The Carhullan Army

the work that brought no gain. And I had begun to despise Andrew.
    It hadn’t always been that way between us. We had been like-minded once, two feisty students, full of the sense that things could be better, that the worst could be prevented. We had been at college together in the Solway City. I remember seeing him in the Union bar, strong-featured, attractive I thought. Both our flats had been flooded when the new estuary defences failed, and we were caught up in the first of the big insurance scandals, put in temporary housing, close to each other. It had seemed symmetry enough to bring us together. My father had died shortly after and Andrew had helped me arrange the funeral. It had been a relief to have him take my hand and console me. We talked of going to Scotland, making a life there, but in the end we moved back to Rith. I had loved him then, and I leant on him in the years that followed.
    As the rolling conflicts began abroad, and the recession bit at home, I’d taken comfort in venting my half-formed opinions to him, and hearing them echoed fully by his own. We seemed united by our disappointment, our anger, and our distrust of the reinvented Forward Party, who had taken office under the banner of reform, and had then signed the Coalition Oil Treaty. The failure of international policy was so clear. The war was geopolitical. It was not ours to fight. We had the technology to disengage from our allies abroad, but not the will to invest.
    We had protested. We’d travelled to London and rallied at Parliament; the crowds were so large people were crushed and the gathering was broken up with tear gas. The troops continued to be dispatched. Every day along the pipelines soldiers were blown apart. More were sent. Andrew said it would probably go on for years, and if he were called up to serve he would refuse. If we had known what was coming we would have left the country then. Though I don’t know where we would have gone.
    As I ate fish out of the can in the abandoned village, I remembered us sitting on the Beacon Hill. The dark red of Andrew’s hair had caught the final rays of sunlight. His head had blazed as he talked and his eyes were alight with frustration. It was the night the prime minister had made his final address and stepped down. Within a year of taking office the Forward Party had split, and from the ashes of its new image old doctrines had risen. But something was different, I knew, something was terribly wrong. There was a feeling of unsettlement around the town, as if the world was turning quicker on its axis, as if it was slightly out of control. Andrew’s brow was furrowed. He looked like a man twice his age. ‘They’ve signed us up for dependency and bankruptcy,’ he said, tossing a stone hard into the air and watching it fall towards the bushes on the slopes. ‘And now Powell’s got control of the party there’s no way out. The man is dangerous. He’s one of the old guard. He’s power hungry, and he’s a bigot.’
    Back then he had seemed unafraid, undaunted by the gravity of approaching disaster, even when the market crashed, businesses began to go bust, and jobs were lost, even as the country began to stagger towards collapse. I would listen to him seethe about all that was going on, and his fury was almost tactile, almost mine. I was young. I looked to him for reason, for a voice. He bristled at each new measure the government put in place, blamed them for everything: the widening of the conflict abroad, the new fronts in China and Venezuela, the ruthlessness of the banks, blackouts, deportations, empty supermarkets, and hospital closures. He resented the extreme measures put in place to administer the crisis. The ten-year recovery plan was just a contrivance to keep people in check, he said, and decoy their attention. Most of all he hated the creation of the military police force. It was un-British. The Authority was an affront to the rights of the public.
    When the general elections were suspended, all hell broke loose. He told me to stay home, and went out on the street with a group of local men. He threw rocks at council windows, surged up towards the civic offices in the castle, and took a riot stick in his lower back. The monitors fired live rounds into the crowd. Five people were killed. It was the same in the other towns and cities. Nobody stood a chance.
    Andrew came home and peeled off his shirt so I could see the lesion. I remember putting my fingers gently on