Free If Then by Matthew De Abaitua Page A

her parents and her little brother, Euan.
    “She’s ten years old!”
    “We can’t evict children!” Carla was beside herself.
    The vast thoughts and scattered images and sense of interconnectedness faded, and he came to in the garishly-coloured room, where he registered human stink and sweat quivering on moustache hairs. People. After the state of grace, he always felt mournful and misanthropic. They asked him what they should do about the child. Surely they could not follow normal eviction procedure. The town would never accept it. The Process had to be questioned. But there was no love in him for anyone and he just wanted to go home. Edith tried to detain him, but he shook her off and warned her away.
    James and Hector went outside onto the high street. The evening was cold and still, the street illuminated by high burning braziers. Alex Drown was waiting for them.
    “The soldier is a pacifist,” she said.
    “He said that he would not fight.”
    “You and Hector are part of an ongoing thought. We must think of him in terms of yourself, your connection to him, what the Process is trying to communicate through that contact between you and him.”
    “Under the influence of the implant, I saw images of the war.”
    “It’s coming,” she said.
    “Are you staying in Lewes tonight?” he asked.
    She shook her head.
    “I will walk back across the Downs.”
    “It’s five miles across dark country. You’re not afraid to be out there on your own?”
    She looked back at the town hall, as the ombudsmen filed out, and then up at him.
    “There’s plenty to be afraid of here, bailiff.”

6
    R uth resented making men’s clothes. She put her arms around James and took his chest measurement then withdrew when he returned the gesture. On her wrist, she wore a small cushion of pins, a sign that he should keep his distance, that she had no patience for him right now.
    The choral gowns of lamentation, a dozen hooded linen ghosts, hung in a line across the living room, their breasts rent during the last eviction and requiring repair. She inspected each gown in turn, and, with pins between her lips, made quick notes with a small pencil. It was the week before eviction and everyone had a job to do. The black silk and lace remained untouched in its transparent box.
    After James cleared away the lunch plates, Ruth went down to the communal kitchen to put in her loaves and check the stockpot. The kitchen in their house was small with only a firebox for cooking and an improvised vent that let in the cold. Narrow and with broken chipboard, the kitchen had been designed for heating up ready meals after a day at the office, for whipping up fairy cakes or grilling fish fingers, not for baking bread, preserving fruit, hanging game, fermenting cider, cultivating yoghurt, and all the other cooking techniques they employed.
    Sensing her annoyance, James boiled water upon the firebox and made tea from a hedgerow leaf bound in a small stained muslin sack. She drank a mouthful and gave the rest to Hector. She was cross. No, not cross. To describe her mood as cross would only annoy her more. She could not forgive him for the names that had appeared on the eviction list.
    “I know the Bowles family,” said Ruth.
    He said nothing.
    “Agnes is beautiful and bright and her brother, Euan, who is four, is blond and very serious. The family made sacrifices during the Seizure and accepted reallocated housing in Malling even though they owned a nice place in the centre of town. The father, Tom, built a wooden shelter at the school so that in the summer the children could have lessons outdoors. How will we survive if we evict a family like the Bowles? It makes no sense.”
    He was staring out of the window, drinking his tea.
    “What are you saying?”
    “The Process is supposed to create absolute fairness. But can you give me one good reason why the Bowles family are to be evicted whereas any number of frankly useless individuals are still