Immemorial

IMMEMORIAL

D.L. Christopher

This electronic version was published by D.L. Christopher at Smashwords (2013)

Copyright D.L. Christopher (2008)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.

The moral right of the author has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

For my partner Lisa and for my son Dylan, with love and thanks.

CHAPTER ONE

Jed had a plan. He had several plans, but this plan in particular, he knew, was about to reach glorious fruition. Jed entered the room of his dissertation tutor with a fixed grin, he knew instinctively he was not there to be praised, but was nevertheless content with the summons.

‘Sit down boy,’ the tutor was prepared for confrontation and gripped a few pages of neat, double spaced type in fists with whitening knuckles. He began to read aloud as Jed seated himself on the wooden chair opposite.

‘That the world was not a kind and wonderful place before Ernest Featherstone took the lives of two-hundred and fifty innocent civilians will be of no great surprise to anyone with even the most minimal historical knowledge, yet Historians of the last two hundred years have tended to use his actions and those of others as proverbial sledgehammers with which to drive in nails. Just as it is erroneous to fully attribute the rise of the Third Reich to one man’s machinations, as though he were some comic book super-villain waging war on civilisation and it’s most laudable ‘Freedoms’ (freedom in its most capitalised form) and not, as it actually was, the natural, though lamentable, conclusion of the events set in motion by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles (28th June 1919) which crippled the German nation and left both the state and its people destitute, humiliated and angry.

‘Give me a long enough lever and a fulcrum to place it on and I shall move the world’ claimed Archimedes – and this is how we should view the periods leading up to the actions of Featherstone. History is the ever lengthening lever, and on this occasion Featherstone was the fulcrum that allowed history to tip the world on to its side. Essentially it is my belief that the actions of History’s most reviled men should not be viewed in isolation as a cause of upheaval, but as a result of upheaval. Just as you cannot reasonably expect to cripple a nation without invoking its ire, you cannot sponsor a fear of ‘otherness’ (other races, religions, classes) without expecting that fear to become resentment and hatred in turn.

As popular Historian Oscar Gelding once stated (BBC ‘Featherstone and the Bomb’ 2019) England was already going to hell, Featherstone merely upgraded the postage. History, after all, is not made of individuals – only history books are – yet those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it (Edmund Burke 1729 – 1797) and as such it is important not just to condemn the actions of such men, but also understand the history that led to these actions so that we may never see them repeated.

It is lazy both morally and intellectually to presume that any one man could be so powerfully evil (though evil they certainly were) that they can single-handedly change the world and as such we should not be asking who Ernest Featherstone was in isolation, but at which point on history’s ever lengthening lever did Featherstone decide to place his fulcrum and why?’

The lecturer looked up with his rheumy eyes half hidden by the thick rims of his reading glasses.

‘History’s ever lengthening lever? It is morally and intellectually lazy? I must assume that you have written academic essays previously or you would not be sat here now – and oh that you were not,’ the lecturer pushed the thick rimmed spectacles back up the bridge of his nose as he laid the sheets of paper on a small occasional table beside his leather reclining chair. Jed remained seated opposite, stony faced as his lecturer sighed extravagantly.

‘You are of course aware that my own text Featherstone in Isolation has won awards?’ he asked.

‘Is it?’ asked Jed, trying to stifle a smile.

‘Yes it is,’ said the lecturer, removing his reading glasses.

‘I’m beginning to think, Mr Choudhry, that you are being purposefully difficult.’

‘Nah, man, it’s just true, innit? It’s ridiculous to think that anything happens in isolation, yeah? It’s all part of life’s rich tapestry innit?’ Jed grinned.

‘I believe you must be smoking too much of that weed stuff that’s floating around the campus. I have to say I’m disappointed. You came here on some very high recommendations from a good friend of mine and I would hate for you to waste your obvious potential on drugs and women, I feel I would be letting that friend down. At the moment this,’ he flicked the paper sheets ‘reads more like Hippie ramblings than a serious work of academic Historical research. I think you really need to reconsider your proposition before it costs you your credibility as an Historian.’

