By: Harlan Thoroughgood

 

“The main requirement for a society is to be social,” he begins, “but the reality is that being social is about more than just text on a screen. It comes down to brain chemistry altered by physical interactions, including body-language, touch, sense of smell, intonation and various sounds… All the things the online communities seek to emulate. However, eventually, they all eventually – sorry, repeating myself there – but, they all end up doing the same thing a lot of other people do naturally, and it is one of the things that people who go online started out avoiding: actually going out with friends in the real world.

“Our virtual worlds are, well, virtually useless at conveying the human experience in any kind of accurate form. Television lacks a whole variety of senses that make up the human experience. Literature describes them, but many people have a hard time visualising what they read, let alone feeling the senses, hearing the sounds. That kind of synaesthesia seems to be beyond most, probably because schools encourage visualisation and little else. Photography suffers the same problem, and it is interesting that few people ever try and bring the smells, or feelings, for example, that they encountered in one place back with them as a form of memento to share with others.

“In fact, this main social aspect – sharing – has become a key problem point with our society in recent times. Just as we’ve begun to spread out online, we have become somehow less social; similarly, as our group of friends has expanded, our capacity to share with them has been reduced, too. You need only to look at social networking sites, where the majority of people believe they are sharing their experiences with people. But, let me ask you this, isn’t a picture, or a status update, or a Tweet, just another way of showing off? A selfish way of saying, “I did this,” in order to come across as somehow better than those on your friend’s list. You didn’t take all these friends you’ve greedily added as a status-symbol with you on your travels, you just wave it in their faces that you did something and they didn’t.

“In addition, the same principles are warping who we are as people. We have become NPCs in a grand social computer game, our reactions and behaviours categorized and filed, and sold to the highest bidder. The human engine, finally mapped out in a way that game theorists have been trying – and failing – to do for decades. But when we didn’t fit the principles of game theory, instead of changing the theory, they decided, instead, to begin changing us to fit their models.

“Just look at capitalism, or Neo-liberalism, or whatever chosen handle it goes by these days. It used to be all about the value of something being proportional to the amount of effort put into acquiring the capital to purchase and therefore own it. Then, we could show off our possession in selfish social interaction, or share them in inclusive social interaction. Put another way, we could keep up with Jones’s next door, or we could let our friend test drive the new car we bought to see how it handles.

“Now, we are moving to a new way of operating: you purchase something you can enjoy on your own, but which comes with an endless consumer burden of updates, upgrades, applications, and etc., but which you also will never actually own so as to allow major corporations to control innovation – or completely stifle it – or increase their revenue through litigation. In this model, your new phone/palm-top computer device, that film you will have to pay to watch every time on your video-on-demand service, the home you rent… You won’t own any of it. It ends up being transitory, and pointless. The value of that possession becomes reduced and hollow.

“Instead, you end up in a race to the bottom, where everyone scrambles to find the latest bit of software, or unshared-experience, to wave in the faces of their friends. Or, alternatively, you get renegades, who, simply because they long for the time in their childhood when most media was accessible, and capable of being shared, and who create their own means of sharing experience with others, that are slowly legislated against on the basis that the rights holders are being cheated out of money, even as those rights holders warp our reality into one of selfish, solitary consumerism.”

 

Ernest Morrison has been running a variety of workshops for a number of years. They are run by himself and a few friends he has acquired, and many of them use old experiments on human interactions to measure how effective certain parts of our society are at working with each other, socialising, and maintaining their own mental health.

Recently, he has seen a rise in the number of people demonstrating anti-social behaviour. This isn’t the type of anti-social behaviour you read about in the newspapers. Instead, this anti-social behaviour is the type that masquerades as professionalism, motivated-business-sense, online social-networking, and online-trolling whilst hiding behind the belief that speech should be free (and that, therefore, insulting people should be protected by law).

This type of behaviour is permeating every level of society, and can be seen as the main cause of unjustified entitlement and depression.

Morrison often uses an experiment using a safe with a smaller safe inside, and a prize in the second safe. Ten people are given the codes to the outer safe, and another ten are given the code to second safe, and then they are split into pairs. The pair are then told that inside the safe is £100 – and that they can choose to split the winnings any way they like, based on who did the most work during the experiment.

Unbeknownst to the pairs, the person who has the code to the outer safe has scored lower on a screening test before starting the experiment. The test measures whether or not the person would be more, or less, likely to feel entitled to getting something because of their own perceived social status.

Morrison has stated that in an ideal society, both participants would share their winnings equally, having been given a code for nothing, and therefore having actually done the exact same amount of working as the other person in achieving their goal. The results of the experiment showed this for many years, as there were a variety of reasons making individuals value being perceived as essentially altruistic and co-operative.

Then the results of the experiment began to change, around ten years ago. When Morrison first noticed it, it was with individuals not from a specific socio-economic background, but whose parents had spoiled them as children, young-adults and teenagers. Many of these individuals were found to be from a lower-economic class because the parents used material purchases to show their affection because they had to work so much, whilst the parents of individuals from a higher-economic bracket were able to spend time with their family and show their affection in other ways.

But the consequences of this began to warp the world around us. It made us believe that an entire underclass was lazy and wanted hand-outs, when the systems of our society had trained them to feel entitled. Meanwhile, the rich naturally felt entitled because their economic-clout allowed them freedoms not afforded to those less well off.

Along with this entitlement came the advent of social media.

Social media claimed to give everyone a voice, though in reality it tended to give a voice to whoever could come up with the most pithy statements. It resulted in human interaction becoming increasingly like walking on quicksand – those who were quick and didn’t think very much survived with little trouble, whilst those who wanted to take their time were left behind. From text-us-your-views to post-comment, people were competing in verbal sparring matches. TLDR became the cry of a generation wanting simple explanations to complex problems.

Meanwhile, more and more people began to use social media as a primary means of communication. Neighbours would email rather than walk two doors down the road; friends would play questing games online despite being only a few miles apart; people would stay in and watch video-on-demand rather than succumb to escalating cinema prices. Slowly, many people stopped talking face-to-face, and we began to live our lives in little boxes with little communication save the news feed on our social networking site.

And that is when the isolation and depression started to seep in.

What Morrison found was an increasing trend. Those who scored high on the test would take the bait that was set out for them. They would get the first person to open their safe, and would then renegotiate their share of the winnings. Their rationalisation was, increasingly, that as they had the code to open the only locked safe, they were more entitled to the money inside.

These people were the children of entitlement, raised by market-forces and ‘Pokemon’ and parents who had to work too many jobs in their diseased quest for more money, who believed that their own value was directly connected to how much they could get out of people. They represented the selfishness that characterises the rise in the Neo-liberal belief that people are individuals only out for what they can get, and that society can function perfectly if we all only become greedy enough.

However, it conveniently ignored the increasingly isolated individuals, often far more ponderous and intellectual, who were becoming depressed and downtrodden. The reason for this was that the children of entitlement were taking over, dominating the media, and feeding us a stream of stories designed to promote the greed is good ideology that seems to surface every so often under another label. The isolated would try and reason with this new ideology, but would often find themselves in a much more dangerous position than they realised: they were using rational means to counter an irrational opponent, turned sick by a need to value their worth by having more than other people.

In this situation, the rational person would often come off far, far worse than the irrational person, because they would either become infuriated, and seem irrational themselves, or they would revert to the common lament of intellectual outsider, and openly wonder, “What is the point?” The dynamic would then change, with the isolated desperate for social interaction which reinforces their self-worth, and therefore deciding to end this social interaction by leaving and forfeiting the money they never had, or agreeing to renegotiate. Meanwhile, the child of entitlement would often try and bleed them for all they were worth, and therefore increase their own feeling of self-worth. The intellectual outsider seeking emotional self-worth, whilst the child of entitlement seeks material self-worth.

In most cases, the pair would often agree, but the difference in the amount shared was growing wider with each passing year.

The following is an interview with Ernest Morrison.

 

Your research is very interesting, and your speech at the conclusion of the recent workshop was very illuminating. Can I ask, though, why you think social media is an evil when it can bring together like-minded people all over the globe? I’m thinking of those with niche interests which may have made them feel like freaks had they not had the opportunity to discuss their interests with others.

That is a very good point, but I don’t believe social media is evil. I believe its prominence is evil. Social media is a tool, and a tool is incapable of doing anything until people project their own beliefs onto it. Some tools become so synonymous with the evil that they do – guns for example – that we cannot imagine another use for them, and they then need to locked away. However, social media is not an evil, even though some politicians often look at how their opponents use it and declare it as such. But, again, that is them projecting onto a tool, when it is people they are really in opposition with.

 

You said that a sense of smell was important to human interacting and shared experience…

I know where you are going with this. I said that physical interaction, person-to-person, is important, and yes, to an extent sense of smell reinforces that. Like the first time you smell a lover, and whenever you smell that same smell you associate with them it triggers your memory. I didn’t mean that cinema could be improved by having everything smell like shit in historical epics.

 

You did, however, suggest that people should try to share experiences more. Aren’t there some limiting economic factors that may stop friends from sharing some experiences, though? Plus, what if someone wants some quiet time to themselves?

Actually, what I was suggesting was the function of how we present our experiences. These days we don’t tend to present our experiences as stories told to friends person-to-person, but via photographs on social-networking sights, or brief status updates, and when we meet up we kind of, mentally, think, “The pictures are there… they should look at them.” The older generation don’t do that, they interact and discuss. As for time to yourself, I’m all for it. Just not to the extent that we are remaining in isolation playing on computer games, or surfing online.

 

Do you think reality TV has played a big part in twisting our perception of reality?

Absolutely. When you start to believe that edited segments of people’s lives are somehow representative of the real world, you start to lose sight of what the human experience really is. A television show can condense a day at work down into a montage, and then the person is out spending their wages. We know that work takes a long time, but something about the way that is presented persuades us that work should be fun and quick, just like a montage. Then, at work, it makes it drag on far, far longer, and makes us feel more depressed. Then there are these text-in-your-views things, and they are just insane. Since when did you ask a fifteen year-old from Essex to give you advice on your thirty-five year-old husband cheating on you? There is a reason we don’t put Dave from Northampton in charge of our economy, thank you TV news.

