Freedom Island (6 page)

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As I hurried towards our meeting, the wind blew fiercely across Heroes Square. I couldn’t help worrying, or hoping, that the old man wouldn’t come. For the first time in ages I cared about something, or even about someone, as if we were two men simply at different points of the same experience—but I was afraid too.
              He was already there, waiting, his grey hair or what was left of it flapping in the breeze, a personal monument to better times from beneath a brown hat grown tatty and dirty. He was tall and straight, a newspaper tucked under his arm, and his walking stick contrasted with the inner strength that shone from him; it was as though he were a young man disguised as an old one. Once I was close, he turned and began walking and talking, his voice raised above the wind:
              ‘The Union’s first supporters were the dispossessed nobility of the 1920s and their banker and industrialist friends—the elite families and corporations. After the Second World War, they were joined by the post-fascists like Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement and Hans-Ulrich Rudel’s Reichspartei with their dream of a single nation-state, ‘Europe a Nation’: they had sensed a second chance to create that dream through diplomacy, rather than force. Their dream was for a modern, dynamic higher form of society, strong and logical, honest, respecting the land; a civilisation based on the greater European tradition, a ‘meritocracy’ where skills could be freed to capture the beauty and wonder of life and to harness science for good, to push humanity forward. Soon they’d sold the idea to the very liberals they hated so much and to the misty-eyed students—the idea that this time it was they who would be calling the shots, that it was they who really knew where we would all be heading. Over the decades, countries flocked to join, driven variously by poverty, the fear of invasion or extremism, or the loss of prestige and influence. They wanted progress so desperately they bought the story without question, that change is good—but real progress takes time and they were impatient. This was the lesson the fascists had already learnt: People live for just seventy-five years and everyone wants to live to see their dreams—if you want that, young man, I suggest you aspire to modest things.’
              ‘Where did it go wrong?’
              ‘Ideals, like the romantic idea of a European Nation, or indeed communism or fascism, require everyone to take part, which requires oppression. It was an ideology of fantasy and distorted history, a new world order no less than fascism was: repackaged, resold sugar-coated as federalism with the power of the word and the soothing mystical clouds of passing time, rather than the might of the gun: Fascism had evolved. There were the honeymoon years of wishful enthusiasm, blue banners and meaningless slogans to paper over the cracks, reverse-engineering an identity for us, but the Union was increasingly forced to react to local nationalism, local self-interest and paranoia, regional corruption and divergence or deviation, contrary opinions or traditions. It was muddling its way on from crisis to crisis under the pretence of progress, harmonising this and that, shutting out opposition, centralising policy-making more and more toward an ‘ever closer union’—as going backwards could only ever lead to failure. The Union was hurtling towards a centralised extreme, the kid gloves were off, the fairness and diplomacy were replaced by warnings and threats—’
              The history lesson gave way to passion: ‘we have no control, we don’t know how the rules are made, we have no cultural identity. They’ve had us forgetting our past to make us all think the same! We, and our lives, moulded to some plan dreamt up in meeting rooms by invisible bureaucrats who understand nothing about us, whose interest in us only goes as far as their wall-map!’ His words were thick with pain: ‘We pursue dreams that are not ours, with emotions that are not ours. We convince ourselves that this is how we feel—the way they tell us to—and we crush our deeper emotions, our depression and our anger, our frustrations, our hopelessness, in order to live off the emotions that they feed us. This island is packed full of repressed emotions to the point of self-destruction!’
              We walked on into the park and past Canterbury Castle, now a play area for children. Society and Family had given them everything, knowing life is short, and in return the children were its eyes and ears: they reported on family members, passed on derogatory remarks or details of hushed meetings. It looked as if the proximity of the play area was making the old man nervous. I still couldn’t make out if the old guy was serious—was he connected to the Insurgents, or just a grumpy old man with too much to say?
              ‘I understand,’ I said. ‘Is anybody doing anything?’
              The old man bided his time until we sat down on a bench a little further on. Opening his newspaper he resumed talking, as though to himself. ‘A few. A few, like you, have appeared here and there, who felt sufficiently uneasy and had sufficient time and energy—and bravery, to question—to challenge—the system. I include myself, although time and energy are no longer on my side.’
              ‘Only a few?’
              ‘Most people simply overreact. They commit crimes, go insane or run off to live on a beach somewhere, drinking and drugging themselves to death. Or they wind up in damn Rehab or rotting in jail, or censored to the point that every word they speak is monitored. They are labelled nationalist or racist, deranged, unhinged . . . anything contrary to unity and harmony. We all respond differently; some people are simply better able to control themselves than others.’
              ‘But still, there have been no wars in Europe since the Union was formed,’ I tried.
              The old man sighed heavily, looking at me sideways. ‘Our surrender saw to that, besides, sometimes war is good! People fight for freedom and justice, whatever they may be seeking freedom from, or justice for. It is sad to say it, but war balances mankind: that’s why we fight. Without it we slip into an ever tighter spiral, closing in on ever finer details: fighting instead ideas, activities. We have become victims of moralists and organisers who have left us empty, picking away routinely at our lives like vultures cleansing us of all our habits and opinions without our permission. We are left like books without words. There is a war, Oliver, and by not bothering to fight, we’ve nearly lost it.’
              I frowned, for no specific reason other than that I was thinking, but the old man took it as an invitation to elaborate.
              ‘Personal relationships are typical. The Union made this daft law that we must all must marry by thirty-five or face double taxation. Now what kind of a blasted relationship is that? Any price for a few babies! And as it was the laws that caused the “marriage strike” in the first place, all they will produce is more loneliness . . .’
