Pilgrim Process

The author would like to dedicate this novel firstly to the memory of Alan Myers, 1933 to 2010, who was a teacher and a friend to the author. Alan was also a friend to people on both sides of the Iron Curtain throughout the Cold War, some of them extraordinary people including a Nobel Laureate, many of them ordinary people in whom he was just as interested. He wasn’t specifically a champion of the oppressed, because he appreciated talent wherever it might be found; he simply never allowed political or security barriers to stop him helping someone get recognition for their work. There will be a link to a site containing a lot of Alan's work on the author's blog, accessible from his Smashwords author's page.

This novel is also dedicated to the memory of Sadie Eleanor Martineau, 1960 to 1997, who was an artist and a musician, treated poorly and taken from us far earlier than she should have been. Despite her skill with the guitar, she firmly believed that there were occasions when the appropriate instrument for a young Christian was a trumpet.

Prologue, Power’s Sweet, Sweet Wine

Despite the air of exultation already sweeping the corridors and offices of Party headquarters, the man sitting in an armchair in the private suite continued to study every constituency result minutely as the details appeared on the monitor screen. It wasn’t just a case of natural caution overwhelming his recognition of an overwhelming victory: he was already planning for the future. The landslide hadn’t been in doubt; things like that simply weren’t left to chance! No, what he was looking for were those constituencies where The Party would in fact have lost if things hadn’t been so well organised. He knew the estimates of those chased off the electoral register in each constituency, how many disabled people were casting their votes by proxy -and which returning officers had thought it prudent to find another bundle of ballot papers in a hurry before the end of the count.

His calculating eye could see which of the glorious victories marching across the screen, might be resounding defeats save for the efficiency of The Party in guaranteeing its own fortune. He noted each one and planned an appropriate response. It was galling; after all he’d done, to know that the democratic process required him to resort to precarious subterfuge to keep The Party in office. It seemed that the more he achieved in his political career, the more the Masses carped and criticised. Well, the time was approaching when such criticism and obstructionism could be dealt with instead of being fenced with in endless futile arguments! When an aide came to congratulate him and lead him out to praise the Party workers already celebrating throughout the building, he saw that his Leader was smiling, an unusual light of genuine warmth in his eyes.

It’s time now, sir. A thumping victory! Yet again you’ve confounded those who said that public opinion was largely set against you! Thank you, Malcolm. Yes, we’ve confounded them, but we’ll have to make sure that it stops now. Talk against us merely undermines; we’re the ones who are building the future. Next time, I intend that the press will report us fairly and that the opposition will freely acknowledge all our great achievements before they plead for their own chance to do better. The electorate will, of course, be far too wise to give them a chance to spoil things. Malcolm laughed appreciatively: the great thing about The Leader’s jokes was that he said these brilliantly ironic things as if he were wholly in earnest!

The Leader smiled indulgently at Malcolm’s unexpected burst of laughter: the boy was obviously overcome with the excitement of victory. Did Malcolm realize just how great this victory was, though?

This isn’t just another win you know, Malcolm. This is the one when everything’s in place for our real move. Nobody can stop us now; it’s too late for them to interfere. This isn’t another step on the way, we’ve just leapt the threshold to our future. Yes, Sir! Will you be saying that to the boys and girls out there? They’d really like that. The Leader nodded at Malcolm’s suggestion and strode out confidently to bask in the adoration of those who’d helped deliver the victory for him.

Afterwards, a girl came and served him with an early breakfast in the suite. He recognised her as Malcolm’s younger sister, roped in to help with the party’s chores and to bring her to the notice of those who could advance her career or maybe find a powerful partner for her. That kind of thing was well understood: an age-old party tradition, shortly to be subtly changed. He slipped his hand under her skirt and looked up at her pretty face as she jumped and blushed.

Sara quickly controlled her instinctive reactions. She just couldn’t afford to make a fuss, for the sake of her career -and especially for Malcolm’s. The blush changed to an inviting smile and she stood quite still as his hand roamed. Then he nodded towards the sofa. She went promptly and as willingly as she could, undoing her blouse as she went, trying so hard not to remember the way she’d dreamed it might be the first time. He knew that it wasn’t that she found him attractive, but she understood that she didn’t have a choice. Nobody had a choice anymore; it was just that Sara was the first to know.

