When next he meets Maria, she hardly looks at him. “I don’t often get the chance to talk to someone like you,” he says, finding her where first they’d met in the street. “You’ve shown no concern for me,” she says, tightening her jacket. It’s later in the year, the summer’s heat having given way to the late-fall’s rain and bitter cold. He says, “I want to turn back the clock to before…” She finally looks him in the eye and says, “I can’t believe that.” He looks aside. In the street there’s ragged, haggard men walking quickly, trucks and buses rolling past belching smoke and grinding gears. But when Valeri looks at Maria she’s starting to turn, as if to make down the sidewalk away from him. In the stockade Private Craig Thompson isn’t alone, with a handful of others awaiting their punishments for their minor crimes. It seems someone up the chain of command has decided the time is now to institute a new crackdown on even the most trivial of offences. They’re not bound to be in the stockade for long, not with crisis in the streets about to explode into war. At the barracks there’s a lingering sympathy for the crowds in the streets, soldiers like Private Craig Thompson already counted among them in spirit if not in fact. Sequestered on base owing to the current troubles, they have little to do but sleep and sit. The troopers in the street have yet to call on the army for help, and when the time comes the won’t use raw recruits like these men, not at first. That’ll come later. Craig will be among those men needed to bring order to chaos and to introduce chaos to order. When once Colonel Cooke comes around, nowadays he seems more involved, looking over the men with a sharper eye and walking among them with a leaner, more purposeful gait. No one dares laugh when now the Colonel exhorts the men to God, country, and King; the Colonel says, “if called upon to make war on his majesty’s enemies, then all you men will give all that you have to give, even your lives if deemed necessary.” And Private Thompson can only look on with a mounting uncertainty, the experience of living under threat of war only succeeding in keeping him awake at night, staring at the underside of the bunk above, wondering what the day will bring. He won’t have to wait long to find out. “No more asunder,” he says, “no more to blame.”
Yet, it seems only yesterday when we were in the midst of a frantic, frenzied boom. New glass and steel towers reach for the sky every week even as the working man struggles to pay his rent. Screens are dominated by talking heads breathlessly proclaiming the release of numbers heralding some impressive new gains in wealth even as half the population patches holes in their jeans and cuts back on the meat in their diet for the doubling, tripling in prices. In front of another block of working class apartments there appears mysteriously in the night a sign boldly proclaiming the coming of a new luxury tower that no one in this neighbourhood will ever be able to afford, while in the night not-homeless men and women pick through dumpsters looking for anything that can be pawned. Still languishing in the prison of listlessness and discontent, Garrett Walker has taken to drowning under a storm of red ink for all the debt notices he’s posted in the mail. It’s a criminal offence, for able-bodied men like Garrett to be cast out of work, discarded like some old, disused piece of machinery, then come after to be torn into pieces and then sold for scrap. Though his wife pledges to stay at his side, Garrett knows his daughters can’t make the same pledge, nor should they. As he listlessly and methodically looks for work where there is no work to be found, Garrett sees on his screen the same news break as everyone else, bold declarations of an impossible feature, the rising in value of the wealthy man’s holdings heralded as progress, prosperity, the talking heads breathlessly announcing the hoarding of wealth as though it were the dawning of a golden age for all. In it Garrett sees only cruel mockery, a celebration of excess while millions try only to fight off hunger for one more day. At some point, and no one, not even Garrett can know when, he gives up hope, some switch inside him flips even as outwardly nothing in his life changes, not immediately. As he looks into the distance and sees the fires of liberation burning deep in the heart of London, he commits himself to breaking out of this prison of the mind called impoverishment. “No more asunder,” he says, “no more to blame.”
If you stop at just the right time of day in just the right part of town and listen, just listen, you’ll hear the voices of the thousands and thousands of workers, students, and parishioners cheering in the streets, their faces and their voices reaching from a future we can only dream of to encourage us, here, in their past, our present. In the night, with this city calm, we wait. Unwilling to let it be, Valeri starts after Maria, but stops a half-step on. “Don’t leave,” he says, “I just need you to come with me for a minute. We must talk.” But Maria doesn’t stop, and Valeri doesn’t pursue her. He watches as she disappears down the sidewalk and into a crowd. “You there!” a Police officer shouts at Valeri, “keep moving along! This is no place for loitering!” The officer advances, but Valeri stands his ground. “This is a public street,” he says, “I can go anywhere I please.” He thinks to pick a fight with the officer, but the better judgement in him wins out. He can see the officer himself is looking for a fight, and he withdraws, muttering something under his breath. “You trash should learn your place,” the officer says, “you’re the wretched scum who’ll all rot in jail.” It’s as though Valeri exudes an energy that attracts all the wrong kind of attention. But still he withdraws from the scene. At the underground church, the rogue priest has nearly finished preparing the congregation for the next step in their salvation by the time he’s taken into the back of a police lorry. Though the congregants, including Darren Wright and his young friend Sheila Roberts have yet to learn all they need about the forbidden gospel, and it’s in their ignorance they’ve become ready to stand. Studying the Bible, the Word of God, Darren happens upon an epiphany which can only come from study. For now, he waits, along with all the others gathering here and in underground churches across England and around the world, waiting for an unmistakable sign from God that their moment is at hand. They won’t have long to wait. This is the moment in which all doubt is passed, when Darren is committed irrevocably to the way forward and is turned away from evil. As Darren closes his Bible and leaves for the night, he casts a look down the street and imagines the fires of liberation burning through the night and long into the coming day. “No more asunder,” he says, “no more to blame.”