Allied

The first thing that Elliott taught me is that there are two kinds of protest. Or at least there used to be. He taught me that the first one is the kind we still have, the kind they show snippets of on the news sometimes. This kind is furious, desperate, spilling out onto the streets like blood gushing from a wound. Those kind of protesters have cheekbones poking sharply through the skin of their faces, and eyes which have grown wild and angry and boiling. Their actions are not a way of saying I will not do this anymore, but I cannot do not this anymore. This kind of protest is what the historians called the revolutions from below, the Peterloos and the mutinies and the storming of the Bastille. They still take many forms, those people who constitute 'below': It is anyone who will bleed into the gutter if they do not stand up now.

           And then there is the other kind of protest, which we do not see much of anymore. The kind which involved people who were clean and fed and nicely dressed, who had the time and the will to care about the people bleeding into the gutter. They used to sit in their glossy kitchens with fresh seeded loaves in the breadbin and their laptops open, and their social media feeds plastered with injustices. And once they'd finished having dinner they had the energy to be angry about it all, about the oppression and the suffering happening outside. They found the time to tweet and comment and re-tweet. Some of them signed petitions and organised. And their eyes weren't wild or boiling, when they congregated with their home-made banners, because the most they could do was imagine what it must be like to bleed into the gutter. They were nicely dressed and still had the privilege of smiling, and their words of protest weren't as noisy, or as jumbled, because they'd had the time, sat in their warm, glossy kitchens, to piece them together. So unlike the other kind of protesters being kicked in by big, heavy boots, these nicely dressed, well-mannered people were listened to. They were the ones with the leverage, this class for whom activism was about injustice, not about survival.

           They used to call them allies, Elliott told me. People who are on the same side.

           To achieve change, he would tell me, you need both kinds of protest. You need revolutions coming from both directions, the wild-eyed and the nicely-dressed, and colliding in the middle with a bang. If they do not have the warm hand of an ally to cling to, then they may as well consider themselves beaten before they've even tried to stand up.

That was the government's great achievement, Elliott thought, that they'd worked this out. He believed they had re-evaluated their strategy after the worst of those historic protests, the ones before our parents were born, when the buildings were set alight and the night skies burnt red for seven days. It was mostly the wild-eyed who were there, chanting over the roar of the flames, but this riot was different because even the nicely-dressed were on their side. Most did not get too close to the flames, but many loitered dutifully on the edges with their banners and their eloquent speeches, and very few condemned them. They were allies. Allied against the oppressor. Colliding in the middle with a bang. And the government were frightened.

So Elliott believed that the politicians had gone away, gathered round the drawing board, and thought carefully about that second kind of protest, the altruism of the nicely-dressed: All their compassionate tweets and home-made banners and articulate speeches. The kind of protest they couldn't use policemen to squash.

           And it was so clever, what they came up with, because it wasn't like what had been done before. They did not use slogans and dog-whistles to make us despise the people in the gutters, tell us they were animals, sub-humans, dangerous criminals, pin yellow stars to their coats, bellow Law and Order from podiums and bang their fists. They had done their reading. They knew that this approach did not always work, because unless you were vigilant the empathy of the nicely-dressed would start to trickle back.

           So their new policy was not to generate hate. It was to nurture apathy.

           Elliott thought they had planned it this way, calculated all these factors, inputted the formula of human nature and eureka, here it was. He pictured them sat around a big oak table in a darkly furnished room, wearing suits and muttering to each other. A couple of psychologists clutching clipboards at the far end of the table, presenting their findings.

           So how do we do it? Well. It's about energy. People's energy. Which is like all other kinds of energy in that it cannot be created or destroyed. Can only be redirected. The fact is people will only open their laptops once they've had their dinner. Will only care about someone else's hungry child, staring at them out of a Facebook post with eyes like two pence coins, if they have never had to worry about feeding their own. The fact it, there is no such thing as apathy for most people. It is simply distraction, energy expended on more immediate things.

