No Future Volume Three

      

     No
     Future
     Volume
     Three

      

      

     Bradley
     Stoke

      

      

    No Future Volume Three

Contents
      
     .
     516
     LXVI Roland
     2090.
     523
     LXVII Odile
     2110.
     531
     LXVIII
     Sally 2091.
     538
     LXIX Iris
     2058.
     546
     LXX
     Gabrielle 2040.
     554
     LXXI Mark
     & Molly 2075.
     563
     LXXII Alex
     2034.
     571
     LXXIII
     Tamara 2098.
     579
     LXXIV Alex
     2035.
     587
     LXXV
     Eugenie 2101.
     594
     LXXVI
     Eugenie 2102.
     602
     LXXVII
     Psychlone 2107.
     610
     LXXVIII
     Iris 2059.
     618
     LXXIX
     Lindiwe 2069.
     626
     LXXX Olive
     2085.
     633
     LXXXI Sir
     Norman 2080.
     639
     LXXXII Phil
     2104.
     647
     LXXXIII
     Iris 2060.
     655
     LXXXIV
     Chris 2105.
     663
     LXXXV Iris
     2061.
     671
     LXXXVI
     Psychlone 2108.
     678
     LXXXVII
     Iris 2062.
     685
     LXXXVIII
     Odile 2111.
     693
     LXXXIX Mark
     & Molly 2076.
     701
     XC Eric
     Esterhazy 2046.
     709
     XCI
     Gabrielle 2041.
     717
     XCII Alex
     2036.
     725

      

    No Future Volume Three

     LXVI
     Roland
     2090
      
     “Stop
     that!” Roland shouted. “Stop that right now.” 
     Osama regarded Roland with
     an admiration that was very much compromised by the very real fear for
     his own safety and a sincere wish that his friend could sometimes put
     prudence above charity.
     The suit worn by the large
     unshaven man who Roland addressed were much smarter and more costly
     than those anyone normally wore in this part of London, but he was
     oblivious to the fact that it was now splattered with blood from the
     already critically ill man whose face he’d slapped several times with
     a pistol. There might once have been a time when his victim could have
     taken command of the situation, but no patient in the care of Roland’s
     relief centre was ever in a state to offer resistance. The patient was
     even less able to do so now. His nose was smashed flat and several
     teeth had been punched out of his mouth.
     “Are you telling me what
     to do?” the unshaven man challenged Roland. “You’ve got some fucking
     nerve.”
     “This man’s already dying.
     You don’t have to make it worse for him.”
     “The fucker owes me,” the
     assailant said, as he held his victim up above the ground by his
     throat. “I’ve been looking for this cunt for years. The fucker’s only
     getting what he always had coming.”
     “It’s not right. Put him
     down. Let him die in peace.”
     “Don’t fucking tell me
     what to do, you cunt,” said Roland’s unwelcome guest. He slammed his
     victim’s face several times against the wall. A pitiful whine
     accompanied the first few impacts. He was then dropped onto the floor
     and kicked repeatedly in the face and ribs.
     Roland continued to stand
     firm when the man in the designer suit had tired of kicking his victim
     and strode over to him. “Just how many fucking greaseballs and grasses
     have you got stashed here, fuckface?”
     “None at all that I know
     of,” said Roland. “This is a Relief Centre. We provide help for the
     poor and needy. You can see that we don’t mean you any harm.”
     “Don’t make me do
     something I’ll regret, you cheeky fucker,” said the man sarcastically.
     Without further provocation he punched Roland in the chest so hard
     that he doubled up and fell backwards. “I don’t want any more of your
     lip. You’ve fucking crossed the line. You don’t let cunts like Reg
     Reid into the manor. From now on, you either pay tribute or you and
     all these dopey fuckwit junkies and clapped-out whores are gonna be
     incinerated.” He gestured towards the other beds where those patients
     who were sufficiently conscious were trembling with fear. 
     “I already pay rent to
     Harry Rogers,” said Roland. 
     “Next time that fucker
     comes round, you tell him you’re paying rent to Oban Rushmore. That’s
     me, if you didn’t fucking know already. Tell him that if he doesn’t
     fuck off, I’ll stick my fist down his fucking throat and pull out his
     fucking kidney. I’ve tolerated you cunts for long enough. Either pay
     up or dig a hole in the ground where we can bury you.”
     With these parting words,
     the man walked off still unconcerned about the bloodstains splattered
     over his suit. He made no attempt to hide his gun from curious
     onlookers in the street. He had no fear of the police and didn’t care
     who knew what he’d just been doing.
     “He’s dead,” said Osama
     who’d run to the assistance of the victim. “Reg is dead. I think that,
     towards the end, that thug was just kicking a corpse.”
     Roland bit his lip. He’d
     had no idea that this patient was in any way different from the
     countless other diseased, starved and destitute that he’d taken into
     his shelter. Would he have acted differently if he’d known? And hadn’t
     the well-dressed gangster just claimed that the Relief Centre was now
     his property?
     “We better dispose of the
     body,” said Roland. “I don’t think anyone else will volunteer to do
     so, judging from what we’ve just seen.”
     It was only a day or so
     later that Harry Rogers walked into the Relief Centre. He was wearing
     his trademark tracksuit which was conspicuously less expensive than
     Oban Rushmore’s suit. This suggestion of physical fitness was totally
     out of place on a man with such a grotesquely obtuse stomach. However,
     it wasn’t his fists that he relied on to win a scrap, but rather the
     pistol and flick-knife that he brandished ostentatiously.
     “Oban, eh?” said Harry as
     he counted the notes that Roland handed over to him for what both
     parties euphemistically called rent. “That fucker’s been muscling in
     all over the manor. Why’d he come here?”
     “One of our patients was
     someone he was after,” said Roland.
     “Yeah. That figures,” said
     Harry. “Oban never forgives a slight. What’d he say, then?”
     “He told me that we’d have
     to pay rent to him rather than to you.”
     “He did, the cunt. And
     what d’you expect me to do about it?”
     “I rather thought that the
     money we paid you would give us some protection from thugs like
     Rushmore.”
     Harry considered this
     momentarily as he shoved the wad of notes into his back-pocket. “You
     thought wrong there, Roland. It looks like you’ve got to pay rent to
     two landlords from now on. I’ll still expect my wedge.”
     “But we’ve got nothing
     left to pay Rushmore now that we’ve paid you.”
     “Tough,” said Harry. “Why
     not flog off some of those drugs you’ve got in the medicine cabinet?
     They might get a few quid on the streets.”
     “They’re for the
     patients,” said Roland.
     “Well, that’s not my
     problem,” said Harry as he walked past an old woman who was gnawing on
     a crust of stale bread and cringed noticeably as he swaggered by.
     It was only the following
     day that Roland got the visit he was now dreading. It was one of
     Oban’s henchmen: a scrawny brown-skinned boy, who was also wearing an
     expensive and well-cut suit. His face was badly scarred and he
     flaunted his aggression by pushing the lapel of his jacket aside to
     reveal the gun-holster strapped to his chest.
     “I’ve been told you’ve got
     something for me,” said the boy.
     “Who sent you?” Roland
     asked cautiously. He was as worried for his own welfare as he was for
     the several people in his care slumped around the room and anxiously
     watching the unfolding drama.
     “My man Oban,” said the
     boy proudly. “But you already knew that, you cunt. Where are the
     readies?”
     Roland had been expecting
     this moment, but he didn’t know whether there was something more that
     he should do. He shoved his hand into his jeans pocket and pulled out
     some notes. They came from his own private savings rather than from
     the money he’d set aside for managing the Relief Centre.
     “Is that all?” asked the
     boy incredulously. “Is that fucking all? My man Oban’s gonna
     be fucking mad if I only give him this much. Ain’t you got nothing
     more?”
     “Nothing,” said Roland.
     “This is a charity. All the money we’ve got comes from donations and
     street collections and all of that goes on running the centre. We
     spend every last penny we have on providing food and rest to the poor
     and needy.”
     “To the fucking scum, you
     mean,” said the boy. “Oban’s not gonna like this one fucking bit. Give
     us more or I’ll have to take something.”
     “We haven’t got anything
     more,” said Roland.
     “I dunno about that,” said
     the boy who looked around the room, presumably for something worth
     purloining in lieu of cash. After a moment or so, he relented. “You’re
     right. There’s fucking nothing here. What a dead loss. Don’t you worry
     though. I’ll be back.” 
     He kicked an elderly man
     who was crouched on the floor and sent him sprawling onto his face. He
     then walked off while counting the notes and muttering obscenities as
     he did so.
     “What do we do now?” asked
     Osama when Roland had told him what happened.
     “I don’t know,” Roland
     admitted. “We can’t afford to pay off two sets of mobsters.”
     “Can’t we just pay off one
     lot,” said Osama. “After all, that Rushmore thug did suggest that he’d
     hospitalise Harry if he got in the way.”
     “We can’t play one group
     of villains against another,” said Roland. “You can’t trust them in
     any way whatsoever. And furthermore, we shouldn’t do anything that
     causes harm to another person—even Harry.”
     Osama nodded, but he
     didn’t seem convinced.
     The next visit by Harry
     was rather sooner than the weekly cycle to which Roland had become
     accustomed. He was still wearing his tracksuit, but it was splattered
     with bloodstains and his face was covered with bruises. One eye could
     barely open from the swelling of his eyelid. When he opened his mouth,
     there was a fresh gap where once his front teeth had been.
     He glared at Roland before
     he could express any sympathy for the man’s obvious distress.
     “Was it you who
     fucking spoke to one of Oban’s boys and set him after me?” Harry
     asked.
     “No, of course not,” said
     Roland honestly, though he immediately suspected Osama. Roland had
     been rattling a collection tin along the plush thoroughfares of Regent
     Street and Oxford Circus all the previous day while Osama was working
     at the Relief Centre by himself. If the boy had returned for more
     money, would Osama have passed on what Rushmore had said to him about
     Harry?
     “I don’t fucking believe
     you,” said Harry. “I’d know one of Oban’s boys a mile off in their
     fucking West End suits. Why’d he want to rough me up then? Why’d he
     tell me to keep my nose out of his business? What was that all about
     then, eh?”
     “I don’t know,” said
     Roland. “All I know is that Rushmore told me that I was to pay rent to
     him from now on.”
     “Well, of course he
     fucking would,” said Harry. “But why’d he beat me up? He didn’t need
     to know you were paying me too, did he? Did you grass on me? I should
     fucking kill you, you fucker.”
     Roland was getting quite
     confused by this. He was now expected to pay two sets of thugs for the
     privilege of providing charitable relief in East London. And given
     that he couldn’t afford to do this, he was now being threatened with
     violence for being remiss.
     “What should we do,
     Harry?” Roland asked, not unreasonably. 
     “Just fucking pay up,” he
     said. “That’s what. Fucking pay up. I don’t care where you get your
     wedge. I don’t think Oban does either. We’re not fucking econ...
     econom... fucking experts. If you wanna continue to operate in this
     part of town you follow the rules. And if you don’t, you’re fucked.”
     Roland discussed this
     dilemma with Osama next time he saw him.
     “What do we do?” he said.
     “We can’t pay both Harry and Rushmore. And by trying to do so we’ve
     got no money to be able to stay open. What’s the answer?”
     Osama considered this
     carefully. “I think we’ve reached the end of the line,” he said. “We
     can’t go on. We’ll just have to close the centre.”
     “And the patients?”
     wondered Roland.
     “We don’t take any more
     on,” Osama said. “We close the soup kitchen. And within a week all the
     patients we’ve got will be dead.”
     Roland looked distressed
     by this. “Is that it?” he asked. “Is that all we can do? Has
     everything we’ve done been wasted?”
     “Of course, it hasn’t,”
     said Osama. “There are many people whose lives we’ve saved. But let’s
     be frank. We can’t carry on. Not here anyway. Just by taking care of
     the patients we’ve already got puts us at risk from heavies who’ll
     continue to come round and demand money from us. We can’t offer relief
     to the destitute if we can’t even offer them protection from violence.
     You saw how Oban treated Reg. You saw how one of his boys beat up
     Harry. The next people they’ll attack will either be one of us or the
     volunteer workers. Or they might even turn on those we’re here to
     help.”
     “So, it’s hopeless,” said
     Roland despairingly.
     “It is here,” said
     Osama. “But we can always open up another relief centre elsewhere.
     There are people in need all over the Republic.”
     Roland’s face lit up.
     “You’re right,” he said. “From out of the ashes, the phoenix arises. I
     take it you’ll come with me.”
     Osama nodded. 
     “What else can I do?”
      

    No Future Volume Three

LXVII
     Odile
     2110
      
     The
     remuneration for a day’s work was meagre. It amounted to nothing more
     than the use of a second-hand blanket and a meal that was double the
     size of what Odile normally had to eat. That was all. But it was
     something. 
     Edith was helping to boil
     a pot of stew on a stove, while Odile doled it out into wooden bowls
     that were greedily snatched from her by desperate supplicants in the
     long queue that stretched ahead of her. This queue had started to form
     well before dawn and many of the hungry and needy had been waiting for
     hours. 
     “How’s it going?” asked
     Roland cheerfully. He was the old man who’d organised the soup kitchen
     in Lancaster after thugs had burnt down a similar enterprise in
     London. This was an inferno in which dozens of helpless patients were
     incinerated. As Roland frequently reminded Odile and the others who
     occasionally worked for him, things might be bad in Lancaster but they
     were much worse in London. Odile wondered whether Roland was just
     saying that to comfort people who usually saw a capital city on
     television that still had expensive shops, art galleries and public
     monuments. Was it really so bad in England’s distant far south? Odile
     wasn’t sure. She’d never even been as far south as Manchester.
     There was a television
     pinned to the soup kitchen wall tuned to a news channel despite the
     many complaints from those queuing. They’d rather watch a quiz show or
     a situation comedy that showed a life of indescribable luxury led by
     middle-class families affluent enough to live in a gated community.
     What made matters worse was that Roland insisted on screening news
     from the EBC which was a television company that currently attracted
     only a small percentage of the national audience. And this was for
     good reason. The EBC News had few of the exciting graphics and
     pulsating music that enlivened the news on Sky England. There were too
     many depressing news items about famine and drought, often happening
     in countries no one had ever heard of, and not enough about
     celebrities and television talent shows. Indeed, at the same time as
     Odile was ladling out soup, the newscaster was droning on about the
     recent conflict in Virginia between England’s ally, the Republic of
     North America, and their mutual enemy, the rump USA known officially
     as the Northern Unites States.
     “Do you think it’ll be the
     big one?” asked a man with as good as no teeth at all and an overcoat
     that consisted of more threadbare patches than any of its original
     mohair.
     “The big one?” wondered
     Odile.
     “You know: when the bombs
     go up and we all die,” he said.
     “That’ll never happen,”
     said Roland cheerfully as he hovered behind Odile. “No one could be so
     stupid as to bring the whole of human civilisation to an end. It’s
     taken us tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years to
     get here. Who’d want to wipe it all out in a single day of utter
     madness?”
     “That’s what they said
     about Israel,” said an elderly woman who’d already got her soup and
     was dipping a large chunk of freshly baked bread into it. “Look what
     happened to Jerusalem. Not to mention Damascus and Bethlehem. It’s
     still glowing from radiation after nearly forty years. And I bet
     that’s what they said in India, Kyrgyzstan and the Ukraine before
     that.”
     “It’s different this
     time,” said another man who was standing several people behind in the
     queue. “The Americans have got more missiles than the rest of the
     world put together. It’s the one thing the yanks were good at
     building. Now they’re pointing them at each other instead of at the
     Russkies or the Chinese or the Iranians.”
     “Let’s hope some of them
     are pointed at the fucking Scots,” said another man in the queue. “I
     don’t trust the Scots not to start another bloody war. They’re always
     sneaking people into England, but they don’t let any immigrant scum
     out.”
     “Let’s not get into an
     argument,” said Roland hastily, who knew only too well how much more
     impassioned the discussion could get. “We all know that the Scots
     wouldn’t want to bomb England however much our government antagonises
     them. Radiation clouds can blow north as much as they can south.”
     “Well, I’m glad we kept
     our fucking nukes,” the last man said. “Perhaps if we’d used them
     already, the Scots and the Irish and the rest wouldn’t keep
     humiliating us.”
     “We’ve got a wider choice
     on the menu,” said Roland raising his voice over the conversation.
     “We’ve got two soups now. There’s Leek and Potato Soup. And there’s
     Vegetable.”
     “No meat though,” said
     someone in the queue. “I ain’t had no meat for ages.”
     “There’s no real meat
     anywhere anyway anymore,” said another. “It’s all GM crap. When’s the
     last time anyone here could ever afford real meat?”
     Odile wasn’t sure. But
     each discontented voice quietened down after she’d ladled out the soup
     and the supplicant shuffled to one side to gulp it down under the
     canvas shelter outside the battered old cafe that housed Roland’s soup
     kitchen. All the while above Odile’s head the newsreaders gave a
     litany of yet more depressing news about the world’s woes. Was it any
     wonder that the people queuing up for food would rather watch a
     cartoon of the ever-popular Rodney Rat or the top-rated show Who
     Wants to be a Billionaire? where contestants competed with each
     other to win enough to afford, for instance, a trip of a lifetime to
     the Scilly Isles.
     “This isn’t going to be
     enough,” said Edith, when Odile joined her girlfriend many hours later
     after the last drop of soup had been ladled out and the volunteer
     workers could tuck into more than two thousand calories of much-needed
     nutrition. “The blankets help, but how’re we gonna pay our rent?”
     “You know the answer to
     that,” said Odile who mimed a huge cock being shoved down her throat.
     “Ruben can only have so
     many blowjobs a day,” said Edith. “We’re not the only girls he’s got
     as tenants and a lot of the others are just as desperate as us.”
     “We look better and give
     better head,” said Odile.
     Nevertheless, she had to
     admit that her lover had a point. What had once been a special treat
     for the landlord when the girls were skint had become a rather regular
     offering. How much longer could Odile trade her cock-sucking skills
     for a crappy mattress in a draughty room without even a hearth to
     light a fire? And where would they go if they had to leave?
     “You can stay here at the
     soup kitchen,” said Roland with a cheeky smile. “And you won’t have to
     fellate me either.”
     “What’s that word mean?”
     wondered Odile, while Edith nudged her.
     “What would we
     have to do?” Edith asked more diplomatically.
     “Just sleep here and make
     sure that no one breaks into the kitchen at night,” said Roland.
     “We’ve had several break-ins already. They’ve not amounted to much
     really. A stolen mattress. A medical kit. A basket of fruit. But we
     operate on a very low margin. All the money we get through donations
     goes to keeping the place open.”
     “What would we do if
     someone broke in?” Odile asked.
     “I dunno,” said Roland.
     “Scream. Shout. Throw things at them. It doesn’t matter. No thief
     would break in here if they wanted something valuable. They’d break
     into the big houses on the hill where the old University used to be.
     Just having someone here is sufficient deterrent for most thieves.”
     “We’re a bit behind in the
     rent,” said Edith thoughtfully. “We could move in straightaway. Do we
     have to bring our own mattress?”
     “Not unless you’re
     particularly fond of it,” said Roland. “We’ve got several mattresses
     here. As long as you don’t mind the fact that the last people to sleep
     on them also died on them, they should be fine.”
     The girls agreed, although
     the space available to them on the soup kitchen floor was actually
     less than that in their old apartment and they’d have to be out of bed
     on those hours when the soup kitchen was open. There’d no longer be an
     opportunity to make love together in the afternoon and they’d have to
     be very wary about inviting over friends to share their company, but
     it compared well to being kicked out by Ruben and forced to sleep on
     the street.
     “I don’t like what’s
     happening in Virginia,” said Edith during the night after the couple
     had expended their bonus calories in carnal pleasure.
     “Fuck! You’re not still
     bothered about that shit,” said Odile with exasperation. “America’s
     thousands of kilometres away. It’d take days to get there by ship.”
     “Or seconds by nuclear
     warhead...”
     “Always the cheerful one,
     aren’t you?” said Odile. “The Republicans might be our allies, but
     they’re just posturing arseholes. They’re just trying to get extra aid
     from the Northern United States for the famine that devastated
     Arizona.”
     “That’s on the border of
     the Western Union, sweetie,” said Edith. “You’d expect them to invade
     California or Mexico if they wanted aid for Arizona. Anyway, they’ve
     got all the brothels and casinos out there so they don’t want to lose
     foreign tourists even if they only speak Spanish.”
     “Well, I dunno,” said
     Odile whose sense of geography was always rather vague. “But it’d take
     a lot for the Northern States to rise to the bait. And the Canadians
     would have a thing or two to say if their impoverished southern
     neighbours started lobbing missiles at each other. Imagine what it
     would do to the Canadian wheat-fields.”
     “I’m surprised you even
     know where Canada is,” said Edith who was nonetheless impressed by her
     lover’s show of erudition. “But I am worried. It’s not just
     the Americans. There are the Chinese and our allies: the Russians and
     Indonesians. Then there’s us, of course. The English. We’re surrounded
     by our enemies, like the Scots, the French and the Irish. All our
     allies in Europe are in the Mediterranean Union, which is more North
     African and Muslim than European and Christian. It’s a mess. The whole
     world’s like a crazy quilt with nuclear warheads all along the seams
     and every time there’s another plague or famine or drought or
     earthquake you wonder whether someone’s just going to let rip.”
     “You worry too much,
     Edith,” said Odile. She kissed her girlfriend tenderly on the lips.
     “Let’s just enjoy our last night on this mattress together. We won’t
     have to be bothered any more about that rusty spring that pokes into
     your arse.”
     “And you won’t have to
     suck Ruben’s cock anymore,” Edith reminded her.
     “That as well,” said
     Odile. “So fuck, Honeypot. Spread your legs. I just can’t get enough
     of you. Even after all these years.” 

    No Future Volume Three

     LXVIII
     Sally
     2091
      
     Sally
     had a great deal to be satisfied about even though she wasn’t the kind
     of person to take good fortune for granted. She was blessed with
     relatively affluent parents who loved and cherished her. She was
     similarly blessed with the intellectual ability to secure a place on a
     postgraduate course at Oxford, one of England’s two greatest
     universities and one which still ranked moderately highly in the
     world. She was a talented sportswoman, a girl with an extensive social
     network and, as she was often reminded, attractive and beautiful. 
     How could she have been
     born so lucky?
     Sally was aware that each
     one of her good fortunes reinforced the others. A beautiful woman
     without brains and money was unlikely to be able to achieve very much
     in the modern world if she didn’t marry well or trade her looks for
     money. A beautiful woman with brains alone could only succeed if she
     slept with the right men or women. But a beautiful woman with both
     intelligence and a generous allowance could gain the academic
     qualifications necessary to succeed in one of the shrinking number of
     well-remunerated professions. Sally genuinely enjoyed studying for her
     doctorate. Who would have known a generation ago just how exciting the
     growing synthesis between robotics and biochemistry would become? And
     as someone already ahead in an area of academic research that was
     attracting Chinese and Brazilian investment, maybe she could one day
     study abroad. Perhaps she could become a fellow at a university in a
     prosperous city like Beijing, Pyongyang or Buenos Aires.
     Still, Oxford was a
     pleasant enough city on the edge of the Cotswolds. It was almost the
     very last corner of Old England. The colleges and most of the city
     were walled in to keep out the proles and peasants that were a nagging
     and uncomfortable reminder of how far it was possible to fall. Sally
     had no understanding or sympathy for England’s great unwashed. All she
     knew about them came from the few moments of prole television she
     occasionally stumbled upon. They were a dreadfully uncouth bunch
     unhealthily obsessed with quiz shows and vulgar situation comedies.
     They were often appallingly racist and homophobic. You certainly
     wouldn’t expect to have much of an intelligent conversation with any
     one of them.
     There was a sense that
     Sally and her friends were surrounded by an ocean of the less
     well-off. Labour was so cheap these days that almost everyone could
     afford to employ a servant or two. Sally had two maids whose names she
     could never remember who slept in the communal servants’ quarters just
     outside Oxford’s city walls and whose task was to ensure that Sally
     was properly cared for while she stayed in her room in the student
     halls. Servants were best when they were just there when you needed
     them but at the same time kept themselves discreetly out of the way
     when you didn’t. Sally expected them to be on hand even when she took
     a young man or woman back to her room for the sexual exercise that she
     practiced as enthusiastically as her daily jogs along the city centre
     river.
     Sally was a woman of
     routine. It was the best way to get ahead in life. Up at six; an early
     morning jog; breakfast prepared by one of her maids who stood
     attentively by while she shared her muesli and yoghurt with the lover
     with whom she’d enjoyed the night; and then a day of study and
     research. It was only after she’d eaten in the halls that she would
     choose to socialise with her wide circle of friends during which she
     would invariably imbibe a glass of wine and even some coke or hash.
     And finally she’d go to a bed either in her own room or in the room of
     one of her lovers to keep toned those muscles that more formal
     exercise could never properly address.
     “Do you want to stand as
     president of the MCR?” Simon asked one evening as they lay together in
     Sally’s bed.
     “MCR?” asked Sally, who
     for a moment wondered whether Simon was talking about a biotech
     company. “Oh, the Middle Common Room. I’m not sure. It could be a lot
     of work.”
     “It isn’t at all,” said
     Simon. “I’ve been doing it for the past year and I think you’d be
     ideal to take over the role. It’d look perfect on your CV. Employers
     care about that kind of shit. It shows maturity and leadership and a
     respect for tradition.”
     “Tradition,” repeated
     Sally with a slightly mocking edge to her voice. What did she care
     about tradition? She was a thoroughly modern woman who had no time for
     outdated fripperies at all: even though she lived in a city that was
     steeped in a thousand years of academic history. All around her were
     buildings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and some even
     older than that. She frowned and then beckoned towards the maid on
     duty. It was the black one with the skinny legs. “Pour the both of us
     another glass of sherry, will you?” she ordered. She was totally
     indifferent to the fact that both she and Simon were naked. And she
     was similarly untroubled that they’d just been openly fucking while
     the maid was in attendance. 
     What the maid thought
     about this was really of no concern to her at all.
     “How much will it cost to
     be president?” was the question uppermost in Sally’s mind.
     “It’s got a lot more
     expensive over the years,” said Simon. “You might need to clear the
     outgoing with your parents. It’s all about outspending the opposition.
     But I don’t think it’d be more than the cost of a year’s fees.”
     “How guaranteed am I that
     I’d even win?”
     “The first week of the
     campaign should see off the most talented competition. They’re
     generally the ones who got into university by the skin of their teeth.
     You know: by academic excellence alone. They’re the guys with
     scholarships from charitable foundations and internet companies. You
     should outspend them by the end of the second week. Then what you’ll
     mostly have to deal with are the talentless no-hopers with a tonne of
     dosh. Be careful. Money definitely makes a difference. That’s when
     you’ll have to spend your money wisely. I’ll be able to tell you who
     to bribe and whose public support you need.”
     “The campaigning sounds as
     if it’s more hard work than the job.” 
     “Well, that’s democracy
     for you,” said Simon. “It’s all about buying votes and  knowing
     how to get the job rather than knowing what to do with it once you’ve
     got it. Employers know that. Someone who can run a good campaign would
     be well set up for a life in modern corporate business. I take it your
     parents can spare the cash.”
     “It won’t take long to
     persuade them. I just need to convince them that it’ll be money well
     spent.”
     “I don’t think there’s
     anyone who’s got the money who’d be able to put up a good fight
     against you.”
     “You’re such a sweetie,
     Simon,” said Sally affectionately. “What I need now,” she continued
     while she twiddled with her crotch, “is for you to show just how much
     you love me and not with words. But your cock’s shrivelled somewhat.”
     “Your maid’s got pretty
     hot lips,” said Simon with a wicked smile.
     “She has?” said Sally who
     hadn’t really noticed. She glanced over at the maid who was standing
     by the sherry decanter in a flimsy skirt and cheap plastic sandals.
     “Come here and get my friend properly prepared,” she ordered.
     “Yes’m,” said the maid who
     shuffled over towards the couple. She knelt down between Simon’s knees
     and took his penis between her hands and thick lips.
     “Show a bit more
     enthusiasm,” Sally ordered. “We haven’t got all day.”
     “She’s not doing too
     badly,” said Simon as his penis began to swell.
     “It’s for my
     benefit not hers,” said Sally dismissively. “I want your cock in my
     snatch not tickling her tonsils.”
     She also didn’t want her
     maid to actually enjoy herself with her boyfriend. Although maids were
     cheap and plentiful, it wasn’t unknown for people like Simon to get a
     little too attached to them. If this maid showed any signs of pleasure
     from having Simon’s cock up her throat, Sally would have no choice but
     to dismiss her.
     “Fucking get on with it,”
     she said to the maid as she pressed her hand firmly on her
     short-haired pate. “Show some enthusiasm!”
     The following morning,
     however, it was Sally who was assessing her own enthusiasm. Simon
     wouldn’t have suggested that she stand for president of the MCR unless
     there was a very good chance that she’d win the position, but every
     hour of every one of her days was already taken. And Sally also
     wondered just how easy it would be for her to persuade her parents to
     bankroll her candidature. They’d often complained about the burden of
     financing their daughter’s expensive education and there were also
     Sally’s two younger siblings who had to be considered. On the other
     hand, Simon was undoubtedly right. Most employers would be as
     impressed by Sally’s experience as an MCR president as they would be
     by her academic qualifications. Perhaps she could get on the fast
     track for a place on the board of directors and soon earn a generous
     salary (supplemented by bonuses). And Sally already had pedigree.
     She’d been head girl at public school which had been the result of a
     costly election campaign also paid for by her parents.
     Sally was jogging along
     the banks of the River Thames with her mind focused on such elevated
     matters when she happened to notice that there was a body floating
     face downwards on the river surface. She abruptly stopped in her
     tracks and watched it bob by. One leg had lodged against a floating
     log and this caused the body to spin slowly around so that Sally could
     get a more leisurely view. 
     The body belonged to
     someone who was far too badly dressed to have been a student or
     lecturer. In that sense there wasn’t much for her to worry about. The
     death of a prole wasn’t a serious matter, although Sally knew she’d
     still have to make a phone call to the university authorities about
     it. Proles were always dying from something or other in the wasteland
     beyond the city walls. If it wasn’t from natural causes such as
     starvation or disease, it would be from murder. Even though it was
     strictly speaking a police matter, it would be pointless to call them.
     They’d be too busy patrolling the outer suburbs to have time to spare.
     Such deaths were routine police business, but it would be treated with
     far more alacrity by the university authorities.
     Sally called the
     University of Oxford Security Services and described what she could
     see from the river bank. While she spoke the leg became dislodged and
     the body continued to drift with the river towards an ancient bridge.
     The questions she had to answer were all to the point. It was
     obviously not such an unusual occurrence that the security services
     didn’t know how to handle it. Their main concern was that the body
     might be a vector for one of the unpleasant plagues that beset the
     proles who weren’t quarantined behind high walls and didn’t benefit
     from regular health checks.
     When the call was over,
     Sally clicked off her mobile phone and sat on a bench that had been
     donated to the city of Oxford by Sigma Cybernetics plc. She watched
     the corpse float towards a bend in the river. How had it managed to
     drift so far into the city? Had it been carried through the tunnels
     under the imposingly high Oxford City walls? Had someone somehow
     thrown the corpse over the top? However it had got there, Security
     Services would soon drag it out of the river and then incinerate it
     and that would be the end of the matter. Unless someone came asking
     for it, no one would even be bothered to determine the prole’s
     identity.
     What could Sally learn
     from this? It wasn’t something she often thought much about, but it
     reminded her that if she should somehow lose a grip on her good
     fortune there was a precipitous fall towards the absolute poverty that
     most English people suffered. This wasn’t a fate she’d welcome at all.
     The unfortunate truth was that the trend in the Republic was for the
     proportion of those who were relatively affluent to steadily drop and
     part of that tendency was caused by bankruptcy and business failure.
     Although everything seemed perfect for Sally now, at any moment her
     fortunes could dramatically decline and there would be no safety net
     to catch her as she fell.
     If being president of the
     MCR would in some way help to bolster Sally’s future prospects, then
     the ridiculous expense of campaigning for the position would be well
     worth it. Sally had no intention of ever being let loose amongst the
     hyenas and vultures of the wicked world beyond and she was resolved to
     do whatever was necessary to ensure that this would never happen.
      

    No Future Volume Three

LXIX
     Iris
     2058
      
      
      
     Iris
     had never lived anywhere other than London before in her life, but now
     here she was: renting a room in an ancient sprawling house in the
     suburbs of Oxford. Although she’d had to make new friends, was now
     earning somewhat less money than she’d used to and had to sleep on a
     disgusting mattress that should have been replaced years ago, Iris was
     happier than she’d been for years. The year in which she’d made a
     living as a prostitute now seemed like nothing more than a nightmare
     from which she’d at last awoken. 
     Her current job at the
     Biotech lab for Sigma Cybernetics plc was one for which she was
     ridiculously over-qualified and which only two years ago she’d never
     have contemplated ever applying for. And the fact that she’d had to
     re-locate to Oxfordshire, some seventy or eighty kilometres from
     London, would have placed a job opportunity like this right at the
     bottom of the list. But now when she went to sleep she no longer had
     the odour of aging men adhering to her body and no residual memory of
     their repulsive cocks between her thighs that no amount of scrubbing
     could remove.
     Although the same river
     ran through Oxford as it did London, there were none of the elaborate
     flood barriers that were being built throughout the capital city just
     as they were on the English beaches. Nonetheless, Oxford wasn’t
     without walls and those weren’t only the ancient mediaeval walls that
     attracted the few tourists who’d ventured so far from London. The
     student riots of the last few years had embarrassed a government whose
     legitimacy had been secured by a promise to banish the chaos and
     anarchy of public disorder. The city council was determined to
     demonstrate its commitment to the government’s effort to restore
     civility and order to the Kingdom and, like other tourist cities in
     England such as York, Bath and Norwich, the City of Oxford had
     constructed a wall around the town centre that had at least provided
     employment to privately resourced security staff and building
     maintenance workers.
     In practical terms the
     wall was just a bloody nuisance for Iris. Every morning she had to
     stand in line until she could flash her work permit and the shiny new
     Government Issue ID that verified that she was eligible to work in the
     city centre and therefore wasn’t an illegal immigrant. It didn’t
     normally take her long to get through the security checks, but other
     people in the same queue were often delayed for much longer,
     especially those that looked slightly foreign or were dressed in a
     fashion that bothered the security staff. It wasn’t just a person’s
     skin colour or accent (especially Scottish or Welsh) that might earn
     special attention. There were other characteristics such as hair that
     was too long or too short, too many tattoos or body-piercings, or
     clothes deemed to be too eccentric.
     There was a clear
     difference between the world inside the city walls and that outside.
     It was almost as if Oxford was one big gated community. Outside the
     walls were derelict and aging properties where the unemployed, the
     poorly-paid and the criminal underclass had to live, work and most
     likely die. Inside the walls, the streets were clean, the buildings
     properly maintained and the shops well-stocked. But, most of all, the
     people inside the city walls were better dressed, better spoken and
     better fed. In actual fact, a higher proportion of those confined
     within the walls were of foreign origin than those outside. Many were
     tourists from China, Korea and Brazil, but most of the others were
     students at the venerable University of Oxford. Although they mostly
     came from the same wealthy countries as the tourists, some even came
     from Africa and the Middle East. There were no Americans, of course.
     Few of them could afford to travel so far abroad these days. And there
     weren’t many from Europe now that the Kingdom of England had such
     hostile relations with almost all its immediate neighbours, especially
     those with which it had so recently been constitutionally bound.
     The main consolation Iris
     had from her boring work was her daily stroll through the city centre.
     This was sometimes along the grassy banks of the River Thames where
     she might pass the occasional punt and even a few ducks. This was a
     privilege that would have been denied her if she hadn’t happened to be
     employed within the city walls. Passes into the city centre were
     usually only issued to students and tourists.
     The contrast to the
     peaceful and elegant streets of central Oxford couldn’t be greater
     than with the suburb where Iris rented a room in a large sprawling
     house. It was nearly an hour’s walk home along roads where most
     street-lamps no longer functioned and where prostitutes lurked in the
     shadows. It was always a relief to get home and through the front door
     even though now, in midwinter, it was scarcely much warmer indoors
     than outside. The only room that was heated was the living room where
     she and the other residents, mostly young people like Iris, would
     gather around the television and share the warmth emanating from the
     coal-burning stove.
     Deciding what to watch on
     television was always a compromise and inevitably the news channels
     were the ones about which there was least dispute. The choice was
     principally between the various affiliates of Fox UK and the rather
     diminished service provided by the EBC. Ever since the government
     abolished the license fee system, the EBC had struggled to provide an
     impartial service and even this was still censured for its supposed
     liberal bias by the government and the majority of the privately owned
     media. If the other spin-offs from the venerable BBC based in Scotland
     and Wales weren’t so parochial, Iris would have relied on them for
     news, but instead, like everyone else, she settled for either the
     sparkle and glitter of Fox News UK or the static images on EBC News
     24.
     “What does this England
     First policy really mean?” asked Sue who was sitting beside Iris
     on the sofa dressed in a thick jumper, scarf and woollen mittens.
     “How’s it gonna be any different from what the government’s been doing
     anyway for the last few years?”
     “It’s just a slogan,” said
     Steve, another housemate. “It probably doesn’t mean anything at all.”
     “I don’t like the
     government posters,” said Sudesh who was rolling a spliff on the back
     of an old magazine.
     “What’s wrong with them?”
     asked Iris.
     He smoothed out the tube
     of cigarette paper and twisted one end. “I dunno,” he said. “They’re a
     bit sinister. All those white faces, English flags and village greens.
     It’s nostalgia for an England that never existed and it’s scarcely
     what you could call inclusive.”
     “And how’s all that
     patriotic jingoism going to create jobs?” wondered Steve. “That’s
     what we want. Not warm ale, pork scratching and cricket pavilions.
     It’s jobs.”
     Iris might well have
     wondered, but it soon became obvious that what the slogan meant wasn’t
     so much about creating more jobs, but to ensure that what jobs were
     available would be allocated first to those people whose origins were
     indisputably English. And it was Sue who was to be the first victim in
     the house.
     “What the fuck!” she
     exclaimed as she sat cross-legged in the living room when Iris
     returned from work on a particularly chilly evening. She’d just opened
     a manila envelope that had been addressed to her. “I just can’t
     fucking believe it. I’m gonna be deported.”
     “Deported?” wondered Iris
     who could only assume that Sue was joking. Of all the people she knew,
     Iris seemed the least likely to attract the attention of the English
     Homeland Security Services. “You’re not American, Australian or
     anything are you?”
     “Of course I’m not,” said
     Sue. “I’m Scottish.”
     Iris had never noticed
     this before. Sue didn’t have a pronounced accent and although it
     clearly didn’t come from London it wasn’t one that was easy to place.

