Eric Brown: The Serene Invasion

There was another delay, this time lasting thirty minutes, while the plane took its place in the take-off queue. He spent the time writing a short email to Sally and sending it as the plane climbed and banked over the dreary grey suburbs of south-west London.

See you in a little over ten hours. I can’t wait. Work has been hell, I’ll tell you all about it later. There I go again, complaining about my job, when yours… Anyway, things are just the same in England. Food-shortages and riots. Could be worse: look at France…

He went on in this rambling vein for another couple of pages, the epistolary logorrhoea a prelude to the oral: when he met Sally they’d talk non-stop, catching up on the mutual missed events of the past three months.

The plane flew west, out over the Atlantic and south over the Bay of Biscay, giving French airspace a wide berth. A nationalist terrorist group had brought down three planes in as many months over the south of France, in response to the number of foreigners flooding into the country. Airlines were taking no risks.

Allen lost himself in work, cropping images of bombed-out houses, the dazed victims in the streets of the Turkish capital. The country was paying the price for its acceptance of the West, its repudiation of ‘traditional’ values. Repression of dissidents, including Kurds and Islamists, had been severe and uncompromising, in the grand tradition of Turkish state heavy-handedness. The result was an anarchic free-for-all in which ideologically opposing terror groups, of every shade of political and religious persuasion, cut swathes through the country’s innocent population.

A little while later he felt a tap on his shoulder. A woman peered around the seat behind him. “Do you think that’s appropriate for children to view?”

“Excuse me?” Allen turned awkwardly to look at her.

The woman leaned to one side and indicated a small girl seated beside her. “My daughter saw what you were doing as she went to the toilet…”

His first reaction was to apologise — the typical English, deferential climb-down hardwired into every citizen of his class and age. His second, to tell the woman that her daughter should mind her own business.

He indicated the vacant window-seat beside him, “I’ll move,” he said, and did so.

In the aftermath, he wished he had said something caustic, along the lines of, “Perhaps you shouldn’t shield your precious daughter from the realities of the world…” but on reflection he was relieved he’d not had the gall to do so; that would have started him on his hobby-horse, the sanitised, advertisement-led vapidity of the British news media these days, which was happy to report atrocities with lip-smacking gusto, but was prudishly reluctant to show the effects of bombings and similar attacks. Even the internet, once the bastion of laissez faire content, had been hamstrung by recent government restrictions.

The website and sister magazine he freelanced for was based in Germany, where restrictions were a little less draconian.

He worked on the photography for another hour, by which time a hostess was processing down the aisle handing out shrink-wrapped trays of fodder the blandness of which was calculated to offend the least number of passengers. Allen chewed on a cheese roll — the cheese the latest milk-free version, cheap, rubbery and tasteless — while staring through the window at the ocean far below.

They overflew a vast hydraulic wave-farm, a series of great metal platelets connected by tubular pistons the width of the Channel Tunnel. He’d covered a story down there a few years ago. The Spanish government had flown him to Cadiz, then ferried him out by hydrofoil, to witness an amazing sight. A hundred boat-people, refugees fleeing the revolution in Morocco, had set up camp on the back of one of the farm’s great see-sawing plates, subsisting on fish and little else, until evacuated by the Spanish authorities.

The farm was free of inhabitants now, other than its skeleton crew of engineers, but he did see a tangle of wreckage and a sprawling scorch mark on one of the heaving pontoons: the result of a terrorist attack last year.

The last he’d heard, the Spanish government was thinking of closing down the farm on grounds of inefficiency, and building nuclear reactors to supply the nation’s rapacious energy needs. Opposition voices pointed out the dangers of reactors prone to terrorism…

An elderly man hobbled down the aisle towards him, smiled and inclined his head, and walked on past. Allen responded with a vague smile of his own, wondering if he’d met the man somewhere recently. His memory for faces, as well as names, was appalling, which was odd as he thought of himself as a visual person. He was endlessly fascinated by the appearance of things, of how reality presented itself visually — his degree had been in art history, and he’d been a photo-journalist for the past ten years — and yet he was forever unconsciously snubbing people because he failed to recognise their faces.

A little later the old man paused in the aisle beside Allen, cleared his throat and, when he had his attention, murmured, “I hope you don’t think this impertinent of me, but I was wondering if you’re Geoffrey Allen?”

The man had the diffident, old-school manners of a much earlier generation. Allen guessed he was in his eighties.

He smiled, wondering if the man had recognised him from one of the ID mugshots that occasionally accompanied his pieces in British colour supplements. He felt at once obscurely pleased and embarrassed.

He smiled. “That’s right.”

The man extended a frail hand. “James Cleveland. I worked with your father many, many years ago, and I once met you when you were this high. I’ve followed your career over the years.” After they had shaken hands, Cleveland indicated the aisle seat. “You don’t mind…?”

“Not at all.” Though, truth be told, the last thing he wanted was to be pinned in situ by someone reminiscing at length about the greatness of his father — a situation he’d suffered on more than one occasion over the years.

“Your father was a wonderful politician, Geoffrey — I may call you Geoffrey, by the way?”

Allen smiled his assent and groaned inwardly.

“We were on the same back-bench committee many years ago, investigating police corruption. I have never worked with a finer mind…”

Cleveland continued in this vein, and Allen responded with nods and the occasional monosyllabic agreement.

The fact was that his father had been a great man, and that rare animal: a politician loved by the people, a reformer who worked tirelessly for his constituents. That he had rarely shown himself at home was a side-issue that few knew or cared about, outside of the immediate family, Allen himself and his younger sister Catherine. Perhaps it might not have been so bad if their mother had not also been a parliamentary politician, if not of his father’s eminence, then certainly as hard-working. Allen was raised by a series of European nannies with, in the background, two distant figures called mother and father who he knew he should feel something for — as he had read about in books — but for whom he felt almost nothing other than resentment.

His parents worked hard for years, tirelessly for the people they represented… and where did it get them, he thought?

Now Cleveland said, “And I was so sorry to read about…”

“Yes,” Allen interrupted, fearing what the politician emeritus might say next, “yes, it was a… terrible shock for all of us.”

Tactfully, Cleveland changed the subject. “Well, I’m visiting my grand-daughter in Durban. She’s just given birth.”

“Congratulations.”

“And you? Work, no doubt?”