 

Has it given us a sense that we are entitled to opinions about things we know nothing about?

It isn’t just that, it’s the passion with which people defend views that they know very little about. We did an experiment where we asked people about their views on the economy, and then tested them on certain facts and figures. Those who knew the least were amongst the least willing to consider another perspective when confronted with the facts, and became the most angry and stubborn. They claimed they were entitled to their opinion, and when we pointed out that their opinion was wrong, they made it clear they would rather try and convince us that our facts were wrong. It is like if someone has always believed the moon is made of cheese, and you show them a moon rock, they are going to cry conspiracy because their systems of belief – religious, political, whatever – are more important than knowing what is going on in reality. It’s anti-intellectualism, and it’s all about having answers without asking questions, rather than asking a question and finding the accurate answer.

 

You referenced models of people in game theory. What are they?

There was once a belief that using mathematical logic you could predict human behaviour. But the mathematicians doing the equations screwed it up. They assumed, for example, that in a situation where one person has a diamond, and another person has a lot of money, the desired outcome would be to end up with both the money and the diamond. This was obviously flawed because in reality, that would be stealing, and people tend to frown on that. So, instead, I proposed that the logical thing to do in any situation is co-operate, so that a consensus can be reached. Even in our experiments were someone has ended up with all the money a consensus has been reached as one person has either consented, or withdrawn from the experiment after opening their safe. But their belief was that there was only material self-worth at work, rather than emotional self-worth. Plus, humans tend to be fairly unpredictable, anyway, and can behave in contradictory ways at the worst possible moments, sometimes for specific reasons, sometimes due to human errors. You cannot account for such random factors, because by being random, you never know what to expect. Once again, they were trying to use what they considered a rational approach, but it was irrational, as reality is chaotic, and we try and impose an irrational order on it, with some limited success. The rational approach was to leave the maths at home, set up the experiment, and then report what they found. Instead, they did the maths, blamed the humans when their experiments failed, and then tried to change the word to fit their equations, causing us all to become a little madder as a consequence.

 

You say that co-operation is central to human interaction, but don’t some people have to suffer so that others can succeed? Isn’t success defined by who you have beaten to achieve it?

It used to be said that it was the taking part that counted. But, I’ll humour your question for a second. Imagine tennis. Player one plays player two. Player one wins. What happened first? Did he beat his opponent, or did they co-operate by playing each other according to the rules of the game? We always start with co-operation. If we co-operate, even if we lose a game, we can be proud of the effort we put into competing. The problem we have now is we have skewed the rules to reward non-co-operation by making the punishments so flimsy. Footballers consistently cheat, refuse to co-operate, and are not punished appropriately. People play with little spirit of co-operation, and instead set themselves up as enemies of their opponents. It means that they then move from playing for emotional self-worth, where they do so to be involved and get enjoyment, to material self-worth, where they have a series of empty victories. This is then reflected in the real world. Success is defined in many ways, and a good loser used to be loved more than a bad winner. Sadly, more people value material self-worth, these days. At least, they do in sport.

 

Is me watching a film at home me pandering to my material self-worth?

It is if you are the first to watch it and you put up a message making that point.

 

What you said about purchasing solitary experiences that have nothing tangible for you to own troubled me. If I was to rent an apartment, would that be emotionally unfulfilling?

Wouldn’t you rather have your own house?

 

Point taken. But it does seem, at the end, as though you are condoning criminal behaviour, by suggesting that piracy is the only logical reaction to an industry that charges you every time you want to watch a film. Do you support piracy?

Piracy is justified when copyright never runs out, because those who are in charge of the law have shown a disregard for innovation. An author should be entitled to profit from his work for a time, but when most people do a day’s work, they get paid for a day’s work. They don’t then say, “I worked last Thursday, so I should deserve to be paid for the next sixty years.” In addition, many copyright holders didn’t even produce the work they are profiting from, someone else did, and often that person won’t have got one dollar in royalties. You just need to compare comic books and fashion, where comic books are stagnating because they have been printing Superman and Batman for decades, to a dwindling audience who have seen it all before, whilst fashion has no real copyright and has to constantly innovate to stay alive. Writers should expect, say, a few years of protection… Maybe twenty? But if you are relying on one book you wrote twenty years ago, or a film made twenty years ago, we should really be asking, “What have you done for us lately?”

As for piracy in the form it is now, it is fascinating to watch the innovation and commitment of these individuals involved with it, and to study their beliefs. The idea that information wants to be free is an infectious meme that goes all the way back to the early press, and is one that runs against the big-business-state we see running our lives at the moment. Once again, you see the two competing facets of my work in it – on the one hand, you have the pirates, trying to share things they have experienced with people all over the world, taking a sense of emotional self-worth from that, and bringing emotional self-worth to those that then go on to share those experiences – films, music, television, open-source software, information – with others; meanwhile, you have an oppressive business state that wants to control releases and information, to sell them to you individually, and force you to consume them to reinforce your material self-worth, using adverts that tell you how special you’ll be if you buy this car, or wear these trainers. Then, when people react by stealing or looting, to increase their material self-worth, they’re shocked. It’s laughable.

By: Harlan Thoroughgood

 

“This is a trend that has been on the increase for years,” said Olivia Bassett, prior to her rise to the Home Office during the PiP’s election win. “Young men turning towards criminal activity to get their kicks. Seeing death, and destruction, and the perversion of the very rules of our society as the latest high. They are thugs and ruffians, every one, and they will be stamped out underneath the boot of justice if I have anything to say about it!”

The crowd went wild, clapping and honking like a thousand dumb, trained seals. I remember one young man, dressed like he was a fifty year-old Geography teacher, telling me afterwards, “This lot seem like the real deal. I think they’re going to do some good for this country.”

“Don’t you think that her attitude is going to make things worse? After all, people don’t like being stood on – literally, or figuratively.”

“Well, I don’t like that violent gangster rap stuff they listen to, so something has got to give, and I think it should be them. It’s just not civilised.”

I neglected to point out that intolerance tends to be frowned upon, especially when it is a white, middle-class male pretending to be sophisticated and modern by criticising a largely black musical movement as being incendiary and involved in organised crime.

A year later, though, I was reminded of that exchange. I had arrived at Harley High School two days after the infamous shooting that left seven pupils and three members of staff dead. The two young men responsible had then shot themselves, leaving their exact motivations a mystery.

In the wake of any tragedy there is always finger pointing, and the unnecessary application of Occam’s Razor to explain events: the simplest, often stupidest, explanation immediately becomes the story of the day, and anyone who disagrees with it is obviously immoral and stupid. The reason for this is that stupid people tend to make people with rational arguments angry, and when you have a calm idiot spouting sensible twaddle, and an angry intellectual screaming fiery facts, all too often the one pulling his or her hair out seems like the one you should ignore.

As a consequence of the Occam’s Razor approach, this became a story about youth gone feral with guns. It was linked to gangster rap, video games, heavy metal, the laughably titled “meow-meow”, long coats, hooded coats, benefit cheats, petty criminals, and, of course, the party that was previously in power.

Olivia Bassett appealed to the baser instincts of the general public by repeating her “zero tolerance” policies again and again, with a righteous fury that opposed the idea that these young whipper-snappers could represent that she was in some way not doing her job. She appeared on the Beeb, spittle flying from her mouth, and a blazing fire flickering beneath those dull, deadly eyes. There was only one word to describe her: rabid.

Her response was to spend the year between then and now doing everything she could to ensure this never happened again. Unfortunately, given that most members of the PiP are no longer just trying to mimic a bulldog in spirit, but also in intelligence and looks, most of her initiatives were reactionary and made the problem worse.

Police were handed curfew powers for anyone under eighteen, leading to a number of youngsters being arrested for leaving their part-time jobs a little later. A number of computer games were banned for encouraging civil disobedience, resulting in the closure of two major UK exporters, whilst several games, far more violent, were left on the shelves because the army had been involved in their creation, and the army’s motives are beyond reproach. The worst law, however, was the one that brought metal detectors into our education system.

There are a large number of people in this world who believe that one life saved is worth violating every civil liberty that we have. I call these people “belms”, and when I say the word I insinuate, through the way I pronounce the word, that they have some severe mental difficulties that, far from not being their fault, are entirely of their own making, and therefore they deserve to be mocked.

The reason for this is that for every life saved by these metal detectors, we have an entire generation being trained to feel criminalised and under constant surveillance. What is the point of a life saved where you have no right to privacy? One young woman, aged sixteen, with a week to go in high school, was found with a sex toy in her bag that set off an alarm because she panicked, and thought she might be able to get away with sneaking it into school. She worried about leaving it at home in case her mother found it, and, instead, an insensitive security guard exposed her to all her classmates.

No one followed up on that story, but one quick phone call confirmed that the girl is now on anti-depressants because of the abuse she received, and her relationship with her mother has been permanently damaged.

The security companies have, of course, cleaned up in this environment. Supposedly, they make people feel safe, but lets be honest here for a second: How many people really feel safer knowing that there is security, or even police, there? Surely having them there is just a symptom of how unsafe, how insecure, we feel? Many of them create an environment of intimidation and resentment, and only act after something has gone very wrong. In a very real sense, they are becoming increasingly like jailers, keeping us locked in our little suburban cells, away from those who rightly deserve to suffer our ire.

In that environment, they create a consequence-free culture for those in power, and the more vindictive, sociopathic authority figures exploit this to the full.

But we can never argue with these measures, because being smothered in cotton wool is always better than a few isolated incidents of extreme violence, because outrage is so chic, and because we all want to pretend that the world is neat and ordered and that we haven’t been manipulated into a mob mentality during our shock at these horrific events.

Of course, that does beg the question:

Who is worse, the person who commits the crime, or the person who takes advantage of it?