****

Chapter 1, Year Two, Sunday Morning

As happened every Sunday morning now, Sophie Nelson made her way along the alley beside the Young Women’s Vocational Training College, which sat on a hilltop overlooking the heart of Offaton. The alley opened onto a steep, litter-strewn grass slope swooping down to the bustle, fumes and oppressive noise of the town centre. Sitting on one of the much-vandalised park benches at the top of this slope was a lonely figure that Sophie Nelson knew well. A twinge of pity for the figure twisted in Sophie’s heart, as well as concern that all this would one day attract unwelcome attention.

Sophie didn’t need to talk to Jane Cecil to know what was troubling her: it was always the same thing. Her eyes would look out over her hometown the way they’d once looked out over hundreds of towns and villages from similar vantage points every Sunday. The camera would have panned over the town, wrapped in the peace and dignity of the way Sunday used to be, then it would find Jane’s smiling face, framed by wind-teased blonde hair, and she’d introduce her programme. There would then have followed a cheerful half-hour or so of interviews with local worthies, interspersed with the gathered congregations of the district singing their favourite hymns in the parish church, or sometimes a mission hall or citadel belonging to another denomination.

Hardly any of the buildings below them had changed since those days. You could easily picture the way it’d have looked; the tree-lined hills in the distance leading west into Bedfordshire and, on the hills nearer at hand in the same direction, slate-roofed houses in loose Edwardian order or tightly-packed, concrete-tiled high-density developments on what Sophie understood to be a former hospital site.

The buildings hadn’t changed much, but the town had changed rather mightily. The centre was thick with people, car parks were jammed and, across the river, framed by the Centre of Choice in Telecommunications and the Office of Training Opportunity, the honey and grey stone Parish Church was right in the middle of all the bustle. People were coming and going from the middle doors of the church building; family groups, little knots of teenage friends texting even to those in earshot; a fair cross-section of the registered middle-income population of Offaton. Sophie could see no tears in Jane’s eyes -she’d stopped crying about this months ago- but the once famous saintly sparkle had faded into sad reflection. After 4pm, the doors would close for two hours while the counters were cleaned, shutters pulled down to seal off the kitchens and dust covers put on the tills. The floor would be swept and chairs set out. Then the staff would leave and, one by one, the members of Offaton’s local Anglican trust would walk quietly past the late shoppers to reclaim their church.

When they prayed, the stink of fried onions would smother the sweetest incense, the occasional patch of grease on the floor would stain the hand-embroidered kneelers -and shame would pierce their hearts. It wasn’t as much their own fault as it had appeared to the outside world, but it had been a leading member of the lay synod who’d brought the first lawsuit using a previously obscure clause in the Commercial Opportunities Act.

At a time when so many parishes had opted out of the administrative and financial structures of the Church of England to become local charitable trusts, the prominent members of many congregations had been enthusiastic about the way they’d be able to manage their own affairs, free from the malign influence of church bureaucrats and trendy bishops. The only words of caution had come from local Baptists, who’d been managing their own affairs for some centuries. Their helpful observation that a registered charity is governed by the charity laws hadn’t made any impression on people carried away by the euphoria of at last being able to discriminate against lesbians and apostates if they wanted to! Then the clause had come to light and people wondered why, if it meant what the plaintiff said it meant, hadn’t anyone brought a case before all the parishes had become local charities and therefore subject to its provisions?

Sophie felt moved to rescue Jane from the spectacle. After all, Jane wasn’t even an Anglican. It was just that parish churches had been the centre of her professional life -when she last had a job- as well as the centre of the community. What had happened was too much of a symbol to be an accident. Miss Cecil, if you come along with me I’ll show you something you didn’t expect to see again. Oh, alright. I shouldn’t look at this, I know, but I just thought that if I saw it every Sunday, then God would know that some of us are appalled by it! At least the money-changers in the Temple didn’t put out TV adverts about what they were doing in God’s house. No, but if they’d had TV they probably would’ve done. Come on, come see; it’s something nice, promise!

Sophie took Jane by the hand and led her down the side of the slope to a little alley, which disappeared behind the businesses that fronted onto Lister Street and the new market. It wouldn’t do to walk Jane past the parish church itself, with its smell of onions and the air of threat all that implied. Jane noticed that Sophie was carrying a shopping bag. Just as well really: this was a mandatory shopping day, which was why Sophie wasn’t expected to attend her vocational training course on either Saturday or Sunday. They weren’t heading for the shops, though. With the troubling sight of the parish church safely behind them, they rejoined Lister Street, passing by a little fish and chip shop -closed now by the slickly marketed and packaged product touted in once-sacred precincts across the river.

