Despite, or perhaps because of their wearying familiarity, the elements prove more of a drain on her still tender psyche. Katherine battles to her rented, cold water flat against the sullen drizzle and the relentless brown of the buildings and the dead battleship grey of the sky. Her stockings are laddered and her court shoes are still damp from the downpours three days before the unopposed invasion. All the way home, she can't remember if she smokes here. A newspaper poster of the newly crowned Queen peels from the wall above her bed. She presumes it's the Queen, the doesn't recognise the face at all and it seems bad form to ask. The damp conquors the ceiling, febrile continents of mould spread is strange configurations, like maps of the 16th century. She reads a Cosmopolitan from more than a world away and hides it under her mattress from herself. Her skin is smooth as a snake's in her sleep. Sometimes she feels like an Calcutta street hustler's cobra, she can't hear the music but on she dances just the same.
Over her lumpen valve radio self selected trades union officials welcome what they now coyly term 'recent developments'. The voices of others are strangely absent but entirely uncommented upon. She struggles in vain to find the light programme. She listens to dinner music from the south of France while she still can. The cinematograms in Leicester Square blare stirring martial music from their darkened lobbies. Mighty posters of gaunt but godlike workers, cast from bronze or hewn from granite, hang from Marble Arch, already tattered at the edges. The streams of refugees, heading for rumoured ships waiting on the Clyde and the Tyne, have run down to a trickle. Maps, printed several years before, instruct the remaining populace on the approved new names for their capital's landmarks. Due to overwhelming proletarian demand, apparently, nearly every prominent building, square and park is to be renamed after the same person, to avoid confusion perhaps. A sudden shortage of wood means the hangings are from dock cranes, six or ten at a time. Katherine fills in her reports dutifully, like a postcard from a South Coast holiday. The bells of St Pauls are lowered and smelted for busts of the new Praesidius. The last three rooks lie butchered in the tower's litter ruined grounds.
She's awoken by the drone of four engined bombers, blackening the sky like Passenger Pigeons. They drone across the grim horizon to land in barred airports in Belfast and Dublin. One by one they taxi in turn to their resting places, facing west across the Atlantic. Their rivets are rough as an old miner's hands. She wonders when Markov will turn up like a bad rouble. Alan the Weasel would be in his element, trading sour cabbage for widow's wedding rings. She leans down damp swollen sash windows and reads the letters dumped in the postbox next to her own. A mother's birthday letters to the last known address of a long lost son. When she goes out, to search unsuccessfully for sugar, for the first time anywhere the stray cats run scared.
Rumours abound. A destroyer, carrying the Royal Family to Canada, is presumed lost to unspecified submarine activity in the Irish sea. Loudspeaker vans alternately appeal for calm and demand spontaneous and heartfelt celebration. Members of the former cabinet and its shadow are retiring from public life for health reasons, or plunging through fourth floor plate glass windows, with metronomic regularity. The People's Emergency Committee issue patriotic orders that the straggle of strikers left picketing the ports are to be shot. The collapse of bread supplies is traced to the nefarious activities of the Americans and Jewish saboteurs. The New Times and People's Telegraph soldier on in 'changed circumstances' with much the same staff as before. Katherine cleans her anachronistically sleek sniper's rifle, her hair still uncomfortable in its blunt cut bob. She prefers it cropped short, as she'd worn it as a girl. She wonders at the heaviness of everything here, the spoons, the shoes, the door handles. She wonders if those who'd most stridently berated the niggling faults of democracy in their homeland still welcome its annhiliation quite as much as they'd hoped. Oxford and Cambridge are quiet as lambs. She feeds the sparrows everything she has and the little she steals and still they go hungry. Rascally cockney sparrows line up for their ration in silent, industrialised rows.
Sometimes the power of a gesture rests in its very futility. Her duty is clear even as her loyalties are blurring. She longs to be gone from here and staring at the sea, longs to stand cold and spray flecked and wind smacked and lonely and at one with the gulls and the sky. She is no English martyr. She is here to do a job, in this new worker's paradise, whatever job needs to be done. Whatever the calamity, however noxious or alien the system, there is never any shortage of quite ordinary chaps suddenly quite happy to betray, butcher or bury their neighbours. Already the statues are being erected. Already she confuses the Dear Leader's determined, if not handsome features, with her last glimpse of her father's face in her dreams.
Powdered egg and semolina, housewives queue for turnips after nine hours of work. Gangs of turned out dogs haunt the streets, baying till morning between the rumble of armoured cars. Katherine visits the National Portrait Museum and catches sight of herself, in sentimental pastoral garb, in 1736. Hudson had caught her eyes, the old fraud, and they stare back at her now but still she feels oddly insulted. There are blatant white gaps everywhere, the good stuff was packed on the first armoured trains back to Moscow. She washes her newly prim hands in a porcelain sink as heavy as fossils. The latest headlines warn against 'provocations' and 'stern measures' against the hooligan anti proletarian elements. The bathroom ceiling drips steadily, long after the rain. Plans for huge vampire castles, jagged slags of concrete white as wedding cake icing, are front page news in papers of six pages. The future, it seems, has begun.
Grown men make little pistol gestures to each other in the Post Office queue for identity papers and tell themselves this is enough. The heroes are already dead, their skulls splintered, unknown and unlamented. Nelson has been pulled from his column, libraries cleansed of unhelpful works, everything is now forbidden or compulsary. As ever a few fight, a few more collaborate with unseemly glee and everyone else just gets on with their lives as if the clouds are the same colour they ever were. Even the rowing boats on the Serpentine are confiscated. Alan the Weasel pulls up a fourteen year old's skirts in a rancid back alley while his mother waits in his purring Austin, doing her lips in the mirror. The holidays are renamed. There will be a red star atop a New Year's Tree this year. The schools are reopening. Katherine waits on a rooftop, fortified only with vimto and spangles, as meagre crowds are bussed in and mustered for the Dear Leader's parade.
The leaves of the trees wave in approbation. The black limosine is heavy and slow as a hearse. Katherine stares down the calibrated sights and Laura Veirs sings in the shells in her ears but her thoughts are elsewhere. She blinks and gathers herself. The crosshairs meet on a bald spot his statues curiously omit. He is fatter this time than she's seen him before. In the snows of a railway station in Estonia, in the heat and stink of Alexandria, how many times does she have to do this? She slows her heart to a crawl, to a stop as she squeezes the trigger.
She doesn't wait to see if the heavy mercury tipped bullet hits home. The stock is in her pocket before a speck of heavy Georgian blood despoils Markov's purloined brass rimmed binoculars. Crude sickle winged jets roar over even as the motorcade slews to a stop, twisting grotesquely as a snake forked by a gardener. Ships hoot on the river. Daisies bloom before the mower's blade. She will let their revenge consume them. War is the only thing which makes a difference. Heavy shod children clap and skip in the puddles in the playgrounds, no matter how bad things get, people still have a good time. Already she can hear the grindings of extraordinary engines and, for a moment, quiet as pins in a drawer, the ticking of every watch in the country.
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