Chapter 11

Another double header, told from Dave's point of view when the text is upright, Debbie's when it's italicised.

Saturday morning found London bathed in unexpected sunshine. Niusha was already up and about when I woke, apparently preparing breakfast, given the smell of spices emanating from the kitchen. I wondered whether I should call Debbie ... get some details about what had actually happened the previous night, but then thought better of it. I would call later but ... well, it was still early and she'd sounded like she'd been anticipating an eventful night, so...

Also, I thought, as Niusha came back into her bedroom, wrapped in a sheet and carrying a tray, it was hardly fair to her – I mean, I'd been perfectly clear about my position viz a viz Debbie, and I had no reason to believe that she wanted anything more from me than companionship and, well, sex, but ... it still didn't seem fair to prioritise Debbie just at the moment. Also, of course, the breakfast she'd prepared smelt wonderful and, I realised, I was really hungry, so...

I woke in one of those strange dreamlike states which for a moment left me unsure as to where I was ... and who it was breathing gently beside me. As I gathered myself together ... noting the large quantity of clothing strewn across the floor, and blushing slightly at the sight of a large glass dildo lying amongst the debris ... some of the events of the previous evening came back to me. I shuddered, remembering that I'd come very close to being raped, had been assaulted, by a guy who I should have known not to trust. It was not a good way to start the day, really, so I was glad in a way when the duvet beside me stirred and a tousled mop of red hair appeared, followed rapidly by the bleary eyed but smiling face of my new friend Jane. I reached down to her, pulled her up towards me and gave her a long kiss, aware of her nakedness pressing against me. I wasn't sure that either of us were entirely awake, yet, but, then, neither of us seemed to have a problem as the kiss extended and became rather more of a caress, both of us subsiding back into the bedclothes as our hands began a mutual exploration...

Niusha sat on the bed beside me as we ate – flat breads and cheeses, served with distinctly British-style tea – and smiled quietly. We didn't talk much, beyond a comment or two on the unseasonable weather, but it felt good, relaxed and easy. I said as much as I stroked her thigh gently, putting the plates to one side as I reached up to draw her down towards me.

She pulled back slightly to loosen the sheet she'd tied round her, casting it off her as she leant for ward to kiss me, her small breasts brushing my chest as she did so. "Oh, good," she murmured, reaching down to stroke my stomach, moving lower, "I was hoping you wouldn't be too tired after last night..."

Some time later, we were dozing in a tangled heap when there was a firm rap on the room door. Shit, I thought, wondering, after all, how this sort of thing would go down with the management of a small country hotel, but pulled myself up out of the bed anyway, kicking some of the more blatant evidence out of sight even as I found and pulled on a robe, wrapping myself in it as I pulled open the door.

It was Colin, the architect, looking a bit embarrassed ... and Rosie, leering at me from over his shoulder. I grinned at them both, a pernicious voice in my head wondering whether I should let the robe fall open ... see what happened. But, no ... that could produce reactions that I really didn't want to have to deal with ... at least not with Colin. So I greeted them politely enough, wondered how I could help.

Surprisingly, Colin, the timid one, spoke up – probably because Rosie was too engrossed in her undoubtedly salacious thoughts, I reckoned, except that it turned out that Colin was the one with the problem. Or not a problem, exactly, it was just that at some point in the previous evening Jane, or Kath, or both, had agreed to give him a lift into Bowmere to get his train back to London – and, I remembered, also to take me in so I could meet the new legal bloke off his train up. And, now, it was obviously a bit later than I'd realised, no-one seemed to know where Kath and Jane had got to, the snow was falling heavily enough, again, to make taxis a bit reluctant to come up the valley and ... This was, frankly, not the sort of problem that Colin was particularly well equipped to deal with – and Rosie, typically, was enjoying his discomfiture far too much to volunteer any sort of help. So he'd come to me. Which was, I reflected, exactly the right thing to do, for once. I shooed him away, promised to locate the missing pair – he must have been able to hear them giggle from inside the room – and told him I'd join him downstairs in ten minutes, providing he could get three cups of coffee sorted out by the time I got there.

