I'm still suffering from post-Brexit blues. Writing this story helped a bit!
The Final Test by Clare Hawkins
Henry was sure that he wasn’t being
followed, but he was still sweating with fear. He’d never been to this part of
town before. He turned into the lane he’d been told about and scurried down it:
a tunnel between the brick walls of terraced houses, giving way to broken fences
then a line of lockups. Some of the garage doors were metal up-and-overs and
others were scarred wooden ones, barred and padlocked. He stopped, glancing
once more behind him, just in case, then looked for the green doors. There they
were, only a few yards further on.
There
was no going back. This place offered him his only hope. He advanced to the
doors, nudging the one on the right, which opened a crack into darkness. What
was that? A shout? Someone in the lane? In one quick move, he slid in, pulling
the door shut behind him.
Inside
smelt of limey earth and urine. Henry stood, shivering as the sweat cooled on
his skin, his eyes adjusting to the dark. In front of him was a wall of
cardboard boxes, stacked high, spewing out what looked like household junk: the
tube of a vacuum cleaner hung down like a snake and a child’s broken bicycle
veered over a roll of carpet. Along to his right, at the far end, he noted a
glow of light and moved towards it, to discover a small gap in the barrier of
boxes. Squeezing through this, he came up against the side of a sort of wooden
shack, a decapitated garden shed, its window the source of the light. From
inside came the low drone of a voice.
Henry
let out his breath from a knot in his chest and tapped on the side of the
shack.
‘Yes?’
‘Nemo,’
Henry whispered.
‘Come
in.’
When
Henry pulled open the plywood door, four faces stared back at him. Two men and
two women, were jammed together in a tight circle on plastic garden chairs round
an upturned bin with a candle on it. Their eyes were dark and sunken. Each
clutched a sheaf of papers.
‘I’m
afraid there are no more seats,’ said a bald man with a lined brow, the tutor,
Henry assumed.
His
voice was soft, educated, and he gestured to the only piece of bare floor space
at his feet.
Henry
nodded. ‘Sorry I’m ‒.’
‘That’s
all right,’ said the man, handing him some tattered photocopied papers. ‘We’ve
only just started.’
Henry
crouched down in the space.
He
glanced up at the others, comforted a little by their strained faces, their
shared tension. The other man was young with tousled hair, one woman was middle-aged,
white-faced and dowdy-looking, while the other was younger with glasses.
The
tutor spoke in a clear whisper. ‘The questions never stay the same. However,
these old test papers will give you an idea of the range of topics. I have a
list of others as well.’
‘But
I’ve heard they’ve got new tests, not just paper ones,’ said the middle-aged woman,
in a quivering, slightly accented voice. It was the vowels that betrayed her.
‘Yes,’
said the man, ‘SSDs.’
‘What?’
the woman said.
‘Subliminal
sensory detection systems. I’m afraid I can’t help you with that kind of thing.
Sorry.’
‘But if we pass the
exam,’ said the woman with the glasses, ‘surely they won’t ‒’
The
tutor shook his head. ‘No guarantee. Come on, let’s get started. Now, don’t
take notes.’ He tapped his temple with a finger. ‘It’s all got to go in here.’
Henry
looked down at the front page of the first paper.
EIP Test Paper 1 Time Allowed: 20 minutes
NOTE: ALL QUESTIONS MUST BE ANSWERED.
Failure to provide an answer to any question will result in a zero score
and automatic referral to the exit unit.
SECTION A
– Cultural Affiliations
Part
1: Cooking and Eating
- Describe the origins and ingredients of the following
items:
(a) barmcake
(b) rock bun
(c) lardy cake
(d) bannock
- Which of the following dishes would you serve when
entertaining friends?
(a) Lancashire Hotpot
(b) Fidget Pie
(c) Cullen Skink
(d) Urney Pudding
(e) Flead Cakes
Henry suddenly
felt sick and let out an involuntary gasp. The middle-aged woman started
crying.
‘I
can’t. It’s no good,’ she squeaked. ‘How can we prepare for a test like this?’
‘Sssh,’
whispered the tutor sharply. ‘I know it’s difficult, but I’ll help you. You
must be quiet though. You know what will happen if they find us.’
The
woman sniffed and pulled a tissue from her sleeve, holding it to her nose.
‘Right,’
said the tutor. ‘Let’s go slowly. Bannock
that’s the one to watch. If you know the answer to anything with Scottish
associations, you must never let it show. Sometimes it’s knowledge that’ll give
you away. Sometimes however, it’s a matter of discriminating the Scottish item
from the others.’
‘But
that’s trickery,’ sniffed the middle-aged woman. ‘They said the tests would be
fair.’
The
tutor looked down at the test paper and muttered. ‘And you believed them?’
