John C.P. Warner

We take our names from that which we will never see again. It is an empty joke on our part – a form of psychic flagellation, so that to speak one another’s name is always an act tinged with a sadness that has become a constant, wearisome arthritis of the soul. So I eat – when I eat – with Holiday, with Take-Away, Satisfaction, Retirement and with countless others. It is a dull ache, through which fresh misery must penetrate each day until, in some, it no longer can. Numbness ensues and is often lethal. Once you can accept this as your lot, it seems, you are unable to continue. Some will cease to attend meal-time, others are more active in their final withdrawal, loath to allow our constant companion to complete its work, having taken their teeth, their hair, their strength, they are not prepared to let it take their lives, it is their last and only act of defiance in the face of the fearful tyrant that stalks us all.

           

I remember a time of surfeit, when hunger was an abstract concept, a fleeting feeling provoked, most often, by the smell of cooking food. I see in my waking dreams an endless montage of half-finished meals. My stomach lurches in these moments as the digestive acids meet my stomach lining and my body, in an agonising betrayal, begins to gnaw at itself. I think back at the half-hearted pity I felt as I watched footage of starving children, how I felt myself absolved of guilt by my annual donation, claiming penury in a house with cupboards overflowing with food that was rapidly approaching sell-by-dates.  I hate myself.

 

The sound of the horse upon which that third rider entered our world was not the jovial clippity-clop of hooves, but the nauseating screech of cutlery on ceramic. I hear it follow me along the streets of London – a magnificent city, yet already beginning to crumble and fall upon the banks of the Thames. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair – perhaps we inconsequentials, we that have lost ourselves to this new order, were perhaps not as disposable as they had thought.

           

Screeeeee

           

The horse draws closer.

           

Screeeeee

           

It is never far behind me. I have kept ahead of it for a long time, but I have no idea for how long I shall be able to continue doing so. A helicopter thud-thud-thuds overhead, I no longer wonder where they go, I seldom wonder at anything at all. There was a time when I – along with many others – would wander to their compounds hoping for hand-outs, but there are only so many beatings with the butt of a gun a man can take on an empty stomach. It is for this reason I no longer visit the crop fields. The shadow-men that ring-fence the areas are keen with their batons and are becoming keener with their guns. I amble along Oxford Street, empty now but for others like me, other inconsequentials. It hurts to walk. My skin cracks with every movement, oozing, sending lightning bolts along my nerves until I have to stop, rest a while before proceeding. Meal-time will not wait for me.

With each second’s pause, the horseman draws ever closer.

           

Screeeeee

           

The sound forces me on.

           

Screeeeee

           

That discordant, warped echo of the past causes my ears to ring with a sound I can no longer tell myself is not real. The boundaries between the worlds outside and inside of my head have blurred so that I can no longer differentiate between the two. Sometimes I find myself talking to people I know are there, I know it, but then they’re gone and I know they were never there, or were years in the ground.  Each time is a fresh loss.

 

# # #

 

Dostoevsky once said that the civility of a nation could be judged by its prisons – there are no bars on the prisons here, a man is confined only by meal-time and how far he can walk, giving himself enough time to get back for the next. Food is our dungeon-ball and hunger a chain that shortens over time. I could labour at first, and did – subsidising my meagre ration; I gathered crops, I maintained buildings, I kept the world within the sight of the compounds beautiful and in harvesting kept them alive, but with only a loaf of bread for a day’s labour I soon found myself unable to work with the zeal they expected. Instead of the quick end of those that perished in the fields, parks and streets, worked to death, I found myself on the outside, useless to them. So I walked, pretending to myself that things were not as bad as they appeared – that they would inevitably get better – even as my skin became a network of open sores, I walked. I walked through a city grown eerily quiet, littered with wrappers, boxes and the dead. I walked as my feet bled and left prints on the paving stones, a trail that any wishing to follow my mental and physical decline could follow. Occasionally I would find myself weeping, with no idea for what or for whom, I would simply cry until I could not cry anymore and then I would stop just as suddenly. At these moments I found myself murmuring The New Lord’s Prayer – as recited during meal-times:

 

Our Father, who art in heaven,

Hallowed be thy name,

Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done,

On Earth as it is in Heaven.