Which turned out not to be a problem, when we finally got our respective acts together – and sorted out the tangled mess of clothing enough for each of us to appear decently dressed, which took rather longer – we found that the hotel was, in fact, already serving lunch ... it was even later than I'd imagined.

Oh well, I thought, in the circumstances even Colin should be able to obtain caffeine and indeed he had done ... three large cups arriving at the table just as we sat down to join him. I noticed Kath look wistfully at the bar before shaking her head, decisively, and then, marvellously, redden slightly as the waitress serving us – Charlotte, again, I think – greeted her and Jane as Mss Braithwaite and Whittaker, a knowing smile indicating that she was under no illusions as to how they happened to have just staggered out of the residential side of the hotel, in the company of a guest, looking a bit ... dishevelled...

"Bugger," Kath muttered. "Ex-student sees a teacher in these sort of circumstances, it gets around. Ex student sees two teachers and..."

She laughed and, to my surprise, so did Jane ... and, from across the room, Charlotte, too.

We decided to take a walk in the park, given that it was such a nice day and neither of us had anything particularly pressing to do. I was amused to see Niusha gather up the various used condoms discarded around the bedroom and, eventually, throw them away in a public bin just down the street – was she wondering about her reputation with the bin men, I wondered? – but, task completed, she lost her slightly preoccupied look and once again started to chat amicably and at length.

This time about supermarkets.

"We should blow them up," she said, "even if we have to leave their distribution networks in place for the moment." I was a bit taken aback by this, my own thoughts having been rather more on the various aches and pains emanating from the general area of my groin, as well as by wondering quite how she maintained her athletic ease of motion when she surely couldn't be feeling less battered, but the realisation that I was discussing blowing things up, in public, in London, with a woman wearing apparently Islamic clothing brought me back to reality.

"Sorry," I said, more or less intelligently, "how did we get started on this?

"We didn't," she said, "I did. I was wondering about the stuff we were talking about last night, and amongst the many other detrimental effects of the big retail chains must be that they stifle community engagement. You no longer need to source anything, negotiate the purchase of anything, actually talk to anyone, you just pitch up at your local big brick box and there it is. Hell, you can check out by machine and cut the human side out of it entirely. Aside from the poor sods stacking the shelves, of course, but whoever takes any notice of them?"

I contemplated this, wondering where it was going, turning to look at her and noticing again the peculiar beauty of her eyes – well, and the rest of her, actually – when she was enthused. Come to think of it, last night, when we first ... no, I brought myself back to the present. Forced myself to concentrate on the conversation, not the woman I was having it with.

"OK," I said, "I can think of a variety of reasons why supermarkets are a bad idea – the fact that most people choose or have to drive to the buggers being an obvious one – but I have yet to be motivated to get out the chemistry set. And what was that about leaving the distribution networks intact?"

She had a reply waiting, of course. "Simple. Talk to the local shop you buy your vegetables from – I know you avoid supermarkets, too – and you'll find that they have increasing difficulties in sourcing produce. Its not so bad in London because of the number of restaurants and stuff, but there are parts of the county that hardly have any wholesale markets – the big chains just hoover up the entire harvest. So its a simple statement of necessity ... for the moment ... that we need to keep their supply chains active."

"So ... what...", I replied, thinking aloud, "a bloody great artic turns up every few hours and unloads onto a bomb site. Unloads ... oh, you know, crates of 5 000 cans of beans, 2000 nappies, that sort of thing. That's a recipe for either chaos or – more likely – a riot. And possibly starvation, given the stranglehold the buggers have at the moment."

"Well, yes, that could be one outcome. Or, of course, you could get a little more organised – distribute or, rather, allocate, the loads in advance, either to smaller traders – not necessarily conventional shops, maybe individuals who'd like to be the local source for baked beans or whatever the hell else. Or, more positively, to local food co-ops, ideally acting as not for profit distribution hubs for a fairly small neighbourhood. In either case, you'd have the chance to instigate an actual market – but a diffuse market, free from existing virtual monopolies ... and maybe including elements of barter to supplement the cash economy. And, come to think of it, such a localised network structure would be ideal for LETS – a Local Exchange Trading Scheme – so no need for a central currency ... or at least an exclusive one.