           So, if times are harder, if there is less to go around, then the nicely-dressed will redirect their energy. They will struggle to dress themselves as nicely. They will still find bread to put in their breadbins, but it will not be the fresh, seeded kind they like. They will still have kitchens, but they will not retain their glossy sheen. This is not a description of oppression, or even truly suffering - as this would turn their eyes wild and propel them towards to the other kind of protest - but it is a removal of luxuries. And the fact is, like the glossy kitchens in which it is nurtured, empathy is just another luxury.

           Less To Go Around. It will keep these people out of the gutter, but off Twitter, they concluded. It will direct this energy inwards. Draw in their multiple chords of empathy until they have only one, looped and tightened like a rope around those they cannot do without. Husbands and wives and children. Let human nature - our prioritising instinct - take its course. That way, nobody has to hate anybody. They may do that on their own, but it will not be essential. Either way, those bleeding down below won't have anybody there to help them stand up.

           Elliott was convinced it had worked like this, powerful men sat around a big oak table, but in truth, as I would point out to him, we didn't really know.

           All we knew was what the politicians told us. Less To Go Around, they had begun to say, shaking their heads. It is deeply unfortunate, but I'm afraid there is simply Less To Go Around. Our parents had been children when that kind of talk started, and their parents' generation still had the energy, in those early days, to be angry, to ask questions, to demand whose fault this was. What do you mean, Less?

           The politicians would shake their heads apologetically in response. They would say in their gentle, sympathetic tones that this was the time for people to be thinking about their families, to be spending time with their families. To All Draw Together. By which they meant inwards.

            The psychologists might have had a hand in devising that one too, the There Is Nothing More Important Than Family. Using the power of love, the way it swallows us whole, like something warm and lumpy sliding through the belly of a snake. The way our evolutionary programming forces us to love our children and our parents and our partners before anybody else, makes us want to wrap ourselves around them and retreat into our homes. Crawl back into the womb.

           We know that you all want The Best For Your Families, they would say in those sympathetic tones, and everybody would nod in agreement. That didn't have to mean you wanted The Worst for other people's families, that you wanted everyone else to suffer. All it meant was that you wanted to make sure your own nest was lined. That was all. And now that it wasn't as easy to line anymore, who could blame you.

           The virus that came at that time gave these messages a special power; that worked like a charm, Elliott said, because people did start to worry about their families. He had learnt about it from his parents, the way people started to lock up their households against the disease, mentally divide off the expendable people outside from the precious people inside. And the panic of food shortages; supermarket shelves skeleton bare, the unruly scramble for food and medicine. People coming home, drained from all the effort of struggling for The Best For Their Family now that there was so much Less To Go Around. Collapsing on their sofas and not having the energy to open their laptops.

           The process was slow, but eventually it began to see results, this Less To Go Around. Our grandparents' generation became too old to protest, energy needed to be expended on things like getting out of bed, making cups of tea, remembering to turn off the heating at night. The outrage began to flicker and wane. And their children, and the children of those children - like Elliott and I - growing up in un-glossy kitchens without the right kind of bread in the breadbin, had the benefit of never having known life any different.

           Except Elliott, whose parents, their fury boiling for longer than most, had not let him forget that the downtrodden were still being trodden on, or that their parents had once had luxuries like compassion and nice clothes. They had carried on tweeting in support of the people down below when almost everybody else had their laptops shut and all their chords of empathy wound tightly around their families. So Elliott had not forgotten, either.

           He told me all of this from the beginning, when we met at university. We would have those conversations late at night, lying side by side on his bed, balled up, warm and soft, in something I wanted - but did not dare - to call love. He would tell me firmly, over and over again, that he could not offer me anything more than this because he was determined to be an ally - like the kind our grandparents had been - and he simply did not have that energy to spare.

           They were right, those psychologists, he told me. You only have a finite amount of energy, and in these times you need to distribute it wisely. You will not have enough to care about these people being trodden on in the gutter if you have partners or children. All the love and worry and the pain they will bring will suck up all the energy in your bones. You will be allied to those people only, and not those who need it most, and what good will that do.

           But it's human, I said once, murmuring into his shoulder. Using all that energy on love is what we do.

           Exactly. He replied. They have found our weakness.

           The next morning he would always get up early. I would watch him shake himself awake and peel himself away from the ball of warmth we'd crawled into. It looked so painful, tearing off those feelings, turning his attention to other things, like being forced out of bed and in the middle of the night.

