It struck me as a pretty obvious truth.
*
By then it was autumn, tending winter, and the air was bitter. The Europe vote, contrary to reason and expectation, had gone against the Continent and in favour of old and ugly passions. That skinheaded nationalism which for years had not dared to raise its voice for shame was now unbound. The contempt and anger seemed to become more intense the further back Britain looked along the route of refugees fleeing massacres and famine in places so much less civilised than here. The French and Germans were bad enough, the Romanians worse, and the Bulgarians beyond the pale. All those desperate thousands from Syria were the sort of liars who would pretend to be children when they were in truth fully nineteen years old, just to get their hands on the lush and unmerited hospitality of our gracious country. In between tales of their mendacity, the tabloid press sprinkled references to the Spitfire Summer of 1940 when Britain stood alone, alongside hints and allegations of migrant rape. The headline splashes were surrounded by teasing portraits of the child daughters of celebrities.
This heady cocktail of pride, virtue and sleaze worked as it always has, stoking resentment beyond the reach of words. Now Brussels was vanquished, a real Britishness could find its feet. Life would be better, for a start, if coddled criminals were properly punished. Hanging was discussed again, along with flogging and work gangs for antisocial offenders. Drug use and prostitution must be made properly illegal once more, and ordinary Christian families should no longer be penalised for existing. Loose women should carry their children to term and look after them, and the workshy must pay their way. The effete metropolitan snobs who opposed these sensible measures should shut up and let the real country be what it was. Judges who upheld the wrong law at the wrong time were dubbed ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE, and while to the eyes of some so-very-generous commentators the rich and exotic DNA of those of us not entirely Anglo-Saxon might thicken the British ethnic soup just as the Raj had spiced up the national kitchen, most of the time it was clear that people who weren’t from here should go back where they came from – even or especially if they were the devious sort of foreigner who manages to be born in a British hospital and raised like a cuckoo in this green and pleasant land.
It was an anger that could not be assuaged, not by victory in politics nor concessions from government. It was not even lulled by the occasional murder of a Polish window cleaner or the random beating of a Hasidic rabbi by the side of the road. The mood was set. The orphaned threads of the tapestry flapped about in the breeze, then knotted together and made something else; something new.
I had hoped that we were alone in all this. Let Britain be a laughing stock, and the world continue along its moral arc. Let us be left behind; sooner or later we must realise our error. Then, in November, America joined us in folly and ugliness. The same country that embraced Selassie, and inspired him and me by putting astronauts on the moon, echoed to the joyful celebration of a revitalised Ku Klux Klan. The vile and furious of every nation were made bold again.
In London they called themselves the Georgians, in honour of that Turkish saint whom English bigots routinely bless with pearly skin and simplistic opinions, but they were more like some throwback to the seventies: a blend of football hooliganism and the militarised spleen of the National Front. They inverted the rhetoric of tolerance, and proclaimed themselves the oppressed, and not the oppressor. They made the convention that one should not use racial slurs sound like the beginning of Auschwitz.
They leapt upon Annie as if they had been waiting for her, and in a sense no doubt they had. She was everything wrong with their world: a young black woman making money and making a point at the same time. They called her ‘mud-skin’, ‘Negress’ and ‘bitch’. They used a host of other names familiar and novel. From behind anonymising screens, they threatened her life day by day. Her post-bag was vast and horrible.
Well, that was survivable, for a while, and we thought it would blow over. She was offending all the right people. It was frightening and infuriating, but a significant and growing fortune and a platform to speak your mind can ease the pain of being hated as an individual by those who in any case hate you in general. So long as it was only words, let them howl.
Then one night, outside a bar, someone threw pig’s blood in her face.
*
I helped her clean up. Annie was still angry.
‘Where the fuck do you even get pig’s blood after ten o’clock at night?’
‘I’m not sure that’s what matters,’ I said.
‘Where? The? Fuck?’
‘We need to talk about personal security.’
‘Is there an open-all-hours wanker’s equipment shop?’
‘You should come and stay with me. Both of you. Or go to Michael’s.’
‘Because I’m a little bit hurt that no one’s ever told me about it, if there is. What if I’d needed to drown someone in fermenting sheepshit? You know, after hours? Because obviously I can get sheepshit during the day, I mean, who fucking can’t? But what if I’d had a sheepshit emergency and, just because no one mentioned to me about the wanker shop, I couldn’t drown this person at all and I had to wait until the next day and, you know, the urge had passed off? Because that would have been a tragedy. Do you have to be on the wanker email list, or is it one of those paper mailshots that comes through the door every so often? You know: carpenter can make you shelves, handsy guitar teacher ten quid an hour, and by the way here’s where you can get fucking pig’s blood to throw in someone’s fucking face at fucking midnight. Because if there’s a wanker shop I’m going in there right now and I’m buying all their stock and I am going to the police station and I am going to drown that little fuck right fucking now!’
