Fi and I cuddled up under the duvet with Oscar nestled between us. He’d taken to climbing into our bed recently when his night-time nausea got too much.
We listened to the Prime Minister being grilled on the morning news. He twisted under questioning.
“It cannot be helped. We cannot expect business to step into this – would you? I mean its common sense. And government? If we do this, we’d be on the hook for every failed service…I mean, we cannot do that. Look Sarah, it’s not our money, it’s yours–and if we did this, your children’s and their children’s too. These are hard choices, Sarah. They may have to…”
He’d blundered into a trap of his own making; one the interviewer was quick to keep him in. “Have to what, Prime Minister?”
“Well, um, Sarah, you see this is moral hazard. We step in here, which we as a nation can ill-afford to do…and it’s not just the cost of this. We do it and we only encourage others to take risks…”
He did not say it. Did not have the guts to say what he meant. That PancWeb was going to fail, and we were going to let it. People were going to die, in their millions.
The thing about diabetes is that it is so damned big. Dream disease – first chronic, then deadly. Debilitating yet treatable for anyone who can keep paying.
The genius of PancWeb was that it did not try to be an artificial pancreas. It was simple to implant, hardly more complex than a stent. Pop it in in the morning and back at your desk that afternoon, that’s what they used to say. Once in place, the web literally grew down the intestinal tract where, through careful self-regulation, it seeped just enough insulin into the body to break down glucose.
It was heaven sent for our Oscar. He got his diagnosis at seven, just seven! It meant a life of paranoid management under the threat of coma. Except for the miracle of PancWeb. It was the easiest decision we ever made.
But its genius was its downfall. Once it was in, you couldn’t take it out. Not without a series of difficult, time-consuming procedures to laboriously pluck out every last gram of the web. That was something few could tolerate and fewer afford.
So, when it went wrong, when the PancWeb’s fatal flaw revealed itself, the crisis was inescapable. You see, the web started to degrade after five years of use. Of course, the degraded web poisoned the patient, making them progressively weaker until it finally killed them. What’s worse, thanks to generous healthcare outreach, the benefits of this miracle cure had been shared globally. By the time the link was proven, there were nearly half a billion devices implanted and weaving their deadly web.
It was someone’s fault—someone had to pay. And by the time corporate contagion was cauterised, it had already done for three stock market darlings, toppling like dominoes one after another. Insurance was next, then the reinsurers. Which all of course hit the pensions, impoverishing electorates.
All this created the perversity of deliberately sleepwalking into the death of millions. With solemn faces, the politicians began to say that the people had paid enough. And do you know what? Some people started to agree.
Enough! Really? Just change the rules. Take global action. Do it, just for this, but right now. Or time runs out, and they will all die.
#
It unified us, in a way. Around the world, victims mobilised, and public opinion swung behind us. Those in power felt the pressure.
In England, we tried to force their hands in court, force the government to stand behind the right to life. On the day of judgement, we were there, Fi and me. We waited, mobbed outside the High Court. There were some hundreds of us facing the shields and batons of the police. It was desperate stuff, but the wheels of law would turn and deliver our just fate.
The suited barrister stood at the podium before us, police flanking his position. It did not look good.
“The law is the law,” he started “it is not some arbitrary sense of right and wrong. This place can only deal with professional disinterest and apply the law as we find it.”
There were shouts already.
“The facts and the precedent are inescapable. It is with true sympathy and a shared distaste that…”
Blah blah blah…
The suit’s flat words were received with anything but flatness. The shoving came from the back of the crowd at first as we all roared our outrage. This could not be it. This was not our way. They’d thrown raw impotence at us, and we spat it back with shouts and banners, then bricks.
Which drew the inevitable response of muscular and batonned pressing into us—step-shove, step-shove. Our lips may have been split, but our spirits weren’t broken.
Our reaction, the rage, those bricks, they were just what They wanted, the government, the money, the haters. Unreasonable, irresponsible, dangerous, unacceptable. Just like that, sympathy was turned, and unity split in twain. Responsibility and fault were spread; they were diffused and reflected.