Jed laughed. ‘Is it, yeah? I think you really need to reconsider your credibility as an Historian before it costs you your ability to create original propositions, yeah? I liked the stuff you did on McCarthyism, but since then you’ve lost it man. You sold out, yeah?’

‘On the contrary, young man, what I have done is learned to operate within the constraints of my field. There is no room in History for conjecture. History is fact because it deals with facts, you’ll learn in time...’

‘Fuck that, man. That’s like saying botany is a lettuce because it deals with lettuces.’

‘That’s not what I mean. What I mean is that if you wish to be successful, there are certain rules one must abide by and some of the more fantastical whimsy that occurs later in this extract has no place in History.’

‘Is it? I don’t need to be successful; I just want to be right, yeah?’

The lecturer sighed. ‘I’m trying to help you Jed, that’s what you like to be called, am I right?’ Jed nodded. ‘I just want to stop you making the same mistakes that countless promising young men have made before. Pride cometh before a fall, as the Bible tells us...’

‘Whatever.’

‘Your lack of respect is disappointing. I can’t stop you from making your mistake, but remember that you were warned; I intend to pass on this warning to your father and expect he’ll also wish to discuss it with you.’

Jed made a sucking sound through his teeth. ‘Prick,’ he said and left, leaving the door wide open as he did.

#

He left the building in a hurry, he had an hour and a half before he was due in work and thanks to improvements on the tube network, he would have to take an hour long bus journey from Kingston station to Ealing Broadway and then on from there to North Acton, a short walk from which was the monstrosity within which he would spend four hours attempting to sell people who didn’t wish to buy, things he didn’t wish to sell.

His father thought it would teach him values. What it was actually teaching him was that ninety percent of the population of England were utter cunts when dealing with telesales calls. As a result, he was even harsher with those that dared to call him.

He had been working part time for some six months, his longest job to date, and had seen it break countless others. Any slight chink in his self confidence would have marked him for the same fate. The thing about people telling you that you’re a cunt for four or more hours a day is that it’s only a matter of time before you began to believe them, he thought. That kind of reinforcement was difficult to ignore and so chatty, lively people entered and the machine churned out pale, timid creatures, no better off financially for their short time on the minimum wage and irreparably damaged by the grinding torture that was the job.

He was doing it to prove a point which made it easier and he continually told his father that he was going to drop out of University to pursue a career in sales. It was working. His father had already made references to the possibility that the job could be affecting his studies. Following the meeting with his dissertation tutor and once he told his father that he had taken on another shift in the glass fronted monument to banality, he would surely see himself banned from working and his allowance reinstated. He would be victorious.

Once scanned and then seated on the bus he began to visualise the event. Fantasy it may be, whimsy almost certainly, but he found these mental re-enactments helped him to focus his mind on the history of the man. He had read virtually every biography, theory and conspiracy about Featherstone’s actions and so found it relatively simple to add fantasy flesh to the dry bones that such facts and theories assembled.

He pictured Featherstone poring over electronics texts, learning the trade with which he would soon single-handedly murder more people than any other person in modern English history. In this respect he was not sure which of the images he envisioned was correct: was it the young Featherstone, irrevocably damaged by the loss of a much loved and admired father, or the aging man, bitter and twisted with hatred of the world? He couldn’t be sure, but he intended to make educated guesses, and if the faculty didn’t like it? Fuck ‘em. He was going to be on TV.

CHAPTER TWO

Rise and shine Mr Featherstone,

Whu... his throat was dry; the partial word scraped along his vocal cords and rasped through his teeth. It was enough, this grunted acknowledgement, to startle the white clad, cube shaped woman that had been opening the curtains. She told him in hushed tones not worry, but looked increasingly troubled as she began to back out of the room, her eyes fixed on him and as unwavering as her placatory smile until she reached the door.

