The divide, p.3
The Divide, page 3
Smaller classical artefacts are easily portable, yes, and also ultimately boring to border officials, particularly if no gold or silver or precious jewels are involved. People, forged passports, currency, information and disinformation – these are all potentially exciting for border guards. Roman pots travelling from one museum to another – no. And the idea was an epiphany, in the sense that it came to me in the bath and I could have shouted ‘Eureka!’, though in fact I had just sat upright so suddenly that water sloshed over the sides, flooding the floor.
‘What the hell?’ shouted Noah. I could have made some laboured joke relating to a Noah and a flood. I could have told him what had actually happened and shared my idea with him. Somehow, I did neither.
‘Sorry. Slipped,’ was all I said then.
Yet I was excited. Ridiculously excited. But who could I run my idea by? Far too dangerous a thing to talk about out loud if I didn’t want to attract the attention of the Subgarda. So I chose Gran, and I managed to meet her one day soon after.
‘Of the many things in the old Britain that suffered or collapsed following Brexit,’ she said, ‘a few parts of the old establishment managed to rise above it, to retain their sovereignty and, I believe, or I would like to believe, that the universities are amongst those.’ That was how she talked. She passed me a St Clements muffin, just about the best thing ever that a person could make with a Spanish lemon.
‘But, Petrichor, you must be careful. This isn’t a game.’
I knew it was no game.
An art historian from Bristol often used to visit Oxford back in about 2041 when I was doing my work experience. He came to see people in the museum who specialised in post-mediaeval art. I had talked with him in the staff room, shared pots of coffee and biscuits – this was back in the days when the museum could afford to buy us coffee – while we discussed the logistics of setting up exhibitions when so much of the material one would love to include was on the other side of the Divide. He was sad that the whole of Scandinavia was unreachable. He would never get to see the treasures of the Hermitage in St Petersburg or any of the paintings held by the art galleries in Warsaw. Only the images that had been printed in books were available to him, and the government had forbidden him mentioning these artworks in his lectures.
Within the safe confines of the staff room walls, he leant forward, this stout man, his too-tight suit bulging around shoulders and thighs, and talked about how he managed to send messages, through a chain of couriers, to his counterparts in eastern Europe. We too leant forward to join in what felt like a conspiracy. Talking with the other curators later, though, I discovered they didn’t think of it as a conspiracy. They admired the man, they felt sorry for him, but they did not imagine that any of us in the safe, sound democracy of Wessex would ever feel the need to use dead letterboxes, codes, whispers and partisans lurking in the darkness muttering, ‘The grey goose will fly north when the moon is full,’ or whatever.
But that was before it all blew up. Literally. Eight years ago, back in 2042. By then I was living in Arles, in Provence, and in the final throes of my thesis, head down. The election going on back home was acrimonious. I spent as many hours as I could in the museum, focusing on their Roman busts and statues, and I was lodging with a couple, in their sixties but very active, who came and went a lot. Henry and Mimi. While my head was buried in dusty catalogues, Henry and Mimi were out and about chatting with people, sitting in the sunshine in squares drinking coffee, reading newspapers and generally finding out what was going on, not just in France but also back in Wessex. Henry was English; he came from Surrey. He had come to live and work in France decades ago and never bothered going home. Why would you when you had such a lovely climate, tasty food, gorgeous wines, beautiful countryside and so much history literally in your face. At times when my mind was scrambled, I would borrow a scooter and drive out to the Pont du Gard and just sit, on the shores of the wide river, gazing up at the impressive, magisterial, graceful arches of pale stone that supported the aqueduct, high in the blue sky.
It was serene, calming. And I remember returning to the house one day feeling enriched and strengthened to carry on with a last push on my thesis to find Henry and Mimi sitting in the kitchen looking concerned. They were lovely people; still are. We send each other postcards regularly.
‘Petrichor,’ said Mimi, standing up and moving round the table to pull out a chair for me. ‘Sit down, sit down, please. We have the need to tell you something.’
‘We need,’ said Henry. ‘You don’t need to say “we have the need”; you can just say “we need”.’ I was really fond of Henry, but he did have this habit. All the time. She just let it wash over her.
‘Something bad has happened at home,’ she went on, as I sat down with them, dumping my bag on the ground and shrugging off my jacket. Mimi leant towards me, anxious as a crow. ‘There has been huge explosion.’
I saw Henry twitch but, tellingly, he stayed quiet.
‘Chaos back in England,’ she went on. Then she got out her tablet and showed me the YouTube video. There were already many of them online, of course, because back in those days, before the Closure, the Houses of Parliament were a big tourist attraction. I watched a panoramic sweep along the Palace of Westminster, taking in the Elizabeth tower and the clock and sweeping across to include the smiling face of a young Japanese woman wearing a fuchsia beret and waving at the camera. A massive boom, followed by prolonged rumbling, and the camera jerks back towards the building accompanied by a soundtrack of screams and gasps. The action seems to go into slow motion and black and white, like a jerky, ancient Hollywood silent movie, yet I know this is still in real time. The long roof of the building seems to fold in on itself. The camera jerks back to fuchsia beret woman: her face has done that thing that a really bad actor does in a soap opera – jaw dropped, mouth hanging wide open, eyes popping. The picture swings back to the building and we watch it, probably with our jaws dropped too, crumpling like the house of cards it once was.