              ‘Did you marry?’
              ‘No. But I lived with Barbara for thirty years. We had no children, although we tried. Then, of course, I would have been forced to marry her. That’s Union political correctness for you! We were penalised, but she was happy that we didn’t marry.’ His face looked as though he were about to spit: ‘What we had was between her and me, not a threesome with the Union!’
              ‘I was already thirty-six when I met her,’ he added. ‘Just as I had convinced myself that love didn’t exist, that all hope for me was lost, it leapt out of nowhere and changed my life forever.’
              His yellowing eyes were lost in another time, a place of happiness.
              ‘Life was better before, I’ve learned that from the books. But nobody understands that now. You can tell each generation something new, the Union knows that; they will never believe their parents. No, the spoken word is lost between generations; each generation always desperate to move on, away from those old fools and their silly ideas. But the written word remains like an elevator through time.’
              He tossed the newspaper to the ground recklessly, its pages flew in the wind. ‘Did you know, back there in the Square where we now worship the Presidents of the Union, there once stood statues of great British heroes from over one thousand years?’
              ‘No, I didn’t.’
              ‘Not many do. The Union replaced them with its own, foreigners every one of them, who have ruled over us, made our laws, leaving us on the outside and most amazing of all, they have trained us to honour them and be proud of them as though they are our own. But they are not.
              ‘Take away the books and the history, censor the music: the culture, and all people are left able to imagine is tomorrow, going to work, fetching the kids, doing the shopping, mortgages, clothes, new hair styles and their chemical kicks of ice cream, chocolate, burgers and sex.
              ‘They busy themselves with the pursuits they have been fed, their minds sanitised and diverted by empty television, rewritten books and selective news. They accept their misery because it’s all that they know. They’ve lost all ability to love life or to hate it, to know who they are.’
              He drew a deep breath, looking straight ahead, ‘But, subconsciously within us all there is a desire to run free, and that the Union can never kill. That is our chance. Maybe all it takes is a great leader to wake everyone up and then the whole damn Union will collapse like a house of cards.’
              ‘They would fight us.’
              ‘If there was an uprising, it would have to be violent . . . ’ the pitch of the old man’s voice rose; his cheeks more pale and hollow, ‘else we’d be routinely dissolved by their psychiatrists and forgotten. They would have us off in Rehab reading their fairytale history books and taking drugs with Latin names.’
              ‘And the army?’
              ‘They would come. Sure enough. But maybe, just maybe, sufficient people would rise up. It could happen. The army would fight us; they would not be British after all—they’d use Czechs or Germans or Irish . . . But what choice do we have? To wander obediently through the life they dictate for us? To lie uncomfortably in our beds while they watch us, just in case we should decide to do something they don’t like?
              ‘And that leader would have to be ruthless. It’s the human cycle perhaps, power rocking between the intellectuals and the thugs. The people we must fight are not the sleepy bureaucrats you might imagine, no, they are privileged thugs who live well from the Union just the way it is; they cherish their power and they defend it, ruthlessly.
              ‘We must fight fire with fire,’ he went on, turning to look me in the eye, ‘and we need a twin.’
              ‘How the hell do you know I’m a twin?’ I said, rising to my feet, and after a pause, as the penny dropped, ‘or that I’m ruthless?!’ I took a step back, regarding this seemingly harmless old man with an acute sense of danger. He continued staring,
              ‘We know what you did, Oliver.’
              ‘Are you police?’
              He couldn’t repress a chuckle. ‘No, we are rebels. And so crazy is this world that when things are at their most desperate, we need a murderer like you to take us forward. In another time or place you would be hanged, and rightly so. But to us, you have the strength we need. And you are a twin.’
              ‘What’s my brother got to do with this?’
              The old man raised his eyebrows, with a little frustration. ‘You have your health chip embedded in your foot, so they know where you are—’
              ‘I know that, but—’
              ‘Our organisation is full of people who dropped out of the system, who cower in cellars and live like thieves because we had to dig out their chips. Then we have runners with clean chips, so we can communicate and prepare.’
              ‘We can put your chip into your twin when we make a move, and switch it back afterwards. His DNA, blood group, heart rate, vitamin levels, testosterone, blood sugar etcetera should be close enough to yours that the network is unlikely to raise an alarm. And as he works on a farm, it’s also quite reasonable that you work with him and live with him, putting your chips in the same cell at the same time. And so you can become free for action, but the rest of the time you can walk around as a free man. Nobody else can do both. You can be both a coordinator and a commander; you can be safe and also act. We can slip you through their technology.’
              I was rooted to the spot. But, what choice did I have? To continue my routine, of not knowing what was good and what was not, to pretend that none of this had ever happened at all?
              The old man broke into my thoughts. ‘You see, we have groups all over the Department, and beyond. But everything is slow and problematic. You alone can make it function properly, plus you have knowledge of the Union. You have been on the inside—more so than anyone else we have—and familiarity creates possibility. You know things which are important even though you may not realise it. Believe me, it’s as though you were sent by God; the others will follow you. And if we are careful, we can keep the system guessing and you will run this operation for years.’
              ‘And then . . . ?’
              ‘And then you will be in Rehab or dead.’
              ‘Thank you for your honesty.’
              ‘If, or rather when, they work out that you are involved, you will simply lead them to us. But we all accept the risks—our days are numbered—but you will make us more effective . . . and, more ruthless.’
              I was out of my depth.
              ‘We were following him—the man you killed . . . and he was following you. He was an informer, an “Observer” as they like to call them. Then you killed him, and that got us interested in you. We’ve been working out how to approach you.