He was alone.

Carrying out a checklist he found that both arms were working, although sore and stiff and that the same applied to both of his legs. The neck to which his head, he was pleased to discover was still attached, had a limited range of movement and felt as though he were recovering from some form of Exorcist style head spinning.

Then there was his head.

Oh yes.

His head was most definitely still there, though the aching was almost enough to make him wish it otherwise. He was thirsty. Every breath he took was air rasping over the surface of Mars, the stale, dry gusts crossing the barren red plane of his tongue. He looked around the room with the blurred eyes of the newly awake and saw a strangely familiar plastic jug with a blue lid. It squatted on a cheap and frail looking chest of draws to which laminate strips were clinging like drowning men to flotsam, their grip ever weakening and tenuous. Although uncertain as to why the jug was familiar, he was certain that it was empty. There were numerous other ways in which the room was familiar, from the peculiar way in which the dirty yellow light filtered through the lightly browned windows in stripes that seemed more to darken where it did not fall than illuminate where it did, the door which was complete with an anti-slamming brace and one long crosshatched pane, the faded and forgotten floral print curtains were a kitsch relic from a nineteen-twenty's housekeeping manual. It was all familiar yet somehow foreign. It felt as though he were on the set of a much watched film, or like Alice, through the looking glass, peering disconcertedly at the samely different, differently similar world in which he found himself.

He sat up and began consciously not to worry. It seemed a strange thing to focus on, not worrying, as the act began to generate a slowly rising level of panic. If someone has asked me not to worry; were they, in actual fact, implying that there was something to worry about, but about which they would rather I did not? Should I, contrary to advice, be worried? He felt as though he should be, but there was a sense of disassociation, a feeling that all he was seeing was unreal and that at any moment the curtains of reality would be drawn aside to reveal the clarity of the world beyond. He waited patiently for this to happen.

He continued to wait for this to happen.

It did not happen.

Lying there in a semi-strange bed in a semi-strange room, he inspected the room with a distant, semi-amused eye, tutting and clicking his palate at the shabby, faded drapes that partially hid the brown window and similarly hued vertical blinds, sliding his eyes with a quizzical disdain over the off-white coloured walls that would die one day of sepsis, if the water stains and grubby marks were any indication.

He waited for the return of the woman in white.

The woman in white did not return.

The thirst was almost overpowering by the time he decided to find the kitchen. He assumed that she was a maid and that he must have stayed there previously for him to have recognised the uniform. He untangled his legs from the firmly tucked folds of the sheets and swung them out over the edge of the bed. It occurred to him that the sheet tucking had been a little obsessive. Perhaps I was drunk, he thought.

He didn’t remember being drunk but the two things were hardly mutually exclusive. Had someone left him there tucked up tight in the bed and breakfast of the damned, some erstwhile partner in excess come guardian-angel ensuring his safe-keeping? He found that he could not penetrate the mists. All memories were insubstantial creatures of smoke cowering and craven. He clutched at them and saw them artfully avoid his grasp, the smoke of them coiling around his fingers.

He lowered his feet slowly to the floor, determined to find out exactly what he was doing there. His arms felt shaky as he attempted to heave his weight up and over his feet. The goal quickly became the zenith of an arc, however, and he carried on forward over and then down as his curiously weak legs buckled. The fall seemed to last much longer than it should have and whether it was lengthy or simply proof of the relativity of time, he had broken the woman in white's second commandment and was fully worried as his head hit the floor.

Somewhere in the distance he heard a woman begin to cry, ‘Steven,’ she seemed to be saying amidst floods of tears ‘I shook him. I shook him.’