‘Annie,’ I said, and then, at last, she said that she could still taste it, and allowed herself to cry.
Later came the emails and letters and the ringing phone, threats of death and rape – endlessly, rape, as if all the years of modernity had not happened and it was only civilised to silence a woman in that way – but by then they were redundant.
I found that I had in yet another way misunderstood myself in age. I had imagined that the hot blood of youth was now cooled and quiescent, but it transpired to be otherwise. I had not controlled my anger, I had simply misplaced it between the election of Margaret Thatcher and the rediscovery of my art, and where it had been there was a deep, damp pool of head-shaking and sorrow which now dried as if left to sit beneath an Ethiopian sun, becoming over the course of days a crucible of white-hot coal. I was no longer prepared to sit idle – and idle was how I perceived myself, idle and ignorant and lazy. I resigned from Bekele Security in the morning, and in the afternoon I accepted an interview request. It was one of dozens I had had, and I picked this one because it was television and I knew it had a large middle-class demographic of media professionals and opinion-makers – people who talk for a living, and people who these days as often as not put their thoughts directly into text via the social media.
It was a very nice interview, done live and conversational. We talked about Addis Ababa and Witnessed, and about how it had been living here in the seventies and how it was now. We talked about my transition from artist to businessman to digital designer. I was self-effacing and calm. I talked about my struggles with interfaces, my concerns about art objects created and channelled through screens, my ideas about endlessly replicable products through which each individual may have unique experiences. I said that I had reservations about digital life replacing analogue connections, but that I wasn’t so impressed by the history of the twentieth century or the first decades of this one that I felt humanity should be held immutable and perfected. If digital devices were going to change the way we thought, that was fine, so long as they made us less monstrous rather than more.
‘In which connection,’ I said, ‘I have something to tell everyone. Would you mind?’
The interviewer looked pleased and nervous. I favoured him with a little grand
fatherly smile, a twinkle of Father Christmas: Oh, don’t worry, the nice black gentleman won’t do anything rash.
‘Please do,’ the interviewer said. ‘Ladies and gentlemen: Berihun Bekele.’
I thanked him, and then I went right ahead and announced live on air that I was founding my own software company. I had no employees, and the ink of incorporation was barely dry, but I told them my new entity would make a series of apps – I had learned the language well enough to counterfeit a convincing plan – constructed around the GPS location software now built into most every device. Users would tag their experience in the street, in bars and clubs, on different modes of public transport.
‘So, like Foursquare,’ my interviewer said, with the doubt of a young person looking at an old man in front of a computer.
‘Exactly like that,’ I said, ‘except that our users will record incidences of hate. We’ll be working initially to produce a live map – like a traffic congestion map – of more and less racist areas, safe routes home, institutionally racist police forces and local authorities, local populations. We’ll have a star rating system and so on. Eventually I want to roll out iterations for anyone who is not part of the obvious privileged class – for women, for trans people, for people of colour, for the blind and the deaf and so on so that we can map prejudice and racism intersectionally – but one must start somewhere, so I’m calling version one Walking Whilst Black. I have some concerns about the name because I don’t wish to rule out those who are in wheelchairs or mobility carts, but the phrase is there in the language and I feel it is well understood. Available to download next month. About a month after that, we’ll publish our first report into the reality of Britain’s hate at a street level. We’ll be able to tell you who are the most stupid, ignorant, bigoted people in the country to an accuracy of a few metres.’
I got up from the sofa and removed my radio mic, knowing there were four whole minutes left in the segment. Well, they would have plenty to talk about without me, and my bad manners would add to the headline. I meant to walk off the stage then, but instead I stood there for a while and I heard whispering in the studio and a little scattered applause. For the longest time I wasn’t sure why. I could see that the cameras were still running, little red eyes peering at me as I stood, and then I realised that somehow, in the space between getting up to go and actually leaving, I had extended my clenched fist and dropped my head, as I had seen Tommie Smith and John Carlos do in 1968.
*
Time has broken a little bit all around us. I can see the moment, a quarter of a century ago, when Michael showed me the first sonogram of his daughter.
‘This is the head,’ he told me. ‘These are the feet and that’s a thumb. She’s sucking her thumb.’ He looked at me. ‘She’s sucking her thumb.’
I took him in my arms, and for a moment it seemed to me that he was barely larger than the speck in the picture. He was surely only two or three years old. I could smell his hair and lift him from his feet, and he would laugh the pure laugh of a child before the knowledge of mortality.
I have my arm around Colson now. I can feel Annie’s hand under mine, and we are clinging together to make a frame to bear him up. My shoulders are aching already. When I was younger – forty years ago or so – I could have carried them both.
Annie needs me. The speck in the picture needs me. Through her, Michael. Through Michael, Eleni. I could not save Eleni, but here I can – I will – discharge the debt. We are all here, in this place, this burning house. Five of us making one thing, like one of my pictures.
I turn us all around and I start walking through the choking murk. One foot in front of the other. The air is thin and hot. You can die of scalded lungs before ever the flames touch you. Keep walking.
