Hymn From A Village (16 page)

I do my exercises, one hundred laps then my back stretches so I don’t end up with a stoop. A hundred sit-ups and as many press-ups as I can manage and that’s me finished. I do them when I wake up in the morning, before my afternoon nap and when I smell the food cooking.

If I ever get out, I’ll have a body fit for Hollywood. Imagine Kirk Douglas in his prime.

Last time I was outside it was winter. It’s the one flaw in the ID scheme. They’ve got us all tattooed on our earlobes so we can’t get away with it most of the time.

I knew people who sold their homes to pay them to get a water sign.

If I’d known then, I’d have sold mine too. Got me one of those sixty nines or a wobbly H instead of these green zig-zags.

It’ll be months until it’s cold enough for them to give permission for hats and hoods again. Soon as they do, I’ll be out there sucking up as much fresh air as I can.

On a good day Dimitri brings down the paper to read. It’s full of crap, but better than nothing.

If we’d paid more attention to the press in the first place, maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess now.

The catalyst to it all was a piece in ‘Astrology Now’, one of those collections of random information that seem to matter these days. Turned out that forty-seven per cent of the government were water signs. The figure for the whole of parliament was even more against the odds: sixty-five per cent were either Cancer, Pisces or Scorpio. Anyone with a grasp of probability knows that was a little unusual, but anyone with a basic grasp of common sense would have known it was a piece of nonsense.

How the chancellor came across the information is anybody’s guess, but she used it in her blog to poke fun at the opposition.

That should have been the end of it.

It might have disappeared without notice had it not coincided with the vote on the war.

There were enough rebels to put the result in doubt and without support from the opposition the Prime Minister would go down with his hobby horse. The chancellor seized her opportunity. Sending messengers scurrying around corridors, wheeling and dealing with anyone who would listen, she called upon them to rise up and be counted, test the waters as it were.

The vote was carried with a huge majority. The sea-creatures had it.

Soon there were references to the sea all over the place. They quoted science and literature to prove their point, scraped up any old angle they could find to give them mileage on the sofas of Breakfast TV.

The usual demonstrations were going on at the time: the anti-war, the pro-life, the send-poverty-into-oblivion, but none of the activists thought that a movement against Pisceans seemed worth creating.

Wish I’d taken my soap-box to Speakers’ Corner with the other nutters and given it my best shot.

When they moved against the government they had no chance. Came from nowhere, forced parliament to dissolve and formed a party populated by the best liked politicians in the country.

H to O, they called themselves. I wonder which guru came up with that.

Even then we couldn’t see the way it was going. We could have out-voted them three to one, yet H to O got in with the largest land-slide ever recorded.

At first, they worked within the traditions of democracy, even made a few improvements. You didn’t see litter on the streets and there were no kids hanging around on corners any more – everyone was far too scared of what their special units might do to them to cause any problems.

The Sharks they call them. The teeth of the law. Imagination was never their strong point.

Jade didn’t take it any more seriously than I did, at least until Astrology Now came up with a few more statistics for us to think about. They did a survey of the prison population.

Four out of ten offenders were born into Fire signs and, even more conclusively, when it came to crimes in categories one, two and three, the figure rose to sixty per cent.

There was no mention of the way the Sharks had been targeting Leos for the previous six months or the way the judges seemed to have it in for the Sagittarians; things like that didn’t seem to matter.

It wasn’t long before the press were calling for blood and the government leaped into action. Water puts out fire, they said, and it did. That’s when they came for her.

The last time I set eyes on her, we were having lunch in the Sunrise on the Brecknock Rd. It was the usual for me, Spanish omelette and chips with onions on the side, two toast and a mug of coffee (the sort that looks expensive but tasted like it comes from the washing up bowl). Jade had the soup, straight from the can, with a bottle of water and a slice of bread.

Always on a diet she was. Seems like a waste of time now. Still, if she’s alive, she’s probably satisfied with her body for the first time in years, all skin and bone, just like she always wanted.