Oh, and the riot stoked the Counters. It brought them out from their online conspiracy corners into the open, into our real lives. They’d been around online ever since the PancWeb crisis hit. It was our own fault we had diabetes in the first place, no self-control, ate too much. And anyway, what do you expect if you subject yourself to unnatural medical procedures? We should have known it was too good to be true. Why should they be expected to pick up the bill?
And so, when it was time to make hard choices, our government, Our Government, clothed the Counters in respectability—gave their lies credence as a bulwark against crippling cost. Emboldened, the Counters became a movement; you saw them everywhere we protested, throwing hate back at us.
#
We sat huddled in our tent, Fi, Oscar and me. Fi’s eye had come up black after the High Court riot—a baton in the face. Whether it was the police or one of the Counters, she did not see, but it was a right old shiner. I was hugging Oscar. He still had his childlike looks that played so innocently in the news. But he should have been growing, not diminishing. While his friends bulked up and pulled away from their parents, Oscar regressed, less confident, more dependent, weaker. I gave him a squeeze and breathed in his scent.
Our camp had spread over Parliament Square, standing sentry over the Parliamentarians debating our fate. It was a haphazard mix of multi-coloured dome-tents and old- fashioned ridge-jobs held sturdy with rigid poles and guys that lay in wait for staggerers late at night. Outside, the police’s megaphones shouted their garbled message. “Disperse, go home.”
Accept your fate.
The court had judged. The people’s representatives had spoken. And public opinion? Oh, that had so relentlessly swung behind them both. It was a tragedy. No one could have foreseen what would happen. And now that it had happened, there was nothing to be done. Nothing that anyone was willing to do.
Shouts and screams were coming from outside the tent.
“Mummy, Mom?” Oscar said weakly, looking first at me, then to Fi with fear in his eyes.
“Let’s go, Jas,” said Fi.
“Go?” I looked at her. She had always been the one that refused to give up.
“It’s not safe.” Her eyes flicked to Oscar, who had retreated, curled up in my lap like he was eight again.
“Oh,” my voice fell flat. “What about Hyde Park? That’s supposed to be safer” I said.
Fi paused a little. “Or we could just go home…” she said.
That was when someone crashed onto our tent. A sudden bulge fell between us, and the sound of profanities spouted from outside. A tentpole sprung out of place and the whole thing started to collapse, swamping us like a heavy blanket.
“That does it…” Fi was scrabbling for our stuff—clothes, torches and chargers, anything she could scoop into her bag. “Just take Oscar, I’ve got this.”
So it was Oscar and me that first pushed our way out from our pancaked tent.
“Christ Fi, get out,” I shouted when I saw what was happening.
The horses! They’d unleashed the horses. They were charging full pelt from Westminster Bridge, sending the protestors scattering in panic. Meanwhile, a water canon was spraying canvas-stripping plumes across the square, hemming the protesters into a desperate crush to the north.
It was then that I saw the flag, the one with the green and red cobweb. It had been torn free by the water jet and flung into the air, where it turned and twisted. And just for one moment, it hung above us, like our cause faltering against the inevitability of gravity…
“For god’s sake Jas!” It was Fi, pulling me from my stupor.
We were standing in a no-man’s land. Towards Parliament, the militants were fighting back. The pained whinny of a horse drew armoured police and the acrid aroma of pepper spray. There was no quarter down there. Away, towards the parks, the protesters were stoppered by enclosing roads, their bodies thick with panic, a screaming cacophony as the trampling began.
“Jesus, Fi” was all I could say.
That’s when we heard the shot. The first shot that is. It came from the battle by parliament. Who knows who fired first, but we all know what happened next. The news and the Prime Minister made sure we knew. We ran, like desperate sheep struggling to break free of ever confining fences. Our hands gripped Oscar and we used our shoulders and elbows to cut paths through the pressed crowd, who yelled and pushed in return. The side streets were blocked with plastic barricades, manned by police with riot shields. We were swept along with the bruised, the terrified, and the horrified into the open space of St James Park. Here the broken protesters fell to their knees and sobbed or roared in outrage.
We stumbled on from there, carried by a dazed crowd to the gathering at Hyde Park. To our people. To safety.
#
That was it really, the tipping point. Our tragic fate turned creation myth for society’s new enemies. We became something to be protected against. Persecutors, not victims.
