In the end, it was all a waste. The saving, the balancing of their portfolios, the penny-pinching and buying toothpaste on offer—all that painstaking preparation for an independent old age, the better to burden neither family nor the state. The couple had done everything right. They hadn’t blown their assets prematurely on extravagant holidays or—as the tabloids had claimed the gaga elderly would all splash out on when foolishly allowed access to their own retirement funds—Lamborghinis. They’d bought their house at a provident time and paid off the mortgage. They’d both worked well past the point at which they might have comfortably retired. Besides their hard-earned pensions, neither had drawn on the public purse; to the contrary, they’d paid sizable tax bills without complaint. They’d put aside as much as possible for the rainy day presently gathering into a monsoon, yet increasingly their monthly income could barely purchase a tin of Baxters butternut squash soup and a packet of builder’s tea. Even that long-term care insurance: the company went bust, so all those hefty premiums had bought them no more security than anyone else enjoyed—meaning none. Kay and Cyril Wilkinson discovered for themselves that there was only one thing worse than being very, very old: being very, very old and broke.
* * *
Frail but all there, both Kay and Cyril were proving remarkably long-lived. If, as news presenters compulsively observed, extended life expectancy was a stroke of great good fortune for everyone, enduring into their late nineties made the couple luckier than most. But were they lucky? As matters unfolded, this question was not as easy to answer as all that.
When Cyril turned one hundred years old on the twenty-second of January 2039, no one from the royal family sent a birthday card. That might have been because Buckingham Palace, along with all the other royal residences like Windsor Castle, was by then occupied by “asylum seekers” from a wide range of nationalities. For history, alas, does not instruct problems to politely wait their turn, even in a country with a reputation for revering the queue. Thus, on top of a Western-wide financial implosion that made the Great Depression seem like a pet death, the tide of tourists-for-life now rolling up from the global south made Europe’s “migration crisis” of 2015 seem like a school field trip. Accurate numbers were impossible to come by, and anyone who claimed to know even roughly how many migrants had stormed the continent by foot, lorry, plane, and boat clearly had a political agenda. Leftists claimed that only a few million had breached the continent’s borders, whilst much-demonized nativists were equally certain that the total well exceeded a billion souls. Just as they’d thrown up their hands when trying to keep track of “billions” versus “trillions” in government spending, most of the public settled on “a lot.”
Many Britons who could afford to be charitable donated clothing, disposable nappies, bags of penne, and jars of pesto to support the incomers. The most considerable hostility to the influx was amongst first- and second-generation immigrants, sometimes from the very countries this more recent wave had fled. Having made it across the English Channel in time, Pakistanis, Afghans, Hindus, and Nigerians all demanded that the UK pull up the drawbridge. Yet the “drawbridge” in this instance was a useless figure of speech, and unless Britain was willing to come to the unacceptable conclusion that the unending flotilla of boats from France and Belgium was a military matter—in Turkey, troops had been ordered to shoot migrants on sight—policy decisions were nugatory. Besides, British bureaucracy was one of the last casualties of the onslaught, so that for the first few years every incomer was duly registered for a pittance of a weekly stipend, provided housing until there wasn’t any, assigned a taxpayer-financed lawyer, strictly instructed not to work, and allowed to appeal denied asylum claims up to seven times. Any threat of deportation was empty bluster. Rather than remove the asylum seekers, it would have been cheaper and more logistically feasible to evacuate the English.
Meanwhile, the NHS, whose budget had so ballooned that the standing joke about Britain having become “a health service with a country attached” was no longer funny, was so inundated that doctors reminisced nostalgically about the coronavirus pandemic, when they’d naively had no idea what the word “overwhelmed” really meant.
“Being hospitable is the least we can do,” Cyril maintained early in the surge, then predicted to soon subside. “Climate change is largely the West’s fault. We’re reaping what we sowed, so we’ll simply have to move over and make room.”
“Sorry,” Kay said. “Europe, North America, and Australia have reduced fossil fuel emissions to practically nothing. Pounding one more nail in our economic coffin, we’ve bent over backwards to reach carbon neutrality by 2050—another one of those distant years that was never supposed to actually arrive, and now it’s right round the corner. Meanwhile, China, India, and Southeast Asia have been churning out emissions to beat the band—”
“You can’t blame poorer nations for wanting, and deserving, a Western lifestyle, bab.”
“You’ve got to be joking!” Kay exploded. “We’re living on mouldy toast. What ‘Western lifestyle’?”
“If the UK weren’t a massive improvement on their wretched circumstances, these benighted refugees would never attempt the perilous journey across the Channel.” Even in these early days, Cyril’s soothing liberal platitudes had begun to assume the demented singsong of
