Authors: Andy Palmer
The streets were quiet but from time to time I would pass someone, mostly better dressed—in their Sunday best, calm and collected with their dogs or partners or both, or busy marching to some highly anticipated meeting somewhere. There would be the odd tramp who would ask for money and I would say no and continue on my way, twisting along to avoid the other walkers or lampposts or rubbish bins or dog shit. People appeared to walk at me, their faces to the ground their minds elsewhere; it was a miracle we didn’t all collide. I was sure I was more evasive than most, but still my shoulder would brush others’ and sharp-edged shopping bags would bash against my legs to produce scowling looks from their flailing owners, drawing on my vice of saying sorry when I shouldn’t.
I walked past the Central Café, its orange and brown striped awning extended to shield the interior from the sun. Then I bought some chocolate, a few mandarins, some milk, yoghurt, and headed home, completing a small circle and entering my building via the underground car park, as I sometimes would because I liked the smell.
Then, I cleaned the walkway outside my flat (although it was not mandatory). Now, anyone who might take a look around inside would never have believed that I would clean outside, but I did, and with increasing frequency, because it gave me an extraordinary pleasure: the pleasure of deliberately doing something purely by choice—something of no consequence whatsoever.
❊
Eminent Union scientists have concluded that the human character is done and dusted by the age of fifteen. And, thanks to that tidy piece of science, unsuspecting fifteen-year-olds are drilled, mentally and genetically, socially, to determine what they might perform best at (as everyone is good at something), and to set them on that course. For many this no doubt had happy consequences, but I, unfortunately, was identified as suitable for administration: a subject or career that had never entered my head nor probably ever could have, and which I came to despise as my own intrinsically introvert and circular nature being replicated around me. It gave me no purpose: I was assigned to be an incomplete man.
In the Union, everything is categorised.
It was Monday morning.
Repetition tired me; sameness, predictability, not just on a level I could easily express but deep down, not just in my actions and routines but in my thoughts and options, in everything I saw and heard and thought and felt. I had come to crave immediacy and randomness more than anything. Perhaps everyone feels the same, or not: one day I was sure one way, and the next the other; this was possibly the fundamental question which bothered me the most.
It was precisely because of the pointlessness that I had come to fear death: running out of time, to have wasted it; bounced from point to point by circumstance and the malevolence or kindness of others, perhaps by the slightest wayward comment. I was muddling my way along, and a sufficient number of personal compromises can surely only take you in circles. Yes, somehow thanks to my lack of confidence or commitment, my indecisiveness—my lack of passion, I was getting precisely nowhere: defined by all the things I had never chosen.
I paused to gather my keys, my bag.
As I arrived at the railway station, the digital read-out was telling me by how many minutes and seconds I had missed the last train, and I gazed around at the crowd. I couldn’t understand it: some people were simply likeable. They generated smiles, perhaps not obvious, but deep in the eyes of others there would be some subtle change, recognition, imperceptible by sight but seen all the same, that showed they were likeable. I was, I considered, a normal guy, and it wasn’t that I didn’t like other people—I generally did—but rather that they generally didn’t like me all that much. And increasingly so.
I might say the wrong thing or laugh at the wrong moment, but that wasn’t it. People found something distasteful, looking a fraction side-on as though unsure, even when I was feeling at my best: as if they sensed my desperation and were afraid to catch it.
In my twenties, it had been easier. But now, by my mid-thirties, I had attained a rather sickly appearance—hungover, my hair greasy, longer and disheveled; I had come to hate visits to the hairdresser even more than to the dentist (given the expectation of conversation).
I wore glasses, of course. They seemed to separate me from others, I felt, and I’d noticed how people stood back an inch or two more than when I wore my contact lenses: maybe that was it, and I stopped to look at a reflection of myself, with and without glasses.
I dragged myself on through the station. It was modern yet the battle against filth was already being lost. Tramps, men and women for whom civilisation had already collapsed, skulked in the corners around telephone kiosks and pools of anonymous liquids lay here and there. ‘Don’t drop litter’ echoed twice, and I resisted my usual urge to respond to recorded announcements with obscenities. At the platform my train was arriving, shiny and new and fitted with all the modern technologies you might have heard of, and many you would not. I broke into a run, which always irritated me immensely as there would be another train a few minutes later and hurrying, considering my destination, seemed the ultimate waste of time.