Shouldn’t kid myself. All bone and no skin is what she is. All bone and no skin.

When they came in, I was at the counter talking to Stephanos, trying to come up with the solution to the Gooners’ goal drought. Decided we needed some new blood in the management and new legs on the pitch. Jade was watching the world go by from the window seat, so she probably saw them first.

I thought it was just one of the routine checks, sniffing out the illegals and the unsavoury.

It started like it did on any other day, a few people running for the exits, the rest of us getting out ID and trying to get it over with as quickly as we could manage.

One of the boys in the kitchen made a move even before the bell on the door had time to announce them. Had his arms out of the washing up bowl and was through the back faster than Jesse Owens.

I wasn’t surprised. There were new faces working there every time we went in. We didn’t mind who did the chopping or wiped the tables, so long as they could keep the prices down.

Two minutes later the boy was back again, this time with a bloody nose and a set of plastic cuffs on his wrists.

There must have been ten of them in the caff by then. I was too busy trying to catch Jade’s eye to try and count them. They were like grey clouds on a windy day the way they rushed from one table to the next. A plague of bloody locusts. There wasn’t time to do anything.

I shouldn’t have talked out of turn, I know, but when I saw the way they were talking to her, the way Adam Harris had her by the elbow and was pushing her out to the exit, I guess I kind of lost it.

Adam Harris always was a lanky bugger. Maybe it would have been different if it hadn’t been him. He was smirking at me as he took her, see? Looking down his nose, his face beaming the message loud and clear, “Who’s the daddy now, O’Sullivan? Who’s the daddy now?”

True, we’d given him a hard time at school, but it wasn’t our fault he couldn’t manage to do anything without screwing up and it was nothing to do with me that the girls never gave him a second look, not unless they were staring in fascination at his teeth and his acne.

“Let her go, Harris, or I’ll knock those corns down your throat.” The words were out before I had the chance to think. The shark in charge was all over me like a rash. His neatly ironed, grey shirt sleeve rushed towards me, his fingers gripping white onto the baton. He was married, or at least he had a ring. I wonder if his wife knew what he got up to at work. I could smell his aftershave and burning toast. Jade was shouting something, only it’s all blank now, like it were a silent movie or a cartoon strip with all the speech bubbles bleached white.

Harris dragged her off, all the time smiling under his silly Thunderbirds hat. His hand went down to her waist then gave her bum a squeeze. That was the last I saw of her, that gormless goof groping her backside.

“Took her on to bus,” Stephanos told me afterwards. He was making me sip water and held a cloth filled with ice cubes to my face. “With all the others. You a lucky guy, Sully.”

Luck. One man’s luck is another’s misfortune. I wonder who got my share of the good stuff.

The way I look at it, Harris is proof that there’s no such thing as a Piscean master race. Take the machine gun from him and he’s nothing. I’d like to meet him one day, down a dark alley, just me and him.

That was when we had to get our ears done.

It was the first time anyone tried to go up against them. The protesters were mown down on Trafalgar Square.

The lines outside the official branders just got longer. From what I can remember, we were all there willingly. There didn’t seem to be anything to worry about as long as you weren’t a Leo.

I got mine in Camden Town. After all, if you’re going to have the government impose a look on you, the least you can do is get it done with some panache. Stand out from the crowd. Do it in style. Even showed mine off when I first had it, just like I did when I got the mermaid on my shoulder.

The mermaid was Jade’s idea, to celebrate our love she said. She had a seahorse down by her ankle so everyone would be able to see it in the summer. Turns out they were ironic choices, now she’s sleeping with the fishes and all.

I don’t want Dimitri to end up like the people who looked after Miss Frank. Nobody ever remembers who they were, yet they were the real heroes when you think about it. Anne was there because she had no choice. The people who kept her in hiding, they were the ones who were risking something, just like Dimitri.

Dimitri Karlov, for the record.

He’s a good guy. Doesn’t need to be doing any of this. If I were in his place, I’m not sure I’d have it in me to put it all on the line.