In the middle of my house there is a room that cannot be breached. It is not large, but it is large enough, if we can get there. The safe room has its own air. With three people in it, the supply will last not more than ten hours, but that will be enough. Worry about the other problem once we’re inside.
One foot, then the other, even though the smoke is thick and Colson is heavy and Annie is stumbling. She’s not crying. Not my girl. She is swearing, fit to turn milk. Good.
I touch the metal plate, and we fall inside and lie on the floor. The door closes again, the air clear and clean around us. Breathe. Think.
Smoke is no longer the problem; the problem is heat. A real fire is hard to protect against. People think they know what it is – they use gas hobs and charcoal grills and believe they have tamed the flame, but even a small blaze can be terribly dangerous. A big one – room-sized, house-sized – is not just more of the same. It is a ferocious, consuming power, lethally radiant. If we are not rescued soon – if the fire is not extinguished – we will be baked in here like potatoes.
In Addis Ababa, long ago, I walked through the walls of my prison and escaped.
If I think about it, surely I will remember how.
get me two
SURELY I WILL remember how.
The Inspector lies quite still and silent in her bed. Very carefully, she does not move, does not think at all. She allows the pattern to linger in her mind. Movement is the inexperienced dreamer’s first mistake. The action of engaging the body banishes memory of the dreamstate from the mind. Too much chatter will do the same.
As if her own mind were a hide, and she a hunter, she rests perfectly still.
Surely I will remember how.
There. She has it all now, everything she wanted to hold on to – and yet she waits a little longer, fixing it in both surface and deeper self: her list of questions, her clues and suspicions.
Still without speaking, she holds the list, and moves to the upright position. Her hand finds the pen and she begins to write. She does not spend long on each note. Glossary must come later. For now, just the keys to each.
Berihun Bekele painted a five-panel picture that was to all intents and purposes the Chamber of Isis, linking the two internal fictions. Annie Bekele’s company was called Fire Judges, which ties Hunter directly to Lönnrot. The company mainframe was called the Spine, like Firespine, the name the Witness itself pulled from the interrogation. The notional game project that is an unflattering portrait of the Witness and the System had an alternative name: ‘Gnomon’. Like Firespine, Gnomon was a sort of demon to Athenais. Kyriakos bought a painting of his shark titled with the same word.
The randomly chosen word that is the name of the case she is investigating.
And then we come to the east panel, which is me.
Impossible. Impossible impossible. Just as Athenais said. Was that a warning, that earlier scene? A taunt? A woman held captive by a demon made of eyes. A monstrous Witness.
Project Gnomon.
She asks the Witness how it was assigned.
– Are you well?
Neith repeats the question.
– Inspector, it is three a.m. and you have recently suffered a traumatic head injury. You are displaying signs of agitation. Are you well?
‘I’m fine. Answer the question.’
– Do you wish me to call medical assistance?
‘No. I am well. Proceed.’
– Case names are generally assigned by a randomisation process. Numbers are generated by drawing on the decay of a sample of radioactive isotope held in a sealed environment in Oxfordshire. These numbers are then used to select words from the full English lexicon which is also randomised. Names are rejected occasionally on the basis of cultural appropriateness. It would not be acceptable to have an operation codenamed ‘fart’. Some use-criteria are also applied to avoid polysyllabic scientific jargon and so on.
‘Is that how this name was chosen?’
– The case name originally generated for the Hunter interview was TORTILOQUY, meaning crooked speech or deception. It was rejected because the word was selected earlier this year in conjunction with an ongoing trafficking investigation. The duplication is unusual but not statistically s
ignificant. GNOMON was substituted automatically.
‘It’s random?’
– Despite the appearance of the word in the case, yes. It appears significant because you have now met it in what appear to be several different environments. You forget that all these environments exist only in Diana Hunter’s consciousness. She chose the word, and it was subsequently selected at random – a single coincidence. With each iteration of it inside the psychodrama, however, it accrues greater weight for you. It is the disadvantage of human pattern recognition, exacerbated by the fact that you designate it an unusual word. However, there are half a million words in the English language and an extensive vocabulary includes perhaps thirty-five thousand of them, meaning that there are more unusual words in English than commonplace ones by a factor of fourteen. In fact, ‘gnomon’ is common in several specialist areas, meaning that its selection by Hunter is within the bounds of ordinary behaviour. The practical taxonomy in use within linguistics is more complex, but for the sake of argument: if one were grading rarity on a scale of one to five, it would be a three. ‘Xyster’ and ‘mollag’ would be fours, ‘Brummagem’ a five.
‘“Mollag”?’
– Obsolete regional: a dog’s bladder inflated as a balloon and used to float a fishing net. Truly obscure words such as these are not used as case names.
‘Why not?’
– Because there is no point assigning a name no one can remember or pronounce.
Almost, she laughs. The machine is so affectless as to appear droll.