I found myself gasping, clutching at my throat, with Henry and Mimi looking at me anxiously. I flopped back in my chair, feeling like a rag doll, boneless. I was remembering going as a tourist to this hallowed place. One could actually go into the chamber – the very heart of the House of Commons – where, back in the day, debates were held, leaders of parties shouted at each other across the despatch box, where a Speaker sat shouting ‘order, order’, where a grand mace lay, glowing, embodying the power of parliament. There were green benches. The party in control – Conservative, I believe, at the time of Closure – on one side, opposition parties on the other.
From that moment, things escalated at extraordinary speed. What had been a quite civilised split, a gentlemanly division, if you like, became a raw, unholy, savage, slaughterous war. I had to make the journey home on a long ferry journey from Roscoff because it was no longer permitted even to pass through Anglia in transit for home. And the channel tunnel came up to the surface in Anglia.
As soon as I stepped off the boat, I felt the change. People shuffled around quickly with their heads down; there were armed soldiers everywhere; I was stopped and searched even though I was coming from an allied country. Change upon change upon change, unheard of in my lifetime. I went straight home, which was my parents’ house in those days, and they flung themselves on me the moment I walked through the door.
‘Thank God you’re back.’
‘Are you alright?’
‘Did they try to stop you? Challenge you?’
‘Have you eaten?’
‘They’re locking down all the borders.’
‘Have you heard from your sister?’
Why would I have heard from Jasmine? But when I saw the news, the full horror of the backlash from the bombing of the old parliament sank in. Each side was blaming the other, and, worse, each side was blaming infiltrators amongst their own people for the bombing. Suspicion of one’s neighbours had soared to a peak.
And that was when the autocrat Aayan Andras was voted in as Premier of Wessex and they added another five metres to the height of the wall. And when the Subgarda grew tenfold in power and strength and duplicity. Rumours began to whisper their way through the populace about a secret government department, the Dark Politic, which was said to control all media; people were told how bad life was in Anglia, though nobody believed it. And I realised I might never see Jasmine again.
3
Hercules
There was war throughout Europe after Brexit. It had all begun with Ireland and the violent divisions stoked up by Brexit, which bruised the nation. It escalated with the west and the east accusing each other of spying and of Russia poisoning people in western cities.
This expanded to fishing wars and rapidly, ridiculously and unbelievably to the point where there was a critical risk of nuclear weapons being used. This could never happen, would never happen, but the threat was always there. Eventually both sides agreed to stand down, but hard borders were set up down the length of Europe, splitting east from west. The east side of England wanted to ally with eastern Europe, trading, manufacturing, fishing and farming, while the west of England and Wales wanted to ally with western Europe. Riots in the UK started and escalated. The government, pro-Europe and pro-eastern, was brought to its knees by rebels storming parliament and taking over Whitehall. It set up a new regional centre of government in Cambridge. The rebels opened an alternative parliament in Oxford. The two halves could not reconcile, and the wall was built: the Divide. They said that it was our side, Wessex, that first started building a wall but as soon as the Anglians saw it was happening, they set to work putting up an equally imposing and repelling structure parallel to ours.
Scotland had its own wall, of course – well, they were used to having walls: Hadrian’s Wall and then the Antonine Wall centuries ago, so after Scotland gained independence, a stone structure went up quickly and easily. Our wall, though, the Divide, followed the line of the ancient Roman Watling Street and further – diagonally from Kent to Cumbria. Wessex and Anglia grumbled along, more or less managing.
I was thinking about how rapidly all these changes had come to be considered normal. Was it a good thing that humans were so ready to adapt to new situations? Or should we have been more determined to cling on to the old life? On a macro-level, maybe the governments should have made more efforts to keep discussions open, to keep the dialogue flowing. On a micro-level maybe channels of communication between friends, amongst families, should have stayed open. But they did not. So I could not contact my own sister. Communication satellites were destroyed.
What form should my message to Jasmine take? Jasmine, in Cambridge. A tiny chip concealed in the head of a pin would probably be good, if only I had the knowledge or the capability or the tech know-how. A hand-crafted note in invisible ink written in beautiful copperplate calligraphy? That was not going to happen. Some sort of audio file, buried in the ear of a netsuke mouse? I would worry about the details later. The first thing to work out was the vessel; it need not actually be a vessel, of course, in the sense of a Grecian urn or a Roman amphora, but some thing, some object, that needed to go from west to east.
I sat in the museum basement, amongst my favourite things, my classical statues, and the inkling of an idea sparked. Rather than thinking I should try to send something east, maybe it would be better, easier and altogether less suspicious if I was returning something to the east – something that they were demanding be returned.
‘You seem perky tonight,’ said Noah as he carried the plates to the dishwasher.