I guess it helped, really. For the rest of you—for you not affected, do you know? I think in some way, we were society’s cure. We were like a virus and by raising the antibodies of hate against us, you fought us and got better. A sick man is desperate and will take any medicine he needs to survive. Shake the virus and come back stronger.
It was Hyde Park where it finally hit home. Thankfully, Fi and I chose to leave three days before Eviction Night.
We’d been happy there in our safe little village. Oscar wasn’t a lonely, strange, sickly child. He had friends, all dimming together. And we had a community, parents each enduring the same dreadful, inevitable fate. But the Solidarity Camp had begun to empty, their guitars and drums thinned out. The food that was so generously and deliciously prepared was reduced to a bland sustaining gruel. Not that we minded that—it was other things we minded.
We were used to the Counters, their cat calls and derision. Real life trolling played out so proudly for the news. You had to be immune to them or it would drive you crazy. But it got worse. The Counters were legitimised by politicians and press with their questions and challenges, rumours and innuendo. Blind eyes were turned to their behaviour, and any outrage was mired in independent reviews that would conclude long after we were all gone.
You know that thing that states do? The thing where they shine bright lights and play terrible music really loudly at some Generalissimo holed up in his compound? Well, they’re crowd-sourcing that now. The outraged mob of Counters asserted their right to protest beside us in the park. And that right was delivered by halogen and rock.
“Come on…we know how this ends.” That’s how Fi said it. She was right, of course she was right.
I think leaving that place was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done. Worse than the battle of Parliament Square. Worse even than The Night.
We’d not really left our spot near the square at the middle of the camp for a week. Oscar was nicely lost in loving companionship, painting, and low-key circus skills. We even had our own media, running 24/7. It had kept the spirit in the global community strong, cocooned in its own little bubble. So by the time we left, the Counters had established their perimeter. You see, since the Oxford Circus bomb, they’d pretty much been given a free rein.
Fi and I never agreed about Oxford Circus. It poisoned us. Does do something mean do anything? Any means necessary was what Fi had said in an echo of other struggles. But we both knew it was too late. Oxford Circus, Times Square, Gare du Nord—hundreds of lives snuffed out in an organised cry of impotence and injustice. And all it achieved was unleashing them, deputising the Counters to go where legitimate law couldn’t tread.
“It’s not going to get any better, Jas,” Fi said. “We’ve had the good days. Let’s just go home for the end.”
There you are. She said it. The end. It was an end.
Days. Weeks if you are lucky, but not a month. That’s what the Doctor said. It had got into Oscar’s spine and was now spreading to his brain. There was no stopping it, just manage the symptoms, manage the pain. Poor Oscar, he was so distant. He just wanted cuddles.
Why do they hate us? We were just two women with their son. But it was hate. As we stepped from our camp and into their lights, we shielded our eyes and could hear their voices rising above the moronic music.
“Go back and die!”
I wanted to hold Oscar, cradle him to my breast, protect him. But he was up to my chin now—I could not do that. So we walked either side of him, arms and bodies shielding him from what they threw. We walked towards the braying mob.
I could see the police, riot shields resting against the trees, idly looking our way as the air became thick with missiles. They did not budge an inch. We raised our arms against the bottles and piss and flinched as the timber and half bricks found their mark. And ducking low we protected Oscar from the worst of it. Only the worst though.
When we reached them, the crowd parted, then closed again—surrounding us.
We’d heard it all before—our sex, our sexuality, my ethnicity—all a cause for ignorant hate. Online, PancWeb victims met horrific bile and abhorrent illegal threats. We were used to it. But to have all this shouted in your face in a shower of spittle by a man too long from bathing…
“Hey! That’s enough!” A saviour’s voice came from nowhere. I never saw their face. We were clinging to each other too hard, eyes down trying not to provoke them. But the mob moved, opening, letting us pass.
“Let them run to their holes and die. It’s just a couple of dykes and a kid.”
We moved, walked fast through the mob receiving nothing but kicks, shoves, and spit.
We made directly for the police, towards where they stood impassively as we approached. “Go on, fuck off home,” was all they offered, watching a piss-stained thirteen- year-old stumble past their absent care.
There was paint on our door when we got home. Unclean daubed in putrid green and red. Since we’d been doxxed they’d brought it all offline, right to our own home.
