Free Resolution Way by Carl Neville

messages, the murderous hostility you will provoke if you will not suffer silently, if you have the audacity to protest the world, to suggest that the contentment of some is predicated on others being condemned.
    Well, she said with a smile as Ralph gently shook his head at her.
    OK, he said with a grudging sigh, a long drawn out, well …
    Object to anything and you will be playing the race card, have a chip on your shoulder, be obsessed, a racist yourself, a naïve, politically correct fantasist, a conspiracy theorist, a militant, a danger, an extremist, a failed woman, an irresponsible mother, someone who should put up and shut up, who should just leave if she doesn’t like it. Don’t you see? All your experience, everything you have seen, known, felt, read, discussed, understood, lived, is an illusion, the world as you have bitterly suffered it day-after-day does not and has never existed and for you to insist that it does will bring an almighty wrath down upon you.
    Do not speak. Exist only as much as we will allow you and no more. Be visible only when and only in the ways we command.
    Was it always like this? No, she doesn’t think so. It has got worse, surely since she was a girl. Perhaps back then she was just more shielded from it.
    And yet, it felt when she was younger that things were coming together, the backdrop of her life was the assumption that somehow differences were evaporating, that we were making progress, that by the time her daughter was ready to go to University the world would be transformed. She thought those raves, the music, the attitude prefigured something, a more joyful, accepting, pluralistic form of life that was coming that would somehow just spring forth from these experiments, this collective effort at dissolving the structures of the world. Was that naïve? Was that naivety a consequence of her own relative privilege, going to University, having parents who were teachers?
    As for Louise, well, no wonder Louise is so angry. Paula tries hard to be moderate and controlled but sometimes her own rage and despair are palpable, filling up that tiny flat. She imagines she can smell it, some acrid fumes that have come pouring off her, and she lights a perfumed candle, a gift from Joolzy she never imagined she’d use, to try and neutralise it.
    People comment on her strength, Penny said it to her once; you have absorbed blows that a lot of people never recover from. She knows that’s true; some people are wounded, disappointed, see their hopes crushed early on and never readjust, recover. Vernon was one of those, damaged just by the act of being launched into the world, like a ship with its hull breached, taking on water from day one.
    But you just keep on going, somehow, don’t you? Paula Adonor asks herself, looking at her face in the mirror in the morning as she cleans her teeth, wonders whether perhaps there isn’t something wrong with her, something pathological. To still be up and functioning – why hasn’t she been driven mad by it? People talk about how much she cares, but perhaps it’s that she hardly cares at all, and what drives her on, inures her, allows her to fight for justice is precisely a lack of compassion, an attachment to something more abstract than flesh and blood.
    Is it bad luck, is she cursed, or has she invited all this into her life. Has she needed this, disaster after disaster, to thrive, to live, to give her a sense of self, a mission?
    She remembers something Vernon liked to quote, she forgets who said it. Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. Or a curse, perhaps.
    She rolls over in bed and hears, she thinks, her daughter rolling over, restless too in her room, the walls in these old flats so thin, and Lee, mumbling and crying out in his room, locked away forever inside himself.
    She’s drifting off to sleep and moments return to her, swirling in, mingling and overlapping, a comforting confusion of place