     “I still don’t
     understand,” she said.
     “Scotland’s not part of
     the same country as England these days,” said Sue. “And since England
     left the Northern European Union, all those old treaties that let
     people in the Union work wherever they wanted have been torn up. Scots
     can work in Sweden and Poland, just as Swedes and Poles can work in
     Scotland, but none of us, it seems, can work in the Kingdom of
     England.”
     “That doesn’t make any
     sense,” said Steve. “I thought you’d spent all your childhood in
     Durham.”
     “I did, but I was born in
     Scotland,” Sue said. “When the old British passports were scrapped, I
     was issued a Scottish passport. I didn’t think anything more of it and
     I’d never thought of applying for an English passport. I mean, who
     wants one of those anymore? The only places they’re good for are
     places you don’t want to live. That is, unless you want to carry on
     living in England.”
     “They can’t do that!” said
     Steve unconvincingly.
     “They fucking well can,”
     said Sue. “And they fucking well have. I’ve got to leave voluntarily
     before the end of the month or I’ll lose the right to make my own
     arrangements. It’s just like what’s been happening over in the
     Republic of North America where all the Mexicans and other Hispanics
     have been rounded up and driven across the border, no questions
     asked.”
     “Won’t you be better off
     in Scotland?” said Iris. “They’re not doing so badly across the tartan
     border, are they?”
     “There’s still not much in
     the way of jobs,” said Sue. “And anyway I’ve got a job. It
     might not be much and it’s a fucking waste of a Master of Arts from
     Trinity College, but it’s better than nothing. And I don’t know anyone
     in Scotland. My parents emigrated from England to Canada fucking years
     ago before the fall of the United States. It’s a fucking nightmare!”
     Sue wasn’t the only person
     to fall foul of the England First policy, but Iris had to
     admit the policy did help the government fulfil its promise to provide
     more jobs for English citizens. As more and more people were deported
     for not possessing the right kind of passport, the jobs they used to
     have became instantly available to properly certified English
     subjects. Iris thought that enough blood had already been squeezed
     from the stone over the last few years. She’d witnessed the departure
     of almost everyone she’d known who hadn’t been born in the UK and,
     most significantly, whose skin-colour and complexion was dark, dusky
     or black. Only those who could show indisputable proof of birth within
     the English counties seemed to be safe. But the range of unwanted
     people was now extended to include any non-national unless, of course,
     they came from a relatively prosperous country like China or Brazil.
     People like Sue who’d believed they were safe because they began
     working in England when the country was part of the Northern European
     Union were now receiving manila envelopes that enclosed their
     deportation orders.
     Iris noticed that many of
     her colleagues would suddenly not appear at the office one day and no
     explanation was ever forthcoming for their non-appearance. Nobody in
     permanent employment would ever put at risk what reputation they had
     to the risk of being labelled a troublemaker.
     One thing that troubled
     Iris was how little news coverage was available on the deportation of
     what must surely be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Scots,
     Welsh and Irish. Predictably neither the national newspapers nor Fox
     News UK made any reference about the fate of the many deportees,
     although they showered constant praise on the government for its
     resolute courage in pursuing the absolutely necessary England
     First policy.
     “About time,” said Stewart
     Platell on Good Morning England on Fox News UK. “There’s a
     good reason why there’s been high unemployment in this proud nation
     and it’s not because English men and women are not willing to work.”
     “England should always
     come first,” said Amanda Hislop on Telegraph TV. “We’ve let ourselves
     accept second-class status to our French and German neighbours for far
     too long.”
     The EBC was less
     forthright but by virtue of being meticulously non-partisan in a
     country where the opposition was mostly silent it had to tread
     carefully. The mild criticism voiced by the people it chose to
     interview in the pursuit of balance was elsewhere either dismissed as
     naive and impractical or damned as unpatriotic. The only news agencies
     that expressed an openly negative opinion came from abroad, but their
     coverage mostly featured cheerful Scottish and Welsh passport holders
     who were returning home from what was characterised as exile in the
     land of weak tea and muffins. This gave the impression that it wasn’t
     so much that such nationals had been deported, but rather that they’d
     at last seen the error of their ways and were happy to return to the
     land of their birth (despite the fact that Wales, Scotland and Ireland
     had no more jobs and a not much better social security system than did
     England).
     “And then there were two,”
     said Iris to Steve when the house they shared was now empty of all the
     other people who’d once lived there. After Sue had left, it was only a
     matter of time until Sudesh, Gerhard, Mohammed and Alexei should also
     leave.
     “I take it that your ID is
     OK,” said Steve.
     “Yes,” said Iris. “And
     yours?”
     “I just hope that the fact
     my grandmother was Irish isn’t held against me,” he said nervously.
     “But you just don’t know, do you? Just how far can these bastards go
     till they’re satisfied?” 

    No Future Volume Three

LXX
     Gabrielle
     2040
      
      
     There
     was a demonstration going on in Oxford’s city centre. Normally,
     Gabrielle wouldn’t be worried by something like that, but the taxi she
     was in would have to pass through it and she was concerned for the
     safety of Ajit, her Chief Farm Manager. Would they notice that he was
     Pakistani?
     “Relax,” said Ghazi who
     was also accompanying her. “Things might be getting heated over there
     in the Kashmir, but these guys aren’t about to be lynching anyone.
     Look at them. They’re a mixture of Muslims and Hindus. It’s the war
     they’re complaining about: not one side of the other.”
     Gabrielle looked more
     closely at the banners on display. There was a reassuring lack of
     factionalism. There was an apparent even-handedness about the
     complaints, but it was surely rare in the heated atmosphere of the
     last few months to find someone whose origin was in the Indian
     subcontinent who didn’t side with either Pakistan or India. Indeed,
     there were plenty of good reasons to attack both parties. Neither
     democratically elected government had been exactly blameless, though
     Gabrielle suspected that in many ways they were just enacting what
     their respective electorates wanted them to do. The carnage in Kashmir
     was enough to upset anyone. Then there were the terrorist bomb attacks
     in Delhi, Mumbai and Lahore. And every day there was yet another story
     of an atrocity of one kind or another committed by Muslim, Hindu and
     Sikh extremists. It was sometimes difficult enough for Gabrielle to
     maintain the stance that it was the war rather than the warring
     nations that was most to blame. 
     Gabrielle enjoyed her
     business trips out of London and there were few cities as delightful
     as Oxford. She was looking forward to staying with Ghazi for a few
     days at the hotel. She just hoped the rooms were properly
     sound-proofed as she’d become a much more voluble lover as the years
     passed. Ajit was staying in his own hotel room. Gabrielle had thought
     about what it would be like to make love with him, but that was just
     never going to happen. Even if he wasn’t already married with
     children, he’d be reluctant to compromise his working relationship
     with his boss. Furthermore, he probably wouldn’t appreciate sex
     without some kind of emotional tie. 
     What a drag!
     Gabrielle saw plenty of
     evidence of a more partisan attitude towards the India-Pakistan War
     after they’d got out of the taxi and entered the grounds of Jared
     Diamond House. This was where she was due to attend a set of seminars
     regarding some of the latest agricultural and biotechnological
     products. There were many posters on the office walls that publicised
     talks and discussions on the war. Some of the accompanying graphic
     images were extremely distressing, but then there was no shortage of
     distasteful photographs arising from the conflict. There were images
     of Muslim children being burnt alive, Hindu mothers being
     disembowelled, and naked cadavers being excavated from trenches that
     had been dug high up in the mountains. It was inevitable that there
     would be strong emotions in such a large population of British people
     whose origins were either India or Pakistan: especially here in
     Oxford. British Asians were, of course, disproportionately represented
     in the world of academia. No other ethnic community in the United
     Kingdom had invested so much effort to get ahead. And, naturally, this
     academic and material success attracted the wrath and envy of another
     community that was less well represented in university circles, but
     Gabrielle knew to exist in Oxford from viewing the hate graffiti
     sprayed on the walls alongside the railway line. Pakis Out! Death
     to Ragheads! Fuck Off Back to Neelum Valley! The last was an
     unusually well-spelled reference to the infamous biochemical atrocity
     that had become a byword for the excesses of modern warfare.
     “I’m delighted you could
     make it,” said Samirah, the promotional manager for Jared Diamond
     House’s Biotech seminars. “I’m sure you’ll agree that we’ve got some
     star speakers and plenty of exciting new ideas. Here are your passes.”
     She handed Gabrielle the
     name tags that they’d have to dangle over their breasts for the
     evening. She hesitated slightly when she saw the names associated with
     Gabrielle’s companions.
     “I hope you don’t mind me
     asking,” Samirah said in a relatively low voice. “Are your companions
     Indian or Pakistani? Not necessarily, of course, by birth, I hope you
     understand, but by...er...allegiance. I’ve been instructed to keep
     Indian and Pakistani nationals apart. There’s been ever so
     much trouble in recent months.”
     Gabrielle understood
     Samirah’s concern but she also knew that her response wasn’t going to
     be very helpful. “One’s Indian and the other’s Pakistani,” she said.
     “I think they would prefer not to sit apart.”
     “I understand,” said
     Samirah thoughtfully while she consulted her notes. “I’ll see what we
     can do.”
     Fortunately, neither Ghazi
     nor Ajit dressed in a way that announced their allegiance or religion
     and most attendees wouldn’t care one way or another. There were a few
     other Asians, even though their presence in the agricultural
     profession had only begun to be widespread in recent years since
     agriculture once more became a prosperous industry and was attracting
     those who in an earlier generation might have been attracted to a
     career in financial services. Like Ghazi, most dressed no differently
     to any other British citizen irrespective of ethnicity, but there were
     some who openly paraded their sympathies. A group of Asian men and
     women with a prominent tilaka on their forehead sat on one side of the
     lecture theatre while on the other side were bearded men adorned in
     loose traditional clothing. They sat as far from each other as was
     possible.
     Gabrielle was grateful
     during the seminar that she’d studied Chemistry and Biology as part of
     her degree in Agriculture and Farm Management. She might not be as
     comfortable as Ajit with the polysyllabic names and she was sure that
     without the aid of the photographs and slides she would have lost the
     thread of the discussion, but she was equally sure that many of the
     others were totally blinded by science. The bullet points that most
     visibly awakened their attention were phrased in terms of profit,
     investment opportunities and the bottom line. They may have been less
     concerned than Gabrielle and certainly Ajit about the less prominently
     highlighted caveats regarding mutation, disease-resistance and
     unproven side-effects. 
     Ghazi was obviously bored
     by the seminars and Gabrielle could see his eyes wander about the
     room. He was clearly attracted to Samirah who, despite her Islamic
     name, was certainly not Pakistani and was so pale-skinned that she may
     well have had no connection whatsoever to North Africa or the Middle
     East. He also had his eyes on an Asian man on the Pakistani side of
     the room who was surrounded by farmers of a more traditional English
     aspect that were so obese that even Ghazi would have hesitated to fuck
     them. Gabrielle knew that Ghazi had a true connoisseur’s nose for
     those men most likely to find him attractive and who’d be game for a
     fuck. Gabrielle wondered whether this young Asian would be sharing
     their hotel room tonight.
     However, this wasn’t what
     happened although there were several times during the rest of the day
     when Ghazi was absent. That was hardly unexpected. There was little
     likelihood that he’d really get much joy from the seminars though, as
     a private investor with many lucrative sidelines, it was almost
     certain that he’d find some money-making opportunity from either the
     information given by the professorial lecturers or, more likely, from
     the contacts he’d make during the coffee breaks. What was rather less
     to be expected was that the Pakistani man towards whom Ghazi’s eyes
     had wandered was also not there.
     Gabrielle wasn’t put out
     that much during the evening when she lazed about in her hotel suite
     watching an ancient Hollywood blockbuster while dressed only in a
     dressing gown. She’d probably have been rather more surprised if Ghazi
     hadn’t found a man or woman with whom to spend his time, but her
     long-time lover was always reliable in one respect. She was more or
     less guaranteed that she would eventually be fucked long and hard by
     him and if he picked up a third party... well, that could be an extra
     treat. In any case, Gabrielle was rather enjoying the preposterous
     superhero nonsense that had once been such standard fare in Hollywood
     when movie budgets were extravagant enough to afford real human
     actors. These days only the excellence of computer graphics disguised
     the reduced expenditure on special effects, although nothing could be
     done to disguise the poor quality of the script-writing.
     When Ghazi did arrive,
     well before midnight, he had the unmistakable odour of sex on his
     body, but as the man or woman with whom he’d so obviously been sharing
     his body wasn’t there Gabrielle was grateful that her lover showered
     off the aroma before joining her on their double bed. She guessed that
     it had been a woman he’d had sex with, simply because he’d not brought
     anyone back with her. Gabrielle wasn’t even slightly attracted to
     women, but thankfully most men, even those who enjoyed having sex with
     other men, were generally attracted to her.
     It wasn’t Samirah, that
     was for sure. When Ghazi and Gabrielle attended the seminar the
     following day, where Ajit was patiently waiting, Samirah betrayed none
     of the tell-tale signs with which Gabrielle was so familiar when her
     wayward lover had made a conquest. It could have been anyone. The
     hotel bar had been full of women the night before, though it was
     anyone’s guess how many were guests and how many were plying for
     trade.
     It wasn’t until much later
     in the day, after lunch in fact, that Gabrielle discovered who it was
     that Ghazi had had sex with. 
     She was chatting with Ajit
     about some of the products that were on display in the foyer. The new
     brands of GM wheat were particularly impressive, although Ajit was
     troubled by the fact that the wheat was sterile. They disagreed about
     the new breeds of goat that were being cloned. Gabrielle was impressed
     by the milk-yield and the quality of the lean meat, whilst Ajit was
     troubled by the fact that the goat’s legs were so short the animal
     could barely lift its stomach off the ground.
     It was then that they
     heard the sounds of shouting and furniture being kicked over that had
     them both wondering whether it was better to run towards the source of
     the commotion to identify the cause or to run away for safety. There
     had been many terrorist incidents in the last few weeks related to the
     war in India and Pakistan: generally directed towards British Asians
     rather than any other ethnic or social group. Mosques had been set
     alight. A Gurdwara in Manchester had been fire-bombed. A
     dormitory that was housing migrant workers from Bangladesh (which
     nation had stayed resolutely neutral in the conflict) had been the
     victim of a suicide bomb. Could this be another terrorist attack?
     Ajit led the way back to
     the lecture theatre with the more cautious Gabrielle trailing behind.
     It was clear that no bombs or guns had been used but the cause of the
     fracas wasn’t immediately obvious. A group of people was gathered
     around the part of the room from which came the unmistakable sound of
     violence, but it was only when Gabrielle got closer that she
     discovered what was happening. It was a fight, but scarcely one that
     was evenly matched. Ghazi was lying prostrate and whimpering on the
     floor while three or four bearded, hooded men were kicking him
     repeatedly in the face, the chest and the groin. 
     And then before the
     security guards could arrive, they ran off. 
     The attackers weren’t
     attendees of the seminar, because all the people who’d been there the
     day before were still in attendance with the exception of the Asian
     man who’d attracted Ghazi’s eye. All the Muslim and Hindu visitors
     were there. No one from either group had been amongst those who’d run
     away and now hidden in Oxford’s crowds of tourists. The Muslim Asians
     who dressed in traditional dress had been so far from the scene of the
     incident that it was obvious that none of them had been active
     participants.
     Ghazi was in a very bad
     state. Gabrielle and Ajit sat with him in an adjacent room while they
     waited for the paramedics to arrive. His nose was broken and several
     teeth had been kicked out. He had difficulty breathing and he clutched
     his chest where it was likely that a rib had been broken. Blood was
     trickling out of his nose and his mouth. A bloody gash was open across
     his forehead. One eye was badly swollen.
     “Why did they attack him?”
     Gabrielle asked Ajit. “Was it just because they thought he was a Hindu
     and they didn’t like Hindus?”
     Ajit shook his head. “I
     don’t think that’s why,” he said sadly. “I don’t think religion or
     nationality had anything to do with it. In any case, since Ghazi sat
     next to me and most people guessed that I might be Pakistani, they
     might well have thought he was one as well. Or at least a third- or
     fourth-generation migrant. No, it wasn’t that at all.”
     “What was it?”
     “I speak Urdu mostly, but
     I also know Sindhi,” said Ajit. “I overheard some of the conversation
     between those with the long beards: you know the ones in traditional
     clothes. What they objected to wasn’t Ghazi’s religion. It was what he
     seems to have been up to with one of the other Muslim men who were
     there yesterday but who I gather from what I heard might also be in
     hospital.”
     “You think it might be
     Ghazi’s sexual behaviour that they objected to?”
     “I don’t know your
     boyfriend very well,” said Ajit very carefully. “He doesn’t confide in
     me about personal matters and most especially not about his sexual
     activity. Nevertheless, I know that he did something yesterday that
     some people clearly didn’t like. And I guess he’s been punished for
     it.”
     “He most certainly has,”
     said Gabrielle as she continued to attempt to staunch the flow of
     blood from Ghazi’s bloody mouth.

    No Future Volume Three

LXXI
     Mark & Molly
     2075
      
      
     There
     was much that was making Mark feel guilty. Here he was—a married man
     with a devoted wife with whom he’d lived for fourteen years and a
     delightful nine-year old daughter—now living every day of the week in
     Oxford: a two hour train journey from Islington. And this was all
     because his employer, Sig Mu Inc., Korea, needed a representative in
     the university town and Mark was aware that he’d been considered to be
     the best man for the job. He also knew that if he showed any
     reluctance, his employer would soon conclude that he was no longer the
     best man for the job he currently held in Central London.
     Not only did Mark feel
     guilt that he was abandoning his familial duties for reasons of
     economic necessity but, worse, that he’d allowed himself to succumb to
     sexual temptation. And this was something he’d sworn never to do. He
     was weak and fallible and terrified that his wife might find out about
     it. Mark didn’t deserve Molly. He’d failed her. And he continued to
     fail her every moment that he spent with Salma.
     It wasn’t that Mark had
     gone out of his way to be unfaithful. Indeed, nothing could have been
     further from his mind. Salma was just the woman who worked next door
     to SM Incorporated’s skeleton office of two men and one young
     secretary. The company that employed her had something vaguely to do
     with the manufacture of nanocarbon polymers. Salma was a scientist by
     profession with qualifications from Harvard and Shanghai and she was
     working in Oxford for reasons rather more of necessity than choice.
     “My home in Damascus was a
     place where one of the Israeli missiles struck. My parents, my
     grandparents, my aunts, my young son: they all died that day. Damascus
     still hasn’t recovered. Syria continues to suffer from the Israeli
     invasion and the puppet dictator they put on the throne. My country
     was once one of the most democratic and liberal republics in the Arab
     world and now it’s nothing more than a vassal to the Jewish state.”
     Mark knew very little
     about Middle Eastern politics. It was all very confusing. He knew
     there were countries in that part of the world that were now nothing
     more than a nuclear wasteland such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and
     Turkmenistan, although he wasn’t sure whether they were strictly
     speaking even in the Middle East.
     “They are mostly
     Muslim,” Salma told him. “But if you come from Syria or any of its
     neighbours you don’t think of yourself as Middle East. That’s
     a sort of Western view of the world. But Israel, Jordan and Lebanon,
     like Syria, are definitely what you might call Middle East.”
     “And Arabia, Yemen, Iraq
     and all those others?”
     “I guess anywhere within
     easy reach of Israeli missiles is in the Middle East.”
     “It’s certainly hotting up
     over there, isn’t it?” Mark remarked.
     “It’s always been bad,”
     said Salma. “There’s been a hundred and thirty years of Israeli
     threat, but now since all that’s left of American support for Israel
     is rhetoric and evangelical volunteers rather than hard cash, there’s
     a chance that the balance of power might swing elsewhere. It’s not the
     only nation with nuclear weapons. Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and the Democratic
     Republics of Arabia could pack a punch if needed. Not to mention
     Turkey, Iran and Iraq.”
     “You don’t think there will
     be another nuclear war, do you? Surely the last two were bad enough.”
     “They say things always
     come in threes,” said Salma reflectively. “But I hope not. What hope
     would there be for Syria under the missile flight paths? My hope is
     that democracy will return to Israel and that the Israeli people will
     vote for peace.”
     “Is that likely?”
     “There’s not been a proper
     democracy in Israel for over fifty years,” said Salma. “But stranger
     things have happened. Remember North Korea. Or for that matter, how
     things turned out in the Congo.”
     Mark nodded sagely. Things
     quite often didn’t happen the way people expected, however much it
     sometimes seemed that history was playing itself out in a sort of
     pre-ordained way. The Anglo-Saxon economies were in disarray. The
     climate was getting steadily more unstable. And every day more and
     more things that were once affordable were becoming prohibitively
     expensive.
     And that included
     accommodation.
     Mark was now a tenant in
     two properties. He was paying rent for the two-bedroom flat near
     Holloway that he shared with his wife and daughter. That wasn’t cheap,
     though Molly’s job with Hackney Borough Council did help pay the
     bills. His other home where he slept five nights a week was a single
     room in a large house that he shared with a mixture of mostly young
     people who kept nothing like the same hours as he did. They never did
     the washing up and left the kitchen in a shocking state. The bathroom
     constantly stank as a result of the antique plumbing. And Mark didn’t
     feel comfortable when he sat in the living room with the other
     housemates while they smoked dope, snorted lines and watched moronic
     quiz shows. After having lived as a husband and father for so long, he
     hated having to share a house. The only retreat his bedroom afforded
     him was when he pushed his ear-plugs as deep into his ears as he could
     and pulled a duvet over his shoulders to keep out the draught that
     whistled through the poorly-fitting windows.
     Mark soon found that
     Salma’s small bedsit was much more comfortable than either his Oxford
     or his Islington home. Her ex-husband had left her a regular stipend
     that was enough to supplement her income and to allow her to live
     relatively comfortably. Although her bedsit wasn’t situated in the
     best part of Oxford, it was near enough to the city centre that she
     could walk to work and not have to squeeze into the crowded buses. Her
     neighbours were quiet, the flat was tastefully decorated and the bed
     was gloriously inviting.
     Mark stood by the window
     of her apartment through which he could glimpse the city walls that
     kept gown and town apart. After all these months in Oxford, he’d not
     once ventured within the walls but he could see from Salma’s window
     that there was much that would be worth visiting if he should purchase
     a tourist pass for the day. Perhaps that was something he could do
     together with Molly and Monica if they ever came to spend the weekend
     in Oxford.
     Thinking of his wife
     brought a fresh spasm of guilt to Mark. He glanced back at Salma. She
     and Molly were both women in their thirties, although Salma was
     somewhat closer to the end of that decade than Molly. She was also a
     larger woman. Although not exactly fat or obese, she could best be
     described as chunky. She was taller, rounder and, in places, rather
     flabbier. But she was also, Mark had to shamefacedly admit, a rather
     more passionate lover than Molly who often seemed distracted during
     their lovemaking. 
     Especially in recent
     months.
     “We shouldn’t,” said Mark
     ineffectually as Salma dragged him down to lie beside her on the
     luxurious bed in a room that had none of the icy chill that permeated
     Mark’s own room. “It’s not right. What would my wife think?”
     “Shut up about your wife
     already,” said Salma in a voice that sometimes betrayed the Jewish
     influence of one half of her complex lines of ancestry. “You’re with
     me now. Or would you rather be somewhere else?”
     Mark had to admit he’d
     much rather not.
     And after a lovemaking
     where Mark’s face was sometimes pressed to Salma’s voluptuous bosom
     and where his penis was lodged deep inside her vagina’s warm liquid
     grip, the couple lay beside each other gasping from the exhaustion
     that was inevitable for two people who never did nearly enough
     exercise: especially not Mark since he’d had to abandon his bicycle in
     London. 
     “You’ll stay the night
     won’t you?” asked Salma.
     “Of course,” said Mark who
     didn’t want to face the perilous journey back home after dark to the
     outer suburbs of Oxford. He was also more than happy to stay where he
     was on the firm mattress under a warm duvet pressed against a cuddly
     woman in a draught-free bedroom. It was bliss of a kind that he’d come
     to appreciate ever more every time when he returned to his noisy,
     chilly flat where he had to roll around the mattress to avoid a loose
     spring pronging into his arse.
     However, when he settled
     back into Salma’s arms under her all-embracing duvet he was suddenly
     awoken by a loud commotion from the street below that was still
     audible through the windows’ double glazing. It was the sound of
     shouts and yells, accompanied by rather unsettling thuds. Salma
     immediately jumped out of bed and rushed to the window.
     “What is it?” asked Mark
     who expected Salma to blame it on drunks returning from the many pubs
     outside Oxford city’s walls where the prostitutes and drug-peddlers
     who were banned from within could ply their trade more freely.
     “I don’t know,” said
     Salma. “There seems to be a kind of attack on the house opposite.”
     “An attack?”
     “Well, it’s difficult to
     tell from here. But it looks like people breaking and entering the
     house and there seems to have been some looting.”
     “Shall I call the police?”
     asked Mark who rolled over the bed to the small cabinet where his
     mobile phone was lying with his glasses and wristwatch. 
     Salma nodded. “It’s number
     16,” she said. “Tell them to come quickly.”
     It was actually over half
     an hour until the police finally arrived and then it was just two of
     them on their bicycles. They were fully armed and they immediately ran
     into the house, but they were too late. The people who’d broken into
     the house had left a long time before and had shown no sign of haste
     as they did so. They carried the more portable loot away with them
     such as television screens and computers, but as they were also
     carrying baseball bats and other improvised weapons neither Mark nor
     anyone else were inclined to offer them any resistance.
     “House robbery,” said
     Mark, as if it summed it all up. “That’s not very nice. And right
     under our noses.”
     “It might be a little more
     than that,” said Salma thoughtfully. “Oxford’s got a sizeable Muslim
     population and a lot of them are Arabs. I guess their parents or
     grandparents came to the country when there was plenty of oil money
     sloshing around the Arabian Peninsula. And I sort of know the people
     opposite. They were an old Jewish couple who were active in Oxford’s
     Jewish community. The man always wore a skull-cap. His wife wore one
     of those weird wigs. They weren’t exactly circumspect about their
     religion. Not that they’d ever felt the need to be.”
     “You think that them being
     Jewish and there being so many Muslims in Oxford is why their house
     was attacked?” 
     “It does seem a reasonable
     hypothesis, doesn’t it?” said Salma. “Every time the Israelis
     perpetrate an atrocity of one kind of another in their undeclared war
     against their neighbours there’s some kind of retaliation by
     steamed-up Arabs somewhere else. You saw on the news the other day
     about what happened in Petra, didn’t you? Thousands of years of
     history went up in smoke along with those cowering Palestinian
     guerrilla fighters.”
     Mark didn’t really have an
     opinion on the matter and he was more eager to burrow under the duvet
     than discuss the robbery. Several more police arrived on their
     bicycles, all well-armed and fully protected. Half an hour later, an
     ambulance leisurely pulled up into the road and paramedics ran into
     the house. It was only when stretchers were brought out with sheets
     covering the faces that Mark felt he could at last return to bed
     without appearing to be insufficiently concerned about the welfare of
     Salma’s neighbours.
     “Do you think they were
     murdered?” Mark wondered.
     “I don’t think we’ll ever
     know,” said Salma. “The news media doesn’t bother itself with
     incidents like that anymore.”
     Mark remained troubled the
     following morning when he and Salma left for work. His pleasure at not
     having had to catch a bus and having rested in bed an extra hour was
     compromised when the couple crossed the road to see what had happened
     the night before.
     Most of the windows were
     smashed and through the shattered glass Mark could see a degree of
     reckless vandalism that was far beyond what was necessary. The door to
     the house had been pulled off its hinges with a metal bar. And through
     the open doorway Mark could see peculiar symbols spray-painted over
     the hallway walls.
     “Is that Arabic?” Mark
     asked Salma whom he’d reckoned would know.
     She nodded. “I can’t read
     it all from here,” she said. “But it’s not a quotation from the
     Koran.”
     “What does it say?”
     “It doesn’t appear to be
     especially complimentary towards Israel,” she commented. 
      