“This,” I said to Fi. “This is what your lot have made happen.” I didn’t even leave it at that. “You and your lot,” I said in tears, my knees buckling at my own front door.
Why did I say that?
#
Deeply regretful. Lessons must be learned, the Prime Minister said four days later about the horror of Eviction Night. We’d made it out in time, before the worst of the Counters’ excess had been unleashed and unrestrained against everyone we’d left there. We’d seen it coming. So had they, so had everyone. Why couldn’t they just let us be?
But we had friends. Brave friends, battered friends, who nevertheless stood beside us. We did not need to shop or clean or cook that last week. Dave and Sue, Kareem and Ash, Pippa and Sandy. They came in shifts, being there when we needed it, keeping scarce when not.
We were loved despite it all—despite the centrifugal force that was tearing at Fi and me with looming pain and present faults. We kept it together, for the most part, for Oscar’s sake. But the fault lines between us were deepening further for being buried. I felt the distance.
Why did I say that?
In those final days, a strange solemnity settled. There was nothing to be gained from hate or struggle. The end was inevitable. At home, we played our greatest hits. For Oscar, for Fi, let’s face it, for me. Mushroom pilaf, Jenga, whatever that driving game was that Oscar was hooked on. We were conjuring a past to live in, urging it to stretch forever. One day, two days, three days, more.
#
I couldn’t bear to watch the Prime Minister that night. His soothing words urging healing. Where was his healing when we needed it? Where were all of you when we needed you? We felt so very alone.
It was Pippa and Sandy on duty on The Day. They were keeping their distance in the kitchen, no doubt listening to the PM. Fi and I were on the sofa with Oscar laid across our laps. Fi stroked his hair. He was so passive, we thought wordlessly as we watched our boy go pale.
“Mummy,” Oscar said.
“Yes?” We both said together.
“You’re going to be fine, Ozzy,” Fi said.
“Mummy…I don’t want…” Oscar was becoming weaker.
“I know, my love,” I said, squeezing his hand. “We tried, my love … everything …” I was lost. There was nothing I could say.
The pain was written in his face; the drugs had stopped working. There was no way back—we had to let him go.
Fi started to hum. It was that old lullaby we used to sing to him as a baby. I hummed too, tears rolling down my cheek. Then we sang.
Go to sleep, darling Oscar
Darling Oscar, go to sleep.
Our voices cracked as the frown left Oscar’s face. His muscles were no longer tense, his breathing shallowed, then stopped.
#
Fi left too. After the funeral there was too much, and our rift was too deep. I couldn’t stay in the flat either. It’s let to someone else now. But I did go to the ceremonies. Mourning and reconciliation, they said they were. Closure Pippa said I’d get.
I don’t even know what that means. You don’t close the door on that, you don’t move on to a new chapter. I wear it here, in my heart. It stains everything I see, hear and taste. And I would not have it any other way.
They did not move on either, the Counters. Maybe I should have let it go, move on with my life, like Fi. But apparently, I made it up—we all did. Or we brought it on ourselves to rob them of their freedom or some such. I don’t know. I refused to let their lies stand. I confronted them and those that sought comfort in their fictions. I had to, for Oscar.
And they know who I am—they keep track. There was paint on my apartment door again last week. The landlord is upset—it makes the other tenants nervous, he said. No offense, but two weeks’ notice.
I shouldn’t have taken them on, I guess. Bury Oscar and get on with my life. But I’m not going to do that. Shall I take my revenge? Smear excrement on their doors? Homemade explosives on reconciliation day? Or at whatever sporting irrelevance that the nation is using to turn a corner. Nightly I recount it. But no—I shall pick the scab and keep the wound raw.
#
So here we are, International Reconciliation. Across the globe we come together to remember, to mourn in a spirit of reconciliation, bringing our broken society together. Our fractured society was refusing to mend, so it was time to put away the rancour and the blame and start to look forward.
Is that right?
Five years after they’d buried the last of us, buried our souls in indifference, then contempt, then hate. Five years is long enough to put the rancour behind us—to forget our differences, they said. Forgive the deaths on both sides.
Things were said that we regret. Things were done that we regret. It is time to put them to one side and move on.
Move on?
