If Then (2 page)

2

R
uth was also
on her rounds, with the afternoon’s deliveries folded into a large oilcloth bag: dresses, tunics and children’s pyjamas of her own design, and a ball of the brightly coloured hairbands that the women of Lewes could not get enough of this autumn, a ribbon strengthened with wire. The ribbons were used to hold a ponytail down so that it lay evenly over the
stripe
, the mark of the Process that ran from crown to nape.

This stage of her life felt more embodied, if that made sense, than her life before the Process; now she had to walk to meet and talk to people, and be accountable there and then, and trade things that she had made with her hands, rather than the sly interaction of the screen. Of course, she felt the ache of wanting to pull out a phone to check her messages – and saw how, during a lull in conversation, other Lewesians would move as if to take their phones out to alleviate the tedium of presence – but the sacrifice of the screens was no great loss.

In the morning she taught at the primary school and after letting the children loose into the field to play in the roots and branched webbing of the kiss-kiss tree, she undertook her role of seamstress; she made nice things for younger children – babies and toddlers – and their mothers, her tape measure girdling lithe bodies as gossip was ventured over a chipped mug of warm herbal brew, Ruth mostly listening and nodding, taking one pin at a time from between her lips to mark a seam. Sewing itself was done at night, by candlelight. There was no domestic electrical supply so she used a hand-cranked machine set up on a table next to the draughty sash window of their flat above the Needlemakers. Her grandfather had been a tailor, and when she was growing up, he had lived with her family. He kept odd hours too; she would wake in the middle of the night, hear him shifting around in his rooms, smell his lit cigarette, then fall asleep again to the whirring of his electronic sewing machine and the click-clack of its pedal.

She worked at her hand-cranked machine while James came and went in the living room, unable to settle in the two or three hours after dinner that formerly would have been occupied by television and internet. She was peripherally aware of him as the mechanical teeth of the footplate pulled the fabric under the foot and into the stitching action of the needle; he moved from room to room, or rested upright in a wooden chair, one eye half-closed, one boot off, half-asleep. The half they left her with.

The making of things was important to her. James, in their pre-Seizure pomp, made corporate loops for an agency. She remembered how important it was to him, the deadlines and the
soshul
metrics, and so by extension how important it became to her that these loops were persuasive and liked by the right people. She worked as the manager of a library in Hackney, running up and down three flights of stairs to attend to the needs and complaints of staff and customers. In the final year the customers were in a right old state; she opened the doors at nine and they barged into the library to secure its resources for the day, men and women of every ethnic mix, eighty-ninety people by five past nine, the library full at ten, using the computers to look for work, appeal for benefits, run their secondhand car business or church group, or in the case of one particular woman and her three children, living in the library as a refuge from the spread of evictions. As the Seizure approached, London’s population was sorted and re-sorted, and her library filled up with the remainders of that calculation. Not customers but
sufferers
. She could not always understand what they were saying, what they were so urgently showing her on their screens. The drop-in shelter opposite the library closed down, A&E started screening in-patients, and before she knew it, one morning she went to open the doors of the library and there were two hundred people outside, almost a mob, spilling back from the pavement and out into the street, overlooked by the balconies of a new hotel and an empty ziggurat of flats.

On her rounds, she preferred to walk around Lewes via the twittens, the steep high-walled alleyways that ran betwixt and between the old buildings of the town. These old ways were quieter and more private; on the high street, she had a vague sense of the other Lewesians judging her and James. Under her role as schoolteacher, she was accountable to every nutty parent and she accepted that, but the feelings of other townspeople toward James was not something she liked to articulate, even to herself. She took no pleasure in it; they feared him, and pitied her. Also, there was an air of playacting on the high street, a let’s-pretend of community life that offended her truth, the moral compromise she had accepted as her lot. As if the choice to submit to the Process had not been a last resort but a way of life they had all long strived for and finally achieved.

