Ken MacLeod - Intrusion

‘I’m a consenting and mildly addicted passive smoker,’ said Maya, inhaling a passing wisp. ‘I should explain. I work in an Advice Centre, out in Hayes. Lots of refugees and DPs, you know? Which means I work with people who – I’m not making this up – will list smoking under “outdoor activities”.’

They laughed.

‘But that’s not why I picked here,’ Maya went on. She leaned forward, elbows on the table, hand waving. ‘It’s sort of relevant to your problem, sort of an example…’

‘Oh yes, my problem,’ said Hope. She put the coffee mug down, hard. ‘You have some explaining to do.’

Maya did some explaining.

Hope put her elbows on the table and her palms across her eyes.

‘Oh God ,’ she said. ‘I feel like I’ve been stalked or something.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Maya. ‘Really you haven’t. It’s just that, you know, you posted on ParentsNet, and then that other mum at your school uploaded yesterday’s little contretemps, and—’

‘Yes, I bloody know that!’ Hope snapped. ‘But that science woman, what did she have to poke her nose in for?’

‘For God’s sake!’ said Maya. ‘She hasn’t done anything. She just told me about you, and I came up with an idea to help. To let you know you’re not alone. And come on, I did help.’

‘Yes,’ said Hope. ‘For today. But that doesn’t do me much good, does it?’

‘That’s what I want to talk about,’ said Maya, sounding both exasperated and embarrassed. ‘About ways you can deal with the situation.’

Hope decided to give Maya a chance. ‘OK,’ she said.

Maya leaned back, as if making a conscious decision to get out of Hope’s face, and waved expansively. ‘The first way,’ she said, ‘is the kind of thing people do here.’

‘Drink coffee and smoke?’

‘No,’ said Maya. ‘Find workarounds. Look, I understand how you must feel, like everything’s closing in on you. The health centre, the school, the insurance soon enough… I know all about that sort of thing, because I deal with it every day. Laws and bureaucracy, God! But the point is, if you really want to, you can get around it.’

‘Like?’

‘Take the school, for example. All those mums who’re giving you trouble – well, maybe you can shame them by going to school in a group with mums who support you.’

‘I don’t know any,’ said Hope.

‘OK, but have you looked? Asked? Anyway’ – Maya waved a hand again – ‘let’s leave that for the moment. Sooner or later the insurance issue will come up – the school will be told it can’t be insured against your little boy, or rather you can’t be insured. Now, you have alternatives there: you could home-school…’

‘No way!’

‘… or join a parents’ school group. I can help you find some.’

‘No, again. I’m not taking Nick out of the nursery.’

‘Well… in that case, there are alternative sources of insurance cover you might consider. Mainly religious – Islamic, some kinds of Catholic, even, uh, Mennonite and so on, you know, sects . They’ll all cover you and the school will have to accept that you’re covered, because of various non-discrimination acts – you see how it works, you use one part of the law against others?’

Hope looked at the dregs of her coffee.

‘Want another coffee?’ she said.

Maya nodded. Hope used the five minutes it took to buy the powder and milk and queue for the water to think over why she objected so much to Maya’s well-meant suggestions. By the time she got back, she thought she had it.

‘I don’t want to sneak around,’ she said. ‘That’s what “workaround” means to me. I don’t want to live in some hole-and-corner way, relying on the goodwill of sects and cults, thank you very much. I just want to live like everybody else.’

‘OK, OK,’ Maya said, again with the backing-off body language. ‘All right, let’s see how you can do it mainstream.’ She gave an embarrassed smile. ‘Have you thought of writing to your MP?’

Hope stared at her. ‘What would be the point of that?’

‘More than you’d think,’ said Maya. ‘They still take letters from constituents seriously. And come on, your MP is one of the better ones. Jack Crow.’

‘He even lives around here,’ Hope said. ‘I’ve spoken to him, now I come to think of it. He knocked on our door at the last election.’

‘An MP who canvasses?’ said Maya. ‘My, my. Did you vote for him?’

‘None of your business,’ Hope said.

Maya nodded. ‘Fair enough.’

‘But I did,’ Hope added.

Maya looked surprised. ‘I wouldn’t have expected you to be—’

‘Oh, no,’ Hope said. ‘I’m not. No, I don’t believe in all that , but it’s – well, it’s two things. One is my job, you know? In China? So I’m all for that side of it, the war and so on; we really have to, you know, defeat those people. And the other is, uh, my husband. He’s from the Highlands and he’s half native, as he puts it, and I don’t know if you know what the people up there are like, but I swear if he even thought I was going to vote any other way he’d walk out on me.’

‘Really?’

Hope laughed. ‘It’s a slight exaggeration, but he takes it all very seriously.’

‘Ah!’ said Maya. ‘So he might be quite pleased if you were to take it so seriously that you’d actually join the—’

‘What! I couldn’t!’

‘Why not?’

‘I mean, look at me!’

‘I’m looking at a regular Islington mum.’

‘Exactly! And my accent! Come on, I’m a Home Counties middle-class girl.’

Maya put a hand across her mouth and pinched her nostrils as if stifling a giggle.

‘I think you’ll find,’ she said when she’d ostensibly recovered, ‘that you’ll fit right in.’

That evening, Hope wrote a letter to her MP, Jack Crow. She found no difficulty at all in composing it, but quite a bit in writing it. She hadn’t hand-written an entire page since primary school. In the end she found an app on her glasses that sampled her handwriting and turned it into a font that looked like her handwriting would if it had been regular, and printed it off. There was even an app for the printer that indented the paper a little, and an ink that looked like ballpoint ink. She signed the letter in what she hoped was a sufficiently similar ink and script, and sealed the envelope. She looked up Jack Crow and was about to address the letter to him at the House of Commons, when she noticed that his own address was only a few streets away. The following morning, after dropping off Nick – no problems this time – she took the letter round and posted it through the letter box of the MP’s house, a modest multi-household Victorian jerry-built tenement like her own but with, she was quite pleased to see, one floor fewer. It seemed appropriately modest, for one of the better MPs, one who lived in his constituency and actually canvassed.

As soon as she got home, Hope joined up. A few days later she got a package in the post enclosing: a plastic membership card with an offer of a Co-op Bank loan and a data chip containing more information about the Party, the movement, and parliamentary procedure than she could possibly live long enough to read; a welcome letter; and a plastic badge in the shape of a circle with a logo in fake enamel of a torch, a shovel and a quill pen. Around the border were the words LABOUR PARTY and across the middle was the word LIBERTY.

This looked promising. She pinned the badge to her coat collar at once. She knew that Hugh must have noticed it in the hallway when he came home, but he made no comment.

That same evening, Geena walked home from Hayes to Uxbridge, thinking about Hope Morrison. Over another, slightly less chilly, lunch by the canal two days earlier, Maya had explained how she’d helped. Geena had been relieved by the moderation of the actions Maya had taken, and by the modesty of her proposals. But that wasn’t why she was thinking about Hope. She was thinking about her because she didn’t understand her.