that perhaps the enjoyment they seemed to possess wasn’t how they expressed their social responsibility at all.
It was all hatred; I could see it, suddenly, moving through the bones of their faces like a pulsing thing, simmering around their jaws and only occasionally reaching their eyes. Hatred, hatred, hatred; they could hate on this one day, hate with all the passion that they couldn’t use to love.
It wasn’t a means of bringing people together, it wasn’t unity in a democratic spirit; it wasn’t one man, one vote; it was a wedge, it was a splinter in the earth, it was the Mychandra of nationality.
The North fought the South; England fought Scotland; Wales; Ireland – everything hated itself and each other and all the people that made it what it was. It was Red against Blue against Yellow against Green against Orange against Britannica Purple; the royalty of the common man, the idiot, the racist, the fascist. I could understand it though, in that moment; failed education, control, thought-murder, the rape of personality. I could have howled, I could have stood up and recited poetry, if I had known any of the top of my head – I could have recited a line or two of more than a dozen, but nothing else.
I tried to imagine what it would be like if the person, the real person – the man in the middle of that crowd with the beer belly and the patched beard around his half-broken teeth, or that woman with the tired eyes from working impossible night shifts – had any actual say over the country. What would it be like, I imagined, if a politician agreed with the people they represented? Equality would be gone; it would all be self-obsession.
It clicked then, there; politics kept those who might do damage, those who had beliefs, those who thought and acted on their thoughts, out of any kind of power. It was, simply, a way for us to hate each other; it was the colour-coding of opinions, like children, like categorisation. It was a monstrous thing; it was a hideous standard to hold oneself to – it was the revolting manifestation of belief, of personality. It was stereotype and acting and the motion of turning oneself into a ball, a ball of the soul; a ball that they wrapped and choked and tightened and hid deep within themselves.
I watched the crowd, and tried to guess the few that would for something other than Labour; I tried to guess at the Britannica supporters; imagined that all the people in ties were Tories; that all the women with garishly coloured hair were Greens. I didn’t even know who the Labour candidate was, and I was going to vote for them.
What were those people, but weapons to be used against each other and against themselves – emotions to play like the lingering ghosts of piano keys? It didn’t matter how they voted, not really; it didn’t matter that the cat’s universe was not the universe of the ant-hill. The libertarians, the educated, the dishonest, the dying embers of the proles, the fierce greed of the human; they weren’t real, they were veneers, dentures of personality, supplementations to flesh and muscle and nothing else.
This liberty of theirs, of ours; what was it? An outmoded concept – just another form of currency to be traded away in exchange for entertainment, for something to swallow up the time we couldn’t devote to something else; for the latest media designed to promote the impossible search for liberty, the triumph of morality and personality over everything! I could have howled or cried or taken a hammer to the great, mocking face of Wigan.
The knowledge, the desire for freedom – one had to sacrifice it, completely, in order to achieve the desire for it! Liberty is a commodity, given value when it is threatened! Oh, and those voters – monitored, controlled, examined; nothing but nothing, lambs to be fed into the great maw of spinning blades; lambs with opposable thumbs and pens and crosses to mute personality – repetitive, unique studies of rebellion against the very idea of freedom!
The heat was affecting me, I knew. The Mychandra accelerated and, when I looked down, my knees were shuddering to themselves – I couldn’t feel them. It was like watching a recording of myself, and I almost believed that I could feel, touch, smell, taste; hear the signals that my eyes were proclaiming. My body was trying to remember what it was like to be alive. It was trying to trick me and tell me that I existed, that I was alive; that my thoughts were the things that defined me.
A young woman, with a shock of red hair, emerged from the booth nearest to me and, as she walked away from the queue, I saw her lips stretch into a relieved smile that was almost alluring in its obscenity. As she walked away, I hated her; I hated her as she vanished into the stagnant heat of the afternoon; as she vanished into the needle-warmth of the town.
