Chapter 5 : City Streets

James found himself outside the police, station faster than he would have thought possible. They hadn't quite thrown him down the front steps but they hadn't been too polite about showing him out either.

He had no more idea of why they had freed him than of why they had picked on him in the first place. That was one of the problems with being a solitary — you were easy pickings as far as the police, the benefit squads, the tax enforcers were concerned.

Maybe they were planning to follow him, imagining that he'd lead them to some dissident group or other. Well, they'd be disappointed, he thought.

It was dark; nearly 10 o'clock. At least he'd be home before the bars started closing. After his encounter with the police the last thing he wanted was to fall foul of a bunch of women on the rampage after an evening fuelling up on vodka. Even so he went the long way around. There was always the risk he'd attract the attention of one of the bouncers outside the Paradiso. He'd seen them picking on a guy once. Two of them, 210 pounds each of pure muscle packed into sharp suits. Somehow the man had ended up in a heap beside the Paradiso's garbage skip while the two women had strolled back to the door of the club, still immaculate in their black tux's, barely a hair out of place.

He clutched the curfew permit that they'd given him at the police station tightly. He still had half an hour before, like all males, he had to be off the streets without special permission but it wouldn't be the first time that an over-zealous police officer had taken the chance to catch up on her quota by pulling in someone just a bit before the actual curfew time.

He managed to get as far as his street without difficulty. The town was quiet. Then he remembered; there was a big match on tonight. He could imagine the scenes in the Paradiso. Women would be standing in groups around the big TV screen, cheering every time one of the players had his shirt pulled. The stadium would be filled with women baying for one team or the other. And in the Paradiso, there would be more vodka being drunk than usual.

He got back to his flat. The doorway was criss-crossed with black and yellow police tape. "Crime Scene : Do Not Enter" it said. A forensics officer in a white boiler suit was packing up her bag. She looked up as James came into the corridor. "Huh," she said. "Seems like you've got away with it this time."

"What?" said James. "I've not done anything. They let me go."

"Yes," she said picking up the bag. "And they told me to stop looking. Doesn't mean there wasn't anything to find though, does it?" As she went to leave, James started to pull the tape from his door and the voice of his landlady could be heard calling along the corridor.

"We don't want no police around here, Leonard," she called. "You're going to have to get yourself a sponsor. If there's going to be trouble, I want you out."

"There's not going to be any more trouble, Mrs Bryant," James responded. "It was all some sort of mistake."

"Police don't make mistakes with the likes of you," she said. "Any more and you're out."

James shrugged his shoulders, unable to think of anything to say. He just had to hope that this was some isolated bit of harassment and not the start of the sort of campaign he'd heard of that some solitaries had to face. Maybe he'd find some way to get a sponsor after all. He pulled the last of the tape from his door and made his way inside. The forensic team had been as careful as a herd of buffalo. The place was even more of a tip than it usually was.

Disheartened, James pushed his way through the piles of his clothes, books and papers strewn across the floor of the flat towards his bedroom. The mattress had been pushed off his bed; sheets and blankets dumped in one corner. He couldn't face sorting it out. He just threw his jacket onto the pile of things that had been pulled from his wardrobe, stepped out of his trousers, pulled a blanket around himself and lay down on the mattress.

Sleep came slowly.

Florence Daniels pushed her spectacles up from the bridge of her nose, squeezing it between her thumb and forefinger as she tried to give the briefing the attention it demanded. There was Cabinet tomorrow first thing, then Ministerial questions in the House tomorrow afternoon. And that was without the Parliamentary Committee the day after. She needed to be in command of the facts.

The Commissioner for Detention and Reorientation Facilities was trying to make things as clear as she could but it was hard to pretend that her report was much more than a string of numbers. 38,000 suspected dissidents detained during the first six months of the year of which 35,500 cases were sufficiently evidenced to enable summary sentencing and a further 2,000 went to trial with a conviction rate of 96%. The figures were up. Florence supposed that was good but how much more was better enough? You never knew in politics. It only needed some bright young spark to turn up claiming that it shouldn't be 38,000 but 76,000; that summary sentencing rates should be higher; that conviction rates below 99% showed incompetent policing or prosecution or both.

Re-offending rates were very low. But that was because release rates were very low too. She didn't know whether to be pleased that the Commissioner was managing the camps in such a way that detainees weren't released before they were ready or disappointed that she wasn't doing a better job of reorienting them so that they could become useful, sponsored, household members again.

That was the trouble with politics, too many relativities. She looked at the other briefing papers. Sponsorship take up rates seemed to have stalled. The last few months had shown no real increase. But there weren't that many "solitaries" now; their tendency to fall fowl of the anti-dissident legislation tended to mean that most of them were in the Commissioner's camps. Presumably that was good? But what had that back bencher said last week? "The continued inability of the Ministry of Home Affairs to reduce the hard core unsponsored threatens our ability to deliver on the New Order manifesto."

