Powerhousing III

It wasn’t my insulin we moved for; as you know, we needed that for Jane, Deen’s Mother. After a while we didn’t need it at all. The first typhoid outbreak, five years after they built the barrier, took care of the most vulnerable. She had to have a drink, she bought a bottle at the corner shop, didn’t check the seal. ‘Hill-fresh Calder Water’ it said on the label. It’s hard to explain. We knew. We all knew that things weren’t as they were. Everyone was pretending. We thought it better. It wasn’t organised crime gangs producing counterfeit booze, cigarettes, vapes and water. The stuff wasn’t even counterfeit. It was made in the Wild North, but - well - it wasn’t possible to meet the old European standards, nor even the ones passed into law by Londington, even though they did not apply to us anyway. You see, if we put a label with an image of a green hill with a stream on a bottle, we could pretend that nothing had changed. That the water did not flow through damaged pipes befouled by sewage and was no more from a spring than from the Harrow Gate Spa. The typhoid changed a lot of things.

Barter is illegal. Although I think the Police know about the market. The market moves. It’s never in a town. It’ll be out at an old factory or sewage works. It’s one of the few occasions when people from Ourtown Royd and Theirtown Royd do meet. A No Man’s Land where commerce takes place. The old and the young still don’t look each other in the eye. I remember car-boot sales from before. There are no cars at these markets. Cars would attract the police. Goods arrive in hand-carts mostly. Clothes, anything made of gold or precious metals, like the circuit boards from televisions, or antique internet equipment. There are no vans selling pies or burgers. There is beer, there is always beer, even – no - especially in the Wild North. Some of the ‘goods’ walk on their own two feet. Most of them are young and female, but not all.

I go to the market. I buy the blackest of black market items. No, not that. I buy books. Sometimes, I take them to the lectures in the old hospital. I kid myself that I am keeping literacy and literature alive. Books aren’t strictly illegal, there is no real government and no real law therefore. But the Police do not like books. They do not like them at all. I have the blackest of books. It is hidden under floorboards in oilskin cloth. You won’t have heard of it. Look for it though, when you finally get all of this, if it’s ever safe to come here. The book is called Riddley Walker, it’s on a long list of books that were banned during the days of Johnsonia.

Maybe they still are.