#

When he came to he was back where he had begun. His mouth was drier still and there was a raw throbbing above his left eyebrow. There were subtle differences in the room that seemed to creep in at the edges of his mind; each difference a needy child of his subconscious, grasping and yelping for attention that their clamour would deny them. He ran the fingers of his right hand lightly from the crown of his head to the tip of his chin; feeling, as he did, the thick mess of hair atop his head, wincing as his index finger grazed the raised lump, experiencing as if for the first time the contours of his face. His middle finger followed the rise of his nose as his thumb and smallest finger traced the sharp peak and trough of his cheeks and all formed a fist as they slowly traversed the thick but patchy beard below. He closed his eyes and sighed low and long.

He opened his eyes.

One of the cloying infant thoughts had screamed long and loud enough, had turned red enough, had stomped and spun and cried enough for his mind to scoop it up into the loving arms of conscious thought. The light had dimmed, but there on the far wall of the room danced a small and flickering rainbow. His mind scrabbled to attach significance to this light show.

It was water.

There it was that the same plastic jug, with the same inconspicuous blue lid, sat upon the same downtrodden, formerly flat-packed drawers. This time there was water refracting lazy light upon the far wall and beside the jug a small plastic beaker. He reached out to the jug at full stretch and closed his thick, clumsy feeling fingers around the clear handle, an arm moulded, sad and immovable, to its torso. He lifted it slightly and felt it slip. A curse ground through closed his teeth as he set the jug down and grasped it in both hands before collapsing back into the bed as water sloshed onto the sheets. He then drank deeply from the spout. The lukewarm, lime-scale rich water trickled from the sides of his mouth and down his chin as he slurped, smacking his lips, eventually leaving the jug empty but for the droplets that still clung to its innards.

Only now, with his body’s cries for moisture silenced, could his thoughts and senses begin to synchronise themselves.

There were other differences in the room.

In one corner squatted a commode, in another a bracket held a small, flat screened television, the darkened screen of which, like the black and studious eye of a bird, reflected a miniature room at the centre of which was a smudge of pale pastel that he knew must be himself, the pale pink of skin segueing into the paler blue of his pyjama shirt. He shivered, then dragged his eyes away from blank screen and instinctively began to look for a remote control. He found it a short while later in a pocket attached to the metal head of the bed. Gripping the smug, ergonomic controller like the hand of an old friend he pressed down on the power button and the television sparked into life.

There was just a blue screen.

The next and the next and the next: blue screen.

Then there came news footage and a familiar logo.

#

News is seldom good, but News, the news with a capital letter, is never cheery. The footage of riot-police pressing down upon angry crowds that greeted him did not concern him overly, a part of his brain desensitised by exposure at some forgotten time assured him that this was fine.

It was almost worth watching the scenes of casual police brutality, the lazily thrown truncheon, the nose-breaking thrust and crunch of riot-shield on cartilage was almost a forgivable inconvenience. Enduring the fast moving, jerky, phone captured images of men and women dragged from the crowd with semi-coagulated blood still dribbling in viscous brown ribbons over their tear stained cheeks was almost worth it to hear that familiar, dulcet baritone, that crisp Englishness of the news reader. The reassuringly soft, male voice comforted him to such an extent that the report itself was briefly lost in the space between cochleae and consciousness. He lay back upon the bed and closed his eyes, drifting, allowing the friendly tonality of the voice to lull him, with its traditional, bland, understated descriptions of chaos, into a light daze.

'Thank ye very much fer tha' Jeremy, now befo' we return to oor nightly commentary oor with Bradley Turner...' a voice began, an accent? '... we goo across tae oor sponsors,' it continued.

What sponsors? He opened his eyes and began to concentrate. There began a short film that seemed to suggest life could be immeasurably improved by an increased consumption of a chocolate product. The next proposed that one should endeavour to re-live the 'glory-days' by watching repeats of late twentieth and early twenty-first century sit-coms. He was confused. He seemed to recall that the World Service had advert breaks, was he overseas? Then something even stranger, a bizarrely shaped yet cuddly monstrosity waddled onscreen and began singing at him along with a chorus of small children:

If you wanna grow up strong and you want to sing along

Then you've got to tell your mum and dad that smoking is all wrong.

