'We should have been shot like horses, didn't they know that? We should have been stunned like cattle about to be slaughtered, and our throats cut …' He sees it in his mind's eye, he and the others strung up, hung from butcher's hooks, bleeding from their throats.
He sees himself hung thus, forming words in blood. Speaking them, his last silent words, in bubbles of blood. And isn't that what he's doing now, as he speaks into my dictaphone? Isn't he really upside down on a butcher's hook? Isn't he to be trussed up and splayed in a butcher's window? – 'You Danes. You crafty Danes …'
He'll carry on with his story, he says. He'll continue with my instruction. – 'They'd called us in for training. Their heads ached. Their eyes glazed over. So the future had come. The city would gleam, and they were part of the dross of the past'.
Who were they, the remnants? Who, the voyagers out between worlds, between the old and the new? They were rounding them up, the unemployed, the long term sick. The last drunks were being picked up and driven away. The last smackheads were being rounded up and shipped off. The criminals were all tagged and under house arrest. There was to be no slackness, no time to wander across the face of the earth.
'We'd lost the battle, the poet says. We'd lost it because we couldn't be bothered to fight. We'd lost the war because we'd barely known there was a war. We'd been asleep. Asleep at our posts, our non-posts. We'd been left behind. We'd deserted, but then we'd never joined up.
'We weren't guerillas. We weren't partisans. But the great wheels were to roll over us as great wheels roll. The wheels would turn, we would be crushed, and no one would notice. Ah, the wrecking balls at Old Hulme were only a forewheel of the great juggernaut. Only a plate of the great caterpillar tread of what was called regeneration.
'We weren't prepared, of course. We'd posted no watchmen. The sentries were asleep, the army scattered. How could we resist them, we who were unprepared and dreaming? How, we who barely knew we were there, let alone an enemy? In truth, they, too, barely knew we were there. They didn't set our sights especially on us. They didn't crush us as the Israeli army crushes Palestinians. We were the slack, and the slack was to be taken up.
'What happened to them, the last Neanderthals, driven to the edges of Europe by the new breed?', the poet says. 'They knew they didn't belong and couldn't belong. Knew the coming world was not theirs. They weren't hunted to extinction, but died of irrelevance.
'No doubt, the new breed were kindness itself', the poet said. 'Bursaries were offered and scholarships set up, but the Neanderthals knew they were not for them, not really; that they didn't belong to the new world.
'What would become of them, with their heavy brows and dangling arms? What would become of their swamps and still water? What would happen when their marshes were drained?
'They called us in', the poet says. Their names were called and they stepped forward. They crossed the floor tiles of the open plan office to a waiting desk and Case Worker. Why bother with us?, they wanted to say. The midges are buzzing in our heads, and mosquitoes are hatching in our hearts, they wanted to say. We're the old breed, and you're the new breed. You win.
You win. But how could they do anything else but win, the new breed and their Case Workers? They'd become clients, he says. – 'The light had reached us. The gleaming city. And what were they to do, who had banked on structural unemployment? What, for those who had no corners left in which to hide?
'We weren't all Neanderthals', the poet says. 'We hadn't all given up. I'll tell you how they got us', the poet says. 'It was a very Danish ruse', he says.
'Community arts! Community projects!, that was it. We were made part of community regneration. We were encouraged to bid for money. Encouraged to wear hardhats and to tour the orange-bricked housing in the new estates that were replacing Old Hulme and everywhere like Old Hulme'.
They were treated like Prince Charles, he says, as they were shown along the gently curved streets that were named after hedge flowers. Community arts! Community projects! All of south Manchester was going to hold hands Denmark-style, he says. The supermarket was about to arrive, and carparks were to sprawl out on unused land. Orange-bricked community centres were coming, and the healthfood shop would be rehoused in an orange-bricked complex. Community arts! Community projects!
But he'd grown suspicious of it, the word community, he said. They're manipulating us, he thought. They're regnerating words, and not just the city, he thought. Words: soon he wouldn't be able to speak. Soon his words wouldn't be his words.
The word I, for example. The word am, for example. The word alive, for example.
'We were to become our own spokespersons, our own salesmen. We were learning to sell ourselves, to become our own advocates. We learned how to construct CVs and write cover-letters. We learned to read the job pages in the papers.
'Ah, we became avid readers. Avid writers, using the computers in the Jobseeker's training suite. We opened blank Word documents. We watched rows of text march across the page as we typed. We centre-justified and double-spaced. We emboldened and italicised …
'Some went into web design, God help them. There was training for that, too: web design. Web imbecility …
'And the rest of us? We could hardly believe in our CVs, in our letters of application. Could hardly believe in the world. We would have laughed, if we had the strength. You woke us up for this?
'Our heads ached. Our eyes were red. The welfare state was receding, we saw that. We were the last, and the last of the last. They should have left us lying on the shore. Should have left us beached, defeated, on the great shore of the future'.
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