The Prime Minister had rebuffed the suggestion saying that she was confident that the Minister for Home Affairs should enjoy her continued confidence. Florence hadn't been entirely convinced that it was quite the ringing endorsement she thought she was entitled too. She would have preferred it if the PM hadn't said "should".

She looked at her notes. The tax changes that she had pushed through with the Chancellor should really be having an effect by now. The new sponsorship placement interview programme had been introduced. Social attitudes were firmly against the solitaries — in fact that was probably making her life more difficult. She wasn't sure what else she could do, short of making not having a sponsor a detainable offence. A consultation programme? That might allow some time for the effects of the tax and the earlier legislation to feed through.

Her Permanent Secretary looked up from her own dossier. "If I might suggest, Minister," she began.

Florence looked hopefully across at Maggie Forbush with the eager anticipation of a spaniel tempted with a piece of raw liver. "Of course, Maggie," she said. "You know the views of the Civil Service are always welcomed."

Maggie Forbush had done well out of the election of the New Order government. She'd been a junior secretary in the department when they'd been voted in. At the time she hadn't been sure if they could deliver on their manifesto but they'd earned her vote like that of most women. Of course it hadn't helped that the traditional parties ignored New Order and then tried to ridicule them. You couldn't really blame the men for having lost interest in party politics. But with women united for New Order and the opposition parties fragmenting their vote if had meant a New Order landslide. When New Order had started they had been careful not to alienate those that hadn't voted for them. In the end, though, they had become completely focused on their vision of a state run by women, ostensibly for the benefit of all but with determined action against any opposition. The few dissident groups had provoked a strong response but most men had thought the whole thing would blow over. given time Maggie, like all women and even many men, approved of the Government's actions — after all, society needs stability. Maggie was sure that there some injustices and, she supposed some women probably exploited the situation. It was hard to know, the tabloid press carried some lurid stories but Maggie thought most of it was down to women having to hold down responsible jpobs these days and needing support — after all wasn't that the way that men had had it for a long time? Still, by and large, the country was a better place and New Order had been re-elected three years ago with an increased majority, in spite of the fact that opposition seemed to have been better organised.

Maggie turned towards the Minister. In her short time as a senior civil servant she had been quick to learn the ways of the Whitehall Mandarins - "What is the female form of that?" she thought for a moment — and it was always best to wait until the Minister felt she was in a hole before throwing her a life-line. This seemed to be the right moment to help out.

"Well, Minister, the problem is not so much that there are so many unsponsored. It's more that the sponsorship interview process has not been completed for a significant proportion of those involved and that presents a misleading picture. If we provide a new category in our analysis highlighting the effort of the sponsorship placement teams we can show how much effort is being put in there and show how large, or rather how small, the really obstinate cases of non-sponsored individuals are."

Florence always admired the ability of Maggie to come up with solutions to even the most intractable of problems. "So what proportion falls into the category of awaiting interview'?"

"Around 73.6%"

Florence thought the 'around' was unnecessary. Even she didn't believe that the statistics were that accurate. "So, the 'hard core' that the Member for Henley was referring to is only a quarter as big as she feared. I think the PM will be quite happy with that, don't you?"

"Yes, Minister," Maggie said with a smile.

Florence relaxed. The thought of an evening's amusement with the 'demonstrator' that Tanya Charles had provided suddenly seemed like something she could enjoy without worrying about the impending arrival of parliamentary daggers in her ministerial back.

It was only much later that she suddenly thought that Maggie would be back in a few days with a very well argued case for increasing in the staffing levels of the sponsorship interview service. Still she'd cross that bridge when she came to it. That and how she was going to reduce the 26.4% figure as well.

It had been a pig of a day for Angie. The air con had failed on the seventh floor and that stupid bunch of men hadn't been able to fix if for three hours, by which time she'd had dozens of complaining phone calls ... She hadn't been able to get out of the building for a smoke all afternoon and that always made her scratchy.

Norm hadn't been very enthusiastic when she'd told him that he'd be coming over this evening and he'd been even less keen when she sent him out into the kitchen to deal with the last couple of day's washing up.

Angie sat back and flicked on her video screen. It was the usual political stuff on the news. Some New Order party hack was wittering on about the latest agenda of reforms. She didn't take much notice. There were reports of subversive groups active in the North. It sounded like they'd given up in London now and were looking for somewhere that might prove a bit easier. The Chief of Police for the northern district was being reassuring. Angie didn't trust her but if things were getting better in London, she wasn't worried anyway.

A resounding crash from the kitchen brought her attention back to the flat. She got to the kitchen to find an embarrassed Norm standing with shattered pottery around his feet. "It slipped, I'm sorry," he said.