Chapter 7

Tuesday February 1st

I got a phone call about half way through the morning. That was unusual in itself, normally if anything needs doing Lucy just puts her head round the door and tells me. A voice at the other end, which I didn’t recognise, just said, “Are you coming to the cafe at lunchtime? They’ve got some interesting specials on.”

I guessed it had something to do with Harry, so I said, “Yeah, that sounds interesting.”

I spent the rest of the morning feeling as nervous as hell and walked to the cafe wondering all the way if anyone was following me.

Harry was sat there, which I had expected, and he was with a woman, which I hadn’t.

“This is Cara,” he said. “Cara – David.”

Cara was wearing a loose, multi-coloured, v-necked sweater and a pair of scruffy jeans. She had loose unkempt hair that was dark with streaks of grey running through it. She stubbed out the roll-up cigarette she’d been smoking in defiance of the faded plastic sign hanging on the wall behind her.

“You’re a woman,” I said, stupidly.

“Nothing wrong with your powers of observation, then,” she responded.

“It’s just I thought...” I looked at Harry and he just grinned.

“Yeah, I know. Well guess what, some women actually think that New Order isn’t such a good idea. I mean some of them think they aren’t tough enough but let’s say I’m on the other side. Sure the whole male-female thing needed rebalancing but there’s quite a few of us that think that what Johannsen has been pushing through is way too extreme. Anyway, Harry tells me you might be able to help.”

“Help with what?”

“He says you can get hold of information on sensitive stuff that New Order is up to. We’ve been using stuff like that to try to wake up some of the people that voted them in. If we don’t then they’ll be in again at the next election, even assuming they don’t do something about male voting rights. If we can show them up for what they are then maybe some changes will get made.”

“You don’t sound very hopeful.”

“I’m not. Power hangs on to power. They don’t like people trying to take it away. That doesn’t mean its not worth trying though. We’ve done a few things where we’ve got hold of information, run it on social media with a ‘Surely no one in their right mind could be thinking of this... ‘ twist. It gets picked up and debated away from the official government channels and people feel free to express real opinions not just what they think they ought to be thinking. I mean, you couldn’t do it obviously – I mean, apart from the risk of stuff being tracked back to you, I don’t suppose you have access to social media anyway do you?”

She was right. Replacing my smart phone with a dumb brick that could make calls and pretty much nothing else had been one of the first things Angie did and the office systems were all blocked from that sort of thing – or at least, I suddenly thought, they are for me. I shook my head.

“Well, at least we can get stuff out there that might do some good. Stuff that might stop them going too far. We call it “Safewords”. And we can do it in a way that you aren’t at risk.”

Cara made it sound a lot more attractive than Harry’s attempts but maybe that was because she’d curled her legs up on the couch and was leaning forward towards me as she spoke. I liked the idea of trying to do something about New Order. Cara was certainly right that they seemed to be keen to control every aspect of men’s lives and I couldn’t remember the last time I heard anyone speak up against anything they’d put forward.

The guy from the counter came over and interrupted us saying did we actually want to eat anything or were we just going to clutter up his dining room. We ordered some mugs of tea and some sandwiches. “So how would it work?”

“Well, we can work with the stuff you gave Harry on the MCP. That’s likely to be fairly incendiary. If you can get any more on it that would be good. I mean anything on the sort of devices they intend to use for example.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to share my experiences of demonstrating them with Cara but I said I thought I might be able to find something.

“Well, let’s say you had some documents - paper is always good, much harder to trace back than digital stuff – we’ll set up somewhere where you can leave it. What the intelligence community used to call a ‘dead letter box’ until all that sort of stuff got unfashionable. You hide what ever it is there, leave a pre-arranged signal, we pick it up. Nobody needs to meet. Each side takes care that they aren’t being watched and the whole thing goes off nicely.

“So, if I could get you a list of the devices, say?”

“There’s a telephone box at the end of this road. Act as though you are making a call. Push an envelope behind the phone. If you look on the back panel you’ll see someone has been marking up a count using five bar gate marks. Just add one to whatever is on there. Remember the number, check back in a week or so and if there’s anything for you the number will have changed.”

“It all sounds a bit cloak and dagger.”

“It’s simple and it works. If you can help, great. You’ll get the satisfaction of seeing things go off under the Government, which I’m guessing is what you want. If not, well, nice meeting you. Now, I need to go. Do you think it might be worth my while checking that phone box sometime soon?”

In the end, I suppose, it was the fact that it was a woman asking me that made me think, well, if she feels this is all too much, maybe I should try and do something. “Yes,” I said. “It could well be.”

