Paul Cornell - The Severed Streets

London in the summer.

One fine day and dont the English go mad? Every square of grass suddenly acquires a PA with a sandwich and a book about bondage. Sound seems to carry further. Music and news catch you unawares.

Police marching in Trafalgar Square, in advance of the forthcoming vote, chanting they want the right to strike

White-legged men in ridiculous shorts. Socks under sandals.

In the shadow of that fucking ridiculous- You know what we need down here? Not an Olympic Velodrome! Whats it for now?

Pimms with the sun shining off the pitcher. Furrowed brows are now white lines on pink.

Cuts in front-line policing, never mind the specialist units. If the riots continue, if the Summer of Blood arrives, there will be areas where there are riots, where the police will not be able to go!

In the evenings, crowds spill out of the pubs onto the warm pavement. At six in the evening, you can hear the number drone of cricket scores on the radio.

They are expecting us to work for free, when theyve sold this country

Wimbledon and Glastonbury and the Proms

Sieg heil! Sieg heil! Sieg heil!

Theres something about the blank summer sky when the endless dog day, global-warming, tufty storm clouds part and unseasonal shivers give way to proper hay fever that demands fire. Sparks in the blue black. But sparks sink back to the ground. Where the sparks land, there is fire.

Theres a car going past the ends of streets. The car is polished so the sun reflects off it. There are pools of shadow at the end of every street. In every corner that stays dark theres a beggar now, an addict or a whore.

This is my car. Im in it. Its polished like this because of me. Its a big rich car because of me.

What? Is that me? Is this me now, in this big car?! How did that happen? Who does this summer belong to? Whos coming?

* * *

Michael Spatley MP, chief secretary to the Treasury, woke with a gasp. He was in the back of his official air-conditioned car, but he was sweating. Light was sliding across his face. He looked out through the tinted windows, and there were the reassuring streets of London. He must have fallen asleep almost immediately when theyd left the House of Commons. They hadnt even reached Green Park yet. The traffic on Victoria Street was heavy this evening. Spatley loosened his tie and let out a long breath. Hed been having such terrible dreams lately. He always woke up feeling as if he was being accused of something.

He really should find a weekday flat closer than Kensington. Now he was in the Cabinet, he could afford it, just about. His title sounded so grand, but the pay was actually painfully less than he could have earned in industry. The general public just didnt get that. An unexpected smell came to him, from outside the car. He hit the button to lower the window. It didnt work.

Sorry, sir, said Tunstall. Tunstall was Spatleys regular driver from the Ministerial Car Service. He had a finger to his communication earpiece. Ive switched on the security features. Theres a problem up ahead. Well be turning off in a sec and going the pretty way.

Thanks, Brian. The smell was of smoke. A big fire not just wood, but tyres and that stench of hot tar, way beyond the scent of baking streets. Whats going on?

You know the protests. Okay, here we go. He swung the wheel, the angle of light changed across the car interior, and they were off down a side street where shops lined the lower floor of the surrounding tall buildings.

It was good to be on first-name terms with ones driver. Spatley liked the way Tunstall dealt with whatever got in their way, as if life in the capital was one big traffic jam to be slipped around. Spatley took his iPad from his bag and checked Sky News.

incidents in Peckham, where police have yet to arrive, report residents. Shop owners are taking to the streets in an effort to protect their property, some armed with makeshift weapons. Meanwhile, unscheduled anti-cuts protests by flash mobs have slowed traffic to a halt in parts of central London

That was new: flash mob now an offhand part of the news vocabulary. A month ago that would have been so-called. He watched the images for a while: kids in Peckham in hoods or with scarves over their faces, running, in the sunshine, which looked odd, to see all that energy while it was still light. Cut to a mass of kids who looked much more middle class, bushy beards and skinny shirts, rushing into the foyer of some big corporation. Spatley watched the protestors; many of them were holding their phone cameras in the air, like crosses to repel evil, as they upended a vat of what looked like blood but was surely some sort of dye onto the PAs chair. That imagery wouldnt play well for them: a scared black PA, chubby, nice, furious at them. The problem was that you couldnt see their faces, with the front row of the protestors wearing those aristocrat masks with top hats, some of them sporting the little capes.

To him, those masks just looked like giving in. As if revealing who you were these days was not just dangerous, as they wanted to imply, but actually impossible. Face coverings werent allowed at certain protests now; hed voted for that legislation. Hed thought of Muslim women as he did it, and hoped for some care to be taken in the specifics, but, well, the debate just hadnt gone in that direction.

He noted that there was long brunette hair spilling out of the back of one of the masks in the news clip, small, youthful breasts filling out the crisp white shirt. No silver-topped walking canes this time, though, not since the first of these protests, when the police had classed the canes as weapons and charged right in, and several of the protestors had suddenly understood what theyd got into. Protestors was that the right word, even? I mean, come on, they talked about being against the cuts that was all he ever heard from them, cut cut cut but could many of them even sum up the economic case against? What do we want? Its complicated! That had got a laugh and a groan of annoyance at the same time from the audience on Have I Got News for You the other night, as if a satirical show should only have a go at the government and not at a bunch of bloody students. He wished he could sit them down and try to persuade them that he and his colleagues on the Liberal Democrat side of the Coalition were actually doing their best to hold the fucking Tories back.

Or well, that was what they kept saying to other people and to each other. It was more that the presence of him and his colleagues made the fucking Tories even more like the fucking Tories, because they had to keep proving themselves to be so damned hardcore. He kept finding the images coming unbidden into his head: people dragged out of shops and put into vans; Orwellian signs about reporting illegal immigrants; reporters being told that they had no right to know. Wasnt this exactly what hed campaigned against, not very long ago?

He wasnt going to let himself give in to hopelessness. If he could reveal what hed discovered in the last few weeks, those Toff protestors in the masks would be glad he was still in government. Then maybe the Coalition would mean something. Then maybe he would mean something. Because he was actually on the point of demonstrating that there was something much, much worse just under the surface something he could root out and bring into the light.

Yes, in the last few days hed made up his mind about this. He was going to act, and he was going to do it soon. He found his hand going to the inside pocket of his jacket, as it reflexively did when he needed to be reassured about what he had there. He stopped it. He knew what he had. Now he had to act on it.