but then it hadn’t been, it had been extended for… she wasn’t sure for what. Someone said she should see a lawyer, but no one would come, so here she was. This was what life was. This was all that her life would ever be. But for now, in her own way, this was a little victory.
By the sea, the screamers screamed at the waves, which foamed beneath the beating of their fists.
In the prisons, the patty lines kept on rolling rolling rolling
The golf club swung and the ball went wide, carried by the wind
A child scratched the art on the wall, wicked child you wicked wicked
The girl said, no, no, I don’t want to, I don’t want to, please, I don’t I don’t I just please stop please it’s not…
By the fire, Jacob Pritchard weaves his fingers across his belly and thinks about his past, his future and the man before him, and murmurs, “Not sure I want to bring down the system, not sure I do at that. I do just fine, I do, I do just fine with my wall and my gun and my dog we are safe, see, men like me, the Company—it’d buy the petrol I brought in cos I never robbed them, nice cheap stuff, no VAT, they do right by me, I do right by them so you see…”
Then the woman called Milly was in the door of the room, and Jacob looked at her and had nothing but a heart full of love, and saw that in her face which did not approve of this line of conversation, and sighed, and said, “You can sleep in the spare room, but if you get blood on my shit I’ll do you. Only bothering cos I liked your dad, a good man, him and me, we went way back, we went all the way.”
In the morning Jacob Pritchard gave Theo a car, stolen, plates changed, a Tupperware box of egg-and-cress sandwiches, five hundred quid in used notes. “Don’t come back,” he explained, affably, as Theo climbed into the driver’s seat. “Come back and I’ll drown you in tar.” And smiled, and shook Theo’s hand cordially, and watched him on his way.
A bouncing plastic toy wearing the colours of Watford FC by Hairworks swung from the front mirror, thumbs up and right foot raised to boot a ball towards victory.
It was annoying for a time, and then, after a little while, it wasn’t any more.
PART 2
Chapter 50
Lady Helen Arnslade, Marchioness of Mantell, seventeenth of that name, sat before the portrait and said:
“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth?”
Her great-great-great-great-great-grandfather-in-law, who’d served under the Duke of Wellington and damn well shown those pesky Indian natives whose flintlock-fuelled culture was morally superior thank you very much, shifted uneasily against the stiff wooden frame that held him high above the unused fireplace of her tower room. Flakes of oil paint drifted down from his mighty whiskered face as he considered the problem.
“I suppose,” he mused, “that it’s much the same as the divine right of kings…”
“Precedent,” she agreed, pulling open and shut, open and shut the white dressing gown that swathed her grey, thin body. “Or do I mean proportionality?”
“Is the monarch the state, is the state greater than the sum of its people, are the people really the best judges of the value of the state and…” pondered Lord Arnslade, eleventh Marquess of Mantell, one hand resting on the turning globe, another on the golden handle of his sword, his favourite spaniel frozen, eyes wide and frightened, mid-gambol at his feet. His family had earned its title, so the rumours went, not for mighty military service but for questionable sexual liaisons with a monarch who probably should have known better. Several centuries later he knows these things are all culturally relative, but still…
“I do still love him, of course,” mused Helen. “But can love not be loving by going against his wishes? Can you not…” She paused to scratch at the eels coiled in her hair, which, while perfectly acceptable guests, still sometimes got on her nerves when she was trying to concentrate on more important matters.
“You’re talking about making decisions for other people,” the Most Honourable Marquess concluded sagely, feeling on safer ground here—making decisions for other people was something he excelled at.
“I suppose. But then isn’t that the whole point?”
“The moral framework…”
“…well yes there’s the…”
“The whole issue of how…”
“Are my ethics of an acceptable standard to…”
“Having conviction is more than most people ever really achieve, of course.”
Lady Helen hesitated, staring up at her long-deceased, paint-frozen relative, and for a childish moment realised she was chewing her fingernails, a disgusting habit that had been ground out of her decades ago, ridiculous that it was back now. “I don’t think I have conviction,” she said at last. “I used to, but I don’t think I have anything like that any more.”
Lord Arnslade strained, wishing that the painter who’d captured him in oils hadn’t given his chin such a haughty upwards tilt, it was giving him a right crick in the neck now, and though his eyes could naturally follow anyone around the room no matter where they wandered, most of the time he was most comfortable studying the cornicing, which upon consideration he considered to have been rather poorly done. All this made thinking about the serious issues—the deeply concerning matters—that were now before him that much harder.
At last he concluded, a little shower of dust trickling down from the back of the canvas with the effort of it: “Action is belief.”
He felt very proud of himself for having expressed this, essentially condensing his entire life story to three deeply sage words.
Lady Helen looked less convinced, and he felt the globe turning beneath his fingers slow as her confidence waned. Hastily, before the moment passed him by, he added, “Also he is a total shit, if you think about it, and probably has it coming.”