Around 11.00 Geena got a message on her glasses from her friend Maya, who lived in Hayes and who worked out of an office in Station Road. As soon as she saw it, she had a bright idea, inspired by a morning’s subconscious pondering over the predicament of Hope Morrison. She set up an al fresco lunch with Maya down by the canal for 12.30.
At 12.15 she pulled on her coat, nodded to the guys, and went out. Geena usually ate lunch alone in the employee restaurant – the engineers all took in packed lunches, and she needed only the occasional sample of their lunch time conversations to keep track of the discursive practices by which they constituted themselves. This time, she bought two insulated cups of take-out carrot soup and two baguette sandwiches. The bread roll for Maya was listed as ‘vegan filled’, which amused Geena as she left. Her smile broadened as she thought how good it would be to take advantage of the first blink of sun in a month by going for a walk.
She crossed Dawley Road at the cottages and headed down Blyth Road, then turned left into Trevor Road and Printing House Lane, a canyon of factories and office blocks, to where the road crossed the canal, and picked her way down crumbling concrete steps to the canal bank. As always, the chance association of the names set off an earworm of Betjeman’s poem.
No phantom swimmers in this canal. Fringed by tall poplars, cruddy with litter and crusted with ice, the water’s only visible life was a disconsolate duck and the monstrous ripples of the ten-metre-long flexible barges of biofuel that swam beneath the surface like lake monsters. Geena walked carefully along the uneven and ill-maintained towpath for a hundred metres until Maya appeared around a bend up ahead.
Maya waved. Geena waved back. They converged on an iron-mounted beam of greying wood that Geena assumed was something to do with the canal and that now served as a bench. It was just dry enough to sit on. Holding the hot soups out of the way at each side, Geena exchanged air-kisses with Maya and sat down beside her, lunches between.
‘Thanks so much,’ Maya said, pouncing on the vegan sandwich.
‘You’re welcome,’ said Geena.
They popped the tops of the soup cups and inhaled the steam for a moment.
‘Ah, bliss,’ said Maya, and sipped.
Geena had met Maya when they were both studying sociology at Brunel, and they’d kept in touch in the two years since they’d graduated. Maya was a difficult person to get a handle on, and some of that difficulty showed in her appearance. From a distance she looked almost like a crusty, but close up you could see that her fair hair wasn’t in dreads but in springy ringlets, freshly coloured and shampooed; her woollen-patch jacket smelled as if just out of the washing machine, her man-style shirt was cut for women and buttoned on the left, the T-shirt under it had a neat eyelet trim around the neck, her blue jeans had barely a crease and her boots shone. Even dressed for the office in neat blouse and skirt and a warm flared coat, Geena felt slightly dowdy and scruffy beside her.
Maya’s look, Geena had discovered from some old photos she had shown her, was a cleaned-up version of that of her parents at the time they’d met, when they’d both been full-time climate campers, their lifestyle a permanent protest against other people’s lifestyles. The couple had kept that up on a part-time basis, somewhat hampered by the string of part-time jobs they’d had to take to support Maya and her sibs, until Maya was about fourteen years old, at which time their entire preoccupation had been made redundant by syn bio tech. Without missing a beat they’d moved seamlessly into campaigning against that. Now, though, they did their campaigning in a mainstream manner, writing and lobbying rather than squatting in muddy greenfield sites, living up trees, or running onto runways.
‘How’s life in the Advice Centre?’ Geena asked.
Maya sighed. ‘Same as usual. It’s like living in a fucking soap opera.’
She went on to talk about some of the problems the Centre’s drop-in clients dropped in with. Most of them arose out of sublet living: inter- or intra-family disputes, rent arrears, repairs… Hayes, like all the outer suburbs of London, was still recovering from a decade or so of battering from the tsunami-like surges of population movement that had begun when Peak Oil and Peak Debt had made suburban living unaffordable. Eastward from Hayes, in through Southall, Ealing and Acton, regentrification was taking place – which brought its own problems to high-street Advice Centres, as former squatters and renters were pushed out by new buyers. Outward – as in West Drayton and Uxbridge, where Brunel University was situated, and where Geena shared a couple of rooms with her boyfriend – the suburbs were still little more than redbrick shanty towns, every neat semi, bungalow and villa occupied by at least two households and every garden by its goat and chickens.
‘You’d think,’ Geena said, after Maya had finished outlining a particularly tedious tangle, ‘that people could just sort these things out online.’
‘That’s the worst of it,’ said Maya. ‘They do go online. That’s why the guy I was just telling you about got so stubborn. Turned out the advice he was taking was from a parser some law student had knocked up to read Home Office databases and cobble them into essay cribs that he sold to his mates, behind a lawfirm front screen that everyone knew was a joke except this poor bastard who found it at the top of a search.’
‘And other poor bastards too, no doubt.’
‘Oh, I’ll meet them, waving their glasses and standing on their rights.’ Maya wiped her mouth and scattered vegan crumbs to an investigating pigeon. ‘Anything interesting going on in your place?’
‘SynBioTech’s shining towers? I wish.’
‘Saw your piece in Memo.’
‘Oh, Christ, that! Well, it was a bit more subtle when I wrote it, let’s say.’
Maya gave an understanding laugh.
‘Funnily enough,’ Geena went on, ‘it got picked up by the trawl, and…’
She told Maya the story all the way to the bit about Hope Morrison.
‘That’s really, really interesting,’ Maya said. Her eyes were bright. ‘Somebody really should do something for her.’
‘Oh, don’t,’ said Geena. ‘Don’t start all that again.’
‘All what again?’ Maya sounded hurt.
‘Campaigning,’ Geena sang, drawing out the word to draw the sting of what she’d just said. At Brunel, Maya had been heavily into campaigning. Her rebellion against her parents had taken the form of standing up for people who wanted to be left alone. To Geena it seemed to have exactly the same relationship to Maya’s parents’ passions as her clothes did to their fashions: a neater, cleaner, more bourgeois version of the same thing, cut from the same cloth.
‘The rights of the individual and all that rubbish,’ Geena added, emphatically.
Maya shook her bouncy shampooed ringlets that from a distance looked like dreads.
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I just think it’s so important that people in that position know they’re not alone. That’s all.’