Jane wondered if they’d turn up past the Office of Reasonable Compulsion in Community Service Opportunity, towards the Baptist Chapel where Sophie’s father was minister, but instead they crossed over and went up Park Street. Jane didn’t know if Sophie had given up going to church completely; it took a certain amount of grit for a young person to stick with it, especially if she was devastatingly attractive and subject to constant male attention and pressure the way Sophie was.

The footpath they were following rose above Park Street on ivy-dark banks and diverged to follow an abbreviated side road up to a footbridge across the by-pass. They stopped on the middle of the bridge to admire the patched and striped fields of golden stubble and chocolate or chalk-fresh ploughed soil, which rumpled across hills to still-green spinneys and woods. Both of them thought to themselves that God’s hand in the countryside was still visible from a distance, then they were crossing the fringe between a road with middle to high-income houses and the open field still known as Abbey Park. This had been ploughed up for crops; long before the Abbey became a conference centre frequented by the honest trustees of innumerable local management trusts. It was still ploughed up rather regularly in order to erase the line of a footpath running across it. That had been a right of way since before the Romans came!

The landowners hoped that one day they’d erase the rights as well as the path and Abbey Park could become the high-income housing development it so obviously deserved to be. In the meantime, the pretence of farming the overworked dusty soil must be carried on, so as best to present those who walked the path as a damaging nuisance. Certainly, with the new attitude shown since the election things were looking up for the landowners, but Sophie took sight on a post on the far side of the park and walked out the correct and ancient line, still hand in hand with Jane.

As they went, Jane thought that millions of pairs of feet had trod this path, especially before the by-pass had cut across its line. It was a fanciful thought, but just suppose you’d been brought to Britain by your Uncle Joseph when things in Palestine looked just a bit too dicey for you and your parents. Joseph’s business in the tin, grain and precious stone trades might have taken him and his hired ship to the Roman port now known as King’s Lynn, then around to a port on the Ver, before he headed back out through London and around to pick up the tin itself at the Isle of Apples.

Suppose that your family had chosen to travel overland from Lynn to meet Uncle Joseph again on the Ver? You’d have followed the Icknield Way to begin with, of course, and you might have branched off it where it crossed with several other ancient paths at the confluence of two local chalk streams, one of which flowed past the Abbey.

Now, Jane remembered that this path led onto various lanes and bridleways that continued its surprisingly straight line for miles. Once, on a pilgrimage to St Albans, she’d realised that the group of marchers she was with had basically followed this same path the whole way from Offaton. This was the very path that would have been trodden by anyone walking from Lynn to that ancient port on the Ver. Jane’s flesh tingled; she was sure that they had company this Sunday morning!

Sophie wasn’t walking to St Albans today; she turned right once they’d crossed the park and they followed a little lane down to a tiny hamlet, where the biggest house was the historic birthplace of an engineer who invented a steel process which revolutionised the whole world’s economy. He’d then been knighted for inventing a way of authenticating the payment of Treasury revenue on title deeds!

Sophie guided Jane right again, back into Offaton via a little rat-run which led up into a quiet nineteen-fifties estate of dark-red brick bungalows and yellowbrick flats where middle-income pensioners lived in precarious comfort, ever aware that their status depended on the ebb and flow of commercial pressures on their pension funds and trusts.

They made their way through this little estate and, suddenly, Jane knew where they were going! An alley ran between the back garden of a pub and a big, greying yellow-brick building. Going in a little side gate, they entered the grounds of the Baptist church without being visible from the main road and Sophie showed Jane around the rear of the chapel to some steps leading up to a large back room above the vestry, which had once done duty as a scout hall.

The steps and the blue door at the top of them looked as if they’d been left unused since the scout troops of the town had all been merged to form a super troop, totally free of ties to any church. The door was secured by a dirty-looking push-button combination lock. It suddenly struck Jane that a combination lock meant no key: possession of a key might reveal which doors you opened! Sophie knew the combination -Jane was careful not to look- and then they were quickly inside the former scout hall and out of sight.

Jane’s first impression of the hall was entirely of the smell; chalk dust and India paper. This room had been the school in the 19th century, one of the first places in Offaton to offer basic literacy to working class children. There were more recent odours, but somehow the smell of learning reached out effortlessly over two hundred years to tell Jane that universal education in Offaton started here.

She tried to work out what the recent odours were: Jane felt she knew them well but they didn’t cue any memories she’d associate with this place. She mainly remembered the thunder of young feet rushing from one wall to another during a game once popular with Cubs, if not older Scouts.

