This is the 16th chapter of a novel being published in serial form in the Daily Sceptic. It’s a dystopian satire about the emergence of a social credit system in the UK in the near future. Read the first 15 chapters here.
Ella poked her head out of her study door, eyes darting. Checking the coast was clear, she tip-toed downstairs, quietly opened the back door, crept out to the bottom of the garden, pulled a cigarette out of her body-warmer pocket, looked round, furtively lit it, sucked unwisely hard, and exhaled deeply.
Her induction to the world of single parenting was not going well.
It was 5pm, the kind of time Theo would usually be doing dinner.
She had another – yet another – hearing at the Industrial Appeals Tribunal tomorrow. Details changed – one week synthetic nutrition, another bio-implants, this week back to Zeeta and its ATTENTIONLOCK™ for kids. But the themes remained constant. Lying. Denying. Justifying. Always a public good, a perfectly legitimate, data-backed emergency, buttressing whatever mis-deeds the salesmen of deception had pushed this time.
Stressed, tired and pulled in a million different directions, she’d thought often about quitting. But then what? Leave them – the kids, the only ones who mattered – to what future, what unknown echelons of evil?
It had been hard with Theo around. Without him it was barely tenable.
Oh well. Cry a river. Build a bridge. Get over it, as Poppy used to say.
At least there was only one week to go.
It was Week Two of Theo’s stint at Ely, ‘National Harmony Centre of the East’. In another week, he’d take the exam. Then he’d be back. Wouldn’t he?
She leant against the old willow tree at the back of the garden and — cautiously and deliberately, using her left hand and keeping her body as still as she could (all the better to avoid BIM detection) — took another drag.
It was the last cigarette in the packet. She shot it a begrudging stare. Fucking cigarettes – she’d barely smoked in two decades and now, in the last fortnight, the second packet. Not for the first time, nor the last, she resolved, looking at the about-to-be stub, for it to be her last.
The back door opened.
“Mum??” a quizzical shout from inside. Poppy’s. “Mum?! Are you out here??”
Like one of the deers they occasionally glimpsed in the fields behind the house in the days before they’d been bulldozed over by concrete and tarmac, she froze.
“Mum?! What on earth are you doing out there?!” Poppy strode towards her at pace.
Damn. Caught. She needed to stub out the cigarette.
Discarding the butt into the dirt behind the tree, she pressed it into the ground. Priding herself on her sly, seamless execution, she turned around, tripped over a tree root, and fell, narrowly avoiding slamming her knee on the concrete slabs bordering the vegetable patch.
“Fuck,” she cried, to no one.
Standing up again she noticed the dry, barren furrows of the patch. We really need to water those. Instinctively she cursed Theo – it was his job, well, his to remind Libby at least, wasn’t it? And then she remembered.
“Mum!!” said Poppy, now only a few metres away. “Ted’s losing it. I think he’s hungry. Do you want me to feed him?”
Reaching her, Poppy looked. Why, Ella thought? To catch her out?
Seeing a hastily stubbed out butt in the flowerbed behind, she shot Ella a withering look.
“It was my last one,” Ella held out, sheepishly.
“Seriously Mum. You said that last time.”
Ella paused. Poppy wasn’t wrong.
Her thoughts flitted back to an image from her youth, the ban on smoking in public places which quite possibly saved her life. The days when health had actually been about health. A flash of memories — a pile of ashtrays on the bedside table in her student digs, waking up with a throat as sore as if it had been sliced with a knife, a new year’s resolution about giving it up. She’d been doing her law degree at the time – a vivid and poignantly pleasant memory flashed through her mind of a red wine fuelled 2am debate about a long-forgotten dissertation. Sparta. That zenith of a society modelled on communitarian coercion.
She shook her head.
If only she’d known how grindingly relevant, how devastatingly prescient, all that intellectualism and theorising would be some 25 years later.
Well, communitarian coercion it was, but the foundations of public good undergirding such edicts had long since eroded. It was about them; a sham to allow them to reap the glitter for themselves, public affairs overwritten by the insatiable appetites of the gluttons amassing only profit for themselves. History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes…
She looked at Poppy, wondering about the merits of explaining to a sanctimonious 12 year-old that it could have been much worse, but —
“Mum. Hello!! Ted. Do you actually want your child to starve to death?”
No, now probably wasn’t the moment for a lesson in political philosophy.