    No Future Volume Three

LXXII
     Alex
     2034
      
      
     It
     was several weeks since Alex had last travelled outside of London. As
     always the exorbitant cost was covered by business expenses, although
     this time there was no flight across the Atlantic or toward the Far
     East. A train ride north from Paddington to the University City of
     Oxford, even first class, wasn’t quite the work junket that Alex had
     now got used to. But he hoped there’d be plenty of good quality wine
     and perhaps a few class lines to compensate him for the trouble. 
     Alex still wasn’t really
     sure what it was that the company on whose executive board he served
     was actually in the business of manufacturing, but usually that wasn’t
     much of a handicap. Most of what was discussed in board meetings was
     pretty much interchangeable between one business and another. But this
     particular excursion to attend a seminar hosted by Professor Sigrid
     Smith, the universally acclaimed expert in the discipline, was a risky
     one. Alex didn’t dare expose his ignorance by questioning his need to
     attend.
     All the same, Alex was
     gratified to see that Sue from Marketing was also attending. This
     pleased him in two ways. One was that she would almost certainly be as
     ignorant as he was about whatever it was that Professor Smith would be
     talking about. Alex wouldn’t be the only who’d have to blag his way
     through the day. The other reason was that she was eminently fuckable
     and Alex had a notion that he stood a rather better chance than his
     colleagues in discovering the truth of this supposition. 
     She was an ambitious young
     woman of oriental origin whose ascent from a minor marketing role to
     the status of one of the Marketing Team’s rising stars in less than a
     year was almost certainly assisted by some irregular persuasion. She
     showed no reluctance in showing off her assets to their best
     advantage, although in truth there was more suggestion than substance
     to them. She was very thin, which in an age of generally overweight
     women wasn’t a bad thing, and she advertised her beauty by propping up
     her bra and keeping open the top few buttons of her blouse. As a
     senior member of the Executive Board who was divorced and quite
     clearly available, Alex was aware that he would be the perfect target
     for a predatory woman on the prowl.
     “South Korea,” Sue said in
     response to Alex’s almost inevitable question. “Not that I’ve ever
     been there. I’ve lived in London all my life.”
     Alex could have guessed
     this from her liberal use of glottal stops.
     “I’ve never been there,
     either,” Alex said. “So that makes two of us.”
     The fact that his
     incredibly weak attempt at humour was received so warmly suggested to
     Alex just how sound his instincts were on the matter of Sue’s
     availability. He’d learned in the last several years that progress in
     management was actually hindered rather than helped by an intelligent
     sense of humour or the ability to crack genuinely amusing jokes.
     Anything that resembled genuine wit was immediately suspect.
     “I wouldn’t bother,” said
     Sue, in what was possibly an ill-judged attempt to show that she
     wasn’t simply the bimbo Alex hoped she was. “Life in Korea isn’t so
     good these days now that the North keeps lobbing bombs over the
     border.”
     “Well, you wouldn’t want
     to live in a country like North Korea, would you?” said Alex who was
     now wondering how to move the conversation on without exposing his
     ignorance about international affairs. Alex looked ahead of him while
     the taxi weaved through the traffic. He didn’t want to give the
     impression that he was flirting as Sue wasn’t the only one with whom
     he was sharing the cab. There were also two male colleagues who were
     genuinely looking forward to Professor Smith’s seminar. “Famine.
     Oppression. Even plague. It’s almost mediaeval. Just like Oxford
     itself. There can’t be many cities in the world with as much mediaeval
     stuff in it as Oxford.”
     “I’ve never been to the
     city before,” said Sue. “I hope the seminar isn’t going to be too
     technical. I’m not sure I could stay awake.”
     Sue was saying all the
     right things, but Alex could scarcely admit to his own very similar
     fears. Maybe she guessed how little the Senior Executive knew and was
     showing solidarity, but Alex had to be cautious about admitting this.
     “I’ll explain anything
     that you need to know,” he lied. 
     “When will there be an
     opportunity for that?” Sue asked.
     Steady on, thought Alex.
     Not so fast. And definitely not so obvious.
     “I’m sure there’ll be a
     break in our busy schedule,” he said.
     The seminar was at least
     as boring and confusing as Alex feared. The more confusing it was, the
     more difficult it was for Alex to stay awake. He periodically glanced
     over to Sue who, like him, was near the back of the lecture theatre
     and evidently more accomplished than him in appearing to be alert.
     Occasionally his glance met hers and Alex was sure that there was a
     flicker of a smile on her lips.
     “I think I just about
     understood some of that,” she said to Alex when he and the many other
     experts and executives gathered together around the sandwiches and
     coffee that was laid out for them in the corridor outside the lecture
     theatre.
     Alex had to be careful in
     declaring what he understood. “I’ll need to study my notes in more
     depth until I come to a considered decision,” he said. “But it was
     certainly fascinating.”
     He was in an awkward
     position. He couldn’t be seen to be spending too much time with Sue,
     but he really didn’t want to talk to any of his other
     colleagues. The risk that he might betray his ignorance to them was
     much greater than it was with Sue. It was an awkward dilemma best
     resolved by wandering off to the loo, even though he wasn’t really in
     very much need.
     It was while returning
     from a lavatory that was nearly five minutes’ walk away that he again
     met Sue. He didn’t believe that it was a genuine coincidence.
     “Goodness,” he said. “We
     shouldn’t keep meeting like this.”
     This was another weak joke
     and a very old cliché, but precisely right for the occasion. Sue
     laughed appreciatively. “Are we likely to be bumping into each other
     at the Holiday Inn?” she asked disingenuously.
     So that’s where everyone
     else is staying, thought Alex. At least, he wasn’t one of those who’d
     have to slum it. “I shouldn’t think so,” he said with a soft laugh.
     “I’m staying at the Sphinx. Unless you’re there to sample what the bar
     has to offer after dinner at eight I very much doubt it.”
     Sue nodded and then
     discreetly switched the subject of conversation. “I hope the next hour
     or so of Professor Smith’s seminar is as interesting as the first,”
     she said enthusiastically.
     “Indeed,” said Alex.
     In actual fact, it was
     considerably more bewildering. The graphics the professor exhibited on
     the screen might have clarified his thesis for the other attendees but
     for Alex they might as well have been abstract expressionist
     paintings. He passed the time by speculating whether he would meet Sue
     in the lounge bar of the Sphinx Hotel that evening. When that topic
     was exhausted he tried to find as many anagrams as he could from the
     words printed on the screen. He’d have been happier surfing the
     internet or doing a crossword on his laptop, but that would merely
     reveal the extent of his boredom.
     Alex was aware that
     although his increasing years hadn’t been kind to him, his attraction
     to women like Sue had actually increased over time. His enhanced
     appeal was almost certainly better correlated with his status as a
     Senior Executive than it was with any aesthetic consideration. It was
     reassuring that as long as he didn’t fall out with anyone in the
     organisation more senior than him—and there weren’t many of those
     now—his remuneration would continue to rise at a rate entirely
     unrelated to his effort or effectiveness. The less he did, the more he
     could take credit for not interfering with the achievements of his
     manifestly more gifted and rather less well remunerated professional
     staff. Senior management was more about never doing anything stupid
     than about doing anything clever. In fact, there was so much potential
     hazard in trying to be clever that the best policy was never to do
     anything at all.
     “Fancy meeting you here,”
     said Alex when after his satisfying four course meal and a half-bottle
     of wine he wandered into the lounge bar and, as expected, discovered
     Sue sitting on a high stool by the bar where she was sipping on a soft
     drink through a straw.
     “I was bored,” said Sue.
     “I remembered that you said that the bar at the Sphinx was worth
     visiting.”
     “Did I?” said Alex who in
     truth would never have recommended the bar to anyone. “The drinks are
     a bit expensive though. Would you like to share a bottle of wine?”
     Sue nodded.
     “Red or white?” Alex
     asked.
     “You choose.”
     It was obvious what Sue
     really wanted. It was all part of the deal. She wanted the preferment
     that someone like Alex could provide that would bypass the obstacles
     and hazards that normally stood in the way of a talented young woman
     in a meritocratic organisation On the other hand, what Alex wanted, of
     course, was sex. The art of the exercise was to pretend otherwise. 
     It was also necessary that
     Alex should moderate his alcohol intake. This was partly so that he
     wouldn’t say something to this ambitious young woman that could later
     be used against him, but also so that he’d be able to perform
     adequately later on without the help of either prescribed medication
     or the coke that he’d stashed away in his suitcase. Unfortunately for
     Alex, Sue was a woman experienced at the same game. She sipped her red
     wine very slowly and constantly tried to pass the conversation back to
     Alex rather than for him to let her to do the talking. Although both
     parties knew what the outcome of this encounter would be, the process
     of getting there could prove to be fraught. 
     Alex couldn’t discuss his
     chequered history with women as this would compromise his position. He
     most certainly couldn’t discuss anything related to his job as he
     needed to maintain the mystique associated with his considerable
     salary. And he certainly couldn’t take the risk of discussing the
     seminar.
     Fortunately, there was a
     television in the lounge bar permanently tuned to Fox News UK with
     helpful subtitles displayed across the bottom of the screen.
     “It’s certainly hotting up
     in your ancestral home,” Alex remarked to ensure that conversation
     kept away from any danger zones.
     “My ancestral home?”
     wondered Sue, with a slightly alarmed expression.
     “Korea.”
     “Hotting up?”
     “It’s just an expression,”
     said Alex who was now regretting his remark. “You can see it on the
     news. The North Koreans have just launched a whole load of missiles
     into Seoul.”
     “Missiles?” 
     Alex was really regretting
     that he’d not chosen a different subject. “Conventional ones, I’m
     sure,” he elaborated.
     For the next quarter of an
     hour or so there was no conversation between the two of them while Sue
     focused her attention on the screen. Alex could see that matters were
     serious in Seoul, although the film footage was no different than that
     shown for any of the other countless conflicts across the world. From
     the Middle East to West Africa, from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego, from
     Lithuania to China, it was always the same kind of news. Some
     catastrophe, either human or natural, that caused buildings to
     collapse. People running in panic. Emergency vehicles gathered around
     bloodied bodies. Shaky videos recorded on bystanders’ mobile phones.
     One disaster was much the same as another.
     “Do you have family in
     Seoul?” Alex asked sympathetically, when the news switched to a
     football story about Stoke becoming champions in the Premier League.
     Sue nodded.
     “Close family?”
     “You could say that,” she
     answered sorrowfully.
     Shit! Was this whole
     evening going to be wasted?
     “You seem to be rather
     upset by it all. Would you like to rest somewhere more relaxing?” Alex
     asked sympathetically. His hotel suite with its en-suite living room
     and luxury Jacuzzi was perfect for receiving visitors.
     Sue nodded. 
     Alex inwardly cheered. He
     was going to get the fuck he’d been longing for the whole day after
     all. 
     “I’ll bring the wine with
     us,” he said as he stood up and pulled the bottle out of its ice
     bucket. “Mustn’t let it go to waste.”
     Sue still looked troubled,
     but Alex knew that she no more wanted to waste her time than he did. 
     “Show me the way,” she
     said.
      

    No Future Volume Three

     LXXIII
     Tamara
     2098
      
      
      
     Whatever
     it was that had defined Tamara’s Jewish identity over the years, it
     wasn’t her religious faith. Nor had it been her need to belong to the
     Jewish community. Her identity was more intangible. It was the sense
     of a shared tradition and what had been until recently a shared
     nationality. She’d never troubled herself about her Jewish heritage
     when she’d actually lived in Israel. It was only after she’d abandoned
     the nation of her birth to radioactive dust and vengeful Palestinians
     that she’d become concerned about what it meant to be Jewish.
     So what was she now doing,
     travelling south to the outskirts of London on a dilapidated
     horse-drawn coach with eighteen other Jews, most of whom devoutly
     religious, to a kibbutz that had only recently been founded? What had
     persuaded her to seek refuge within her national and ethnic identity?

     Tamara had made a genuine
     effort to settle down to life as a care worker in Morecambe, but it
     could never be something she’d really want to do for the rest of her
     life. Tamara didn’t need reminding that it was a job and that
     for a refugee from the Middle East such a thing wasn’t easy to find,
     but she was too easily disgusted by the needs of the elderly and
     incontinent to feel at ease in the nursing profession. Surely there
     was more to life than this?
     And then Tamara heard that
     there was.
     Many of the exiled Israeli
     citizens scattered throughout the Republic of England had concluded
     that there was no future for them in the refugee camps that the
     English government had grudgingly set up to shelter the unfortunate
     victims of foreign wars. The English had more than enough to worry
     about without the additional burden of thousands of stateless
     Israelis, radioactive Palestinians and famished Jordanians. The only
     possible course of action was for the tribes of Israel settled amongst
     the dark satanic mills to build a new Jerusalem in England’s grey and
     drizzly land.
     And one such place was
     Epping Forest. Once upon a time it had been a London park, but the law
     no longer had the power or authority to protect common land from
     settlement.  The police force was overwhelmed by the rather more
     immediate problems of famine, plague, fire and civil disorder. The
     rule of law was no more respected or observed than the institutions of
     government that still debated great matters within Westminster City’s
     reinforced concrete walls.
     Tamara had made her
     northward journey from Surrey to Lancaster in far less time than it
     would now take her to return south, but that earlier journey had been
     paid for by the St. John-Easton estate. In comparison to her current
     travelling conditions, the journey by maglev train from London to
     Manchester and then by steam train to the faded seaside town of
     Morecambe had been one of unparalleled luxury. Tamara felt more grand
     than she’d ever felt before in the company of those so wealthy that
     they had no difficulty in affording such an expensive mode of
     transport. The journey south, however, was by a makeshift wagon that
     had once been a diesel-powered coach now to be pulled all the way by
     four sturdy farm horses whose real worth would be proven when set to
     ploughing the fields at the kibbutz towards which the travellers were
     headed. The roads on which they would travel were mostly pot-holed and
     sometimes barely roads at all, but at least this route along England’s
     decaying road network was cost-free. It was far too expensive to use
     the motorways that were generally for the exclusive use of commercial
     transport and the relatively wealthy. And even if cost was no
     obstacle, a vehicle such as the one in which Tamara was travelling
     would never have been permitted through a tollbooth. 
     The other travellers on
     the coach came from all around Lancaster and the Lake District. Like
     Tamara, they’d heard about the expedition from Tobias who was the
     driver currently sat on the coach roof and urging the horses on. He’d
     travelled all the way from Epping Forest to the far North West of
     England on a mission to find suitable new recruits to the kibbutz. In
     fact, everyone was suitable as long as they were also Jewish. 
     Tamara walked from
     Morecambe to Lancaster on her first free day after she’d heard about
     Tobias’ expedition from a co-worker. It was there that the man in whom
     she would later place her trust was camped out along with the horses
     that he’d bought from a local farmer and the coach that he’d
     requisitioned and re-engineered. Although she’d always been sceptical
     about living and working in a kibbutz, Tamara recognised that she now
     felt a real need to reassert her national identity. And after so long
     in the wilderness, she also wanted to live amongst people of the same
     culture as herself.
     “There’s no religious
     aspect to it,” said Tobias. “The only thing we have in common is that
     we are all Jewish and that we want to preserve our Jewish identity.”
     Tamara could see that
     although Tobias wore a skull cap, he sported none of the other symbols
     of an orthodox Jew. He didn’t wear a black suit or a white shirt. Nor
     did he have long sidelocks.
     “What about political
     affiliation?” Tamara wondered. She would rather associate with goyim
     than spend time with Likud supporters who still blamed the misfortune
     that had befallen the Israeli state on anyone and everyone other than
     the Israeli people. Tamara had little patience for those who would
     happily blame Arabs, Americans and Europeans, but never questioned the
     conduct of the Israeli government over the preceding century.
     “As I say, all we have in
     common is our Jewish heritage,” said Tobias. “There will always be a
     variety of opinion about the cause for the Second Diaspora, but unless
     we make an effort to respect our differences then as a people we’ll
     never recover from this setback.”
     So Tamara was now gathered
     together with new companions whose characters were exactly as
     disparate as the greater scattered Jewish community. Some were men,
     some were women and some were children. Some were orthodox and
     conservative. Others had opinions rather closer to Tamara’s. But
     Tobias was right. All the travellers had in common with one another
     was their Jewish heritage. 
     Tamara had plenty of
     opportunity to get to know her companions as the coach trundled south
     along England’s wretched roads. Not one of her companions shared the
     same opinion on the fate and fortune of the Jewish people with anyone
     else. By all accounts, the last two decades following the nuclear war
     had been universally traumatic. Tamara’s experience was by no means
     unique, even though most of the others had lived in England for many
     more years than her. In fact, by virtue of having emigrated from the
     Promised Land within only the last decade Tamara had the distinction
     of being the person on the coach with the most recent connection with
     the land of their shared heritage.
     “You still had to carry
     radiation masks after all those years?” commented Aaron whose parents
     had left Israel long before even the firebombing of Damascus.
     “The main worry wasn’t
     radiation,” said Tamara. “We were more worried about the Palestinian
     gangs who’d shoot you as soon as they saw you, unless you were a
     woman. In that case, you’d be shot only after you were raped.”
     “Gruesome! How did you
     cope?”
     “We never went anywhere
     without a gun.” 
     “Rather like now,” said
     Aaron who nodded his head towards the armoury of rifles, baseball bats
     and pitchforks that Tobias had loaded onto the bus.
     “Exactly.” 
     It was indisputable that
     Tobias’ precautions were necessary. Indeed, nobody would have agreed
     to accompany him on the arduous trek south unless they were well
     armed. England was a lawless country at the best of times, but the
     general population displayed so much naked resentment towards
     immigrants that a coachload of Jews would be easy prey to almost any
     kind of violent gang. The gangs to be most feared were those
     associated with the Muslim communities of big cities such as
     Manchester, Birmingham and Swindon. It was for that reason that the
     journey deliberately skirted the large conurbations and took a rather
     circuitous route.
     The journey was an
     opportunity for Tamara to get a view of the English countryside that
     she’d never seen before. Her previous excursions across the Republic
     had been at a much faster pace, but now she was able to appreciate the
     fields and pastures of rural England where rustic labourers were busy
     tilling the soil. Horses much like the ones pulling the coach were
     dragging ploughs through the mud. Occasionally, a dog or small child
     would run out from a village and chase after the coach but generally
     they were left alone. Sometimes stones would be thrown at the coach by
     idle youths who didn’t have much else to do when they weren’t working
     in the fields or hunting deer or feral cattle in the woods. 
     At night, Tobias would
     find a parking spot by the road that was already populated by other
     travellers’ makeshifts carriages and rickshaws. One of the men would
     take up guard duty. Tamara wasn’t too upset when her half-hearted
     attempt at volunteering for duty was rebuffed. Although it was
     definitely sexist to assume that a man was better than a woman at
     scaring off would-be aggressors, the risk from armed gangs was
     absolutely genuine.
     Although there was other
     traffic on the road, the roads were nothing like as busy as they’d
     been in an earlier age when people routinely drove to out-of-town
     shopping centres and sped constantly along the nation’s highways and
     by-ways. Those were the days when fuel was cheaper, incomes were
     higher and the motorways hadn’t yet all been privatised. Nowadays, the
     traffic was mostly animal- or bicycle-driven, though there sometimes
     passed the occasional gasoil and battery powered vehicle, mostly
     hastening as fast as it could from the motorway to a private gated
     community. On one occasion, a cavalcade of motorbikes and heavily
     armoured black vehicles came thundering by. At first Tamara wondered
     whether it was an army convoy of the kind that was so common in Israel
     when she was a child at the start of the nuclear war, but it was
     nothing more than a wealthy landlord or Chief Executive Officer
     returning from his office in a Business Park to a mansion somewhere in
     the Cheshire countryside. Such vehicles were designed for civilian use
     but were often accompanied by well-armed motorcycle outriders. It
     wasn’t at all unknown for an armed gang of highwaymen to seize a
     passing carriage and demand a ransom.
     When the coach was flagged
     down as it passed by the outskirts of Stafford, Tamara naturally
     feared that it was by a gang of highway robbers. The men were clearly
     fully tooled up and it was obvious that the travellers wouldn’t be
     able to put up much of a fight against them. Tobias removed his
     skull-cap and jumped off the coach to address the armed men. Tamara
     could see through the cracked windscreen glass that the men were
     mostly young. Only a minority were white-skinned. Some were black and
     some, Tamara noticed with a thud of dread at the back of her throat,
     wore head-dresses and sported thick beards. They were almost certainly
     Muslims, although at least one was a Sikh. 
     While Tobias was talking
     to the men his girlfriend, Uma, walked up and down the coach and
     talked to each passenger individually. She spoke urgently and in a low
     voice. Tamara noticed that Talman—a Hassidic Jew with a black hat and
     sidelocks—was especially agitated. Uma didn’t engage in further
     discussion with him and strode swiftly along the bus to the next
     person.
     “What’s going on?” asked
     Tamara when Uma finally got to her.
     “We don’t think there’s
     anything to worry about,” said Uma. “Especially not you, Tammy.
     There’s been a local war between gang-members in Stafford and in
     Telford in neighbouring Shropshire. Several people have been murdered
     and these people are simply guarding the town against what they call
     the Tellies.”
     “Tellies?”
     “Apparently people in
     Telford watch a lot of television,” said Uma. “However, we still have
     to be careful. You must have noticed that there are several Muslims in
     the gang. They’re of Pakistani origin I think, so they won’t have a
     specific grudge against Israel, but they’re young and potentially
     hot-headed.”
     “So...?”
     “I don’t think I have to
     spell it out,” said Uma. “Two or more of them will almost certainly
     board the bus to search for Tellies. They’ll probably be rude and they
     might ask awkward questions. What you mustn’t do, whatever happens, is
     make apparent to them that we’re a coachload of Jews who’re travelling
     south to a kibbutz. And we most certainly mustn’t admit to being
     Israeli. It’s all the excuse they need.”
     Tamara nodded. It was what
     she expected.
     It was ironic that Tamara
     had joined this expedition in the hope that she would no longer need
     to deny her Jewish identity, but now found that this was something she
     still had to do. 

    No Future Volume Three

LXXIV
     Alex
     2035
      
     “My
     people will never be held ransom by its neighbours,” said
     Tabitha as she sprawled beside Alex on his roomy double bed. 
     Alex glanced towards the
     television that was burbling on in the background as it had been for
     the whole time that he and his fellow senior executive director were
     enjoying the pleasures of one another’s luxuriant flesh and stomach
     bulges that was the inevitable penalty of too many business lunches.
     The news story was about the stand-off in the Korean peninsula between
     the belligerent North and the ever conciliatory South.
     “Your people?”
     asked Alex, who was somewhat puzzled by Tabitha’s statement. What had
     this to with the staff in the Strategy Division of which she was
     director?
     “Israel,” said Tabitha.
     “Israel?” wondered Alex.
     “What’s that got to do with anything?”
     “Fuck sake, Alex,” said
     Tabitha with obvious irritation. “It’s got everything to do with
     almost everything you can think of.” She returned Alex’s bewildered
     expression with something that approximated to understanding pity.
     “You really don’t get it, do you?”
     “Get what?”
     “Did you even know I was
     an Israeli citizen?” she asked.
     “No, I didn’t,” said Alex
     who’d never once thought about it.
     “Well, that figures,” said
     Tabitha. “You really don’t pay any attention, do you? I’d have
     thought it was obvious.”
     “I never think about
     people’s nationalities,” said Alex. Although this wasn’t always
     absolutely true, it was certainly so with regards to Tabitha. In fact,
     until very recently Alex hadn’t thought much about Tabitha at all. 
     She was a relatively new
     member of Talpha Apps’ executive board and Alex was taken as much
     unawares as everyone else by her rapid rise in status in the
     organisation. Within a few months of not having achieved much of
     demonstrable value she now boasted a salary that wasn’t far short of
     Alex’s and had gained the respect of the rest of the board; although
     this was more for her decisiveness and energy than her professional
     expertise. She’d recognised that Alex as a potential kindred spirit
     and without doubt as a man who couldn’t resist the tempting offer of a
     fuck when it came his way.
     Tabitha was almost
     certainly the oldest woman Alex had ever had sex with although,
     depressingly, she wasn’t actually very much older than him.
     Nonetheless, of the two of them she was the one who’d made the better
     job at concealing the ravages of the passing years. While Alex’s
     paunch was now too obvious to hide under a belt hoisted up high and
     the bald spot on his crown was too large to be hidden under a discreet
     comb-over, Tabitha had compensated for the increasing kilograms of
     flesh with expensive pedicures, sympathetic skin therapy and a subtle
     and intelligent use of make-up. She was now encouraging Alex to take
     that long-resisted step of taking advantage of his executive gym
     membership. After all, it cost the company a fortune just to keep
     renewing it for him.
     “I was born an Israeli
     citizen,” said Tabitha. “I did my military service after graduating.
     I’m proud to hold an Israeli passport. And I can tell you that if we
     were pushed around by the Syrians, the Jordanians, the Lebanese,
     or—God help us all—the Palestinians in anything like the way the North
     Koreans do their southern neighbours there’d be a smell of burning
     flesh from one end of the Middle East to the other. It’s because
     Israel never compromises, never stands down, never shows weakness,
     that we remain strong and why we shall never be in the same sorry
     state as South Korea.”
     Alex wasn’t the sort of
     man who’d expend effort on an argument he knew he could never win. It
     was obvious that Tabitha would countenance no difference of opinion,
     although Alex had known many people, most of them women, who expressed
     rather more sympathy for the Palestinians whose houses were
     bulldozered and whose cities were bombed than for an Israel bristling
     with nukes. However, he couldn’t resist mentioning how much the
     military support from the United States was critical to Israel’s
     survival.
     “That is a typical
     Anglo-Saxon opinion,” Tabitha almost spat out in defiance. “It’s the
     opinion that the guilt and shame of allowing the Holocaust to happen
     was the sole reason for the foundation of the State of Israel. It’s an
     opinion that belittles the achievements of a proud nation united by
     race and religion on the pretence that it’s secured entirely by
     American money and American votes. Even when America falls, Israel
     will stand tall. It is our destiny. It can never be otherwise.”
     Alex still wasn’t sure how
     much or whether at all he would benefit from having a relationship
     with a work colleague, especially one as senior as Tabitha. It was
     less difficult to see how Tabitha might benefit from a relationship
     with him. It did her no harm at all to embed herself in a position
     with regards to the rest of the Executive Board from which it would be
     impossible to dislodge her. It would also benefit her if her
     relationship resulted in marriage. It would double her disposable
     wealth more or less at a stroke. And it would be even more to her
     benefit if she later became the wronged partner in a subsequent
     divorce. But despite knowing this, Alex wasn’t a man who could easily
     turn down an opportunity for sex even with a lover as formidable as
     Tabitha.
     Alex was drawn to the very
     thing that also most troubled him about having a relationship with a
     woman who was his social equal on so many levels. His relationships in
     the last couple of years had been a series of short liaisons with much
     younger women who were totally unsuitable as long-term partners. In
     most cases these relationships were predicated pretty much on
     exchanging sex for money and status, so they weren’t too unlike using
     the services of prostitutes that since Alex no longer had any
     difficulty in affording he was also more often tempted by. At least a
     relationship with Tabitha wasn’t compromised by disparities of age and
     income that were too obvious.
     “I’m not sure,” said Alex
     a few days later when Tabitha remarked that they should formalise
     their relationship by making it public knowledge. “Isn’t there
     something a bit wrong about someone who’s not at all Jewish marrying
     someone who is? Aren’t there restrictions on that sort of thing?”
     “It would have to be a
     proper Jewish wedding,” speculated Tabitha more to herself than anyone
     else. “If it got that far, of course. And you’d have to get
     circumcised.”
     “You’re kidding right?”
     said an alarmed Alex.
     “Do I look like I’m
     kidding?” asked Tabitha whose face betrayed no trace of humour
     whatsoever. She pulled at the foreskin of Alex’s limp penis as it
     trailed over his thigh. “This thing is absolutely disgusting!
     If we were to stay together, I’d have to insist you did something
     about it. And it’s not a religious thing, either. It’s just
     commonsense hygiene.”
     “Is it?” asked Alex, who
     nevertheless wondered why, if that was so, that no one had ever
     mentioned it to him before.
     Although Alex didn’t know
     it at the time, this exchange was to be the highpoint of his
     relationship with Tabitha. Over the subsequent weeks, he became
     increasingly aware that Tabitha’s attitude towards him had begun to
     cool. It was no longer Tabitha who would make arrangements for them to
     meet at a restaurant, wine bar or West End show, but Alex who would
     remind her that they should do so.
     At the same time, Alex
     became aware that he was no longer the only man on the Executive Board
     who attracted Tabitha’s wandering gaze.
     Tom wasn’t divorced,
     separated or single. As far as Alex could see, he’d been happily
     married for many years now. He was also no more Jewish than Alex.
     Furthermore, he was some ten years older than Alex and the years had
     taken a visible toll. He was almost entirely bald, his stomach
     strained at shirt buttons that were often too tight and the bags under
     his eyes had become a permanent feature. No one could say that Tom was
     a better physical catch than Alex, but Tabitha had quite clearly fixed
     her attention on him.
     Alex could see why Tom
     might be an attractive proposition for Tabitha, despite being
     non-Jewish, middle-aged and already married. He’d been on the
     Executive Board for rather longer than anyone else and he actually
     knew something about the products that Talpha Apps sold to the world.
     He was one of the few executives whose opinion the company’s technical
     and professional staff paid any attention to, although he was visibly
     more at ease in the company of those who knew better how to
     regurgitate clichés and buzz words than express anything of insight or
     meaning. He was demonstrably more senior than Alex in status,
     competence and usefulness to the company although his salary was
     pretty much the same. Alex could see that if Tabitha could prise him
     away from his wife, he might well be a better stepping stone for her
     than Alex could ever be.
     The inevitable break-up
     with Alex didn’t come without pain. It was one of the facts of life to
     which Alex had become well accustomed over the years that the more
     someone drew away from you the more desperately you wanted things to
     stay much the same. Tabitha’s visits to Alex’s bed became less
     frequent whilst Alex was no longer invited back to Tabitha’s Docklands
     apartment with its delightful view of the newly reinforced flood
     barriers.  In contrast, the sex they had together was becoming
     more fervent and passionate. This was also a familiar pattern known to
     Alex. 
     “What about Mrs Turner?”
     asked Alex as if it mattered to Tabitha when she at last broke the
     news that her relationship with Tom had reached the stage where it was
     no longer appropriate that she should continue to have sex with Alex
     (not that her passion in the last hour or so had noticeably declined).
     “It’s Tom’s decision what
     he does with his life,” said Tabitha baldly. “If he wants to move on,
     that’s his choice. His wife will just have to accept that society’s
     movers and the shakers sometimes just have to move on to greener
     pastures. Tom isn’t a man who’s content to stand still. He has a
     passion to succeed and get ahead.”
     It was difficult for Alex
     to reconcile his image of Tom with Tabitha’s depiction of him as a
     dynamic manager. Alex knew him as a man who he’d only ever seen get
     agitated when a waiter in the restaurant was slow in serving him or
     when a taxi was late to arrive. Generally, he was avuncular, unhurried
     and imperturbable. His value in Executive Board meetings was mostly on
     those few occasions when it was necessary that someone who understood
     the business should venture an opinion. On such rare occasions, he
     manifestly enjoyed milking the other executives’ anticipation while he
     slowly elaborated why something might or might not be a good decision
     (although he never once ruled against the expert opinion of his
     technical advisors).
     And so Alex was left on
     the shelf. His relationship with Tabitha had never been made public
     knowledge, unlike hers with Tom. She soon consolidated her status as
     his new fiancée while also expecting and receiving the congratulations
     and good wishes of the other board members. 
     It was Alex who was now in
     the more junior position. His longer sojourn on the board counted for
     nothing in comparison with the charisma of a woman of drive and
     ambition. It was obvious she was now a very likely candidate for the
     position of Chief Executive Officer if the current one should move on.

     Alex’s main hope now was
     that his past relationship would remain an asset and never become a
     liability. But that could only happen if he maintained a very high
     level of discretion. 
     And so this was one
     relationship that neither he nor Tabitha could ever acknowledge had
     ever happened. 

    No Future Volume Three

LXXV
     Eugenie
     2101
      
     Not
     many were left in Eugenie’s original posse after they’d been forcibly
     evicted from the mansion in which they’d been squatting in Hampstead.
     Ned had been shot in the back by the Security Officers while he was
     trying to escape by scrambling over the wall. Natalie had been bundled
     into the back of a van in which at the very least she’d be raped. Of
     the thirty or forty people who’d crammed into the Hampstead mansion
     after word about it had slipped out and others had settled in, only
     half a dozen of them were now in Eugenie’s company. And it wasn’t
     because she knew better than anyone else what to do. Ever since their
     eviction, they’d been wandering aimlessly beside the north periphery
     of the M11 motorway on which only the wealthy could travel and
     alongside which an electrified fence acted as a barrier to any
     invasion from rabid foxes and desperate plebs.
     There was probably once a
     time when Epping Forest was a desirable part of North London in which
     to live, but there was nothing particularly special about it now. The
     plague and famine that ravaged London as much as it had the rest of
     England had been especially savage in the suburban sprawl between the
     railway stations of Theydon Bois and Coppersale Common. It was
     especially tragic given that this wooded district had earned a good
     reputation as a refuge to those who’d sought to live an alternative
     lifestyle set apart from the general poverty of modern England.
     Unfortunately, good intentions and utopian idealism had proved to be
     no protection at all against the ravages of the plague. 
     Alone amongst her
     companions, Eugenie felt almost at home in the fields and woodland of
     Epping; no longer trudging through Central London’s dilapidated ruins.
     This was what she knew best. Plough-horses on open fields. Ragged
     beggars huddled by the roadside. Poachers who survived on the flesh of
     the rabbits, birds and feral dogs they’d caught in their traps.
     Improvised cottages where people who’d never before known the sweat
     and toil of a life on the soil now had to adjust through necessity to
     a life of bare subsistence. 
     “The countryside is real
     weird,” said Tony. “It must be like home to you. All these fields and
     shit. How d’you find anything to eat round here?”
     “We’ll find a way,” said
     Eugenie, who wasn’t quite as sure of herself as her demeanour
     suggested. 
     “Perhaps we should go
     hunting for animals and stuff,” said Tinkerbelle, who despite her name
     only resembled the Disney fairy because she was rather short and not
     at all by virtue of her Ethiopian ancestry. “I killed a cat once and
     ate it. It didn’t taste good, but I was fucking hungry. It made all
     the fucking difference.”
     “I don’t like the look of
     those boys over there,” said Andy pointing at a gang of youths who
     were sauntering about in workmen’s clothes and wielding improvised
     clubs. “We ought to get as far away from them as we possibly can.”
     Eugenie respected Andy’s
     nose for trouble. He’d already saved several times their motley crew
     from calamity on the long trail from Hampstead through the ruins of
     Chigwell and the ganglands of Wanstead. As Eugenie was the only person
     in the company who’d ever lived in a country village outside of
     London, everyone looked towards her for guidance. The general view was
     that a childhood spent in the East Midlands country was essential
     preparation for the wilds of London’s outermost parks. 
     “We’ll head for those
     trees over there,” Eugenie announced as she gestured towards the
     forest edge. “If those guys make a run for us we can easily find
     somewhere to hide.”
     The most discrete way for
     six young people to slip out of sight almost certainly wasn’t to walk
     across an open field towards the nearby woods while constantly
     checking behind them that they weren’t being chased, but they weren’t
     many other options. The other avenues of escape were blocked off and,
     in any case, Eugenie was already concerned about where they should all
     sleep for the night. Perhaps there’d be a bush or tree they could
     sleep under. It would be more comfortable and probably a lot safer
     than what they most often had to resort to. 
     Fortunately, there was no
     need to make haste. The youths might be swaggering in a way that
     suggested trouble, but it was a necessary show for such gangs to
     flaunt their aggression simply to ensure that they wouldn’t be seen as
     vulnerable and thereby invite trouble from other gangs. Eugenie
     wondered whether she and her friends, armed as they were with their
     own makeshift clubs, spears and slingshots, might not make a similar
     impression on the poor people of Epping. As they strode into the woods
     following the yellow and blue marker trails that were once there for
     the benefit of recreational walkers, it was notable how many onlookers
     made a deliberate diversion to avoid having to come into contact with
     them.
     Not everyone ran away or
     was able to. When Eugenie and her friends hunted through the foliage
     for a good patch on which to lay down their torn and soiled sleeping
     bags, they disturbed someone who was far too ill to run away. This was
     a woman in her early thirties huddled into a tight curled ball under
     several threadbare blankets in the midst of an expansive ornamental
     bush that the deer hadn’t yet nibbled away. She pulled her blanket
     tight to her throat and stared up with an expression of utter terror
     at Tony when he discovered her in the undergrowth.
     “Don’t worry, we’re not
     gonna rape you,” said Andy.
     “You don’t have to worry
     about us,” said Amy who, although she was a girl, was also the largest
     person in the posse. Her style of dress was a deliberately incongruous
     mix of short cropped hair and a filthy lace-hemmed dress. “We’re just
     looking for somewhere to sleep the night.”
     “You ain’t got plague,
     have you?” Tinkerbelle asked with genuine alarm. “I thought this area
     was certified safe.”
     The woman shook her head
     and replied through encrusted lips and a hoarse throat. “I’m a
     survivor,” she said. “Most people in the kibbutz caught it. So did I.
     The difference was that I survived. Most of those who got it didn’t.”
     “So, what’ve you got, if
     it ain’t plague?” asked Amy who instinctively raised a rag to her
     mouth.
     “I dunno,” the woman
     admitted. “It’s not plague. I guess it must be a cold or something.”
     “I’m not taking chances,”
     announced Eugenie. “I’m keeping back. There’ve been so many plagues
     and contagions these last few years you just can’t be sure. Maybe it’s
     a new thing going round. Now there aren’t any cures anymore for the
     latest strains of flu, gon, cholera, typhoid or pox, almost anything
     can be the one that takes you out. Even measles or mumps might be a
     killer these days.”
     Nevertheless, Eugenie and
     her friends weren’t going to just abandon such an obviously vulnerable
     woman. In any case, what she was suffering from had more to do with
     having to sleep on a damp blanket in the pouring rain rather than the
     plague. Her symptoms were totally different from what she’d have had
     if she’d had the plague. In any case, it was considered lucky to hang
     out with someone who’d survived a contagion.
     The woman’s name was
     Tamara and she’d been part of a settlement that had been established
     in the middle of the forest before it was ransacked and firebombed.
     The settlement had been a kind of commune rather like some of the
     better organised squats in North London, but it went by the weird name
     of a kibbutz.
     “Why’d you call it that?”
     Amy wondered. “Was it something to do with someone called Kibbert?”
     “No. There was no one with
     that name,” said Tamara. “It’s a Jewish word. It’s a kind of
     self-reliant community that used to be pretty common in Israel.”
     “Are you a Jew?”
     Tinkerbelle asked innocently. “I didn’t think there were any Jews left
     after all those nukes went off.”
     “It was your lot, the
     Jews, that started the war,” said Tony with second-hand indignation.
     “I don’t imagine you’re at all popular with the Arabs and Pakis who
     live round here.”
      “I’m sure you’re
     right,” Tamara said, “but those of us in the kibbutz kept ourselves to
     ourselves and we didn’t cause any trouble.  Most of us weren’t at
     all proud about our nation’s role in the war, but that’s just history
     now. There’s been more than twenty-five years since then. I was only a
     child when it all happened and all I’ve ever known of Israel is
     nuclear fallout and radiation poison.”
     “So what happened to the
     kibbutz?” asked Eugenie. “Why’s it no longer going?”
     “It was the plague that
     did it,” said Tamara. “We thought we might be safe when the latest
     outbreak began two or three years ago. We weren’t living in a big city
     centre and we did what we could to keep ourselves away from it all.
     But like everyone else we soon found that the antibiotics being sold
     in the shops were useless when it started again.”
     Eugenie wasn’t the only
     one in her crew with unhappy memories of the plague. There were the
     quarantined zones; the armed guards with orders to shoot anyone
     straying where they shouldn’t; the hastily assembled signs that warned
     people away from infected areas; and, of course, the plague itself.
     Eugenie wasn’t the only one who’d lost everything to the ravages of a
     virus that knew no borders, was immune to all medicine and was fatal
     to almost everyone who fell victim to it. Tamara’s experience was
     almost worse than anyone since she’d actually been infected and at one
     time was sure that she’d soon be dead. At the same time as her, the
     others in the kibbutz, including Tobias and his girlfriend, also
     became infected and died within a day or so of exhibiting the first
     symptoms. Before it was over and Tamara was well enough to count
     herself as one of the rare lucky ones, the kibbutz was reduced to less
     than a third of its original number and was barely able to support
     itself. Those who’d survived were traumatised by the distress of
     having to bury and burn the bodies of the recently deceased and, until
     very recently, dearly beloved.
     The story was a familiar
     one to Eugenie who’d come across many devastated communities on her
     northward trek from Hampstead. First plague and then not long after:
     pillage, pestilence and penury. Nevertheless, there were tasks that
     Eugenie and her posse had to attend to so that they could survive and
     Tamara’s value, above everything else, was that she was familiar with
     the local terrain. She’d be able to guide Eugenie’s crew away from
     hostile gangs or places where the plague was still prevalent. It would
     be ironic that now, when the outbreak had almost petered out, Eugenie
     were to die from its very last gasps. A fire was assembled from the
     dead branches and rubbish lying around. Eugenie and her friends
     huddled with Tamara around the light of its flickering flames as the
     balmy autumn dusk drew in. Not everyone was gathered together as it
     was Amy’s turn to act as look-out for hostile gangs that might be
     hunting for easy pickings in the dark shadows of the night.
     “It wasn’t long after the
     worst of the plague had passed that the Muslim gangs descended on the
     kibbutz,” said Tamara. “They call themselves Jihadists and I
     guess they believe that they’re serving their faith by engaging in
     Holy War against the Jews.  Of course, we’d joked about the
     jihadists when there were plenty of people in the kibbutz who could
     defend us. One joke was that our kibbutz was like a West Bank
     Settlement. This was meant ironically because it was precisely the
     defence of illegal settlements on land owned by another nation that
     was the trigger for the war that destroyed Israel. After the plague
     had done its worst, we were demoralised, miserable and easy prey.”
     The attack on the kibbutz
     was intense and violent but undisciplined and chaotic. Tamara managed
     to escape from the fray with nothing worse than a scar on her shoulder
     from a jihadist flick-knife and exchanged her survival for the coat by
     which she was grabbed and from which she managed to struggle free. She
     fled as quickly as she could: more concerned about her own survival
     than by the plight of her fellow kibbutzniks, but as she later
     discovered little mercy was shown to those she’d abandoned. The women
     were gang-raped with little regard for age and few were allowed to
     live. The men were spared the indignity of rape in most cases, but not
     spared either the terror or the torture that followed.
     “Is it part of the Muslim
     religion to do that kind of stuff?” wondered Tinkerbelle.
     “Of course not,” said
     Tony. “It’s just extremists. Anyway they’re still pretty pissed off by
     the millions of Muslims who’d died in the war.”
     “I guess us Jews think
     we’d already suffered enough when living in what’s left of Israel
     without also having to face the same thing here in England,” said
     Tamara. “But you’re right. It’s not religion that makes people behave
     the way they did, any more than it was ever a Jewish commandment to
     bulldozer Palestinian apartments, fire missiles into foreign cities or
     launch Armageddon on the peoples of Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and
     Palestine.”
     “Any excuse for a fight,
     eh?” said Tinkerbelle sarcastically. 