I had made this journey 836 times before. More than 300 hours, it had taken me. I pondered a few of the better things I could have done with that time, that series of regular reasonable patterns that together spell madness. But I was not alone. As I got on, the carriage was full of dead faces masking tortured souls, yes of course they were: greyed and unfulfilled men and women, twice daily asking themselves why they’d surrendered their dreams for monthly appraisals and the latest crap novel.
Because in the Union, lives choose you, not the other way around.
One man sitting across the carriage had a hard face, with sharp cheek bones and a high forehead. His eyes were different, he was awake, certain, alive—the alpha male? Sometimes you see someone like that, don’t you? who though not acting in a violent way simply carries an air of aggression. You avoid their glance. You know instinctively they would like nothing more than to fight you, to knock you down. To kill you. But you have to admit, they carry an air, I thought: an air of freedom; freedom from fear. They are alert, they feel their environment and it irritates them, or amuses them: We fear such people because they have no fear. They are not switched off like the rest of us. But what made them?
I got up and stepped off the train to the click-clicking of the Society and Family tracker cocooned in the door-frame, shuffling with everyone else for the 837th time to do the work of the moral majority, to sit in useless meetings spouting words I could hardly believe were my own. As I walked I wondered how we all end up like this: organic computers processing food into labour for the good of the establishment, such that even our private lives represent little more than a stage of the production line.
I made my way on down the narrow streets amid an army of clones. Once in my office cubicle, I sat staring through an internal window at the others, grazing at their screens and tip-tapping—tap tap tap like the clicking of an insane irregular clock—or bustling around with their files clicking their pens purposefully, united by a mutual fear of one another, screaming silently inside and jostling to be the best at things that really didn’t matter: the men fooling themselves with their egos and aggression, the women with their kids and some perhaps the man they’d wanted. Everyone was the same. Just then, my scheduler reminded me of a meeting and I was back on automatic, my misery temporarily obscured by numbers and plans, strategies and reports, adrenaline requirements and expectations.
My work was to monitor errant men. Top of the pile was the case of sixty year-old artist A. Blofeld, who had held that spot ever since C. Wilson was removed by the Chair for passing on a serious sexually transmitted disease he’d known he had. Blofeld, however, who was something of a regular, attracted a little more sympathy. He was a man for whom double taxation and other onerous measures had done nothing to curb his enthusiasm and resolve to date more and more women. He remained unrepentant. This one would not be so simple: he was always leaving them just before the two-year threshold, and he didn’t seem to care about the fines either. A civil case could have been possible on the basis of deception, except that his innumerable ex-girlfriends still seemed to worship the man and could not be convinced to turn on him. What’s more, he was careful not to date younger women, so removing the possibility of a little entrapment, whilst the warnings issued to his new acquaintances had merely enhanced his renown further. So despite my deep personal admiration for the man, he was giving me an appalling headache at work. I had to get him to face up to his social responsibilities, as defined by the Harmony Charter. I would have to hound him, my last tactic: bother him senseless on minor offences. He was a free-living man so bound to be careless; he would drop litter, miss appointments, pay bills late, paint something controversial, commit some minor offence . . .
‘Everyone in the Company, owns the Company.’
Together, the employees of the Morality and Culture Company elected its leaders, shared in its success: and each of them expected everyone else to pull their weight. This seamless extension of the shareholder principle, which first created the psychotic multinationals, had been applied to state functions masquerading as people power. Uniting market tendencies with the power of the state—it was not so much a conspiracy as a natural partnership. A vicious place: everyone’s your boss, everyone’s watching! Control by greed and envy, the coming of age of office politics; the downtrodden critics of the old system had become their own police—motivation from the bottom up!
But make no mistake, we were the new nobility; those lucky enough to get our noses in the trough, to sit high up in those shimmering headquarters in our standard-issue blue suits, towering, looming above, dissecting the crumbling monuments of Canterbury’s past below—the neglected streets stocked with the hopeless in their once beautiful blocks, utterly decrepit inside and out; multi-storey caves silently absorbing the lives of their transient residents, generation by generation.
