Lewis

Lewis says she would take on the debt.

What can you do, where can you go without debt? She wants that University place, she wants to study Political Science, or Law, or both, fuck the cost. She wants revenge for what they did to her brother, for what they have always done, for what they are going to do now to what’s left of her family.

In the gym every day working out, plenty of protein shakes, no alcohol, no weed, in bed early every night, hitting the books at home. She keeps quiet, keeps her head down and boils with rage.

Revenge consumes her. In the gym as she strains for the last rep she thinks of her brother. When she wakes up aching and has to plough through The Republic or The Prince or Leviathan she thinks of her brother. When she has to go into DEP workshops and listen to all that bullshit, she thinks of her brother.

And she thinks of her father, of course.

She has a girlfriend now and they refuse to be cowed. Laura is three years older and the most beautiful, powerful woman she has ever seen. They caught each other’s eye at a demo in Peckham and immediately she knew. The same evening they began an affair of such intensity that she felt she could crush the world into dust; she got that much strength from it.

All the boys down Deptford High Street know she has a girlfriend, the boys in the gym, always coming on to her, trying to turn her. Chatting all that shit about needing a real man and how they will take the pair of them on. Such stupid shit they talk. Her mum tells her just to ignore them. They are just boys, she says. Lee wasn’t like that. Neither was Dad. I know, her mum says. Well, you’d be amazed by how different people can be. Look at you, she says and strokes Lewis’ face, I am so proud of you.

Yes, pride. Fuck you. You can’t take that away from me. She is half drunk on her own refusal to play the game, on her own determination to fuck them over, even if it is purely through her refusal to be intimidated, to be broken, to fall apart. A few months ago she shaved her head, a number three cut all over, and Laura says she loves running her hands over it, especially when Lewis’ head is down between her legs and she has her beautiful feet up on Lewis’ strong back. She loves Laura’s flesh, her belly, her big hips, her boobs, her lack of shame about taking up space. She never tries to disguise her size; spilling out of her clothes, undulating down the High Street in a feather boa, high heels, and a skin tight second-hand business suit and planting a fat, warm kiss on Lewis’ lips outside PayBank, grabbing her bum as all the market traders pause momentarily in their barking and wheedling, and the old Rasta who has been sitting in his blue deckchair mid-street as long as anyone can remember shouts encouragement.

She is 17 years old and she will take on the debt to study even if she has to work for the rest of her life to repay it. The world is bigger and stranger than you imagine it to be, there are people in this world, she knows, because she is one of them, that you wouldn’t dream existed, that seem fantastical. Sometimes at night she seems fantastical to herself, and the prospect of what she might do, how extraordinary she might become, intoxicates her further so that sometimes the only release from the waves of excitement that sweep over her is to nudge Laura awake and make love. At other times, true enough, she hears her brother moaning in his room, snorting, making noises, hears his head thrashing and then she is dropped suddenly, violently out of life and bounds back up scalded with rage. Sometimes she goes to him and puts her arms around him to try and soothe his fears, other times she is appalled and the idea that it would be better if he had died, better still if he did die, assaults her and she rolls over and over in the bed, trying to outmanoeuvre her own thoughts.

What to do about Lee, now? It has been eighteen months since he was injured and the appeal is just due to start and there will be no justice. Everyone knows what happened. They say his brain turned in his skull with the force of the blow and that was it, in an instant he was gone, evacuated, jettisoned, nothing of her brother left at all. Some knotted cord twisted too tight, a few threads snapped and all that he was is lost, unrecoverable. They know the name of the policeman that did it; there is phone footage everywhere. She has seen it, once. She won’t watch it again. The officer moving forward with his baton raised, the police horse coming in from behind. Lee trying to back away from one, backing in to the other, the man on the horse flailing his baton around. The blow is deliberate; anyone can see that except the jury, the Police Complaints Commission, the press. In defending himself against attack the officer accidentally catches Lee on the head with a downstroke. And it’s true that the police officer, the pig, the fucking filth, does get hit with placard, bouncing off his protective visa as he cracks her brother on the head with his truncheon. Distracted, confused, in fear of his life, responding to a volley of abuse. The whole situation “regrettable”.

The abuse they have received for campaigning, for pushing the trial through the courts, then appealing. All the social media stuff, the sheer, almost fanatical hate and poison. The smears in the press, press run by rich men. Pointing out that Lee was “typically” raised by his mother alone, no mention that her Dad died or acknowledgement of just how fucked that is for her mum, to lose her husband, for the children to lose a father and then to not even lose her son but have him go out one day to support his friends on their protest, to go out to protest because he knows what it will mean for his sister, who wants to go to University in a couple of years’ time, and be returned to them as a shell, twisted up, eyes blank, rocking back and forth in a wheelchair, unable to feed himself or wipe himself, or speak his own name.

And now they smear her and her mum when they can. Some of her relatives have asked her to tone it down, to not be so openly rebellious, even if by that they just mean out and proud and in love. Do it for her own sake, make herself less of a target, make the family seem more respectable, but her mum says no, no way, you be who you are I am proud of you, proud of you. They don’t like the fact that her mum is educated, articulate. They want to dismiss the whole thing, they want to make it, make it part of some whole chip on the shoulder thing, a column in The Telegraph referred to the regrettable role model of Doreen Lawrence, a woman simply unable to let go, as though you could ever let go of the death of your child, the murder of your child, and counselled acceptance, suggesting that her mum’s constant demands for justice represented a form of harassment of police officers already under considerable strain and attempting to do their job under difficult circumstances, what with all the recent unrest.

Her mum laughed at that one, a bitter laugh in the kitchen and then her eyes filled, for a dazzled second, with tears she quickly squeezed away. That’s how it was, she was victimising them. Her mum has cut the articles out and kept them to remind her just what they are up against. Another columnist had asked just what her child, a personal trainer, “and clearly not himself academically gifted”, had been doing at such a demonstration anyway, and whether his presence hadn’t perhaps been due to his mother’s seemingly radical convictions rather than his own, that perhaps the root of this “highly” regrettable incident might not lie there; the blame, the culpability, the final responsibility, lying with, as always, as always, the mother. What radical convictions are those, Paula Adonor asked in a letter back, that education should be free for all, here as it is in many countries, that the police should not be able to ruin a young man’s life with impunity?

Lewis cannot exactly see what she will do, how her revenge will manifest itself, in what ways she will make them pay, cause justice to come into being in the world, but that is not as important as her desire and her will. First she must understand the world more fully, the way her mother understands it, the way Laura and her friends understand it. She sees herself now, even more fully, as part of a struggle. What it is to be seized that way, when you are still young, by a conviction that will shape your life. Certainly she was always interested but everything that has happened in the last two years has strengthened her resolve. Even before, even as a kid, she was dipping into the books that filled the house, books which are proving invaluable now as she does all the reading for the degree that maybe, probably, she will never be able to afford. Perhaps the Open University, which is itself getting more and more expensive every year, is her only option, now she has to help her mum look after her brother, especially now they have cut benefits, taking away his help. Perhaps she can do some online courses and build up credits, some MOOCs and UACs and cobble it together that way.