The tall arched windows were fairly dirty, but they let plenty of light into the hall, allowing Jane’s eyes to interpret the messages coming from her nose. There were old tables and chairs stacked around the edges of the room and posters about various scout merit badges fading on the walls. On one of the tables a pile of old bibles had been left, apparently forgotten, and there were various other abandoned oddments here and there. There was a table set apart at one end of the room and the window behind this was covered with a sheet of plastic with coloured drawings on it. The effect as the light shone through it was just like stained glass, even though the scene depicted was a scout camp. A person standing at that table couldn’t be seen through the window, though, and Jane felt that somehow this was important.

Sophie went to the table and opened her shopping bag. The contents surprised Jane, although somebody less literate in religious matters would hardly have raised an eyebrow at a minister’s daughter carrying a Communion set. Sophie spread a cloth on the table and set out the plate and cup, filling the cup before putting the bottle carefully aside at the back of the room and then placing the bread on the plate.

Just one cup, Sophie? Have you abandoned the priesthood of all the believers here? "Don’t worry; our set hasn’t changed, but our secret guests have to worship according to their rules, wrong as they may well be. Don’t you recognise the chalice?" Jane did -and she understood now why there was a pile of old bibles simply lying around, why the old-edition hymn books had been left in this room and not thrown away, why she and Sophie would creep out of the chapel grounds by the side gate and come back with the Baptist congregation through the front doors a little while later.

In theory, many things were still legal and there were no plans to outlaw them. But there never were any plans, till it happened -and then it was too late! During times of apparent liberty, a great deal could be learned by observing those who enjoyed that liberty, all the better to remove it.

Eyes were watching already; making detailed notes, linking names together, faces to places. Whenever the crackdown finally came, it would be too late to hide things then if the eyes already knew where they were.

Throughout the service that followed in the Baptist chapel, it was as if there was another congregation singing the same hymns at a little distance. Perhaps it was just an echo.

****

Chapter 2, Year Two, Tuesday Evening

All over the City, executive floors ended the working day in the mild holiday atmosphere which came from seeing the Chairman depart early and knowing that he wouldn’t pop back suddenly. In the offices of national newspapers, sub-editors prepared to put the Wednesday edition to bed without guidance from on high. Malcolm Mallinson escorted The Leader’s wife to Covent Garden, while several other executive assistants squired Chairman’s wives and daughters to shows and restaurants around London and the Home Counties.

In Stevenage, Annabel Jones walked along a sunken cycleway from the town’s swimming pool towards her home, where her mother would have supper waiting. Annabel was calculating whether she’d qualify for entry to this year’s junior national championships when she heard a faint scuffle on the gritty tarmac behind her. She turned round and saw a man approaching her. For a moment she wasn’t a bit frightened: his face was too dispassionate for a rapist or mugger! Then she saw the object in his hand flash with cruel arcing fire and a shock wracked her with stunning pain.

All her muscles were still set with aching cramp when the white van reversed down the cycleway with its back doors open, then there was only terror as she was driven away helpless in the back.

Simon Gosmore was getting somewhat cynical about the meetings at his new mother lodge -and increasingly frustrated by the way he was having to spike stories, which deserved a place in his paper, simply because it might look to the Brothers as if he was abusing the sacred secrecy of meetings. Was it entirely accident that certain Party members in the lodge made a habit of freely discussing the very subjects his journalists were working on within his hearing? Whether by accident or design, it was making life extremely difficult! His journalists were noticeably censoring themselves nowadays, thinking that it was editorial policy not to cover anything about The Party except what it put in its official newsbites. Simon had no illusions about what this was doing to the esteem in which his staff held him, nor what it was doing to their self-esteem, let alone his own.

He’d been surprised to find that the ceremonies at this lodge weren’t quite what he was used to; hitherto he’d always assumed that all lodges were pretty much the same.

This lodge was a bit special, though. All the editors seemed to be members and the only Airwave Authority members who weren’t in this lodge were the two female ones. He found nothing objectionable about sharing a lodge with so many top Party members; in a way it was reassuring to know that there was at least one place where they met other people as equals. Only, they seemed to dominate the business of the lodge as thoroughly as they dominated government. One local innovation, which excited Simon’s curiosity, was the way that the Informed Brothers withdrew to the Seat of Power to hold a ceremony within a ceremony, which was closed and secret to ordinary Brothers.