“No, of course not darling. Sorry. I’m just a bit stressed.” She shook her head, following her eldest back inside.
As they approached the house, Poppy stopped.
“Oh, also Mum. Robert dropped a bag of stuff off and a letter came. I think it’s from Dad.”
Later that evening, walking furiously away from the house, kids safely installed in front of the TV – Poppy with instructions ON NO ACCOUNT TO OPEN THE DOOR and the oven triple-checked and 100% completely, conclusively off.
There were tons of reasons she missed Theo, but high up there, at the very top, was being unable to walk. Or at least, to walk in a way that occasioned her the possibility of stringing more than a half-completed thought together at any one time – alone and in solitude and unfollowed by an entourage of children, grabby hands, sticky fingers and endless, endless questions.
Christ, she wished Theo was here.
But he wasn’t. Because, as his letter had just informed them, he was “perfectly happy to be ensconced for a further fortnight in the National Harmony Centre”. Ensconced. It struck her as a funny word for him to use. His language claiming the inversion of what it meant, intentionally she thought.
Feeling momentary guilt-struck about the three children alone in the house and the almost endless array of possibilities in which that might go wrong, she speeded up to something that was almost but not quite a jog.
She checked the BIM. Twenty-one minutes. Twenty-one minutes to get around the block. To think. To decide what – if anything – was to be done.
“Hello everyone, no need to worry,” his letter had started. Obviously she had immediately worried.
“I’ve decided to stay another two weeks at grown-up school,” he’d continued, before explaining in a way that sounded all very convincing and innocuous but which she understood to be absolutely the opposite, that because he hadn’t got the score he was hoping for in his exam he was going to retake it the following week.
“Kids, it’s important to try to do your best,” the letter had said. “Especially because if we get a better credit score Mummy will be able to take you for treats and ice-cream at the cake shop again.”
She’d looked hard at the handwritten letters. It was definitely his writing – definitely him – but really, promising the kids something he knew to be impossible. That wasn’t Theo, at least not the Theo she knew. She had squinted hard at the letter, trying to discern the unsaid, the unspoken, the unsayable in the smallest of gaps between his words, between the lines.
Inwardly and possibly also outwardly sweating, she’d tried to keep as calm a demeanour as possible, whilst internally wanting to scream and shout and cry. She’d muttered something about wanting to get air, why didn’t they have a bit of chill time, and…
And, well, here she was.
She slowed, staring distantly along the dusk-lit road at nothing much in particular.
Fucking hell Theo. What have you done?
Whilst, for the majority, the re-education camps were just that – for the oppressed few, they…
Now at a standstill, her thoughts trailed off.
Theo was going to be at the camp for “at least” another fortnight. “At least.” What did that even mean? Did he know? Had they told him? Should she be contacting someone? Who? A lawyer? She was a lawyer. But there was no training for this. It was impossible not being next to him, not being able to text him, not being able to gently poke his ribs and to work out – together and as a team, like they were, like they’d always been – what was going on.
“But kids, I’ve got good news!” the letter had ended.
A happy, smiling hand-drawn emoji face, etched next to good.
“The food here is good and I’ve made some new friends. I’ll be back with you in another two weeks and will be able to tell you all about it then. I’m super excited to see you and love you all HUGELY.”
There had been another sketched cartoon, this one something that looked like a bear hugging some chickens, but the sentiment was clear at least.
She looked at her BIM. She’d used up 17 minutes of her precious 21 minutes.
She felt truly scared. No two ways about it.
The reality was that for the oppressed few for whom the applicable rules of civilised society had ceased to apply, no-one knew what the re-education camps were.
Detention centres?
Gulags?
Worse…?
There were rumours of people being held there for months, rumours of families broken up without warning. There had been one story reported a few months ago by a fringe online outlet, since shut down, of forced deportations, unclear to where. Citizens unwilling or unable to comply and no longer suited to the new paradigm of coercive cohesion simply shipped off to another time, another land, another place, evidence of their existence erased, denied, eradicated.
It was too much to contemplate, at least in the four minutes of quiet she had remaining. Telling herself it might be okay, she pushed the thought from her mind and walked on, back home, faintly wishing she had another cigarette to calm her nerves but just as quickly feeling grateful she didn’t.
Look out for chapter 16 next week.
Molly Kingsley is a freelance journalist, lawyer and founder of parent campaign group UsForThem.
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