Why does it have to be this hard just to live? How many different battles should a person have to fight just to live? Work all day, look after a disabled child, try to get some justice through the courts for an obvious and grievous wrong that has been committed against you, fight to keep the little support you are offered while the people you rely on and who rely on you in turn are swept up out of places they have lived all their lives and dumped somewhere miles away like so much rubbish.

Her mother tries to calm her sometimes, nodding along to Lewis’ ranting, telling her she knows, she knows, she understands, and yes of course she is angry too, but she is also careful and tired and she has to conserve her energy and hate is exhausting when you get older. And when you were my age? Well, of course I wanted change and of course that is what I struggled for in a way, but life was a lot easier for me, your grandma didn’t have to pay for me to go to University, there were more jobs around, rents were lower. And I hadn’t had any tragedies in my life. Yet, Paula almost says. Yet.

Fuck tragedy, she gets pissed off if her mum uses that word, it is not a word she accepts for herself, for her own experience. Once when her mum said it she spat back, best thing that has ever happened to me. And her mother then flew into a rage, this is not about you, this is not all about you, it’s about all of us, the three of us. They didn’t speak for the rest of the day and Lewis went out, up to New Cross with Laura for a rare day of drinking and almost got into a fight with some boys, some typical, fucking stupid boys halfway down Lewisham high road who started kissing their teeth and catcalling. Moments like that she wishes she was bigger, physically bigger, so she could slap them down, humiliate them; five foot four is not much when her mum is five foot nine. How come she didn’t grow taller? No one knows. Maybe her Dad dying stunted her. The shock, suddenly like that when she was thirteen. Her mum kept telling her she would have a surge but it never came. If she was taller, six foot tall, which was Lee’s height, six foot five, six foot eight, she would beat them down, she would make them beg, these stupid fucking stoned, drunk boys never read a book in their lives and think they are masters of the fucking world, think they are running things. Slaves. She remembers a line she liked from a film she watched with her mum when she was a kid, Once Were Warriors, all about the Maori in New Zealand. She bugged her mum like mad after that to get a tattoo and she dreamed of a face tattoo, permanent war paint. That line, she’s wanted to use it herself sometime but is just too corny to do it, when the drunk husband has pinned his wife up against the wall and is going to her hit and she says, “Go on Jake, hit me, hit me. You’re still a slave. A slave to the bottle. A slave to your fists.”

And then she knew, she got her first taste of how not to be slave. Stay away from the bottle, use your mind not your fists. And yet, she dreams of violence, and she asks Laura sometimes, don’t you want to kill them, kill them all? All the pigs, all the fascists, Tories, Labour. You can’t trust any of them. She doesn’t trust anyone except Laura and a few people she knows from demos and occupations, people she follows on Twitter. Her mum, of course. The boys who run the arts centre, her uncle James and her cousins and some of the people down the gym, so, really, she laughs at herself, actually if you spread it out, if you imagine it like water flowing out and around obstacles in rivulets and streams and hooking up, merging and combining with other streams that seem to be seeking hers out, then she trusts really a lot of people, but no one higher up, maybe, although her mum’s colleagues are decent people too and her teachers and Lee’s lawyers. So many good people all wanting the same thing, the right thing, for the world to be put right, for there to be some justice. So why isn’t there, why not?

How come? How come we can’t just shake all the bullshit and all the bullshitters off and just live together?

She asks her mum and mum says it’s a constant fight, sometimes we have the upper hand, sometimes they do, but Lewis can’t remember a time when she felt like her family had the upper hand, maybe when she was a kid and her Dad was still around, and Lee was OK and they weren’t fighting this court case and worried about her mum losing her job and money money money all the time being a problem.

Fuck money. She’ll take on the debt even if she has to clean toilets to pay it back, even if they put her in jail because she can’t repay it. She will still have learned it all, it will still be in her.

They can’t take that away from me. That’s mine for life, that and my friends, that and my mission. That and my demand for justice.

But look at Lee. Maybe even that, your learning, your self, the self you struggle and sweat to build, they can take that away from you too, the most valuable thing you have, and no one has to be held to account. They just laugh in your face. Tell you it is “regrettable”.

She rolls over in the bed, worried suddenly that perhaps finally there is nothing that can’t be taken away from you.

Perhaps they will never stop until the whole world is used up, until the last tree is felled, the last fish left floating, the air unbreathable, all of humanity squatting in the dark in poverty and disease and fear.

Lewis is cycling, head down, fast as she can along the South London Cycle Route, part of the Green London Urban Trail initiative connecting Deptford to Peckham to London Bridge and beyond, which cynics say is really just there to compensate for the poor quality train service into the centre and help defray the added weight and inconvenience of all those eager new workers, urban explorers, professional pioneers reclaiming South London’s under-appreciated and neglected living-spaces, flooding in from the gentrified concrete council blocks and flimsy steel and glass new builds.

She is going to see Dan, an old friend of Lee’s from when they were kids. Dan has his degree now and debts he has no hope of paying; also, astonishingly, a job.

He works at Heart of Chicken.

It goes by a number of names but Heart of Darkness or Arsehole of Chicken are the most common. Is there a worse place to work? A worse employer? Maybe Amazon now they too have introduced A.M. for all warehouse staff, who aren’t even customer-facing and, just like Heart of Chicken, publish daily service stats and insist on monthly and weekly unpaid development sessions and reviews on putative days off. Heart of Chicken prides itself on being “a Total Employer” and “an engineer of attitudes and outlooks” helping partners “make the mindset of intense customer focus a 24/7/365/4Life orientation” using a “holistic affective regimen” developed through “synergizing the ground-breaking techniques of NLP and Total Physical Response”.

Lewis has an interview coming up at Heart of Chicken, mandatory, even though she’s not claiming because everyone seventeen and over now is obliged to undergo Recruitment Training, and attitude and engagement are key factors in the assessment criteria. Though a job itself doesn’t exist and she wouldn’t take one even if it did, she has to, for two humiliating hours, undergo a Welcome Session and be assessed on her suitability as a Potential Partner.

Lewis has asked Dan how he can do it, how he can hold the job down, what tips he has for this upcoming interview which she knows she is going to fail anyway and so have a black mark against her, more than that a whole set of data points and scores and ratings mapping her out as a potential employee in a file somewhere. Dan told her his technique for keeping the heart-shaped monitor he has pinned to his uniform pulsing hard and glowing rosily with love. It’s the standard technique, the one everyone uses as far as he knows.