Give us this day, our daily bread.

Amen.

           

 

What is the point, we had asked of our Priest, of begging forgiveness for sins we are too weak to commit? I don’t believe in God – I don’t see how anyone in my condition could. I suppose events of the recent past have resulted in my adopting some very Epicurean philosophies – in their purest form. I am forced to leave the more modern variety to the compound; theirs are the cups that runneth over, so to speak. I have come to see pleasure as an absence of suffering, as a state I am unlikely to enjoy again, which begs others of Epicurus’ questions: is God able to prevent this, but unwilling? Then he is evil. Is he neither willing nor able? Then he is no God. Yet I find a strange comfort in this redacted meal-time prayer. Petitioning for something achievable, for near certainties, can deliver something akin to the feeling one would associate with the paternal benevolence of an involved deity. It is only when one asks for something one does not have – like health, or an end to the hellish existence that is our lives – that the futility of prayer is revealed.

 

# # #

 

I am beginning to worry that I will not make it back in time – it is a feeling common amongst the inconsequentials, to the extent that some of us – even those who do not move further than the gates of our sector’s feeding pens – begin to worry that today might just be the day that the food does not come.

           

Screeeeee

           

I pick up my pace.

           

Screeeeee

           

There was resistance at first. In a traditional British manner, thousands, perhaps millions of individuals expressed their distaste, yet did nothing to combat the removal of hard earned rights. Rationing brought about rioting, there was a brief armed rebellion, but torture, murder and starvation soon dampened the revolutionary spirit. It is a lesson the British Government learned well in its infancy and has practiced ever since. Where intimidation doesn’t work, there is always violence, there is always the snap of bone, the tear of muscle, the exposure of viscera, there is always murder.

 

Of course – and to a crazed theme-tune composed of the dull, wet thud of police baton on skull, the percussive spray of bullets into a kettled protest, the hiss of gas canisters – the governmental mouthpieces in the media still preached messages of calm, rationing was necessary because the land was needed to produce rape-seed or other ‘green’ bio-fuels for business and business would bring prosperity. Eventually. Meanwhile we starved, almost all of us. The wealth-creators were preserved – they needed to eat properly, they needed to travel, they needed warmth and clean water, because they would rescue us from our misery, from our hunger, from our endless labours. Until then, there was only toil and the tightening of belts. The endless tightening of belts. They took everything and like Heller’s Italian patriarch we chose to live on our knees rather than die on our feet. For that supplication and for every single one I have given since, I am ashamed. But alive. Just.

           

The Church played its normal role; it showed a humanitarian face to the world as its bank accounts swelled from the very actions they offered us the ‘comfort’ of the Lord as recompense for. They fed us bread bought with our labour and doled out as charity, they offered us the love of a Lord content to watch us and countless billions of the other lambs of God starve needlessly to death as purple-robed clerics broke bread and drank the wine of life with fraudsters, murderers, politicos and plutocrats. We thanked them for it and we offered praise to God, more sheep than Lamb. We thought only of survival, so divorced had we become from our species that our lives and those of those closest to us had taken precedence over all else and so all suffered, all starved – all but a few. We inconsequentials found out to our cost what value our masters both here on earth and in heaven had placed on our lives, it was not high.

           

Screeeeee

           

I stumble.

           

Screeeeee

           

I feel a familiar pain as the skin on both of my knees and on the heels of both hands splits and begins to lazily spill my sluggish ichor onto the dusty ground. I can see my sector’s feeding pen, yet rather than propel me on, the condition of my mind and body compels me to see the very proximity of my destination as confirmation of the unfairness of my existence. I will die here in the dirt such a short distance from my goal. I would weep if I were able. Instead I begin to crawl, removing yet more of the papery skin from my legs and hands, by the time I reach the crowd that awaits the drawing back of the electrified gates I cannot see properly for the pain, but I hear them begin to open, hear the relieved sighs of those inconsequentials that have made it back today – or those that did not leave – and I know that my prayers have been answered.

           

We must beg our bread. We must beg our bread. Hallelujah.