She knocked discreetly on the wooden gate of the Radcliffes’, and then flicked up the latch to let herself in. She had a cap for their infant son, made the previous evening out of her allocation of jersey cotton. She always put jersey cotton aside for the newborns because it was stretchy and soft, something comforting for the child to grow into. The cap was her own design and included a hand-stitched leaf with red and orange cotton, autumnal colours, so that the parents could always recall the season of his birth.

Ruth called out to see if anyone was home, and waited in the large and overgrown garden. The house was over three storeys and had been allocated to the Radcliffes and another two couples, one young, one much older, forming an ad-hoc extended family. Clearly they had failed to negotiate who exactly – in this setup – was responsible for the garden. She was aware of a heady floral perfume, and was wondering what the source of that scent was – jasmine? Or something richer? – when the man of the house (Laurie? Larry? She never quite caught his name) came out to greet her. She showed him the baby’s cap. Could she try it on the child, to check the fit? No, she could not. He explained that the baby was with its mother. They had walked out to the Institute.

“His stripe?” said Ruth.

“We followed the instructions. Gave him the injection, cut his hair, and then gave it forty-eight hours for the cells to form. But it doesn’t look right. The cells are uneven in size, and they’re still growing,” said the baby’s father. He was fuzzy with sleep deprivation, unshaven and uncombed and untucked. Younger than James, his hair a crowd of contrary brown curls.

“We’ve had a few cases of that over the years. I’m sure the Institute will be able to fix it.” She remembered the purpose of her visit. “Can I leave the cap with you?” Laurie or Larry accepted it from her, turned it over in his hand, his feelings equally reversible: on the one side, he appreciated the care she had taken in making this gift for his newborn son, and on the other, anguish at the fear and pain caused by the striping.

“I’ll come by in a week,” she said. “And I know that when I do, your son will be fine.”

It was not an empty reassurance. After the injection of the new cells and initial discomfort of their formation under the scalp, people were, by and large, fine. With some grooming, the stripe could be concealed, forgotten about, except in the private moments. Closing the gate behind her, she wondered what the next stop was on her rounds, and found herself touching her stripe, felt the hundreds of tiny folds and ridges under her scalp, the rough discoloured skin on the back of her neck and at the top of her spine. An odd odour came away sometimes; in the twitten, she caught a whiff of it on her fingers, a yeasty concentrate, sour and fungal. She got on her tiptoes, reached over into a neighbouring garden, and plucked bay leaves from an overhanging branch to wipe her hands clean.

The twitten brought her into the ornamental garden of the old hotel, a sloping lawn terrace with a southward view to the Downs and the quiet lanes of the A27. It was noon or thereabouts, and on the lawn Jane Bowles was organizing the preserving and pickling of the produce grown in the allotments. Rows of jars laid out in the sun, using the natural disinfectant of strong sunlight, the best way to dry the jars after they had been scoured with hot water. Jane gave a quick wave to Ruth as she passed by, then continued instructing two men carrying hot jam pans. That was the thing with Lewes life. You bumped into people. And she bumped into Jane more than anyone, their friendship a string of chance encounters. They had organized something once – an afternoon in the bitterly cold lido – but the date did not deserve repeating: the Bowles had children, and they did not, and James was not easy to be around, if you were unaccustomed to the way his presence drifted in and out.

She taught one of Jane’s children, blonde Agnes, precocious but polite enough. But then all the children were precocious in one way or another, one of the benefits of the stripe, and living among the kiss-kiss tree and the other natural forms made over by the Process. What had begun as a last resort had become an ongoing experiment in human potential.

Ruth watched the two men in undyed burlap tunics pour the jam carefully into a jar: a berry jam, red and thick and translucent in the pan that, when it ran, turned amber in the sunlight.

“I’m impressed,” Ruth said to Jane. “A very organized operation you have here.”

“I used to be a project manager,” said Jane. “Making apps.” She shrugged, made that sigh and shrug that Ruth recognized as one particular to the people who had accepted their losses in the Seizure. “Today I make jam and pickle vegetables. Over the weekend, I organized the children into picking gangs and set them a competition as to who could bring back the most fruit.”

