Hatred (Collpase, #1)

Chapter Three – 23 years and 9 months before the collapse-2

In the new year, as Annabel and Jim walked to the polling station, they discussed the riots in London and the emergency powers the Government had given itself. The Army was on the streets and the deaths of some key opposition figures had sparked rumours that the Government was murdering its opponents. The bush fires, floods, drought and famine in Africa didn’t seem so important anymore.

The deaths had also sparked protests in Edinburgh, and protestors had caused more damage.

Jim watched Annabel as she went into the booth, and she waited for him as he posted his slip in the ballot box.

“Do you think we are wasting our time?” asked Annabel.

“It’s never a waste,” said Jim.

When they arrived home, there was no power again, and they had turned the water off.

“Do you think it’s another strike?” Annabel asked.

“No, just lack of capacity I imagine.”

Besides the lack of power, they had no water in the kitchen. To ration water, the water company only turned on the supply between 6am and 6pm. In the flat, the water tank would fill, which served the shower and taps in the bathroom, but the taps in the kitchen, which were connected directly to the mains, stopped working in the evenings.

Jim showed Annabel a cartoon on his flip showing Walker having calluses manicured into his hands to make him look more like a worker.

After Jim had given his first lecture, he felt a tremendous relief from all the worries which had been surrounding him. He felt freer and calmer.

However, when he browsed the online library, his anxiety soon returned. The range of specialist literature intimidated him with the apparent gaps in his knowledge. He felt uncomfortable with so many unfamiliar titles.

He retreated to the staff room, but his heart sank when he saw Joe Wood there.

“I can’t believe it,” Joe said, seeing Jim enter. “They’ve moved the complaints tablet.”

Joe always had something to complain about.

“What are you going to do now?” Jim asked.

“Look, this is where it should be,” Joe pointed to an empty plinth. “I’ve left a post-it note. Lecturers may not move the complaints tablet from its usual place.”

Jim had contemplated working from home rather than the staff room but as he and Annabel were renting a room in the house of an interfering elderly landlady who rented rooms to other house guests in her large terrace house together with her noisy granddaughter. The complaints of Joe Wood seemed the lesser of two evils. Annabel spent her days at the music academy for the same reason.

The landlady would cook an evening meal for her guests, but it never satisfied Annabel and Jim. There were still shortages in most of the shops, and the price of coffee had become exorbitant. They would buy what they could find and then barter with the other tenants in the house.

“Live well,” Dr Baker would say as they sat down for dinner and everyone surveyed the paltry spread. “We will live well again.”

“Do you believe that?” Annabel would ask.

“Oh yes, and I am going to run a hospital. But it won’t happen with just knowledge and competence. Connections are important, maybe the most important. Though I wish I had the musical talents of you, Annabel.”

Dr Baker would argue with the bad-tempered John Morgan, though the two men liked each other, and it always amounted to harmless banter. The two were in contrast to the soft Wyatt Harrison, whom Carter had introduced to the house.

Annabel and Jim couldn’t work out what Wyatt did, but from his connection with Carter, Jim imagined he might be a smuggler. Wyatt told Jim that he had served in the army as an interpreter and that the authorities had denied his wife and child visas to enter the country. How much of what he said was true, Jim could not tell, but sometimes Wyatt would cry as he told his stories, lamenting his failed life. No-one knew where his money came from but claimed he often played online chess with Dr MacDonald, whom he described to the rest of his housemates as depraved.

He joined up as a volunteer police officer and returned almost every day with stories of how the police force was becoming more and more xenophobic.

“What’s that got to do with me?” Annabel asked. “I was born here.”

“But your parents weren’t, and that’s what matters,” said Wyatt.

“Then they’re racist, not xenophobic. My father was British.”

“Whatever.”

Jim saw Carter every day. Carter was still a big supporter of Walker, even though the distributions of seats in the new assembly were not in Walker’s favour.

They went for a drink together and ended up at the same table as a young man who was unwillingly dragged into one of Carter’s rants.

“This country has its roots in many places,” Carter argued. “You might see artists, writers, musicians and athletes from many backgrounds but they still belong to this country.”