What you need to do is search through your mind for your happiest memories and keep them in your thoughts at all times, focus only on these, after all the job is mechanical, what matters is that the monitor pumps out genuine pleasure in work, sincerity in service, proof that the smile and the upbeat, customer-oriented attitude are real. Focus on your finest, your best moments, the faces of friends, your first love, your kids, some fantasy you have of yourself, whatever is most precious and vital to you, anything that will flood your system with chemicals, keep the pleasure centres of your brain alight.

Heart of Chicken’s slogan and poster campaign show a young light-skinned black girl against a black backdrop beaming munificently out with an oversized plastic heart incandescent on her chest, the glow adding a pink sheen of satisfaction to her already enraptured face. Underneath it says “The Heart of the Heart of Chicken”.

The slogan was created by a 23 year-old Yale educated marketing visionary Brewster Kervorkian, a lift from William H Gass’ collection of short-stories “The Heart of The Heart of the Country”, a book his father had introduced him to as a child. “Our house was kind of atypical”, Kevorkian said in an interview Lewis read on the Guardian website a year or so ago, “I mean, Pynchon, Coover, Saramago, Bloch, those guys were basically bedtime reading for us. Were we kind of bratty and precocious? Well, yeah, I guess.” Kervorkian is also responsible for the resurgent popularity of Huey Lewis and the News after his phenomenally successful viral marketing masterstroke for Heart of Chicken which took the group’s 1984 hit “The Heart of Rock and Roll is the City”, changing the final word to Chicken and showing the group, all wearing the trademark Affective Monitors, bursting into song in a bright mock-50s diner. “It’s the irritation/fascination thing”, Kevorkian explained, “plus all the references, to Back to the Future, and the 501 adverts and so on, plus the nonsenses factor, the surreal edge that makes that phrase ‘the Heart of Rock and Roll is the Chicken’ so hard to shift. It’s a brainworm. Plus Huey gives maximum Charisma, of course.”

Even remembering Kevorkian’s tousled hair, John Lennon glasses and tweed suit has got Lewis’ irritation levels cresting and a strap of rage pressing tightly behind her eyes. She breathes out hard as she rounds the corner and the Shard comes into view, this will never do, she has no chance in the interview. Not that she doesn’t have good memories, but in reality, even though Dan shrugs it off, isn’t it the saddest thing? He’s told her that he maintains a kind of crop-rotation system, cycling his memories and fantasies around to keep them fresh and productive, to replenish them, leaving some fallow for a while so they don’t get used up too quickly. But inevitably they begin to wear out, deplete, and people, of course, especially the rush hour crowds at morning and evening, the Friday and Saturday night drunks heading for the last train home, do everything they can through covert or overt means to get his monitor down to orange, or even worse blue, especially now that the burgers are free not only if service takes over two minutes but if the numbers on the LCD display showing Dan’s Authentic Satisfaction Level fall below 80. Everyone wants a free burger so the techniques range from hostility and rudeness, to threats, to delaying techniques, to passive-aggressive fumbling with cards and change.

There’s even a pass-time now called ChickenSmashing and a Facebook page and a Twitter feed dedicated to hints and tips on particular techniques, certain members of staff it’s easy to upset or intimidate, and the haul of free burgers and Sticky Thighs and Tinglewings and TenderCrowns that can be claimed. The Facebook page she glanced at once immediately depressed and enraged her and she had to go to the gym to work her anger off.

“Leyton posse smashed the Fairfield Lane Heart of Bullshit last night. Made the shaky, grinning bitch Amanda cry by asking her how the fuck she felt about working in Heart of Chicken for minimum wage at 11.30 on a Saturday night when decent people were drinking good beer and having lives. Heart rate dropped straight to blue, numbers down to 64 (SMASH! I thank you!). Complimentary burgers all round from the cock-kissing manager, Amanda sacked on the spot (double SMASH). What the fuck ARE these people good at?”

For a while Dan could hold it at bay, overlay the angry, insulting faces, the delighted demands, the watchful eyes, the gangs of youths relentlessly mocking him, the jaded businessmen fussing and barking orders, by sheer power of projection, screening them out with some sweet, sylvan scene from his childhood, his first kiss, the day he got his A-Level results, that big night out he had, his mates’ faces, jokes and larking and moments of fun and ease and possibility, but slowly they are being worn threadbare, no matter how quickly he recycles them, until eventually they will be used up, affective burn-out, his memories bleached and barely accessible to him, his dreams parched and empty and he will be, what, twenty-one next month and his minimum wage, zero hour contract at Heart of Chicken will regrettably be terminated due to his insufficient commitment to Heart of Chicken’s service-oriented ethos. “At Heart of Chicken, we wear our Heart on our Sleeve, quite literally”, the promotional pack that Lewis flicked through at Dan’s flat one day informed her, “the Heart of Chicken difference is that we take genuine pleasure in serving our customers, that is what has made us the world’s number one crafter and purveyor of a range of creative chicken options. Our Affective Monitoring System WorkingHearts lets the customer, partners and the point of delivery staff themselves know whether they truly love the product, love to serve and genuinely love to embody outside and in the Heart of Chicken ethos and ethics.”

All this talk of love, of genius, of ethics. She can barely imagine what it must be like as she stops at the lights and watches silver-grey summer storm clouds gather over the river. She’s held one of the Affective Monitors in her hand and shuddered, thin, cheap-looking, made in Cambodia with a short white wire and a little flesh coloured adhesive sensor-pad at the end that reaches back through a gap in the stupid uniform to attach itself to your chest. She knows Heart Of Chicken has the highest staff tur-over ratio of any company in the world, six months is a long career with them, and she knows they favour the young due to their “greater natural optimism”, “stronger affective immediacy” and “chemical rich bio-environment”.

The Affective Monitoring System has been around for a while but it was Heart of Chicken’s CEO Hugh Barton’s strategic genius and vision that saw its potential in the retail sector. It started off innocently enough, as these things do, a gimmicky pair of electronic cat ears, essentially a toy developed in Japan, that wiggled when the wearer was happy and that soon got used in the Hostess bars and Soaplands so that there was no faking it anymore for the salarymen whose egos needed stroking, and the girls who could keep their ears waggling were the ones who became semi-celebrities. At last the question was answerable, the doubt that perhaps she was only pretending, that her pleasure was faked, put to rest. From there of course it went mainstream, this simple little technology, revolutionising retail and recalibrating customer-focusedness as part of a global mission to make service transparent, authentic and truly satisfying.

As she sets off again she goes past an advert for a high-end Casino that says, “Surely the whole purpose of life is to enjoy!”

She is busy, she wants to be busy, nonstop, to go to bed exhausted at ten and wake up angry for the day at six and not waste a second of it in melancholy or dreaminess. She is in love with her own sense of purpose, in love with books, the people she has found online, the people she knows IRL, the accessibility of this hidden and burgeoning world of occupations, protests, demos, strikes, and talks, she is in love with her own sense that she incarnates a truth that she can’t yet quite express but that she will grow into: that she was once a child, a girl, but now she will be a weapon.