All the editors were sympathetic to The Party, of course -they’d hardly be publishing if they weren’t- but there were some who liked to believe that they retained some spark of impartiality still. Oddly enough, these were the ones, like Simon, who remained ordinary Brothers and who had no idea what went on in the Seat of Power. It was pointless to speculate about this.

Probably, The Informed had a dram or two of fine malt while keeping their Brothers waiting for purely dramatic effect. They always emerged looking whisky-flushed and sounding breathless, though there was something about their demeanour that suggested something significant was happening.

In any case, Simon had to refrain from unfair personal attack upon a Brother -and all the important Ministers were Brothers from his own mother lodge now! This was really why he’d joined the Brotherhood in the first place: it kept things reasonably civilised in a fourth estate grown notorious for its excesses.

The purely social rewards of Brotherhood weren’t what they were cracked up to be. For some reason the feast after each ceremony usually rankled with Simon. He put this down to the way that The Leader managed to fulfil the most hackneyed stereotype dreamt up by the satirists of a few years ago: always having a side order of grilled kidneys with the main course. It was difficult for Simon to fulfil his Brotherly duty and protect The Leader from ridicule when his personal habits were a satirist’s dream come true! It was perhaps just as well that satire had largely been driven underground. Come to think of it, the underground DTP sheets that came Simon's way from time to time tended to lack satirical bite nowadays, even when they contained things The Party interdicted.

None of the interdicted items that made it into the underground press and Usenet sites would do The Party any real harm. Simon sometimes wondered why they ever bothered to make those smirk-sheets illegal. If they weren’t illegal, nobody would bother to read them because they contained nothing genuinely interesting. The mainstream stories Simon had spiked in the past week would have done The Party more harm than the previous six month’s underground output put together.

Simon didn’t like to remind himself about the widening hole in his journalistic integrity and he allowed the orderly patterns of the ceremony to fill his thoughts and senses instead.

*

The Leader found in these evenings far more than just a chance to mingle and communicate with his Brothers both low and high. The ceremony was excellent, of course; an exquisite mixture of pleasure and terror, of mysteries revealed and secrets yet kept, of truth revealed in symbols which would ensure that weak minds which deserved to be deceived would grasp a false meaning while the strongest would understand best. The awesome excitement as The Informed of highest degree went into the Temple’s Seat of Power for the inner mystery that those outside could only guess at, always guessing wrongly!

Inside was the most dread mystery of all and, in this, The Leader found the centre of his life and the foundation of his hope that he would transcend the fate awaiting all mortal creatures that lacked Power. This was a pleasant mystery too, the exercise of ultimate power on a personal level.

Who was who inside the Seat of Power was also part of the mystery; the most absolute secret of all was just who Ruled here! Personalities changed with the reshaping of the hierarchy until even the most sceptical of The Informed believed that they’d passed into another state of being where a different order prevailed.

There was only one unInformed entity present. By her nature, she could never be Informed and her value was that she couldn’t understand the changes. She didn’t understand what happened, or why, but she helped them to make the transition because what happened to her was something even The Informed couldn’t do outside the Seat of Power, yet. One day, the act would be one of devotion to the source of Power, but for now it had a practical purpose.

When it happened to her, everyone inside the Seat of Power knew the laws of being had changed. Now they could speak freely about Knowledge that would ruin them all if it were revealed too soon and each could express his deepest desires without fear or embarrassment. Anything could now be discussed; anything could be arranged. Before the transition, even the closest of The Informed feared to tell the others all, lest their ambition drive them to take advantage of each other. After the transition, they were chained together by what was on the table around which they stood: Reveal anything to the unInformed and this would be revealed too. But that crude block wasn’t needed now, because each time the transition was made they all found the strength they needed to strangle their doubts and the worry, perhaps even the hope, that there was another way.

When personal desires had been discussed, (and everyone present knew just how important their own personal desires were to their purpose; without them there was no motivation) The Ruler outlined what was now necessary for their purpose. Each understood; each would obey in fear and desire.

They went back outside and wound up the ceremony while trusted functionaries tidied the Seat of Power in case one of the weaker Brothers gathered the courage to sneak an illicit look. If he did, what he’d find was exactly what rumour said he’d find, interesting, but wrong. And by that knowledge of his, they’d know that he was not to be Informed. The ceremony finished, robes were exchanged for evening dress and the Informed began their humble duty of socialising with ordinary Brothers on a common level.