           It wasn't so painful at first, I suppose, when we were still young and occupying that brief space - a sliver of time so much thinner than it had been in our grandparents' day - between belonging to a family and starting your own. But it didn't take long for people our age to begin to squeeze themselves into households, to become husbands and wives and parents. Now that there was Less To Go Around, people didn't live for as long, and children weren't as healthy. We were told that we should start our families early, while there was time, in case there were complications, bereavements, along the way. Make sure we had as much precious time spent with them as possible. After all, they would say, There is Nothing More Important Than Family.

I waited for Elliott, thinking that for all his zeal at university he might give in a couple of years down the line. I thought he would - he must - eventually cave. People needed love, and life was lonely, these days, for the few people left without a family to crawl back to, no arms and smiles waiting at the front door. And it wasn't just the loneliness. The laws had been changed so that after a certain age, you didn't have the same privileges, like the rewards and the tax breaks, if you were spouse-less and childless. If you chose to live like that then people thought there must be something wrong with you.

           Elliott didn't seem to mind the judgement, but I knew how lonely he  was. He reminded me of a monk, or a priest, pinning himself to a goal and letting the screws be hammered through his wrists.

           I started joining in with his activism, going along after work to meet his small, raggedy group who shouted in the street and handed flyers to people outside the train station who weren't going to read them because all they wanted was to Get Home To Their Families.

           I managed to care, for a while. But it became difficult. Jobs were less secure, family members became ill, my old friends faded and withdrew into their relationships, wrapping themselves tightly in layers of love like cotton wool. First they had engagements and then they had weddings and then they had babies who would materialise, plump and gorgeous and smiling, on my social media feed.

           Meanwhile, this was all I had: Elliott and the flyers. The hope that he was going to cave.

           Sometimes I would manage to persuade him, as we stood shivering in the darkening evenings giving out the last of our flyers, to let me come back to his house to cook him dinner. It was plain he wanted to keep me at a distance, but sometimes, in his weaker moments, he let me inch closer.

           You can allow yourself to have friends, Elliot. I would say casually, fetching bowls from the cupboard, placing cutlery on the table: Warm, domestic actions like the ones my old friends must be doing at that moment for their husbands, their wives, their plump, smiling babies. How are you meant to cope without friends?

           Elliott would only smile and shake his head, because we both knew that the way we felt about each other, without his resistance, would demand much more of his finite energy than any friendship did.

           These evenings in Elliott's empty house reminded me of the nights together at university, with that same intimacy tugging at our sleeves in the silences. That same force pulling us inwards towards each other, towards that warm place, and Elliott always pulling back. Or almost always.

           There was one wintry evening, when it was dark and windy and cold and everything felt more hopeless than usual, when Elliott didn't resist. It was late, and dinner had been made and finished hours ago, but the feeling that tended to grow in the room as the evening drew on - the sense that I ought to go home - wasn't as strong, somehow. We had been watching the news, sat side by side on his sofa, with that intimacy throbbing in the inches of space between us. Eventually, without a word, Elliott turned off the television and sat there, listlessly watching its blank screen. For once, he looked defeated. He looked sad.

           I had only intended to hug him, shuffling closer on the sofa until I had an arm around his shoulder, but before we knew it the warmth had swept us up. Swallowed us whole. Lumpy and sliding through the belly. Not heat and carnality, clawing lustfully at each other's bodies. Just the feel of somebody else's skin pressed against yours. The simple warmth of it. The two of us being wound inwards together with a ribbon and wrapped in bubble-wrap.

           We lay in bed afterwards, listening to the wind howling outside.

           What if we tried it? I said softly, placing a hand on his chest and looking up into his face. If we agreed we wouldn't allow ourselves to use up too much on each other.

           Elliott was silent. I could feel his heartbeat, regular and strong, under my palm.

           It's like you said once, he replied finally. It's human. We won't be able to help it.

           He got up early the next morning and just like all those times before, I watched him peel himself away from me, sharply, like tearing off a plaster. I watched him stand up and leave that love behind on his bedside table like a broken watch.