J Marsh: Apocalypse Rising

While Valeri lives in the working-class part of London, Sydney lives somewhere else, not quite in the wealthy part but in what another time might’ve called the middle-class part, back when there was such a thing. “Are you always so…” she starts, seeming to search for the right word. “…Pensive?” she asks, once, as he sits on the edge of his bed after they’ve had each other. She seems naively unaware of the fight in the streets threatening to explode into war at any moment.

“I like to think before I speak,” he says, thinking of the gravestone he visits every month, once a month, noting himself the steward of his family’s future.

“Too many people speak before they think,” she says.

He turns back to face her, finding her sitting propped up against the bed’s headboard, and as he leans in for a kiss he chooses to imagine she believes everything he believes, even as she doesn’t. Then, he says, “let them,” and pulls back from her before saying, “the value of truth doesn’t change only because everyone else is lying.” She nods. It’s a lesson Valeri’s come to learn in life, but at some personal cost. Struggling to control his urge to lash out at any authority is Valeri’s day-to-day task, a routine well-rehearsed from his boyhood days when he’d turn against every teacher and thumb his nose at every after-school nanny, only to come home and find his mother and father tired.

After night has fallen the dogs come out, sirens wailing as the troopers speed by in their lorries, chasing the latest hotspot. Across the city the sounds of explosions booming can be heard, here and there, intermittent like the summer’s rain. A crisis looms in the night. As the workers, the students, and the parishioners have yielded the streets for the night, the streetlights flickering on, one by one. While the working man sleeps, the wealthy man schemes, hosting meetings in his boardroom on the top floor of a sleek, stylish, glass and steel tower situated almost exactly at the city’s centre. The wealthy man has always schemed, true, to harvest what rightfully belongs to the working man and to reinvest his harvest anew, but this time is different. This time, so late at night with the city’s lights splayed across the darkness, the wealthy man raises his glass and toasts his own ingenuity, the boardroom filling with the sound of glasses clinking. Meanwhile, across town, Valeri thinks on the way it’s all happening again, seemingly just as the way his parents and their generation were provoked into rising fifteen years ago. But they, at least, had some small measure of personal comfort in their lives; as a generation, not everything had yet been taken from them. After Valeri and Sydney part ways again, each carrying the implicit threat of a permanent separation, he barely has time to throw on his tattered old clothes and bound out the door himself before there’s the sound of a booming explosion, rolling in across the city like a smoothly undulating wave. Still a ways off from the rising of our apocalypse, and already all of Britain seems at war with itself, caught in an orgy of hatred and recrimination fuelled by the ghosts of yesteryear. Still there’re burnt-out shells of blocks set ablaze fifteen years ago, still there’re collapsed ruins of roadblocks bulldozed by police, and still there’s the lingering threat of the next rising in all.

The wealthy man’s is a scheme to change nothing real, not at first, but to rearrange fictional entities, entities that exist only on paper, creating distance where there’s none, instituting a complicated legal framework wherein relationships are obscured, mangled, creatively redefined until it’s all just right. Once given the ministry’s seal of approval, a rubber stamp, it’s expected to be sprung on the working man, the unsuspecting public; by then, it’ll be too late to stop. There’ll be squabbling in parliament among the self-interested members, but nothing will come of it. It’ll prove to be one of history’s most perverse ironies when this scheme, the grandest of all, turns against him. This time, though, it’s different. This time, while waiting for their rubber stamp, the architects of this new arrangement realize belatedly what’s happened, that news will break over the coming days on their collusion with one another to parcel off the property of others and sell what doesn’t belong to them so as to enrich themselves. This is the news that’s broken on the screens of Valeri and his fellow workers at the shop, this is the news that seems not to bother Hannah, and this is the news that’s compelled Sydney to act in her capacity to rid the shop of a tenth of its workers. Amid the light rattling of distant gunfire, the day’s work rushes on.

It’s hardly the first time they’ve been found to so scheme; they’ve been so scheming since the advent of our way of life. And although a few of them might pay some small price for their collusion, this is not but the latest proof on the insidious way the wealthy man can, writ large, not only survive but thrive in his duplicity and in his conspiracy. In handing to the wealthy man a slap on the wrist, the way of things implicitly endorses and condones his thievery, channelling it through an apparatus that recognizes his place and enshrines in law his ownership of that which isn’t his. In the street on the way to the bus stop that day, there’re more troopers speeding about, taking the homeless, the prostitutes, and even the odd worker into their lorries to be tossed into a jail somewhere in the Welsh highlands. It’s become a routine of sorts. The police step up their disappearings, targeting only those whom no one can particularly care that much about. It’s not part of some well-planned strategy but a well-rehearsed act played out from instinct. The police and their managerial apparatchiks might dress up their acting out in the air of some master plan, but in truth they lash out all the same as the crowds of workers, students, and parishioners who fill the streets so often. For Valeri, the news breaks that day not to a muted ambivalence among his fellow workers in union but to a rousing anger, the whole lot of them gathering around their screens to mutter expletives and trade thinly-veiled threats against their enemy. For a time, it seems a wildcat strike might break out right on the floor. But it’s not to be. The threat of losing their pittance is enough, for now, to keep them in line, as with all the other workers in all the other shops across Britain. But it won’t be that way for much longer. Valeri looks forward to the coming gathering at the union hall, where it’s expected they’ll raise the votes needed to take part in the planned general strike. This, he thinks, is the fighting back he finds his element in. He’s only half-right.

At work, days after they’ve last had each other, Sydney walks past Valeri, like every other encounter the two trading surreptitious glances. But, unlike every other time, this time she quickly and quietly drops a folded-up scrap of paper in his lap. He stashes it in his back pocket, only later, when he has a moment to himself retrieving it and reading it. ‘Love you.’ The rest of his day he thinks to ask her what it means, but he sees her nowhere, and she doesn’t respond to his messages. He leaves confused and disoriented. Still in this early period, with fallen wages and fallen bodies, men like Valeri, in love with women like Sydney, see for themselves a future which can only still-more privations. But for Valeri, in love with Sydney, he thinks of his parents killed by a hail of bullets in the failed revolution fifteen years ago and feels emboldened. His roommate, Hannah, settles for a more comforting remembering of the failed rising, having been living in a small city up in the provincial hinterland. That was before the last of the factories closed and Hannah’s father, Valeri’s uncle, found himself out of work for a very long time. Now, in the city, the days see her tie her hair back neatly and tightly into a bun while donning a nurse’s teal scrubs; she looks workmanlike, yet authoritatively feminine. By the end of her shift, she’ll be covered in the sweat and blood of patients dead and dying, and her hair’ll be a tangled, matted mess. This has become her routine.