The room is cool when I arrive, and bathed in shadow. The sun has migrated to the other side of the hospital. It’s a bland looking place to be, with blank beige walls disturbed only be a solitary mirror. There is a young woman in a bed, sipping some water through a straw. She’s dressed in pink silk pyjamas, and her hair is a mess.

“You don’t have a photographer with you?” she asks.

“Not usually,” I reply.

Phew. She breathes a sigh of relief.

“Harlan Thoroughgood,” I say, offering my hand.

“Tricia Polliver,” she replies, shaking it.

I sit down next to her bed. “You seem to be recovering well.”

“I guess I do. My arms still ache, though. And it’s still hard to walk.”

“It must beat wasting away.”

“Ha! Yeh. It beats that.”

There was a pause, then, and I poured myself some water, and took a drink.

“Anyway…” she begins. “You came to see me when I was in the coma?”

“It’s part of what I do,” I lied. I had no reason to go and see her when she was in the coma. I just did because it seemed like nobody else cared that she was in a coma.

“They said that a few others did, but only after you had written about it.”

I sighed. “Most people in my profession can be heartless, but that is part of the profession. I do try and keep some perspective, though.”

“I read some of your columns,” she says.

“I hate it when people say that. I always try and write what people actually said, and it comes across as shameless self-promotion when I include that people said that.”

“But I did,” she insisted. “I liked them, too.”

“This is your column, though. The one about you.”

“What are you going to call it?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“How about, The Forgotten Victim: A Survivor’s Story?”

“That sounds like a bad TV movie.”

She laughed.

“Cheeky,” she said, but she smiled. “I take it the story wont be all about me?”

“Its about how we get so wrapped up in reacting to things, we forget about common sense.”

“I’ve never liked the term “common sense”. It seems so… pedestrian? Is that the word I want to use?”

“Sense is sense, but we’ve been tricked into thinking that the word common means something lesser. Everyone wants to be special, to be unique, these days.”

“What else is there?”

“Contentment. Being happy with what you have, and who you are.”

“Hmm. So… what’s your first question?”

“What is it like, being shot?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Really?”

“Well, I remember fragments, images, sounds… But everything else seems to have faded. I banged my head when they shot me, and I think that may have had something to do with it.”

“What did you see, or hear?”

“I heard a crack, a gunshot, and I didn’t realise I’d been shot, and a few moments later I kind of crumpled to the floor. I’d turned a bit, and I could see them, but they kind of got a bit blurry. But they’d moved on by then, so I just led there until someone, I assume, found me breathing.”

“Did you have a near death experience?”

“Yes. My great grandfather flew down on angels wings and told me it wasn’t my time yet.”

“That didn’t happen.”

“I think I just blanked out. I remember seeing something to do with In the Night Garden, but I was probably dreaming or something.”

“Was there any warning that they were going to do something like this that you were aware of?”

“Honestly, no. They were just two guys. I didn’t hang out with them or anything. There are always a few who slip between the cracks, aren’t there?”

“Why do you think they did it?”

“My friend Lisa, who visited the other day, says that they wanted to be famous or something, but that doesn’t seem right to me. I mean, there have been quite a few of these shootings, but it isn’t like everyone has the names of the killers etched into their brain. Unless they added it to the National Curriculum whilst I was out?”

“No, they actually ruined the National Curriculum without doing that.”

“Anyway, why do I think they did it? They probably saw no reason not to do it. Maybe it’s that simple. Or maybe it is more complicated. Maybe they wanted to die, and decided to take people with them, or get revenge for some perceived slight and they didn’t realise they would have no way out themselves. I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter to me, now. Its not like they can really stop bad thing from happening with, I don’t know, blanket laws, is it?”

“That’s certainly how I feel. Laws against blankets are stupid.”

She grinned at that.

“You know how I really feel?” she said. “I feel a bit sorry for them. Not as much as I feel sorry for all those who were killed by them, but sometimes the perpetrators are just as much victims as everyone else is. I mean, what led them to this stupid end? What made them think that their lives, and the lives of other people, meant so little? Maybe that is the real reason. You don’t tend to murder people you value, do you? Not unless your cracked. I don’t know.”

“Have you seen what has been done in your name by the government?”

She pauses. “Yes. I have.”

“How does that make you feel?”

“Viva la revolution? Ha!” she laughes. “Seriously, it makes me a little sick that they have presumed that any of us would want to see things like this happen. I’ve never met any of these people, and they keep saying they are doing it in the memory of the victims? I’m one of the victims, and there is no way that those who committed the crime can do this ever again, given that they’re dead.”

“But what if someone else were to do it?”

“How do you stop hypothetical people?”

I smiled. “The hypothetical people are pretty dangerous. You never know where they are going to turn up, or who they will support next.”

“Honestly,” she began, “I can’t see how they can stop things like this happening. Ban guns, and a lunatic will bring a knife. Ban knives, and he’ll use a chair. Ban chairs, and he’ll smother people with beanbags. Then you have nowhere to sit, and nothing to use to cut your food with at lunch-time.”

 

Morgan’s note: Two days after this column was printed, Angela Bassett contacted Tricia about meeting her to discuss what had happened to her, and any concerns she had about what had been done. Tricia’s response is not appropriate for print.

By: Harlan Thoroughgood

 

This article originally ran as one feature. However, because of space limitations in reprinting these columns online, Harlan, Morgan and myself have re-edited them so that they appear in six consecutive parts.

By: Harlan Thoroughgood

 

This article originally ran as one feature. However, because of space limitations in reprinting these columns online, Harlan, Morgan and myself have re-edited them so that they appear in six consecutive parts.

There was someone stood in the space between the houses, in the shade, leaning against the wall and doing his best to be unseen. But stealth isn’t taught to cheap council-estate thugs, and if it was, then the white track-suit, expensive trainers, and gold chains would be enough to make him as anonymous as a sledgehammer in the groin.

Regardless, there were very few reasons for him to be standing there, idly sucking on a cigarette and blowing smoke out, into the air. Occasionally, he would look at his phone, and every once in a while he would send a text message. It was clear he was a lookout, and the good money was that Reuben Roberts wanted enough warning to make a run for it if anyone came knocking on his door.

I watched him in my rear-view mirror, occasionally shifting my glance to look at my eyes, which were a little tired and heavy. I could do with some sleep. Too many late nights, and too much drinking, were taking a bit of a toll on me.

Then the conspicuous thug turned and walked to the front door, and knocked. After a few moments, the door opened, and he gestured, and loudly articulated that he needed the toilet.

Amateur-hour.

The door closed, after a young man with a fierce expression and a goatee beard had a quick look up and down the street, and then all was quiet.

Seconds later my fist was pounding on the door.

Silence.

I pounded my fist against the wood, again, and then a voice came from the window.

“Who is it?” said the inconspicuous thug.

“Avon calling,” I replied. “I’m here with some free cosmetic samples for Carmen Watts.”

“You what?” he replied. “Never heard of her. Jog on.”

I flashed him my press badge. “My name is Harlan Thoroughgood, of The Circadian Atlas. I’m doing a story on Mike Walton. Carmen knew Mike, and now she’s hiding because some very bad men are going around causing a fuss about all this. If she talks to me, then her story is out, and they have no reason to go after her.”

“I told you to jog on,” he stated, with cool, dumb eyes and a furrowed brow. He’s used to trouble, and used to handling himself.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“I said -” he began, but I interrupted him.

“Yes, it does sound like a woman screaming inside.” I took out my mobile phone. “I best call the police. Can’t have a woman in danger.”

I held the phone to my ear, and it was silent. I couldn’t risk getting the police involved at this stage. However, conspicuous thug didn’t need to know that.

Then, I heard the door behind me open.

The man with the goatee held his hand out. “I would like you to hand me that telephone.”

“And why would I do that?”

“Call it a precaution.”

I studied him, from shoes to his styled hair. Expensive shoes, badly ironed pants, a belt, and a black shirt, collar undone to reveal a few sparse hairs on a tanned chest. His hair was an organised mess, styled to make him seem nonchalant. His eyes were dulled, though, and the smell of too much smoke drifted off him.

“Reuben Roberts?” I asked, though I knew it was him.

“My reputation precedes me,” he said, with a dozy smile. “But you… not as much as you would like. I don’t read papers. Dead media and all that.”

He was trying to intimidate me.

“The phone stays with me,” I told him, “And you can put some coffee on. I’m falling half asleep here.”

“You don’t give me orders.”

I smiled. “Reuben Roberts, I am a member of the press. I can hurry and hound you until you hang yourself with your shoelaces for a chance to escape. I can direct all my righteous fury at you safe in the knowledge that you are a lousy, two-bit pusher who doesn’t know how to use a gun, much less where to buy one. Today alone, I have gone on a quest to destroy the life of one of the most powerful men in the world, using only a keen mind, some good contacts, and my words. I have fought members of parliament, the police, and the people who supply you with your phoney-baloney pharmaceutical happy-pills.”

I stepped close to him.

“You do not frighten the press, Mr Roberts.”

His eyes narrowed. “You can’t come in if I don’t let you, and you don’t have the police on the phone.”

“I just want to speak with Carmen. I can make all this trouble she is in vanish.”

“We’re safe here.”

“With your man failing to watch out for you?” I nodded towards the conspicuous thug.

Reuben Roberts glared at his man, and the conspicuous thug slunk back through the window.

I sighed. “How about we come to a financial arrangement, then?”

He thought about this, and then slowly nodded, and ran his thumb across his bottom lip. “I think we can do that.”

He stepped aside, and as I was about to walk past he put a hand on my chest. “Any funny business, and we’ll kick your head in. Clear?”

*  *  *

Reuben Roberts lived in fairly standard semi-detached housing. The house to the left was vacant, and would remain that way for some time to come. On the right hand side lived an old woman who had once had Reuben arrested, but had been looked after by Reuben since her husband had passed away. The front and back garden were both clean and tidy.

Inside, it smelled of cigarette smoke and weed, and the wallpaper was in need of tearing down and being replaced. The carpet was old and worn, and the space was tiny and cramped. Regardless, two sofas and a leather recliner were positioned around a forty-two inch television, a few consoles, two DVD players, and a table covered in bags of weed, two bongs, and some newspapers.