    No Future Volume Three

     LXXVI
     Eugenie
     2102
      
     For
     all her life until now and especially after having travelled south to
     London, Eugenie had lived in fear and dread of gangs and most
     especially gang members. Wasn’t gang culture just one of the many
     reasons why everything was shit these days? Rape, violence, theft and
     murder: no one could pretend there was anything virtuous in the
     activities of England’s many gangs whether they were based in Central
     London, Nottingham or here in the Outer London suburb of
     Uxbridge.  
     So why was Eugenie now a
     fully initiated member of one of the most notorious gangs in all
     London known by the almost ludicrously innocuous name of The Youth
     Club? 
     It wasn’t that her
     membership was merely casual or superficial. The proof of this was the
     crude U-shaped tattoo etched across the blue stubble of her shaved
     forehead and pate. She was attired in a peculiarly feral uniform
     threaded through with feathers and furs that gave gang members an
     untamed appearance. She’d submitted to the excruciatingly long,
     undeniably messy and rather painful mass gang-bang that was the
     mandatory initiation rite for all female members of the Youth Club.
     She was rechristened with the gang name of YouTube Chick. This
     was a phrase whose ultimate meaning was lost on Eugenie but which she
     understood was extremely obscene. She’d become versed in phrases and
     symbols whose meaning and significance was deliberately obscure to
     anyone not already a member of the Youth Club and whose real purpose
     was to announce her allegiance to other gang members in awkward
     situations. The one rule of conduct that bound members of the gang
     together was that no one member should knowingly kill, rape or main
     another without the consent of other members of the gang. It was a
     security of sorts that Eugenie treasured in these lawless days.
     This precarious protection
     against violence wasn’t the only privilege of gang membership and it
     wasn’t the principle reason that Eugenie had sought out membership
     when she’d stumbled into Uxbridge town centre. This came after a long
     hazardous journey around London’s outermost perimeter along the
     electrified fences that fortified the M25 motorway. The fence wasn’t
     there only to protect motorists from the unwanted attention of the
     mendicant poor and desperate. It also served as a firewall against the
     spread of plague across the Republic’s town and countryside. Eugenie
     soon discovered how foolish it would be to was to approach the
     electrified fence. This only served to attract the attention of armed
     guards and their exceptionally vicious genetically-enhanced dogs.
     She’d come across the bodies of other travellers who’d ventured too
     close to the high fences that protected the privileged few from the
     unwashed and poorly fed majority.
     It wasn’t because Eugenie
     was especially drawn to the London suburb of Uxbridge that she’d made
     the journey from Epping Forest. In fact, she had no reason to expect
     that the London Borough of Hillingdon would be any better than her
     original home. Her trek wasn’t one she’d have willingly chosen. 
     After more than four
     years, the plague that had forced Eugenie to leave her home in the
     East Midlands was still devastating England just as it was the rest of
     the world. Eugenie had heard that it was the nation’s worst such
     pandemic since the Black Death, but as there had been several other
     such outbreaks in the last forty or so years that had been compared to
     the infamous Mediaeval scourge the comparison had become increasingly
     stale. However, Eugenie knew for sure that it had devastated her life
     and those of everyone she knew. The only people safe from the virus
     were those wealthy enough to live in the fenced-in villages and
     suburbs that Eugenie could never enter. The wealthy might occasionally
     fall victim to the plague but they had access to hospital care,
     air-conditioned homes and plenty of food. All that must surely have
     helped them keep the worst of the contagion at bay.
     The civil authorities
     generally ignored Eugenie and her companions. They were no more
     protected from violence or theft than they were persecuted for
     vagrancy. The English government’s main concern was to address the
     anxieties of the ever-diminishing number of people still eligible to
     vote: a privilege wholly dependent on property-ownership. As long as
     Eugenie didn’t trespass into streets and districts that had restricted
     access she was as invisible to the authorities in the Outer Suburbs as
     she’d been in Central London. 
     All the same, when a fresh
     incident of the plague was reported in the vicinity of Theydon Bois,
     it was the presence of people such as Eugenie that swiftly attracted
     the attention of the Contagion Control Police who’d been directed to
     the London Borough of Waltham Forest to round up and evict all
     vagrants and non-domiciled residents. There was a rumour that they
     would be transported to the plague-ridden city of Milton Keynes where
     a slow and painful death was almost certain.
     There was no coordination
     or plan to their escape when Eugenie and her friends first spotted the
     armed police run over the fields towards the woods where they lived
     accompanied by their ferocious dogs. Those who ran the slowest, such
     as Tamara, were left behind to the policemen’s mercy. Eugenie,
     Tinkerbelle and Andy raced through the woods towards London’s
     Metropolitan Border until their path was blocked by the electrified
     fence that ran alongside the M25 orbital. 
     For the next few weeks
     Eugenie and her friends followed the fence westwards as it circled
     North London. There was little to eat and the only places where they
     could shelter were in the overgrown woods and fields that now belonged
     to no one. They had to make the occasional diversion around obstacles
     to their path such as the turnings off the M25 and the private estates
     hidden behind armed defences that were even more insurmountable than
     those protecting the motorway. When Eugenie walked past the well-mown
     lawns, the roads free of potholes and the private shopping malls that
     were the preserve of only the privileged few, she felt both anger and
     envy that so much of England’s wealth was concentrated in so few
     hands. Had it always been like this? Maybe the disparity in wealth was
     just somewhat more obvious nowadays after all the ravages of economic
     collapse, climate change, foreign war and, of course, plague. Eugenie
     had heard that there had once been a golden age in which ordinary
     people could afford to fly by aeroplane to foreign countries for
     nothing more than personal pleasure and when every household had
     reliable access to electricity and water.
     Eugenie was alone by the
     time she’d reached Uxbridge. Andy was last seen running for his life
     from a huge, slobbering genetically-enhanced guard dog that would
     probably eat him if it had the opportunity He’d been rather too
     optimistic when he ignored the warning sign outside an orchard and
     allowed his hunger to exceed his common sense. 
     Eugenie didn’t know what
     had happened to Tinkerbelle after a night when they’d slept on
     different floors of a disused watchtower on the perimeter of a now
     derelict farm. There was no sign of her friend when Eugenie woke up.
     It was quite likely that Tinkerbelle had been abducted even though
     there was no sign of struggle. Isolated communities that were short of
     women were known to go to extraordinary lengths to ameliorate the
     gender ratio. It was also possible that Tinkerbelle had left of her
     own accord. She’d become increasingly depressed ever since Andy had
     run away. The two of them had been very intimate.
     So by the time Eugenie
     arrived in Uxbridge, she was desperately lonely as well as hungry and
     weary. Was it any wonder that when she saw Billy Bollocks—as he’d been
     christened by the Youth Club gang—that she would be drawn to him? It
     wasn’t for his apparent charm or good looks so much—of which there was
     a complete absence—as it was for his possession of a bag of groceries
     that he’d stolen from a woman as she was leaving a heavily defended
     supermarket complex. Eugenie didn’t know the details of how he’d
     acquired the groceries, but in any case she didn’t really care one way
     or the other. She’d not eaten anything substantial since she’d trapped
     and skinned a rabbit several days earlier. 
     Billy Bollocks would have
     been a truly unexceptional looking young man if he wasn’t so
     extravagantly tattooed: especially around his shaved head. His
     aggressive personality wasn’t expressed in either his physical stature
     or his height, as he was actually rather shorter than Eugenie, but
     rather by his eccentric clothing. He was flamboyantly adorned in
     feathers, fur and slogans stitched into the leather and denim that
     affirmed his gang loyalty. He had an ugly scar across one cheek and
     over a left eye that was notably dull and expressionless.
     “What I wouldn’t give for
     a bite of that,” said Eugenie boldly as she walked up to Billy in
     clothes that were as ragged and eccentric as his, but less from design
     than mishap. She pointed at a can of Heinz Alphabet Soup and a
     Ginster’s Cornish Pasty.
     Billy glared at Eugenie
     with an expression that lightened his general expression of hostility
     with a touch of amusement. He held an army knife in one hand that he
     could easily use to ensure that Eugenie would surrender everything she
     had irrespective of whether there was a likelihood of reward. He
     smiled grimly. 
     “What are you suggesting
     then, you slut?” he asked.
     “A bit of this,” said
     Eugenie who pulled up her skirt to reveal that she wasn’t wearing any
     knickers. “I’m a good fuck,” she added, in case that wasn’t enough of
     a hint.
     “I’m sure you are,” said
     Billy, who contemplated the wild unkempt hair between Eugenie’s thighs
     with some interest. “But I bet you’ll only want to fuck if you get to
     eat first.”
     “I’ll have more energy if
     I do,” Eugenie conceded. “Otherwise I’ll be too weak to give you as
     good a fuck as you deserve.”
     Billy considered this.
     “Yeah,” he said. “That makes sense. All right. We’ll fuck after. Just
     don’t get any ideas about running away when you’ve eaten. This knife’s
     killed plenty in its time. See the notches. Each one marks a scalp. I
     can be a really mean fucker if you cross me, you slag.”
     “A deal’s a deal,” said
     Eugenie who nestled down beside Billy and waited her turn while he
     took first shares of all the grocery items that he’d stolen. 
     Eugenie honoured her
     compact. Well, she’d be stupid not to, even though a fuck was about
     the last thing she’d really wanted. She hoped that her faked moans and
     occasional reciprocal thrusts would further endear her to the aptly
     named Billy Bollocks.
     It was obvious that he’d
     taken a shine to Eugenie however qualified her affection was towards
     him. He was an aggressive lover who fucked hard and snorted as he did
     so. He thrust his cock as deep into her cunt as he could and shoved
     his filthy oily fingers up her arse at the same time. He’d seen plenty
     of pornos, so he splattered his semen over her face and onto her chest
     although it really wasn’t necessary and certainly wasn’t something
     that Eugenie enjoyed.
     She followed Billy back to
     where he lived with the rest of the Youth Club gang. The neighbourhood
     was spread over a number of suburban houses in a cul de sac at the end
     of a long street that had been chosen because it offered a good
     strategic view of any approaching hostile gang. Eugenie wasn’t exactly
     welcomed by the other gang members and Billy didn’t make it especially
     easy for her. She could see that the gang was a tight group of people,
     many related to one another, and that they were automatically
     suspicious of outsiders. But Eugenie was hungry. She’d not slept on a
     mattress for many months and she didn’t care anymore who she had to
     fuck to get what she wanted.
     At first, she only had sex
     with Billy, but Eugenie knew that she’d soon be kicked out of the
     relative comfort of the four bedroom house with en suite bathroom and
     conservatory if she didn’t spread herself more widely amongst the
     company. 
     So she built up the trust
     of the Youth Club gang by being open with her body and sharing all the
     drugs that passed by. Of course, it would be stupid to be known only
     as a slag, so she also helped the other girls do the housework and
     cooking that was expected of them when they weren’t lying prostrate on
     a mattress with their legs in the air. As time passed she won enough
     trust that associate membership of the Youth Club gang became pretty
     much inevitable.
     And now she was one of
     those who not so long ago she had feared and despised. She was one of
     the parasites on ordinary people who were unable to fend off the
     violence, theft and bullying that was doled out by the Youth Club,
     just as it was by the many other gangs in North West London. But as
     she chewed on the food that was stolen and got high on the drugs that
     were the subject of the most nearly legitimate commerce the gang was
     involved in, she knew that when she went to sleep it would be indoors,
     on a mattress, and out of the rain, the sleet and the wind. She
     mightn’t be able to choose who she would have sex with and she might
     have difficulty reconciling her lifestyle with her conscience, but she
     now had a lot to be grateful for.
     For all the aggravation,
     pain and humiliation of gang rape, non-anaesthetised piercing and
     home-made tattoos, it was all worth it when Eugenie considered the
     other alternatives that she’d got to know so well after having slept
     under bushes, huddling under the dark shadow of ancient overpasses and
     in abandoned barns. She had enough to eat, she had somewhere to sleep
     and she now had a loyal group of friends who would take huge delight
     in using their knives and cudgels to cripple or maim anyone foolish
     enough to assault her.

    No Future Volume Three

LXXVII
     Psychlone
     2107
      
      
     If
     it hadn’t been absolutely necessary, Psychlone would never have left
     Exeter. It was where he’d been to university and where most of his
     friends lived. But this was exactly what he’d been forced to do when
     an outbreak of Hen Flu closed down the entire city. His only other
     alternative was to suffer an indefinite period of effective house
     arrest in a city now designated as being in quarantine.
     It was only because one of
     his mother’s old boyfriends happened to own an apartment in Uxbridge
     that this was now Psychlone’s new home. He’d rarely ever visited
     London in his life before, but this unremarkable dilapidated suburb
     near the M40 motorway and serviced by the Metropolitan Line was so far
     out from the more famous sights of London that it was almost no
     different from living in an outer suburb of Exeter. But at least it
     was safe from Hen Flu: a disease whose tortuous path from its origins
     in Uruguay or Uzbekistan (depending on who you spoke to) was most
     keenly felt in England’s South Western counties.
     Once upon a time, this
     would have been a model estate in the Borough of Hillingdon, but the
     area was now somewhat tatty and in places derelict. His neighbours
     were scarcely wealthy, but mostly they had jobs and their homes were
     well looked after. The area wasn’t sufficiently wealthy enough for
     there to be security guards or an electrified fence, so most people
     protected their homes behind metal doors secured by countless locks
     and steel bars. Nevertheless, even these weren’t a guaranteed
     deterrent from the most determined thief as was evident from a nearby
     house whose windows had been smashed and the front door pulled off its
     hinges. 
     Although Psychlone was
     still wistful about his old haunts in Exeter, there were definite
     advantages for a professional musician to be living so close to
     Central London. After he’d fought his way past the beggars gathered
     about the entrance to the underground station, it took only an hour or
     two by steam train on the Metropolitan Line to get to the heart of
     London where he could go to a West End night club and put on live sets
     for the rich and privileged. He was able to get two or sometimes three
     bookings a week, mostly on the strength of the monster success of his
     Eric Esterhazy hit, but he was invariably shattered by the
     time he caught the early train home the following morning.
     Psychlone wasn’t the kind
     of guy who liked to annoy his neighbours so he preferred to wear
     headphones when he was making music in the evening or at night, but he
     liked to take them off when he could to allow his ears to recover.
     This was one such time. It was midday on a Wednesday when his
     neighbours were at work. As always, the couple who lived downstairs
     had left for work early dressed in the uniforms of their professions,
     which were, respectively, psychiatric nurse and supermarket security
     guard. The street was quiet. No motorised vehicle would venture down a
     suburban residential road where it was at risk of being car-jacked, so
     the only sounds anyone could hear other than the occasional clip-clop
     of a horse-drawn wagon was the stream of percussive electronic music
     emanating from the windows of Psychlone’s small flat. So when the
     front door knocker was rudely hammered in the hallway below him,
     Psychlone could scarcely pretend that he wasn’t home.
     Before he unlatched and
     unbolted the front door he checked who might be outside through its
     eyehole. He’d heard plenty of stories about the door being opened by
     the unwary only to permit a torrent of thieves and mobsters who’d
     trash the premises and maim anyone foolish enough to offer resistance.
     However, all Psychlone could see were two girls, one about the same
     age as him and the other somewhat younger. They were eccentrically
     dressed: all feathers, leather, rags and tattoos. Their heads were
     shaved and the younger girl had a gruesome scar across her nose and
     cheek. On the other hand, eccentric dress was no reliable guide to
     anything at all. Psychlone’s own style of fashion with his long hair
     shaved short at the temples and a set of clothes assembled from
     second-hand clothes shops and market stalls in West London could also
     be considered eccentric. And many of the wealthy young men and women
     who crowded out the Fat Pig or the Ursus Majoris were
     also eccentrically dressed although the price tag for their
     fashionable clothing would bankrupt Psychlone.
     “Yes?” he asked the two
     girls outside the door. “Who are you and what do you want?” 
     His initial thought was
     that the girls were collecting for one of the many worthwhile
     charities that filled the welfare gap no longer bridged by taxation.
     Although Psychlone paid taxes, the only benefit he was aware of
     getting was military defence against the potential threat from the
     neighbouring Republics of Scotland and Wales.
     “We’re insurance
     collectors,” said the older girl with a curiously mocking smile.
     “Insurance collectors?”
     asked Psychlone sceptically.
     “Yeah,” said the younger
     girl in a high-pitched voice that sounded even younger in years than
     she looked. “What YouTube said. We’re insurance collectors.”
     “You don’t look like
     insurance collectors.”
     “What are we supposed to
     look like, eh?” said the younger girl. “You fucking tell us. What
     makes you think we’re not what we say we are, you cunt?”
     “Shut it, Sick Chick,”
     said the girl known as YouTube. “The gentleman has a right to harbour
     doubts. Haven’t you, sir? What with all the tricksters and thieves
     around... It’s a wonder anyone can trust anyone, isn’t it?”
     “It certainly is,” said
     Psychlone who wished now that he’d not opened the door. What had
     possessed him to do such a thing? “What insurance company do you
     represent?”
     “You what?” said Sick
     Chick. “What the fuck’s an insurance company? What the fuck do
     they do? You’re a cunt, you are.”
     YouTube slapped Sick Chick
     smartly across the cheek. “Fucking shut it, Sick,” she said sternly.
     She then addressed Psychlone who was hesitating on the notion of
     slamming the door on the two uncouth girls. “You just want to know on
     whose authority we claim to be collecting insurance, don’t you?”
     “Well yes. What sort of
     organisation do you belong to?”
     “You mean where do we come
     from, you arsehole?” piped up the irrepressible Sick as she nursed her
     cheek. “We’re Youth Club, we are. Don’t you forget it. That’s what we
     are. The fucking Youth Club.”
     “I don’t understand,” said
     Psychlone who’d heard of youth organisations like the Scouts, the
     Cadets and the Pioneers. Perhaps the Youth Club was something like
     that.
     “I’ll explain sir,” said
     YouTube. “As long as Sick Chick here doesn’t keep butting in. You’ll
     have to excuse her, sir. She’s had a rough life, she has. Most of her
     childhood she was feral like a cat or a dog. She slept wherever she
     could and survived by stealing gear and running errands for the bad
     guys.”
     “And you’re not the bad
     guys?”
     YouTube ignored the
     question. “When we say we’re insurance collectors, we’re telling the
     truth. It’s what we do. And we don’t ask for much either, sir. For a
     guy like you, nothing more than a couple of grand...”
     “Two thousand pounds!”
     said Psychlone, alarmed. That was nearly what he earned in a single
     gig. It was nearly what it cost to travel by train to Exeter and back.
     “What do I get for two thousand pounds?”
     “Two grand a month, sir,”
     said YouTube. “It’s not extortionate. It gives you a sense of
     security. You can sleep soundly in your own bed knowing that both your
     property and your person are going to be safe from harm. It’s surely
     worth it.”
     “And what happens if I
     don’t pay two thousand pounds?” Psychlone asked.
     “We’re fair, sir,” said
     YouTube. “Some people pay rather lower premiums than others. The old
     people on the estate who’re living on their savings: they don’t pay so
     much. It’s only reasonable they should pay less. They’ve got less so
     they pay less. You’ve got a nice place here, sir. You’ve got a good
     audio system and you dress real smart. So, you’ll pay a bit more. That
     seems real right and proper, doesn’t it?”
     “I guess so,” said
     Psychlone. “And what happens if I don’t pay anything?”
     “Then you’ll be fucked,”
     shrieked Sick Chick. “You’ll be fucked like you’ve never been fucked
     before.”
     “Don’t keep butting in,
     Sick,” said YouTube in a reasonable tone. “The gentleman is asking a
     perfectly legitimate question. What do you get for your two grand a
     month? What does your non-negotiable monthly premium bring you? Well,
     as I say: peace of mind.”
     “I still don’t
     understand.”
     “Have you ever noticed how
     many houses in this area have a symbol carved into their front door
     that looks a bit like a U with a vertical line through it?”
     “Well, yes,” said
     Psychlone. “I just thought it was mindless vandalism...”
     “It might be vandalism,
     sir,” YouTube admitted. “But it’s not mindless. That symbol signifies
     that the property benefits from the protection of the Youth Club. And
     for two grand a month we’ll carve a symbol like that on your door.
     Well, another symbol I should say, because I can see that the couple
     who live in the flat above you already pay their monthly premiums.”
     “Do I have a choice?”
     asked Psychlone to whom it belatedly occurred that these two girls
     represented some kind of protection racket.
     “The insurance premiums
     will protect you against robbery, theft, break-ins and mindless
     violence from the many gangs that wander the streets of North West
     London,” said YouTube. “You might have heard of the Eyeliners from
     Hillingdon. You can tell them by their prominent eye makeup: both men
     and women. They’re real bastards, sir. Only the other day they broke
     into a convent and raped every nun they could find. Then there are the
     Lords and Ladies of West Drayton...”
     “They’re real fuckers,”
     said Sick Chick. “It was one of them that knifed me when I was raped a
     couple of years ago. Right fucking cunts they are.”
     “There are gangs like the
     Ox Hands from Langley and the Nutters from Ickenham. They’re all
     ruthless and violent. Given the opportunity, they would ransack and
     burn every single house on this estate but only after they’d
     slaughtered each and every one of the tenants. It would be mayhem.”
     “And the Youth Club?”
     “For your very reasonable
     monthly premium, the Youth Club will not only not bother you in any
     way, they will guarantee that in the event of one of these vicious
     gangs entering the borough on a crazed murderous spree you will be
     defended to the best of our abilities.”
     “We’ll tear the fuckers’
     eyes out of their heads and strew their guts across the street,”
     elaborated Sick Chick. “I’ll take a fucking steel rod and fucking ram
     it up the arse so they’ll know what it’s like to be raped before I
     crush their fucking heads with a fucking boulder.” 
     “...But mostly we’ll be
     acting as a deterrent,” said YouTube.
     “And if these gangs never
     venture this far into Uxbridge?”
     “Then your safety can’t be
     guaranteed, sir,” said YouTube. “You might have noticed the house just
     a block away that was broken into the other day. The house was
     assaulted by a gang of youths that pulled off the front door and ran
     away with all the possessions inside. I can’t say what happened to the
     people who lived there...”
     “They were fucked double
     time,” said Sick Chick enthusiastically. “Back and front. It was
     wicked! But they’ll live though. They won’t be so fucking late with
     the fucking insurance payments in future.”
     “As I say, sir,” said
     YouTube who chose to ignore her companion’s remarks. “There is a
     penalty incurred if you don’t pay your premiums promptly.”
     “I see,” said Psychlone
     thoughtfully.
     “I take it that you’ll be
     registering for household insurance then, sir?”
     “Registering?”
     “That’s just figurative,
     sir. Have you got a couple of grand on you?”
     “Not at the moment,”
     admitted Psychlone.
     “We’re understanding
     people, sir,” said YouTube. 
     “But only so far, you
     tight-arsed cunt,” chimed in Sick Chick.
     “We know that people don’t
     always carry much money on them,” YouTube continued. “When do you
     think you might be able to get the money? Tomorrow perhaps?”
     “I think so,” said a
     defeated Psychlone.
     “We’ll be around some time
     before it gets dark,” said YouTube. “We look forward to a long and
     happy relationship with you, sir.”
     “But don’t think it means
     you can fuck me, you lech,” said Sick Chick aggressively. “I don’t let
     any cunt inside my twat. Not unless you’re gonna pay for it, that is.”
     “Well thank you for being
     so understanding, sir,” said YouTube as she placed a firm hand on Sick
     Chick’s shoulder and turned about. “We’ll see you soon.”
     “I’m sure you will,” said
     Psychlone who now felt humiliated and sick in the stomach. 
     So, this was what life in
     London was really like.

    No Future Volume Three

LXXVIII
     Iris
     2059
      
      
     Although
     Iris missed living in London while she was living in Oxford, she
     hadn’t really felt ready to return there from so soon. However, the
     Biotech Lab was one of the first businesses to shut down when Sheep
     Fever struck the nation. And now she was effectively evicted from the
     city along with everyone else who didn’t have an actual job in the
     city and didn’t have the good fortune to have been born there. The
     authorities could only extend the charity of quarantine to a limited
     number of people.
     Sheep Fever was such an
     innocent sounding name for the devastating pandemic whose progress
     across the world from the Republic of North America to Europe, Africa
     and Asia had been tracked with such anxiety by the English government
     and the world’s media. The other name by which it was known—White
     Death—was a melodramatic echo of the ancient mediaeval plague that
     expressed rather better the dread and horror evoked by mention of the
     disease. It was an especially nasty disease that had very little to do
     with sheep beyond having originated in agricultural land where few
     humans lived but was still home to unfussy livestock such as sheep and
     goat. Amongst the symptoms were high temperatures, coughing fits,
     sickness and diarrhoea. The time in which it took to die was
     interminable. Despite the frantic efforts of pharmaceutical companies
     all over the globe, no cure for it had yet been found.
     Although the English
     government was happy to dispense well-meaning but not especially
     helpful advice, it had no grand plan to avert the worst affects of the
     White Death as it spread across the Midlands and Home Counties. Like
     everyone else nowadays, when Iris ventured outdoors she always wore a
     surgical mask around her mouth or held a handkerchief to her face. She
     wore gloves in public places and conspicuously avoided shaking hands.
     The most common means by which White Death was spread was by touching
     a surface on which someone had coughed or vomited.
     The Government of National
     Unity was definitely in its element in discovering novel ways in which
     to restrict the freedom of movement of the populace. The Kingdom’s
     border controls were tightened yet further. Tourists were only
     permitted into the country if they’d booked to stay at an approved
     hotel. Any lorry transporting goods into England was obliged to leave
     them at the dock or airport for English workers to carry onwards to
     their destination. The railway tunnel between England and France was
     now bricked up to prevent anyone bringing the disease in from the
     continent, even though it was actually more widespread in England than
     anywhere else in Northern Europe.
     Draconian restrictions to
     free movement were imposed across the whole of England, although
     Greater London had somehow escaped the worst. This was mostly thanks
     to the improvised defences and barbed wire that had been raised around
     the inner circumference of the M25 motorway. As a resident of
     Uxbridge, Iris benefitted from this extra security. The London Borough
     of Hillingdon had effectively imposed martial law on its council tax
     payers. No one could walk far before being stopped by a quarantine
     officer and having their eyes scrutinised for the small white spots in
     the pupil that was the earliest sign of infection. There were several
     occasions when Iris witnessed the haste in which those suspected of
     infection were escorted away by nurses in white uniforms for further
     examination. 
     Iris’ attitude towards
     such a stringent policy was mixed. There was a very high death rate
     from White Death. Barely one in twenty victims survived once infected.
     Although she had a great deal of sympathy towards the victims of the
     plague and, of course, their family and friends, she was secretly
     pleased to see them dragged off to a place where they were less likely
     to pass on the disease.
     On the whole, it was
     actually rather boring to live in the midst of the White Death.
     Because they were forbidden from commuting, most people were unable to
     get to their usual place of work. Only essential vehicles were allowed
     to travel from one London borough to another. The exhaustive checks
     required when getting on or getting off public transport resulted in
     more time being dedicated to such business than was actually spent
     travelling. Nonetheless, getting to work was the least of Iris’
     concerns. She was unemployed and had to live off what was left of her
     savings. Even if she had a job in Central London, where most of the
     opportunities were, she’d never be able to get there to earn a salary.
     Iris initially relied on the basic food and provisions made available
     as emergency aid, but as the weeks became months and the White Death
     kept its grip on the country such generosity became more than either
     the London Borough of Hillingdon or the English government could any
     longer afford.
     “It makes sense though,
     doesn’t it?” said Iris’s housemate, Eustace, as they queued outside
     the labour exchange. “There are jobs to be done and we’re able to do
     them. The roads aren’t gonna get cleaned by themselves.”
     “Or the bodies burnt in
     the incinerators,” gloomily remarked Yolanda, who’d been dossing down
     on the sofa in the shared house ever since she’d been evicted from
     Leyton Buzzard. “Or the barbed wire fences guarded. Or the sick and
     dying sorted from those who’re gonna live.”
     “That’s all true,” Eustace
     agreed. “It’s all gotta be done. And, anyway, what else would we be
     doing now? I mean, what I ought to be doing is working at my desk in
     Holborn, but with so many businesses suspended during the crisis, what
     else can I do? And we get to do our bit to help our country in its
     time of need.”
     Iris felt a bit weary as
     she listened to her housemate echo the propaganda being broadcast on
     Fox News UK and, with noticeably less enthusiasm, the EBC. It wasn’t
     that she disagreed with the essential message that the best way to get
     through the White Death was for people to work together for the common
     good. What troubled her more was how the government had somehow made
     the crisis fit its xenophobic, business-friendly, insular agenda. Not
     only had the barriers between nations been strengthened, but every
     possible way to monitor, interfere and marshal the population was
     being applied. And ultimately to what end? And to what extent was it
     simply to keep Sheep Fever at bay?
     Those already protected
     from the vagaries of the greater world by their wealth—sheltered in
     gated communities and escorted in chauffeur-driven cars—suffered far
     less than most of the population. Those suffering the most lived in
     districts once noted for their ethnic diversity, such as Brixton,
     Bradford and Southall. These were the most rigidly quarantined
     districts and where there was most opportunity to deport people to
     distant nations that many didn’t know even existed. Iris was lucky not
     to live in such a borough just as she was to be white, middle class
     and university-educated, but she was also aware that there was a small
     minority for whom this crisis was little more than an inconvenience.
     And it was to uphold the rights of this privileged minority that the
     government was at its most active.
     The jobs that the Labour
     Exchange assigned to Iris were really no worse than those she’d been
     given when she worked on the Work Experience Programme in East London.
     She was far more fortunate than those allotted the decidedly more
     risky jobs. Iris’ most frequent assignment was to organise the
     distribution of fruit and vegetables from the borough’s borders to the
     supermarkets and grocery stores that sold them to people who, like
     Iris, had earned sufficient work credits to be exchanged for food,
     clothing and other necessities. Eustace and Yolanda were most often
     assigned to distribute batteries to those who had no privately
     installed source of electrical power.
     Most people needed to earn
     a living by whatever means they could during the crisis.  Only a
     few of those who lived in Uxbridge had places of work within walking
     distance of their homes, so they mostly had to exchange their labour
     for work credits. Whether consciously or not, it was apparent that the
     local government was discriminating against some and showed preference
     to others. Those who were black or brown or had difficult-to-pronounce
     names were those most likely to be allocated jobs which Iris, despite
     her burgeoning social conscience, was pleased to have been excused
     from. 
     The White Death was no
     joke. Those who had the closest contact with the people and places
     where it had struck were inevitably those most at risk of contracting
     it and then becoming part of the statistical 95% whose fate was to die
     in a crowded hospital ward after several agonising weeks of suffering.
     And it was precisely to such places as hospitals, crematoria, border
     defences and quarantine zones that people like Juanita Mendez, Tammy
     Zenawi and Bobby Nidal were assigned. No statistics were issued of the
     relative proportion of those so assigned who subsequently fell victim
     to White Death.
     The countless public
     service announcements issued by the government emphasised a very
     curious kind of Englishness that was as alien to Iris as it was to the
     majority of Uxbridge’s residents. The bulldog spirit invoked to
     confront the crisis was resplendent with references to the music of
     Edgar Elgar, cream teas, warm beer, cricket pitches and old-fashioned
     tea-shops. The implied message was that an alternative England that
     might include dance music, mosques and skateboard parks was no longer
     wanted.
     All the same, the White
     Death’s tight grip on England’s throat couldn’t last forever.
     Nevertheless, despite the many assurances from the government and the
     many apparent breakthroughs, no cure was ever found for the disease.
     Sheep Fever remained incurable to the end. It was still a disease from
     which only one in twenty people were likely to survive. The news
     stories became less about the search for the killer cure and more an
     account of how science and medicine, even in China and Russia, but
     most certainly in England and America, had at last met its match.
     Iris was no disinterested
     observer with regard to this particular news story. Her study at
     university and her research in biotechnology had given her experience
     and expertise in the rather older disciplines that three centuries
     earlier had resulted in the first ever inoculations against smallpox
     in England. The microscopic entities that infected every human being
     on the planet had ever since been evolving at a rate that now
     surpassed human ingenuity in finding a cure. Before the advent of the
     White Death, every bacterial or viral mutation had been countered,
     usually at great expense, by an antidote that subjugated the menace to
     little more than a few hundred unfortunate deaths and yet another
     government-backed investment in the pharmaceutical industry.
     The pace of evolution had
     now overtaken human science and human material resources. The ultimate
     defeat of the Sheep Fever pandemic resulted more from the ancient
     policy of separating the infected from those not yet infected and of
     allowing the virus die with its host. From Ipswich to Penzance, from
     Carlisle to the Isle of Wight, and from Shanghai via Nashville to
     Stockholm, this was a plague whose demise simply illustrated the
     prosaic fact that no parasite that kills its hosts can continue to
     spread when there are no new hosts to which it can spread.
     It was several more weeks
     after the White Death pandemic had subsided that the Metropolitan Line
     could reopen and the makeshift crematoria alongside the Uxbridge
     canals could at last close down. It was also a time of fresh
     employment opportunity though not necessarily of the type for which
     Iris was best suited. There was much that needed to be done and there
     was a shortage of people able to do it. In London, as in all the
     world’s great cities that had suffered the most from White Death, such
     as New York, Paris and Johannesburg, there was the inevitable sharp
     bounce back from the poverty and fear that had been associated with
     the plague.
     Like most of her friends,
     Iris wondered whether a government that had profited so much during a
     crisis where small minds and small horizons could flourish was really
     best suited to engage with a period of new hope, new expectations and
     new opportunities. But for now she was just pleased that she could at
     last travel by underground train into the city centre to work in an
     office or restaurant and that she no longer had to walk around all day
     with a strip of cloth strapped over her mouth.

