When he was a younger man, Stanislaw Czerkawski emigrated from his native Poland to England, and found work among many others in shops cleaning floors. By day he cleans, and by night he cleans, always tired but never angry. Sometimes his employer cheats him out of wages, taking off sums for taxes and fees Stanislaw is sure don’t exist. But whomever he and the others complain to, they’re met with racist insults, mocked as dirty Polacks who aren’t worth the wages they’re paid. This, while he cleans human waste off the floor for his wages and lives in a little, one-room flat infested with bedbugs and mice. Too late has Stanislaw realized there’s no place for him in this present-day England. In the meanwhile, like so many other working men mired in poverty and despair he’ll survive despite the indignities meted out on him, and in surviving he’ll learn at some great cost to place his faith in the certainty of the working class struggle. Each of these five men will find their place in the burgeoning resistance, still carrying itself out in the shadows but sooner than any man thinks to step out into the light.
At the general strike that’s about to unfold, coordinated not by months of careful, deliberate planning but by the passions of the moment, memories of the failed uprising fifteen years ago will rule the day. Still Valeri will be there, there to witness history in the making. But among the crumbling walls and the rusting metal beams surrounding him whenever he walks the floor, there’s the spirit of no surrender, the instinctive need to act against the way of things, before this current chance is lost. At night, one night, while Hannah and Valeri sleep, in the alley behind their little apartment there’s a rusty, old pipe, one of many, this pipe springing a leak in just the wrong place. In the morning, Hannah wakes up first, discovering the water shut off. There’s a note slid under the door. ‘A pipe burst. Going to be 2 weeks until the parts get in. No hot water until then. – Graham.’ Hannah swears, then leaves the note on the counter. Valeri finds it, swears again, then leaves it on the counter. The next time they see each other, a few days later, with still the water shut off Hannah has already decided to fix the water herself, heading down into the basement with little more than a few pieces of rubber tubing and a toolbox half-filled with old tools. At the end of the day, Hannah wipes the muck and grime from her hands and heads back to the apartment, turning the tap on and running her hand under the stream of water, warm, then hot, feeling satisfied. Even as this minor victory is won, there’s a thousand defeats handed down on people like her, in secret, in offices and in boardrooms men in suits and ties cutting deals to trade off entire city blocks at a time. These acts of war are interspersed with the attacks of the policemen on the streets here in London, all over England, too, though the policemen’s attack can no longer succeed in terrorizing into submission the policemen carrying their attacks out anyways. As the working man acts, so must his opponents react, compelled as all are by greater forces to play their roles to the end.
But on the streets at night there’s an odd peace. Amid the gradual disintegration of the current order, things seem to have a permanence that grows stronger and stouter with each passing day. As one factory shuts down, another opens somewhere else in the world; it’s a pattern that repeats itself a hundred times over with the passing of each and every year. After closing his shift at the plant in the industrial district, Valeri leaves as he always does, walking the same street, he comes across a young woman he’s never seen before, no one’s ever seen before. She’s sitting in the dark, her whole body seeming to crumple in on itself, her hair a mess, her face bruised, blood trailing from cuts on her cheek. He stops, just close enough for her to see him, and after a moment or two she says, “please.” Valeri wants to keep walking, but his instincts overpower his good sense, and he approaches her and offers a hand. Outside, the troopers circle round the block, prowling the city’s streets at night, looking for trouble. There’s the usual riffraff milling about, the odd homeless person sifting through a dumpster, bored youths sitting on the steps of apartments while smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap beer. In the distance, the sound of sporadic gunfire pops like a firecracker, while sirens wail high and low. Already the fighting has started; still the order prevails against the random, disjointed outbursts directed against it, in the middle of the night Valeri suddenly emboldened to take his own personal crusade and make it into something vastly more than what it is. Risking a beating and arrest at the hands of the police, Valeri seizes on the boldness inside him and shelters the woman for the night, the working class slums all around them burning tonight brighter still than ever before. Under the cover not of darkness but of the fire’s light, they leave.
At night, tonight, Hannah tires quickly, but keeps a smile on for the overdoses and the gunshot victims, through the night keeping on her feet thanks not to caffeine but to a well-practiced gumption. As she works, the pipe she’d fixed holds but some of the water leaked pools and drops onto an electrical circuit, shorting the circuit and cutting power to the whole building. She’ll come home that night, tired, and she’ll fall into bed without thinking much of the darkness, across the city trouble brewing in the streets. At night, tonight, the homeless, the prostitutes, the usual flotsam and jetsam of the city take up their usual spots around Victory Monument deep in the working man’s territory. At night, tonight, there’s no crowd of demonstrators, and the only troopers are a pair of junior officers who come around every once in a while to walk the beat. At night, tonight, when no one’s looking and when the passions of the restless have taken respite to lick their wounds, it’s almost time for Valeri to live up to his promise. At war almost continuously since the failed uprising fifteen years ago, the streets in the working class neighbourhoods are dangerous at night, in the darkness lurking the impending dawn.
In the industrial district where the trains often come through so late at night, the three or four or five men have made good their meeting and have gone their separate ways, leaving only a few bootprints and discarded cigarette butts as evidence of their meeting. In the morning as the working man rises to have at the day, the latest acts of dissent lay themselves bare for all the world to see, if only anyone should look. Things are as oppressive and ascetic as they are not because of some new law which declares who may and may not speak but because of the constant threat of deprivation, a threat which insulates us all from each other. In the meantime, Valeri’s fate lies not in the past but in his own personal future, and it’s a chance encounter with the troopers in the streets that’ll soon send him on a journey careening headlong into a collision with the rest of the history binding us all to the same fate. Valeri to pick up the tools of his trade and use them to fight back. He thinks of Sydney, and after leaving for the night he calls her. He speaks in an almost-hushed tone, holding the phone close. “Come to the hall,” he says, and she reluctantly agrees. In these times of radicalism and imminent war, the lives of ordinary workers like Valeri become lost in an ever-escalating storm of death.