In
the moment of silence that followed, Henry felt his dismay weighing like a
heavy stone in his stomach.
The
tutor looked up at the woman. ‘You’ll have to work on that accent. Have you got
copies of the RP recordings to practise?’
She
nodded, stifling another sob with the lump of tissue.
Henry felt his armpits prickle with
sweat again.
‘Has
anyone ever passed this test?’ he said.
‘Yes,
I did,’ the tutor sighed, glancing at them apologetically. ‘But look, if you’re
completely thorough with your own purging, it’s just possible that you might
escape the test.’
‘Didn’t help my
friend,’ said the young man with tousled hair. ‘We had a de-contamination day
at work and he was picked up.’
Henry’s throat tightened. This had
started him thinking about Colin again and how his attempts to purge his home
and family had failed. He could still hear Colin’s wife
screaming, as the Specials had pushed her and the children into the armoured
van. Colin had stood in their living room, bleeding from the head and in
handcuffs, the result of his futile attempts to resist. Henry had stayed silent
in the background, amazed that they hadn’t arrested him too, for
fraternisation. How could Colin and Marion have missed the thing? They had
meticulously scoured their house and destroyed all incriminating evidence: tea
towels from Oban and Skye, a shortbread tin used for storing buttons and a
tartan rug lining the dog’s basket. Henry had driven with Colin to a river
fifty miles away one night at three in the morning. They had watched the black,
weighted shape of the dustbin bag sink into the water as they stood on the
bank. That terrible day, the Specials’ officer had mockingly waved an audio
cassette in front of Colin’s face, Kenneth
McKellar’s Songs of Scotland. The Specials had found it propping up a
broken bookcase in his daughter’s bedroom.
Henry
sometimes wished he’d gone with the first wave north, the voluntary emigrants,
but he was terrified of being herded into a hostile environment as an alien,
jobless and penniless to a future in some transit or refugee camp. Scotland,
plunged into economic recession, was heaving with resentment at the financial
burden of those first expulsions. The English government refused to pay any
compensation to those they had driven from their homes and their jobs. Also,
the weather in Scotland was awful. Henry would never forget one childhood
holiday: two weeks in a sodden tent near Loch Lomond and his skin itching with
midges when the rain finally stopped.
‘Right,’ said the tutor, finishing
his last recitation of the ingredients of lardy cake, which Henry had only half
heard.
‘Here’s
a really important section. You’ve got to give evidence that you’ve upheld the
key principles of Englishness.’
Henry gulped and thought hard. He
could only identify two examples of actions that might qualify: he’d sold a few
raffle tickets for his local cricket club and, ten years ago, had attended the
first part of a hanky dancing workshop led the Colchester Morris Men. The
others were struggling for examples too. Fortunately, the tutor was able to
supply them with a number of untraceable fabrications, such as commissioning a
portrait of Nick Griffin, which had sadly been lost in a fire, or scrubbing graffiti
and offensive slogans like ‘Freedom and respect for all!’ from walls and
hoardings.
The session lasted for four hours.
Henry’s head ached and his throat was parched. By now, however, it would be dark
and easier to get home unnoticed. The only risk was encountering one of the
vigilante gangs that roamed about with torches and clubs looking for people
with red hair or anybody engaged in anti-government activity.
The tutor’s head was bowing with
weariness as he bade them goodbye until next week, exhorting them to keep
rehearsing the material about cooking, sport and music that they had learned
that evening.
‘Be hopeful. Keep strong,’ he said.
They crept out of the shed, around
the wall of boxes. Henry, the last in line, found himself standing next to the
crumple-haired young man outside the doors. The women had already disappeared.
‘Fancy a drink?’ said the young man.
Henry, startled by the overture,
stuttered, ‘Is there anywhere safe?’
‘Yeah, I know somewhere. I know the
landlord. It’s a bit of a way, but I’ll die if I don’t have a beer.’
‘Which way?’ said Henry.
He followed the young man, who
charged off down the lane and through a network of streets for more than half
an hour. Henry didn’t see the pub sign until he was standing beneath it. The Bulldog, the image of a squat,
bandy-legged creature with a squashed grinning face made Henry’s shivers
return, even though he was hot with hurrying.
‘Hey, is this OK?’ he panted.
The young man turned to Henry and
grinned. ‘Best place to hide, in the heart of English Identity country, isn’t
it?’
There was a logic to that, Henry
supposed. What kind of person with any vestige of Scottishness would go into a
place like this?
It was nearly empty apart from two
miserable looking old men, humped over their beers in the far corner. Henry’s
companion walked confidently up to the bar, where the landlord was standing
smoking. Henry tried not to cough, as he’d still not got used to smoke indoors
since the repeal of the anti-smoking laws in memory of the late founder of the
Party, Nigel Farage.