We had eaten what he called a parsimonious supper, what I called a cheapskate dinner, of carrots, parsnips and kohlrabi with tagliatelle. There was a good reason, though, of which I had to keep reminding myself. We were saving up for an Easter feast. A leg of lamb. A leg of Welsh lamb which we would roast with garlic and rosemary in Italian olive oil. Stop fantasising, I told my stomach as it rumbled in self-pity. Yet despite the dinner, I was indeed perky now that I had had ‘the idea’, as I was calling it. The idea to actually really try to contact Jasmine. Yet I felt the need to hide the reason from Noah; I would not dream of confiding in him, though it would not occur to me to question why that was. I suppose it was just that he never seemed to feel he needed answers. Or that he never asked the question in the first place.
‘I’m planning a new exhibition,’ I said.
‘Oh? Will it involve going anywhere?’
Sometimes I thought that was all he cared about – that I stayed in one place and he always knew where I was.
As I lay in bed later, I thought more about how I would manage my plan. It would need very careful thinking through, because I did not want Marcus to reject the suggestion out of hand and scupper my plans before they even started.
I veloed in fast the next morning. No stop-and-challenge this morning, thank goodness. Once there, I was able to wander the galleries freely before the museum opened to the public, and I ended up in the antiquities area that housed my beloved little friends from western Europe and Britain in Roman times.
The obvious answer would be an anniversary exhibition. Two thousand years since some momentous event. Any momentous event? But I could think of nothing in particular that had happened in the fifties CE. Claudius had been emperor; Messalina, his wife, had been executed for conspiracy; he married his niece Agrippina; then he adopted her son, Nero, as his own, which turned out to be a big mistake. But it didn’t warrant a major exhibition, bringing in statues from all over Europe. Statues that would need bringing in, then sending back. And the sending back, that, for me, was the vital thing.
It was a pity we were not nearer to 2061. That would be the two thousandth anniversary of the Battle of Watling Street, the huge confrontation between the tribes of the east, the Iceni and the Trinovantes, and the Roman forces. It was a massacre; the dominance of the machine of the Roman army over the poor sods trying to defend their homeland. Tens of thousands of them were killed, and it was the end of Boudicca’s revolt. And now the wall, the Great Divide, was built along the line, more or less, of the ancient Watling Street.
But the problem with an exhibition is that it takes months, more than a year even, in the planning. The idea has to be pitched to the Director. Once agreed, it has to be slotted into the timetable of the museum’s exhibitions. Then you have to decide which objects you would like to use from your own collection and those you need to borrow from other museums and organise how they are going to be transported. You have to involve designers, publicists… No, no, no. I wanted to do this now. I needed to send a statue straight away. I wandered back to my office. This would have to be small-scale.
By break time, I had the frame of a plan. A frame in the sense that I had an ornate outline of beautifully carved and gilded floating ideas, but little substance – no solid picture in the middle.
‘Marcus?’ I wandered into his office.
‘Hmm?’ He looked up at me over his glasses, most of his mind on whatever was in the book he was poring over.
‘I need to borrow something from the Fitzwilliam.’
‘Aha?’
‘A bronze. The Hercules.’
‘Right… er.’ I could see the whirring going on in his mind as he clicked through his mental catalogue, locating, picturing. ‘Not very big, is it?’
Size meant cost when it came to transporting antiquities. Size, along with value, along with insurance. But since we could not get to Cambridge, Cambridge had to come to us, just occasionally.
‘Well, if it’s important…’
‘I won’t need to keep it for long.’
‘Then go ahead.’
‘Thanks, Marcus,’ I replied, very casually indeed, keeping a calm, not-all-that-bothered, the-things-we-have-to-do-for-the-furtherment-of-knowledge-and-all-that-jazz expression on my face as I turned and strolled away.
Great. I needed to get the letter of request sent off, then the great plan could begin.
Suyin, these days, seemed to exist in her own personal whirlwind. She shot through the galleries at high speed, shielding herself from anyone approaching her with a barricade of files, folders and loose papers. I realised I had barely spoken with her in weeks. The bluebells were coming out in the University Parks, which seemed a good reason for a walk, so I bearded her in her den one day – that is, I cornered her in her office – and said, ‘Door, ten minutes, with sandwiches.’
I was quite surprised that she came. She barely paused to collect me up as she swept down the steps of the museum and started to march up the road. We swirled along, she a pocket tsunami, me the debris in her wake. Finally, we reached our safe place, our den.
‘It’s the school,’ she said. ‘At first we barely noticed. We were perfectly happy with King’s Hill.’
Well of course you were, I thought, at that price.
‘It was Lucas who noticed first. That they weren’t being picked for teams; that their homework was being marked more and more harshly; even that they weren’t being invited round to their friends’ houses after school so often.’ She looked at me, her soft brown eyes not just concerned, but scared. ‘We’ve managed to talk with some other parents whose children are mixed race. Or maybe not even mixed race – just darker-skinned. It’s mad, Petrichor, mad. We were supposed to have got rid of all that when the Divide came. Wasn’t that the point of it?’