Reuben sat down, and lit up a partial smoked joint, and after a few puffs offered it to me.

“I need my head clear, thanks.”

“Your loss, dude.”

“Where is Carmen?”

“Upstairs. Why do you want to speak with her? What has got her so worked up?”

I looked out the window. “I was led to believe you knew what this was all about.”

“By who?”

“Never you mind. Confidential sources.”

He nodded, and then threw the conspicuous thug a small plastic bottle. “You want to piss, you do it in there from now on. Anyone else comes to this door, I hear about it long before.”

The conspicuous thug made like he was going to argue, but Reuben gave him a look, and he went quickly outside.

Reuben, meanwhile, waited for him to go, and then he called to the kitchen, “Carmen!”

In walked a young woman, wearing a long jumper that ran down to her knees, which she clutched close to her. She was small, and her hair was dyed blood-red, and it fell down over one eye. He skin was so tanned she looked like she had been left to bake for too long.

I stood up, and held out my hand. “My name’s Harlan. I’m here to help.”

She eyed it suspiciously, but didn’t stop clutching her jumper/dress. “Did you want coffee?”

“Your boyfriend can make it. We need to talk.”

“I ain’t makin’ you any coffee,” said Reuben. “And I’m definitely not leaving you with her. Only reason you are inside at all is because you was attracting too much attention out there.”

“I paid for coffee,” I said.

“Oh, is that what we’re calling it,” he said with a smirk, but he got up and went into the kitchen. He left the door open so he could listen in.

“Would you like to sit down?” I asked Carmen.

She shook her head, and then changed her mind, and decided to sit down, anyway. “Who are you?” she asked, having a hard time processing what was going on.

“Harlan Thoroughgood. I write a column that holds people to account for the bad things they have done.”

“Is that why you are here? To hold Reuben to account?”

“No. I’m here to see you.”

“Why?”

“Why are you hiding, Carmen?”

“I’m not hiding.”

“You have a guard outside, you are inside with the curtains drawn, getting yourself so stoned you can’t think straight, barely dressed. This isn’t any way to live your life.”

“Better than going to work.”

“But you are in hiding, aren’t you?”

She looks away, towards the kitchen.

“What about Donal Kaye?” The words have left my lips with the force of a grenade, and now there is only the silence before the explosion.

Carmen’s eye are flames, and her mouth scrunches up, and her nose wrinkles.

“Who do you think you are?” she screams, and she moves to attack me, before Reuben races in and grabs hold of her wrists, and moments later she is in his arms, crying.

She calms down, and Reuben brings in our drinks.

“I’m sorry I brought it up,” I said.

“Don’t be,” said Reuben. “It isn’t like you did anything to her. Aside from upsetting her.”

“I get the feeling that you’ve always been upset about this, Carmen,” I say, deliberately directing the comment towards her so she didn’t feel like she was left out of the conversation.

“Mmm,” she mumbles.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

Reuben looked at her, and stroked her knee. “Its time to let someone else take the weight of all this, babe.”

She smiled, and kissed his hand.

 

Carmen, and Bradley Newman, were in the limo’ that night, with only the driver. They were dressed up, heading onwards and upwards, and ready for a fancy night out. The limo’ had bottles of chilled cola in the back, and they were filling up on sugar and caffeine when they came to a stop outside an abandoned building in the middle of a building site.

The limo’ had child-locks on, which kept Carmen and Bradley inside as the man walked around and opened the door for them.

Waiting outside was a man, dressed in a suit and tie. He was the solitary actor in the spotlight, which glared on him from behind, and dazzled the children. He was very nervous, always adjusting his cuffs and his tie, and when they got close to him they noticed he was sweating, and that he stank of body odour.

He shook both of their hands, and led them into the building whilst the driver waited outside. He stated that the party was to begin in an hour, and that they had a few preparations to make before it got started. They shouldn’t worry, as it was going to have a haunted house theme.

He led them across a black and white chequered floor, and up shadowy, creaky wooden stairs, to the second floor. Cobwebs caught in Carmen’s hair, and when she began to complain, Bradley said that he liked it.

It was like an adventure.

One the second floor, the adventure ended. He walked them into a room, and then locked the door. They were trapped in there with him.

Carmen and Bradley started to react badly, and that was when he pulled out a stack of twenty pound notes, and put them on a nearby table. He sat in a seat next to the notes, and then tapped his finger-tips together for a full minute, and when he stopped, Carmen and Bradley were silent.

He made it very clear what he was going to do. There was four-hundred-and-eighty pounds in the stack of twenty pound notes. That was two-hundred-and-forty pounds each. Then, he explained the rules of the game to the children.

He began to beat Bradley. He punched him, kicked him, scratched him. He spat on him, insulted him, made him lick the dirt off his shoes.

Every ten seconds Bradley got through, both he and Carmen got twenty pounds. There was enough to last ten minutes.

The only way to make him stop was if Carmen told him to stop, or if Bradley fought back.

But Carmen didn’t make him stop, and Bradley didn’t fight back.

They wanted the money.

Eventually, Bradley was the battered and broken mess that Stella Wood would later find.

Carmen, meanwhile, broke down after about five minutes, and started telling herself to stay quiet just a little longer. “Just be quiet a few moments more…”

In the end, Bradley blacked out, and Carmen’s memories became a murky, merging muddle that swirled endlessly together.

The next thing she knew, the police were there, and they were in an alley way.

 

To be concluded…

 

By: Harlan Thoroughgood

 

This article originally ran as one feature. However, because of space limitations in reprinting these columns online, Harlan,Morgan and myself have re-edited them so that they appear in six consecutive parts.

In the modern world there are a lot of ways to track people down, but most people don’t know about them, because if they did it would put an end to the idea of an investigation involving someone doing actual leg-work. Generally, these days, most people can be tracked down thanks to the electoral register and a few phone calls. There are other ways, but this has usually worked for me.

However, there is one drawback to this approach, and it was the main problem with this part of what was becoming a genuine, pavement-pounding investigation: I did not have the name of either the young boy who was found savagely beaten in an alleyway by the police years before, or the name of the young girl who was sobbing over him, but who chose to remain silent.

No name meant that this was a trail without a beginning, never mind an end.

I was just pulling into a local convenience store car park when my mobile phone rang, which was a shock, as I had, a few hours earlier, explained to Rhea Walton that my phone was out of charge. Because I threw it into a pond.

“Hello?” I said, sure that it must be someone calling from beyond the grave to give me a lead on this story.

“You’re a dead man,” said Morgan. “What did I say about not dragging Thora’s name through the mud? She’s a professional muck-raker, for God’s sake, she gets plenty dirty enough by herself.”

“You would know,” I replied, smirking, safe in the knowledge Morgan couldn’t see me.

“Wipe that smirk off your face,” he responded. “I can hear it down the phone.”

“Morgan, everyone already knew,” I protested. “And we’ve got more important -”

“Everyone knew, but said nothing. Big difference, Harlan! Now they know everyone is talking about it, and they don’t want to lose out in the juicy gossip lotto. Do you know what the top prize for the juicy gossip lotto is, Harlan? They have an actual prize. An actual prize.”

“What is it? You feed me something juicy and we can go halves.”

There was silence on the other end.

“Did you ring for an actual reason, or just to let off some steam? It’s hot here. I was about to buy some water. I’m feeling light-headed, Morgan.”

The silence continued for a beat.

Fine. I’ll hang up.

Then…

“We’ll split it three ways.”

“You and Thora can keep it. Tell me why you rang up!”

“I’ve got three things for you, and all of them are big news. Numero uno, Tolstoy Pennington is looking after the McCourt’s business interests, so be wary -”

“Oh, Speedy Gonzalez, thank you for saving me.”

“You have a run in?”

“He’s with the one person who could provide me with all the information I need.”

“Not quite. You remember you don’t like talking to the police?”

“It’s not that I don’t like talking to them, it’s that they kick people to -”

“Save it for the column, Soap-Box. I tracked down one of the officers who found the kids that night, but this is time sensitive because, well, politicians are looking to close the book on this one. Her name is Stella Wood, and the details are waiting in your email, so get over there, like, twenty minutes ago.”

“What is the third thing?”

“She didn’t tell me much over the phone, but she did tell me who could have destroyed the entire scene that morning, and was therefore a person of interest in their case.”

“Jimmy McCourt?”

“Nope. He was nowhere near there. He has a genuine alibi.”

“Who, then?”

It turns out I was half-right, after all: a lead.

 

Stella Wood lives in a run-down little council house. She works at a supermarket, now, having quit the police due to stress, two years earlier. She looks delicate from a distance, but up close you can tell she would be more than capable of dealing with an angry drunk. When she greeted me at the door, she eyed me up and down, sizing me up.

“Thoroughgood?”

“That’s me,” I replied, with a friendly smile.

She didn’t return it, just stood aside and expected me to invite myself in.

I did. I don’t mess with the police when they are staring me in the face. Retired or otherwise.

Inside the house it was cool. She handed me a bottle of water.

“Your editor rang ahead,” she said, with a slight smile.

It set me at ease. I think the show at the door was just that: a show.

We sat down in her kitchen, at a small table in the narrow room. She poured herself a cup of tea, and offered me one despite the water. I declined it.

“You are probably wondering why I rang The Atlas,” she started. “I know us cops are supposed to all read The Post, hate immigrants, and love right-wing politics, but I got into it to help people out. That’s what got me booted out, okay? The stress of banging my head against a wall in the hopes that a few people would be better off. In truth, we just manage the stress, sometimes. Sometimes we’d do some real good, but you have a small period where you feel like nothing you do matters, and slowly the world warps around that belief, until your belief becomes the reality.”

“You want to talk about it?” I asked. She would talk to me. She just wanted to explain herself. It was the least I could do for her putting her neck in the noose like this.

