Perdition

By Ian D. Hall

April…

The children loved to watch a hanging in the park; it was free entertainment after all, and the increasing noise, the chanting of the adults, their parents, their uncles and aunts, and occasional grandparent, meant that they were observing the ritual, the convention, with strict, but glorious observance.

The old man leaned back on the faded grey slats of the park bench and smiled. He too enjoyed a hanging, a public display of society retribution. He relished the moment when the world would see the person on display for what they were; traitors to the cause, murderers, thieves, butchers, stealers of time, child abusers, rapists, radicals, thinkers, mutineers, the dying breed of activists, die hard fanatics, soft in the mind (as he was apt to call them), revolutionaries, the green guard brigade (although there hadn’t been one of those in London since…when exactly) and some children as well.

He didn’t like to see the children hang, it meant failure on the dream, the proposal that had been handed down, the doctrine that had meant to save the country from itself when the first bombs rained down from the dark sky on a cold, unfriendly September night in 1953.

He didn’t like to see children hang. It didn’t stop him from ordering it to happen if the punishment was necessary to keep the peace, to keep the country safe.

Children were at the heart of it, they had to be. The old were set in their ways, they remembered what it was like before the bombs dropped the first time on British soil, when Zeppelins appeared over the east coast of England, the Norfolk town of Great Yarmouth becoming one of the first towns in the country to suffer what would be a seemingly constant barrage of arial dominance.

The older you were the more likely you were to remember the government embarrassment of the First World War, then the nightly bombing raids by the Nazis in the industrial heartlands of the U.K., the knowledge that when you went to bed at night you might never wake again as the East End burned, as Birmingham became a polluted smoking cinder, as Liverpool endured as it was almost wiped out, as Glasgow suffered, the older you were the more you remembered. Then came the surge, the invasion.

The old man watched a group of children, no more than five years old, tugging at the legs of one of the men they had watched being hanged that morning. He smiled, but it wasn’t the broad beam he had given in the past, a smile he reserved for a memory, of sailing in the open waters of the channel in his pride and joy “Dreamboat Annie”, in the days before nationalism wore a black armband and a symbol corrupted from a peaceful people, before the rumours of mass extermination, this was a smile for the cameras, of those he had placed the welfare of the country in.

Those bombs that fell during what he remembered as the Blitz should have been the final ones to fall; but that moment of blinding light seen on the horizon, the rumble of fierce Devil damned anger that felt as though it upturned the land, turning everything around the epicentre of the explosion to ash white, desolate, burned to a crisp. Nobody spoke the name of the town anymore, nobody, as far as he knew even remembered the destruction, the true extent of the horror that took place there; the first practical example of being able to alter the narrative to suit the message.

There had been other bombs dropped, September 1953 saw the world shrouded in such moments of madness, a brief but violent end for many across the various continents, across countries that seemed to no longer exist except as strategic outposts against an enemy of convenience. Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Marseille, Hamburg, Rio, Buenos Aires, Tehran, Sydney, names now all but forgotten, even Leeds was only partially remembered by those with long memories or who saw the unadulterated records, of which there was so few now.

The children, it had all been achieved with the children in mind. Minds that were malleable were the ones that were easiest to control, as a colleague once noted, it didn’t even have to be all the children, for most would follow suit if you were able to pinpoint the natural leader in a group, instruct that one child, develop it enough to be an unquestioning member of the state, and the rest would naturally follow. All children want to be part of a gang, to be liked and loved by their peers, and those that don’t, well they were easily labelled as misfits, eccentric, odd, creatures displaying nonconformist attachments…psychopaths.

Spread a rumour about a child, get the pack to turn on them by suggesting they were somehow a danger to the collective whole, that by being their friend they were placing themselves in the firing line of being alienated, and then watch them become an outcast, watch them become solitary, become unsociable, and then the crux of the matter, observe as they either join the outcasts of society, or spread the fear that they are part of another insurgence of hate against the system that has kept the nation safe.

It was roughly eighty-twenty in favour of the outsider rather than the potential anarchist, that’s what the internal studies showed in the New York City laboratories, and as part of the informal group that sent those deemed to be more on the extreme wing of society to the camps outside of Tamworth, Taunton, and Inverness, the old man had considered himself a reasonable expert on picking up on the signs and tendencies of the child that threatened the harmony of the nation.

The group of children that surrounded the slow swinging hung bodies on the wooden scaffold had grown larger, at least ten now were taking turns to push each of the three bodies back and forth as one might push a younger sibling as they attempt the swings down the park for the first time.

