Then one day, a little kid pushed his way up onto the roof. A runner.
‘The lady said you was here,’ he said.
‘Who’s the lady? Who are you?’
‘What you got here?’ the boy said, looking round the roof, eyes wide. ‘This is mad, fam.’
‘Oi, don’t touch. What do you want?’
‘You know a Caleb? Said he wants to see you.’
‘Is he alright?’
‘You live up high, man, you got anything extra? Long,’ he said. ‘Long to get up here.’
‘Is he alright, though?’ I said. ‘Oi, stop, is he hurt?’ I shouted after him, but he just shrugged as he ran off.
The water was high as I made my way to Caleb’s. When I got there, the door was open.
‘Finally,’ he said, when he saw me.
‘You’re alive!’ I said back.
‘I’ve been trying to work it out,’ he said. I followed him into the kitchen. He’d been drinking. There was a cloud of booze in his wake. ‘The point of it all,’ he said.
‘The point of what?’ I said. ‘Life?’ My hands were covered in dirt. I made my way to his sink. ‘You look thin. Not boy-limic are you? Eating okay? Can tell you’re drink—’
‘LandSave,’ he said. ‘The LandSave people. Who they were, why they were here.’
I turned back from the tap.
‘I had it all in front of me all along,’ he said.
‘Do you remember a man called Rex Winstable?’ Caleb asked me.
I found myself nodding. I did know that name.
‘Hugely powerful at one time,’ Caleb said. ‘Classic upper-class Nazi sympathiser.’
‘My grandad liked him,’ I said. I thought back. ‘It was him that paid for us to come here. Or not him but his – I don’t know what they call it…’
‘His foundation?’
‘Some money thing, yeah.’
‘Right. Well, every year, the think-tank arm of it used to do this essay competition. Sounds pointless, but it was big. Controversial, high profile, huge prize money, launched careers. Anyway, follow me—’
Caleb pushed past me, and went upstairs. I’d only ever been upstairs at his house once or twice. Up on the first floor, the walls were lined with even more books than down below, floor to ceiling in thin, different-coloured slices. He led me into a room. There was a table in the middle of it.
There were three books on the table, each one a different colour. A simple embossed title, The Right is Revolutionary Essay Competition, volumes I, II and III, and under that, the year each one was published.
Caleb put his finger on one. ‘Guess who won in this particular year?’ he said, tapping on the date.
‘How am I supposed to do that?’
‘A young man called Edwin,’ he said. ‘Edwin Meyer.’
I reached for the book. ‘Let me see.’
‘Wait. I need to explain first. I always followed Winstable. Found him interesting. Don’t know if you ever saw him on TV, but he was bald, charmless, kind of thumping, you know? Edwin Meyer on the other hand… he had something else. Ease,’ he said. ‘This ease. Everything Winstable didn’t have.’
‘So they fought?’ I said. ‘After this prize thing?’
‘The opposite. Winstable made him his protégé. But it wasn’t long before Meyer was calling the shots.’
‘Okay…’ I said. ‘What do you mean, though? Protégé like how?’
‘It set a whole different thing in motion. I’m convinced Meyer was the one who got Winstable to push for Localisation. And it worked. It was kryptonite. It cleared the path for Meyer to take over.’ Caleb was speaking really fast. There were patches of gluey stuff on the corners of his mouth. ‘Meyer’s policies were even worse. Toxic. But the way he said them… The man could sell a new son to God.’
‘But my mum liked him,’ I said. ‘Lots of people did. My mum’s not racist, she’s not anything like that.’
‘I’m sure she’s not. He’s just one of those people. Nothing sticks. Anything that’s bad, he’d say was a joke. He got away with everything. Topped lists of people you’re not supposed to find attractive but do. All this call-me-by-my-first-name, I’ll-drink-a-pint-with-you man of the people bullshit.’
‘Action Man,’ I said.
‘Exactly. Because he says things and then does them. Or, in this case, he does things without saying them.’ Caleb had the book in his hand. ‘This edition is incredibly rare. That’s why I kept it. Meyer tried to get it out of print. He had every single copy he could find pulped. He said it was just an intellectual exercise – that he was extremely young. Pushing extrapolation to its limit. All this rubbish. But if you look at what’s happening now, it’s all here, I swear to God. It’s the blueprint for what they’ve done.’
‘What does it say?’
‘He pitched it as an ethical ideal. Moral, environmental, you name it. Every kind of ideal.’
‘Pitched what, Caleb?’
‘Population cutback,’ he said. ‘Extreme population cutback. Too many people. Too many migrants. Too many everyone. He suggested countries took matters into their own hands. You remember that guy in Japan, who gassed a whole load of kids?’
‘A bit,’ I said. ‘Not a lot.’
‘In this essay, he calls that “a landmark undertaking”. In other words, a good start.’
I felt suddenly like I was watching myself from above. Like I was this small thing tucked against the ceiling. I imagined the tops of our heads.
‘And if he has power now…’ Caleb said.
‘We know he has power now.’
‘That’s his thing. Reduce populations. Make sure only the “best” survive. They’re academics, the people at the very top. He’s pals with Nobel Prize winners. They don’t have the manpower, but they think they’re clever. They are clever. I mean, who built the wall?’
‘We did,’ I said. ‘They got us to finish it ourselves.’
‘If you think about it, it’s a masterpiece,’ Caleb said. ‘Send all your undesirables to the edge of the country. Then get them to dig like animals until it becomes an island again.’
‘But someone will stop it,’ I said. ‘They have to.’
‘Who? The government? He is the government. The rest of us left here? We’re under clear instructions right now. What we’re supposed to do now is die.’
‘But I don’t want to die,’ I said. My voice sounded like the smallest thing.
‘Well, neither do I. But the whole thing’s set up against us. To look like our fault. When we die, it’s their proof. That we were just deadweight all along. I mean, just look at this bullshit.’ He opened the book to the title page of the essay. ‘Countering Dysgenics to Save the Planet,’ he read. ‘The Radical Next Battles of the “IQ” War.’
‘Dys-what?’ I said.
‘Dysgenics. Opposite of eugenics. Opposite of natural selection. It’s about the population getting – quote-unquote – worse.’
Caleb started reading from the opening paragraph. Suddenly, I was no longer up on the ceiling. It was like the walls and the whole house above me were all falling into me at the same time. I pulled the book away.
‘Can I just think please?’ I said. ‘Leave me a moment. I want to read it for myself.’