“Great,” she said, got up and gave Harry a hug before checking the street outside and leaving.

I turned to Harry. “Are you and she...”

“No. She’s way too busy.” He picked up his mug of tea. From the way he looked at the door she had just left through I felt he wished that she wasn’t.

Thursday February 3rd

I managed to write down a detailed description of the devices that Lucy had demonstrated on me. I used all capital letters so the hand writing wouldn’t be easily traced. I even invented details of a couple of devices that hadn’t been there and left out two that were, so the descriptions wouldn’t be traced back to the particular ones that Lucy had.

I was pretty nervous walking down to the telephone box but nobody was taking any notice of a bloke walking down there on a busy lunch time. There certainly weren’t any MCF officers around. In fact here weren’t very many women about at all. Just a few men, coats on, hunched up against the wet and cold February weather, more concerned about getting where they had to be than in worrying about anyone else on the street. I stuffed the envelop behind the phone like Cara had said. There were four vertical lines drawn on a poster beside the phone. I added the fifth, like I was making a note while I made a call, put the phone back down and left.

After the excitement of me playing spies, I had a really strange conversation with Jill this evening. We’d just finished dinner – she lets me eat at the table with her which Angie had stopped doing a bit before she moved out – and she suddenly said, “What’s your fetish then?”

I was surprised, I suppose. I mean our relationship isn’t sexual in any way. It’s just like I’m her housekeeper. I said “What?”

“Your fetish. I mean at the sponsors’ support group they said most men have one and it’s a good idea to give them little treats occasionally to keep them on side. And I just wondered what your was; in case we wanted to do that ... I mean I know there’s the dress thing...”

Well, at first I was sort of half grateful for her consideration, except of course, it isn’t really is it? And then I was a bit confused, but I suppose she’s used to learning things and then trying them out at uni, so I suppose you can’t blame her. “No,” I said, “no, the dress thing was just a practical thing for housework. It was Angie’s idea.”

“But you still wear it. For housework, I know, but you do still...”

She was right, I did. I suppose I still haven’t accepted the fact that Angie left. Maybe I’m clinging on to that – one of her instructions to me. “No, it’s not a fetish. I don’t think I’ve got any...”

“OK. Just thought I’d ask. I mean mummy tells me that with Geoff, my father, it’s feet. He’ll do anything if she just lets him get down at her feet. She’s been ever so cruel to him sometimes from what she says but it seems he just loves it.”

I didn’t want to think about that. Nor did I want to think about being crouched down at Sally’s feet, or for that matter, her daughter’s. The trouble was my cock was disagreeing stiffly and Jill noticed.

“Are you sure you haven’t got something you want to tell me about? Maybe I’ll have a word with mummy. We should throw a dinner party, daddy could be there as the butler and you could wait at table as a maid.”

I told her I didn’t think that sounded fun at all.

After our chat I was thinking. I actually miss Angie. I mean I know she bullied me but we had been in a relationship before New Order were elected, however unfashionable that idea has got these days. Maybe that’s why I’ve even considered getting involved with Safewords – perhaps because the Angie relationship has gone and I need another. I mean, obviously not Cara, although she is the sort of woman I fancy. If I look around, there’s Jill but although she’s my sponsor, I don’t see her even really being on board with that and she’s a lot younger than me. And Lucy? Well, I think she’s just focused on the job and sees me as some sort of animated vibrator when it comes to sex. I don’t think there’s anything else going on with her.

I’ve decided I’m going to stop wearing that overall. I’m not happy with the message it was sending out and since it seems I’ve got a choice (I don’t think I did with Angie), I don’t see why I should. Maybe that will help me draw a line under the Angie thing? I’m not sure.

Thursday February 10th.

Well, Cara was right about, the MCP stuff being incendiary, all right. There was a piece on the radio this morning about it and it was all over the papers. It seems that while people were quite happy that individuals did this sort of thing, a government programme with electronic monitoring smacks a bit too much of the surveillance society for most people. That mystical being ‘A Government Spokesperson’ had to make a statement saying that this was all just the start of of consultation process and that there wasn’t any intention of introducing the programme until they were confident that concerns over privacy and practicality could be ironed out.

Then Nina Henning, who is the Minister responsible apparently, turned up to accuse whoever leaked the information of being only interested in disrupting policies and explained the Government had a clear mandate to introduce them. “The activities of groups like Safewords,” I was surprised to hear her use the name, “put at risk the progress we are making towards rebalancing the gender power balance in the UK. We will not tolerate leaks like this from within Government. They distort the actions of the Government by presenting a partial picture and fail to take account of the ways in which various policy initiatives interlock.”