01
A hand over hers, the chafe of skin on skin. The first touch in months. Miri lashes out, thrusting an elbow hard into the stomach of the person who has come to stand too close; a tall figure who neatly side-steps the blow and, undeterred, presses forward. A dazzle-patterned scarf is bound over their mouth and nose, and above it are two black eyes that gleam like oil on water. Miri tries to draw away but is not quick enough to escape the strong fingers that circle her wrist and restrain her. A rough slip of paper is pressed into her open palm. Then the fingers loosen their grip, releasing her, and the masked figure disappears into the crowd.
Alone again at the edge of the square, Miri takes several steps back to shore up the distance between herself and the mass of people gathered there. Then she examines the paper. A flyer, bearing the usual line – Say no to life – above a short quotation. She balls it up in her palm and shoves it into her pocket.
She is only here to see the Offset. She wants – needs – to see the execution, but the longer she waits the harder it is to stay. The unexpected physical encounter has set her on edge. Without noticing, she starts pressing finger to thumb in a repetitive gesture she half-recalls learning in childhood. There is, she thinks, a rhyme that should accompany the motion but she cannot remember what it is. Something about an inch-worm. No. A spider. A spider and a flood borne of a cleansing rain that hammered the Earth for forty days and forty nights. Or is that something else? Her brow creases into a frown as she tries to remember, but it’s no good. All she has left is the mime. Finger, thumb, finger, thumb. There’s something about it that makes her feel still. Calm. As though that one repetitive movement is enough to slow her racing heart: her nerves transformed into kinetic energy and heat. For as long as she can keep it up, she is safe. Or should be. Right now, it isn’t working too well.
The square is packed. Miri struggles with crowds at the best of times and it’s been a long time since she’s seen so many people in one place. It’s too much to contemplate, all those lives compacted together into one vast, sprawling beast. Even standing apart from the worst of it, the stench is inescapable; a pervasive musk of stale sweat beneath the occasional tang of urine and sulphur that wafts through in the heat.
For one fleeting moment, Miri imagines herself standing atop the empty capital of the blackened pillar at the square’s centre. From that giant height, the crowd becomes no more than squirming ants. In her mind’s eye, she lifts a heavy bucket aloft and tips it until water comes pouring out, crashing down onto the masses below, flooding the square until it becomes a sea, a watery grave thick with the bodies of the drowned ants. Then, just as suddenly as it came, the image is gone. Now, when she glances at the crowd swarming around the base of the column, the vacant plinths, she sees herself as part of it; another cell of the fetid mass that grows like a blight in the earth. Her heart spasms with revulsion and she stares down at her hands, focusing on the movement until the sense of stillness returns. Finger, thumb, finger, thumb.
Slowly, she turns her attention to the feel of the November heat on her hands and face, the scratch of her threadbare shirt against her arms and back, willing her consciousness out into her skin to acknowledge the barrier that holds her together and keeps her separate from the world. It helps. When she next looks up, she observes the crowd with newly impassive eyes. Even so, she is neither quite brave nor foolish enough to relinquish the protection of the childish ritual. Finger, thumb, finger, thumb. Like a talisman to ward off evil.
Now she’s regained her composure, a wary voice in her head tells her to go, to leave now rather than risk suffering again the sensation of being subsumed into the heaving crowd. Or worse still, touched. But she can no more bring herself to turn away than she can learn to breathe underwater. Her place is in the square. She must stay and watch. She must give witness to the execution.
She’s not sure how long it’s been since the last Offset – she doesn’t venture often into this part of the city. But, from the excited activity of the ageing crowd, she figures that it must have been quite some time. The mass of bodies swirls with eddies and currents as people make their way through to meet old friends, to get a better spot, to get closer to the action. But there’s no mistaking where the focus lies: the steps that ascend from the square to the Gallery, an ancient building with a monolithic edifice of cracked white stone.
For now, the Gallery steps are empty save for a glass-fronted booth that stands between two of the crumbling pillars. It’s a broad, squat structure, purely functional in design and comprised of little more than painted timber frame and glass. What lies within the booth changes from Offset to Offset. Sometimes it contains gallows and sometimes a guillotine. Today it holds a wooden chair, tall and narrow, with a number of broad leather straps hanging from it, rusted buckles trailing to the floor. A metal rod runs up the back of the chair like the frame of a medical drip and a round, metal bowl hangs from it at approximately head-height. A thick wire leads from the metal rod to a generator at the back of the booth.
