I had two sons and two daughters. My youngest daughter is married. My eldest died. My youngest son runs a trekking company in Arizona. My eldest is Philip. He inherited Danesmoor when my husband died, eight years ago. You will know him, of course. He is the minister of fiscal efficiency. He owns an island in the Mediterranean. He doesn’t use his title. Everyone calls him Mr. Arnslade, because if he was Your Lordship it might seem elitist. People are very anxious about that sort of thing in government. They don’t want to draw attention.
I am the only family left in Danesmoor, but the estate is run by a steward called Fish. Fish isn’t his real name. I don’t know his real name. He never told me. He arrived a few years ago and took over everything, and I caused a fuss because the estate had been a thing I managed, and it was going well, but Philip said…
There wasn’t much for me to do after that.
Fish wasn’t a bad manager he just didn’t
I felt like a foolish old woman and I was being treated like…
Do you know a man called Simon Fardell? He’s an old school friend of Philip’s, and they went to university together. They went to Oxford do you know
you do.
Simon is a shit.
I’m not saying this to excuse my son. My son is also a shit. But Simon was the shit that blocked the toilet, if you’ll pardon my saying so.
Naturally he assumes he isn’t. Most people assume they aren’t shits. It’s just good business. That’s what it amounts to. Business is good. Good is business it is
Anyway.
They would meet in Danesmoor. They’d have long weekends together, there’d be drink and I’d sit with their wives in the other room, that’s how this works. Philip is married to a useless trophy creature. I know that I’m his mother and it’s my job to dislike anyone my son marries, but she really is a vacuous little nothing. I quite like her, in a way. Being so empty-headed means that, unlike my son, she isn’t a shit. She’s just too useless to be anything better. Simon’s wife is far too good for him. Her name is Heidi. I think he hits her sometimes, but she always says… when it’s good, it’s really good, and when it’s bad, he always says sorry afterwards and that’s how she knows he loves her. I always thought I’d tell her to run away. It’s a very easy thing to say, much easier than anything that matters—but I never mustered the courage. We’d sit, us women, and drink tea and read magazines about holidays and handbags, and in the room next door the men would carve up the country and that too was just part of… how things are. How they have always been.
And one weekend I walk into the room while the men are talking to look for my mobile phone, which I’m always putting down somewhere, and they’re talking about mass graves.
They don’t call it that, of course.
They use the words ‘excess labour reallocation,’ and I think well, excess labour reallocation isn’t it wonderful if a little sad when your boys are all grown up.
But then they stop speaking when I enter and I wonder why, surely reallocating labour isn’t that bad after all, but they’re now pretending they were talking about anything else. Anything else at all. And I’m a little bit curious, I’ll admit, but don’t really think about it, except I do.
I do.
Because I know Philip’s face.
I know when he’s…
Once, when he was a young man, he got into a duel at university. He shot another boy. Killed him. I was mortified, but all he could talk about was the cost, and Jeffrey indulged him of course, paid the indemnity because it was that or let his son go to the patty line, so of course he paid but…
There was a look in Philip’s eye, a thing that reminded me of that day he came home with an indemnity and blood on his shoes, and I thought… hello, I thought. Hello, my boy. What have you done this time?
It didn’t take long to find out. I wasn’t being nosy, not at first. I was just… drifting into the study. Then I was just sitting at his desk. These actions I could explain as being casual deeds on an innocent afternoon. Even when I started rifling through his files, I thought, this is just a mother being interested in the son who she loves.
Which of course was a lie.
I knew he’d done something, and I wanted to know what, needed to know how bad things were, without ever admitting this to myself. When I found the files, I was almost disappointed at how easy it was. In his own home he hadn’t bothered to hide anything. Numbers of beggars rounded up from Birmingham city centre and sent without trial to the recycling yards for ‘rehabilitation through labour.’ Number of illegal immigrants caught on the last sweep, divided by age and gender, sent to the patty line for ‘indefinite reintegration.’ Companies who make dangerous products—chemicals, oils, fuels—don’t like to pay for their workers. Patty labour is much cheaper, but sometimes it’s hard to find. And when the patties can’t work any more, they sell them off cheap to another company, which is owned by a company which is owned by a company which is always owned by the Company. And when you can’t sell them, when they’re too broken to buy, you have to find an economic use for them.
It’s not that they’re shot.
Lined up against a wall.
They’re just starved to death.
Or set cleaning radioactive equipment.
Or beaten because they can’t work a seven-day week.
Or locked in solitary confinement until the noises stop.
It’s not murder.
It’s corrective rehabilitation integration. It is the individual repaying their debt to society through labour. Labour benefits business. Business is society. That is all.
These things take some time to contemplate.
And there were the documents. Paper, files, I even used the computer. A doddery old woman like me, fancy that I can click on ‘Yes’; Fish would be amazed.
When my son sold the government tax service to the Company, a lot of people got extremely rich. I’d say there were over a hundred people who became billionaires overnight, and another thousand or more who are now millionaires courtesy of their shrewd investments. But that’s all. A thousand people enriched and the Company now owns the country. A single stroke of the pen and they own everything. They own the law, the judges, the hospitals, the schools, the roads, the police, the army and the government. They own it all, and maybe that’s good, maybe that’s what we need, to be efficient to be…
But it’s not.
There are the obvious signs, of course. The mass graves behind the prisons. where they bury the ones who never got to see a lawyer before they died, whose sentences were always extended, always, because the paperwork went astray. The company that handles the paperwork is run by a company which is run by a company which…
The enclaves levelled because the people couldn’t afford to pay their corporate community tax. The homes destroyed, the migrants who died on the side of the road, villages and towns wiped out because they didn’t produce a decent profit margin for the Company. And then there’s the rest, the casual murders that aren’t even part of the plan, just happen on the side. The old people dying of cold in winter, heat in summer, because they can’t afford to pay their energy bills and the Company doesn’t make a profit on relief for that sort of thing. The dead in the hospitals. The dead in the cells. The police needed to save money to turn a profit, so the Company took over responsibility for reporting fatalities. The hospitals didn’t have enough money for the morgues, but the Company owns a company which owns a company which…