J Marsh: Apocalypse Rising

Though Valeri doesn’t know it, not yet, the police have stepped up their disappearings, seeking to head off the coming uprising even as they unwittingly yet actively work to foment it. “Don’t upset your father,” his mother would say when he was a small child before sending him off to school for the day, “be good.” But he never would, always finding some trouble to get himself in, on returning home his father there to tell him, “you must learn to be better than anyone else. It’s the only way people like us can survive.” It’s only in this time of radical ideas and violent upheavals that Valeri will come to learn what his father meant. For weeks after Sydney started working here, Valeri had been certain she was there to pick and choose the workers who were to be terminated in the company’s latest bid to make more from less. As he arrives that day and takes to the shop’s floor, he arrives to find the machines out of order again, but this time with one of his fellow workers having been among the disappeared that morning. He’s a younger man named Jack Kingston, and Valeri doesn’t learn right away he’s been disappeared; it comes out later, the company having informed on the activities of one of its workers to the police. In the afterward of the failed rising, this became the new norm. Whenever some worker fails to turn up for his shift, it’s assumed he’s been disappeared. The assumption is right more often than it’s wrong.

It seems like the sort of thing you’d only hear about in a tyrannical regime, and perhaps it is. It’s not nearly as dramatic as it sounds. The police who drive about in their lorries looking for trouble and making it wherever it’s not found are neither all-knowing nor all-powerful even as they seem to leap on trouble before it can begin. But as he and Sydney lie in bed after their first night together, she turns onto her side and says, “do you know I’ve been planning my route around the floor to get a look at you?” Valeri thinks for a moment and then says, “well, I do now.” It’s a small moment, one which promises something much more. But events in the world around them are about to overtake their budding affair and turn it on its head. In the morning, Valeri comes to realize what a fool he’s been all along, and after Sydney has bid him farewell for the day he regrets the wages he’s spent pursuing this affair; fulfilling and exhilarating though it may be, the adult in him knows emotional fulfillment and exhilaration mean little when his stomach growls and when his clothes are threadbare. But Valeri sees the diversion of a tryst with a virtual stranger as an outlet in times of need. Like all working men in Britain and across Europe, he’s learned to start fast with his love, lest any given woman be disappeared suddenly in the night like all the others.

In the morning, Valeri searches through his kitchen for something to eat, reaching for the top cupboards and feeling around the bottom, finding them bare. He looks through his wardrobe and picks out the shirt not with the fewest holes but the shirt with the most, pulling it on and straightening it as best he can. He downs a mug of coffee thick and black as toxic sludge. His is a routine overshadowed by the strain of a night’s sleep spent unslept. But his is hardly a unique situation, the working man around London and across Britain faced with the kind of privation and hunger that coexists alongside the abundance and the luxury of the working man’s nemesis, the wealthy man, who lives not far away but whose presence is felt by the working man in everything he does, everything he sees. Sometimes Valeri stops and wonders what his parents would think of his life now, even worse than the lives which prompted them to join the millions in their failed rising. More and more, lately this wondering has made him feel shame gnawing at the back of his mind, stronger still, soon enough to compel him to do things he’d never thought he’d do.

After the war fifteen years ago, still there are many working men who work themselves tired and sore every day and who return home to bare cupboards, broken windows, and faulty switches, as if his rising has only prompted a new wave of anger and discord in the hearts of they who would deign to fight back. This, Valeri knows; as the hot and sticky early-summer’s morning makes him sweat, he goes to his apartment building’s shared washroom and turns on the shower’s tap only to find nothing comes out. On the door, on his way out, he notices a sign declaring the building’s water out for an indeterminate length of time. Valeri sighs and returns to his unit to give himself a sponge bath using jugs of water kept in the kitchen cupboard for exactly these occasions. “Save some of that for washing the clothes,” says a woman, “if you ever plan on washing them, that is.” She thinks nothing of approaching Valeri even as he’s nude. And he thinks nothing of being nude in front of her, not even bothering to turn to face her much less conceal himself behind his towel. Life in Britain’s crowded working class flats has become too hard for embarrassment over such things.

Valeri’s roommate is a young woman named Hannah, her hair as red and fiery as her temper. She walks into the main room and approaches Valeri, intending to ask him where he’d been. He can hardly believe all the years that’d passed since the two were children, playing in the yard of her childhood home in the northern hinterlands. All those years ago, before the rising that took his parents, she would’ve never imagined they’d be in want of running water. She says, “you must be tired by now.” But Valeri says, “you’d think so.” They exchange knowing looks, not unlike the knowing looks Valeri exchanges, from time to time, with Sydney. With Hannah, though, the moment is entirely absent any romantic or sexual overtones, rather that of one member of a close-knit family concerned for the other. He tells her what he saw on the screens, but she doesn’t seem bothered by it. “I’ve seen it too,” she says, reaching into the cabinet for a brush, “and it only means more work for me.” Valeri tosses a look over his shoulder and says, “but you enjoy that, don’t you?” But she’s gone.

Even today, Valeri is not what he seems to be, with a mop of unruly hair, black as oil and twice as dirty. His boots are held together by the glue he’d applied himself, the glue he keeps on applying whenever his boots start to come apart at the seams again. Nearly everything he owns, he owns second-hand, given by a friend or family, or outright bought at one of the charity shops doing brisk business in his part of town. His little flat overlooks a gravel lot where, late at night he can often spot illicit drugs, cash changing hands, in smaller quantities each time. In the little flat he shares with his roommate, they live on the edge of the working class district, almost within sight of the glass and steel towers reaching for the sky. Earlier in the month, Valeri spotted a sign, erected, he thinks, during his day, though he also thinks it might’ve been there for a long time and this is just the first time he’s noticed it. The sign boasts of a coming development, in big, bold letters marking the future site of luxury apartments, right on the edge of the working man’s part of town, right at the boundary separating one world from the next. It’s an open secret this luxury development is not meant to house people; scarcely anyone in Britain could afford the million or so pounds to buy in, save a few who already have everything they need, and even those few would never want to live among the restless rabble. Amid constant shortages of the essentials of life, the livelihoods of men like Valeri are traded like cattle by men wearing suits that cost more than he makes in a year. As the night is always darkest just before dawn, the lives of working men like Valeri are so filled with despair at the moment before their liberation is at hand.