Miri doesn’t know anything about the person who is due to die in that chair, but she knows everything she needs to about the crime they have committed. It is the only crime still punishable by death the world over: the mortal sin of procreation.
Historically, the transgression was voiced by one of suitable authority – a mayor, a judge, a religious leader – who stood before the crowd and explained that the Offset was perfect retribution, exacting and brutal. How every birth, every act of creation, every new life threatened the fragile equilibrium of all things. That the imbalance had to be righted, and that the wages of sin was death. “For every birth, a death,” they would say, in recitation of the law.
There is no such pronouncement anymore, though. There is no need.
The part of the crowd nearest the steps is thick with Activists, including anti-natalists baying for breeder blood. They are all dressed like the one who gave her the flyer, dazzle-patterned scarves bound about their faces. The banners they wave are daubed in red and depict graphic scenes of environmental destruction. Several bear the image of a bloodied ouroboros. Miri can’t hear the slogans they chant but she can guess their meaning: save the planet, the Earth is suffocating, no mercy for breeders. In their midst, Miri spots one or two people who don’t look like anti-natalists. They are white-haired and bear green spirals painted on their faces, and they are trying to tear down the banners. Miri thinks she could almost admire their courage if she didn’t find their views so abhorrent. One of them has a crudely made megaphone and attempts to drown out the anti-natalists’ shouts, but only serves to silence the voices of their own group. Others in the crowd – those marked by neither ouroboros nor green spiral – roll their eyes or laugh. Every Offset is the same; the Activists come in their droves to shout and mock, some in favour of the ritual and others against it. No one else pays them much heed. May as well protest the heat of the sun, for all the difference it will make.
Miri turns her eyes skywards. The sun is distant and remote, obscured behind the thick haze that permeates the city. Far off, a solitary tree rises up amongst the buildings, listing at a precarious angle, its charred branches stripped bare. Miri’s eyes snag on its grim silhouette. For as long as the dead tree stands, it serves as a monument to the wildfires that coursed through the heart of London the summer before. Soon, though, it will fall and the fires will recede in public memory until they are as hazy as the smog that even now chokes the streets.
Even though Miri knows how easy it is to not see, and how much easier it is to forget, it still seems unbelievable to her that anyone could be quite as blind to their surroundings as those wearing the green spirals. They protest against the Offset even as they stand within sight of the most recent natural devastation. It’s as impossible to understand as the selfishness of those who, like the person due to be executed, wilfully continue to add to the world’s burden by creating more parasitic mouths to feed on the lifeblood of the Earth.
Parasites like you, says the voice in her head.
She quickly pushes the thought away. Finger, thumb, finger, thumb.
Silence falls on the square like an axe. At once, her attention snaps back from the sky and down to the booth, where two pigsuits have appeared. Their terrible forms cast dark silhouettes against the glass. They are vacant shells, dreadful chimeras of dented aluminium and transparent acrylic, each one encasing a fleshy hollow moulded into the shape of a body. The pigsuits have been empty for years; have long since outgrown the human officers who once wore them. Now they are driven by the frenetic command of their programming, of the sensors and circuitry that laces their articulated exoskeletons.
There’s a sharp intake of breath somewhere nearby as fear pulses through the crowd. Heads jerk upwards. It reminds Miri of old footage of herds on the African savannah, before severe droughts turned the grassland to desert. An antelope catches the scent of a prowling lion and, one by one, the rest of the herd raise their heads in search of the coming danger. Unlike the herd, the crowd in the square doesn’t turn tail and flee but merely cowers, trying to reassure themselves they have nothing to fear.
For now, at least, they do not. The pigsuits’ interest is confined to the thin woman who stands between them, small and fragile. She is there of her own volition, honouring the choice that was made by her child, offering herself up in sacrifice. A mother.
Miri feels herself incline forward, rocking onto her toes, eager to drink in every detail of the woman. Next to the degenerating pigsuits – their fasciae blossoming with rust, their clear central casings so grease-smeared as to obscure the chasm within – her appearance is neat. Fastidious, even. She wears a plain brown skirt with a white shirt tucked into the waistband and her wiry ash-blonde hair, freshly dyed for the occasion, is drawn back into an elegant twist. She does not look up at the crowd but keeps her eyes downcast as she moves into the glass-fronted booth and drops herself heavily down into the wooden chair. Once she is seated, she waves a hand to indicate that she is ready. The closest pigsuit bends and reaches out a handless glove to fasten the straps, looping several around the woman’s arms and legs and then another across her torso.