She sighs, and looks like she might not for a moment, and then launches into it with gusto. “It was something easy. Something that shouldn’t have gone wrong. This woman reports her television has been stolen, and when we track it down, we find her son selling it. But her son then tells us that his mother told him to take it. He could get a good price for it, and she’d report it stolen to the insurance and get a new one. But, it was the fact that while we were running around looking for a television that was never stolen, this kid… This kid used to come up to us at the same time every day, as he left school, and ask us about our day being police. He said he wanted to be a policeman and catch criminals when he grew up. We are usually always there, but that day we were called elsewhere, and the other kids see his cop-friends aren’t there, and one pushes him. Nothing too serious, until the kid takes the wrong tumble and ends up with five stitches in his head. The next day, he just walked on by. I tried to say hello, but he put his head down and walked away. What was the point, when we get blamed for that?”

“Ibra Amin.”

She paused and looked at me. “That’s right.”

“My editor mentioned it to me. It’s not a story that stuck out, but the stories that don’t are often the ones that resonate most. The big stories… well, they are just too big to be real, aren’t they? A princess dies, a terrorist blows up some buildings, and we expect Bruce Willis himself to bring the culprits to justice. But something small, like Ibra Amin getting a few stitches, is something we all know, we all understand.”

She nodded a few times, lost in thought.

Then she handed me a slip of paper.

Before it was in my grasp, she had me held tight at the wrist, and stared me down across the table, so close I could feel the warmth of her breath on my face.

“You have to promise me something,” she said, even more serious than before.

I nodded.

“That is the name and address of the girl you are looking for. Her name is Carmen Watts. She never had a decent break in her life, and the only thing on her side at the moment is that no-one can get close to her and her boyfriend because he’s a dealer, and he loves her, and he knows all about this. He’s a decent kid in a bad situation, but he doesn’t see it is a bad situation. He thinks he’s living the dream. She feels safe with him around. The big, bad, drug-dealer.”

“What’s his name?”

“Reuben Roberts.”

“And what is it that I am supposed to promise?”

“You get her to tell you what she told him, and then you publish what she tells you. No. Matter. What.”

I thought for a second, and then looked her in the eye.

“What happened that night?”

She lets go of my hand, and looks a little confused for a moment. “You know, people spent so long telling me what to say about that night, no-one has asked me to tell them what happened. Well, no-one who wanted an honest answer.”

“Then tell me.”
Police Constable Stella Wood and her partner (unnamed by request) came across Carmen Watts and Bradley Newman in that dark alley, and immediately assumed he’d gotten into a fight he had little chance of walking away from. They called an ambulance, and while they were waiting, Stella’s partner tried to get Stella to talk. However, the only thing she kept repeating, over and over, between her sobs, was, “Just be quiet a few moments more.”

It was like a mantra.

“Just be quiet a few moments more… [sob]… Just be… [sob]… be quiet a few moments more… [sob]…”

At the time, they assumed she had been hiding when the fight had been going on. Carmen stood there, shaking in the cold night air, holding herself against the elements and the things that come out of empty places and hurt children.

Then, they went to the hospital, where they found marks around the penis and anus that made them think that there may have been some sort of sexual element to it.

But neither of them had been raped.

In fact, Carmen had been left alone. There wasn’t a single scar on the outside.

The inside, however, was another matter.

“Just be quiet…”

 

In movies, the villain has always been there since early on. They say that is what criminals do in real-life: they insert themselves into the investigation to feel smarter than everyone else, or relive the crime, or just because they are really awful at being a criminal and don’t think the genius detective with a one-hundred percent clearance rate won’t notice the several times a minute they slip up.

However, sometimes, in a world without Jessica Fletcher, or Adrian Monk, or Batman, we find that the criminal is not the irritating guy who has been rubbing our faces in it throughout the course of the investigation.

There were a few things that had begun to add up during the course of this investigation:

1. The location where the crime took place was never found, but many of the buildings were torn down in the following few weeks.
2. Carmen Watts was staying silent because of what had happened that night, not because of any external pressure.
3. Jimmy McCourt was somehow involved in all of this.

All of which made me think about the name Morgan had told me earlier today:

Donal Kaye.

Donal Kaye, the business-genius whose renovation project breathed new life into a derelict area, and whose seminars since turning into a business-guru were selling well without him being a household name.

Donal Kaye, who gives inspirational talks about how he was abused by his father as a child, often in front of his sister, but overcame this, and rose to be a close personal friend of a great many influential people. Influential people with names like, “McCourt”.

Donal Kaye, who, in case you were missing the obvious, has a surname that can be reduced to one letter, seen on the telephone of Mike Walton the night he died:

The letter “K”.

 

To be continued…

 

By: Harlan Thoroughgood

 

This article originally ran as one feature. However, because of space limitations in reprinting these columns online, Harlan, Morgan and myself have re-edited them so that they appear in six consecutive parts.

Rhea Walton is skinny. White vest, grey sweat pants, and white and pink trainers. She is twenty years old. She is pummelling a punch-bag in her mother’s garage instead of crying for her dead father. She thinks he committed suicide, but she is certain that it wasn’t because her father was a paedophile.

Pum-pum! Pum-pum! Her fists pound the bag. Pum-pum!

The family has been besieged by the press, and they have resolutely refused to engage them in any meaningful discourse. Rhea’s mother divorced Mike five years ago, and in her eyes that means he is not her problem.

But Rhea always loved her father, and she refuses to believe the accusations levelled at him. She thinks it must be a mistake. She thinks that someone is trying to get their name in the newspaper, and her father is an easy target.

The only reason I have access to Rhea is because I was the last person to see her father alive. She has as many questions for me as I do for her.

She wipes a few stray hairs from her eyes, and positions herself like she is about to lay into the punch-bag again, when she stops to catch her breath. She looks at the floor for a moment, and there seems to be a heavy sadness in her eyes, but it is only for a moment. Then she raises her head, and motions for me to throw her the towel on the bench next to me.

She catches it in her right hand, and wipes her face, and then sits down next to me.

“I read your story about that graffiti guy. I imagine there were a lot of people upset that you gave that supposed vandalism a human face. I mean, it is easier to get angry at shadows.”

“I try and give a voice to people who don’t usually get to use their own.”

“Okay… Tell me about my dad.”

I paused, and sized her up. She was leaning forward, now, eager to know more. It looked like her lip was trembling.

“He was upset about something,” I began, and then stopped.

There was a longer pause.

“And?” she asked.

“I don’t know how much I can tell you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want to tell you, because you might get your hopes up, and, well, what I am doing is just a theory. A hunch. It could all be in my head, totally insubstantial. I don’t want you thinking that there’s more to it than there actually is.”

She looked like everything weighed heavily on her, but she got up and went back to the punching bag. She punched, and punched, and punched. Pum-pum!

After ten minutes, she drank some water, and then sat down next to me.

“Sorry,” she said. “I just felt like hitting something.”

“I have that effect on a lot of people.”

“What are your insubstantial thoughts? Then you can tell me what was going on with my dad.”

So I told her the whole thing. She sat, and listened quietly.

By the time I had finished, she really did look like she wanted to hit something.

“I…” she began, before struggling to get the second word out. “… see.”

“You seem like you do. It would help me if you’d share your thoughts.”

“There is something that my dad didn’t tell you.”

“Something serious?”

“If he didn’t kill himself, then this got him killed. Someone wanted him under their thumb.”

“Will you can the suspense and just tell me? I’m trying to help.”

She looked taken aback for a second, and then continued. “He was being blackmailed. He told the police the truth that day, and then went back on what he said after he got a letter on his wind-shield, and then they fired him from the unit for it.”

“What was he being blackmailed with?”

“My dad… He was kind, but his biggest problem was that he tried to please everyone. Everyone but himself, that is.”

“There was someone else?”

“How did you -”

“I’ve been around. Did your mother get something in the post?”

“She figured it out on her own. He admitted it. Then… broken home.”

“Did he tell you who was blackmailing him?”

“I don’t think even he knew. He suspected, but he didn’t know.”

Everything went quiet for a second, and the quiet made it harder to carry on talking.

Eventually, I broke the silence.

“Rhea, there was someone with your father that night. Someone who can verify his story. Did you know anyone from the unit that could help me find out who that was?”

“Yes. Veronica Slattery.”

“Do you have an address, or a phone number?”

Rhea Walton not only had a phone number, she also loaned me her mobile. She left me alone to make the phone call, and decided that it was time for a cup of coffee.

The phone rang three times, before Veronica Slattery answered it.

“Hello, Rhea.”

“Sorry, Rhea just loaned me her phone so that I could ring you.”

There was a tense pause on the other end, where muffled voices spoke in the background. Finally, Veronica Slattery returned to the other end of the line.

“Who is this, please?”

“My name is Harlan Thoroughgood, and I would like -”

There was noise on the other end of the phone, and that stopped me. The next voice to speak was definitely not Veronica Slattery. Not unless she had a sex chance and became an intolerable ass-hat.

“The good Mr. Thoroughgood, ‘ey? Splendid to have a chance to speak with you. Especially in this instance. Especially.”

Oh crap.

“I don’t think you mean to use that word in that way.”

Don’t mess about, Harlan. Hang up the phone.

“Do you know who I am?”

Tell them it was a wrong number.

“If you don’t know, that I’m certainly not going to tell you.”

HANG UP!

I ended the call.

Rhea, who had been listening in the kitchen, walked back into the garage with a cup of coffee for me. She saw that something was wrong, straight away, but she didn’t ask me what it was. She must have assumed I was going to tell her in my own time.

I handed her the mobile phone, but didn’t say anything.

“I take it it went well?” asked Rhea, tired of waiting.

I shook my head.

“What happened?”

“There were people there with her.”

“She isn’t a recluse, Harlan.”

“You don’t understand. Not people, but people.”

“I don’t understand because you keep using the same word to, I assume, describe two different things.”

“Are you close with her? Veronica Slattery?”

“She’s always been there for me and dad.”

“Not anymore,” I said, with a disbelieving chuckle.

She went to ask why, and then looked at me with a confused look on her face, the wheels slowly turning behind her green eyes.