After she eats her breakfast she heads straight for the gym, she wants her body to be flat and strong, to burn off her boobs, her bum, build muscle in her shoulders arms and thighs, develop stamina, strength, speed.

She’s always the first into Wavelengths, the staff still bleary and yawning, settling contentedly into the early morning calm, the wash of chlorine coming in from the empty pool, bleach from the freshly swabbed floors. Lee used to train there, before they modernised it, in the cramped, humid studio above the pool, though he actually worked over at the bigger centre in Lewisham, did extra hours up in Woolwich at Fitness First, Gymbox in Charing Cross, the Reebok place over in Canary Wharf that he used to run to for his sessions on Thursday evening. Lewis used to go with him sometimes, up Creek Road and past the Cutty Sark, down through the foot tunnel to the other side of the river, threading through the quiet cul-de-sacs of flats and mini-marinas then following the DLR line from Mudchute, watching the HSBC tower and its endlessly flashing light grow incrementally closer with every footfall, every breath.

Here she is then, 7.10, the gym virtually empty. Lewis lays down two of the exercise mats in the area next to the free weights, watching the day reluctantly brighten through the big windows that look out onto the road, the local authority flats opposite that are being gutted and resold as part of Renovate UK’s Smarten Up! campaign. The same company that are trying to kick everyone out of her block too. A white canvas banner, “Renovation is Segregation” is slung between two of the flats on the third floor, a riposte to the “Renovation is Innovation” slogan that has been springing up everywhere.

Lewis warms up with stretches both static and dynamic; stretching is important, too many people skip it, Lee always insisted to her, then she begins to jump gently, experimentally from one side of the mats to the other, seeing how she feels today, how sluggish her system is, how much she has recovered from her previous workout. She takes her work log and pen out of her pocket and lays it down on the floor in front of her. Keep a record, Lee told her. She is keeping a record, a record of everything.

She jumps sideways, lands in a crouch, jumps back again and again, begins to pick up the tempo.

She’s trying to leap across and land into a controlled, single leg squat, arms out to the side, not too wobbly, good form, form is crucial, but each time she topples over backwards, has to jab a hand round to support herself.

The boys in the evenings, at the weekends, when she can’t avoid them, like to look and laugh, make comments, but she has her headphones in anyway listening to Kate Bush or Nina Simone. She refuses to listen to urban, whatever that means, fuck that. That’s what she is supposed to listen to, right? Worry about her nails and her hair and how seductive she is and what she is wearing and the size and shape of her arse, the best way to get it looked at, but she just doesn’t give a fuck about what the boys think. She is not going to try and dance or sing, though she dances, though she sings, or have the kind of attitude they think is all hot and sexy. She will have an attitude alright but a different one altogether, not sassy and competitive and all about getting the attention, getting the juice. She will have a real attitude, cold, clean, sober, sexless.

Probably she gets away with things, gets a certain amount of distance and respect because people down here knew her brother, not because he was a big man or tried to run things or any of that but because he gave his time and he was respectful to everyone, because they know what happened to him and they respect her mum too for what she has been through and done in the community. Because despite all the shit that has happened to her she has kept it together, kept her dignity.

Yuk, she can’t believe she used that word. That’s another term, another cliché she wants to scorch away. Dignity. Who is ever dignified but the defeated, the weak, the abused, the murdered, raped, and marginalised when they are silently bearing their suffering, pleading their little case in quiet certainty that it is hopeless.

Fuck dignity, she wants power, she wants revenge.

They want you to fall apart, they want you to give in, to give up, to collapse, to say: I have had enough, I won’t fight anymore, I won’t resist you, even in my mind.

Lewis springs up from the left-hand side of the mat, the leap only takes a second or so, a huge effort, pushing the body up as high as it will go, at the apex of the curve the brain and muscle calculating at tremendous speed, beyond any possible conscious thought, the descent, the impact, how to lean into it, draw yourself down into a crouch, muscles minutely calibrating balance and counterbalance. Down, her body compressed, her mind so finely, mistily infused in all her muscles that she knew the minute she heard about the idea of the mind/body split it was some bullshit, that the mind, if the body lies untended, unworked, will drift and detach and have a seeming remoteness, but there it is: Descartes didn’t do enough cardio, as the guys on Left-Wing Workouts, her absolutely favourite YouTube show, like to say.

Pause, feel the signal switch, the muscles that have caught and stabilised you reverse over to become those that will propel you back. She is swamped by a pair of Lee’s old Adidas tracksuit bottoms which she has rolled up and one of his T-shirts, far too big for her, that she always wears in tribute. As she leaps she sees her reflection in the glass, caught between the grey dawn and the antiseptic gym lights, seeming to ripple and flutter through the air, a series of strips and folds billowing along behind her, undulating up then layering tent-like around her tight, balled-up body.

The body is amazing; you have such abilities, capacities, powers latent within you. So much that goes unexplored, is never dragged up to surface. There is a life within you, your body’s life, burgeoning, reticulated, poised and waiting just as your death is waiting – think of yourself not crawling between heaven and earth but caught instead in an uninflected state between the body’s life and the body’s death. No matter how much she loves her, Laura doesn’t understand it, can’t be persuaded of its existence, having never experienced it, the extraordinary, elevated clarity of the body’s penned up energy, honed, channelled, doubled and redoubled, mounting, peak upon peak into a rare, pure seam of elated clarity. Not just the runner’s high, the post workout buzz, but the hormonal balance, the chemical surfeit, the body’s extraordinary capacity to generate opiates, endorphins, dopamine, to sweat out toxins, oxygenate the blood, heighten all the senses. Lee knew this, loved this, didn’t drink, dodged KFC, kept his diet clean and explored his body’s capabilities, this was where his interest lay. Lewis understands it too, she picked it up off him she supposes, used to help him with his workout routines, all bodyweight, pushing the table back and trying press ups and lunges and leaps and he never told her no, you can’t do this, you are a girl, quite the opposite. He told her try, try again, think about it, practice, the first time it is impossible but the fiftieth time, the hundredth time, your body is not a given any more than your mind is, it can be altered, it can grow, develop, learn.

She hears the same things from her mum about studying. When she can’t understand something, her mum says, come at it from a different angle, you explain it to me, and then often she finds that yeah, she does get it, or is closer to grasping it. Now read more, don’t worry about getting it all straight away, tackle different books on the same subject and read, read, read, your brain will do all the hard work for you if you just get out of its way, your brain is smarter than you are, grant it autonomy. Your body will reward you for letting it live, just as your brain will. Patience, patience. It happens. She reads up on physiology and diet and the way the body is a whole, interconnected system of tissues and tendons, ligaments, nerves and neurons, constantly converting and breaking down food, manufacturing chemicals in a set of extravagantly complex interactions and interdependencies. She knows the theory that we have three brains, the ancient brain of the instincts and drives, the affective brain, and the cerebral cortex, the nexus of imagination and memory, and she feels that perhaps we have three bodies, the inert body, the stagnant body, the sedentary, daily body, the alienated body cut off from its purpose, its nature, which we only experience negatively now, a drag on us, a burden, most present to us in illness or pain; then the smothered, primal body of constant activity and exhilaration developed over millennia to toil and sweat and be pushed, to operate at a high level of chemical and hormonal production; and then the affective body, the joyful, sensual body of touching and caressing, of stimulation and sex, the untouched body, dead and dormant and ready to spring suddenly to life at the lover’s behest.