He’s a GP just over the other side of the Camden Road. Earns enough to own a pad in a quality spot, has two cars and a motor bike, holidays in the sun twice a year and pulls the women like no man I’ve ever known. There’s no way I’d risk that. Good job he’s not like me.

I met him after they rumbled we were trying to leave the country. A dozen of us crammed into the false section of a container were headed to Amsterdam. It was supposed to be a consignment of organic dog food. Stank like the insides of a whale. Made us feel real Moby Dick.

Don’t know how the Sharks got wind of it, but the driver pulled the plug on before we left the warehouse. Dropped us off in a park in the middle of Canterbury and told us to wait, so we did. Three hours we hung around in the fog and then got instructions from a guy with garlic breath and a limp. He gave us pieces of paper with addresses and passwords. Had to get there under our own steam, he said, before disappearing from whence he came.

Three nights it took to get here. Mostly on foot. The weather was lousy, the coldest June since records began. More of that luck I was talking about.

Slept as best as I could during the day. It’s amazing how many places you can warm up when it’s chucking down with rain and all you’ve got are summer clothes. Train stations, the backs of burger bars and doorways of shops. Jewellers are best, all that bright light throwing out heat like their main job is to heat the street. When I was desperate I’d stand behind the exhausts of buses.

By the time I arrived at Hilldrop Road I was a stinking mess.

I waited until 10:30 and gave the door the two long and three short taps just as instructed. It opened before me as far as the security chain allowed. A smartly pressed white suit and a narrow silk tie were the first things I saw of him. I had to look up as far as my neck would crane to get a good look at his face, or at least the strip of face that was visible. There were smile lines at the sides of the stunning blue of the eye I could see.

Unlocking the chain, he opened the door and greeted me as if I were one of his long lost relatives from Moscow. Even spoke in Russian before allowing any words of English to pass through his lips.

“Welcome to the Monkey House,” he said in an accent that was all North London. “Come in and let me get a look at you.”

I’ve had cooler greetings from relatives. I was half expecting him to tell me how much I’d grown once he’d finished with taking my bag and patting me on the back.

“You’ve been in the wars, my friend. Come. I have just the thing to put the life back into you.”

I followed him into the kitchen and sat down at the table. He was right about having just the thing, too.

Three bowls of soup I had, the best food I ever tasted. Big chunks of vegetable and hunks of bread that must have come from a deli.

While I scoffed it down, he passed over a glass of whisky that was like the magic porridge pot – every time I emptied it, he filled it up again.

and then I felt nothing. Next I knew I was waking up in a strange bed made up with the kind of crisp sheets I thought you only got in hotels. The smell of washing powder blended with the aroma of the fresh coffee waiting for me on the bedside table is a cocktail I’ll take with me to the grave. I smell it as soon as I think about it.

The luxury treatment only lasted for the one night, but I’ll never forget it.

I knew it couldn’t be like that all the time. I had to move under the boards into my cell and I’ve been here ever since.

I thought he was being paranoid at first, the way he made me wear headphones in the daytime to listen to the radio. He gave me this pair of slippers early doors, an inch thick with rubber tested out in space. Make me quieter than a church-mouse they do, and ten times more likely to break my neck, but I wear them all the same. Anything to keep him happy.

He pops down to see me every so often. Tells me the news and how the Arsenal have been getting on. Best of all, I like to hear about his love-life. When I first knew him there was practically a different woman every week.

He found something wrong with all of them until Aduke came along. I’m pleased that he’s met someone nice, don’t get me wrong, but I miss the buzz I got from hearing about his conquests. When you haven’t got someone, see, you’ve got to get your kicks from somewhere. He says he’s going to get a woman for me, only I don’t know if he has the guts. Even told me that there are people, men and women, who do that sort of thing for the cause. I’ll believe that when I see it.

Six months ago, he started seeing Aduke, this Nigerian dentist. I knew straight away she wasn’t like the others from the way he talked about her, like he was finally with someone he respected.