    No Future Volume Three

LXXIX
     Lindiwe
     2069
      
      
      
     Although
     this was by no means the first time in her life that Lindiwe had been
     ill, she’d never before felt as desperately sick as she was now. Her
     luck had run out. The Buffalo Pox that had spread across England as it
     had the rest of Europe, Africa and Asia had finally chased her down.
     The horrible boils of pus on her face and chest could never be
     symptoms of anything else. And here she was, still living in the same
     Redhill squat which had been her home for almost a year with only hard
     floorboards on which to sleep. 
     As a result of the fever
     and pain from which she suffered, all Lindiwe could do was shiver and
     sweat in the corner of the room swaddled in a blanket with her
     consciousness lapsing periodically into blessed oblivion. She needed
     food and drink, but didn’t have the energy to leave the small spot in
     the room that she’d claimed as her own and venture out to beg on the
     mean streets of North Surrey. In any case, she wasn’t sure she even
     had the ability to hold anything in her stomach once she’d let it slip
     down her throat.
     It was obvious that
     Lindiwe was sick. She sat huddled against the mildewed wall displaying
     the typical symptoms of Buffalo Pox such as horrible festering sores
     and postulating boils. This was reason enough for anyone to keep their
     distance. Any contact with Lindiwe or with anything she touched could
     easily spread further a plague that had already claimed so many lives
     across the world
     Lindiwe was sure that
     there had once been a time when pandemics of this kind were countered
     with an antidote that would later be released to the public. Such days
     were gone and these days many new strains of cholera, diphtheria,
     typhoid, hepatitis and leprosy had taken a fresh hold on those least
     well prepared to defend themselves against it. The limits to a
     pandemic’s range wasn’t determined only by the spread of poverty and
     access to medicine. It was spreading much further as scientific
     progress was no longer keeping ahead of the pathogens’ rapid mutation.
     This was England’s second great epidemic in just over ten years, but
     the first Lindiwe had known since she’d arrived in the Kingdom. It was
     ironic that although she’d managed to avoid the many truly horrible
     diseases that had ravaged Lesotho and neighbouring South Africa it was
     in England that Lindiwe was finally laid low.
     The English had almost
     certainly learnt lessons from the last plague, still known as the
     White Death, but that knowledge was compromised by the fact that it
     had happened during the period of the Government of National Unity
     whose one redeeming feature was its natural instinct for prompt
     authoritarian action. The government could be congratulated for having
     put into place a truly radical response: in which England’s borders
     were hermetically sealed, internal movement regulated and vast areas
     of Southern England, the Midlands and the Home Counties quarantined,
     but such praise was compromised by the fact that such policies were
     the knee-jerk response of an insular, almost racist, government very
     much in the pocket of big business. Nothing was considered more
     precious or sacrosanct than the welfare of those least likely to
     suffer, so the hundreds of thousands of deaths directly or indirectly
     attributable to Sheep Fever were overwhelmingly concentrated amongst
     the already poor and vulnerable. No loss, the government probably
     thought. Such people would never vote for them even if they had the
     opportunity to do so.
     Buffalo Pox’s spread
     across England followed a different pattern to that of the White
     Death. This may have been because the current coalition government of
     Labour, Green and other left-of-centre parties made a huge effort to
     differentiate itself from its discredited predecessor. Nevertheless,
     although the contagion was distributed more evenly across the
     socio-economic classes and ethnic groups, there were still many tens
     of thousands who’d died and many more who were likely to die in the
     future.
     And Lindiwe was convinced
     that she would soon be one of them.
     Like everyone else,
     Lindiwe had followed the disease’s progress with alarm as it emerged
     from the recently re-opened Channel Tunnel and the southern ports;
     then spread through the counties of Sussex and Kent; and now to the
     very edge of London. Why was this contagion known as Buffalo Pox? Why
     not smallpox or even cowpox? Its flimsy connection with buffalos was
     more to do with Water Buffalo rather than the species of Bison locally
     known as Buffalo by the citizens of North America’s fragmented
     nations. The disease’s origin was more the kind of place where such
     buffalo wallowed rather than the animals themselves.
     Such concerns were of
     little comfort to Lindiwe now; although her thoughts were so
     fragmentary and unconnected that anything so abstract was a kind of
     comfort to her. She was also sometimes aware of the presence of the
     two other African women who shared her bedroom and with whom, until
     she became ill, she’d huddle together for warmth and company under the
     threadbare blankets. 
     There was Uzoma: a large
     woman now unnaturally diminished by hunger and from whose bosom and
     buttocks protruded more bone than flesh. Her fluency of English was
     poor and her knowledge of any other language that Lindiwe understood
     was non-existent, so she mostly communicated by hand-signals and a
     severely limited repertoire of words. Lindiwe still didn’t know from
     which African country Uzoma was a refugee. 
     There was also Yewande
     whose original home was Serrekunda in the Gambia, now a province of
     Senegal. Her English was excellent as was the quality of her
     education, but there were few job opportunities for a Historian in
     Comparative Linguistics. She now made a living in one of the many
     sweatshops that lined the London-Brighton Road. She was by far the
     best dressed woman in the house—resplendent in the tee-shirts and
     football sweaters that her employers sold—but she was also generous in
     helping to stock the place with household provisions.
     Although her two
     room-mates kept a prudent distance from her, it was only because of
     them that Lindiwe was still alive. They slept as far from her as they
     could on the other side of the room, their fully clothed bodies
     wrapped round each other for warmth. When either woman ventured in her
     vicinity, she would keep her mouth covered as protection from
     air-borne viruses. Neither woman was expert in medicine, but both knew
     enough not to touch Lindiwe or anything that she’d worn, touched or
     coughed on. And it was they who ensured that Lindiwe was provided with
     the food and water that she was physically incapable of fetching for
     herself.
     The outcome of Lindiwe’s
     battle against near death was by no means certain. The days were long
     and feverish and Lindiwe was almost always surprised when after she’d
     fallen asleep she would awaken the following day. Was she getting
     better? She wasn’t sure at first. The moments when she thought she
     might be recovering, when a boil had retreated or the phlegm she
     coughed up was less viscous or tasted less revolting, was often
     followed by a fresh outbreak of debilitating fever whose affects
     couldn’t be relieved by the water that Uzoma or Yewande had left in an
     old plastic bottle beside her.
     All the same, Lindiwe was
     convinced that a corner had been turned when she was at last able to
     concentrate with more attention to Yewande’s unbroken monologues on
     those few moments when she wasn’t working or sleeping. (Uzoma’s
     similar monologues served only to dull her senses to welcome sleep).
     The Buffalo Pox had cut a swath across the Kingdom and decimated
     farming communities as far afield as Cornwall, Cumbria and Suffolk. It
     was now retreating from its original strongholds in the South East of
     England and the capital had mostly escaped the worst of it. 
     “Good!” said Lindiwe
     bitterly. “So, I’m nothing but a freak statistic.”
     “Not just a statistic,
     Lindi sweetheart,” said Yewande who was delighted and encouraged by
     Lindiwe’s comments although they were scarcely cheerful. “You’re
     alive, remember. And you might not become a statistic at all.”
     A day or so later, Lindiwe
     had recovered enough to be able to watch the television news on
     Yewande’s laptop screen (or for as long as its battery power lasted).
     This was a privilege that Lindiwe truly appreciated. The cost of
     powering batteries was especially prohibitive in winter when there was
     so little solar energy. She watched the EBC News constantly on the
     small 25 centimetre screen as it continually recycled the same news
     stories hour on hour on a diminished budget and with most outside
     images provided on license by Sky News UK and foreign broadcasters
     from Scotland and Ireland. It was the same depressing cycle of famine,
     plague, warfare and economic malaise, but more than anything else it
     helped distract and even cheer Lindiwe. It was comforting to know that
     however bad things were for her, it was many times worse elsewhere.
     The Buffalo Pox and the series of other plagues and contagions that
     had spread across the world had been so severe in some countries that
     global population growth, including in even Africa, was actually
     faltering in its otherwise inexorable climb. When the sources of
     disaster weren’t the familiar four horsemen of the apocalypse, there
     were other ills to trouble the world. Earthquake. Crop failure.
     Drought. Flood. Aeroplane crashes. Border skirmishes between the
     fragments of what had once been the United States. Even some ominous
     sabre-rattling in the Middle East. It all put Lindiwe’s near death
     from an international pandemic into some kind of perspective. 
     Soon Lindiwe was well
     enough that she could stand, walk, talk and even contemplate
     re-entering the land of the living. But was she now able to make a
     living? She didn’t want to return to the life of a prostitute even if
     Empire Cleaning Services were to employ a woman so scarred by recent
     sickness. There wasn’t much income to make from other more legal
     occupations such as begging. Lindiwe dreaded that she would have to
     resort to theft or some other form of crime to survive.
     “Can you sew?” Yewande
     asked.
     “Sew?” wondered Lindiwe
     who was now well enough to sit on the same side of the room as her
     friends. “Are you offering me a job in the place where you work? Would
     they take me on?”
     “I’m sure you could do the
     work as well as I can,” said Yewande. “It’s monotonous but it’s better
     than starvation. And although Union Republic Sportswear isn’t actually
     advertising at the moment they have plenty of vacancies.”
     “Vacancies? Is business
     improving at the moment?”
     “No,” said Yewande. “But
     you’re not the only one who’s contracted Buffalo Pox in the last few
     months. There are many sewing machines sitting idle at the factory at
     the moment and it’s unlikely that many of those who once used to
     operate them will ever be returning to work.”

    No Future Volume Three

LXXX
     Olive
     2085
      
      
     The
     doctor must be shitting her. It wasn’t right. Olive had already been
     infected before by gon, syph, NSU, chlam and every fucking thing but
     AIDS, but why was this syph so fucking different? 
     “A jab, a few days off
     work, and it’ll be gone,” said Olive pleadingly. “I’ve had syph
     before. It ain’t no big deal.”
     “It’s not as easy as
     that,” the doctor of the charitable health centre said sadly. He
     peered with one eye at the clock: conscious of the queue of patients
     trailing around the block. “There are several different strains of
     syphilis and they constantly mutate. We’ve seen it happen with
     gonorrhoea, influenza, rabies, polio and now it’s happened with
     syphilis. The viruses have mutated faster than the pharmaceutical
     companies can find an antidote for them.”
     “Well, fuck it,” said
     Olive who wasn’t sure she understood even a quarter of what the man
     was saying. “Just scribble something on a piece of paper and I’ll take
     it to the chemists. If I have to, I’ll even pay for it so’s I can get
     back to work.”
     “I don’t think I’ve made
     myself clear, have I?” said the doctor apologetically. “There is
     no antidote at present for the variant of syphilis that you’ve
     contracted. I can’t offer you much at all in the way of a cure. All I
     can offer are palliatives. It won’t cure you as such, but it’ll help
     deal with the symptoms.”
     “Well, that’s fucking
     better than nothing,” said Olive. “Just give me some of those.”
     “Well, of course,” said
     the doctor. 
     He tapped away on the
     keyboard attached to his tablet and raised his head to watch a
     prescription sheet being dispensed from a laser printer on the far
     side of the surgery. After the single sheet was printed, a further few
     sheets followed. This was a health leaflet of the sort that only
     charities and foreign governments provided.
     “What’s this other crap
     I’ve got to read, doctor?” Olive asked half in dread and half in
     scorn.
     “It explains the symptoms
     of neo-pallidum syphilis and how to best deal with them. It includes
     the standard advice that you probably already know about such as
     avoiding sexual contact to restrict the further spread of the disease
     and what other symptoms you should look out for. What it will probably
     not make especially clear is that there is currently no known cure and
     that you may well have to live with the affects of this infection for
     the rest of your life. It also specifies your possible likelihood of
     mortality.”
     “Likelihood of what? I
     wasn’t expecting to live forever anyway.”
     “This strain will make
     that even less likely,” said the doctor glumly.
     Well fuck that, thought
     Olive as she wandered out of the surgery past the winding queue. Like
     her, none of the other patients had the steady income required to pay
     insurance premiums for health care. Most were elderly, young or
     disabled. Few were employed, although even those lucky ones were
     unlikely to be able to afford medical attention that wasn’t provided
     by charity. And the state of their health wouldn’t be accepted as a
     reason for not being able to work. Employers were choosy about who
     they employed, so anyone who was prone to sickness or took a day or
     more off work would soon return to the ranks of the even more
     destitute unemployed.
     Olive was a self-employed
     woman, of course. Or at least that’s how she’d characterise herself if
     there was ever another government census of the sort that used to
     happen once every ten years. In practice, it meant that she let men
     fuck her for money. She supplemented this core income by petty theft,
     drug-dealing and begging. And whether she had the clap or something
     more serious, as long as she could give her johns a blowjob or a
     handjob, she had no choice but to do so. Fuck the advice about holding
     back on the fanny. If a john wanted to fuck her and he had the
     readies: well, that was what she’d allow him to do, rubber or no
     rubber.
     Even so, Olive resisted
     the temptation of dropping the freshly printed health advice into the
     nearest recycle bin. Even if she couldn’t find a use for the paper to
     roll a spliff or through which to snort a line, there was some stuff
     on the kind of clap she’d got that she might want to read about. If
     nothing else, it’d give her an idea of what to expect if the doctor
     wasn’t just spinning a line and she really was suffering from
     something incurable. But then there was once a time when they said
     that AIDS was incurable and, from what she’d last heard, that was
     still just no longer true. Perhaps they’d find a cure for all the new
     strains of clap just like they used to do when Olive was a kid and it
     was her mum who’d turn the occasional trick. Olive was determined to
     continue fucking even if her twat was weeping with sores, warts and
     pus. There was always some miracle wonder-cure that the drug companies
     could make a fucking bomb from. That sort of business never went
     insolvent, unlike all the others that had gone bust over the years.
     Olive was true to her
     intentions. She found the time to turn a trick or two along Streatham
     Hill near the railway station before she returned home to the
     dilapidated squat on Ullswater Road. In only a couple of hours she
     scored nearly a grand from three blowjobs and an alley-way fuck.
     That’d be enough to keep her in hamburgers, kebabs and crack for a day
     or so.
     “So what’s the verdict?”
     asked Yana, her room-mate and occasional lover when Olive had
     persuaded her to unpadlock the bedroom door. “It weren’t nothing
     serious, was it?”
     “It wasn’t Goat Flu or Rat
     Fever or shit like that,” said Olive, referring to the contagions
     attracting most attention from the media at the moment. “It was just
     the clap again.”
     “Again!” echoed Yana.
     “That’s no big fucking deal, is it? It’s just goes with the job, don’t
     it? Nothing to get in a sweat about.”
     “Well, fuck it,” said
     Olive who didn’t want to get anxious about what the doctor had said.
     “I’ve got some crystals. You got any shit?”
     “Yeah, dope, snow and,
     best of all, some GHB.”
     “I ain’t had that in a
     while.”
     “I found a new source.”
     “Cool.”
     The one thing that Olive
     needed more than anything else was something that could take her mind
     off her fears. And sometimes these surfaced for long enough for her to
     get really depressed. But smack, coke, E and alcohol so easily
     banished such despondency. Drugs were cheaper than food these days.
     And why eat, when all you did was add calories? After a line, a tab or
     a toke you didn’t fucking care. You might be the world’s worst fucking
     mother who couldn’t be bothered to speak to her daughter for well over
     a year now. You might be sucking cock and taking it up the arse from
     johns whose names you’d never know and whose faces you could never
     remember. You might be sharing a mattress in a squalid bedroom in a
     house full of psychos, smackheads and petty criminals. You might even
     be suffering from an incurable strain of venereal disease. But what
     the fuck! When you were high, you didn’t give a fuck. And what
     was life about if not to enjoy yourself and fuck everything else.
     In any case, without the
     drugs that were so easy to buy and no trouble to afford, what would
     life have been like for Olive, Yana and any one of the few people, all
     women, she considered to be her friends? She didn’t fucking care if
     some john had fucked her in the arse and who, rather than pay what had
     been agreed, waved a knife around and told her to fuck off. She didn’t
     give a flying fuck if she got beat up by security guards who saw her
     as fair game if she ever strayed down one of the private streets they
     patrolled. As long as each night ended on a high in the arms of either
     a paying customer or a close girlfriend, what fucking difference did
     it ever make?
     “It’s a fucking mess down
     there, girlfriend,” said Yana with genuine revulsion. “I ain’t gonna
     put my tongue there. It’s fucking disgusting.”
     “What about your pussy?”
     Olive pleaded.
     “What’s your tongue like?”
     “Good,” said Olive, poking
     it out as far as she could.
     “There’s a reason you go
     to the clap clinic more often than I do, girlfriend,” said Yana with
     more seriousness than her inebriation might suggest. “And that’s
     ’cause I’m fucking careful with what goes in my twat and you’re not.
     Look, O. I love you, I really do. Not since that cunt of a boyfriend
     dumped me I ain’t loved no one more than you. But, honestly... It’s
     fucking warfare between your thighs!”
     “It ain’t that bad!” said
     Olive.
     “It fucking well is.”
     “You’re fucking shitting
     me...”
     “Have a look in the
     mirror.”
     “Not now.”
     “The only tongue you’ll
     get on those lips, dearest, will be from one of your johns,” said Yana
     sternly. “And fuck only knows what you’ll be giving him in return for
     his cash. There are enough warts and weeping sores there to fucking
     coat the dick of every john in London.”
     “Well, if you ain’t gonna
     lick my twat,” said Olive, “at least let me have another line.”

    No Future Volume Three

LXXXI
     Sir Norman
     2080
      
      
     “What
     the fuck do you mean?” Sir Norman asked sharply. “There must
     be a cure. I don’t care what it costs. I’ll pay it whatever the
     expense. There’s always a cure.”
     “Not this time, my lord,”
     said Dr. Urey, the Harley Street doctor to whose medical advice Sir
     Norman had privileged access. “I shall continue my investigation, but
     as you know I have many contacts in the pharmaceutical industry and
     what I’ve so far been given to understand doesn’t bode at all well.
     And then there are the complications as well...”
     “Complications?”
     “AIDS may not be the
     killer it once was, my lord, at least not in the Republic of England,”
     said the doctor, “but your natural defences have nonetheless been
     weakened as a result of your close encounter with HIV. Not to mention
     some of the more minor venereal diseases you contracted in the Congo
     and elsewhere...”
     “It’s not your job to
     lecture me on how I should occupy my leisure time,” Sir Norman spat
     back. “Your job is to cure me.”
     “Of course, my lord,” said
     the doctor with a slight hint of annoyance in his voice. He also had a
     knighthood and undoubtedly believed that he’d earned it for
     substantially more worthwhile reasons than had Sir Norman. “You’ll
     have the very best medical attention, but you also deserve an accurate
     diagnosis. This strain of the Typhoid bacillus is especially resistant
     to modern antibiotics. But you may be comforted by the knowledge that
     its rate of mortality should be in your favour.”
     “It is?”
     “Within the normal range
     of statistical variability, it is, my lord. More than seventy percent
     of cases recover after only a few weeks. But as I mentioned with
     regards to your condition, my lord, there are complications.”
     “Just fucking sort it
     out,” said Sir Norman brusquely, assured that a doctor even with a
     knighthood and an international reputation would do whatever he was
     asked whether he was treated with respect or contempt. “I want to be
     out of bed as soon as I possibly can.”
     “Naturally, my lord,” said
     Dr. Urey who left Sir Norman’s bedside with a deferential nod that he
     was unlikely to offer the majority of his wealthy patients. Blue blood
     still had its privileges even in a fucking Republic.
     But shit! Sir Norman
     didn’t feel at all well. Fever, headache, coughs and a fucking
     insistent pain in what the doctor called his abdomen. He certainly
     hoped he wouldn’t have to suffer all this for very much longer.
     It was obvious what had
     happened. The pharmaceutical companies had lost their way. Once they
     were able to stop any and every pandemic in its tracks almost as soon
     as it made its first appearance. Within days of a disease being
     reported in the international news media, a wonder-cure was found.
     Those with the wherewithal, like Sir Norman, made damned sure they’d
     get hold of it straightway. It was only after that it was made widely
     available to the general public at a substantial, but deserved, profit
     for the pharmaceutical companies and their prominent shareholders such
     as Sir Norman. But nowadays, all that entrepreneurism, research and
     development had become more of a cost than a profit centre. The value
     of Sir Norman’s shares in the biochemical industries were in the same
     depressingly familiar decline as those he owned in almost every other
     industry.
     How had Sir Norman been so
     foolish as to fall victim to one of the many plagues and contagions
     currently sweeping across the planet? He’d totally avoided the White
     Death when it played its part in the downfall of the Government of
     National Unity. Even though Sir Norman was now run aground in England,
     unable even to fly by private jet to his Scottish estates, he’d
     previously succeeded in avoiding all contact with even one of the
     various pandemics As he flew back and forth across the globe to
     nations in Africa and Asia that had been devastated by plague (not to
     mention famine, war and climate change), he’d dodged everything that
     might bring him harm. It was probably in Scotland that he’d contracted
     the HIV mentioned by the doctor. The fucking jocks were just as
     retroviral as the fucking niggers, spics and ragheads. The assorted
     strains of venereal disease were nothing more than the collateral
     damage to be expected when a man spent his life in pursuit of the best
     anal passages on the planet. 
     The treacherous media
     would have a real field day if Sir Norman were to meet his death from
     this particular epidemic. A one-time lord felled by Typhoid: an
     illness once thought banished to the Middle Ages bringing down a
     knight whose ancestral legacy was from an age where class mattered and
     the peasants pretty much knew their place. How much mileage would the
     turncoats on Sky News UK make from the demise of a man so closely
     associated with the Kingdom of England’s final last stand in the cause
     of decency and tradition? Did they want the world to collapse in the
     inevitable morass of squalor and degradation that would result when
     the privilege associated with affluence had spread so widely amongst
     the plebs and scum that it exhausted and despoiled the resources of
     the entire planet? It was better by far that the opportunity and
     ability to indulge in excess was reserved only for those few whose
     tastes were sufficiently refined to appreciate the products of four
     and a half billion years of evolution (or six millennia since the
     Garden of Eden, if the moronic Americans were to be believed). Only
     those who truly appreciated the delights of fucking a black arse or
     shitting on the paps of a black bitch should be so privileged.
     Nevertheless, for the next
     month or so Sir Norman was equally as wretched as any other citizen of
     the English Republic. The first week had been bad enough, but at least
     the one-time Lord of the Realm was able to articulate his rage. He
     could berate with both imagination and wit anyone, including his
     doctor, who came in contact with him. He even managed to gain
     something of an erection as a result of the energetic application of
     tender loving care from a male prostitute (black, of course) who he
     employed to tug at his penis. But as the week went by, Sir Norman’s
     temperature continued to rise, his heart beat more slowly, his head
     pounded, his throat sore and his nose had begun to bleed periodically.

     Dr. Urey could give Sir
     Norman no concrete reassurance although he was well able to recite
     such words as leukopenia, eosinopenia and lymphocytosis
     that his patient didn’t understand and was rather
     grateful that he couldn’t. The only practical relief the doctor could
     provide was the administration of painkilling drugs by syringe which
     brought the blessed relief of unconsciousness.
     Sir Norman’s fever further
     intensified after another week and he was now more often feverish than
     not. Sometimes these periods of delirium were almost ecstatic
     especially when ameliorated by morphine, but Sir Norman’s most normal
     state of mind nowadays was of panic as he slipped in and out of
     consciousness. On one such occasion he discovered to his alarm that
     there was a further distension of his already unseemly belly. His
     abdomen hadn’t just inflated like a pus-filled balloon: it also hurt
     like fuck whenever the affect of the powerful painkillers began to
     wane. Even worse was the diarrhoea that messed up his exquisite silk
     bedsheets. That was truly disgusting. It had the odour, composition
     and colour of some kind of pea soup: itself a far cry indeed from the
     haute cuisine Sir Norman normally enjoyed. Although there was no time
     of the day when he was free from fever, the symptoms became steadily
     worse towards evening. It peaked at a time between the lunch and
     dinner his chef prepared with culinary skills that Sir Norman was no
     longer able to properly enjoy. This was mostly because he was now
     spoon-fed a rather unedifying selection of plain fruit and vegetables.
     As the fever intensified
     and the pain and discomfort worsened, there were fewer and fewer
     moments of lucidity and those few were scarcely agreeable.
     “My lord. My lord,”
     repeated an insistent voice on one such brief occasion. 
     When Sir Norman opened his
     eyes and saw his doctor standing by the bed with his solicitor, he had
     sufficient awareness to guess that this was no coincidence and that
     Dr. Urey had administered a palliative drug that gave him the
     temporary relief required for him to answer the solicitor’s questions.
     Like Sir Norman’s doctor, Mr Neville Underhill’s services didn’t come
     cheap, but if the lawyer needed something he made damned sure he got
     it.
     “What do you want?” Sir
     Norman asked with as curt an inflection as he could manage, but even
     through the fog of fever he could tell that his voice croaked badly
     and that he must have sounded rather less than imposing.
     “I’m sorry to have to
     trouble you, my lord,” said Mr Underhill. “But there are urgent
     matters that require your attention.”
     “And what might these be?”
     asked Sir Norman again aware of the faltering authority of his speech.

     The tentative hold that
     Sir Norman had on his consciousness was put under intense strain as
     his solicitor advised him of matters the thread of which he lost
     within a few moments. There were words such as ‘intestate’, ‘close
     relatives’ and ‘favourite charities’ that alerted him to the gist of
     meaning hidden beneath Underhill’s mealy-mouthed but loquacious
     monologue.
     “I really couldn’t give a
     flying...” Sir Norman began, before faltering on the word that
     reminded him all too well of what he did once care deeply about. “What
     difference does it make?”
     “It is imperative that in
     the event of an unfortunate outcome that the Newbury estate doesn’t
     become just a gift to the state,” said the solicitor. “You have
     successfully avoided paying almost a single penny to what was once Her
     Majesty’s government...”
     “Fuck them!” Sir Norman
     hissed.
     “...but is now the
     government of the people of England,” continued the solicitor. “There
     is no obvious beneficiary for your estate. You have no relatives or
     companions who should naturally inherit the estate and you haven’t
     written a will. Just who should inherit your fortune if the worst
     should happen and...?”
     “Don’t you worry,
     Neville,” said Sir Norman. “I’m sure you’ll be well provided for.”
     “That is scarcely the
     issue,” insisted the solicitor. “Is there any cause...?”
     “Try the Red Cross,” said
     Sir Norman in a semi-delirious state. “They do good things. Or the
     Croissant Rouge. Keep the ragheads healthy. Why the fuck not?
     Everything else is fucked...”
     “Croissant Rouge?” said
     the solicitor who appeared alarmed. “What about causes more dear to
     your heart? The Conservative Party? The Taxpayers’ Alliance? The Koch
     Foundation?”
     “Fuck it!” shouted an
     agitated Sir Norman. “Give it all to the Croissant Rouge. Give the
     Arabs as many baguettes as they can eat.”
     “Are you sure, my lord?”
     “Or Greenpeace. They’re
     still going, aren’t they? The world’s such a shit-hole the Greens’ll
     find plenty to campaign against for years to come.”
     “Is that really the
     message you want to leave as your legacy, my lord?”
     “What’s that?”
     “A deathbed conversion to
     exactly the causes you’ve most despised and excoriated all your life.”
     Sir Norman paused for
     thought. What sort of legacy did he want to leave? Did he want
     hippies to praise him while they hugged trees and tried to save the
     world’s last living whale? Did he want ragheads, niggers or other
     kinds of brown-skinned scum to imagine that he was anything other than
     a robust believer in tradition and ethnic purity?
     “Fuck it!” gasped Sir
     Norman. “Just give everything to the Tories. They can be guaranteed to
     preserve my legacy.”
     “Indeed they can, my
     lord,” said Mr Neville Underhill with satisfaction. “Your legacy will
     be long remembered by the happy people of a prosperous nation.”
     “I certainly hope so,”
     said Sir Norman as his consciousness dimmed for the very last time.

    No Future Volume Three

     LXXXII
     Phil
     2104
      
      
      
     It
     was an image of a kind Phil had often seen before, but what was
     horrifying about it was the simple fact that it wasn’t being broadcast
     as part of a news story from a distant urban slum or a foreign
     country. In fact, it was being transmitted from a surveillance camera
     just outside his own home. And this image, live and direct and in
     gruesome detail, showed a man’s body slide slowly downwards into the
     dark red reflective sheet of his own blood that had splattered onto
     the steel shutters that covered the windows of Phil’s house. It was
     fortunate that Phil had recently had them installed on the persuasive
     urging of the Ashton Lovelock Neighbourhood Watch. 
     The image was truly
     grotesque. The man’s head had exploded from the impact of the
     well-aimed rifle shots. A rich red puddle of blood was spreading
     outwards across the patio in the long shadows of the late evening
     summer sun. 
     However horrifying the
     image was, Phil’s thoughts were also with those neighbours of his
     who’d not abided by the local Neighbourhood Watch’s advice. Many homes
     were lacking the steel shutters and anti-personnel devices that were
     now almost standard. Who knew from what humiliation and torture such
     poorly defended neighbours were suffering from at the mercy of the
     plebs who’d broken into their property and who hadn’t yet been
     eliminated by the security guards? Their worldly possessions would be
     ransacked. Their houses plundered. And the women (and maybe even the
     men) raped. And possibly murdered.
     Phil’s hope rested in the
     speed and efficiency that the security guards would employ to defend
     his property. The manufacturers of his home security system had told
     him how many minutes the house was guaranteed safe against determined
     assault, but such information seemed so academic when he’d authorised
     the purchase of the advanced security system and had it installed.
     The live feed from the
     cameras scattered around the lawns and residences of Ashton Lovelock
     were providing a continual and unsettling view of the violence that
     had descended on the gated community now that the plebs had overrun
     its streets and malls. Phil had the facility to switch the view from
     one camera to another simply by moving his hand. Many stores in the
     Gaia Mall had been totally thrashed, but they would have been the
     obvious target of the plebs’ initial onslaught. They were after
     clothes and electrical goods as well as the food that they’d been
     pleading for. The extent of their avarice only demonstrated the extent
     of the hypocrisy in the claims made by the plebs’ representatives in
     the media that having enough to eat was all they wanted. Some of
     Phil’s neighbours’ houses had been broken into. Phil felt especially
     sorry for the Stewarts, despite their decidedly Scottish surname,
     whose house was now engulfed in flame. 
     But, as the cameras also
     showed, the security guards were responding to the pleb invasion with
     overwhelming force.
     It was only right—given
     the way they bled his wallet each month—that the security officers
     should respond to the invasion of Ashton Lovelock with so much force
     and determination. This was also only what was necessary given how
     many yobbish invaders they had to repel. Hundreds of the fucking plebs
     had streamed in through the breach in Ashton Lovelock’s electric
     fence. And an entirely unappetising bunch they were too. The men were
     unshaven. The women wore no makeup. Shabby cheap clothes: ill-fitting,
     unstylish and unprepossessing. The plebs were barely human. They
     deserved the bullets that tore their bodies apart. They deserved the
     savage beating they were getting from the security guards that left
     them barely alive. The most unlucky ones deserved to have their
     corpses left abandoned in bloody puddles by the kerbside. If Phil
     wasn’t so worried about his safety he’d gladly have left his home to
     personally deliver the coup de grâce to the bastards himself.

     There’d been warnings of a
     possible invasion for several months now not just in Ashton Lovelock
     but in every affluent village and suburban retreat up and down the
     Republic. The protests in the big cities had been getting increasingly
     violent as the unwashed and uneducated proles, plebs, peasants and
     vagrants remonstrated about their imagined grievances. It was nothing
     more than whingeing, of course. Did they really expect to get
     something for nothing? Where did they imagine the money would come
     from to address their ridiculously long list of unachievable demands?
     The universal provision of education, healthcare, security and
     well-paid jobs didn’t come from nowhere. They had to be earned. And
     although the protestors had been treated with far more respect than
     they deserved, they continued to agitate for what they laughingly and
     unashamedly called their rights.
     The government’s
     extraordinary patience eventually ran out. This was a long time after
     it had for ordinary middle-class citizen such as Phil. The protestors
     would have to disperse. They’d illegally occupied parks in London,
     Birmingham and Manchester and refused to pay the daily entrance fee.
     They’d erected tents around public and private property to which they
     wouldn’t normally be allowed access such as cathedrals, banks and the
     shopping malls. They regaled innocent bystanders with demand for
     greater justice, equality and respect. Well, to get respect, a person
     has to earn it, and these people most certainly hadn’t done that.
     The private security staff
     and armed mercenaries employed by the English government and the
     mayors of England’s great cities showed both enthusiasm and gusto in
     their struggle to force the plebeian scum off the roads. It was
     heartening to watch videos on the internet of their long-delayed
     retaliation. No mercy was shown with boot, stick, baton, rubber bullet
     and latterly, as the conflict worsened, with guns and other more
     lethal hardware. Despite the propaganda broadcast by what little was
     left of the liberal media, the retaliation was entirely proportionate
     to the nuisance caused by the plebs and their disruption to English
     commerce.
     And now the bastards were
     invading Ashton Lovelock.
     They must have come from
     miles away, though Phil wondered how they could have made the journey
     from the dilapidated urban wastelands of Warwick, Coventry or
     Bicester. The impoverished plebs couldn’t afford to travel by car and
     they most certainly wouldn’t have been welcome on the motorways.
     Perhaps they’d walked all the way or travelled on the back of donkeys.
     However they’d got there Phil could see the trouble brewing as he
     drove home every day and passed the steadily expanding encampment just
     outside Ashton Lovelock’s perimeter. The signs they brandished were
     the usual ones about jobs, greed and human rights. There were even
     some relating to climate change, flooding and the other environmental
     problems that bedevilled the world. Didn’t the plebs realise that the
     solutions to such problems were exactly what the company that employed
     Phil was working to resolve?
     And now it had happened.
     The plebs had breached the defensive walls and fences. There was
     plenty of speculation about how this had happened among the messages
     buzzing about the internet as knowledge of the invasion spread across
     the online world. Wire-cutters. Tunnels. Electrical short-circuits.
     Even an inside job from sympathetic workers in the mall or from the
     residents’ servants. Whatever! It was happening now, just as it had
     happened in other privileged communities all the way from Cornwall to
     the unflooded islands of Norfolk, from Windermere to Bishop’s Avenue,
     and from Hay-on-Wye to Stratford-on-Avon.
     Phil was relieved to see
     that the plebs had now moved away from his home and were congregating
     elsewhere. They’d clearly been deterred by the blaze of gunfire that
     had mowed down the protestors who’d struggled fruitlessly to get
     through the steel sheets that had slid up on the outside of his
     already toughened windows and reinforced the deceptively oaken
     appearance of his front door. The liberal media might gripe about the
     effectiveness of deterrence, but it was fairly obvious to Phil that it
     had clearly worked as he watched the plebs wander away from the
     gruesomely disfigured corpses on his lawn and driveway. His anxiety
     was now rather less about his life and property and rather more about
     whether his insurance premiums were sufficient to cover the cost of
     cleaning up the mess of dead bodies on his estate. There was even the
     possibility that—like warfare or Acts of God—this was something his
     expensive insurance policies just didn’t cover.
     From what Phil could see
     from his screens, the plebs were now in retreat. That was good, of
     course, but it would still leave a scar on the community of Ashton
     Lovelock that couldn’t be brushed away so easily. It could be weeks,
     even as much as a month, until the shops were re-opened. And the
     Stewarts... If they’d suffered as badly as the internet gossip
     suggested, there’d be funerals for several weeks to come. And if
     they’d survived, then Phil would have to find time to offer condolence
     for their losses. He hoped they were well enough insured that he
     wouldn’t be expected to help provide them with charitable assistance
     in their hour of need. That would be regrettable; but neighbours had
     to stick together, especially after such a brutal onslaught.
     There was another crackle
     of gunfire as the security guards located a group of plebs who’d been
     hiding in the back garden of a house just half a block away. The
     security cameras from all the surrounding houses swivelled round to
     focus on the bloodshed. There were just three plebs and two of them
     were women. They were clearly terrified as the security guards
     surrounded them with their automatic rifles in hand. They were such a
     pathetic bunch. Scrawny. Ill-fed. Clothes that were patched and
     re-patched again and again. The older of the woman had a mouth with
     few teeth and many gaps. It was a relief to watch them get scythed
     down by a spray of automatic gunfire. 
     Scum like that didn’t
     deserve to live.
     Phil continued to watch
     the carnage from the comfort of his lounge until well past his normal
     bed-time. He didn’t need to worry about having to get to work the
     following day. Like other employees on the Warwick Business Park he’d
     been notified that special leave would be extended to anyone who had
     reasonable fear that they might be caught up in the protests spreading
     across the nation. Phil wasn’t so naive as to believe that his
     employer was being generous merely for reasons of inherent goodness.
     The drop in profit resulting from the loss of skilled technical and
     executive staff who’d fallen victim to the angry mob just wasn’t worth
     it. The cost would be even greater if the employee became eligible for
     compassionate leave.
     As the fear receded that
     Phil might fall to the same fate as the Stewarts, he continued to
     watch the live coverage of the security guards’ clean-up. He wasn’t
     quite as comfortable as he would ideally choose to be. The steel
     shutters were still securely up on all the doors and windows so he
     couldn’t benefit at all from the natural light of the evening sun. And
     he probably wouldn’t want to venture out of his home for several more
     days. He’d be doing all his shopping online until the mall returned to
     a good state of repair.
     Look! There was another
     pleb hiding in the shadow of a recycling bin. 
     The bastard was still
     holding onto his spoils of plunder. In this instance it was a cheap
     laptop and a saveloy sausage. Fat use they’d be to him now as a
     security guard raised his rifle and pointed it towards the pleb’s
     forehead. He looked understandably anxious. No doubt he was reflecting
     on the folly of his criminal trespass. Perhaps he’d be leaving a
     family without its main breadwinner. 
     The shot from the rifle
     was brief and not especially loud. The pleb collapsed to the ground. A
     circle of blood steadily grew on the forehead just above eyes from
     which all life was now extinguished.
     That was a lesson the
     plebs should all remember.
     As the evening shadows
     lengthened and the sun dipped below the horizon, there were fewer such
     eventful moments. Now that the mob had recognised that their invasion
     had been countered with far more force than they could possibly
     withstand they’d run off back to where they’d come from. The security
     guards were under no obligation to chase after them, of course. In
     fact, the terms and conditions of their contract almost certainly
     prohibited them from doing so. Beyond the confines of Ashton Lovelock,
     the plebs could only be pursued by a police force so poorly funded and
     overstretched that it was effectively no force at all. They’d be at
     liberty to plunder, rob and murder one another with virtual impunity,
     but hopefully they’d now learnt the lesson that Ashton Lovelock was
     not the place for such lawlessness.
     But the excitement wasn’t
     completely over yet. As the security guards continued their patrol,
     followed behind by ancillary staff that would tidy up the mess, drag
     off the bodies and mop up the blood, there were yet more intruders to
     locate on the well-tended lawns and polished patios.
     This would be a long
     night, thought Phil as he idly dipped his hand into a carton of
     popcorn and chomped on a huge beefburger.

