Free If Then by Matthew De Abaitua Page B

here?”
    “What are you saying to me? What do you expect me to do about it?”
    “You’ve met the family. At the lido. Do you remember?”
    “No.”
    “It was last summer. We had a picnic. You bought us popcorn. Their boy, Euan, kicked a ball at you. He wanted to play.”
    “I don’t remember them,” he said.
    “Then there must be something wrong with you,” said Ruth.
    Through the window, an unharnessed horse loitered in the empty street. He wondered where the rider was. Ruth would not be receptive to him changing the subject. Snow was coming, and he anticipated waking up tomorrow to discover the horse and the town erased.
    “Do you think there is something wrong with me?” he asked.
    “I’m tired,” she said. “Is there something wrong with you?”
    “You are angry.”
    It took her a moment to master herself. “You told me anger could get me evicted.”
    “That’s just something I say to keep the peace. No one knows what makes a difference to eviction. Apart from the obvious. Do you remember Mr Farncombe? A debtor. And a bad heart. He clearly had to go. Do you remember how he chained himself to the radiator? I had pull the whole room apart.”
    “You remember Mr Farncombe, but not the Bowles?”
    “I remember all the evictions. It is a very vivid time for me. The adrenalin, the confrontation, the strangeness of being there but not being in control. I almost tore Farncombe in half because the Process hadn’t registered that, when I took hold of him, he was tied down.”
    “He might have considered that a mercy.”
    “Not at all. The douanier told me that Farncombe’s friends from Brighton came and got him. He’s holed up with them in an old hotel on the front. There is always life after eviction. The Bowles family will be fine. Somebody on the outside, some old friend or a lord who wants a young family on his land, will take them in.”
    “If it is so hospitable out there, why did Farncombe chain himself to the radiator? Did you ask yourself that?”
    “He was afraid of change.”
    “Should I tell Agnes not to be afraid?”
    “Tell her not to resist.”
    Ruth returned to her sewing machine. With one hand, she spun the mechanism and with the other, held the linen gown so that the needle completed the seam, and sealed off their conversation.
    No one is indispensable.
    His boss taught him that, a long time ago, when he first worked in an office. He never quite believed it, always felt there was something exceptional about his insight and his talent, right up until the point they dispensed with him, and then with his boss. He went on to teach business to students, or was it genetics? He was not nostalgic for the lost age of jobs; in retrospect, it seemed an arbitrary sorting mechanism for his class. They made nothing but money, and towards the end, not even that. He heard of a bank that fired all its clients because their algorithm could make more money without them. People ceased to be a vital component of the economic system. To call what happened next a collapse or a Seizure was to speak from an anthropic perspective. From the point of view of the financial instruments themselves, the system was thriving.
    The Seizure was a long time coming; like dementia, its progress was marked by mood changes, problems with reasoning and memory loss. The wobble, the General Strike, the crash, the recovery, the second crash, the collapse, the hope, the end of hope, the chaos and then Seizure: it lasted for so long that it was normal right up until it really wasn’t anymore . The government sold redundant regions of the nation for private development and he helped maintain order. An archipelago of prosperity arose. Islands within an island. He didn’t sleep much to begin with, kept awake by wine-deranged financial calculations at four in the morning, crazed escape plans, the rigmarole of anxiety. During sleep, the mind sorts through the flotsam and jetsam of the day to decide what is worth committing to