It jiggled its tumescent rump as it danced around in circles, nodding its head and waving its arms:

Girls you tell your mummy that you want to be a dancer.

That her smoking all those cigarettes is going to give you cancer!

Boys you gotta say that you think football's really cool!

That you just don't wanna wipe and find there's blood there in your stool!

The creature then stood there as a firm, scientific sounding voice informed the viewer that there were, now, less than three hundred days of legal smoking remaining and asked him if he was ready to commit to his recovery. A number flashed across the screen, promising to direct smokers to their local 'quitters club'. Following this, the accented anchor passed the viewers across to Bradley.

'These terrible scenes of civil disobedience are brought to us by our 'roving eyes' in Bolton, Leeds and Newcastle where, following the rioting in Liverpool and Manchester the police have been forced to use tear gas and full riot protocol to quell the escalating demonstrations. A shame though it may be to see these people hurt, the Police Press Commission has released a statement claiming that this action had been delayed as long as possible and that accusations of brutality are unfounded. They suggest that video footage of two police officers, supposedly beating a youth in Manchester can only be staged fakes, specifically targeted effort to further destabilise the current terse relationship between the Police and the public in the run up to the tenth anniversary of the May 3rd Massacre combined as they are with the all too familiar conspiracy stories running in the liberal media this week.'

The day was becoming stranger still. He was uncertain as to his personal news consumption but he remembered a few things distinctly, like VA and VI Day when the government had declared, with much pomp and ceremony and following their decision to level large parts of Afghanistan and Iraq with depleted uranium shells, the final withdrawal of British and American forces, but a massacre? Surely, regardless of his viewing he would remember a massacre?

A schmaltzy fanfare followed this second report and was, in turn, followed by more adverts for products that one could simply not live without.

He changed the channel: blue screen.

The next and the next and the next: blue screen.

He flicked the power button again and the screen was blank once more but for a faded BBC logo in the corner of the plasma screen which burned briefly on and then itself faded to black. He closed his eyes and slumped once again into the soft pillows of his bed. What on earth had happened to the world since he had... what exactly? The thought crossed his mind to try again to stand, but he thought better of it, remembering the lump he had received as reward for his pains.

‘Hel...’ he choked and coughed as the word stuck in his throat. ‘Hello?’ better this time. ‘Is there anyone... out there?’ more coughing. ‘I'm really hungry,’ more spluttering ‘any chance of a meal and some more water?’

He waited for a response.

The entrance of two heavy set men, also in white uniforms, provided it.

They hurried into the room, their eyes to the floor, their thick brows knotted above flattened noses, the muscles in their hands and arms tensing then un-tensing quickly and visibly as they came toward him. They seemed unusually nervous for such large and muscular men, but this gave them no pause for thought as they pinned him to the bed, their fingers, gristle coated concrete strips, weighed heavily on the soft flesh of his arms and thighs. He struggled briefly, cursing them, before he saw a third visitor enter the room.

‘This will not hurt, and in your condition is a necessary evil,’ said the newcomer, his white lab coat flapping open to reveal a well cut, well filled, dull grey suit beneath. His eyes were hidden behind fading grey transitional lenses that suggested he had recently returned from a spell outdoors.

‘I suggest that you do not struggle. You will only harm yourself and we have been briefed, now that you are awake, to hurry your recovery along as best we can. We do not wish to hurt you, but needless to say we will if we are forced, Mr Featherstone.’

He stopped his struggling and lay there, pressed into the soft mattress with his mouth wide open, in stunned silence. He stared at the newcomer’s approaching face; the stress of the situation throwing everything into sharp focus. The man’s pores seemed to open to gigantic proportions, his grey eyes, a picture of professional detachment, were swirling pools of murky water waiting to drag him under. The