Further contributing to the festivities, the anti-climate-change Extinction Rebellion, once so popular amongst affluent young white Britons, had merged with the antinomian No Lives Matter movement to become “Extinction!” full stop. Gathering a fearsome strength, the faction urged a pagan embrace of the very apocalypse that the original eco-activists had aimed to prevent. Regarding themselves as sharing common cause with the asylum seekers, these young people weren’t pummelling immigrants or torching encampments. They were smashing anything that smacked of a hoary old civilization that had had its day, and the targets of their arson were larger than tents—like the Houses of Parliament. According to Simon and Hayley, the Wilkinsons’ now-teenage great-grandchildren had joined the anarchists and were out marauding across London all night long. The UK having bred the disaffected punk scene, it made sense that the country would also give birth to an antisocial movement far less decorative and middle-class (for Britain no longer had a middle class), which quickly spread to the continent. Once the restoration of Notre Dame was finally completed for a second time, within a fortnight a rabble of young white Frenchmen in Extinction! T-shirts burnt the cathedral to cinders.
* * *
“We’ve no need for six bedrooms. In a way it’s fair.” Cyril’s stock social justice had grown lacklustre, and he pitched the platitudes in a mocking minor key.
“I’m sick of you telling me I have to learn to share, like some toddler,” Kay whispered hoarsely. “I hate having these people in our house.”
They were holed up in the loft, to which the homeowners had been banished by a good thirty visitors who had co-opted the rooms below.
“At least Simon tried to evict them,” Kay added.
“Bab, it’s hard for us to get our heads round it, but Simon is seventy-five. The display of loyalty was terribly touching, but banging on the door and making empty threats about ringing the police—what police?—simply put him at risk. Even most of the adults downstairs are less than half his age. He’s lucky they merely laughed at him. It could have been much worse.”
“It’s Roy who could organize our rescue if he wanted to,” Kay said.
Of their family members, Roy alone had flourished in the chaos, having got in on the ground floor of people-smuggling for the refugees who were better off. It was a lucrative trade. At seventy-two, he’d finally found his calling.
“True,” Cyril agreed heavily. “He has the underworld connections to mobilize a mob on command. But let’s be honest. Roy’s only interest in this property would be as a safe house for his customers.”
“Maybe we’re lucky that he hasn’t personally chucked us in the street, then,” Kay said. “At least Hayley seems to have learnt her lesson after that abortive performance art. She claims to have nostalgically returned to the ‘social distancing’ of the coronavirus outbreak, a fancy way of saying that she never leaves the house.”
Hayley had chosen the worst possible historical juncture to revive her arty ambitions from university. The piece she staged for the tent city in Regent’s Park was bound to end in tears. To illustrate “inequality,” she sat on a plush stool wolfing profiteroles as actors pretending to be refugees looked mournfully on. The actors were robbed, the profiteroles seized: far edgier theatre.
“Hey,” Kay said. “Did you see they took apart those lovely end tables and fed them to the log burner? And the kids used the charcoal afterwards to draw pictures on the sitting room wallpaper.”
“It was getting a bit faded,” Cyril said with a sigh. “Sod the wallpaper. The real problem is the plumbing. London’s sewage system is fragile enough, after all those wet-wipe and PPE fatbergs. But they don’t seem to realize what you can and can’t flush. I barely got the upstairs toilet working this afternoon, but when I sneaked down the ladder just now it was backed up with shite and overflowing again. Sorry, bab. Back to the bucket.”
“Got to feed the oldies, ya?” came from below. Having joined a contingent of local anarchists, the guests of their impromptu Airbnb hailed from multiple countries, so at least communicated with each other in English.
The retractable ladder rattled down, and their personal chef rose only the few steps required to fling the evening meal on the dusty floorboards. The lone main course was, as ever, a small mound of cornmeal mush, which might just have passed for polenta except it contained no butter, no parmesan cheese, and more fatally no salt. The plate was a piece of their wedding china: chipped and cracked but still attractive, with its cream centre, emerald border, and glint of silver on the rim.
“Don’t know why we bother with them,” came a female voice as the ladder was slammed closed again. “Food bitching to find. Waste of good ugali. Means time, Sarina get too thin.”
Once their overstaying houseguests had tromped away, Cyril whispered, “I’d enough time to get a partial charge on my phone today, because the others were mostly out—foraging, I suppose. But the electricity is bound to be cut off eventually. Our pensions no longer cover the British Gas bill, and the direct debit won’t have gone through for the last two months. They won’t be lenient forever.”
“Hurry up and check the BBC website, then!” Kay urged. “What’s the news?”
Cyril inhaled, scrolled, and sighed.
“What? How much worse can it be than yesterday?”
“They’ve rappelled up the Bank of England and bashed in the windows. It’s suspected they murdered the governor. In any case, it’s now another squat.”
The headline was of a piece. August university campuses from Cambridge to Bologna were occupied by needy arrivals, and what few courses were still offered were conducted patchily online; Hayley’s husband had long before been made redundant at UCL, as the last thing anyone had time for was linguistics. The British Library was covered with plywood, whilst the Booker was long gone, and even Sweden had dropped awarding Nobels for the last three years. The looted V&A was
