Chapter 30

Britain Means Business

Tamara

2095

It didn't come as much of a surprise to Tamara when Zoe died. The mystery was rather that she'd managed to live so long given that she'd managed to maintain for so long a drug habit far in excess of what a woman of advanced years was designed to withstand.

All the same, it had been good while it lasted. She and Mohammed had done well out of keeping Zoe supplied with a regular supply of whatever drugs that were currently on the market. Mohammed profited from having a regular customer who paid promptly and in advance. Tamara profited from having a very nice house to live in and a wonderfully warm and clean bed in which to sleep. The only penalties were that she had to leave regularly to visit Mohammed, which she did in Zoe's car, and to sit with Zoe while she sunk into yet another of her mostly silent drug-induced trances.

"What was your relationship with the deceased?" the doctor asked Tamara after he'd examined Zoe's dead body.

Tamara had rehearsed her answer. "I was her lover," she said.

The doctor raised his eyebrows. "Well, Miss St. John-Easton was a strange one, that's for sure. And the toxins in her body ... You do know what caused her death, don't you?"

"Drugs overdose?"

"Amongst other things," said the doctor. "However, we shall be discreet. And not just about her illegal drugs habit, of course. I hope she's left something for you in her will."

"I'll just have to wait and find out," said Tamara who hadn't thought about that possibility before.

Of course, Zoe had died intestate. Naturally. When would she have found the time to sort matters out with her solicitors however often they might remind her of her duty to her family? And this of course bought Tamara a great deal of time in which she could remain resident in the house she'd made her home for so many months in her new assumed role as Zoe's bereaved lover.

Tamara had everything she wanted except a line of credit. She had full access to Zoe's home, her car, her possessions and everything within the estate's secure walls. What she didn't have was the money to replenish supplies as they ran out. Thankfully, everything continued to function much as before even though Zoe was no longer alive. Groceries were delivered. The cleaning staff arrived once a day to tidy up what was now a much less disorderly home. The electricity and water continued to be on supply. But Tamara knew that at some point all this would come to an end and that she hadn't put aside nearly enough cash to cover all the costs.

All the same, Tamara could comfort herself with the notion that the direct debits and standing orders that had been set up were tapping into a well of funds that must be pretty much bottomless. And ultimately that source, as Tamara discovered from Zoe before she'd died and from her own research on the internet, was Zoe's father who'd died nearly half a century earlier.

"He was rich," Zoe told her. "Fucking rich. He almost owned the bloody government. If it wasn't for him there'd probably never have been an English National Unity government."

"But he died a couple of years before all that happened," Tamara pointed out.

"During the London riots," agreed Zoe. "Yeah, that was probably the catalyst that made it all happen, dear. Money spent on political influence. Chaos caused by joblessness and poverty. People weren't used to it."

"Things were better fifty years ago, weren't they?" said Tamara.

"People didn't think so at the time, dear. The nuclear wars over in Asia. The crop failures. The high price of fuel. Everyone thought it had just gone too far."

"I don't see why there were riots then when most people had enough to eat; when people thought plague and famine was banished forever; when ordinary people could drive cars and didn't have to buy household electricity in portable batteries; when Norfolk still existed as a county and London wasn't flooded half the time; when, for fuck's sake, Israel was a land of plenty. What were people complaining about?"

"If people had complained a bit more," said Zoe, "perhaps we wouldn't be in the mess we're in. Dad didn't think the real problems were anything to do with the stuff you've just gone on about. He thought it was all to do with governments interfering in the interests of business. That was what he mostly thought, but he also believed that immigration, homosexuality, atheism, environmentalism, trades unions and a whole shitload of other stuff was to blame. A lot of people agreed with him. Especially the stuff about immigration."

"That's what the English National Unity government was most famous for, wasn't it? Kicking out foreigners."

"It got worse when England was forced to leave the Northern European Union. That was when the United Kingdom fell apart."

Tamara got bored with conversations like that. The English felt so sorry for themselves. They, and also the Americans. The English annoyed everyone through their well-documented stupidity and arrogance. And soon they woke up to find that the United Kingdom was no longer united and no longer a kingdom. It wasn't even any longer part of the Northern European Union that it had whinged about for so long. The Americans were even worse. They let their most extreme political party take absolute control of the United States and then watched with growing horror as it dismantled the engines of government. All that was left was a progressively weaker nation that steadily squandered a reservoir of wealth that was far from boundless. Eventually, what a nineteenth century civil war had sewn together was dissolved through constitutional crises and economic collapse. At least this time it wasn't associated with the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.

Even so, what were these misfortunes compared to those suffered by Israel. The nation of Tamara's birth existed now only in the abstract sense of having a paid representative in the United Nations' headquarters in Beijing and by the continued existence of millions of worthless passports. No sane person would actually choose to live in a nuclear wasteland where crops were mutated, cancer was everywhere, and the Palestinians doled out vicious vengeance on any Jew foolish enough to be identified as such. That wasn't what had seemed the most likely of possible futures when, after the initial barrage of nuclear weapons, the Israeli soldiers streamed out of the Promised Land to secure their victory. A rather hollow victory it now seemed when even a limited retaliatory response had destroyed Israel as a nation. And hollower still when it became obvious that wind direction and rain spread nuclear fallout and radiation as evenly on the victors as the defeated and that an angry vengeful Arab population many times larger than the population of surviving Jews was not, after all, likely to retreat in cowed abjection.