Swings…nobody, certainly no child, knew what a swing was today.

Ten children, mostly boys, but a couple of girls thrown in for good measure, could be seen laughing as they pushed with even greater venom and hate on their faces. They had been conditioned to see the hanged as lesser people, whatever their crime, they were damned, and they deserved to be seen as such by the children more than ever.

The hanged, at least they had a final face to show the world. There were some that just disappeared without a trace, whose very existence was wiped clean, erased, eradicated as if they had been caught in the white heat of the atomic bomb that made Leeds uninhabitable; they simply had never been.

Ten children, at least two of them could, would show anti-social tendencies within a couple of years. The old man studied them closely and picked out three that might be worth remarking to another concerned ear that they required a closer eye upon. One of the girls, no more than seven or eight years of age showed sympathy, a trace of empathy as she pushed one of the bodies back and forth with the other girl. Two of the boys were taking a fair amount of interest in the anatomy of one of the other dead men, poking the stiffening body with a couple of pointed sharp sticks, jabbing it, puncturing the torso to the extent that the innards started to fall out onto the stone and gravel below.

Still, they laughed. He secretly enjoyed the sound of children laughing so cruelly. It never lasted. Soon they would be like the rest, afraid, fearful, their minds broken, and the result, peace.

The girl would have to be watched, such air of compassion, it troubled the old man. The two boys, he thought as he put his hands on his knees and rubbed them against the rough fabric of his trousers, they showed promise. There was special place for boys like that. He would find out their names, they seemed the type that could be developed, that would not be averse to be part of the system, to be the blunt force the nation needed.

In the distance the sound of a forgotten church bell rang out, drowning out the children’s laughter, splintering the air. A look of contempt crossed the old man’s face. He had not managed to have the church completely disbanded, stifled – yes, censored – absolutely, but not quite neutered, not dead. The bells were only heard in times when the nation needed to understand there was a still a threat, the clergy, those that could show their loyalty, were deemed necessary to give the populace the comfort they needed, but they did so knowing that the old days, the bad days of secrets held in spiritual confidentiality were no longer tolerated. Yet, the church bells ringing out, even if was the time, bothered him.

There were to be no secrets, except those held by the state, the body and mind belonged to the state, therefore the state was the holder of all facts.

He watched the children become bored, slowly peel off, perhaps mindful of the time, there were things to do, learning to absorb. Time for a hanging was over, the public mood sated for another day, and there was always another day when a traitor could be executed, another day when a murderer could be marched up to the steps of the public scaffold, another day when a secret was revealed and aired for the anger of the local populace, dangling on the end of a rope, kicking out, struggling against hope; unless of course they were lucky and their neck snapped, but that then led to tempers being frayed, the public, especially the children, being denied their entertainment.

Football kept them interested and tribal; pubs kept them docile; games of cribbage kept their mind ticking enough to believe that they had reason; but a hanging that was spectacle, it was theatre, it was pantomime for the masses…and how they barrack and cheer in their droves.

When the last of the children had departed the scene, he removed himself from the bench and wandered with purpose across the scorched earth, the rubble and remnants of another war, and at one time had been an allotment, a playground, a football pitch, a cricket field, he didn’t know and didn’t care enough to remind himself to look it up later in his office, and found himself looking up at the strangled faces of the men the nation had put to death.

He wondered if they still used capital punishment elsewhere. The valued films he had seen, the modern reconnaissance gathered by loyalists in the field suggested they did, but they were scratchy at best, not conclusive. No matter, the truth was only what the nation to hear and they, at his direction, had long been able to film the truth themselves and show it on the screens for all to see.

He had known two of the hanged men, one personally, one through various colleagues, had never been in the same room as him but had learned enough that his presence could not be tolerated as he advocated a change of tack in the ongoing silent war. The other, the third man staring down at him, his tongue hanging at the side of his mouth as though he was catching the trail of gravy that had slipped out whilst chewing on a piece of gristle, he had never met, never known, never found anyone who could identify him; he was just an unknown, a blip in the machine.

But someone had to be up there to make the truth become fact, so why not someone who created no waves, whose thoughts were perhaps as pliable anyone’s. It served its purpose.

To the populace the truth mattered and hadn’t always made sure that they heard what they needed to hear, the official response to traitorous allegations that the food shortages were orchestrated, that outbreaks of illness and disease were clamped down less they worried the man playing crib, the woman who signed the documents in Truro, the young girl learning her history.

He allowed himself the pleasure of a fleeting smile, a rare commodity in the world.

“You have served your purpose my unknown friend,” he whispered to himself, mindful that even he was not above the law.

