Chapter 1: Exit Strategy

Norm Hailman was an absconder. He had run out on his one-time girlfriend then sponsor, Beth, after he had decided that he couldn’t take the bullying any more. He didn’t think of himself as a trouble maker but, in New Order Britain, going missing from your sponsor put you on the wrong side of the law. At best, if you were caught, you got returned to your sponsor. If you weren’t so lucky it could mean a spell in prison and being assigned to a government run sponsorship scheme. And the word was they were no fun at all. Norm had been dodging Male Control Force officers ever since leaving what had been his home. He was getting used to finding ways of living with hardly any cash and no credit

It was late November. London was sulking through a bleak, grey, day. Streets wet from late afternoon rain reflected the lights from shop windows as peopled scurried by, not wanting to stop in the cold, easterly wind. In London’s West End the queues for tickets at shows that evening were shorter than usual as the attraction of bars and restaurants seemed to trump those of standing in line for the hope of an evening’s entertainment.

Norm was sitting in The Pig’s Tale, a bar in Soho’s Old Compton Street, not far from Shaftesbury Avenue, the heart of London’s theatre land. He was trying to look inconspicuous,.

Twenty or thirty years ago, the Pig’s Tale had a fearsome reputation for hard drinking artists and journalists. In its hey-day, writers and painters had rubbed shoulders with prostitutes, perverts and wannabe bohemians, petty crooks and some not so petty ones as well. Now it was just a seedy dive where the table tops were only slightly less sticky than the carpets. Its main attractions were that it was dark and quiet and it didn’t have a ‘women only’ policy. Plus, it had a back entrance.

Norm’s efforts at blending into the background were made more difficult by the fact that there were so few other customers. His contact was late. That was making Norm nervous. Any indication that things weren’t going as planned made him nervous. But, he told himself, if you were doing what he was, then nervous was a good way to be.

He drank his beer slowly, trying to look as relaxed as possible. Besides, he was short of cash. He had to make it last.

Norm’s plan was to get out of the country. As far as he could see it was the only alternative for an absconder to a life constantly looking over his shoulder in case he was detected or betrayed. He knew that it wasn’t going to be easy but he’d had friends that had tried to hide out from the MCF after absconding and they had failed. One was back with his sponsor again after being run to ground by a pair of MCF officers that had left him bruised and cowed. He remembered the triumphant crowing of the man’s sponsor when she heard that he’d been recaptured. The scornful “he couldn’t find his way to the end of the road without a leash on his neck” remarks had been delivered with a triumphant smirk. He was determined Beth wouldn’t have the chance to crow about him.

It felt like a lifetime since he had left his home in Fordswell, south west of London. In fact it had been barely a week. Sure he’d been frustrated with the regulations and limitations that the New Order Government had brought in, and he hated the way that every interaction between a man and woman seemed to be politicised now but what had been worse was what Beth had ended up expecting in the bedroom. That had been the final straw.

He wondered how long it had been before Beth had realised that he’d absconded and notified the Department of Sponsors Affairs. It would have been at least a day but DOSA would know by now of course and that meant the MCF would have his name on a list too. He wondered if they were really as efficient as they were supposed to be. So far he’d managed to stay out of their way.

That was more by luck than judgement, he knew. Although he was determined to get out, he didn’t really have much idea of what happened after that. But, he told himself, maybe it was better to be flexible, not to be locked in to some predetermined goal. And so far he had managed to stay on the run.

Staying out of the way of the MCF hadn’t been easy though and, while he hadn’t been happy with the way things had gone with Beth, back then at least he’d had a roof over his head and three meals a day. Now he was having to live off his own resources; what he could scrounge or steal or what he could pay for out of his rapidly diminishing funds.

He hadn’t got used to being a fugitive, constantly looking over his shoulder and his surroundings were anything but familiar. He’d lived in London once but it had been a different place then. And, even though Fordswell wasn’t far from London, it still felt like it was a thousand miles away. The nearest that Fordswell came to a seedy Soho bar like the one he was in now was the kebab van that parked up just by the village green on Friday evenings.

He looked around, wondering where his contact had got to and worrying about how long he should wait. He caught himself drumming his fingers on the table and stopped – that just made him look more impatient.

To distract himself, he thought about his walk up to Soho from where he’d dropped off the ‘men only’ bus near Covent Garden. London was both familiar and strange. He used to live in the east of town but these days, as well as the inevitable problems of a big city, there were all the restrictions on male access and behaviour. Plus there was the constant threat of being stopped by some inquisitive MCF officer looking for a way of making an otherwise boring patrol more interesting. The place was at one and the same time both familiar and strange.

Then there was the fact that, while trying to get out of the country wasn’t technically illegal, travelling without the authority (or at least tacit acceptance) of your sponsor was. He’d spent the last week in a state of barely contained panic, worried in case he got stopped by an MCF officer. He knew his ident card would flag him up as an absconder straight away. Just as bad, and even though he knew it was unlikely, he worried about being spotted by one of Beth’s friends.