In the morning:
“My name is Corn.”
“Theo.”
“I know.”
“I’m very happy to meet you, this is going to be—”
“I was arrested for assault. I did it. He attacked my sister. I attacked him. I got eighteen years on the patty line. After nine, I broke out. Killed a guard when I did it. I killed him. I didn’t mean to, and I’m not sorry I did it. It’s just the way it went down.”
“I see.”
“You used to be an auditor?”
“Yes.”
“Bess told me to help you. If you fuck us, I will make you eat your own fucking eyeballs.”
“Right. Well. That’s very clear.”
In a cottage ten miles outside Derby, a laptop, a connection, a woman who once did a favour for a man and the man loved her and never forgot, and now she helps the patties, the runners, the screamers, the faders, the ones who pray to the moonlight through the bars.
“I made the jam myself,” she murmurs, putting a plate on the table in front of Theo. “I won’t tell you how much sugar goes into these things.”
The jam is made from gooseberries. It is disgusting. Theo eats it anyway, as Corn watches. Helen sits by the fire, gossiping with the woman about condiments and cats and the weather and the state of politics and the problem with women’s fashion and how underwired bras are just a tool of oppression all things considered.
Corn fiddled with a camera. A young woman sat in the window of the living room, framed in light, one foot up on the sill, knee bent, eyes turned out towards the brilliant winter sun, a laptop shut at her feet. Corn murmured, not looking up from the camera, “She’s Bea. She does the machines. She’s good. She’s good.”
There was that in Corn’s averted gaze, the quietness of his speech, that made Theo look away.
By the first light of the new day they sat down in the kitchen, put a camera on a tripod, sat Helen in a wicker chair, a cup of tea by her side.
She took a few attempts to get it right.
“My name is Helen Arnslade, my son is Philip Arnslade, minister of fiscal efficiency. These are the names of the ones who died in HM Prison Lower Ayot, and whose bodies were put into the incinerator. Una Debono. Alice Turan. Janet Gantly. Rowena Ngongo. Claudia Hull. Michelline Heather…”
They stopped every hundred names or so for Helen to have more tea and Bea to check the camera. When the light faded, they had supper. Supper was porridge and gooseberry jam. Theo was too hungry to care what it tasted like, and had stomach ache well into the night.
They posted Helen’s videos online, and the contents of Dani’s USB stick two days later.
Waited.
For a few hours nothing happened.
Then for a few hours, the internet exploded.
Then they turned on the news, and nothing happened. GDP was up, unemployment was down, and the prime minister was heading off to the USA to visit key corporate innovators.
At 7 p.m. Corn tried looking up “Helen Arnslade” on the internet, and no results were returned by any search engine. He tried texting a message to the woman in the window with Helen’s name in it, and the message showed as sent on his phone, and she never received it.
“Well,” mused Theo. “I suppose it starts here.”
Chapter 61
Bea had trained as a weaver.
“I liked to play with computers when I was a kid,” she mused. “I was told I should do IT GCSE. The school hadn’t ever taught IT GCSE before, and the teacher didn’t know what it involved or how to teach it but I did it anyway I did it and I got a C and I was really proud of that but the school tried to pretend it hadn’t happened. It looked bad on the statistics it was just…
Anyway I was good at art too but there wasn’t any use for that, but then someone said why don’t you go into textiles, people always need clothes. And they do but they don’t want to pay for them and the moment you design something new someone’s ripped it off so I designed this T-shirt I thought it was really nice actually and I put a picture of it up on my blog and next thing you know…
I mean it was a large company who stole it, someone owned by a company which was owned by… anyway, I was like, give me my royalty cos you’ve nicked my design, and they said that I hadn’t copyrighted it and I’d hear from their lawyers and we had this meeting and the man called me a very silly little girl and on the way out I was so angry—I was just so angry—I scratched his car with my keys and the indemnity wasn’t much, but the guy put his lawyers on me and suddenly it was so much more it was, like, everything I had. I paid, but my parents, they lost their home. And now I was in the shitter, and this guy, it just made me so angry that he’d got away with this stuff, that he could do it and next thing he’s running for government and—get this—he said that rape, he said it’s a thing, like if women don’t take responsibility for
and I was so angry I just…
So I hacked his site. Redirected everything to a victim support charity. He made sure I got six years. He had friends at the Company, and the Company was funding the redevelopment of the courts, and the judge, well, his pension came from Company shares so…
They put me in a textiles prison. I got my own cell and everything. Special sponsorship. Made the T-shirt I’d designed for the guy who locked me up. Retailed for £8.99, big spring seller. Funny that. It’s all very funny, isn’t it?”
Data rolled between camera and computer, computer and internet. Bea watched a bar crawl towards completion and chewed her bottom lip. Helen sat by her side, waiting, polite and patient. At last:
“I like machines. People think if you do art you can’t like machines, but I always thought they were wrong. I think people like to be right. And they like to be told that they’re right. And they forget when they’re not, because it makes them feel bad, and most of the time they’re wrong.”
Helen smiled and mused: “I have led an incredibly privileged life. I am not ashamed of being privileged. If you could choose privilege you would, of course—but what matters is that you understand privilege for what it is. That you know this and see that with it comes a duty. Duty is the reason is why—”
And Bea replied, “I used to have my own loom. But different looms have different effects sometimes you want to achieve other things you want to—you’d really destroy your son for duty?”
A slice of the knife across the white of the egg on her plate, cutting off a triangle. She ate, and eating gave her time to think, and Bea waited, and Helen said, “Yes. Because my son is a good man who knows the difference between right and wrong. He is a man who understands that he has a duty. He does not destroy the world for an island in the Mediterranean Sea. That is the only acceptable truth.”
Bea looked like she was going to argue, but looked in Helen’s eyes and saw the tears that were waiting to grow there, and put her hand in Helen’s hand and didn’t say a word.
Chapter 62
Corn had a car. It was one of only two that the patties had running. The car was old, and made of different cars. He said, “We take it to Northampton, then we have to change cars. If you enter London in something like this—the CCTV—they pick you up, you have to be driving something proper.”
Helen made them sandwiches. The sandwiches were bad. The bread was thick and dry, and there wasn’t any margarine. She stood in the door of the farmhouse, pushed them into Theo’s hand and murmured, “Be safe, down there. Be safe.”
Bea sat in the front passenger seat because she got carsick, and took turns driving with Corn. Theo sat in the back, knees together, hands in his lap, and watched the land roll by. Gentle hills and bursts of thick trees, the leaves spiralling up and away in great gusts of wind that whooshed and crackled through the branches. A church spire peeking up from an orange-brick village. A manor house where once, centuries ago, a woman had hidden her brother from the Roundheads even though she didn’t believe in his cause, and where in another time the children had lounged in the setting sunlight by the still waters of the lake as the bombers went overhead, barely disturbing their tranquillity.