Lewis takes a deep breath and leaps. Some day soon she will perform the impossible and it will seem commonplace and natural, she will look back and wonder why, how come, at some point she just couldn’t get there. She will land on one leg with the other straight out in front of her and settle into a perfect, stable, solid, squat. One more attempt and her workout will be done. Then a shower, back to the flat to eat and help her mum with Lee before she has to leave for work. She goes into the changing room sometimes and sees girls in there taking photos of their abs or their arses in the mirror, pouting, knowing they’re going to put them up on Facebook or Twitter or upload them to Tumblr praying for a like or a retweet or some accolade like DAT AZZZZZ!!!! or HNNN!!! And she hates that people do it for the wrong reasons, she wants them to fuck off out of her gym, has to control her anger and just leave, stamp back up Resolution Way and past what she can only think of as the Other Gym, The Fascist Gym that has taken up residence in the arches under the railway bridge. All she sees in there is white people. Middle-class white people paying double the rate of Wavelengths, pretending to be soldiers in a separate space filled with barked commands and quasi-military insignia and that worries and disgusts her as much as the girls doing selfies in the mirror or spending all their time chatting shit to the fitness instructors or on their hands-free in full makeup and box-fresh gym gear, walking at 3.4 mph and trying to get eye contact from every boy that goes past. She jumps again, and feels her heart thump hard enough against her ribs to pin her up there in the air at the peak.

Sometimes it almost all comes into focus, she feels on the edge of a system, a holistic system of her own, the body within the body, the mind within the mind, the world within the world, the interrelation and interdependence of these things and somehow, more and more, she begins to think in terms of blackness. She watched a documentary that she found in a box of old VHS tapes in her mum’s room a few weeks ago called “Baldwin’s Nigger”, intrigued by the title, and she was blown away. She has read everything she can get hold of by Baldwin now and is in love with him. There is a line in the film she remembers, that struck at her and stung her into an even greater state of wakefulness, “we are the flesh that they must mortify”.

She thinks of Laura, how she is entranced by her body, loves to see all that voluminous pale flesh gathered up in her small, dark hands. And in truth she even actively encourages her to grow bigger, fatter, imagines her as a yielding, mountainous, rose-pink and white continent over which she joyously scrambles just as Laura sees her perhaps as an adventurous, determined son, powerfully and doggedly, demandingly plucking pleasure from her. The desire within desire. These rings and knots and circuits, feeding back and shifting in an endless, ungraspable exchange. At least, ungraspable for now, for her, but she will read, and listen and watch and study, and then she will strike and turn the world inside out, so that its buried truths may liberate us all.

She knows that she will die young, that it is inevitable that she will hurl herself at the world, exhaust herself in the attack, know no limit to the danger she will put herself in, and that this will mean she is destroyed.

Her mother is talking more these days about her life when she was Lewis’ age or thereabouts, more wistful, talking about the first really serious relationship she had. Lewis prompted the conversation, spotting the shoebox on the table one day, back from the library having picked Lee up from the improvised day-care centre set up in the Albany, feeling bad about having to call Joolzy and get him to come round and help her get the wheelchair up the stairs.

She asked what it was and her mum gave her the whole story. Since then she has been looking through the box, half curious, reading the part of the novel that’s in there, which doesn’t really grab her and besides there’s too much other important stuff to discover. Her mum seems pleased she has shown some interest in it and so she pretends to be more engaged in it than she really is, and she is sure this boy she fell in love with at University was very nice and very talented but she distrusts this dwelling on loss and failure and tragedy and victims.

She will die young but this will not be tragic, nor will she be a victim, nor will she be heroic, nor noble or any of those things; victim is not a word she will ever use in reference to her own life.

Yes she loves her mother but sometimes she thinks she has invited tragedy into her life, she says melodramatically sometimes that she is cursed and Lewis gets angry and accuses her of racism, of thinking that they are subject to some kind of magic, and her mum reacts angrily, saying Louise, you can’t control your life as much as you think you can. But you can, if you are prepared to pay the price.

An intense, brilliantly disciplined attack, that’s what she will be, none of this drifting confused through the world and giving up before you have even started. She loves white men too much, that’s her mum’s problem, and she’s getting to that age where she has started getting flirty. White middle-class boys, she’s got a thing for them. Arty, soulful white boys, like this one she’s flirting with now online and letting into their flat to look at the writing of some arty sensitive white boy she had a crush on back in her Ecstasy days.

She finds her fists are clenched her teeth tightly locked, breath coming rapidly through her nose. This room is too small, the flat is too small, she decides to go out for a run, changes into Lee’s old grey Nike hoodie and some black Adidas tracksuit bottoms. She will head up the hill to Blackheath, go round Greenwich park, back along Creek road, past the Waitrose, back to the flat.

When she comes back in, feeling better, lighter, more forgiving, having told herself on her run that well, there’s plenty of arty white boys she likes too, just not in that way, but Laura’s white anyway and people give her shit for that and her Dad was black and well. It’s complicated, but you can’t let it get too complicated or what? You end up just sitting there looking confused while they fuck you over again.

Her mum has dug some photos out from among all the boxes that are piling up in the living room and has spread them out on the table.

I went out for a run, she says.

Did you take your pepper spray?

Yeah.

Her mum looks at her questioningly. We have had death threats, Louise? You know that don’t you?

She pulls the top two inches of the spray can out of her hoodie pocket as proof, gives her mum a sighed OK.

OK.

Anyway, she says. I am not the one who has been letting strangers into the flat.

Lewis can’t believe she has been so dumb as to let someone into the flat when there’s no one there, someone she doesn’t even know.

Lewis, Paula says, do you think it matters now, do you think this flat isn’t full of bugs, do you think they aren’t listening to everything we say or watching everything we do? You can lock the door, but they’re already in here, everywhere, and anyway, I checked him out, he’s a writer, a critic.

A journalist?

Not that kind of journalist, no. And journalists have helped us, remember, Louise. Dawn. Evan.

Is this who you have been flirting with on the phone?

Paula raises her eyebrows.

It’s true even if her mum doesn’t want to admit it; she has noticed how over the years it’s changed. When she was a little girl, her mum used to keep her eyes down in the street, not ashamed or intimidated but not wanting to offer encouragement to the men who stared, and they did, she understood, her mum was pretty. She thought, maybe secretly liked the idea when she was a kid that when she grew up she would be pretty too. Is she? Laura tells her she’s gorgeous. Well anyway, she is what she is.