At lunchtime I went to the bank, and as usual was submissive with the cashier as though it was their money. Things had been going well for Morality and Culture and my bonus would reflect it. Next month I would buy a Yomi Home Entertainment System, a closed network for those who could afford it. Everyone wanted one. My personal monthly appraisal though was not so strong: those catching better reports would be tossed mobile phones,
package holidays or fitted kitchens—
for which they were without exception overjoyed, or else some office cast-off; printers, scanners, coffee machines and cars.
And never was a Yomi Home Entertainment System more important. The previous month I’d been late twice in one week and was handed a weekend curfew: since they knew when the trains had left, and they knew I was healthy . . . well, there really are no excuses left anymore. They even set my alarm clock! Just once, I’d fancied, it would be great if it were set for a less obvious time, 07:01 . . . or even if it would tick, rather than silently waiting to pounce.
My mind wandered to Frank Sloth, my gloriously gloomy office confidant. Grumpy and sarcastic, pasty and lazy, paranoid and critical, but hugely entertaining and genuine once you got to know him. Every day for a week I had missed him. He had gone. But just where, I didn’t know. If anyone knew, nobody talked about it. And no one asked. All that remained of him was a three-line memo in my mail advising that Frank had checked himself in to Rehabilitation for ‘personal development’; this being a process fabled to spit you out at the other end rebuilt, into a fresh new life. Whether it did or not, nobody had been able to confirm, and the Union was careful to ration knowledge. But since Frank had always been terrified of Rehabilitation, as of everything else, it seemed highly unlikely he would have done it willingly. Maybe he’d been denounced or a system error had dragged him off by mistake. He was always whingeing, of course, whispering that something had to be done about this or that, so maybe he had finally spoken up and put his foot in it. But without him, time was dragging terribly.
I arrived back at the office.
‘Hello Ollie, how are you feeling today?’
It was my boss, Mr Dickinson-Standing. The Company offered ‘personal development’ as a ‘perk of the job’: don’t take it and you’re not in the ‘company spirit’. After some cumbersome small-talk which always made it uncomfortably clear how little we had in common, he began:
‘Today we are going to look at three positives, and three negatives. We asked your colleagues and your friends to identify these, to help you.’ I already felt exhausted. Then, just as I was wondering if there are friends without utility, and then how the simple-minded seem to love psychology, he got a knowing look in his eyes:
‘If you want to be a man at night, you should be a man in daytime too!’ —it was an imported proverb. Dickinson-Standing, for his part, having concluded some time ago that I needed anti-depression drugs, was now convinced despite my assurances that I wasn’t taking them. I wasn’t.
I continued daydreaming until he chirped-up about how my friends say my worst characteristic is that I drink too much and how it makes me dull company. Which of course left me needing a drink. Alone.
‘You must drink less—we will track this over the next month and let's reduce the amount by thirty percent, shall we?’
‘But aren't friends there to help?’
‘Ollie, if you feel bad use a therapist, Morality and Culture will pay. Don't make your friends suffer too!’
‘On the positive side,’ he went on, ‘your colleagues and friends say your social attendance is reasonable,’ adding with the intonation of an ambitious father: ’I think we can do a bit better than that, don't you?’
I nodded.
A while later, I was home again after a train journey identical to the morning’s, only in the opposite direction. I stared up at the standard light fitting on the ceiling. It was the same light unit as in all the other flats in my apartment building, and countless others. I flicked it on. I knew there was a camera and microphone in it, although maybe they were never used. I knew the department that procured them.
But it made me terrified of talking in my sleep.
I noticed an unopened telephone bill on the table. This was quite out of character: I always paid my bills on time. It made me deep down, or so I felt, a good man. It was one of those regular actions that seemed to glue the rest together.
The days were taking on a surreal texture, more than just repetition. That light was white, annoyingly so; it made the walls and everything else look as though they were yellowing. The paint on the window frame was beginning to bubble crack and split, and that stale smell of ageing, peculiar to the lonely, seemed to suffuse everything around me. I sighed. It was seldom that friends would visit. I gazed around at the stupefying banality of hell.