Was everybody in this place homosexual? Is that why they ended up here? Or did it come naturally after months and years of being isolated without so much as a picture of a woman? He just could not see himself taking to men. He had never been interested in that kind of thing. With puberty, it was straight to girls without passing through his school mates’ bottoms, unlike so many in his class at the all-male boarding school within the Central Enclave of London. He lost his virginity at the age of fourteen to a sympathetic chambermaid down a back-alley off the Fulham Road. His early sexual adventures were squalid in the extreme—behind some cheap bar, rows of spread legs and clenched bottoms pumping amidst the alley cats. How the hell he had avoided gonorrhoea or worse was a mystery. He would sneak over the school railings into the big wide world, beyond the petty fiefdoms of the monitors, roaming far down into Fulham and Brompton, almost to the towering battlements of the Grande Enceinte itself. Streams of bored maids swirled about looking for diversion after their shifts in the great houses of the Central Enclave. Garish jazz clubs, street dances jigged by folk bands and backstreet gin… No wonder he messed up his O-Levels.
It was from around that time Lawrence noticed a subtle exclusion at family dinners. His father debated with elder brother Donald disputes in the Land Court of Westminster, while their stepmother ate in silence. These were matters in a vocabulary and following a logic that meant nothing to Lawrence. Donald was ten years the older, long graduated from Oxford University, with years of specialist legal training under his belt. Lawrence had just screwed up his O-Levels. On the rare occasions he did try to join in, there would be silence, followed by a delicately condescending lecture from his father on the matter in question. His father never asked him about history essays, or football, the only two aspects of school where he still achieved excellence. Donald never spoke a word to him. If they passed in the house, his elder brother simply ignored him. So, Lawrence spent most dinners in silence, his head down, excluding them as they excluded him. Now he found himself in the Value System, still with his head down excluding the world. The difference was, no girls here; just spays, gays and the very frustrated.
Lawrence eyed the man opposite, recognising him as from the front row of Gang 4. That meant he was an old-timer. Like Lawrence, he was physically hefty, with strong shoulders and wrists as thick as clubs. His large face was bold-featured, with heavy brows and a deep chin, the kind of face that might once have made a career on the stage. However, the eyes were now sunk in shadows and they held a dulled mood of resignation. Lawrence guessed he was in his mid-forties.
“I’m Big Stak.”
“I’m Mirror-Face.”
“How long have you been here?”
“I forget.”
“You can’t have forgotten that.”
Mirror-Face took a gulp of the dandelion tea and smacked the cup down.
“You’ve a lot to learn, tyro.”
He turned his face away, shutting Lawrence out of his attention. SMS London had just ascended to the dais. The population fell silent, leaving the clangs of pots and pans being stacked in the kitchen.
“These are the tasks of the evening shift.”
Gang 4 would be on harvesting. This was good news, apparently—no pleasures of the flesh.
Harvesting involved copses, rather than corpses. The gang harvested willow from the plantation and stored the yield in the Factory. From questioning Spiderman, Lawrence began to appreciate the extreme economic logic of the Value System. Cadavers came in at Goods Inwards, the hides got separated from the meat and waste. Waste got left on an open area near the Pig Farm called the Midden, where the local population of seagulls, magpies and crows, not to mention an colony of giant rats, was happy to assist in stripping it all down to bare bones. Hides were either bated in tanks, or smoked into buckskin in the Smoking House. The treated hides got sorted out, dyed and made into finished product in the Workshop. Products for working people were branded “The Captain’s Best”. Luxury items like briefcases, motorcycle jackets, coats and gloves were branded “Style Captain”. The bones got pounded to dust in a hammer mill powered off extremely bored value on a treadmill. The bone meal got mixed with ashes from the Smoking House and spread as fertiliser into the rich fenland soil of the farmland around the Factory to grow food for the population, thus closing the cycle. By the end of the shift, it was completely dark and they finished under a splendid exhibition of the Milky Way. Lawrence was amazed the ultramarines were so lax about security. He would quickly learn nothing got you hated faster than upsetting the clockwork schedule of the Value System. Delays ate into the very little leisure time that there was.
The gangs formed up for evening parade in twelve blocks on the cobbled yard of the Square. Lawrence took his place in Gang 4, in the rear row at the right-hand end.
SMS London stepped up beside a stone-framed door overlooking the Yard.
“Parade silence.”
There was silence. It was a calm night, sounds carried from far away. There was a faint roar of breakers. This, to Lawrence’s mind, was a detail worth remembering. It must now be nearly low tide, as it had been low tide in the morning twelve hours ago when they unloaded cadavers from the barge. The sea ought to have been miles away, retreated beyond tidal flats. That the sea was still close could be a critical detail in the chain of invention that Lawrence was going to have to assemble in order to get back to life.
SMS London rapped on the door. It opened to the magnificent figure of The Captain in his shimmering black uniform with