I could see that this was the product of more than an evening's thought but I was still wondering why we were going into such detail just at the moment. If only to gain further thinking time, I commented on the distribution side of things and the centralisation that represented.

Niusha snorted. "Oh, come on Dave, shipping onions from Kent to Nottinghamshire to send them to London to sell? How long do you think that would survive. It doesn't make sense now, for god's sake..."

"Yeah, OK ... and there's probably no reason why your co-ops – or co-ops of co-ops – couldn't eventually buy direct, maybe from farm co-ops." I thought for a second. "Oh, I see where this is going ... its like buying books. You can buy from a conventional bookshop, of course, but you get a better range at Amazon – probably the ultimate in centralised distribution – or at AbeBooks, for instance, which is almost the opposite, in a way."

She looked positively gleeful. "Precisely. Add in some appropriate IT and you can not only ensure access to necessary resources, you can also balance supply and demand without resorting to price rationing. Which, of course,..."

I cut in. " ... is where CastList fits in. Except that currently it doesn't do anything of the sort ... and certainly isn't ready to be used by barely computer literate individuals all over the country..."

"Well," she said with a smile, "actually I think you're wrong on the former – even if you did mainly write the thing – as it has sufficient database functions built in to handle basic supply/demand stuff with ease while also allowing more significant balancing / bartering through the matrix model you already use for role enhancement. And, of course, running under GNU/Linux reduces the hardware costs and, being open source, well ... a user friendly GUI is hardly going to be a problem, is it?"

I stopped walking, gently pulling her to a halt, too, turning her to face me. "One thing that interests me in what you just said," I said, deadpan, hands on her shoulders and looking her in the eye, "is the number of is and wills rather than might or coulds – definite statements, I mean, rather than speculative ones. Which makes me wonder: Just when do you have the revolution planned for?"

She looked straight back at me, face showing no expression but a definite gleam in her eyes. "Oh, well ... I thought we could make a start, in a small way, obviously, in ... oh ... I thought ... maybe ... a month or so?"

"What, start with blowing up a few shops, then move on to the rest?"

"No, not really – the bomb stuff was merely a metaphor, as well you know. Actually, I was thinking more of starting with CareSpan's existing work with food co-ops and TimeBanks in London, take it from there. In fact," she smiled broadly, "I'm having dinner with May later on to talk about it. Consider yourself invited."

Kath drove us down in the Landrover, of course, only to find that trains from Bowmere were cancelled because of the snow, so that we ended up dropping Jane there, then driving on to Hartsholme on the understanding that trains were running from there.

They were and, wonder of wonders the buffet on the platform was actually open so we sat over coffees and waited for both trains – both currently on time, according to the information displays – while I talked to Colin about changes to the plans given that I'd suddenly gone off the idea of doing business with Karol and his associates ... and was sure that Dave would not have a problem with my decision.

Colin was, in fact, a little dubious – not that he didn't understand what had gone on, he was just being a technocrat and thinking that there were no very obvious alternatives on the market, in that the other options would make planning permission a more contentious issue. Of more immediate concern, he pointed out, was that we wanted the costings done incredibly quickly so that we could at least have a chance to get some contracts in place before the shit hit the fan with PCW et al. Which would mean that we also needed to identify an alternative incredibly quickly so that the relevant mounting points and suchlike could be built into the structural calculations. I could see the significance of this, realised that actually we just needed to get on with things at the moment, that we could fairly easily make changes later ... even if it did cost more as a result. So I told him, in the end, to proceed with the original ideas; we'd sort it out in the end.

While we were talking, though, I noticed Kath looking a bit uncertain at the mention of Karol's name. I realised that, of course, she was a bit worried about having left him up on the hill last night. I can't say that I was overly concerned about anything that might have happened to the bastard but I could see that Kath might have some uncomfortable questions to answer if anything too terrible had resulted. So, I patted her on the arm, pointed out that Colin's train was due in in only fifteen minutes, with Gareth's ten minutes after that. Once we'd got first away and collected the second, we could head into the valley the back way – over the high road – and see what there was to see.