14
"Well, my son, I don't think all of this will make sense to you. Certainly, parts of it still escapes me, but I will tell it to you, because you have that same look your father always had, because the wise, whoever they are, say: the past is the guiding star to the future, but as for the present, we are all lost.
"London was ailing, sick on something that was hard to pinpoint, hard to diagnose. Not just London, really. The country, the continent, the West was, is, trying to fight the loss of their ideals. I can't tell you why exactly. The kings of the past would have torn their nations apart for the knowledge and power in the average home, but still people were not happy, not like they should have been. Divorces were up and up, people wondered if love in the romantic sense was dead or ever existed. We focused our blame outward to other people, or countries, so we wouldn't have to look inwardly. Education was unwanted because people began to realize that the educated were still not happy. And worst of all to the minds of many, the educated were not necessarily rich.
"Twenty years ago, with London in the midst of a worrying decay, I moved to England. To the outside, near where you grew up. At the time I thought it was a wonderful place. I was fleeing from East Africa, from the Ogaden—a place people like to forget. I was one of the last granted asylum into the country, and at the time felt I was blessed. I found a job, cleaning in the night at a primary school. It was deadening work and I did not like it, but I stayed because there was little else and because my mother taught me that pride was the enemy of good men and women.
"I met your father in the winter of my second year when the weather was turning my enthusiasm into loneliness. The winter chilled me to the bone it was so damp. I waited at the bus stop closest to my apartment. I remember I was longing to go back to Africa—to anywhere warm—when he sat down beside me. We began talking of Africa. We took the same bus. He asked me for my phone number and we continued to see each other and fell very much in love.
"Our romance was a short one through little fault of our own, but I love the simple times we shared together. Unlike myself, your father had a large family that lived in England and their kindness reminded me of just how wonderful people can be—especially after a time when the pangs of a solitary existence showed me just how painful life led alone can be.
"His parents lived in a small three room apartment. I still remember cooking with your grandmother in that tiny kitchen. It was a dangerous task. At first we couldn't move without upsetting each other. Your father often said we would have to become friends or else neither of us would survive to see dinner. The two of us cooked often, for all the family: aunts, uncles, and their children, and Sefu's brothers, so much for so many that they began to insist we cook together, saying one person is sparse but the two of us were a feast.
Your father and I married late in the year and we were so happy for the rest of it. The happiness was sweet but never lasted. The sickness of the country prevented it. The politics shifted again like sandstorms, hiding old problems with new ones.
London’s elite was sick to death of the people’s subconscious cries for the return of former glory and began a plan to outpace even the quicksilver advances of the East and among themselves put forward a plan to build the towers and, as they said at the time, charter a metropolis. The scale was unbelievable and perhaps that was the part people loved. It felt like the imagination of the world combined to create the magnificent buildings. There are, as you know, six of them, the sixth and final will finish construction soon. Each one glides into the clouds and looks like a god forged a gargantuan flower of glass and steel. Each is a different height, but even the smallest is more than a mile high and miles wide at the base.
"The idea electrified the air in England. People's sluggish minds began to feel excitement again, the media set the idea ablaze like a beacon, the politicians pledged their support, and the most powerful businesses looked for involvement. Even I felt a little stir for the project. But that was long ago. The buildings are beautiful, but the people behind them are evil.
"The government bought the plots—the project was so enormous and so popular that government subsidy was neither politically dangerous nor unsafe—and resold them to the conglomerate that formed specifically to build the towers. Mollec, I think it was called. Construction began on the second and third before the first even neared completion.
"The excitement built into frenzy and then fear when Villa 1, only months from finished, didn't have enough inhabitants lined up. Fear of failure dragged the mood of the nation from ecstatic anticipation into a gloomy anger. People turned on the elites—those behind the project, those in the government who had made their support public. Everyone wanted to live in the villas, but few could afford to and people looked in fury for the government to fix the problem. The government, despite future debt, promised to further subsidize and incentivize the project.
"A week of silence and public panic followed before the plan that would ruin our lives was unveiled.
"The Sunday headlines read that a new bill had been passed on the floors of Parliament, one that no one had known of before its approval, and few members of the public understood. None of us had thought it would thrust our neighborhoods into danger and degeneration, but we found out before long.
"I'll do my best to explain it to you, but it is difficult for me because no one knows everything in it, no one, not even your father, understood it all.
"They called it the Within Reach Act.
"In order to fix the problem, one of the articles of the bill directly affected the prices of properties in the towers and made them much more affordable. Of course, never so much so that our family might live there, but the wealthy and upper middle class of central London suddenly found that they might with government help move to a much nicer home for less than they paid previously.
"The result was just what you might expect; within days newly empowered consumers snapped up Villa 1's mass of spaces with a carnivorous delight. Within a month the waiting lists for both Villas 1 and 2 were also full.
"The bill was an instant success in the public eye. England's hallowed project would restore the country's glory once again. But there was more to the bill than simply giving money to real estate buyers.
"The massive success of Villa 1's sales left an enormous vacuum in the housing market in central London, or London Proper. And from this seemingly irrelevant detail arose the second and more malicious part of the Within Reach Act: this article outlined areas on the outside of London and thrust the prices of all estates up nearly eightfold because of taxes. It was at first the least noted part of the WRA but soon the unrest it created would turn the public eye toward it, and toward us. These areas later became known as the Outskirts.
"People were furious at first, but only people who it affected directly. We protested before parliament, shouting our lungs out against the walls, but nothing happened; no one came outside, no one acknowledged our troubles except as a nuisance. Eventually, we could no longer justify our efforts, and went back to work, making vows to return every weekend, every day off until they heard our voices.