Henry
followed the young man, clutching his glass of warm cloudy stuff which was the
only ale available these days. For some time, tantalising memories of drinking
chilled Belgian lager had featured in Henry’s dreams. The young man sat down in
a dark, empty corner.
‘I’m
Josh,’ he said, offering his hand.
Henry
took it, feeling his shoulders loosen and his breath calming a little. ‘Henry,’
he said.
‘What’s
your status then?’ said Josh.
‘One
parent,’ said Henry, ‘my mother. She died two years ago.’
Josh
took another drink and grimaced. ‘That’s close. I only had my grandad, poor old
sod. He’d turn in his grave.’
‘Yeah,’
said Henry, ‘Thank God my mother never saw the state we’re in. She knew things
were going to get difficult. The party got in the year before she died, so she
started clearing things out, burning books and stuff.’
It
was good to be talking so freely. Even though this Josh could easily be a spy,
there was nothing Henry could do now to resist the effects of the beer and a
sympathetic companion. He told Josh about how he’d built a bonfire in the
garden one night, with his mother handing him her leather-bound school prizes: A Scots Quair, The Collected Works of Robert Burns, Scottish Philosophers who shaped
the World. She’d cried and he’d offered to bury them instead, but she’d
insisted and thrown them into the fire herself.
Josh
grimaced in sympathy. ‘Well, I’m not hanging about here waiting for these
bloody tests. Even if you did know all the names of the winners of the
Gloucestershire cheese rolling competition since 1949, they’d still find a way
of getting you.’
Henry
gulped another mouthful of beer. ‘How are you going to get out?’ he said.
‘There’s
a bloke with a boat at Brightlingsea. You want to come?’
‘Where?
Everything’s blockaded.’
‘Well,
I’m going to take my chances,’ said Josh. ‘He can get you to France for two
grand.’
Henry’s
stomach started churning again. He needed to go to the lavatory.
‘I
don’t know. It’s risky,’ he said, squirming in his seat, the sweat breaking out
on his face again.
Every
day on Ingerland 4TV they showed
footage of boatloads of escapees sinking in the English Channel.
‘Think
about it,’ said Josh. ‘Want another pint?’
Much later, well
after midnight, Henry fell into bed. He lay in his clothes, alternating between
hot and cold as he agonised about whether to take up Josh’s offer. He was
dozing when he heard the crack of splintering wood as his front door was broken
down.
At
first Henry thought he was at the dentist’s. He was in a chair, with a thin man
in a suit at his side.
‘Your attempts at deception have been a little unimaginative
to say the least’, the man said, glancing at a clipboard he was holding.
‘Changing your name from “Hamish” to “Henry”. You must think we’re very stupid.
And then there was the attempt to alter your mother’s birth certificate. You
know you have no claims to purity status. There’s nothing pure about this type
of fraud.’
Henry, numb with exhaustion, resorted to his well rehearsed
speech, which he delivered in a monotone, his eyes on the floor. ‘I’m a
marginal category, limited blood affiliation and total cultural assimilation. I
have a right to claim full English citizenship.’
‘Oh you do, do
you?’ said the man, narrowing his eyes.
‘Yes,’ said
Henry, ‘I am English in mind, soul and spirit. I have no allegiance to beliefs,
cultural practices, values or tastes associated with Scotland, nor ever have.’
‘Then you won’t
have anything to fear from the final test, will you?’
They peeled off
his shirt to apply the electrodes to his chest, and more to his temples,
forehead and neck and he was swung suddenly backwards in the chair till his face
pointed up to the ceiling. Some earphones were rammed into his ears and then a
greasy faced man in a white coat stared down at him for a moment or two. ‘This
is the easy bit. Just lie back and think of England,’ he snorted, tapping a
dial by Henry’s ear.
Henry heard the sound of some switches being flicked. He was
too tired for terror, particularly as there was no sign of the expected pain or
tingling. Perhaps it was just a lie detector test after all. Nothing happened.
His next conscious sensation was of an internal pulsing, and
a stirring in his brain, in time to a romping tune, a resonant regular thrum of
a guitar backing and rich-voiced, bouncing accordion. He was transported back
to the carpeted living room and himself as a small child, a sideboard full of
rattling silver plates on a tartan tray and the smiling face of his mother as
she twirled him round and round in furious pleasure, the old record player
vibrating with the same irresistible beat of a reel that set his blood dancing.
‘Got you!’ said the man, leaning over him and pointing at
the dial. ‘No need for these now, sunshine’, he said, ripping the pads from
Henry’s head. ‘Have a nice trip!’
Hours
later, Henry was wedged against a steamy window on the bus, packed with bodies
and lurching through the darkening afternoon. The night was completely black by
the time they crossed the border.
