Chapter 85: Our Daily Bread

Iris

2061

When she was a child and even until quite recently, Iris cherished a very romantic vision of country life. Green fields. Village ponds. Forests. Lakes. Winding lanes with hedges on either side. Songbirds on the wing. And although much of the English countryside was still pretty much like that, now Iris was employed as conscript labour on England's green and pleasant land, what she mostly experienced of life outside the cities was nothing at all like what she'd hoped it would be.

As far as Iris was concerned the least romantic aspect of it all was the actual work she had to do. It wasn't as if she'd exactly volunteered for it. When one of the cleaning women on the estate where Iris used to work had stolen some jewellery and neglected to admit her guilt, every domestic servant employed within a few houses of the crime scene was dismissed. And it was Iris' bad luck that she happened to be out of work at the same time as the Government of National Unity was promoting its Home-Grown and English Food Initiative. The promotional material advertised a nostalgic England symbolised by cricket pitches, the healthy outdoors and a sunny sky. What Iris and the other reluctant urban farm labourers very soon discovered were agri-business compounds which were both smelly and unglamorous and where most work was done indoors and under shelter. The sunny sky and green fields were only what she might see on the walk to and from the dormitory and her place of work.

"I always thought there was like freedom to roam and get to know nature," said Cherry, one of Iris' fellow labourers, as they stood side by side at the conveyor belt and separated substandard tomatoes from the rest. She tossed a decidedly green and slightly smaller tomato into the receptacle destined for prole supermarkets. "All the nature you've got round here are the same muddy fields and pot-holed roads you see every day on the way to work. It's not as if you can go somewhere different at the weekend. The buses don't come round very often and when they do it's only to take you to the retail park."

"To where?" shouted Iris over the racket of insistent rock music blaring out more for the benefit of the shift supervisors than the several hundred or so nominal volunteers who filled the warehouse's cavernous space. "What did you say?"

"The bus is fucking useless," Cherry shouted back through the hackneyed guitar solo that could have been assembled at any time in rock music's century-long history. "It only takes you to the shops."

"Well, it is a shop bus," said Iris. "The only reason it comes to Church Norton at all is to take villagers to the Tesco-WalMart supermarket. Those that haven't got a car that is..."

"Who can afford one of those these days?" wondered Cherry.

"I used to have a car," said Charles who was working on the other side of the conveyor belt. He was at least forty years old, so it was perfectly possible that he was telling the truth. "It was a second-hand Chrysler Chipper. It even ran on petrol. You don't get cars like that anymore, at least not those made in the last twenty years or so."

"Petrol!" Cherry sniffed. "That's not very green, is it? It's worse than fucking diesel. And there aren't many fuel stations where you can buy diesel nowadays."

"It's all change," said Charles. "Almost everyone had a car when I was a kid. Now only the really well-off can afford one..."

"It's all the fault of the fucking government!" snorted Chubby who, despite his name, was unusually skinny and whose other most prominent feature was the scattering of tattoos and piercings on his gaunt face.

"You blame everything on the government," said Cherry.

"That's 'cause almost everything is their fault," Chubby asserted. "They fucked it up with Europe and the United fucking Kingdom. They fucked it up with civil rights, the economy, the environment, race relations ... You name it, they fucked it up. That fucking Ivan Eisenegger and Eric Esterhazy: they're cunts!"

He hissed the final 's' of his tirade and was clearly intending to follow through with more, but Charles spoke first.

"It's not the government's fault that the oil's all run out," he said. "At least not this government. It's been a long time coming. I guess no one expected it would ever actually happen."

"What? Like the floods and the droughts and the plagues and the famines and all the other shit?" said Chubby. "They all fucking knew everything was all going to shit but, instead of holding back, the cunts just pressed hard on the accelerator."

"What's going on over here?" asked one of the supervisors who was carrying a lethal cattle-prod he'd probably have used to discipline the workers if it was ever made legal. "You all fucking shut it. We've got quotas to meet."

Even Chubby didn't want to risk having his daily rate cut for showing lack of enthusiasm, although he made sure that everyone around him could see him mouth the word 'cunt' when the supervisor wasn't able to see. The object of this silent derision wandered off down the line while singing along to the squalling cat-like shriek of the music. It was another one of those rock songs that was either an ode to adolescent sexual lust or some nonsense about hobbits.

The walk back to the dormitory was exactly as miserable as it ever was. There were two miles of muddy lanes and the rain was pissing down. This was what the countryside was mostly like, Iris decided: shit and piss. Or at least manure and slowly draining murky green puddles. There were no drains, no pavements, hardly any public transport and really very little to persuade Iris to renew her contract at the farm when it expired. She'd rather do any job in the big city than stay in this shit-filled arsecrack of the Kingdom of England. London might be grimy and grey, but at least there was always something to do and you could get about by bus, tube and, more often recently, rickshaw.