"Meanwhile, the Outskirts plummeted from grace. The rich and middle class just moved into the center city—into the Villas or into the vacancies left by those who moved into the Villas. Having jobs, money and history, they found little to stand in their way.
"Things were not so easy for us, my son. Your father and I were poor, very poor. What money we had usually bought food for ourselves and Sefu's family. Still we wanted to move. We searched for jobs that might allow us the freedom to leave but we were frustrated again and again.
"Our neighborhood decayed all around us as people left. The diaspora closed shops, stores, consolidated schools. The streets became strangely clean in the beginning, perhaps because street sweepers were like us, too poor to move, but eventually money for all social benefit programs dried up as well and dust and rubbish began to collect like vultures scenting death. The population went from perhaps millions to a few thousand in only two years.
"Into this world your were born.
"I think it was one month to your birth; a day when I could barely walk for my huge belly, when I heard your father and his younger brother Jacob arguing in the next room. I had never seen the two quarrel, but their yells practically shook the paint from our walls and when I hobbled into the kitchen I could see they were close to blows. When they saw me, both stopped and your Uncle Hadi stalked out and slammed the door behind him and left us alone with your father. He still looked furious, but at the time would not tell me why.
"Despite all our protests in the capital and our efforts to change our situation, little had happened in the past six months. People stopped leaving, but only because all those who could move already had. The Outskirts were now a joke to the rest of England—how could a community so close to the wealth of London Proper languish in such poverty? They all asked, how could they be so backward? Sister poverty and her brother crime stalked our streets and made us unsafe. While some on the outside worried for us and tried to aid us, others only laughed at our misfortune because it was not their own.
"Your father told me of his brother's plan to save our community and I immediately understood why he was so angry.
He said his brother had decided to begin policing the community himself and, in the wake of the government’s almost complete withdrawal from the area, attempted to take leadership over the Outskirts with the help of his many friends. It seemed to us a noble idea that was destined for failure—one that would certainly draw the attention of the government. Sefu said his brother wanted a new country within a country and had ideas for agriculture, protection and housing that might make life manageable for the few remaining in the Outskirts.
"Your father was against the idea. He worried that his brother might find himself in a situation that would encourage him to fight with the wind.
"'They will be made into pawns,' he said, ‘and we will all suffer for it.'
"We didn't see Hadi for a long time after that, but we heard of some of his exploits from family and friends. He'd begun to organize his friends into groups. Some cultivated vegetables in allotments and parks near the heart of the Outskirts, others patrolled the streets wearing green shirts, checking on residents, informing them of the new system of edicts—assuring in kindly words that they needn't pledge their allegiance. Only this: if they would lend a hand, ten hands would be lent to them. We prayed for their efforts, and your father put aside his pride and began volunteering as a farmer in a park near our home.
"Meanwhile the collective eye of Briton maintained its concentration on our neighborhood. People all over the world began shouting to the government on our behalf. The pendulum of public favor began to sway in our direction. We had hope that we might accomplish something, against all the odds.
"What country could accept such challenges to it's rule of law without a word? No government in the world would abandon part of its territory, even if that territory was so unwanted and troublesome as the Outskirts; police began to invade the borders of the territory. They locked up green shirts for supplanting the law of the land. They expelled farmers from parks and unbought allotments. They searched for the leader of the organization, who might have been Hadi, but all anyone told them was that there was no leader, because there was no organization.
"Public opinion in our favor grew and grew until one day a story was printed throughout the new media. I can still remember the headline: “Outskirts Massacre: Policeman Left for Dead, Wife and Children Murdered.” Just like that, the empathetic eyes of England glazed over into a hardened stare—we had lost the fight.
"It was something that at the time I hadn't understood. Now I know a terrible truth about this world. Fear is the world's motivator.
"Only a few days later the Proof of Property Act was passed into law. The reform bill pushed through under the guise of public security -to the appreciation of much of this idiot nation. It's a little confusing, my son, but the biggest measure of the bill created a new system for property tax—the tax on houses was now increased proportionately with the selling price of the house itself, after tax. And since the Within Reach Act had already tripled prices on houses in the Outskirts, too much for any of us to afford, most of us in the Outskirts were taxed more than any of London Proper's richest citizens. It was an attack, an attack on the mere idea that immigrants, laborers, and our like might make a new life for ourselves. It was about control.
"But that was not everything. The PoP act made it mandatory for every citizen and immigrant to carry a Proof of Property card on their person at all times or else they could be fined, imprisoned, or in some cases deported. And, naturally, if you didn't, or couldn't pay your taxes, then you would never receive a card. We were in effect made illegal.
"We, your father and I, Jacob, the family and most of the members of Hadi’s organization were lost, none of us owned any houses, none of us had paid rent in almost a year, even landlords had left the outskirts, knowing those left behind had no jobs and no money to pay the rent. Our electricity had been saved by your father’s foresight. He had bought a generator just before our lights shut off. At that moment, with no Proof of Property and no landlord to vouch for us, we became squatters.
"The trials of our lives only multiplied in the years after that. We ran and hid in every dark crevice. Like rats. We scavenged and stole and fought and fled and some died and the rest kept running until we thought like fools we were safe and then they would find us and we would run again.
"My son, you are a brilliant boy, so I'm sure you know that is not the whole story, but I am too weary of the story of my own misfortune. My throat is dry from using the language of stories, so I will tell you the rest another night."