But her mum, she’s seen it now, how the situation’s reversed, increasingly trying to catch someone’s, anyone’s eye out and about, the looks and stares she had taken for granted have fallen away so she finds that for all she hated them, now, mid-forties, even if she looks younger, she’s drifting into invisibility. She shouldn’t care; she should be relieved, even. But she’s just not used to it. When you start to get desperate you make bad decisions, choices of which you are only dimly aware of the motive, and then disaster strikes.

Looking through old photos. Lost youth, faded beauty, happier times, all that.

This is him, she says as Louise takes both earphones out and peers over her shoulder, holds it up. The two of them in a field somewhere. Her mum looks young, wow. She guesses she’s never actually seen photos of her before she got together with her Dad, maybe some of her when she was really a kid. Do they look alike? Lewis glances at herself in the mirror on the opposite wall. Not too much, really, though Lee’s similar.

Keep that photo out, she says, put it in the box, with the other things.

Sure, she says. She glances at it again as she goes into the bedroom to change. So there he is, the boy who died young, the boy whose work she’s reading, listening to, looking at. Mostly it’s the music that interests her, if she had any artistic impulses probably they would go in that direction; she has a pretty good voice and sometimes when everyone’s out and she knows no one’s around she likes to take the opportunity to sing as loud as she likes. Joolzy keeps trying to get her to listen to the soul tradition, her roots, and she has deliberately gone back the other way to piss him off, claims a love for Bon Jovi, Tom Petty, Queen, but in reality after a night searching on YouTube with Laura for exactly the kind of music that was likely to upset him she did suddenly get into the Eurythmics and then Yazoo, and a couple of days ago with the flat empty she sang along to Only You so loud and so fervently that she went up on tip toes, her heart swimming free, and then worried at the end that she might collapse back down into tears.

Music and love and sentimentality; dangerous drugs. Be careful, Louise, remember your time is short, remember you have work to do.

Out on Deptford High Street Lewis is skulking outside the White Horse watching the TASTEE£ sign get fitted up by where the pub’s name used to be, two paint spattered guys on a ladder, the rooms above it being converted into flats. She knows her mum was involved in a group opposed to the sale, but that it went ahead anyway.

Dan arrives a little late. He has been in Deptford library, helping out a friend of his older brother’s, Min, who took out some bizarre mortgage ten years ago and is suddenly getting hit with massively increased payments just as his job’s on the line and he can’t understand why, panicking, not really sure what he signed up for back when he was eighteen and his Mum and Dad were urging him to get on the ladder, sinking their own savings into the place too, so that now he feels he will be letting everyone down, ruining everyone’s life, if he can’t keep up the payments. Dan, for all that he has a degree in International Economics, can’t quite figure out the fine print either and has advised him to get more sound, legit legal advice, but Min can’t afford that and so he is thinking that well, he could sell now, get enough to pay off his debts probably, but they have got another kid on the way, need more space and where will they live? They could get somewhere with three bedrooms outside London but then where will he work?

Dan has no answer for him, there aren’t any, no smart strategy, no moves that haven’t been countered in advance, everything has already been priced in and besides he is tired anyway from his morning stint at Heart of Chicken, called in at 6.00 again. He sleeps now, Dan, with his phone in his hand, because he knows they have systems that send out work requests to up to a hundred phones simultaneously, and so he will be the first one to answer. He has even found himself – perhaps precisely because he is asleep, if he ever really allows himself to sleep these days, and his consciousness isn’t there veiling or compromising his pure autonomic response – answering the phone slightly before the call comes through, almost as though he senses the intention to dispatch the message the same way they say dogs know when their owners decide to set off and come home, and rouse themselves to go and wait patiently, mysteriously by the window, gazing out at the road, panting softly.

The phone buzzes, his thumb automatically increasing the pressure on the accept button that has appeared beneath it, eyes opening, squinting at the illuminated screen in the dark hoping he hasn’t agreed to something too far away or that starts too soon. What time is it now? Forty minutes to get up and dressed, bike it to Heart of Chicken up in Woolwich, no breakfast, it’s raining outside, thirty minutes there and back for two hours work but he knows that Heart Of Chicken’s parent company share information with USG anyway and that if he refuses three offers in a row it will impact on his Viability Rating, the full spectrum assessment protocol run by USG’s Human Capital Division. And even though he is violently, ideologically against the system he still can’t bear the idea that his treasured triple A plus rating would be lost, especially as it will impact on all other kinds of ratings, his credit rating for instance, and then slowly they will start to put the squeeze on him for repayments, especially as his student debt is one of a tranche that the Government has agreed can be abondized, and that his ability to roll over his repayments on his student loans depends on that rating staying high. He has seen people a year or two younger than him, the guinea pigs for the new system, fuck up, misstep, take a negative hit somewhere on their Viability Index often in areas they had no idea were open to assessment, see that other areas start to recalibrate in response, find their interest rate going up and up from week to week, then day to day, hour to hour in a vortex of accelerating, uncontrollable, mutually reinforcing algorithmic panic. A few weeks ago he sat in the square next to Wavelengths with Will, looking at his phone and in the end laughing at the insane exponential increase in his personal interest rate and their conversion into an equivalent number of giveback hours, several lifetimes worth and still rising. Your work life just went parabolic across about five generations, he said. They laughed at the insanity of it, there seemed to be no other response, but here it is, just as with Min who can only keep his repayments down by signing up his kids to his mortgage, intergenerational, possibly endless, for the ex-council flat at the back of Deptford Broadway he thought he was buying. Dan has a dark inkling of what the inevitable outcome for friends who have got caught in that upward spiral is, the term of the debt extending until a default line is reached and then they are bankrupt, unable to ever pay it back and are bought out by USG and funnelled into Permanent Giveback. They will be obliged to have children in order to have someone to pay back the debt, the cost of raising them added to the multigenerational bill stretching on into infinity.

Should have read the fine print.

Dan wants a pint, a simple pint of beer, just one, or maybe two halves and a little bit free getting a taster of the different cask beers on rotation in the Jobcentre. It closed down a few years ago and was squatted for a while before it got converted into a bar. Now anyone local has to report to the Catford Centre. Lewis went up there once on a school trip, mandatory introduction to the kinds of programmes on offer from USG, and the place looked like a prison, security guards on every floor, touch screen computer terminals covered in grease or not working at all, no chairs or desks, seemingly no staff. The corporate video in the big windowless room showed people picking fruit or hurrying through warehouses or pouring coffees accompanied by a semi-coherent explanation from a dazed looking man in his twenties, reciting a script about the numerous ratings levels that would apply to them by the time they reached 18 as part of the Government’s Universal Human Capital Assessment Index, a one-stop rating system that incorporated everything from levels of body fat and eyesight tests through to exam results, work experience, psychometric tests and character evaluations, and would be phased in as a more comprehensive alternative to the only recently introduced Viability Index.