    No Future Volume Three

LXXXIII
     Iris
     2060
      
      
      
     It would never have been Iris’
     ideal choice of career, but there weren’t many choices still available
     to her. Though there’d been an evident expansion in employment
     opportunities as the White Death receded, this brief boom vanished at
     almost the same rate as the last bodies were being incinerating. The
     jobs that appeared to address the need to clean up after the pandemic
     vanished all too soon. The Government’s policy of dissuading foreign
     influence had also destroyed any residual foreign appetite for inward
     investment and the Republic of England was now a place of even fewer
     opportunities and rather less hope.
     As there were no openings
     for a career in Biotechnology even in London, Iris decided that having
     already stooped somewhat lower than she’d ever intended when she chose
     to work for Empire Cleaning Services, her pride was no longer an
     obstacle with regards to any decision she made to make money. As she’d
     already made a living by masquerading as a cleaning maid, perhaps now
     she should actually work as one. So Iris began to look more favourably
     at the many vacancies for domestic servants that were being posted on
     the internet. It was one of the few sectors in the Kingdom’s economy
     where job opportunities were continuing to grow, but the job
     opportunities were all cloistered well away from what Iris viewed as
     the ordinary world. And that was the world where she believed she
     belonged. This other world where most domestic servants in London
     worked was secluded behind the electric fences and high gates of the
     affluent private estates. The relatively prosperous wanted to maintain
     a good distance away from the ungrateful taxpayer, but they still
     needed people to mow their lawn, make their beds and do the ironing. 
     A few years earlier when
     Iris’ source of income was also to provide services for the
     comfortably well-to-do, she’d very much been the centre of her
     employers’ attentions (though perhaps not in a good way). Nowadays
     when she’d gained access into the homes of the fortunate few—having
     been vetted by security guards at the electric gates—she was entirely
     peripheral. As far as her employers were concerned, she was nothing
     more than an invisible presence. All they wanted from her was to
     ensure that the detritus of daily life was removed without fuss and
     with no trace. Toilet bowls cleaned. Shirts ironed. Beds made. Parquet
     floors polished and cleaned. 
     Iris was sure that even in
     just three years there’d been an appreciable hardening in the attitude
     expressed by the affluent towards those less fortunate. Her employers
     previously betrayed the occasional sign of embarrassment at being in
     possession of so much more wealth than those no less deserving than
     themselves. Now, after seven years of the Government of National Unity
     and a year of the White Death, there was nothing that could tarnish
     their innate sense of superiority.
     Iris soon came to rather
     prefer the secluded, secure and tidy world of immaculate lawns behind
     the electric fences to the perils of her life outside. This was ironic
     because it was only outside that she was able to enjoy her free time.
     The world where she worked was a place where the roads were lit in the
     dark; where the electricity was always on and reliable; and where she
     was safe from harassment and arbitrary violence. The hedges that
     enclose the houses were as trim and tidy as the lawns. When she was
     inside the houses—shaking sheets, ironing denim jeans, dusting behind
     the furniture—she became almost house-proud for the well-appointed
     homes whose corners and alcoves she’d got to know in more intimate
     detail than did the actual home-owners.
     When she walked home at
     the end of the day, having cleaned, tidied and scrubbed in five or six
     homes for ten or more hours at a rate of pay that was barely more than
     she’d once used to receive at the Work Experience Centre, she had to
     pass through a cordon of security guards. Even though they all
     recognised her, because they were themselves monitored by security
     cameras, they had to behave as officiously now as on the first day
     that Iris first worked in the private housing estate. Any evidence of
     sloppiness would be noticed by the attendant software and their
     employment would be abruptly terminated.
     And then through the
     barrier gates, into the dark streets where the only functioning
     street-lights were those few not yet vandalised and which were, in any
     case, only as bright as their solar batteries allowed. Iris would walk
     home in a group of other domestic servants in the hope that sheer
     numbers would provide the desperately needed security for the next
     several kilometres walk and subsequent bus-ride. When she at last
     settled down on the decrepit ancient bus with its smashed-up security
     camera and punched-open windows that let in the wind and rain, she
     watched the North West London streets on the journey to her
     house-share just by the periphery of Heathrow Airport.
     Once upon a time, this had
     been a part of London with many jobs but also the constant disruption
     that came from being right under the flight-path of aeroplanes flying
     across the Atlantic or to parts of Europe. Although there were still
     many such flights, they were rather fewer in number than Iris
     remembered from her childhood when she and her mother took holidays
     together in Spain and Florida. Even though her recollection of these
     holidays were marred by the accompanying memory of her mother’s
     constant moaning about her feckless ex-husband and Iris’ father, she
     still recalled the childhood pleasure of sitting by the aeroplane
     window and looking out at the clouds below. Rather fewer people could
     afford to fly these days and as fuel prices continued their inexorable
     rise, this was a number that could only continue to fall. 
     The people who owned the
     houses that Iris kept so spotlessly clean would have little trouble in
     affording the occasional plane flight. For them, the experience of
     flying would be quite different from what Iris remembered. There would
     be emptier airport lounges, smaller crowds and shorter queues at
     Passport Control. Not that Iris could be sure about this. Although
     news stories in the mostly sympathetic media emphasised how strict and
     rigorous immigration checks now were under the present government,
     Iris imagined that those few who could afford to fly were unlikely to
     be the ones whose freedom of movement the Prime Minister wanted to
     restrict. In fact: quite the opposite.
     A plane thundered overhead
     as Iris turned the key in one of the three locks that secured the
     heavily reinforced front door. She looked upwards to the sky as cold
     autumn drizzle pasted her cheeks and could just about make out the
     livery of the Republic of North America. It was ironic that those of
     the original United States who’d previously been most enthusiastic
     about the benefits of unfettered capitalism were the same ones who
     were now nationalising almost every industry still based in the
     Southern states to prevent them re-locating to Mexico or the Western
     Union. And then, in through the door, with a final check that no one
     was following behind, and up the dimly lit staircase to her bedroom.
     There was much about Iris’
     life that was more indigent than she’d been used to nearly a decade
     earlier when politics was nothing more than an abstract term and
     social injustice was something she associated with foreign countries
     that were far away and often difficult to spell or pronounce. She was
     scarcely a radical, but seven years of the Government of National
     Unity had made her more militant and much less apathetic. She still
     didn’t know in which direction she believed the nation should head,
     but she was bloody sure where she wanted to head away from.
     She shared her bedroom
     with Phyllis who also worked as a domestic servant and was as
     ludicrously over-qualified as Iris for the position. Phyllis was
     fluent in several European languages—none of which were now of much
     use in a Kingdom that had disassociated itself from the Northern
     European Union—and had gained an MBA at just the time when most
     international corporations with offices in England made the strategic
     business decision to manage their affairs from aboard.
     Iris strode up the worn
     faded stair carpet by what would once have been a living room but was
     now just another bedroom. She hardly knew the other people in the
     house at all except for those she occasionally encountered in the
     kitchen or bathroom. The other residents were almost always either out
     working or in their bedrooms asleep. The little social interaction she
     had was usually around breakfast and lunch-time, but despite the
     wealth of university degrees few of her fellow residents were employed
     in a profession. The only legal and legitimate jobs in abundance were
     those in domestic servitude. However as Iris was reminded as she
     opened the door to her shared bedroom, illegal commerce such as
     drug-dealing was also enjoying rather a boom under the Government of
     National Unity. The government’s hard-line policies that now
     prescribed deportation or prison as mandatory sentences for all but
     the most trivial drugs offences had led only to widespread disregard
     for the law when the supply of imported drugs was so considerable and
     alternative forms of employment so scarce.
     “It’s from the Kashmir,”
     said Phyllis as she passed the spliff to Iris. “That guy from round
     the corner said it’s the best shit to come from there since before the
     nukes went off. And since there’s nothing but hemp growing on the
     mountains there’s a lot of it and it’s fucking cheap.”
     “How cheap?” Iris asked as
     she took a long draw on the proffered item. 
     “Fucking cheap. A gram is
     less than the price of a shot of whiskey. And you get higher on this
     hash than you’d ever get from a fucking bottle of spirits.”
     “It’s good,” said Iris as
     she felt the nerves on her face tingle. “That’s just the tonic I need
     after a day of work.”
     “Good day?”
     “’S OK. Not great. Just
     OK.”
     “You still good for
     Saturday?”
     Iris shook her head. “Not
     till the evening. I’ve got a couple more houses to clean. There’s
     always work to do after the Friday night parties.”
     “Well, it’s always a good
     time to pick up extra gear,” said Phyllis conspiratorially. “Those
     rich shits always leave unsnorted lines and discarded tabs about the
     place.”
     “You take them home with
     you?” Iris asked naively.
     “Don’t you?”
     “Well...” admitted Iris
     who hadn’t realised that her surreptitious pocketing was such
     universal practice. “I wouldn’t want to get sacked. And when you get
     sacked from one home you’re effectively sacked from them all.”
     “The more wasted the
     bastards are, the less they’ll ever notice,” said Phyllis. “And,
     anyway, what else are you supposed to do with all those lines? Flush
     them down the toilet. The shit’s too good for that.”
     Iris nodded. “This
     most certainly is good shit,” she said as she passed the
     spliff back.
     Phyllis cupped her palms
     around it and inhaled a deep lungful. “Well, Saturday’s still on,” she
     said. “We’ll wait up for you at the pub in the evening till you
     arrive. But I’ve got a favour to ask you.”
     “A favour?”
     “Yeah. You know.
     Freddy...”
     Iris nodded. “When?”
     “He wants to come over
     tomorrow night. You don’t mind?”
     “Just don’t make too much
     noise.” 
     Although Iris tried to
     make out that she didn’t mind that much, the truth was that Phyllis’
     nocturnal trysts with Freddy were a real source of annoyance for her.
     It wasn’t just that her room-mate was so vocal when she orgasmed, it
     was also that the fact that Phyllis got so much obvious pleasure from
     her lovemaking. It was just another reminder to Iris how little sex
     she was getting these days and, furthermore, how little she actually
     wanted it any more.
     When opportunities
     occurred nowadays, and there were no fewer than there’d ever been,
     Iris was never eager to follow them up. And when she did succumb to
     persuasion, if only to justify the continued expense on contraceptive
     pills and condoms, she felt so detached from the actual physical
     activity that it was something she was watching from a distance rather
     than experiencing herself. Her few months of employment as a
     prostitute had shattered her ability to properly enjoy sex any more.
     The psychological distance she’d adopted to cope with the emotional
     toll of having sex with strangers who were most often decidedly
     unattractive now made it difficult to enjoy sex with anyone.
     “We’ll do our best to be
     quiet,” said Phyllis who planted a grateful kiss on Iris’ cheek. “But
     you know Freddy...”
     Iris nodded. 
     She certainly did know
     Freddy. She knew more about him than she’d have liked to. And earplugs
     never seemed to make that much difference given that Iris’ bed was so
     close to the one where Phyllis and Freddy would be fucking. The only
     real solution to this inconvenience was to be so stoned that she
     couldn’t care.
     Iris pointed at the
     plastic bag just by Phyllis’ elbow that held the Kashmir hash. 
     “You don’t think you could
     spare a few grams?” she asked.

    No Future Volume Three

     LXXXIV
     Chris
     2105
      
      
      
     No one could ever call Chris a shirker. He worked hard to
     pay off his debts to the distant City corporation to whom he was
     indentured and he might well have expected some kind of recompense for
     his loyalty and exertion. But the instructions received from distant
     Nanjing showed no appreciation of Chris’ efforts at all. The
     shareholders scattered around the globe had approved the management
     board’s recommendation that the company should consolidate its European agricultural
     assets. As Chris was as much a property of the Chi Chong Investment
     Bank as the ethanol trees, the meat vats and the asparagus collecting
     robots, he was now to be thrown onto the open market to the mercy of
     the highest bidder.
     “How much more do you have
     to do to earn your freedom?” asked Chloe, Chris’ wife and the mother
     of his five children. “Surely there can’t be many more years of
     indenture. You’ve worked for Chi Chong for nine years now...”
     “It’s actually twenty-one
     years I’ve been indentured,” said Chris. “I was just fourteen years
     old when I sold my labour to Chingford Christmas Trees. That was well
     before the company was bought up by the Chinese.”
     “It still can’t be many
     years yet...”
     “They cut my salary
     remember,” said Chris. “That was a few years back. I don’t think I’ll
     ever earn enough to buy my freedom. As every year passes, there’s
     always yet another obstacle on the way.”
     “Well, at least we get to
     keep a cottage in the village,” said Chloe as she gazed through the
     cracked glass of the antique late twentieth-century window at the
     wind-generator in the garden just beside the vegetable plots that were
     an essential supplement to the family’s diet.
     “That’s not certain
     either,” said Chris. “We don’t know what the new farm owners will do.
     Chester Beeches’ business used to be mostly Christmas trees and
     livestock when I first started working there. Over the years, they’ve
     tried every kind of agriculture there is. It’s whatever makes the most
     profit at the time.”
     “And what’s that at the
     moment?” Chloe wondered. 
     Chris shook his head. He’d
     worked long enough to realise that you couldn’t make predictions about
     what the far distant shareholders and business executives might
     decide, whether they were based in London, Nanjing or Chester. But
     he’d find out soon enough.
     What he probably didn’t
     expect was that not only would he no longer be working for Chi Chong,
     but that he would no longer even keep his home. This was a real shock
     to a man who’d lived all his life in Christleton and when he ventured
     beyond the county borders it was only as far as the occasional
     agricultural show in the outskirts of Manchester’s urban sprawl. Chris
     hoped that whatever else might happen, he wouldn’t have to live
     amongst the crime and squalor of a big city.
     “The new owners are
     replacing us with robots,” said Chris, still in shock when he returned
     home after the announcement and not yet able to really believe what
     he’d heard. “Robots!”
     “That can’t be so,” said
     Chloe. “It doesn’t make economic sense. Surely human labour is still
     cheaper than an expensive thing like an agricultural robot.”
     “Labourers are cheaper
     than they used to be,” Chris admitted. “Especially since the banks
     decided to trade indenture for inherited mortgage and household debt.
     But robots have been getting cheaper and smarter and more capable all
     the time. They don’t look anything like humans and you can’t have much
     of a conversation with them, but if you see them in the fields—herding
     cattle, picking asparagus, ploughing fields, sorting out the
     produce—they’re as good as a man would ever be. They’re ten times more
     productive and their running costs are getting steadily lower.”
     “So there’s no
     competition?” Chloe remarked bitterly.
     “None,” said Chris. “All
     the lads are being replaced by robots. Not just me. Everyone.
     Christleton will just become a ghost town. The local supermarket will
     have to close as well. Robots don’t need groceries.”
     “And what about us?”
     wondered Chloe desperately. “The boys are still in school and the
     girls aren’t at marrying age yet. What’s going to happen to them?”
     “Well, unless the
     administrators find a buyer for me, we won’t be able to afford school
     fees for the boys,” said Chris. “The other lads and me: we’re all
     gonna be auctioned off with the other stock that the new buyers don’t
     want.”
     “And who are the
     people who’re taking over Chester Beeches Farm?” asked Chloe. “They
     sound soulless and cruel. To sell their indentured labourers as if
     they were nothing more than old tractors or beaten up combine
     harvesters...”
     “It’s a company I’ve never
     heard of before,” said Chris. “International Consolidated Capital
     Investment or some name like that. I’ve heard they buy assets, sell
     what they don’t want to the highest bidder, and make what’s left as
     profitable as they can.”
     “And I take it that you
     and your mates are what they don’t want?”
     “I guess so,” said Chris
     with hangdog resignation.
     The day of the auction was
     rather sooner than Chris or his friends would have liked. The bad news
     had hardly sunk in that each and every one of them would soon be
     evicted from the cottages and terraced houses where most of them had
     lived all their lives and where, in most cases, so had their parents
     and grandparents all the way back to the days when fuel was cheap,
     jobs were more plentiful and town-folk would choose to escape from
     mundane suburbia to a house in the country. They had less than a week
     to prepare, while also having to work many times harder than usual to
     disassemble, dismantle and slaughter those assets that were deemed to
     have no significant resale value.
     The labourers lined up
     along a makeshift stage and in front of each of them was displayed a
     printed brochure on which each of them was depicted in bland marketing
     prose. They were described mostly in terms of health, age and physical
     strength. There was also a detailed account of the numbers of years
     and months of likely continued indenture on a sliding scale of their
     anticipated value. Generally, the more menial the employment the
     longer the remaining period of indenture would be. For those like
     Charles and Stuart who were now old men in their early fifties, their
     age had so reduced their resale value that it was likely that they
     would die of old age within the next ten years well before they’d had
     a chance to pay off their debts.
     The buyers at the auction
     wore expensive suits, almost certainly purchased in the swanky salons
     of Shanghai, Chongqing or Buenos Aires, and exuded an aura of wealth
     and pitiless calculation. They were mostly men, although there were a
     couple of women amongst them: tight-lipped, sour-faced and with steel
     cold eyes. Although the finance behind International Consolidated
     Capital Investment was almost certainly from the Far East, none of the
     buyers were oriental. They were all European and a minority were even
     English. Chris choked a little when he overheard one of the men speak
     to a colleague with a Scottish accent. He’d always hated the Scots, as
     any true-blue Englishman might, and he hoped that he wouldn’t become a
     vassal to England’s historical foe and the nation that more than any
     other had brought about England’s decline and fall. 
     The auction was as
     humiliating as it was tedious. For most of the time, Chris stood in
     line with his fellow labourers in neatly starched company uniforms,
     while he held up his chin and pulled in his chest in an attempt to
     bolster his saleability. God help any man sold below the reserve
     price. For such a man the future was truly bleak. The inherited debt
     would continue onto the next generation and beyond as compound
     interest piled high on a man’s market value. The man who was sold at a
     good price, offset against accumulated debt, might well yet see that
     day when he could till his own field, buy and sell chickens, and
     maybe—if he worked hard and achieved the required statutory minimum
     income—even be eligible to vote in a General Election.
     Chris watched with anxiety
     as the bidders walked by. Several stopped beside him and asked him to
     flex a muscle, stick out his tongue or turn around. One of these was
     the man with the Scottish accent. Chris hoped that he wouldn’t be sold
     to the jocks. They were known for their hatred of the English and
     there were enough medium-range missiles on the tartan border pointing
     south to leave no doubt as to how willing the Scots were to avenge
     perceived past wrongs. 
     However, it was one of the
     women who successfully bid for Chris and several of his colleagues.
     The bidding wasn’t especially fierce and the numbers mentioned in the
     bidding were somewhat abstract. The value of each indentured labourer
     was calculated in a complex way which took into account the number of
     outstanding years of indenture, the estimated years of productive
     labour, and an overall abstractly weighted quality rating. Chris was
     somewhat put out to realise that those with most marketable value were
     the younger labourers with the least experience and the highest level
     of debt. Nevertheless, like a beauty contest where the contestant had
     no opportunity to demonstrate his or her other qualities or, more
     accurately, like the sale of livestock at a cattle market, Chris’ fate
     and that of his family was decided on the bidders’ whims. The
     auctioneer’s hammer came down decisively on Ms. Charrington, the
     English representative of Consolidated Minerals, Pyongyang. Chris was
     now no longer a Chinese asset but rather one that belonged to the
     Federal Republic of Korea.
     “What use does
     Consolidated Minerals have for agricultural labourers?” wondered
     Chris’ pal, Ian, who’d also been purchased by Ms. Charrington. “Do
     they have an agricultural division?”
     “You just don’t know what
     these corporations do,” said Chas who’d been purchased by the
     Scotsman, who was actually a representative of an Ecuadorian company.
     “You’d think it was agriculture, but it might turn out to be biofuel,
     genetically enhanced fabrics or pharmaceuticals. Perhaps Consolidated
     Minerals has a connection with agribusiness that you’d just never
     imagine.”
     “Perhaps,” said Chris, who
     was worried more than anything else by what he could say to Chloe.
     She’d rather placed her hope in the possibility that he’d be purchased
     by Chrystal Planet, the only bidder that was in any sense a local
     concern, although Chris wondered what use he would be in a business
     that manufactured nanocarbon tubes for the communications industry.
     “I’m going to be a coal
     miner, dear,” was what Chris finally had to announce to his wife.
     “Coal miner? I thought
     mineral extraction was all done by robots these days.”
     “There’s still a need for
     men to help fix machinery underground and to handle those situations
     that robots aren’t fully equipped to respond to.”
     “You’re not a coal miner,”
     said Chloe. “You’ve never been underground. Why’d they choose you?”
     “I’m as cheap as labour
     can possibly be,” said Chris with resignation.
     “And what about me and the
     boys? Where will we live?”
     “I don’t think it’s part
     of the package, dear,” said Chris who’d finally got to the part of his
     briefing that he’d most dreaded having to pass on to his wife.
     “Not part of the package?”
     “Family obligations aren’t
     factored in,” Chris said. “I’ve been told that we’ll all be assigned
     to a dormitory more than twenty meters beneath ground. There’s no
     space for families.”
     “So what do we do?” asked
     Chloe.
     “I’ve been told that it’s
     not any concern of Consolidated Minerals,” said Chris. “The agreement
     to provide family accommodation in the village became void when Chi
     Chong Investment Bank liquidated its assets. The only person in the
     family that Consolidated Minerals is interested in is our middle son,
     Chester.”
     “Why only him?”
     “He’s the designated
     inheritor of my indentured debt if I die in service,” said Chris. “Do
     you remember that peculiar document we had to sign several years back?
     The one that was described as Liability Insurance. The one that named
     Chester as the security on my continued employment.”
     “And what’s going to
     happen to Chester?” wondered Chloe. “He’s only nine years old.”
     “As an asset of
     Consolidated Minerals, he’ll be coming with me and he’ll also be
     indentured to them unless I can pay off my debts before his age of
     seniority.”
     “And is that likely to
     happen?”
     Chris shook his head
     sadly. 
     “I don’t know,” he said.
     “I can only hope.”

    No Future Volume Three

LXXXV
     Iris
     2061
      
      
      
     When she
     was a child and even until quite recently, Iris cherished a very
     romantic vision of country life.  Green fields. Village ponds.
     Forests. Lakes. Winding lanes with hedges on either side. Songbirds on
     the wing. And although much of the English countryside was still
     pretty much like that, now Iris was employed as conscript labour on
     England’s green and pleasant land, what she mostly experienced of life
     outside the cities was nothing at all like what she’d hoped it would
     be.
     As far as Iris was
     concerned the least romantic aspect of it all was the actual work she
     had to do. It wasn’t as if she’d exactly volunteered for it. When one
     of the cleaning women on the estate where Iris used to work had stolen
     some jewellery and neglected to admit her guilt, every domestic
     servant employed within a few houses of the crime scene was dismissed.
     And it was Iris’ bad luck that she happened to be out of work at the
     same time as the Government of National Unity was promoting its
     Home-Grown and English Food Initiative. The promotional material
     advertised a nostalgic England symbolised by cricket pitches, the
     healthy outdoors and a sunny sky. What Iris and the other reluctant
     urban farm labourers very soon discovered were agri-business compounds
     which were both smelly and unglamorous and where most work was done
     indoors and under shelter. The sunny sky and green fields were only
     what she might see on the walk to and from the dormitory and her place
     of work. 
     “I always thought there
     was like freedom to roam and get to know nature,” said Cherry, one of
     Iris’ fellow labourers, as they stood side by side at the conveyor
     belt and separated substandard tomatoes from the rest. She tossed a
     decidedly green and slightly smaller tomato into the receptacle
     destined for prole supermarkets. “All the nature you’ve got round here
     are the same muddy fields and pot-holed roads you see every day on the
     way to work. It’s not as if you can go somewhere different at the
     weekend. The buses don’t come round very often and when they do it’s
     only to take you to the retail park.”
     “To where?” shouted Iris
     over the racket of insistent rock music blaring out more for the
     benefit of the shift supervisors than the several hundred or so
     nominal volunteers who filled the warehouse’s cavernous space. “What
     did you say?”
     “The bus is fucking
     useless,” Cherry shouted back through the hackneyed guitar solo that
     could have been assembled at any time in rock music’s century-long
     history. “It only takes you to the shops.”
     “Well, it is a
     shop bus,” said Iris. “The only reason it comes to Church Norton at
     all is to take villagers to the Tesco-WalMart supermarket. Those that
     haven’t got a car that is...”
     “Who can afford one of
     those these days?” wondered Cherry.
     “I used to have a car,”
     said Charles who was working on the other side of the conveyor belt.
     He was at least forty years old, so it was perfectly possible that he
     was telling the truth. “It was a second-hand Chrysler Chipper. It even
     ran on petrol. You don’t get cars like that anymore, at least not
     those made in the last twenty years or so.”
     “Petrol!” Cherry sniffed.
     “That’s not very green, is it? It’s worse than fucking diesel. And
     there aren’t many fuel stations where you can buy diesel nowadays.”
     “It’s all change,” said
     Charles. “Almost everyone had a car when I was a kid. Now only the
     really well-off can afford one...”
     “It’s all the fault of the
     fucking government!” snorted Chubby who, despite his name, was
     unusually skinny and whose other most prominent feature was the
     scattering of tattoos and piercings on his gaunt face.
     “You blame everything
     on the government,” said Cherry.
     “That’s ’cause almost
     everything is their fault,” Chubby asserted. “They fucked it
     up with Europe and the United fucking Kingdom. They fucked it up with
     civil rights, the economy, the environment, race relations... You name
     it, they fucked it up. That fucking Ivan Eisenegger and Eric
     Esterhazy: they’re cunts!”
     He hissed the final ‘s’ of
     his tirade and was clearly intending to follow through with more, but
     Charles spoke first.
     “It’s not the government’s
     fault that the oil’s all run out,” he said. “At least not this
     government. It’s been a long time coming. I guess no one expected it
     would ever actually happen.”
     “What? Like the floods and
     the droughts and the plagues and the famines and all the other shit?”
     said Chubby. “They all fucking knew everything was all going to shit
     but, instead of holding back, the cunts just pressed hard on the
     accelerator.”
     “What’s going on over
     here?” asked one of the supervisors who was carrying a lethal
     cattle-prod he’d probably have used to discipline the workers if it
     was ever made legal. “You all fucking shut it. We’ve got quotas to
     meet.”
     Even Chubby didn’t want to
     risk having his daily rate cut for showing lack of enthusiasm,
     although he made sure that everyone around him could see him mouth the
     word ‘cunt’ when the supervisor wasn’t able to see. The object of this
     silent derision wandered off down the line while singing along to the
     squalling cat-like shriek of the music. It was another one of those
     rock songs that was either an ode to adolescent sexual lust or some
     nonsense about hobbits.
     The walk back to the
     dormitory was exactly as miserable as it ever was. There were two
     miles of muddy lanes and the rain was pissing down. This was what the
     countryside was mostly like, Iris decided: shit and piss. Or at least
     manure and slowly draining murky green puddles. There were no drains,
     no pavements, hardly any public transport and really very little to
     persuade Iris to renew her contract at the farm when it expired. She’d
     rather do any job in the big city than stay in this shit-filled
     arsecrack of the Kingdom of England. London might be grimy and grey,
     but at least there was always something to do and you could get about
     by bus, tube and, more often recently, rickshaw.
     It was a welcome sight
     when Iris, Cherry and her new workmates came within sight of the
     dormitory block, but less because of what it was than for the shelter
     it offered from the rain. The building had once been secondary school
     in the late twentieth-century when education was free and universally
     available, but had become derelict as the numbers of families who
     could afford to buy their children a place at even the most humble
     school had steadily decreased. The room which housed Iris’s bunk bed
     and that of her closest companions had originally been a chemistry
     lab, but all that was left of its previous role were tatty posters
     that showed the human body sectioned into some very peculiar angles
     and a line drawing of the nitrogen cycle.
     Nevertheless there was
     still an educational role offered on the premises even if it was
     entirely vocational and utterly pointless. There was a nightly
     two-hour lecture on agricultural matters as part of the government’s
     initiative to encourage people to work in the countryside and go some
     way to compensate for the prohibition on migrant labour. Since Iris’
     only other distractions were drugs, drinks and whatever she downloaded
     onto her laptop, she decided to sit in on the sessions. After all, her
     degree in biotechnology actually made her more knowledgeable on
     matters relating to biology than those conducting the presentations.
     It was obvious, however,
     that these lectures could only be described as educational to someone
     who didn’t know the difference between a bacterium and a virus, who
     thought all animals were born in phials, and who were surprised to
     discover that potatoes grew in the ground and didn’t hang from the
     branches. The content was mostly propagandistic, although the
     enthusiastic lecturers in their colourful sweat-shirts and baggy
     shorts couldn’t completely disguise the fact that life in the
     countryside generally involved being dirty, getting cold and wet, and
     learning how to operate sophisticated agricultural machinery. From
     Iris’ perspective, it was the last which was the most instructive. The
     scientists in Japan, China and Indonesia had pushed technology forward
     further than Iris realised. Some of the robots that herded cattle,
     picked beans or trimmed hedges were as multifaceted as anything Iris
     had ever seen cleaning windows, handling customer complaints or
     serving beer in the more modern tourist hotels.
     As each year went by and
     the Government of National Unity uncovered yet more excuses to suspend
     parliament and postpone the General Election, like most English
     citizens Iris now suspected the worst of anything the government did.
     Nothing happened by accident and everything was for a reason. Why was
     the government so enthusiastic to promote the countryside and
     encourage so many urban and suburban citizens to relocate to the
     villages and hamlets? There were the economic reasons, of course. The
     White Death and the government’s trademark draconian immigration
     policy had drastically reduced the number of agricultural workers. But
     Iris had come to realise that such an answer, however much sense it
     made from a rational economic perspective, was unlikely to be the real
     reason. After all, agriculture was only one of the many industries
     that had suffered in the last eight years.
     Iris had two theories
     which she happily discussed with Cherry and Chrystal, another fellow
     labourer, when they huddled around a few lines and one of Cherry’s
     potent spliffs. The first hypothesis was that it was just a plot to
     relocate a bunch of urban malcontents out of the capital city where
     they could only cause trouble to places as far away and politically
     irrelevant as possible. The other was that it was a perfectly natural
     direction for a government of national chauvinism to be heading.
     “I can see the first
     theory,” said Chrystal as she brushed a few crumbs of white snow off
     her nose. “After all, what government wants a load of stroppy
     protestors embarrassing them? If it got really bad it might even get a
     brief mention on Fox News. But what are you getting at with your
     second theory?”
     “I dunno,” said Iris.
     “It’s just that there must be some kind of logic behind all this
     insular, anti-foreign, pro-business stuff. I don’t mean that it makes
     logical sense in a rational way, but rather that the kind of people
     who believe all that shit must sort of think there’s a direction it’s
     sort of taking them.”
     “Yeah...?” said Cherry
     sceptically.
     “Well, the ultimate end is
     that England should be totally isolated,” continued Iris. “It’s like
     the Kingdom has no trade or commerce with foreigners at all. It’d be
     like Mediaeval days. In fact, it’ll be worse than that since there
     used to be things like the Hanseatic League. So, if you’re going to be
     one hundred percent self-sufficient you’re gonna need to be able to
     grow all the food you need. And to do that you’re gonna need a load of
     people who know how to work the land.”
     “I dunno,” said Chrystal.
     “That sounds too much like the cunts in government have a rat’s arse
     idea what they’re doing. I reckon they’re just pushing all this
     countryside shit ’cause they’ve run out of other ideas. They’re always
     pushing one popular initiative after another while they try to justify
     being in power. They’ve done anti-drugs, patriotism, foreign war, and,
     of course, immigrants. Now it’s the time of the countryside. That’s
     all it is. They’re a bunch of cunts with no idea of what to do with
     the power they managed to get through lies and deceit, so they have to
     come up with some kind of shit to justify still being there.”
     “Sounds plausible,” Cherry
     agreed. 
     “If only we could get shot
     of the bastards,” echoed Iris.

    No Future Volume Three

     LXXXVI
     Psychlone
     2108
      
      
     No
     one could ever doubt it. This was by every possible measurement the
     biggest gig of Psychlone’s professional life so far. It was the
     biggest blast he’d ever had, even including the first time he had sex.
     But Psychlone wasn’t making a penny from it. Not even a measly grand
     or so. And the other acts giving it out were also all giving it for
     free. Although Psychlone knew enough from his university studies in
     Political History that there were fewer more hackneyed clichés in the
     history of alternative or underground culture, this whole thing was
     being done for the cause of World Peace.
     But this time it was
     deadly serious. Peace in the world was at serious risk. Those missiles
     stationed on the tartan and taffy borders were more of a threat to
     peace and the survival even of the human species than any war there’d
     ever been in a distant foreign country, however much they served to
     keep the military preoccupied in other matters than that of beating up
     protestors. 
     This time it was fucking
     serious. 
     And one thing Psychlone
     knew, as did the other DJs and performers along with the tens of
     thousands of fans spread in front of him across the expanse of the
     illegally occupied Hyde Park, was that the bad guys in the current
     crisis weren’t the Scots, the Welsh, the French or the Swedes. It
     might be true that those were the nations whose missiles were trained
     on English towns and villages, but the real villain of the potentially
     cataclysmic pantomime playing out across the planet was the Republic
     of England.
     It wasn’t quite as
     clear-cut as that of course. It wasn’t the people of England who were
     the villains. This was made absolutely obvious by the very existence
     of this illegal rave and the huge demonstration of which it was a
     part. The English people had no real quarrel with the Irish, the
     Scots, the Chinese or the Canadians. Furthermore, in a sense it wasn’t
     really the government of the Republic of England who were to blame
     either. They were bound by an alliance of convenience with other
     oppressive regimes across the globe, notably the Republic of North
     America, the United States of North Africa and the Muslim Republics of
     North India and Pakistan. Psychlone, ever the Political History
     graduate, was fully aware that the current arms race and the dangerous
     flirting with Mutual Assured Destruction, with the whole panoply of
     mostly antiquated Weapons of Mass Destruction, was driven less by a
     deep hatred of one set of people towards another but by conflicts of
     territory, resources and the relentless logic of military escalation.

