As the final preparations are made, Valeri looks to the new tower next door. On the plot of land where once there’d been a simple, functional apartment block housing working men and their families there’s now a sleek, low-rise, glass-and-steel tower, the odd bullet-hole pockmarking the outer walls. On the façade, someone’s spray-painted ‘NO SURRENDER’ in the night. Homeless families, drug addicts, and prostitutes have taken up residence, parcelling off their own little spaces to squat in. Where Valeri might’ve once been bewildered by the sight of an expensive project sitting unused for its intended purpose, now he understands. This is something not meant to be lived in; it’s meant as a tool, a weapon of war, for the wealthy man to store his ill-gotten wealthy in the form of something real, to be sold for profit later. But it’s also a response to the working man’s agitation, the aim to engage in a massive population transfer by expelling the undesirable elements of the working class, the prostitutes, the elderly pensioners, the poor made to be addicted to illegal drugs and the common labourers deemed fit only to enrich their wealthy paymasters. Even as bullets fly and bombs explode, this weapon continues to be applied, diligently but not dispassionately. No longer used for its original purpose, now it stands gathering the hopeless among the working class, the police allowing squatters to gather in preparation for a final offensive into the working class slums. Valeri doesn’t know it, but this is, too, is deliberate; by concentrating in these properties, the most pathetic and despondent among them conveniently group themselves into fewer targets. All Valeri can know, at this point, is that when the police finally come, they’ll fight no longer for the streets but for their very homes. Over the next few days, Valeri speaks with the other tenants of Dominion Courts, mostly with Tonya and Roger, they meeting with others, the others meeting with others, a consensus having already emerged among them alclass="underline" resist.
23. The Way Forward
As tends to be the way of things, something must inevitably set off a war between them, the mounting pressures inside each soon to compel them to seek an outlet, any outlet at all for their rage. A rock thrown, a rifle shot, an exchange of fire between two warships on the high seas and within weeks, only weeks the empires of the world have declared war on one another. At home, the working man finds himself beset by such troubles and overcome by such fear that he can’t but watch as this new caretaker commits itself irrevocably to some alliance of empires, all the while at home the working man still worries where his next meal will come from, where his next paycheque will come from, all this started somewhere, somehow, by the looting and plundering of the wealth of the world in this very place where once the working man had lived. News makes the screens of the millions across Britain and around the world, but for Valeri and the rest of the working class measures close to home demand attention over all others. In the night, their fortifications continue, in the way they do.
After having given up on working as a day labourer, Valeri Kovalenko returns to his dark, empty flat and looks to his screen just in time to see the squawking of the wealthy man’s apparatchik proclaiming the virtues of this fight, calling on all his countrymen to devote themselves wholly to this new struggle. But as he sits in his chair and watches, Valeri’s stomach growls, his feet ache, and his back’s pain spasms slightly, just enough to remind him on all he’s been made to surrender for the wealthy man’s benefit. To ask, now, for more is the final insult. Astride a wave of revolutionary fervour, the working men of Britain, Europe, across the world surge towards a war decades in the making, while their paymasters fumble about looking for a way to head off their own demise. And although none of them had planned the next step, in fact it’ll take place in the way that it will through pure happenstance, when the dust has settled the future will look back on our past and see it could’ve happened no other way. Though now we can’t see more than a few days ahead, when a clarity emerges and the lost years of our lives are at last reclaimed, we’ll see it all. In Valeri’s life, this has become as his final resting place, without having died his consignment to this dilapidated, falling-apart apartment block become his castle, the last redoubt of the working man, the ramparts on which he’ll make his final stand for dignity and justice. As Valeri looks out across the street, he decides it’s time to leave, venturing out into the city again in search not of supplies but company, the last company he could expect to find amid the terror and violence gripping Britain’s streets.
It seems like such a strange notion, quaint even, that it was only some years earlier that the working man should’ve been looked to the distant skyline and seen gleaming, glass-and-steel towers reaching for the sky, higher and higher with every passing week. In truth, there’s been war, someplace, sometime, for longer than anyone can remember, and this new war is not new but rather a sudden and unexpected escalation of an old war once confined to some province of some country none of us have ever been to but which now involves us all. At the mercy of forces so much greater than ourselves, we can think only to press ahead. Walls crumble, only to crumble again days later. A third of the stars fall from the skies, only for those very stars to fall again the next night. Before the failed rising fifteen years ago, everyone had been led to believe here in Britain, but also throughout the rest of Europe, the United States and Canada we’d led peaceful lives, free from conflict, as though all had once been well. But it’s a fraud. This, this war erupting on the streets of our cities is but the logical culmination of hundreds of years of fighting, of exploitation of man by man, the way of things collapsing under the weight of so much greed. The air’s filled with the sounds of sirens wailing, of gunshots cracking, of water gushing from fractured mains and of buses trundling along, stopped only by troopers searching them for something, anything at all.
In the time it’s taken all this to transpire, an insidious evil has gathered its own strength, filling the screens of the thousands and thousands with scathing denunciations of this new, foreign enemy, who had only a short time ago been merely a rival, a short time before that a friend, an ally even. This, then, is an insidious power of the way of things, the power to rewrite our common history to convince us these were our enemies all along. In Valeri’s lifetime, he’s seen much anguish. Now, as he emerges from his sleep into a world suddenly at war, he can only look out over the street and imagine himself with another again. At his side Tonya appears, her last suspicion and the last tension having eased. Though he’s committed, she’s not, not yet, still clinging to that last bit of doubt left in her. “You must come to the hall,” he says, “there you can meet our friends, so you can make yourself useful to them later.”