Miri wonders where the woman’s partner and child are. Perhaps they are somewhere in the crowd, watching, revelling in this moment of glory, of righteous revenge and absolute power. If she were bolder, she would push through the crowd to get as close as possible, to be right up against the glass when the electric hits. But the very thought of stepping further into the mass makes her lungs tighten and constrict.
Finger, thumb, finger, thumb.
The woman is shaking with fear now, violently enough that Miri can see every quiver, even from her poor vantage point. The smaller of the two pigsuits is busy adjusting switches on the generator whilst the other straps a wet sponge to the woman’s forehead. As it crushes the hanging metal bowl on top of the sponge, lines of water run down the woman’s face, pooling in her eye sockets and making her blink hard. Miri can see her thin arms uselessly straining at the straps in an attempt to wipe the water away. The pigsuit, ignorant of her discomfort, sweeps a greasy brown blindfold over her face and pins it there. A small pool of damp spreads across the woman’s skirt as she loses control of her bladder. The anti-natalists jeer.
Miri scans back past them, looking to see how the rest of the crowd are responding. They are quieter than the Activists, transfixed and silent. Insignificant details spring out at her; a man kneading a dry earlobe between his knuckles, a couple clasped together with circling arms, an old woman absently clutching a lumpen teddy, threadbare and grey, to her chest.
Miri turns back to the booth. It seems that the pigsuits are finally ready. The smaller of the two, the one that has been tending to the woman, straightens up and retreats into the shadows. As soon as it has, the other pigsuit raises an arm to the lever on the generator.
This is the woman’s moment.
The crowd watches her intently. She wets her lips, tongue darting, and then nods. The pigsuit pulls the lever down.
Two thousand volts shoot down through the metal bowl and into the woman’s body. She braces hard and then falls out of consciousness before beginning to thrash and jerk violently against the restraints. Blue lines of electricity crackle along her limbs and torso. The generator whirs loudly. Somebody in the crowd screams.
Without warning, the pigsuit throws up the lever. A sudden stillness. Ten seconds pass. Twenty. The woman’s chest rises and falls with a weak, rattling breath.
Her respite is short-lived.
With another crank of the lever, the pigsuit sends out a second wave of voltage. This one ensures death. The frantic thrashing and jerking start up again but this time steam begins to emanate from the woman’s body. Vast waves of it churn out from the glass front of the booth, drifting towards the crowd in the square.
The pigsuit raises the lever, allowing the woman’s body to slump forward in the chair. The other steps forward and tugs at the bowl on her head. Once it comes free, Miri sees that the woman’s hair is aflame, blazing so furiously that soon her entire head is consumed. It is no ordinary fire, but threaded through with electricity and unnaturally ferocious. The front rows of the crowd begin to retreat, even the Activists. Miri can see people turning away from the Gallery, gagging, hands pressed over their mouths and noses. The stench hits, dreadful in its familiarity. She thinks of the summer’s wildfires; the blackened bodies laid out on the heath. Bile rises in her throat. Behind the glass, the pigsuits battle with the flames while the woman slowly burns.
Beyond the edge of the square there is a strip of wild grassland that once served as a road. Miri stumbles through it, beating aside the ragweed, thistles and yellow toadflax to scatter the air with clouds of dry, shrivelled seeds. Standing half-submerged in a dense thicket of blood-red filterweed is an old bus stop; a rusted metal frame is all that remains of the modest shelter. Miri lowers herself onto the rickety bench and takes a few deep breaths, stuffing her fists into her pockets. In one pocket is the crumpled flyer and in the other a folded postcard, a willing reply to Miri’s request to meet at seven the following day, in the cool of the evening. It’s from someone they call the Celt, a woman who she got to know in the volunteer-run ReproViolence Clinic out by the Soho tenements. Although she hasn’t had cause to return there in the last few months – not since she recovered from that last bout of pneumonia – she finds her thoughts turn to the Celt with increasing regularity. Just thinking about her now,
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