     On the other hand, that
     wasn’t the kind of complicated message a man could preach to the
     thousands of mostly young people who were enjoying the first free gig
     of their lives. What they wanted were slogans and an easily digestible
     message. And the Plastic Ono Band from a century and a half ago,
     mashed up with Psychlone’s own skronky beats and the insistent sampled
     growl of Captain Beefheart was sufficiently catchy and percussive to
     be both danceable and on point.
     “All we are saying is...”
     Psychlone yelled into the mike.
     “Give Peace a Chance,”
     echoed the crowd, totally ignorant of the political context of the
     1960s and the United States of America’s futile war in Vietnam. This
     was just one of the many conflicts that had led to the nation’s
     economic collapse and eventual disintegration. And this was a
     nation—now split into three warring nations that were threatening to
     fragment even further—that once considered itself the world’s
     policeman in an era when that notion seemed somehow plausible.
     Crowd response! This was
     fucking fantastic. 
     Psychlone didn’t want to
     milk it too much. The crowd wanted more than slogans to sing along to.
     They wanted beats to dance to. There were other tunes on his laptop
     from the far distant twentieth century he could mix and match with
     more familiar tunes from the turn of the twenty-second century. “War.
     What is it good for?” “There’s a Hard Rain a Gonna Fall.” “Eve of
     Destruction.” But Psychlone wasn’t here to drop tunes from the long
     dead Age of Rock and Roll. This wasn’t the time to invoke the mostly
     forgotten ghosts of Gil Scott-Heron, Woody Guthrie or Country Joe and
     the Fish. This was the time to drop the midrange, pump up the bass and
     accelerate the beats per minute.
     No one in the audience
     gave a fuck about the authorities. Any heavy-handed impulse to break
     up the gig would be defeated by the sheer weight of numbers and the
     unspoken fact that many within the political establishment were
     secretly pleased that they now had the excuse of popular dissent to
     put their feet on the brakes on the otherwise inexorable drive towards
     global destruction. In any case, the police would be impotent to break
     up a demonstration of such numbers. There weren’t enough of them to
     make a difference and anyway they were so corrupt and compromised that
     they no longer commanded any respect. The military had the weapons to
     deal with social dissent, but they were of little use against a
     peaceful protest however many laws were being openly flouted.
     Most of those laws were
     generally ignored anyway. Those regarding drugs were routinely
     disregarded. Successive campaigns over the centuries had been a
     totally unqualified failure. Drug abuse was more prevalent than it had
     ever been: openly practised and about the only way in which a
     substantial proportion of the population could make a living. It was
     such a profitable industry that almost everyone in the establishment
     was rumoured to have a finger in the huge pie. Regulating against
     drugs had become as senseless as regulating oxygen. The laws which
     gave cause for most concern were not those relating to illegal drugs,
     public sex or disorderly behaviour. The ones that emboldened most
     people to protest were those related to public assembly and private
     property. Very few of those dancing manically to Psychlone’s beats had
     ever been inside one of London’s parks before. The entrance fee was
     far too prohibitive. Few would ever have marched along roads like
     Whitehall, Piccadilly and Haymarket that were normally the exclusive
     domain of those with money and status. Psychlone had only ever been so
     privileged because he could flash his backdoor pass to the night clubs
     where he performed.
     Here was London’s largest
     park invaded by the unwashed masses—tens if not hundreds of thousands
     of them—all gathered to hear him drop beats that were circulated
     across the globe on the heavily policed internet. As Psychlone also
     knew, he was being seen and heard by many others on countless time
     zones through the same ubiquitous digital media. He would be heard in
     nations such as China, Canada and Vietnam who were the last remaining
     bastions of human rights and the freedom of speech in a world in which
     such values now seemed hopelessly unfashionable. Fewer people would be
     able to decrypt the video and audio signals in repressive regimes such
     as Morocco, Venezuela and the breakaway Republic of Texas.
     But all good things must
     come to an end. 
     This wasn’t just
     Psychlone’s gig. He was, in fact, one of dozens who’d risked arrest to
     perform in the heart of London within earshot of Mayfair: England’s
     most exclusive and heavily guarded residential district. There were
     many wealthy Chinese, Brazilians and Malaysians in the Park Lane
     hotels overlooking the park who were able to witness a historic
     occasion of the sort that was once quite common but now happened very
     rarely.
     One of the promoters was
     urgently whirling his arm round to signify that Psychlone should start
     winding down. Five minutes his spread out fingers indicated. Psychlone
     could see Bobby Tarkovsky of the monumentally popular Techno Skiffle
     band, the Quarrymen. He wouldn’t remain very popular himself if he
     unduly delayed their appearance on the stage.
     It was a cliché but it had
     to be done. The final beats came from Psychlone’s insanely catchy and
     slightly subversive Eric Esterhazy which was an unusually apt
     selection for a gig like this. Most people had only ever heard of the
     man’s name in relation to the universally despised Government of
     National Unity (which was actually no worse than the current
     government), but it gave them a focus for their pent-up anger. “What a
     fucking cunt!” they all shouted in unison as the chorus dived and
     swerved round the percussion and swirling chords. It was ironic that
     the man was now far more famous as the inspiration for a sarcastic and
     undoubtedly scurrilous dance tune than for what he’d ever done as a
     politician. That was one thing for which Psychlone and the ravers
     could be grateful. 
     “Right on, man,” said
     Steve Psonic, the drummer from the Quarrymen, as Psychlone made his
     way off stage and the compère made his way to the centre. 
     “Give it up large!” yelled
     MC Car Crash as he took the mike, before launching into an account of
     what was coming up later in his trademark rap delivery that was both
     hip and essential. As always, he wore traditional West African dress
     that seriously clashed with his choice of hats. Today he was wearing a
     Stetson. This must be a deliberately ironic reference to possibly the
     most despised nation in the whole world. Psychlone was sure that the
     rednecks and hillbillies of the Republic of North America didn’t
     really merit the derision and scorn directed towards them, but they
     did come from a nation that perhaps deserved to be allied with Muslim
     extremists. Like their allies, they still denied the truth of
     evolution even as they preached the merits of natural selection.
     Furthermore, they both promoted the sanctity of the life of the unborn
     child while also televising public executions and reviving lethal
     gladiatorial sports. The Republic represented an intolerant biblical
     fundamentalism totally at odds with their firm alliance with
     fundamental Muslims.
     And these were the kinds
     of people that Psychlone was supposed to regard as his country’s
     natural allies in a time of war.
     Although folk music, like
     skiffle, rock and reggae, wasn’t really to Psychlone’s taste, he could
     see that the Quarrymen were onto something. They had catchy tunes and
     inspired arrangements, that was for sure. They also had an extra spark
     revealed by their exuberant showmanship. With only a modicum of
     technology, they immediately grabbed the audience’s attention and got
     them to dance and even sing along to tunes that were a reminder of a
     far distant age when England, as the major partner of the United
     Kingdom, produced music from the cities of Liverpool, London and
     Manchester that more or less conquered the world. 
     Despite the Quarrymen’s
     obvious skill, it was difficult to believe that there should ever be
     such days again. Just like America—whose pre-eminence in popular
     music, cinema and industry had declined even faster than its economic
     and political fortunes—the Republic of England was a cultural desert
     compared to China, South America and West Africa.
     But the day was yet young.
     It would be several more hours till the summer sun would set. And now
     that Psychlone had done his gig, he could chill out, take it easy,
     listen to the Quarrymen, toke a joint, snort a line, and be content
     that he had done his bit for World Peace.
     And you never know. Maybe
     he had helped to keep those neutron missiles and mushroom
     clouds at bay for just a few years more. 
     That was surely something
     to celebrate.

    No Future Volume Three

LXXXVII
     Iris
     2062
      
      
      
     The demo wasn’t originally going to be anything more than
     a protest. It was meant to be just one of the many other
     demonstrations that had grown steadily in number and frequency and
     extent over the last few weeks. The banners were unfurled. The
     paraphernalia of protest such as masks, tents and protective padding were all in place. But
     today the event Iris was taking part in wasn’t a protest at all. 
     It was, at long last, a
     celebration.
     The Government of National
     Unity had fallen. The most unpopular and universally despised
     government in English history, or at least since the rules of King
     James the Second or King John, was now no more. Ivan Eisenegger had
     offered his resignation to His Majesty the King of England, Scotland
     and a host of other places that were no longer either in the long
     defunct British Empire or the more recently dissolved United Kingdom.
     Nobody was at all surprised that King Edward the Ninth accepted the
     resignation. There would almost certainly have been a complete
     collapse of the very institution of monarchy if he’d shown any
     hesitation. There was already a widespread suspicion that the monarch
     had been complicit in keeping the Government of National Unity in
     power far beyond its statutory five year term and had even been
     sympathetic to its reactionary agenda. But, irrespective of whatever
     opinions the King privately held, he had to appear even-handed given
     that he was also the titular Head of State of the independent and
     almost openly hostile governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern
     Ireland.
     Iris had partied hard many
     times in her life. When she was younger partying hard was something
     she did pretty much on a weekly basis. These were what now seemed the
     happy days of innocence before what had at first looked like just
     another Tory-led coalition evolved into something rather more
     sinister. Nevertheless, as an undergraduate biotechnology student she
     had to temper an enthusiasm for drugs, drink, sex and excess with the
     need to get up in the morning and work in the lab. During the long
     years of Ivan Eisenegger’s premiership and his government’s virtual
     dictatorship, the opportunities for even an occasional debauch
     happened on occasions that were fewer and further between. So much had
     become illegal or actively discouraged, except for those with money
     and connections, that it was difficult to be sure which new law she
     was about to break. Night clubs were closed down. Nightly curfews
     became increasingly common. Any gathering of a dozen or so people
     instantly attracted the unwelcome attention of the police. 
     And now after all the
     dismal years of austerity, oppression and dreary mean-spiritedness
     Iris had the opportunity to party hard in a way that had been
     impossible for almost a decade: the best years of a young girl’s life.
     Iris wasn’t so young now. She was well into her thirties and she
     wondered just how well she could keep the promise she’d made to
     herself to dance, drink and blow out to the very limits of medical
     advisability. She was already flagging and it was still less than a
     day since the first tentative signs of change had been heralded by
     instant messages, bulletin boards and word-of-mouth.
     It had been a huge effort
     to protest for so long, despite the generally mild spring sunshine and
     the cushioning mass of thousands upon thousands of fellow protestors.
     It was Trafalgar Square that had been London’s main focus for protest.
     Over the last few weeks it had more or less become Iris’ home. It
     wasn’t that she had much else to do, of course. She had no job to go
     to. But then who did these days? All the expenditure on her education
     had been wasted and the government’s employment initiatives were
     fizzling out as the funds to provide something that approximated to
     worthwhile work was diverted to other more pressing concerns. And
     nowadays these were to prop up the mostly foreign-owned banks, cut
     corporation taxes yet further in the forlorn hope that this policy
     might yet stimulate a recovery, and bolster up the fractious and
     discontented armed forces.
     However, as the extent of
     the protests grew there also came a mounting sense of inevitability
     about it all. At first, it seemed very unlikely that peaceful protest
     could ever bring down a government that was by no means reluctant to
     employ an extraordinary array of weapons to suppress revolt. Every day
     Iris expected the tanks to roll down Whitehall and the Strand and to
     crush her nylon tent along with all the hundreds of others camped
     outside the Church of St Martin’s in the Fields. She felt almost
     embarrassed by it all. She wasn’t a natural protestor. In truth, she
     didn’t really believe passionately in anything very much. She had a
     general view that something should be done about the despoliation of
     the environment, the extreme weather conditions, the galloping
     inequality, and the crackdown on civil liberties, but she wasn’t
     especially sure what that action should be and just how far it should
     go.
     Then the massed voices of
     discontent became emboldened and either voiced sympathy for the
     protests or actually joined in. What was strange was the universal
     extent to which English people all of a sudden agreed that they wanted
     to see the demise of Ivan Eisenegger’s government. The opposition came
     not only from self-professed radicals, revolutionaries and
     malcontents. The number of protestors was swollen by vicars, priests
     and preachers. By judges, solicitors and barristers. By journalists,
     actors and musicians. By mechanics, engineers and middle managers. By
     professionals, executives and manual workers. From every class, every
     region and every socio-economic group. What was most peculiar was that
     many people who Iris had assumed were the natural friends and allies
     of the government became increasingly vocal in their complaints. It
     was these people that both attracted the most hope amongst the
     protestors and generated the most despair amongst the government’s
     apologists.
     Even the government’s
     natural constituency—conservatives, nationalists and business
     leaders—had decided that enough was enough. Although many of Iris’ old
     friends and by far the majority of her new friends living in the tents
     erected around Nelson’s Column and outside the National Gallery were
     convinced that these turncoats were merely bending with the wind and
     had chosen to follow the prevailing trend, Iris wasn’t so sure it was
     quite as simple as that. A better strategy for a hypocrite would
     surely be to stay quiet until after a change of government
     rather than voice their discontent before where there was still a
     possibility that they would be caught out of step with events. But
     even the conservative establishment had reason to complain. What had
     happened to traditional English values? What right did an
     English government have to irrevocably change the nation’s principles
     of governance without submitting itself to the popular vote? Were the
     legislators of the realm somehow above the law? Shouldn’t there have
     been at least one General Election by now? 
     Was there any way that a
     conservative or a nationalist could plausibly plead that the
     Government of National Unity had been a success? The United Kingdom
     was no longer united. England had fewer international friends and
     allies than it had ever had in its long history. The economy was now
     in a much worse state than it had been a decade ago. The reach of the
     law no longer extended as far as the ordinary people. Not one of the
     government’s targets had been achieved, with the sole exception of the
     draconian immigration policy that Fox News UK contended had still not
     gone far enough and which had contributed more than anything else to
     the extinction of the United Kingdom and the decline in the nation’s
     economy.
     The protests had worked. 
     Iris still had to pinch
     herself to believe it. The slogans which only yesterday were calls for
     the government to resign and for so many wrongs to be righted was now
     centred around the single sigh of relief and solid determination:
     ‘Never Again!’ 
     And never again
     was what Iris truly hoped for. Never again should a government tear up
     the consensual agreement that characterised the English alternative to
     a written constitution and replace it with a series of drastic
     reactionary measures whose appeal was primarily to the basest
     chauvinistic and nationalist sentiments, cheered on all the way by the
     majority of the media and supported by the bottomless pockets of
     billionaires whose patriotism never extended to actually paying
     English taxes or spending much time on English soil. Never again
     should so many people surrender with so little struggle to the loss of
     the basic human freedoms of speech, movement and expression. 
     Never again.
     Of course it could never
     happen again. The nation that Iris once knew no longer existed and she
     was now a citizen of the Kingdom of England whose image had been
     forged by the despised and now deposed government. Could life now
     return to how it was before?
     The nightmare was now
     over. Iris stood in the crowd under the constant drizzle of brightly
     coloured paper streamers: a spliff in one hand, a bottle of red wine
     in the other and still higher than the paper kites that flew up above
     her with crude caricatures of Eisenegger, Esterhazy, Eaglecliffe and
     Eastwick. Every now and then she’d erupt in a cry of ecstasy as a wave
     of celebration rolled over the thousands upon thousands of protestors,
     well-wishers and celebrators who jammed up Central London from
     Piccadilly Circus to Aldwych and from Leicester Square to the
     Embankment.
     Ensuring that the event
     was happening and keeping it live was the constant thump and rhythm of
     dance music that echoed from speakers positioned all around central
     London that was there to represent the multitudinous sound systems of
     the Kingdom. Occasionally the beat was interrupted by the cacophony of
     a rock group, the clatter of an alt-folk group or one of the many
     kinds of English music that had struggled to survive in a philistine
     culture where the most talented music-makers were the ones most likely
     to have been deported or imprisoned. This was the long-awaited
     liberation of the underground, alternative, independent music scenes,
     many of which had only become so because the prevailing culture was so
     utterly unsympathetic to anything whose beats, rhythms or messages
     were neither familiar nor reassuring. And fuck it! it was good to
     dance again knowing that no security guard or policeman would dampen
     down the excitement. No one would be smashing up the amps and trashing
     the sound systems. No one would be laying into the dancers with
     truncheons or tear gas. The DJ was giving it large and no fucker was
     going to stop him until he’d dropped every last beat and smashed it to
     the max.
     When the news broke that
     the Prime Minister had at last done the decent thing Iris was in her
     tent huddled up with Stuart, a guy she’d met on the protests and who’d
     now moved his sleeping bag into the comfy claustrophobic space of
     Iris’ mountain tent.
     “Resignation!” said
     Stuart with an arched eyebrow. “The bastard should have fallen on his
     sword.”
     “Metaphorically he has,”
     said Iris. 
     She listened as the news
     spread across the squatted spaces of Trafalgar Square from tent to
     tent and from person to person. Iris heard the news on the EBC News
     which had become the only trusted voice in the Kingdom of England
     after all other independent voices had been suppressed and subsumed.
     The breaking news being broadcast across the bottom of the screen was
     what she now realised she’d been hoping and praying for almost every
     day of her adult life. 
     And now it had happened
     she wasn’t sure what she should do.
     “I guess we’ve got to
     celebrate,” said Stu.
     “We’ve got plenty of time
     to do that later,” said Iris with a cheeky smile. “What I most want to
     do now is to fuck.”
     Stu was alarmed. The two
     had never fully consummated their friendship and he’d almost certainly
     come to believe that they never would.
     “Are you sure?” he asked.
     After the years in which
     Iris had only ever agreed to have sex reluctantly and with no real
     enthusiasm, the years in which all amorousness was compromised and
     tarnished by her memories of having worked as a prostitute, the years
     in which she’d never been able to let herself truly go, she was now as
     sure as she’d ever be.
     “Fuck it!” she said. “What
     better way is there to celebrate the good news?” 

    No Future Volume Three

     LXXXVIII
     Odile
     2111
      
      
     There
     were several things that could have killed Odile. So much devastation
     was happening at more or less the same precise moment in time that
     there was an embarrassingly rich choice of lethal candidates. But
     whichever it was, it happened far too suddenly and with absolutely no
     warning for Odile to take evasive action, not that there was much
     she’d have been able to do anyway.
     The intense blistering
     heat alone was more than enough to kill Odile even though the
     explosion’s epicentre was over a kilometre away. But if it hadn’t been
     that or the searing temperature, then the abrupt onrush of air into
     the suddenly opened vacuum would have dashed the life out of her as
     her charred body was smashed doll-like against the walls of houses
     that had suddenly buckled into ruins from the same unimaginable force.
     It could have been the
     intense heat, sudden impact or even the lethal radiation that killed
     Odile. Like a marionette with strings cut, Odile and her freshly
     broken limbs were thrown back and forth against buildings and
     lamp-posts: a fresh spurt of blood breaking forth after each
     collision. If by some miracle there was still a breath of life in her
     this was surely extinguished when the walls of a house propelled
     across the street along which she’d a moment ago been walking crushed
     her shattered body against the walls of another and she was buried
     under several tons of rubble. Her skull was crushed and an arm visible
     through the rubble was bent into several impossible angles.
     Odile didn’t even see the
     mushroom cloud or hear the explosion. The searing heat and radiant
     light that instantly burnt out her retinas reached her before any
     associated sound. Her lover Edith was somewhat further from the
     epicentre of the explosion which was detonated more by navigational
     error than design in Lancaster’s outermost suburbs where it could have
     been of no conceivable strategic advantage to whichever of the
     Americans, Scots, French or Irish military command that had launched
     the nuclear-tipped device towards the by-now obliterated Republic of
     England. But Edith’s further term of life was barely a moment longer
     than Odile’s. 
     Her attention was
     instantly drawn towards the window of the room where she’d been
     sitting through which burst a blinding flash of light. There was also
     a weird whistling that wasn’t quite what she might have believed would
     herald the end of everything in the world that either she or Odile had
     ever known. Edith’s eyes were scorched but as she wasn’t immediately
     blinded, she could glimpse the rising column of smoke and dust four or
     five kilometres away. For Edith her the heat was more painful than
     terminally lethal. Her flesh wasn’t so much roasted as severely
     singed. But Edith’s demise and that of everyone else in the Lancaster
     town centre happened when seconds later she was caught in a maelstrom
     of tumbling buildings and other unexpectedly mobile street furniture
     from which she couldn’t possibly flee as the winds rushed inwards
     towards the source of the explosion and flung her repeatedly and
     mercilessly against whatever hard object there was until, like Odile,
     there was no life remaining in a body that was crushed, battered,
     bleeding, scalded and in severe shock.
     Neither Edith nor Odile
     ever believed it would end this way. 
     Probably nobody did,
     including the military officers who’d unleashed humanity’s nuclear
     arsenal in one final pyrotechnic display that lit up the surface of
     the moon and was more than enough to bring a brightly-lit end to all
     that was left of human culture and civilisation. There were no doubt
     shelters in China, Siberia, New Zealand and the Pacific Ocean where
     the last remnants of the human species might survive a little while
     longer, but not necessarily for many more years. 
     It was without doubt the
     end for the Republic of England and for everything associated with it.
     There would be no more English art and culture. No more rural
     retreats. Those who survived were as equal as any other in their
     wretchedness with only ill-health and the prospect of slow death from
     radiation to look forward to. Their brief future history would be
     plagued with endless recrimination and mutual blame during which the
     last remnants of civilised values such as sexual and racial equality
     would be very much forgotten. There was no prospect of help and
     salvation from a scientific community that had unwittingly brought
     about its own destruction and that of everyone else. Perhaps survivors
     with a conscience such as Roland might strive to help the desperate
     millions, but with what resources? The future was a desperate one in
     which human dignity was lost forever and where the distribution of
     food, shelter and clothing, however compromised by disease and
     radiation, would be determined more by luck and bloody combat than any
     concept of desert or fairness.
     It was strictly incorrect
     to say that the apocalypse had arrived without warning, although there
     had been a significant failure in the early-warning systems that were
     meant to sound moments before the weapons of mass destruction arrived.
     But what real use would they have been as thousands upon thousands of
     lethal missiles were launched all over the globe and, as an
     afterthought, over England? But as so few resources had been allocated
     to civil defence it was likely that the alarms would never have worked
     anyway. So much of the government’s limited resources had been set
     aside for war-readiness, famine-relief, quarantine against plague,
     blighted crops, rising sea-levels, violent weather events and the
     impossible-to-satiate demands of the rich and powerful. 
     In any case, whatever
     mistake it was that had triggered the international exchange of every
     ounce of thermonuclear destructiveness the world’s governments had
     stored over the last century and a half was almost certainly not the
     conscious and deliberate choice of a political or military leader. The
     legacy of creaky software systems and over-complicated administrative
     procedures was just not able to cope with a modern world that was
     increasingly beleaguered by mediaeval blight and where most people now
     lived in pre-industrial ignorance. And those who might survive now
     faced a future that would resemble more a prehistoric than a mediaeval
     past. This was the return to an age in which the human being was only
     one of several species of animal struggling to survive by chewing
     carrion and dodging predators. 
     This desperate future was
     the ultimate outcome of the fantasies of those who held the belief
     that humanity was somehow uniquely blessed. Perhaps they had faith in
     the divine providence of an elevated being with a remarkable physical
     likeness to the hominid male with a grand plan so obscure that no one
     really understood it, least of all those who most unquestioningly
     believed in it.
     In the days before the
     final end, Odile and Edith had watched the news broadcasts on the
     television screen at the soup kitchen with the same apprehension as
     everyone else. Nevertheless, even in these desperate early days of
     international war, most of those who filed in for their daily bowl of
     soup would much prefer to watch a quiz show, a situation comedy or a
     chat show. Such entertainment was still very much available, along
     with the increasingly hysterical pleas for calm and restraint issued
     by public officials, until the arbitrary moment when the high-alert
     early warning system somewhere in the world—perhaps in the Republic of
     North America, but just as likely in Northumberland, Beijing or
     Aberdeen—reacted a little too presumptuously at the sight of a flock
     of geese or the distant echo of a small earthquake. Edith’s final
     moments could just have easily have been as she watched the closing
     moments of a comedy quiz show where the laughter of the studio
     audience would just momentarily be punctuated by screams of panic and
     despair as London fell victim to a cluster of missiles directed
     towards it from all over the globe, of which only a few were likely to
     have come from England’s traditional enemies: the Scots, the Welsh and
     the French.
     Like most people, Odile
     had nursed the hope that all the anxiety of impending doom would soon
     blow over. The tense atmosphere couldn’t last forever and normal life
     would eventually resume. Edith, however, reminded her lover that
     recent history didn’t give much cause for optimism. The rhetoric was
     ratcheted up so high that it seemed increasingly unlikely that it
     would just fade away. How could the Scots ever forgive their southern
     neighbours for the insults thrown at them? Although the last few years
     had been characterised as the Second Cold War, the tension between the
     belligerent nations was becoming unpleasantly hot. At which stage
     would the international state of low-level aggression escalate into
     something much more bellicose?  
     The news programmes
     covered in interminable detail the various small-scale wars that the
     hostile nations of the world were conducting against each other. The
     Isle of Man was a particular hotspot. It was criss-crossed and scarred
     by deep trenches as the English peeked over the parapets towards their
     Scottish and Irish foes. In North America, the border states of
     Virginia, Minnesota and New Mexico had long been host to widely
     reported atrocities and massacres. And far from the gradually
     shrinking influence of the English-speaking world, there was warfare,
     border disputes, undeclared invasions and isolated lethal incidents
     across all the continents, although the greatest concentration was in
     Africa, Europe and North America.
     Despite the many signs of
     imminent crisis, Odile’s last day began no differently to any other.
     She and Edith had struggled out of bed with the morning free of any
     need to go to work. Edith stayed at home above the soup kitchen, while
     Odile went for a walk across Lancaster to visit another friend of hers
     in a part of town that only a few hours later would become nothing
     more than a vast smouldering crater. There was no premonition that the
     tatty, derelict streets lined with beggars and drug addicts would soon
     become scorched by the fires of hell and that every last soul would be
     incinerated.
     Even the weather was
     unexceptional. It was a typical April day. Not too hot. Not too cold.
     A little bit drizzly and moderately overcast. None of this would have
     been an obstacle to the missile which either by chance or design was
     headed towards North West England, more likely intended to level
     Manchester or Liverpool than the ancient city of Lancaster. Its
     guidance systems knew nothing about the elements. It was travelling at
     just the right speed, maintaining just the right ambient temperature
     and deflecting sufficient electromagnetic radiation, that it wasn’t
     detected by England’s antique anti-missile defences which, despite the
     years of neglect and the Just-In-Time philosophy that ensured that it
     was only one step away from collapsing in on itself, was still able to
     prevent the arrival of a significant proportion of the incoming
     missiles, but not necessarily of their radioactivity, heat and
     long-term environmental legacy.
     As it glided over
     England’s hills and valleys, hugging close to the wooded hill-slopes
     and cleverly changing colour as it flew over England’s lakes,
     motorways and fields of genetically modified foodstuff, it knew only
     the rough coordinates of its destination. But the decades since the
     missile was programmed and the many alterations made as the
     geopolitical systems shifted according to whim and political
     expediency, the actual target at which it its journey came to an end
     was almost certainly not what was intended.
     Neither the missile nor
     the nuclear warhead whose contact with Lancashire soil would leave a
     churned-up long-lasting legacy of heavy metals for many hundreds of
     thousands of years had any emotion of affection or malice towards its
     target. It was nothing more than a bullet shaped device with
     stabilisers, a guidance system and a very crude Artificial
     Intelligence system that took account of potential obstacles but had
     no means of changing its purpose or objective once in flight. It had
     no notion of the history or significance of any English town or city,
     any more than it would have of Houston, Moscow, Johannesburg, Buenos
     Aires or Edinburgh.  But these cities and many much smaller were
     all to be devastated by similar weapons of mass destruction. Many were
     launched from submarines whose propellers churned up the last few
     corpses at the bottom of the jelly-fish infested oceans now long
     depleted of fish, whales and coral. Many flew from the sky. Some were
     launched from the robot-staffed military bases on the moon that
     brought the last vestiges of humanity’s space adventure on missiles
     back towards the home planet and from whence the whirring automatons
     could observe humanity’s demise with no risk to themselves. Many were
     launched from silos in deserts, often where jungles and lakes once
     used to be, destined to leave the entire planet in a state of
     desertification as much like the Sahara, Arizona or the Gobi as it was
     possible to be.
     Along with Lancaster
     Castle, the shopping centre, the historic monuments and a millennium
     of English history; along with Odile and Edith, their shared love and
     life together; along with the unpredictable and various hopes, fears
     and anxieties of the ragged undernourished people of Lancaster; the
     whole of England and English history arrived quite suddenly and
     abruptly to a very absolute and unmistakable full stop.

    No Future Volume Three

LXXXIX
     Mark & Molly
     2076
      
     This
     wasn’t the first time that Mark and Molly had sat together on the sofa
     transfixed by the vision of a huge slowly growing and self-enveloping
     luminescent cloud tumbling ever upwards into the sky into the now
     familiar shape of a mushroom. This wasn’t even the first time that the
     couple had watched the image of exactly the same thermonuclear
     explosion, although there were so many others that could have been
     shown from either the last two nuclear wars or the current one. It
     might well be that there were other images that were somehow more
     dramatic, more evocatively posed or in some other way more striking.
     The most disturbing aspect of the image wasn’t so much its cinematic
     or aesthetic qualities, but rather where it had taken place.
     Somewhere beneath the
     billowing cloud of deadly radiation was the site of what had once been
     the world’s most holy city. And now all that remained of the City of
     Jerusalem’s three or four millennia of history was being lifted
     upwards above the atmosphere, towards the troposphere and even the
     stratosphere. The holiest of the Holy Shrines—the Wailing Wall, the
     Dome of the Rock and Mount Calvary—were now nothing more than
     radioactive ash being borne high into the heavens to rain down on the
     Middle East and, depending on the prevailing winds, over Europe, North
     Africa and Asia.
     Unlike the many other
     cities that had been incinerated, annihilated, vaporised and
     irradiated, this was one whose name was known to everyone in the
     world, whose presence would be genuinely missed and for which many
     people had a genuine emotional attachment. For Molly it was more from
     her school day memories of having sung the verses of William Blake’s Jerusalem.
     This hymn was performed everywhere in the period of the Government for
     National Unity as it was just about the only decent patriotic tune
     that had any relevance to England rather than Great Britain. For Mark,
     Jerusalem’s significance was more in the hazily remembered Easter
     story whose events took place around an ancient city long since
     covered by concrete whose foundations had now been uncovered in the
     most brutal and radical way imaginable.
     And now Jerusalem was no
     more.
     If it was ever to be
     re-inhabited, it would be only after many generations. By then almost
     everything about the city would be charred, annihilated and perhaps
     long-forgotten. The spirit of Jerusalem might outlive the city that
     was now as totally obliterated as Judaism’s most sacred temple in the
     age of the Romans. 
     Where now in the world was
     there a place for veneration shared by all pilgrims of the Holy
     Scriptures, whether the Torah, the Bible or the Q’uran? Certainly not
     Mecca, Rome or Salt Lake City. Nor, since the many retaliatory
     missiles hit their primary target, the city of Tel Aviv. 
     “I can’t believe it!”
     moaned Molly. “I just can’t believe it.”
     “Doesn’t the Bible predict
     that the world will end when Jerusalem falls?” Mark asked anxiously.
     “What, in Revelations?”
replied
     Molly. “That’s just a load of hallucinogen-inspired bullshit. St John
     the Revelator was some kind of First Century smack-head. And, anyway,
     where was the number of the beast, Gog and Magog, and all the stuff
     about the Antichrist?”
     “Maybe the Israeli Prime
     Minister was the Antichrist.”
     “Not a very impressive
     one, was he?”
     “I don’t like this
     programme, Mummy,” pleaded Monica who was sprawled across her chair in
     the corner of the living room. “Can’t we watch something else? Aren’t
     there any cartoons?”
     “Shush, dear,” said Molly.
     “This is history. You’ll remember this day for the rest of your life.”
     “Why?” the young girl
     asked, unsure of whether she’d missed something important. “What’s so
     special about it?”
     “You see these pictures on
     television,” said Mark. “Those are real. That is what’s really
     happening. It’s not a science fiction movie. It’s a real nuclear war.
     And it’s happening in Israel and Palestine and Lebanon and Turkey and
     all over the Middle East. Millions of people are dying. It’s really
     very very important.”
     “It’s boring to watch the
     same pictures over and over and over again,” moaned Monica who wasn’t
     at all convinced by her father’s explanation.
     The days leading to the
     launch of all-out nuclear war in the Middle East made the actual event
     seem strangely inevitable. The term ‘sleepwalking into apocalypse’ had
     been used again and again by media pundits as a description of how the
     logic of Israeli and Arab intransigence had driven them inexorably
     towards this defining moment. It was a cliché that described a real
     worry and didn’t fully express the complexities of a dispute that
     involved several nations, some—such as Turkey and Iran—who weren’t at
     all Arabic, and amongst which there had been various states of
     undeclared war for several years now.
     The quarrels had become
     steadily more heated over the past few weeks and months as both sides
     tried to bring their competing perceived interests to some kind of
     resolution. Everyone knew that the real catalyst of the conflict was
     the presidential election in the fragmented United States. The
     relatively wealthy North Eastern United States and the Western Union
     were edging towards electing a president who whether a Democrat, a
     Unity Democrat or a Reformed Republican, was unlikely to be supportive
     of the increasingly belligerent Republic of Israel. In contrast, the
     more populous and politically aberrant Republic of North America was
     becoming ever more gung-ho for the Jewish Cause, whilst manifestly
     lacking the financial or military muscle to back up its rhetoric. As
     Israel’s sole backer in the world became progressively more impotent,
     there was a sense that now was the last chance for Israel to employ
     its formidable military assets before they became obsolescent and
     useless.
     The unthinkable
     alternative was for the Republic of Israel and its neighbours to
     compromise and arrive at some kind of mutually advantageous
     accommodation.
     “I should be going to
     work,” said Mark who was now working on a very peculiar workshift to
     accommodate the time zones of his employers in the Far East. “I could
     be late.”
     “I bet there’ll be no
     public transport,” said Molly. “And there’ll be no one in the office
     when you get there.” 
     “Why would that be?
     Israel’s thousands of miles away.”
     “There’s a risk of
     fallout. Internet communication will be flaky at best. Most people
     will be watching the news at home.”
     “I know. I know,” said
     Mark. “But I’ve got to make the effort. I’ll have to walk to the
     office if necessary.”
     “Best of luck,” said Molly
     sardonically.
     Mark nodded with
     resignation and sidled out of the cramped living room. As he walked
     towards the front door of the apartment he could hear Monica’s voice
     still whining: “Are you sure we can’t watch cartoons, Mummy?”
     Having said that he’d walk
     to work if he had to, Mark was more or less obliged to do so when he
     walked to Holloway Road underground station and found it closed. A
     hastily scribbled note announced that normal services would be resumed
     as soon as possible, but gave no indication as to when that might be.
     Fortunately, it was a dry if somewhat windy day so Mark was able to
     walk the six or seven kilometres to the office without too much
     discomfort.
     It was a bizarre
     experience nonetheless. London was eerily quiet. There were very few
     cars, bicycles or horses on the road and those who were sitting inside
     the few pubs that were open were viewing the same film footage of
     Jerusalem’s final moments that Mark had just been watching at home.
     Even so, Mark was careful to stay as visible as he could under the
     faltering streetlamps and as far from the shadows of the early autumn
     dusk as he could. There were those who wouldn’t care whether bombs
     were landing in London itself and would show no compunction in
     murdering a vulnerable pedestrian for something as petty as a mobile
     phone or an overcoat.
     When Mark finally arrived
     at the offices of Sig Mu Inc. he was almost surprised to find that the
     doors were open and that the receptionist was sitting at her desk. But
     then it was likely that, like many ancillary workers in London’s
     offices these days, she couldn’t afford a home of her own and slept in
     a small dormitory in the office block’s basement. 
     “Many people in tonight,
     Ophelia?” Mark asked after he’d swiped his security card at the
     entrance and let the body scanners trace his contours to confirm that
     he wasn’t carrying any weapons.
     “Not many,” said Ophelia.
     “It’s all what’s going on in the Middle East. Look, the Israelis
     launched a missile at Ankara but it’s been intercepted. Baghdad wasn’t
     so lucky.”
     “Are there any
     cities left in Israel?” Mark asked, while looking at a map on the
     television screen which displayed a map of the Middle East with little
     mushroom clouds slowly pulsating over various points.
     “I don’t think there’s
     been any more launched towards Israel for several hours,” said
     Ophelia. “Perhaps it’s all over.”
     Mark strolled over to the
     escalator and punched in a code that allowed him access to Sig Mu’s
     offices on the twenty-fourth floor. Ophelia might well be right. If
     the last two nuclear wars were anything to go by, although the last
     happened when he was only very young, the pattern would be an abrupt
     exchange of nuclear warheads, followed by a few stray explosions and
     spasmodic retaliatory launches from hitherto unknown missiles silos or
     other launch pads, and then a kind of radio-silence as the nations
     who’d just destroyed themselves and one another came to comprehend the
     true horror of what they’d just done.
     Mark was assured by the
     television commentators that the days, months and years to follow were
     certain to follow much the same pattern as that after the last two
     nuclear wars. No one could be really sure how things might turn out
     but there would be little value now in launching more nuclear weapons,
     even assuming that any were still in reserve. As a deterrent to
     attack, the formidable nuclear arsenals of the Middle East had quite
     clearly been a total failure. As a method of cataclysmic destruction
     on a scale that the newscasters already claimed exceeded by several
     factors the first two nuclear wars, they’d unequivocally demonstrated
     the hell they were capable of unleashing.
     As Mark sat at his desk,
     he studied his e-mails while also keeping an eye on the news
     broadcasts his fellow employees were also watching. Naturally, there
     was the tardy release of a notice from the company’s Pyongyang head
     office which announced that due to the real risk of radioactive
     fallout on all European offices, especially those in the Mediterranean
     Union and the South, employees would be excused from attending work
     for the next week. Time taken off would be deducted from annual leave.
     “What do you think this
     fallout will do?” wondered Olaf who normally worked in the secure
     office at the end of the corridor but was today wandering aimlessly
     around Mark’s section. “Will it make my hair drop out?”
     “Not much danger of that
     happening to me,” joked Mike as he patted his bald pate. He was one of
     half dozen or so other people in an open plan office that normally
     accommodated several hundred.
     “It’s best to stay
     indoors, it says here,” said Mark who indicated the health advisory
     leaflet attached to the company e-mail. “The main risk is cancer and
     radiation sickness. It also recommends filtered water and oxygen
     masks.”
     “Where the fuck are you
     supposed to buy an oxygen mask?” exclaimed Mike. “The last one must
     have been sold weeks ago.”
     “It’s the nuclear winter
     we’ve got to worry about most,” said Olaf.
     “Nuclear winter?” said
     Mike. “What kind of shit is that?”
     “Well, not nuclear winter
     so much as increased cloud cover,” Olaf corrected himself. “Nuclear
     winter is for the big one...”
     “The big one?” Mike
     queried.
     “You know, when the big
     nuclear powers, like China, Russia and Germany, let theirs off. You
     know like in the last century when it was between the Soviet Union and
     the United States...”
     “Neither of those
     countries exists anymore,” Mark pointed out.
     “The nukes still do,” said
     Olaf. “Anyway, it’s all the dust and debris and shit that the nuclear
     clouds put into the sky and block out the sun and make things fucking
     cold. That’s what a nuclear winter is. You’ve seen the news
     programmes. There’s been a fuck of a lot of bombs going off. It’s
     gonna be real crowded up there in the upper atmosphere. All the stuff
     that goes up has got to come down, but before it does it spreads
     across the sky and blocks out the sun...”
     “That’ll be a change from
     all the global warming shit that causes all the droughts and floods
     and heat waves,” said Mike.
     “Yeah, whatever,” said
     Olaf. “So, even though we’re fucking hundreds of kilometres away,
     we’re still going to suffer. Fucking radiation and freezing
     winters...”
     “...And mutations, cancers
     and health warnings on everything imported from the Middle East,”
     chimed in Mike.
     “Yeah, whatever,” conceded
     Olaf. “We’re gonna suffer for years to come!”