The pub is full of students from Goldsmiths and Greenwich University. She has always refused to go in as she knows there is an unofficial door policy about keeping the wrong people out, but in practice this never needs to be explicitly enforced, already there is a powerful hex of wealth and white privilege, a magic threshold that means that people stop and glance in through the window, hear the music, see the faces, the decor and understand. She heard Laura and her friends talking about this just the other week, gentrification, the way wealth and poverty coexist, one on top of the other, the same streets, the same spaces, yet seem to be two radically separate realms, people negotiating in and around each other, screening things out, being buffeted and directed by sets of unconscious pressures. Lewis wants to smash it to pieces, break down the invisible barriers, really see, but she knows how hard it is, how hard it is. In the Jobcentre everyone’s white, at least down in the Wetherspoon’s in Greenwich, by the DLR, you get a mix of people, but this has become a separate space. Yes, she is struck by the fact that on Resolution Way the art space she has been going to for meetings is called The Enclave, yes, she sees how this place floats on the High Street connected in a line of power, a shared dimension of futurity, to the rest of the Antic collective’s pubs, in the way the flats above TASTEE£ do, the building bifurcated on a horizontal temporal plane, the way that Canary Wharf, just across the river, always visible, floats outside the space-time of Tower Hamlets, London is itself outside the rest of the country; these multi-temporal spaces, worlds within worlds. She hovers in the doorway of the Jobcentre; you can no more cross those thresholds, breach those barriers, than step into the past or future.

She feels the moment of resistance, it must come from within her but it feels as tangible and real as though it were some physical barrier itself. Then she is pulled in behind Dan as he surges in, settles for a pint of Gunner Smith, a 9% IPA, sips it, settles back on the tastefully shabby settee. A pint mid-afternoon with nothing in his stomach but a bit of muesli will go straight to his head, good value for money. Have a siesta, and then tonight he can work on the paper he’s going to give in The Enclave on Saturday, part of Burst the Bubble’s on-going series of workshops.

Will Lewis be there? Yeah she says, of course.

Laura coming too?

She nods.

How’s your mum doing? Lee?

We are getting ready to leave, I guess, she says. Lee’s alright.

What about you? She asks Dan if he will help her out with stuff she’s studying, things she is not sure she has understood, but he looks too tired; she doesn’t want to put pressure on him.

She worries about Dan. He has always been like a brother to her, close, was always the smart one, went to University, got his degree. He could be across in Canary Wharf now, making his fortune, except he said when it came to it he just couldn’t do it. He knew straight away more or less, going to University, the life this might get me isn’t for me. Of course he worked hard, he did well, but if he ends up in Heart Of Chicken through USG’s Just in Time Temps programme, what hope is there for her? Still no, she mustn’t think that way. Dan says it, her Mum says it, Laura says it, it can change, it’s a set of decisions, a way of arranging the world, we can change it. Yes, we can, if we are not too exhausted, demoralised, depressed, half starved, drunk, messed up, focus so scattered, lives so unpredictable that any cohesion has gone, that even the smallest obstacles seem insurmountable, the most trivial challenges impossible to meet. She read something or did someone tell her, that slave owners always faced this delicate balancing act. You need to feed the slaves enough for them to be able to perform the work, but not so much that they have surplus strength that might be directed elsewhere.

How to maintain the optimum level of starvation, that’s the trick, that’s the art.

When she arrives at The Enclave, Derren Jones is talking about the inconclusive, finally ambiguous Spanish pre-Crisis social movement Pinchar la Burbuja, inspiration for their own Burst the Bubble campaigns, after which Andrew Gillingham will be talking about the crisis of the Seventies and the series of overlapping unresolved crises that have been circling the world since the dot com collapse of 1999. They are in Enclave 4, the art space down on Resolution Way. After the meeting they will assemble at the station, summoning forth, from phones and across networks of friends and fellow activists, sympathetic groups, a wildcat demonstration; point of protest: the Shard.

There are a lot of familiar faces, some people she knows through Laura, others she sees all the time, standing around outside the Bird’s Nest, or drinking Flat Whites in Kwofee or at pop-up exhibitions in the Deli opposite the station, but dare not speak to yet, sure they are too smart for her. Lewis skulks around at the back of the room waiting for Laura, her hood up looking scowly, feeling excited, awkward, enthused, ashamed, exposed.

She wants to go on the Demo, but she has promised her mum she will be back in the flat at 10.00 to relieve Joolzy of his Lee-sitting responsibilities. I will be home safe and sound; no I won’t sneak out later, just go, go.

At one of the meetings she went to with her mum a few weeks ago they were told 95% of new housing in the area has been sold off-plan, most are still only half built but are already re-selling at a profit, as, Sissy tells her, most of the new property in South London is now, not just the in-construction but the unbuilt too, projects launching and coming on-stream two, five, ten years into the future, the deeds on these future revenue streams, rents, assets, already changing hands, getting sold on and traded a decade before they are even built, added to the balance sheet today, used to leverage up and speculate further. The streets are thick with the unbuilt, a palimpsest of phantom tower blocks, projects, citadels overlaying the bricks and bone almost real enough to see, to touch. Who knows if any of these spectral houses will ever arrive, be concretised? And yet the prospect is already enriching those smart enough to know how the game is played, the only game in town.

This is where the next collapse will come from, Dan said to her as they stood down in Greenwich one day, sharing a footlong Jalapeno Chicken Satay Tikka Melt from Subway, looking over the Thames to the HSBC tower’s blinking light. All those promises, expectations, deals made and remade, bets taken again and again, and Lewis could sense, licking tangy orange sauce from her fingers, a sudden shift in the light, static gusting through the damp air, the penumbra of a storm. All this intangible, invisible power in a vast involute roiling, centrifugal, centripetal, everything rising and falling to its mad, multidimensional rhythms.

She closed her eyes, tried to picture it, the virtual space where all this was determined, some space outside time in which future worlds were winking in and out of existence.

She grew dizzy. Imagine the ungraspable expanse of deep time at your back, the accelerating subdivision of the moment, the vast, flat, stacked, maze-like barrage of futures made and unmade before your eyes at nanosecond speed, too fast to record on anything but a subconscious, cellular level, a nausea, a vertigo, a trauma. She squatted down overwhelmed. Peered between the gaps in the flat steel handrail.

Careful Lewis, careful. That’s how they want you to feel. Defeated, dazed, staggering blind and lost. Careful Lewis, careful, don’t do their work for them. She burps into the neck of her hoody. Maybe just that Subway footlong messing with her brain, she dodges junk food usually. Yes. If the world can be made one way it can be unmade, if it can be driven in one direction, it can be wrested and wrestled back another. Another burp, feels a bit better. Lighter.

