Homebodies

***CW descriptions of civil unrest (mild), one or two swear words***

When the girls were small, I used to tell them that if Mother Nature wanted us to fly, she’d have given us wings, and because we could only walk a matter of miles in any one day, it was only right we should stay close to home. It’s then they would joke that at the rate their father was going, constantly zooming ahead of us on our family trips in and around the city, he would be on the other side of the planet by tea-time, so no point in yelling after him to wait for us to catch up. ‘Slow down,’ I’d say when what I really meant was ‘stop’. He, like the rest of the world, was moving too fast, and the faster things moved, the less familiar they became, and less familiar meant less safe.

The solitary bee intent on escaping the hive, that’s how I saw him, and more so as time went on. Innocuous enough in the way that he dressed, his everyday blacks and browns proving both apt and ironic, your typical drone, just a little bit buzzier, setting himself apart with more freedom of flight than what was common even then.

Did he see me as queen, I wonder? Guess he did back then, when I was content to put my mothering and domestic duties first, to combine my work and social life by selling fragrance door to door; when all those ‘honey, I’m homes’ and the scent of fresh blossom brought sweet words and raw pleasures to our hot hungry lips. He must have done, for averse to travelling as I was, preferring to spend on high-end furniture, a landscaped garden, and local activities for the kids, he was ‘fairly certain he’d cope’ without venturing beyond the walls of the city any time soon. He’d been away umpteen times before so it didn't much matter, although he did sometimes say it might have been nice to take a holiday once in a while, if only for our daughters’ sake. ‘Go if you want,’ I’d told him, ‘Take the girls as well if you must, but don’t expect me to come.’

I never understood the attraction, never mind the desire, and much less the need, people then expressed to go jetting off to all those strange inclement destinations which either burnt one’s skin to a crisp or where spending a quarter hour in a walk-in freezer might have been preferable, places so chocked full of people whose languages, dialects and cultures we would be hard-pressed to understand.

‘But they’re not so different really,’ I’d heard it said, ‘and it’s easier when you go with people you know, stay in places with folk just like you. The beaches, nightclubs and shopping malls are much the same if you stick to the tried and tested.’

‘So why not just stay here then?’ I’d ask, and always they’d smile in that condescending way they now deny and talk about ‘getting away from it all’ while others would even claim they were ‘broadening their horizons’, both of which I could do quite simply and cheerfully, and at no expense at all, by allowing my mind to wander or by reading a book. It was, in fact, a book, ‘The Dangers of Wanderlust’, written by a local author which first confirmed my then rather laid-back view that this concept was indeed a refuge for fools, before going on to convince me of how wrong it actually was.

The girls had grown by then. They’d done well at school and college, but had a hard time finding work. The city, self-governing as it had been for several decades, was expanding; there were jobs to be had, but because of a law the previous government had brought in, largely to garner the support of our city’s employers come election time, this meant they could pay incomers less than they were obliged to pay us locals, and were therefore taking on great numbers of people from outside our city (and from places where similar laws applied) to fill the more menial and junior positions. Consequently, my daughters did what so many of their generation were forced to do and flew the nest by plane. One east and one west, and their father wasn’t in the least concerned. Indeed, there were times when he appeared to be all for it. And so we argued.

All this swapping around in order to go where the work was, and all under the pathetic guise of ‘seeing what was out there’ and this 'broadening of horizons’ my chosen life partner was suddenly so keen on, thus escalated overnight from the personal annoyance it had started out as to become my ultimate threat – the potential forever break-up of my family and the decimation of city life as I knew it. ‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘For better or worse, we’ve just got to accept it, and maybe we can learn from these people, same as the girls might learn more about the world than they ever would staying here.’

It was not a view Deering Main, the Wanderlust author, shared any more than I did, and on the night that our younger daughter left, I dreamt I was curled up on his lap like a child who had just been fed a warm and satisfying bottle. Silent but awake, comforted by the man I now saw as my parent-protector, although I do admit, I was more than a little enamoured. It was Deering who later founded the CPP, the political party of which I became an eager and active member, eventually standing as candidate for my ward.

He described me as a butterfly once – in jest, I think. Flitting around the neighbourhood in my yellows and pinks and tangerines marbled into my City Proud Party rosette. ‘Sylva Savore, if you can sell our party policies half as successfully as you manage to sell those imitation scents, be sure you’ll get elected.’ The likelihood became a foregone conclusion when some smart-ass, wordplay-wise, but politically sympathetic reporter then linked my name with his. The Main Man and The Saviour, perfect press, and in more ways than one, but we kept that private.