    No Future Volume Three

XC
     Eric Esterhazy
     2046
      
     There
     were so many other things Eric would rather be doing. For instance, he
     could be doing something to address the scandalous rate of immigration
     from the war-ravaged regions of the world: scarred as they were all
     the way from India to Kazakhstan and from Tajikistan to Azerbaijan. He
     could be consolidating his position as Treasury Secretary by outlining
     innovative new tax cuts and further rationalisation of public
     expenditure. He could be actively promoting the causes for which his
     constituents elected him and in which he believed so passionately.
     Rather than do all that,
     he was having to join the chorus of government ministers gathered
     around Prime Minister Olanthe O’Donnell as she wrung her hands and
     mouthed platitudes about how appalled and distressed she and her
     Cabinet were by this morning’s horrific exchange of nuclear warheads
     and the consequent loss of countless innocent lives. 
     Now, instead of devising
     new ways to keep the quarrelsome ragheads out of Great Britain where
     they would yet further dilute the nation’s cultural identity with
     Arabic chants and minarets, Eric Esterhazy would have to express in
     glutinous syrupy tones how much he and his colleagues would do
     whatever they could to help the millions of unfortunate refugees even
     to the extent of relaxing the Kingdom’s already lax border controls.
     It would be months, even years, until he could once again suggest that
     the traffic should be much more in the other direction: away from
     rather than towards British shores.
     Like his fellow ministers,
     Eric now had to learn to pronounce the names of far distant cities,
     towns and other places just at the moment when their annihilation
     bestowed on them the fame and immortality they’d never have earned
     otherwise. Who’d even heard of Dushanbe before and even guessed that
     it was a city in Tajikistan? And what about tongue-twisters such as
     Jalalabad, Chagcharan and Dzhebel? It was a curse that the part of the
     world where the second nuclear war in less than a decade should take
     place was where the names were on the wrong side of pronounceable. It
     would have been far more convenient if the war had happened somewhere
     civilised where the names were English rather than Turkish or Arabic.
     It wasn’t just that the
     combatants’ names were tricky to say without stumbling and that it was
     difficult to find on a map the location of the now irradiated
     wastelands, the biggest predicament for a professional politician was
     that the whole conflict from beginning to end was utterly
     incomprehensible. Who, for instance, were the good guys and who the
     bad? What had triggered all these fractious quarrelling states to
     finally crack and launch at each other the lethal arsenal that had
     ended up in the hands of absolutely the wrong nations after the
     collapse of the Soviet Union? Surely the experience of such close
     proximity to Pakistan and India where the last nuclear war took place
     should have been some deterrent to the squabbling Stans, especially
     since these were precisely the nations who’d just had to cope with a
     flood of refugees from Pakistan when the country essentially ceased to
     function in any meaningful sense. Wouldn’t they also be left with
     years or maybe decades of civil war, vigilante justice, local
     warlords, refugee camps, a permanent legacy of radioactivity and a
     displaced population? But perhaps the ragheads just couldn’t see what
     they would let themselves in for. After all, there was a reason why
     Great Britain was Great, the United States were United and the
     ragheads, wogs and  spades of the world had to be dissuaded from
     landing on the shores of more civilised nations. 
     Eric Esterhazy was far too
     astute a politician to express such unfashionable opinions in public,
     however much he believed them to be true. It was all because of
     political correctness, of course, that the truth had to be suppressed.
     It was obvious that the different races of the world had to be kept
     apart under Anglo-Saxon stewardship (even when intermixed with
     Hungarian blood). But political correctness was still something that a
     politician whether Conservative or Liberal, especially a Cabinet
     Minister, had to be mindful of. Eric almost envied the Reds and the
     Greens. Political correctness came so naturally to them.
     And now what was Eric to
     do other than spew out hollow platitudes? How could he distinguish
     himself from his colleagues when set against a bland wall of
     solidarity that abhorred the tragedy of a far distant apocalypse and
     pledged to help in every way possible?
     “Don’t be a prick!” said
     Callum O’Leary, Fox News UK anchor, when Eric confided in his
     anxieties after he’d answered the scripted questions on live
     television with a soggy account of how British government aid would
     help the suffering millions in Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and
     the other republics the pronunciation of whose names Eric had been
     rehearsing over the last few hours. “News moves on. People will soon
     get as bored of watching mushroom clouds over Samarkand as they did
     the ones over Faisalabad. Pretty soon the news will focus on
     radioactive fallout, viral mutations and lawlessness amongst refugees.
     And where there’s chaos there’s opportunity for the Conservative
     cause...”
     “Meaning what?” said Eric
     who was weary of cryptic comments, although he enjoyed using them
     himself. Behind O’Leary’s head was fresh film footage of a mushroom
     cloud enveloping in and around itself above what had previously been
     the little-known city of Qurgonteppa.
     “When people feel
     threatened,” Callum explained, “they unerringly seek comfort and
     succour in what they’re most familiar with. They don’t want to be
     confronted by the unknown and the unfamiliar. Not long from now, we’ll
     have the same radiation scares we had six years ago. Accompanying
     that, there’ll be an influx of strange-looking foreigners from all
     these gobbledegook republics in their turbans and sandals who won’t
     speak one word of English between them. There’ll be health scares
     about weird diseases and unhygienic toilet habits. Before you know it,
     the newspapers will be full of stories about the invasion of commie
     ragheads who couldn’t keep their fingers off the nuclear button. You
     won’t need to suffer too many weeks in mourning the death of the
     millions of unfortunate women and children who’ve just been
     incinerated in how-the-fuck-am-I-supposed-to-pronounce-istan...”
     “A Conservative rally
     cry?” said Eric sceptically. 
     “Fear and suspicion are a
     Conservative’s best two friends,” said Callum. “Helped, of course, by
     plenty of cash. And you can be sure that Fox News UK’s shareholders
     will be willing to invest whatever it takes to ensure that news
     coverage on this crisis will suit your government, especially if you
     can get shot of that O’Donnell woman. What someone like her is doing
     as leader of the Conservative Party I don’t know. She might as well be
     Liberal or even Labour. There’s no spine to her.”
     “My feelings exactly,”
     said Eric who warmed even more to his friend and frequent fellow guest
     to the sex parties organised by Fox News UK.
     But although Callum’s
     remarks were reassuring, Eric still inwardly groaned at the prospect
     of the many more interviews to come. Few of them would be nearly as
     sympathetic as those with Fox News UK. On the other hand, Eric was
     grateful that his first interview in the necessary round was in the
     studios of the national news channel where he was most in his element,
     even though he’d had to suppress even a hint of his normal concerns.
     There was no way he could angle the interview towards an attack on
     alarmist Green activists, the creeping influence of socialism, or the
     steady loss of the nation’s moral backbone. He couldn’t find an
     obvious way in which he could argue for tax cuts, increased military
     expenditure, and rolling back the influence of the state as a solution
     to an apocalyptic catastrophe in these faraway lands. Instead he’d had
     to propose the very kind of political intervention and nanny-state
     interference that he was more disposed to opposed.
     “Given the present state
     of the Exchequer, can we afford to be as generous as you suggest?”
     asked Eoin d’Auberge, the dusky-skinned interviewer on the pinko BBC
     where, for the first time in many years, Eric ventured into their
     cramped studios near Old Street.
     Eric hated the BBC. Just
     as he did any media outlet that by virtue of not being conservative
     could only be part of the pinko liberal establishment that had
     sympathies for Greens, Reds, poofs and ragheads. If he had his way,
     what was left of the BBC would be left to wither away but,
     unfortunately, over half a century of starving the corporation of
     funds hadn’t completely destroyed the affection the general public
     still retained for it.
     However, now wasn’t the
     time to go off-script. Although his instinct was to respond to the
     half-breed d’Auberge with an attack on him having asked such a loaded
     question which was so obviously a reference to his general view that
     the British government was already far too generous.
     “These are extraordinary
     times that demand extraordinary measures,” said Eric bestowing on his
     clichéd words as much gravitas as he could muster. “The British people
     have shown many times before just how deeply they are willing to dig
     into their pockets to help those much less fortunate than themselves,
     especially when the disaster has happened on such a tragic scale...”
     “Are you suggesting that
     the charitable and private sector should be wholly responsible for
     providing practical assistance?”
     “What? No, of course not,”
     said Eric who could see where this might lead to, given his many
     pronouncements on how Foreign Aid should be entirely discretionary.
     “As you reported in your news headline, the British Government has
     made a pledge of unconditional aid and assistance that can only be
     described as generous. It is imperative on governments across the
     world to give as much as possible to the tens of millions of displaced
     and mortally wounded in Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Azerbaijan. This
     is an international crisis and it deserves a commensurate
     international response...”
     “Can we be assured that
     the pledge will be matched by actual funds? Or will only a fraction of
     the pledged funds reach its intended recipients as happened, for
     instance, in the Indo-Pakistani Nuclear War?”
     This was another trap.
     Christ! Eric hated these fucking pinko news reporters. Why couldn’t
     this d’Auberge cunt just display the same deference and respect he
     always got from Fox News UK and its affiliates? Eric had only a month
     before been pontificating on why it had been necessary to radically
     reduce Foreign Aid including, of course, all that earmarked for
     Pakistan. Now wasn’t the time, of course, to tell the BBC News anchors
     and their loyal (but mostly non-Conservative) viewers that every penny
     spent on Pakistan had dropped down a bottomless pit of local
     corruption while the entirely predictable consequences of the
     self-induced trauma of all-out nuclear war remained as insurmountable
     as ever. Now wasn’t the time to explain that he expected most of the
     Foreign Aid donated to the Stans to eventually be re-invested in the
     coffers of a handful of large corporations who’d already began
     lobbying for funds to help further British commercial influence in
     that part of the world. 
     “We have learnt many
     lessons from the mistakes made by the previous government during the
     last nuclear war,” said Eric boldly. “You can be assured that we shall
     ensure that the interests of the suffering millions will be the
     highest of all priorities for the government in which I have the
     privilege to serve...”
     Even if it was with that
     bitch O’Donnell, Eric thought, as he blustered his way through the
     remaining few minutes of his thankfully short interview in which he
     made sure that he emphasised again and again the bullet points with
     which he’d been briefed. And these were, of course, so far from what
     Eric would normally propound that he had to bite his tongue and almost
     recite his lines as if it were some kind of school assignment.
     Occasionally, Eric
     considered the meaning of the words he was trotting out and would do
     so again for news organisations based both home and abroad. It helped,
     after all, to be able to match his emotional responses to the words he
     was using. Yes, it was truly shocking and appalling that millions of
     men, women and children had been fatally consumed by the billowing
     clouds of burning radioactive dust. Yes, he could only feel pity for
     the suffering of those whose skin had peeled off in the intense heat
     and whose eyeballs had been burnt out by a glare brighter than the sun
     and whose bones had been shattered by the flying debris. And, yes, he
     felt anguish for the plight of the many who now had to suffer for the
     rest of their lives with the threat of cancer, if, that is, they
     managed to survive the plagues, famines and civil war which were the
     still persistent legacy of the last nuclear war.
     On the whole, though, for
     Eric all this was just a distraction that he’d much rather do without.
     If only the ragheads had killed each other off in a less spectacular
     way, then perhaps no one would have noticed and almost certainly
     there’d be no fresh influx of wretched refugees into the United
     Kingdom.
      

    No Future Volume Three

XCI
     Gabrielle
     2041
      
     Like
     most men—even bisexual men—Ghazi wasn’t someone who’d willingly
     display his true emotions, especially not those such as sorrow, misery
     and distress. This time, however, Gabrielle was in a position she’d
     never been in before and one for which she was not remotely suited and
     that was to provide comfort to a man who’d lost his emotional
     self-control.
     “Amritsar. Jalandhar.
     Jaipur,” Ghazi moaned. “These are places I’ve known and visited. My
     sister lives—or rather lived—in Amritsar. And now they’ve gone.
     Incinerated. Annihilated. Nothing left but radioactive waste.”
     And then he released yet
     more tears on a pillow already damp with proof od his grief and
     despair. 
     Gabrielle placed a
     comforting hand on his bare back, but recognised the need for
     restraint. Ghazi was no longer in the mood for sex that was his
     original excuse for seeking her company. What he wanted from her was
     nothing more than sympathetic companionship which somehow meant more
     to him when it came from a woman who wasn’t Indian or Pakistani, who
     wasn’t Muslim or Hindu, but who understood at least something about
     what such differences in culture and religion might mean.
     It wouldn’t do for
     Gabrielle to remind Ghazi that Ajit, her senior farm manager, was also
     in a state of abject despair although his concerns were more for the
     people of Rawalpindi, Gujranwala and Lahore. It wouldn’t do to bring
     up the subject that her long-term policy of recruiting from the
     dispossessed of the Indian subcontinent had now left her business
     functioning at rather less than half its normal capacity at a time of
     the year when harvests needed to be collected and mid-year tax
     accounts collated.
     Gabrielle was as
     distressed as anyone by the news film that showed only too vividly
     what happened when nuclear warheads were used in anger rather than for
     show. Although she was awed by the magnificent beauty of the unfolding
     mushroom clouds as they rose above the cities of the Punjab, the
     Rajasthan and Kashmir, she was uncomfortably aware that the same
     awe-inspiring splendour consisted in part of the incinerated ruins of
     human lives, centuries of history and the hopes and dreams of the
     abruptly deceased.
     Gabrielle had been so sure
     over the last few weeks that this was a catastrophe that would never
     happen. Surely, the very purpose of nuclear weapons was to make the
     prospect of all-out war inconceivable. Only the very stupid or the
     psychotically insane would contemplate actually unleashing such
     formidable weapons. The news pundits had been vying with one another
     to predict the moment of climb-down, capitulation and compromise. In
     the meantime, people who were unsure where Pakistan was in relation to
     India had now become familiar with the names of places and politicians
     they couldn’t hope to spell correctly. Nobody had expected the nations
     of the relatively prosperous Indian subcontinent to wreck everything
     that had been achieved in nearly a century of independence.
     One consequence of India’s
     growing self-confidence was that the European, American or Oriental
     powers no longer had the influence to restrain the sparring nations.
     After all, India was a member of the Group of Five leading Economic
     Powers including China, America, Japan and the European Union. No one,
     including the Permanent Members of the United Nations, had the means
     to persuade India to take a more temperate stance with regards to its
     equally obdurate neighbour.
     As the crescendo of
     retaliation and counter-retaliation became inexorably more serious
     over the passing week, Gabrielle had already forgotten what it was
     that either India or Pakistan had originally been demanding of the
     other. The conflict had taken on its own remorseless logic and any
     kind of compromise had become ever more unlikely. The mood progressed
     from sound and fury that would eventually extinguish itself to alarm
     and resignation about the near-certainty of a suicidal exchange of
     nuclear warheads. The predictions became less about which nation would
     stand back first as to which one would be so foolish as to be first to
     press the red button.
     There was an uneasy
     stand-off as each day went by and yet another prediction of imminent
     disaster was confounded by an absence of nuclear conflagration, while
     at the same time the bombardment by more conventional but still highly
     destructive weapons continued to rain on the cities of Delhi, Mumbai,
     Srinagar and Islamabad. Armies were gathered at the borders. Aircraft
     carriers were floating on the seas around Karachi and Ahmedabad. Armed
     drones were flying over the mountains, plains and forests. The
     rhetoric became ever more uncompromising.
     And then—when Gabrielle
     got so used to the unfolding crisis that she’d forgotten what it was
     like to live in a time when imminent nuclear war was nothing more than
     a theoretical scenario—there came the first explosion of a nuclear
     device by one lethally armed nation on another in all human history.
     Those punters who’d taken the grim bet at the bookmakers that it would
     be India who’d be the more lunatic of the two belligerent nations were
     well-rewarded. The response as the city of Rawalpindi dissolved into
     nuclear heat and radioactive dust was predictable. Pakistan’s reply
     was cautious in terms of the republic’s military capability but it was
     devastating to the citizens of Jaipur who might have assumed that
     their city’s survival was guaranteed by its sublime beauty and
     historical significance. But all such considerations and many others
     became meaningless as the day went on and more and more of the
     subcontinent’s magnificence was reduced to nuclear waste whose legacy
     was likely to last longer in terms of lethal half-lives than the
     histories of either Islam or Hinduism.
     Normal life in Britain or,
     indeed, in every country in the world was suspended while every few
     minutes came rumours and later confirmation of another nuclear
     explosion and then yet another and not long after, still another. If
     the Second World War had been covered in such blow-by-blow detail,
     then it could scarcely have been more compelling television news.
     Gabrielle was unable to concentrate on any one thing for more than a
     moment until her attention was drawn towards the mobile feed on her
     phone or the high-definition images on the television. Although the
     news presentation, even on Fox News UK, was coherent and informative,
     Gabrielle couldn’t retain more than a staccato pattern in her head as
     atrocity followed by catastrophe followed by humanitarian crisis.
     There was too much to assimilate. It was far too apocalyptic in its
     scale and implications for her to put it into any kind of context. 
     This was just too much
     news for one day.
     All these ancient cities
     whose history was more venerable than most European civilisations; all
     those lives lost in the most appalling suffering; all those mushroom
     clouds sprouting over the Punjab, Gujarat and the Kashmir: all of this
     was far far too much for Gabrielle to take in. She preferred her
     life-defining epic international events to happen at a more readily
     comprehensible pace. Barely had she grasped that Rawalpindi was now a
     city that more resembled the caldera of an active volcano than a home
     for millions of Pakistanis, than she had to assimilate the news that
     the desert surrounding Jaipur was now more hospitable than the city
     itself.
     “This isn’t right,” Ghazi
     moaned. “It’s not right at all.”
     Gabrielle could only
     agree, but what else could she do? 
     She was also aware that
     unlike most wars in the last century, she and other British citizens
     couldn’t just view a war between India and Pakistan as just another
     regrettable foreign conflict which, even if British soldiers were
     involved, was mostly just another televisual diversion. 
     This was a war whose
     radioactive pollution would be carried across the globe by the
     prevailing winds and where—although those neighbouring countries
     unfortunate enough to be in the path would be the ones to suffer the
     most from the fallout—very soon there would be nowhere on the planet
     that wouldn’t see a lethal increase in cancer and other radioactive
     ailments. And there was also scientific speculation that this would
     lead to an unusually cold winter as a result of all the Punjabi dust
     and Kashmiri soil ejected in tiny particles into the planet’s outer
     atmosphere and then smeared evenly over every single square kilometre
     of the planet.
     Radiation and bad weather
     was indiscriminate and random. It was the chill wind of post-conflict
     readjustment that Gabrielle dreaded most. After all, her most loyal
     lover, her most senior managers and the greatest proportion of her
     employees all came from the blighted regions that would now for the
     rest of her life be associated with a single devastating event. No one
     from now on could contemplate Jaipur, Lahore or Srinagar without
     reflecting on its demise, any more than they could Hiroshima, Dresden
     or the World Trade Center. 
     It was more than lives
     lost. It was a permanent scar on human history.
     How would Gabrielle’s
     agricultural business survive this crisis? Would her staff work harder
     given that they no longer had a home in the East to which they could
     return? Or would they be so despondent that nothing useful could be
     done? How long would it take Ghazi to recover from his despair? This
     was itself indicative of the intermittent depression he’d suffered
     from ever since the day he’d been badly beaten up in Oxford
     “Do you want me to turn
     the TV off?” Gabrielle suggested as Ghazi’s gaze was drawn to the
     image replayed over and over again as the dust and debris of the once
     little known city of Jalandhar ascended into the brilliant blue sky.
     “Isn’t this all a bit too much, don’t you think?”
     “It’s certainly too much,”
     Ghazi admitted as his tear-stained face reluctantly dragged its gaze
     away from the huge flat screen that dominated the living room wall.
     “It’s more than too much. It’s a lifetime’s worth of too much. But I
     fear that if I don’t watch what’s happening I’ll miss something and
     that will be the something that I’ll forever regret not seeing...”
     “Like what?”
     “Like the bombing of New
     Delhi,” suggested Ghazi. “Like the end of Indian democracy. Like an
     atrocity that will somehow make even the destruction of Jaipur seem
     like a footnote. I don’t know. This is history. And, what’s worse,
     it’s my history.”
     Gabrielle resisted the
     temptation of reminding Ghazi of how many generations it had been
     since anyone in his family had lived in India or anywhere outside of
     Europe and America. But she couldn’t just sit here and watch Ghazi
     weep over the unfolding tragedy, however naked he was,
     “I’ll phone Ajit,” she
     said. “I’ll find out how he is.”
     Ghazi nodded. “You do
     that,” he said. “Tell him that I feel his pain, even if he is
     Pakistani.”
     “I appreciate your call,”
     said Ajit when he picked up the phone. “My wife is overwhelmed by
     grief. The boys don’t really understand what’s going on, but they
     can’t be dragged away from the television.” 
     “Is there anything I can
     do?” Gabrielle asked.
     “Nothing,” said Ajit, and
     then thinking better of it: “My wife... She needs company. Many of her
     relatives in Pakistan, you understand. There may be funerals. I just
     don’t know...”
     Gabrielle inwardly groaned
     but she knew what she needed to say. “These are special circumstances.
     You can take as much time off work as you feel you need to...”
     “But the farm...” Ajit
     protested half-heartedly.
     “Don’t worry about that,”
     said Gabrielle. “We might just have to write off the harvest this
     year. Especially given the likelihood of radioactive dust...”
     “It will affect all
     farmers in Britain equally,” said Ajit.
     Gabrielle appreciated
     Ajit’s comforting words, but she knew as Ajit also did that with a
     workforce absent in mourning, radioactive dust falling from the sky
     and the likelihood of an unusually cold winter, the immediate
     commercial prospects could not be especially good.
     “Whatever happens to me
     and my business is as nothing compared to what’s happened over in your
     home country,” she said diplomatically.

    No Future Volume Three

XCII
     Alex
     2036
      
     Alex
     was now possessed of an opinion he once believed that he’d never hold.
     And that somewhat dispiriting opinion was that those women whose
     company he most enjoyed were those he could never rate as his social
     equals. A woman like the new Chief Executive Officer, for example, was
     a real balls-breaker whose greatest talent was to keep Alex and his
     fellow directors on their toes. Alex still wasn’t sure whether their
     brief relationship together counted as a positive or a negative asset
     in his executive career. And he didn’t really enjoy the company of
     women who were his intellectual equal. They so often made him feel
     that he was a fraud for earning so much but achieving so little.
     The worst thing about
     women who were in any sense Alex’s equal was that they were also
     generally much the same age as him. That, as Alex now had to admit,
     was not an age when women were at their most physically attractive. It
     also troubled him that just as women of his own age was now no longer
     his first choice, he’d now become the sort of man who was theirs. No
     wonder most men who’d got married preferred to stay that way. 
     So the solution to this
     dilemma, and an increasingly expensive one, was to rely on the company
     of women with whom there was no pretence or illusion, most especially
     regarding relative social or intellectual status, and, best of all,
     where there was no likelihood of any kind of commitment beyond that of
     actually paying for her services. 
     Alex was pretty certain
     that the naked woman lying beside him on his huge double-bed was never
     actually christened Opal, but that was the name by which she
     introduced herself and by which she was listed on the escort agency’s
     website. Alex could easily have chosen Mirabella, Goldie, Ember or
     Alicia, but today it was once again Opal’s turn. She was attractive in
     a peculiarly non-specific way, although just on the cusp of being
     dumpy and short. Her main virtue was how reliable she was beneath the
     sheets and in holding a reassuringly non-threatening conversation on
     other occasions.
     And today, of all days,
     one thing Alex really did not want was something that might further
     disturb his composure.
     The last few days had been
     fraught and there was a very real possibility that they could be
     amongst his last. And not just for Alex, but pretty much for all
     humanity. 
     Events in Korea had taken
     a critical turn. The armed forces massed on North Korea’s southern and
     northern borders were bristling with weaponry that was dramatically
     more devastating than that usually used in a distant foreign conflict.
     It wasn’t only the two Koreas that had the thermonuclear capacity to
     reduce the peninsular to radioactive waste. The Americans and their
     close allies, the Russians, were on one side of the border. While on
     the other side was the world’s wealthiest nation and its most heavily
     armed nuclear power: the Federal Republic of China.
     This could end up being
     very nasty indeed.
     Alex had faith that the
     warring parties would somehow come to a satisfactory face-saving
     resolution. After all, international business could suffer even in a
     stalemate. China had investments in America, Russia and even the UK.
     There was no country in the world, except perhaps the most unhinged,
     that had a good word for North Korea. It was a nation that had
     squandered every penny of its wealth on an preposterously well-armed
     military and a thoroughly pampered political elite whose quality of
     life exceeded that of most billionaires even in neighbouring China. It
     was incredible and anachronistic that the people of North Korea should
     continue to live in ignorance of the world beyond their borders in an
     age where the internet was truly ubiquitous and the cheapest mobile
     phone could store a library of movies that would take a lifetime to
     view in their entirety.
     “What do you think about
     what’s happening in Korea?” Alex asked Opal, expecting (and probably
     hoping) that she would respond with something crass and ignorant that
     would somehow justify his objectification of her as appetising sex
     meat.
     “Shall we turn on the TV
     and find out?” she suggested as she rolled over and clicked on the
     remote control. She was betraying rather more interest in current
     affairs than one would normally expect. On a previous occasion she
     claimed not to know which of Tokyo or Beijing was the capital of
     Japan. Alex suspected then, and even more now as she listened intently
     to the academic discussion on Fox News UK, that her show of ignorance
     was nothing more than an act and that the real woman who Alex would
     never get to know was somewhat more abreast of international news than
     Opal the whore who liked to be fucked in the arse and was expert at
     the messiest kind of blowjob that Alex had ever enjoyed.
     It was the on-screen
     tickertape that broadcast the news Alex was most worried about
     regarding the continued stand-off. Alex wondered just how long over
     five million men in arms and a planet’s worth of thermonuclear
     firepower could remain idle on the 38th parallel. It
     wouldn’t take much for the affair to escalate from a skirmish to
     all-out conflagration. Every report of an island bombed, a battalion
     defecting and an armed scuffle on the borders made Alex either cheer
     or despair. And this same uneasiness was even apparent on the faces of
     the normally self-assured news anchors. And it was fairly apparent on
     Opal’s face as well.
     “How far do you think the
     Chinese will go to protect their ally?” Opal asked, flatteringly
     implying that this was something on which Alex might be an authority.
     He was nothing of the sort
     of course, but after all the conversations and chats with colleagues
     and the blow-by-blow accounts provided by television and internet
     journalists, Alex felt that he’d dedicated enough of his life to have
     some kind of authoritative opinion. But whatever he might argue, his
     main concern was that he and everyone else on the planet should still
     be alive at the end of the week.
     “I can’t believe anyone in
     the world, not the Chinese and not even the North Koreans, would be so
     stupid as to start a World War,” he said. 
     It didn’t seem right. The
     world wasn’t ready for conflagration, although Alex wondered whether
     there would ever be a time when it would be. How ready was the world
     when the meteor hit Chicxulub 65 million years ago? How ready were the
     Minoans for their civilisation to be annihilated by a volcanic
     eruption? Did the people of Poland expect their country to be invaded
     from both the East and the West in 1945? Perhaps the most devastating
     events came when people were least ready for them.
     It was a cliché of most
     movies and television programmes that whenever a big event happened
     there would be bold headlines everywhere with words like War,
     Chaos and Catastrophe. Everyone would excitedly discuss
     the news and associated with it there would be a palpable atmosphere
     of expectation. This was exactly what was happening, but buses and
     trains were still continuing to run, there was no break in the
     transmission of situation comedies, soap operas and quiz shows on
     television, and sports fixtures still dominated the last few pages of
     the newspapers. The world may be due for extinction within the week,
     but Arsenal was still due to play against Sheffield Wednesday and a
     new superhero movie was due to have its premiere in Leicester Square.
     Alex was genuinely
     worried. He’d even phoned up his ex-wife so that he could talk to his
     six-year old daughter. Even Iris had a vague idea of what was
     happening at the furthest end of the world, but she seemed to think
     that after everyone in the world was killed things would just
     magically get to be all right again. Several work colleagues were
     absent without leave and there was a real sense that no one any longer
     cared whether production figures were met or deadlines achieved given
     that all of that might soon be utterly irrelevant. Every announcement
     by the President of the United States, the Prime Minister of the
     United Kingdom or, most of all, the President of the Federal Republic
     of China was listened to with rapt attention. The names of the
     Presidents of both Koreas were now more familiar to the world than at
     any time since the mid-twentieth century.
     “There’s a special
     announcement from Clooney,” said Opal referring to the American
     President. “It looks like it’ll be important. Shall we watch?”
     Alex nodded, forgetting
     for the moment the real nature of the relationship that should exist
     between Opal and her client. It wasn’t for the escort to dictate what
     the client should do, but Alex no more than Opal wanted to miss an
     important announcement. He wondered whether he should now be fleeing
     towards the nearest underground station if the president was just
     about to declare all-out nuclear war. Although Alex was sure that
     there was nowhere truly safe from a thermonuclear device even of
     fairly modest mega-tonnage, there must surely be some level of
     security on the Northern or Metropolitan Lines. Unless, of course,
     overground explosions were to cause the tunnels to collapse.
     The president’s demeanour
     was stern and commanding. At least this president wasn’t the kind of
     idiot that the Americans were increasingly prone to elect as it
     adjusted to its diminished relative status in the world with
     astonishingly poor grace. Alex wondered what kind of mess the standard
     issue president would leave the world. With their inability to string
     together coherent sentences and their tendency to make frighteningly
     inane and foolhardy statements of policy, American presidents had
     mostly become as much a poor joke in the world as their desperate
     assertions of America’s divine mission became more obviously derisory
     and self-deluding. On the other hand, Alex wasn’t sure that Britain’s
     own rather dull Prime Ministers or the other elected heads of Europe
     were actually any better.
     The president’s address
     spun out the tension for several moments as he stressed the gravity of
     the international situation, emphasised the seriousness of the threat
     and praised the endeavours toward peace made by the allies, in
     particular the presidents of Russia and Brazil. 
     Come on, come on, thought
     Alex. Cut to the chase. Are we all going to die?
     “I think it’s going to be
     all right,” said Opal with a tone of relief in her voice.
     “How can you tell?”
     “Body language,” Opal
     explained.
     “Body language?”
     “I’m a Psychology Major,”
     said Opal who for the first time in their many carnal encounters
     confessed that she wasn’t just a fluffy sperm receptacle. “You can
     tell by the eyes, the breathing, the stress pattern in the
     sentences... It’s all there. He’s about to announce that it’s all been
     resolved.”
     And indeed it was. The
     sentences rolled out as the president announced the terms by which
     North Korea had capitulated to the allies’ demands and how the Federal
     Republic of China had made bold steps towards bringing the crisis to a
     satisfactory conclusion. At the same time there were hints about the
     breakdown of civil order in North Korea, the substantial level of
     defections to the south and the brave rebellion by the starved and
     frightened who didn’t really want to serve as gun-fodder for their
     leaders’ manic ambitions. Alex suspected that the real story about
     North Korea’s abrupt and humiliating climbdown from the intransigent
     position it had taken earlier that morning was rather less to do with
     a sudden outbreak of sanity and reason and more to do with the final
     collapse of the world’s most insane country.
     And so it was over. 
     World War Three had been
     averted. 
     What a relief!
     And as he returned his
     attention to Opal in the hope that they could celebrate the good news
     together at a special discount rate, Alex reflected on the good news.
     If the world could survive
     this crisis, it could surely survive anything.

     Cover

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No Future Volume Three