Assembly(8)

Wealth management, he smiles.

?

My grandfather brought his drill set. I’d bought two pairs of goggles. He laughed when I held one out for him. We took a photo, both of us dusty and smiling. My new shelves floating behind. He advised on other problems around the flat. My languishing plant – he said to cut the dying palm leaves away. Months later, it’s green and thriving.

?

Swish. The doctor leans forward and speaks soft. She says I’m strong, I’m a fighter. Says she can tell. I can’t just do nothing, that’s – that’s suicide. She tells me to be responsible. Think of my family. Make a choice.

Nothing is a choice.

But I don’t trust myself to say what I mean, so I just say I’m leaving. It’s time to get back to work. I look around for my things, I need to go.

Nothing is a choice.

And death is not a no-op. It has side effects. I think of the cashflows: the immediate-death scenario. It’s the tallest bar in the chart, a grab at money from years to come. A present valuation of me.

It won’t be beautiful – she’s warning now – it isn’t poetry. It won’t be what I imagine. Oh and I do know that, I know but – what do I care of beauty?

Nothing is a choice.

And I want it. I reach for my bag, then stand and turn. Unhook my coat from the door. She stands, too. Her face a creasing expression of concern and disapproval.

Listen, she says.

?

The train lurches forward again and I touch a hand to my chest. No incision, no pound of flesh – just a needle, a pinch. That was it. Then, the politely evasive phone call, the followup scheduled at my earliest convenience. Now they say an operation, weeks of downtime. Adjuvant therapy, after, possibly, radiation or – chemo, even. Make a choice. Untold disruption to my career.

The promotion.

These directives: listen, be quiet, do this, don’t do that. When does it end? And where has it got me? More, and more of the same. I am everything they told me to become. Not enough. A physical destruction, now, to match the mental. Dissect, poison, destroy this new malignant part of me. But there’s always something else: the next demand, the next criticism. This endless complying, attaining, exceeding – why?

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I don’t know which firm, specifically, the protests were targeting. I was a new grad back then, in crispy Primark shirts and soft M&S trousers. Excited, terrified, eager to work. The guards had cordoned off the building’s entrance with metal barriers. I pressed through the crowds; a mass of sandals, blonde dreadlocks and body odour. Their poster boards and voices jeered from all sides. Arms crossed, I kept my head down and walked quick, focused on the ground ahead. Some shouted as I showed my card. Security lifted aside the barrier to let me through.

Their eyes held. They watched me cross the divide and disappear through revolving doors.

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Let’s say: A boy grows up in a country manor. Attends a private preparatory school. Spends his weekends out in the barn with his father. Together they build a great, stone sundial. The boy, now a young man, achieves two E-grades at A-level, then travels to Jamaica to teach. His sun shadows cycle round and round and he himself winds up, up. Up until the boy, an old man now, is right up at the tippity-top of the political system. Buoyed by a wealth he’s never had to earn, never worked for. He’s never dealt in grubby compromise. And from this vantage, he points a finger – an old finger, the skin translucent, arm outstretched and wavering. He points it at you: The problem.

Always, the problem.

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The other day, a man called me a fucking n—r. A panhandler at Aldgate, big guy, came up too close, and trapped me – between him and the steep drop down to the tracks. He leaned right into my face and spat out those words. Then, laughing, he just walked away.

You don’t owe anything.

I pay my taxes, each year. Any money that was spent on me: education, healthcare, what – roads? I’ve paid it all back. And then some. Everything now is profit. I am what we’ve always been to the empire: pure, fucking profit. A natural resource to exploit and exploit, denigrate, and exploit. I don’t owe that boy. Or that man. Or those protestors, or the empire, the motherland, anything at all. I don’t owe it my next forty years. I don’t owe it my next fucking minute. What else is left to take? This is it, end of the line.

I am done.

?

There’s no time in October for more than peanut butter, traffic lights, and liberated slaves. It’s disorientating, prevents you from forming an identity. Living in a place you’re forever told to leave, without knowing, without knowledge. Without history.

After the war, the crumbling empire sent again for her colonial subjects. Not soldiers, this time, but nurses to carry a wavering NHS on their backs. Enoch Powell himself sailed upon Barbados and implored us, come. And so we came and built and mended and nursed; cooked and cleaned. We paid taxes, paid extortionate rent to the few landlords who would take us. We were hated. The National Front chased, burnt, stabbed, eradicated. Churchill set up task forces to get us out. Keep England White. Enoch, the once-intrepid recruiter, now warned of bloodied rivers if we didn’t leave. New laws were drawn up; our rights revoked.

Yet, some survived. And managed somehow, on meagre wages, to put a little aside. Eventually enough to move wife, husband and child from a rented room in a house shared by five families, to a two-up two-down all of their own. That they owned. And an ethic, a mindset, a drive was established then, that persists now. A relentless, uncompromising pursuit.