“I made a really bad enemy a few weeks ago,” I said. “And now, Tolstoy Pennington is there with your family friend. Tolstoy Pennington, if you didn’t know, regularly has lunch with Benedict McCourt, when he’s in this country. I don’t think the Member of Parliament for Fielding and Brook View is there to clear your father’s name, and if your friend is handing the phone over to him at the mention of my name, then that means that she’s doing as she’s told.”

“But – but – she can’t!”

“She has.”

I paused for a second.

Rhea, meanwhile, walked over to the punch-bag, and unleashed two ferocious fists.

Pum-pum!

 

When working on this kind of story, you create a level of distance between yourself and the story. You don’t want to get too involved, you don’t want to get dragged down with it, you don’t want to be so effected by everything you see that you can’t be objective.

When the story is finished, and you reflect back on what you have learned, you often realise the value of the story, and the way in which you can contain a nice moral lesson for your readers. You turn serial killers into lessons not to accept lifts from strangers, serious infections into a call for health-care reform, or a car accident into a campaign to keep our children safe.

But the blood-boiling, tear-laden path that this story took me down made me realise that the lesson you should learn from this is simple: some people just have empty places inside them, a red room that contains the worst in us all, and, soon, you will see what happens when the door to that room is opened.

 

To be continued…

 

By: Harlan Thoroughgood

 

This article originally ran as one feature. However, because of space limitations in reprinting these columns online, Harlan, Morgan and myself have re-edited them so that they appear in six consecutive parts.

The offices of The Circadian Atlas were full of activity that morning, with people hurling abuse at other members of staff, at least one reporter with a bloodied nose being patched up, and an overturned water cooler lying at the centre of a soaking, worn carpet. Where the water had spread out, it darkened the light-grey to the colour of slate, like a sickness spreading across the offices from a quiet, unassuming point near the door.

It was safe to assume that another round of cuts had come down from on high, and that people were not pleased to find that the hammer of the gun held to their collective heads had come down.

“Cuts?” I asked a young lady carrying a box full of clippings, files and stationary.

“What do you think?” she spat, venomously, before taking care to bump into me as she stormed past.

I resisted the urge to tell her that it wasn’t my fault that the cold-hearted bastards holding the purse strings don’t usually see the human cost of their short-term rise in profits.

I made my way across the room, to where the man with the bloodied nose was holding his head up and pinching the bridge of his nose.

“McManus,” I said, getting his attention. “Where’s Morgan?”

“Fug ooo,” he said. It was clearly an insult.

I flicked his nose with my index finger, and then flipped him off as he screamed in pain.

Morgan Pierce, my editor, was drinking whiskey with Thora Paulson, the gossip columnist, when I found him hiding in a conference room. It seemed innocent enough: their hair was a mess, the door had been locked, and their clothes were unbuttoned, creased, or lying on the floor.

“I guess you must have slipped,” I said. “Both of you.”

Thora repeated what McManus had said to me, but, coming from her, it was far easier to understand what she meant.

Morgan sighed.

“Thora, I need to speak with Harlan. We can catch up later.”

“We were just talking,” she said to me.

“I’m usually a mess after phone sex, too,” I replied.

“Talking,” she repeated, as she walked past.

The door closed, and Morgan locked it again.

“Since when can you pick locks?”

“Since when are you dating the gossip columnist? You know she is going to publish your measurements, and then every women on Earth will know just how useless you are in bed.”

Morgan sat on the conference room table, and folded his arms.

“It’s been a tough morning,” he began. “We all take our comfort where we can find it.”

“You do any firing?” I lit a cigarette.

Morgan pointed to the ‘No smoking’ sign. I walked over and tore it off the wall, threw it in the bin, and then gave Morgan a cigarette, too. He smiled.

“I didn’t fire anyone, but I lost a few good people.”

“Not just here, though,” I said, and handed him a copy of The Periodical Post.

He swore. For a minute. Then, he swore some more, and kicked a chair across the room.

When he’d calmed down, he looked me in the eye.

“What happened last night? I assume you got something.”

I hung my head.

Morgan swore again.

“What happened?”

I told him what Mike Walton had said the previous night, and why he had left early.

“So, who is K?” he asked.

“Sounds very Kafkaesque to me,” I replied. “The whole thing could be a tribute. ‘The Trial 2: Trial… ier’! Were you and Walton close?”

Morgan shook his head. “We’d met twice. Once at some dinner party, then when he rang me up the other night. He seemed to be a nice guy. Not the type you’d expect to rape kids and then hang himself.”

“He seemed like the type to me.”

“Really?”

“Yep. He was a human being.”

Morgan nodded. “So, you want to investigate this?”

I folded my arms, and leaned against the wall. “There are questions that need to be asked.”

“You could go to the police, and let them sort it out.”

I raised one eyebrow, and Morgan laughed.

“There are questions I need to ask,” I said.

“Lay them out for me.”

“He was seen, by another colleague, getting the kids into the limo’. Why haven’t they come forward? Have they been paid off? Why are they staying silent when his head is, literally, in a noose? I also did some digging this morning. The two kids were found miles away. One was badly beaten, the other was crying her eyes out. That same morning an empty building near to where they were found was demolished. The police never found out where they had been taken. Where were they taken? Why did they not tell the police the truth about what happened?”

“And then there is the elephant in the room,” said Morgan.

There was a tense pause for a second, as he fixed me with a stare I was supposed to wilt under. But I didn’t. He knew why I didn’t, because he knew that elephant was the one I was really hunting.

“You go after the McCourt family,” he said, “and we will be entering a storm that could tear the entire paper down. Not just you, not just you and me – they will go after everyone here. We’ve already had one round of pay-offs and lay-offs, and you’ve seen the war-zone out there. What’s going to happen to those people if you pursue that angle?”

I snapped. “This column was meant to be about finding the problems we have today to make sure that we don’t have the same problems, or worse, tomorrow. We are doing good. We are making a difference. Now, you want to piss all that away the first time we have something to go after that is actually worth a damn?”

Morgan sighed. “You want to investigate an injustice, and I will back you up all the way. You know that. But my responsibilities are not just to the stories. You remember the price war? When The Post annihilated The Rapid Response? I know you do, because that’s how you ended up here. You’ve been looking for a chance for some payback ever since then, and when the chance has arisen, you’ve always looked for a way to hit them, and hit them hard. But at the expense of everyone here? You friends, your colleagues – you want to risk my future?”

“My loyalty is to the story,” I said.

Morgan rubbed his chin. Then he fixed on my eyes. “You’ll keep me updated?”

“I’ll need your help.”

“And you’ll let me review it before it sees print, and listen when I tell you something needs to be taken out?”

I glared at him. “If it is justified.” Then I caught myself. Morgan’s supported me a lot, and got me writing this column, and has never stepped on my toes without good reason. “I mean, yes.”

Morgan nodded. “Then go forth and get the real story. Show them that we weren’t scooped. They just hadn’t bothered doing their job.”

“Can do, boss.” I turned for the door.

“Oh, and Harlan,” came from behind me. “The story isn’t Mike Walton now, it is you investigating it. Write it in the first person. I’ll get features to make sure you have space to do the story justice.”

I turned around. “I don’t write first person. I’m not the story.”

“Circulation is up, and people are talking about what you are writing. You are becoming the voice of a group of people who don’t usually care. They want to know more about you. They want you to use ‘I’ as a word, not just a letter.”

“The story is about Mike Walton.”

“The story is you investigating the truth about Mike Walton. This is not a request.”

I fumed a bit. “Fine.”

“What do you need me to do?”

I turned back towards him, and then pulled out a sheet of paper with an address on it.

“This is the building that was demolished the next day. I need you to find out who owned it, who bought the land, who had access to the building…”

“A suspect list.”

“They should know something.”

“You know James McCourt’s name won’t be anywhere near this?”

“I know that whoever got access that night knows Jimmy McCourt. I think they have some idea what he was up to.”

“You really think he was fiddling kids?”

I stopped, and thought for a second. “He’s human,” I said. “He’s capable of anything.”

“Okay. Call in at five and let me know where we are. I’ll let you know when I learn anything. And don’t mention the fact that me and Thora were in here to anyone. On pain of death. And castration. Castration, and then death.”

“Don’t involve me in your weird fetishes,” I said, with a grin. I turned the handle and walked out the door, back into the sickness of The Circadian Atlas.

“I mean it, Harlan!” a voice shouted.

On my way out, Morgan’s secretary asked what he was shouting about.

“Something to do with him and Thora sleeping together,” I said.

“He thought he could keep that secret working in a room full of refugees from the gutter press? These people eat that stuff up. It’s been an open secret for a month.”

 

To be continued…

 

By: Harlan Thoroughgood

 

This article originally ran as one feature. However, because of space limitations in reprinting these columns online, Harlan, Morgan and myself have re-edited them so that they appear in six consecutive parts.

Mike Walton is currently considered to keep rare company amongst the emotions of the masses: he is considered to stand alongside the likes of Hitler, Sutchcliffe, Fritzl, and Rath, as one of the most evil bags of bones to have stalked this lonely planet.

Everyone knows he abused the children in his care. Everyone knows he savagely beat one child until he suffered brain damage. Everyone knows he was in a unique position to cover up his crimes, so that no-one suspected him of anything; not until he committed suicide because the guilt weighed so heavily upon his shoulders.

But just because everyone knows it, it does not make it true.

“Do you want to buy two-hundred cigarettes?” asked the bespectacled, blond-haired, Eastern European. I glanced down into the dim booth by the door, where he had been sat. There was a sports-bag, slightly open, and filled with boxes of contraband.

“I take it they’re cheap?” I asked, before handing over a small sum.

When I reached the grimy bar, the obese owner, wiping dirty glasses, handed me a whisky and coke.

“You shouldn’t encourage him,” he said. “He’ll never leave, now he’s got a sale.”

“It isn’t my job to kick him out.”

“Well, I can’t kick him out. He’ll just spend the money somewhere else.”