I was chosen. A grieving mother and vocal representative of the anger and pain that refused to fade, who daily reminded you all of what you did, what you let happen. If I can sit in reconciliation, if I can set aside and even forgive, there is hope that we can all come together and move on. Never again.
Never bloody should have done it in the first place.
I was chosen a second time. This time by our community. There would be one of us in each ceremony to sow the destruction of their cause. It was just a simple thing they gave me, I could pop it under my bra and none would be the wiser. Just pair it with my phone for maximum devastation.
It was a lovely spring-summer day. The kind that Oscar revelled in. I felt the heat on my skin, the warmth on my cheeks. St Paul’s was positively glowing, the crowd struggling to keep solemnity as the dignitaries arrived. Shouts of excitement at celebrities, boos soon muffled when the villains of both sides stepped from their cars.
They’d laid a green carpet for us. Not the blooming light green of spring, but the deep maturing of a summered oak leaf. This is England—long we’ve stood and long we shall stand.
I got some boos. The undimmed Counters had secured their place at the barriers and their spotters soon pointed me out. I was a minor demon, worthy of perfunctory barracking. Not the frothing fury they reserved for their most hated who followed me.
The security gate chimed of course when I passed through it. It detected the pins in my arms and collarbone from that time the Counters gave me a proper kicking after the protest in Brighton. So they waved me through with a simple chaste frisk by female hands. Maybe this was why I was chosen.
“This way.” The purple-trimmed steward touched my elbow and gestured towards the chairs beneath the dome. I chewed a Rennie to calm the acid that was forcing its way up my oesophagus.
I could not muster a smile or kind words as we were introduced to Them. Them, those faces and silken oh-so-reasonable voices that had pronounced Oscar’s death five years ago. That had said nothing could be done when it could. That roused the rabble of hate to save their own skins. No, not even their skins—the jobs they wanted and the power they had to wield. It was Oscar’s skin they sacrificed—and my life.
So I stood, tight-lipped, and held out a hand that was shook.
“I’m sure,” I think I said. That was it. The blood was roaring in my ears and I wanted to spill my bile now, here in front of them all. But that would have had me out of there and I was chosen. I had to be in there.
So my lips stayed thin and maybe I even forced a little smile.
I was seated two to the right and four seats behind the Prime Minister, just so the camera could pull focus if a suitably sympathetic look crossed my face. We sang their hymn—Abide With Me. I’d chosen to do it then.
Abide with me, fast falls the eventide
Voices raised, set course by the choir and soaring with patriotic fervour
The darkness deepens, Lord, with me abide
As one the cathedral embraced the despair of half a decade ago
When other helpers fail and comforts flee
Of course, none of them identifying as the failing helper
Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me.
But the helpless had been too few to provide more than company and succour.
Then, the third verse was my mark. As it rose, I took the phone from my pocket and could feel the edges of the thing in my bra dig into my ribs. My mouth parched and I croaked the words
I fear no foe, with Thee at hand to bless
Ills have no weight, and tears no bitterness
Where is death’s sting?
My moment. I dropped my hymn book and tore at my dress, yanking the device from my breast.
Where, grave, thy victory?
The congregation sang while those around me stepped back from the mad woman, or forward to offer help. I clicked the button as their final words dissolved into confusion.
I triumph still, if Thou abide with me.
#
So, I spoke. And the device came to life, amplifying and filling the cathedral with my words. It seemed to me that every phone in the place was held up, making sure the moment was saved, streamed, and shared. I spoke.
I do not forgive.
I do not forgive you
Any of you
For what you did
Or what you did not do.
It was your choice
You had everything you needed to know
You chose who to listen to
And I do not forgive you.
That was my message to your reconciliation. It was carried by every news outlet and to every corner of social chatter. You cannot pretend you are reconciled. You are not.
#
“Jasmine, what do you want them to do? What now?” the journalist asked me months later at the foot of the High Court stairs on the day of my acquittal.
“I don’t know. How could I know?” I spat back at him. “Not to get here, how about that? Go back in time and show some humanity. This is your damned mess—you work out what to do.”
#
For Oscar
For Fi
For us all.
About the author: JP Heeley is a London-based author of science and speculative fiction.
Find him on Mastadon @jon53@wandering.shop and Bluesky @jon53.bsky.social