“Did they go far?”

“We let them go outside the wall. As far as Glynde. Your husband kept an eye out for them.”

Jane admired Ruth’s homemade dress, muslin with a printed white whorling pattern that grew denser toward the hem, puffy sleeves and a frill around the neckline, matched with a black and white wired ribbon in her ponytail. Jane was wearing a pinafore dress made by the Process, thick burlap like the men’s tunics, too heavy for this weather. Jane’s stripe would register her elevated body temperature, the nagging discomfort of the dress, her irritated adjustment of the straps and this data would inform the next iteration of dresses. But, for now, too hot.

“Were you always a teacher and a seamstress?” asked Jane.

“Neither. I ran a library.”

“One of the first to go then.”

This remark annoyed Ruth.

“Not at all. The worse things got, the more that people needed the library. And then we were Seized.”

The emotion of that day returned to her, the fury and the sickening helplessness. Redundant, she was texted a number to call for help but the helpline was a labyrinth of misdirection, appeals and further promises, all broken, never intended to be kept. Her customers were irate; she stood with them in the forecourt of the library, locked out, and still they asked for her help. Not asked. Demanded it, shoving their mobile phones at her, failing to understand that she was one of them now. It was so primitive what was done to them, a simple exercise of brute power under the guise of necessity. They took what the administrators offered to resettle, and their landlord got somebody else in. James said the signs were there for them to see. He knew from the way the Prime Minister assured the people that their property rights would be respected, and that no one would be forced to part with their assets, that it was over. Property market falls in China. Russian aggression in the Ukraine. Flash crashes every hour on the stock market – the rumbles of an oncoming storm.

Ruth had stood on their porch brandishing a large kitchen knife in her small hand, weeping. When you are a small woman, you rely on the rule of law to confer the authority and respect you deserve. She would not live without it.

Jane, sensing that Ruth was on the verge of tears, offered her some bread with warm jam. It tasted good. In the first months of the Process, they had been forced to survive on the weave of proteins and gloop of carbohydrates that it assembled. The nuances of good fresh food were beyond it. The patterns for the manufacture of an apple were incomplete.

“That’s nice,” whispered Ruth, staying quiet, not wanting to sob.

“I wonder what the Process makes out of our grief,” said Jane. “How does it respond to our sadness?”

“By making us feel better.”

“But how can it do that?”

“We do keep bumping into each other,” said Ruth.

“I’m sorry I upset you,” said Jane. Her smile was uncertain. There was a lingering suspicion in the town that it was unwise to upset the bailiff or his wife, as if their emotional wellbeing carried more weight than others when it came to tipping the scales of eviction. Ruth assured Jane that no harm was done, but that was not enough. Jane would worry about this slight for the rest of the day; it would nag at her at four in the morning up until the next announcement of the names of the evicted.

It was important that they made this life work. Perhaps the Seizure would not last forever, and the rumours of a coming restoration were true. Perhaps it would even fall to the people of Lewes to lead the way in that restoration, as a model town, with their new ways of living with the Process. In which case their cooperation was vital. When she accepted the stripe, she did so not only because it represented survival at a time when survival was at stake but because James had persuaded her that if this experiment worked – and it was an experiment repeated in other modest towns across the world – then cooperation with the algorithm represented hope of sorts.

She hefted her oilcloth bag onto her shoulder, said goodbye to Jane, and continued on her rounds. Of course Jane would not be evicted: the good mother of two healthy children. No metric of happiness could possibly benefit from the removal of someone like that.

Ruth walked up the twitten toward the motte-and-bailey castle at the heart of the town, strong and timeless atop a raised earthwork. The main street was quiet. The air was cool under the shadow of the keep. She walked up a cobbled path toward the Bowling Green. What did the Process make of her sadness? She knew what James would say: that the sadness was merely blue data and the Process would sort out the accompanying stimuli that caused the dip in sentiment, and so find a pattern to rectify it. But he was just the bailiff, and in all likelihood merely repeating what he had been told at the Institute.