I nodded. It made a kind of sense.

“Who ordered me the drink?”

The barman’s many chins pointed towards a gloomy booth at the back of the room.

I took my glass, and strolled over at a leisurely pace.

The man in the booth was blond, but his hair was thinning. Worry lines were worn into his forehead. Sky-blue polo-shirt, collar down. Beige slacks. Expensive shoes that hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. Ruddy cheeks. Well built for his age, but only for his fifty years. His eyes rested lazily, groggily, on a small, dirty, shot-glass that he spun around between his large fingers.

“Michael Walton?” I asked, extending my hand. “Harlan Thoroughgood. It’s good to meet you. I appreciate the drink.”

He eyed my hand for a second, thinking over whether or not he should take it, like it was a viper, ready to strike. Then he took it in his vice-like grip. He squeezed, and I winced a little.

“Pleasure,” he mumbled. That was how he spoke, a low, rumbling mumble, like the beginnings of an earthquake.

I sat down across from him, and took out my notepad.

“You told my editor quite a compelling story,” I said. “Compelling enough to get him to take you seriously.”

“S’just Mike, thanks,” he said, already behind in the conversation. He looked down at his glass for a moment, like he was sorry about what he was about to do, and then he downed it in one.

“Okay. Mike. You care to tell me the same story?”

 

Ten years ago, Mike Walton had worked at an exclusion unit. It was set up for children, aged eleven to fourteen, who had found that they were not suited to mainstream education. Amongst our bright hopes for the future were children with medication issues, drug problems, aggressive or hyperactive behaviour issues, and those who believed that they had to intimidate everyone with whom they came into contact.

Mike had recently been promoted, and was taking charge of the unit for the first time. He was well known, and well liked, because of his understanding and compassion. It wasn’t just the staff, as the youngsters that came through his doors usually left the unit with a high opinion of him.  Even the politicians that had visited the unit had commended him for his work, and often promised to increase funding to help increase the level of intervention they could make into the lives of these children.

However, these turned out to be the empty promises of politicians, who soon forgot about the unit after the election.

This was easy to do, of course. The unit is like Schroedinger’s cat to most people: it exists in a theoretical superposition that is very easy to ignore; the unit is neither mainstream education, nor is it the streets that they can roam around causing trouble. Put another way, it is the place between the cracks that the so-called naughty children fall through. Somewhere just out of reach, out of sight, and out of mind. Many thought of the units as a kind of prison, when in reality they were there to help those who needed the most help.

It was because of this perception, and the lack of funding, that Mike Walton arranged a meeting with James McCourt.

James McCourt is the son of Benedict McCourt, the owner of the Periodical Post. Whilst his father was busy denying the existence of the acquired immune deficiency syndrome as a hoax, James was helping to run a number of charities, including the Help for Tomorrow Foundation. The HTF was set up to help disadvantaged children (defined as suffering from a poor social background or serious medical difficulties – to the people who often donated they seemed to be the same thing) achieve their dreams.

However, as well as James, there was also Jimmy McCourt, the long-time black-sheep of the McCourt empire. Drinking so much he managed to crash his car both before and during his arrest; being found with a large enough bag of pills to keep most political parties happy during an election year; photographed snorting cocaine off the chest of a pregnant Swiss prostitute; dressing up as a Nazi for a fancy dress party and insulting a veteran as he left; holding a business partner out of a window during negotiations over a record label in order to impress a rap star; and even his involvement with the shadowy, creepy, alien worshipping celebrity scam-cult Far Horizon. It was long rumoured that his father would have called him back to Johannesburg if he could have trusted himself not to strangle him.

But that was the only offer on the table for Mike, and therefore he was left to wonder whether it was a miracle, or a deal with the diabolical, snarling, ingrate bastard-child of Satan.

At the meeting, James made it clear that he wanted to help the unit. As a gesture of his commitment, he paid for three new members of staff on two-year contracts, and shut down the local zoo for the day so that the children who attended the unit could have exclusive access to the animals, staff and facilities.

Safe to say, he had bought himself immediate popularity with the unit, and also with the national press.

Over the next two years, he arranged numerous fund-raising events: a £1000-a-head dinner with the stars, a celebrity balloon ride over London, and a controversial two-day carnival with real circus animals, and a subsequent PETA protest that led to greater publicity, and further donations. It was typical for the children to attend each of these fund-raisers. They would spend the majority of the time enjoying themselves, before being unveiled at the end to appeal to the unwashed masses directly.

Mike was extremely happy to have such an influential, and wealthy, benefactor. The unit was thriving like it had never done before.

However, just as quickly as the good times had swept in, the bad times were soon chasing on their heels. Jimmy McCourt had become less and less interested in helping the unit out. Fund-raisers and donations went from flooding in, to a trickle, to being almost nothing at all. Jimmy had accepted the good press he had received, and was coasting on it. The rumours were now that his father had forgiven him, and that he was no longer shamefaced upon opening his morning newspaper and seeing mention of the family name.

The unit was finding that the HTF money was as much of a curse as a blessing. The children began to complain that they weren’t getting treated to the privileged life they had come to expect from James McCourt’s intervention. The staff were facing an uncertain future, as the money that had paid for three extra staff for the past two years was starting to run low. Resources had been ordered that the unit now could not afford, and minor building work had to be postponed, leaving some facilities with a permanent ‘out of order’ sign hung on them.

It was, therefore, a pleasant surprise when the unit received a phone-call from James McCourt’s secretary: was it possible for a young lady, and a young gentleman, to accompany Mr. McCourt to a fund-raiser that was going to be held the following evening? Mike was in no position to refuse. The money would help to secure the future of the unit for at least another year, whilst this latest development signalled that HTF had not forgotten about their responsibility to the children.

That evening, Mike and another member of staff waited behind with the two children. A limousine pulled up, and a bodyguard escorted the children to the back-seat. Mike remembered the massive smiles on their faces as the door closed.

Then the limo’ pulled away, and that was the last time that Mike saw either of them smile.

The next morning the police arrived at the exclusion unit…

 

It was at this point that Mike’s phone rang. The caller identification came up as, “K.”

Mike excused himself, and went out the fire-doors at the back of the room. He spoke loudly, but not loud enough to be overheard.

When he returned, he sighed. He threw a ten-pound note down on the table, and nodded at it.

“Finish up some other time,” he said, resigned to something he did not want to do. “Got to go.”

Then he wobbled towards the door in an undignified manner.

And then he was gone.

The next day he was the headline in the Periodical Post:

“GOOD SAMARITAN” TAKES EASY WAY OUT; OUTED AS A PAEDO

 

To be continued…

By: Harlan Thoroughgood

 

It has been almost six years since the then Department of Education announced a number of changes to their policies. At the time, many in education were critical of these changes. The most prevalent argument was that such changes were based on ideology, rather than how they would work in reality.

Amongst the changes were three decisions which have caused a massive impact today. Each of them tells you nothing about the actual state of education, and instead acts as a doorway into the privileged, insular perspective of those working for the PIP (Party In Power).

The first decision was to fast-track former military personnel in education. The current Minister for Education and Social Work, Rupert Pengrove, M.P, supported this policy. He stated that, “Those who have dedicated their lives to protecting these green shores deserve our respect, and there is no better place for children to learn that than in the classroom.”

The ideological problems with this decision are these:
(a) The predominant ideology of the military they seem so eager to thrust upon the classroom doesn’t translate into education. Education requires children to learn creativity and leadership skills at a time when they are developing their own sense of individuality. The military, however, seek to crush individuality as a necessity for armed conflict – soldiers have the same haircut, the same uniform, obey a strict chain-of-command, and do things in strict routine.
(b) It also has to be assumed that the PIP believe that education needs more discipline. However, whereas most teachers learn how to manage their classrooms, the military manages situations by intimidation. This can only be because the PIP believe that former soldiers can bully a generation of ASBOs into doing what they are bally-well told.
(c) The policy is clearly discriminatory, and stupid. First of all, it presupposes that those who have possibly spent their career up until now only following orders will be competent at teaching. Then it suggests that it is their military skills, rather than their subject knowledge or desire to improve the lives of their pupils, which is the most important thing a teacher can have.

The second decision was to announce that Independent Schools could now be set up which would have little of the overhead of existing schools, and could be paid for by private individuals. Pengrove stated that this would, “allow local groups to decide for themselves how their children should be taught, in line with their own beliefs.” It was clear by what he said that he meant (prejudiced, insular) faith-schools, but what he didn’t say was even more important.

Many of the Independent Schools that have thrived have become For-Profit (F.P) ventures that teach specific skills, or are own by specific commercial interests. They have caused our current system of education to become multi-tiered, and the pupils leaving school to have a number of disparate skills that leave them stuck on a single career path from the age of fourteen, and sometimes younger. The ideology behind this is simply a way to ensure that schools, and the children working at them, turn a profit.

The third decision was to give head-teachers greater freedom to permanently exclude pupils, with little legal recourse for families who have a child removed due to the decision to cut legal-aid. Pengrove stated it would, “make it easier for other children to learn by removing problem pupils at the earliest opportunity, to allow a better learning environment for those who do want to learn.” The ideology behind this decision was that those “problem pupils” do not want to learn, and should suffer for the rest of their life because of it. It is telling that the majority of pupils permanently excluded since this policy was introduced are from lower-class families hurt by cuts to public spending and the abolition of the minimum wage.

Indeed, it has been an important political question over the past year: what do we do with this generation of pupils abandoned by lazy head-teachers?
Kurt Foley wears a baggy tracksuit to the front-door, his pant legs tucked into his socks. He stuffs his hands into his pockets as he stands aside to let me in, and mumbles, “Aw’right…” His head drops, so he doesn’t look me in the eye. Fourteen years old, and he feels defensive every time he meets someone new.

The house is a cramped and crumbling semi-detached, built decades ago now, and acting as a temporary residence. We struggle our way through the clutter of shoes and coats by the stairs, and end up collapsing into another crowded area: the living room.