There was still pleasure here: all was in order; even as equals all used the proper titles and gave the proper respect: this was the way the world should be -and soon would be! Previous generations had dedicated their power to the Ruler, now it seemed certain that the Leader’s generation of the Brotherhood would see that power flower on Earth. In their lifetimes, the complete ceremony would take place in the public gaze of a whole world united! In the meantime, though, mundane matters beckoned and the unInformed had to led and guided with meticulous care.

Early Wednesday morning, the comatose body of a fourteen-year-old girl was found in the shrubbery that separated the carriageways on one of Stevenage’s major thoroughfares.

Her parents were shocked and remorseful: they agreed to the removal of potentially viable donor organs as if the request came from far away rather than from the hospital Registrar by their side.

When they saw her for the last time before the cremation, Annabel’s torso was covered and they attributed the transparency of her face to deathly pallor. The family mourned, but the outside world often heard this kind of tale, every single week it seemed.

****

Chapter 3, Year Two, Coffee Morning

Jane Cecil put a fivepenny piece in the Skua pedestrian crossing in front of the court building leased by the HertsJudge Criminal Justice Trust. There was a pause as the machine waited for a break in the value of the passing stream of cars corresponding to the price Jane placed on getting to the other side of a tolled trunk route. It was entirely up to the car drivers how much they authorised their toll computers to debit their accounts: the smaller the amount they were prepared to pay, the more frequently they’d have to stop for Skua crossings. Jane once fed a Skua a pound coin by accident; traffic in both directions had screeched to a juddering halt as toll computers hastily applied the brakes and the driver of a Jaguar high-income model had popped a purple face out of the window to curse the silly woman who’d dared to interrupt the free passage he’d paid for. She politely reminded him that it was a free market, after all, and then she made her regal progress across the road.

Jane couldn’t really afford to spend whole pounds crossing the road, but just that once the system had worked for her for a few moments. She’d been unhappy about this later, when she realised just how much money she’d need to have if things were to work for her all the time, as that man was clearly used to having them work for him.

While she was waiting for the Skua to find her a 5p slot in the traffic, Jane noticed that an odd-looking platform had appeared in front of the court building. She had no idea what it was for, but, despite the fact that it was only eight feet square, there was a road-drain-sized grille set into the pavement at each of the platform’s four corners, with a slotted drain channel joining the grilles. One of the legs that supported the platform had a grey steel box fixed to it and there was a high-voltage warning sticker on the box.

The Skua interrupted Jane’s contemplation of the platform with a beep, which indicated that a string of cheap traffic was coming along. The cheap cars tended to get herded into strings as they were forced to make way for cars with a higher toll debit facility, so it was usually possible for a Skua to get you across the road for fivepence if you could manage to wait for one of these strings of traffic to make its stop-starting way to the crossing.

As she crossed the road, Jane’s eye caught the expression on the face of one of the low-income drivers. It somehow managed to convey both resignation and despair at the same moment; only endless patience would get him where he had to go, but there was a fresh humiliation waiting for him at every junction. Breaking free required more than just a substantial improvement in his finances: it was more like a different state of being.

Authorise your car’s toll debit terminal to debit a larger amount for each traffic conflict -and you might just get through some junctions a bit quicker. But, if you met several cars, which had authorised an amount a few pence higher, you’d most likely be held up just the same and your hard-earned money would roll away with every mile. The poorest could at least resign themselves to getting places inexorably. Middle-income drivers were compelled by their own perception of their social position to enter a larger toll debit facility than the bare minimum required to actually move -and each futile confrontation with a high-income car must feel like a mugging. Jane hurried away from the toll road; she really couldn’t bear to see people being ground down by the system.

She was slightly breathless by the time she reached the meeting hall, because the hall was in a public recreation ground and she’d had to double back to a newsagent’s a buy a newspaper so that she had a 20p coin to work the turnstile. Going in, she signed the visitor’s register, trying her best to remember her National Insurance number as she did so.

It didn’t really matter, so she just wrote an approximation in her worst handwriting, scribbling the digits she was least sure about. Most people didn’t need to bother remembering their National Insurance number, but Jane had stopped driving a car and didn’t have a driver’s licence to give the lobby computers in public buildings the information they wanted with one careless swipe. Apparently, if she owned a smart phone, all she need do was point it at the dot-sticker on the cover of the register and click. Jane did not own a smart phone. Other people entering the building made a fuss about having to do even this. "Nobody has ever bothered putting a terminal in here and it just isn’t good enough!" Jane wasn’t troubled: there was always a register book somewhere because there was no way that even The Party could make a driver’s licence compulsory and still demand that people pass a test to get one!

Jane was pretty sure that whatever the driver’s licences were