She stands up again, that age-old question throbbing softly in her seventeen year old head and heart: To whom does the world belong?

Joolzy is over there, he’s popped out and she nods hello, he touches his forehead back in salute, alright soldier?

She wanders about looking at the paintings, picking up fliers, fiddling with her phone. Laura assures her she is on her way. People around her are talking, saying many things she doesn’t understand or half understands, but she knows, of course, there are some idiots everywhere, everyone acknowledges that, but these are the people, these are the people among whom she belongs. She skulks and eavesdrops, swigs nervously at a carton of black coffee.

A nu-step remix of Hot Money by The Derivatives has come on and a couple of drunk girls next to her start ironically twerking and laughing passing a bottle of Lambrini back and forth. This is why some people don’t like this crowd, these art-kids, some people think they are the problem. Remember when Cathedral group set that crappy disused train carriage up next to the station and ran a café in it, bringing in the artists and the funky creatives? That’s gone now and the space turned over to an artisanal food market for the flats they have built beside it.

There’s a very beautiful, tall, pale boy with a coronet of jet-black tumbling glossy curls and heavy stubble wearing a very baggy blue Nylon blouse, top button fastened, talking animatedly to a shorter Asian guy with a mullet, holding a can of Heineken. She loops their way pretending to look at the paintings. These are the guys with the weekly net radio show, aren’t they? Whose friends John and Jo do Left-Wing Workouts.

She loops away again. Someone is talking about Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames. Another the role of women within Nepalese Communist groups. The floor is sticky, her coffee carton drained.

She heads toward the door to get a breath of fresh air, there’s a guy there she recognises, in his mid-forties with steely grey hair, a suit and a nervous manner talking to two women in their twenties dressed in what she can only think of as some kind of Sixties style militant Sci-Fi boiler-suits. One of them she knows is Jessica Durham, a lecturer at Goldsmiths, she has seen her speak a few times and has a massive crush on her that she angrily denies to Laura, though Laura probably has one on her too.

The other girl, young, maybe her lover, with a sharp face and very soft blond hair, looks nervous and seems brittle and edgy, all her energy focused on saying brilliant, unforgettable things.

Just out through the doorway there’s another group, looking grim and tetchy texting away. There’s Dan, she nods, he smiles and nods quickly back, looks distracted. Already several people have been arrested in dawn raids or pinched on public transport, in supermarkets, swiping their Claimant Card or passing one of the million chipped bins, windows, lampposts that grid the city, swept up either under the massively expanded powers of the USG’s Welfare Enforcement Division or in straight busts by the Met. No one knows where they are now, in cells somewhere, detention centres, holding-pens, being deprived of sleep and food, lent on, intimidated. It’s only a few months since the last hard stop fiasco left Lewisham shopping centre gutted and the police station across the road pocked with flying bricks, and so the crackdown continues. Water cannon, rubber bullets, expanded powers to detain, reclassification of the term terrorists, the legal redefinition of the idea of violence, the extravagant sentencing.

The latest mayoral campaign poster has the incumbent in black and white posing at a window and peeping through the blinds, holding a Taser, a parody of the famous image of Malcolm X and the later recreation by KRS-One.

Keeping London open for business. By all means necessary.

Lewis leans against the rail and looks up and down Resolution Way.

Where is she?

Lewis checks the time on her phone, and suddenly Laura has arrived, sashayed in out of nowhere on stiletto heels, sidled up beside her.

She runs her hand up Lewis’s back, says, hello gorgeous. Sorry I’m late, took ages getting ready.

Laura kisses her, her lips taste of nothing but her own delicious lips, her hair smells uniquely of Laura herself. Lewis goes up on tiptoe. Laura’s breasts push against her throat and her whole sublime heft strains against the black satin suit she is wearing. She grips at Lewis’ arms through her tracksuit top and feels the knotted muscle, runs a hand over her shaved head and gazes into her eyes.

You are so amazingly hot, Lewis says and runs a hand up between her legs, watches Laura’s nostrils flare, a smile tickle at the corners of her mouth as her knuckles bump softly to a stop. Laura squeezes a little on Lewis’ fist with her thighs and bites her lip.

Oh my stars, she is ridiculously hot. That eye makeup and the insanely thick false eyelashes. Lewis is half tempted to just pop back to the empty flat right now but suddenly the buzz in the room subsides and a series of Prezi slides are being projected against the far wall, images taken from property websites, Your-home, Zoopla, Rightmove, others from what is increasingly being called the Shadow Housing Sector, a nice euphemism, the boy in the sky-blue blouse, standing at the front of the slowly assembling crowd says, for slum housing. More specifically he wants to address the overlap between the two and the increasing discursive legitimation in the popular press of price gouging, overcrowding and the construction of ad-hoc and improvised “accommodation” in gardens, abandoned sites, garages, jerry built extensions, the accelerating subdivision of existing housing stock into smaller and smaller spaces, into capsule and, informally, “coffin” accommodation, the Government’s restriction of planning and tenancy laws in order to prolong the housing crisis from which they and their supporters benefit. He concludes with a critique of the Alter-housing movement, the wigwams and yurts and wagons snuck away in outlying fields or sympathetic friend’s gardens as mirroring the logic of rentier capitalism under the guise of libertarian Leftism, and concludes by explaining that their own Burst the Bubble campaign differs from the Spanish Pinchar la Burbuja, in that the latter attempted to collapse the bubble from below by mass refusal to take on mortgages, whereas they see the necessity of making property itself subject to attacks, to send a clear message that property is not a global asset class and that any attempt to use it as such will be met with concentrated attempts to occupy, confiscate or radically devalue that asset.

By any means necessary? Someone in the crowd asks, to laughter.

Burn baby burn, someone else shouts out. They are all mindful of the undercover police who are certainly in the room, all mindful of the comrades given seven years for unfurling a sign saying “this property is condemned” on one of the new Hypervillages in the process of being constructed by Singaporean magnate Jensen Foo, photographing it along with a number of activists in balaclavas brandishing petrol bombs and comedy dynamite and clock bombs posing on the only half constructed seventeenth floor of Three Bridges Tower, studios starting from six hundred and fifty thousand pounds. They hacked into Throwbridge’s Singapore Property portal and posted the images up over the original pictures of the development. The list of charges was insanely long, including the newly implemented “threats against property” and “violence against property”, the existing terrorist classification being extended to those who would “subvert or seek to prevent through means of intimidation the lawful transaction of business”. Housing terrorists. Reification at its purest, someone shouts when the recent conviction gets mentioned. People are property, property is a person.

Shard apartments, not shared apartments, because you were meant to be apart. A picture of a benignly clean cut young couple gazing down onto a crowded street and across to what looks like a crumbling Victorian slum appears.

There’s your future, Lewis. Being together, being apart.

Time is it?

Shit, nearly ten. Better get back to the flat, Joolzy will be waiting.