His gaze naturally wandered from right to left, from the unknown life to the disaster in human form that was Civet, then to his former friend, the once leading light in thought and planning, Chemlinsky.

There were others of course, some had escaped across the water, some had been shot in the back of the head, some disposed of ignominiously, the feral pigs in the forest making short work of anything that came their way; but none had had angered the old man as much as Chemlinsky.

In other times, he would have given Chemlinsky a choice, a true death for a patriot. A firing squad on the hill overlooking the once proud majesty of The Tower of London, now known as Rehabilitation Centre Number One, or a beheading outside of his state apartment in Reigate. Hell, at one time, when he was younger and more forgiving of lapses of judgement, he would have turned a blind eye, allowed the man to escape, to take his chance across the water as so many others had done, and let him pine for his home every day; to let him suffer in the silence of non-existence.

That was then, and what Chemlinsky had done was unforgivable, and he wanted to see him suffer in a wholly different way, down amongst the sneering faces of those who were ignorant of what he had achieved, of those who didn’t care enough as long as they saw the dawn of the next morning and if they could scream on a Saturday afternoon, pitiful words of division and hate.

The old man felt concerned enough to look around him, to make sure he wasn’t being watched himself. Not that it mattered, no machine could pick up his words at this distance, but it never paid to take what he knew for granted.

“Why did you have to lie, old friend. If you had told me the truth, if you had shown me the honesty, I once shared with you, I could have made sure you got away; I would have done that much for you. If you were having doubts I would have understood, a war without misgiving is unnatural when you must think for forty million people.”

He allowed himself a small gesture with his hand, a slight wave as if he was indicating the presence of openness surrounding him. “No one here cared to even learn your name. I watched them; I studied their faces as your name was read aloud from the charge sheet; they didn’t care. They will go home, they will go back to their jobs, they will talk with their wives and husbands tonight and do you know what, you will just be an anecdote, a one-line expression of discussion before the inevitable of the day envelops them. You became nothing, and you deserved much more than that.”

He kept his head bowed as he spoke, the least he could in the moment was to keep his mouth from being seen, from his lips betraying him beyond the necessity as act of silent revulsion against the man to whom was now nothing but a hunk of meat ready for the unmarked grave he had allowed destiny to dig for him.

After he spoke, he fell into a moody quiet, a solitude, a sense of aggressive loneliness raged in his stomach, he hoped it wasn’t a sign of anything that might eventually kill him, he didn’t have the time for anyone in the health department to tell him that he had only a short time to live. Not that they would have put it like that of course, too sentimental, too respectful, outlawed modes of expression. Just a simple explanation, a clarification of the final wishes, and then the wait till it was over. Sickness didn’t exist, it could not be allowed to be, you were either well, or you were dead.

He felt in his coat pocket and pulled out a small plate tin hipflask. His fathers. You couldn’t buy these anymore except in some of the more salubrious parts of the city’s narrow streets where the thieves fenced the heirlooms long since abandoned by their owners or confiscated by the blank faces. The old man had managed to keep hold of his, passed down from his father, a relic of the war in which he had served as Captain during the Battle of Passchendaele. Nobody knew what that was now, history had been re-written several times, and only rumour kept it alive in the back of the minds of those who resisted complete assurance of faith.

He unscrewed the cap, raised the hipflask to his lips, and before he tasted a drop of whisky, no gin for him, one of the hidden perks of his position was that he didn’t have to slowly poison himself by drinking that foul tasting gut rot, he gave thanks to Chemlinsky, silently, wordlessly, like the ghost he was sentencing the dead man to become; a silent vessel whose truth would lay underground in a dirt pit, perhaps somewhere on the outskirts of what had been known as Leeds, along with his ashes.

He took one small gulp, and then replaced the metal screw cap so that it gripped to the body of the hipflask tightly.

In the distance the same church bell rang out twelve times. He had been lost in thought so long that time had been wasted. If challenged he could just show them his identification and ask them to produce their own, but he doubted now that anyone would, after all he was where time only mattered in memory.

“Where did it go, Aaron? Where did Time find itself once we took it apart. Was it when the bomb destroyed Colchester, was it when Paris was looted, when Berlin was sacked by both sides, when much of Africa and the Middle East was allowed to rot, or when we saw Los Angeles burn as thousands of troops died defending the border? What was the moment of no return, when we decided we had to make sure war kept us safe?”

The dead man didn’t answer, he just swung slightly as a breeze caught him and pushed dust from the floor along, covering the old man’s shoes.

Ian D. Hall