In the chair sits the sole occupant of this tiny space, Kurt’s mother, Mrs Foley. An overflowing ash tray sits under her left hand, with grasps a cigarette between two yellow fingers. He eyes are sunk into her head, and remain fixed on the television. Kurt mumbles something to her three times, but she makes no reply, and, eventually, he motions me into the kitchen.

We sit at the kitchen table. Barely enough room for one. But Kurt manages to squeeze in. He has no choice.

Kurt sits and stares at the far wall, still not meeting my eyes. He doesn’t seem just opposed to talking, but actively opposed to any such loathed activity that might be interaction. No-one could understand him, or what he is going through, and so everyone should just leave him alone to sleep, sleep, sleep his life away. It is written in the eyes, which turn and glare up at me from under his forehead, as he bows his head forward.

Kurt was permanently excluded from high school a year earlier for smoking. He was one of several pupils who were caught, but he was the only one on a final warning. “The head had it in for me, yeh? There were other kids far worse than me, but he gave them a chance, and he booted me out for havin’ one fag. I’d had loads of cigs before, and I’ve been outside school since, and he’s seen me smokin’ but there’s nothing he can do now, is there? Sometimes I just go down and stand there, lightin’ up, for’t crack, yeh?”

After being removed from school, the local authorities took responsibility for Kurt. They decided that the best course of action was to have Kurt attend the Philip’s Academy, run by Master Alastair Hodge-Sasson. Kurt’s family were told it was this or nothing, and signed the forms needed to release Kurt into the academy’s care five days a week.

This was the culmination of the three decisions laid out above: it was a F.P school that charged local authorities for straightening-out those who were found unsuitable for mainstream education, by handing them over to former-military staff with the authority to, “restrain pupils who pose any type of threat to themselves, other pupils, staff, the delivery of lessons, or the general running of the school.”

“Restrain?” Kurt asks. It is clearly a rhetorical question, although Kurt has already admitted he doesn’t care what it means. “They came in givin’ it all that, but theywant knockin’ out. But the Prefects are the bullies. The teachers ignore what you do, if you’re a Prefect, like they’re blind or somat. So the Prefects, the older boys, would give you a kickin’ if you mouthed off, and the teachers would stick up for ‘em. Should have got me bloods to go kick ‘em all in, if I could’ve been bothered.”

Kurt is all rage, bundled up inside an impenetrable shell of non-compliance, with no real out-let, and no idea how to express himself in any other way. His friends are all about who is the hardest, the police are always traipsing through his house, and every type of school he’s been at has just been more of the same. No-one seems to have taken the time to show Kurt there is a better way to live, and it doesn’t have to involve intimidating everyone around him.

“Boys will be boys,” Master Hodge-Sasson assures me, over the phone. “Kurt was being bullied, and we dealt with that, but you media fellows have to remember: the young gents at our academy have been removed from school for good reason; they do not play well with others.

“Kurt, though… It is a shame his parents removed him. He was a bright spark. He once stole one of our English teachers cars in nearly no time, disabling the alarm, and leaving no damage on it. I wanted him to go work on some engines, see, but, well… The local authority wouldn’t hear of it. They think we beat sense into them here, and then force them to sign up when they come of age, so they don’t end up on welfare. They just refused to spend money on a young chap’s future because he was a criminal in their eyes.”

Despite Master Hodge-Sasson coming across as a reasonable and pensive individual well suited to coaxing the best out of our young people, the attitudes of those who tied his hands is still something of a worry. Our current system promotes elitism, bullying and abandonment, in its ideology, and suggests children who have yet to even develop their own sense of self should be crushed under the heel of those who claim to be their superiors, should be slapped down if they do anything to fight back, and should be expected to improve their attitude without knowing the rewards for good behaviour.

It all suggests that the War of the Classrooms is continuing. Sorry, kids.

 

By: Harlan Thoroughgood

 

They stand outside the shop, seemingly innocent enough. Then you get closer, and see the tell-tale signs that send a shiver down the most resolute spines: leaflets and a clipboard. You panic, and try to avoid them. Is it market research? A charity? Some head-shaving, toga-wearing, tambourine-banging cult?

No, they aren’t here for statistical, charitable, or religious purposes. They saw you and they knew right away that you could help them. And you can help them. All you have to do is one tiny thing, one simple thing that will make a world of difference.

You have to let them neuter you.

Because they think you are a drug addict.

And that is what STOP THIS does to drug addicts.

STOP THIS (Stopping Threats Of Pregnancies That Harm InnocentS) are a trans-Atlantic organisation who are trying to put an end to drug addiction and related developmental problems in new born babies. There primary means of doing this is stopping those with drug addictions from being able to actually procreate.

They were founded by Baltimore-native, and former social worker, Betty Huston. Ms. Huston, at one time, would find homes for infants and children whose parents were not up to the task of looking after their own children, but she grew tired at the amount of effort she put into this, whilst the number of children seemed to grow year-on-year.

Now she works out of her own offices in downtown Baltimore, and in Westminster. In the UK, support has been flooding in from the PIP (Party In Power). They regard her as a hero, doing good work to stamp out the, “social menace of drug abuse.” Of course, when PIP came to power, the first thing they did was fire all government experts on drug use, and announce that policy would be dictated by whatever was likely to get them re-elected (if you read between the lines). Since then, The Periodical Post has essentially been setting policy with a serious of terror-inducing headlines, whilst burying the retractions for most of the stories deep within the paper where nobody can find them.

Indeed, public support has swelled for STOP THIS in recent weeks, following a Post front-page story about an infant who ended up dying because of his mothers heroin-use whilst the child was still in the womb. Suddenly everyone had an opinion on this, and the Post was happy to fan the flames, and prove the old adage about how dead kids tend to sell a lot of newspapers.

At the conclusion of the week long assault on “druggie scum”, “shadowy dealers”, and “heroin-chic ASBOs”, the Post ran a story about STOP THIS convincing the father of the child – also a heroin addict – to have the snip so that he wouldn’t father any more doomed offspring. Public support swelled, and he became a minor celebrity.

Of course, never one to research a story when the headline has real selling power, the Post ignored the fact that STOP THIS have repeatedly approached people with no prior drug use about being neutered, and pursued them despite the fact that they have made it clear they aren’t a drug user.

“I just went out for a packet of crisps,” says Tina, a young mother who lives in Newcastle. “All of a sudden, this old woman is getting in my face and telling me I have to have some operation because I’m a junkie.”

“I’m a student, alright?” says Yusef, from Liverpool. “So, you know, sometimes I look a little rough. But I’m not a smack head or nothing. Saying I shouldn’t have kids? They shouldn’t be allowed kids, man.”

In fact, there are serious issues, even when they do find drug addicts.

“I worked as a lawyer for about ten years,” says a gentleman who asked not to be named for obvious reasons. “Me and my colleagues did quite a bit of drugs. Often it was when we needed to be awake and alert. But it never impacted on my family, and I have lived a very successful life despite my use of certain narcotics. So, when I get told that I need to be gelded because I happen to use a particular kind of stimulant, well, I got angry.”

Then, even when they find drug addicts willing to have the operation, there are issues.

“Yeh, I took them up on the offer,” says Steve, from Liverpool. “You see, I have three kids already, and I don’t plan to have any more. But I’m out of work, and I needed a bit of cash to score, and so when they offer me this money, I was all, “Yeh, lets do this!” So, you know, I got to score, and I still have my kids. I was well chuffed.”

There are also some experts who sense that there is a dangerous hidden-agenda lurking behind the proclamations that this is the only cure to a serious social disease.

“They say they are trying to protect children,” says Dean Hardwicke, a lecturer in Sociology. “But, well, if they succeed, these children they are trying to protect just won’t be born, will they? I don’t want to come across as a pro-lifer, don’t get me wrong, but surely it would be better to help those children who are born. I mean, you cannot force people to be neutered, and people like sex, so there will always be addicts who decide to have sex. However, if they aren’t really bothered about protecting the children, they you have to assume they are doing this for some other reason. I believe that reason can be summed up in one word: eugenics.”

It should be clear by now that STOP THIS don’t have a means of filtering out those who are drug addicts and those who aren’t, and as Mr. Hardwicke suggests, it seems as though their agenda could be very nefarious indeed. It should also be considered that in our culture it is considered taboo to admit to drug use, and that being classified as an addict is like working a scarlet letter.

Even then, should you be aware of those who have problems with drug addiction, the way in which this has traditionally been dealt with is by staging an intervention and getting the person professional help. This help takes the form of counselling, and rehabilitation, that helps an individual recover and become a helpful member of society once more. In some societies – for example, Portugal – decriminalisation has resulted in addicts being open about their addictions, and being able to continue as functioning members of society despite their habits.

STOP THIS, however, suggests that anyone using drugs should be mutilated and abandoned. It doesn’t do anything to stop the use of drugs, or to reduce drug crime, or deaths caused by drugs. In fact, it could be argued that this abandonment could increase the likelihood of drug use, crime, and death.

STOP THIS are probably hugely popular with PIP because anything that distracts from the fact that most drugs problems are their fault is very welcome in the halls and corridors of Parliament. Deaths could be reduced by trading standards, as well as open and honest drugs discussion and education, whilst drug crime would be reduced because those selling and importing drugs would have to be regulated and work within the law. Even drug use could potentially drop because now usage would be moved from private residences to regulated establishments where counselling, and even rehabilitation, can be offered – something that a drug dealer concerned with profits wouldn’t be so willing to offer.

Then there is the problem with eugenics, and the fact that it is essentially prejudiced against anything that doesn’t fit a rigid view of the model human. Suppose STOP THIS were successful in reducing the amount of drug abuse in the UK through this method, what would be next?

It would be easy for modern politicians to start manipulating public opinion. It becomes a series of tiny steps. After the drug users have been wiped out, then maybe they will think it is time for the prostitutes. Before long you have wiped out a vulnerable underclass in a matter of generations, instead of helping them out of the damaged lives they have found themselves in.

If you want it spelling out for you, then you need only remember two words, repeated twice:

Stop this, STOP THIS.