He’s nowhere to be seen now. In fact, he’s rarely shown face since the day we got into government. ‘Surely you don’t expect me to risk my neck coming out tonight?’ He’d practically boomed the all-caps message, the one which had followed the level one alert. Meteor Strike Imminent. Threat to life. Airplanes grounded. Airport in chaos. ‘The airport is your ward, not mine. These are your people. Your constituents.’ And yes, it was my duty to be there to try my best to calm the mob, to reassure the people, to offer words of comfort, but wouldn’t it be better if we put on a united front? No. The CPP would send a car, so please could I ensure I dressed appropriately for once? In the party colours but less garish than on election night, more sober than sorbet, if that wasn’t too much to ask. As if this was even possible in sunshine pastels. And as if anyone would care.

And the rioting – oh, the rioting when I first stepped into this place, armed bodyguards surrounding me, for the mob would surely have torn me apart. I’d witnessed similar unrest, and been in the thick of it on a lesser scale since taking office, of course. The employers’ protests over our new employment laws, the incomers swelling their numbers, the counter protests and the resulting violent clashes, the destruction of the new city complex – the glass entertainment dome - masonry thrown by both sides from within, each blaming the other until they all turned on me, the riot sparked, someone said, by the most trivial of matters; ‘gnats pish’ imported beer, the number one song on the barroom playlist – Hanging Loose - the title considered an obscenity everywhere but here - it was up to me to do something about it… And then came the storming of parliament…

‘You’re lying! You and that bastard, Main! You’re lying…’ The voices came at me, bile spat out. ‘You’ve set this up, grounded the planes so we can’t get in or out. I know, I’ve studied science, meteorology. There is no meteor. You’ve blanked all the screens, cut off all contact… And what the fuck was that noise…?’

Screams and wails and a barrage of words I could no longer make out and what sounded like a series of close-proximity explosions. As I was ushered by the guards into a strong room, I caught sight of the flashes of my party colours, yellow and tangerine, but perhaps more red than pink, whizzing hotly through the night – not directly above us, but at some way in the distance outside the city walls and all around. And then I thought I saw something else, the face of the father of my children, and his lips were telling me to run. I knew that he’d gone. He had packed and left before I received Deering’s message. And he’d tried to persuade me to leave the city too, to take that flight he’d booked for the pair of us to join our daughter in the west before, as he put it, ‘Deering saw to it that no one would ever be able to cross its borders again’. It wouldn’t come to that, I said. All the CPP ever wanted was for its inhabitants born and bred to come first, for travel to be restricted – it was bad for the environment, after all – for our families not be fragmented, and for our culture and traditions to be upheld. 'No,’ he’d replied. ‘That may be what you want. But not him.’

Main would be holed up in his bunker now, together with his wife and children and the party select, the true believers, the ones who wouldn’t question him as I had when he’d first discussed his ‘dream’, his ‘ultimate goal’, his ‘City Proud Vision’, to set marksmen on the walls, to bomb outside of them within a five-mile wide perimeter to deter incoming aircraft or else shoot them down, and to rid our city, for once and for all, of the ‘subversive alien element’.

I shuddered. My love, my true love and father of my children, would be out there when the shooting began, and his running wouldn’t save him from the bullets which I, in my naivety, had helped Deering prepare and fire. The solitary bee would die breaking free from the hive. Couldn’t tell him to stop any more than I could counter-command the shooters, any more than it was within my power to hit reverse on myself. I could only thank God, and perhaps for the first time ever, that my children had grown to take after their father.

‘Ms Savore, it’s safe to come out now.’

I couldn’t tell how long it was before the special agent’s voice broke the silence and led me shaking and in tears through the blood-streaked former airport lounge which tomorrow would become a military base, and next week when the city folks, the compliant ones, would be rostered in to scour and cleanse, and rebuild and start anew. But Deering would have his chambers here, of that I was certain, and children would grow up being taught The Book of Main in school, playground monitors jotting down the names of the naughty few who still dared to race around with their arms stretched open wide. Now be sure, boys and girls, to remember this: if Mother Saviour wanted us to fly, she’d have given us wings.