The young man nodded.

“Why is it then,” Carter continued. “That the media questioned the President’s heritage because his mother was foreign and his father a communist? Walker himself admits he was born in the south and yet even those in his own party seemed to have turned against him. His opponents are no more Scottish than he is.”

The young man agreed with Carter, but without conviction.

“Duncan, whose journey began in Peckham, illuminated The Calders with his presence, but his roots were in Peckham,” Carter was picking up steam. “Then there is Dr MacDonald, who plays the most serious role in the assembly and who takes the side of the strikers in London. Arrested and released again after sizable protests. The Government does not want any martyrs. He refutes any claims he is a foreigner. True, he was born on foreign soil but to parents that weren’t foreign, and he served his country in the Middle East in a conflict that left him wounded.”

The young man didn’t know how to react to this statement, so he just looked non-committal.

“The inhabitants of this country are so proud of their heritage, so averse to all things foreign, in particular those areas with the most refugees.”

This, the young man agreed with. He knew Carter was referring to the gammons and not to him.

“Scottish politics is like Scottish sport,” Carter continued. “You need not be Scottish to take part. And in Alba, sport, religion and politics are the same thing.”

The young man wasn’t one for sport, but didn’t say so.

“In other revolutions, at other times and in other places, the leaders have come from the streets, now sports people, artists and musicians become politicians and they are just as interested in profiteering and backhanders. Does Walker not consider himself to be an artist, a writer as he insists?”

The young man shrugged. He didn’t know.

“I’m sorry,” Jim interrupted Carter’s diatribe. “You must think us rude. We haven’t asked you anything about yourself. What is it you do?”

“I’m living on a commune,” said the young man. “We bought a farm near Loanhead to prove that we can live an idyllic life in a community without money.”

“A communist!” Jim exclaimed. “I thought they had become extinct. How do you join? Do you have to contribute to the investment costs? Kind of buy your way in?”

“Oh no, you can’t buy your way in.”

“Then how can you join?” asked Carter.

“We’ve borrowed the land, we don’t own it ourselves, we’ve been friends for a long time and if someone has a benefactor, they help everyone else.”

“Are there any farmers in your group?” asked Jim.

“One woman is a gardener and the rest are students, a couple from retail and a couple that are... well... or... that have alternative lifestyles.”

“Do you have married couples?” asked Carter.

“Oh no, we consider marriage to be nothing more than legalised prostitution.”

Jim raised his eyebrows. Carter smiled.

“There are two schools of thought in our community,” the young man explained. “One is that couples should cohabit freely without the institution of marriage, the other is that we should overcome sexuality, it won’t be important anymore.”

“How do you mean?”

“We all live in friendly unsexual fellowship. If the beast stirs in two people, they feed the beast and everything goes back to the way it was.”

“The beast, eh?” said Carter. “And where do the women in your community stand regarding these two views?”

“They are divided.”

“What you need is to give the power to the working classes,” said Carter. “It just requires a little educational work.”

“Walker has already shifted to the right,” Jim began again, “So as not to ruin his chances of maintaining a government in the new assembly. He better be careful he doesn’t go too far. He’s only in power because people hate Duncan and MacDonald even more.”

“Now that I agree with,” said Carter.

The young man nodded his agreement as well.

“I think he can hold his ground as President and not just because he’s perceived as the lesser evil. Duncan and MacDonald won’t attack him, they are brothers, hostile brothers but brothers all the same.”

Jim and Carter attended the memorial service held for the independence activists whom the rumour mongers and conspiracy theorists claimed the Government in Westminster had murdered. The crowd was modest, and there was a speech by a short man who spoke as if he was a prophet. He was Jack Allen, the self-styled apolitical politician, and he talked about the victims as if they had been personal friends whom everyone should hold up as martyrs to the cause.

“If we had listened to them,” he said. “The country would not be in the situation it now finds itself in and the only authentic way to honour their memory is to carry through Walker’s work, work that they, the fallen heroes, have started. The country will rise like a phoenix from the ashes of the current troubles, but to achieve this resurrection, everyone must work.”

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