Her freedom, I thought, was an established thing, regimented; her duty to liberty had been discharged, and she could spend her time doing exactly as she liked. Her freedom was a panic and a schedule and biology and it occurred to me that she wasn’t free at all. She was fortunate; she had the chance to be free, just like we all did, and we sacrificed our freedom for comfort and the illusion of freedom.
We had to work, I told myself, and we could walk; we could enter and leave a nation as we pleased - so long as we paid for the privilege - we could waste our evenings as we chose – so long as we wasted them – we could buy whatever we wanted – so long as we could afford it – and we had the impossible right to believe in what we wanted; we could follow what gods, heroes, demons and villains we desired, just so long as we followed; so long as we announced to the world that this, this thing here, this is greater than me and I an inferior and I will do as I am told and forgive me, forgive me for my imperfections!
We even had the freedom of thought! Willingly given to us; we had the freedom to vote, to consider the benefits of this society or that, this community or that.
‘What greater poison could there be?’
Yes! Yes; what more effective paralytic could have been left in the water supply? What stronger blockade could there be to true freedom than the potential for freedom, than a blank canvas of a life spreading out before you, than an empty paper and a full pen and the adoring crowd just waiting for the first lines of genius to spill from your lips?
And what would that work of art be when we had nothing to see – a cross on a piece of ballot paper. Perhaps that was why we threw our loyalty behind a single thing, behind a leader, a party, a brand; each one a rejection of freedom, each one a desire for dictatorship, for something to secretly rebel against and revel in; the desire to be seen as an ambassador for a single thing, a solid entity; to prove to ourselves that we had value, that our opinions, that our support matters.
The only thing left, in the end, was the ability to reject our freedom as an expression of our freedom; to catch the 7:45 bus to work every morning, to spend an hour commuting on the train, to smile at work and lock the door and fall asleep with the television still playing and staring at the social media of people we’d never met and dreaming of their lives instead of our own.
There could be no freedom, no real freedom, whilst we were allowed to be free.
Perhaps, in the end – and the thought came hammering upon me like the responsibility of voting, or partaking – all we desired was the ability and the freedom to hate each other. Unequivocally. Unhampered by morality. Unchained by law. Not required to give reason. Would my illness, making war within my chest, not manifest its hatred at these people, if it had the chance? Would Victoria, with her angel wings and her beauty, not hate those who were less or more or the same as her, if given the chance, with no rebuttal?
The queue had cleared a little by then. The main rush had still to come, as people finished work and came from all across the town, like rats or children allured by the sound of a hornpipe. Most of the unemployed, the night-workers and the self-employed were done, home or on their way home or getting drunk with their friends and pretending to know a thing about foreign policy, pretending to know that they had a certain fix to impossible problems.
Tonight, I remember thinking, the town will cry with immigration.
And something snapped; in my leg, in my throat, in my chest, behind my eyes; it snapped through my
entire body like my skeleton had crumpled in on itself. And the snap was a decision, a decision that didn’t mean a fucking thing.
I wasn’t going to vote; I wouldn’t vote; I didn’t vote.
I refused to play a part in it; to partake in any of it, that circus of hatred, because I am a humanist, however secretly. At the end of it all, when the early hours of the morning crawled across the sky; when the papers were counted and democracy was fashionable and the fascism stood triumphant – the fascism of blue, or red, or purple stood triumphant – I would still love my fellows. I would love all women and all men and all children; I would clasp the very concept of humanity to my breast and sing its praises as it dug its teeth into the flesh of my throat. The young and the old, the black and the white and the rich and the poor; the freemen and the plutocrats, the capitalists and the communists and the prisoners behind their bars – the pregnant teenagers and their rapists, the axe-murderers and the nurses stealing from their patient’s homes, the politicians and the jobcentre employee and the little children in their incubators, the immigrants clustered in modern concentration camps beside the sea and the queen with her fat, wrinkled throat.
And I will