The Opposition Leader
“Who put you up to this, Dominic?” Kim looked at her security guard over the barrel of his gun.
“That’s not for you to know.” His tone was belligerent, but his face was pale and frightened.
She closed her eyes, and breathed deeply, one long breath, trying to concentrate on nothing but the pleasure of drawing oxygen into her lungs. “If I am to die, I would like to know the reason.”
Strange that she should put ‘I’ and ‘die’ in the same sentence. She hadn’t noticed that they rhymed. This little word ‘die’ was one that she had used many times in her speeches.
The meetings were always arranged at short notice in remote village halls and underground car parks or abandoned factories. She asked her listeners, ““Do you think that we should leave the disabled and terminally ill to die? That’s what this government is doing by refusing to care for the old, the sick and the crippled. If people don’t have a family to look after them, they are left poor and sick and hungry. Eventually they get tired. They give up the struggle to stay alive. It’s happening behind closed doors at the end of your street or the other side of your town. All over the country people are faced with the dilemma of caring for a sick relative or going out to work so that they have money for food.”
Kim would pause and feel the silence in the hall, the held back energy, the faces looking back at her, rapt and distressed. “Things don’t have to be like this,” she would go on. “Don’t be deceived by the rhetoric that this is inevitable and that we can’t afford to care for the weak. As a society, we have a choice. We could afford to care for the sick and vulnerable in the past. What’s more important: a weapon that can kill hundreds of thousands or health care for a sick child? We might not be able to change the big things, the politics right now, but there are so many small things we can do for each other.”
As she reached the climax of her speech, a wave of energy would be released sweep through the hall. She rode it like a surfer, not for herself, but for others. It gave her the strength to listen to people tell heart-breaking stories of hardship: the man who left his mother with Alzheimer’s alone with the dog while he went into the office, the woman who tied her disabled son into his bed while she went out to clean other peoples’ houses. She would encourage people to form local committees for those in need, to do small, practical things for each other. “We work from the bottom up,” she told them. “We don’t have a choice about who sits in Parliament, but we don’t have to accept their values. If we live the truth, one day everything they’ve built with their lies will come tumbling down like a house of cards.”
Kim McCabe knew that she was considered a dangerous woman. Wherever she went she left a trail of restlessness and action. Two years ago the Peace Party was declared illegal and ever since then she had been on the run, staying in a safe house for a few days and then moving on. The government wanted her dead. She ran the risk of being shot every time she held a meeting. However, she hadn’t expected that her bodyguard would turn on her.
“So why am I to die?” Kim repeated.
Dominic flinched. His pale eyes flicked towards the television. The cameras showed a picture of young men throwing bricks and retreating at a run beneath the advance of police in full riot gear.
“You cause unrest. You incite people to violence.”
“You know that’s untrue, Dominic. I have encouraged resistance to this government,but never violence. Wherever there are young people who are poor and unemployed with very little hope of a job, there is a breeding ground for violence.”
The educated voice of the television reporter gave the official version of events, “Kim McCable’s Peace Party has stirred up more unrest and violence across the country.”
Dominic’s legs were braced, both hands clutched the handle of the gun, ready to fire. She had to keep him talking. “The government are trying to blame us for the problems they have created.” Kim included Dominic in the ‘us’. It was the way she had always talked to him. He had travelled up and down the country with her, checking out halls before she gave a rally, finding her secure places to stay, sitting at a discreet distance in restaurants and meetings.
“Why are you doing this? Is it for money, or do you really believe what the government say?” Kim asked.
“I don’t give a feck about politics. It’s all broken promises and lies. You should have got out while you still could, Kim, because you’re never going to change anything.”
Dominic had come to them young, nervous and unemployed after a spell in the army serving in the long-running wars in the Middle-East. He said that he was sickened by the government’s foreign policy which waged wars to keep the oil flowing. Kim hadn’t been sure about offering him a job. He was ex-army, after all, but Dave, her campaign manager, had said, “He’s been through a lot, but he’s a good guy at heart.”
Kim trusted Dave’s judgement. He was great at sounding people out and placing them in the right job. It was his idea to move Dominic out of the office after the Peace Party was outlawed. “You need protection,” he said. “The government will use every means to stop you.” He was right.
Kim looked over the gun into Dominic’s eyes. They were green and protuberant, like a fish’s. “You don’t have to go through with this,” she said. “You can put the gun down and we can forget about this incident. I won’t tell anyone, not even Dave. I’ll just tell people that you’re tired. I can arrange to have you move to the Highlands and get you a job in the land league, helping the local communities get their land back. You have an interest in that part of the country, don’t you?”
“Stop talking!” Dominic shouted. He gripped the gun so tight that his knuckles were white. The barrel of the gun wobbled to the side, but he brought it back on target so that it was covering Kim’s heart.
Kim felt strangely calm. Fear was for unspecified threats, when grey men in suits sidled up to her after meetings and politely advised her to stop the rallies. “If not, you’ll be dealt with.” One older man patted her on the shoulder as he said it, as if he was giving fatherly advice.
She had kept herself too busy to dwell on the fear. She had never seriously thought of leaving politics and settling for keeping her mouth shut and her belly full. Giving up would have caused her too much anguish. This was what she was meant to do, the path of least resistance.
She dropped the pen she held and let her hand rest on her stomach.
“Don’t move,” Dominic shouted, keeping the gun trained on her.
Very little time was left. Kim had no regrets for herself, only for the tiny life hidden inside her, so small that she couldn’t yet feel the flicker of its movements. She would have loved to feel its tiny kicks through the wall of her stomach, the weight of it forming inside her, the joy of nuzzling its skin and sniffing its soft hair.
Pregnant at forty-two, she hadn’t expected that. Dave was the father. They had shared the same passion for bringing about change so that every person had a chance to live a fuller life. They had fallen in love over late night coffees as they discussed their reaction to the latest blow to human rights. Wake up, Kim wanted to say to people. They are lulling you to sleep, slowly turning off the lights and telling you that it was always like this, always dark.
The government passed bills making it increasingly difficult for the opposition to operate. They banned any internet sites which criticised government policy. She shared her fears with Dave. When he held her in his arms, it felt as if she had got into a warm, comfortable bath. He held her tight in the darkness, creating a safe, warm space where the two of them gave and received freely. For a brief while, greed and acquisitiveness did not exist.
She had always felt that the relationship couldn’t last. Three years ago, in a move that made the dictatorship evident to even the most optimistic of observers, the opposition party was made illegal. Since then any semblance of normal life had been impossible. Kim had gone into hiding, never staying long in one place, organising clandestine meetings which had been advertised by word of mouth.
They agreed to step back and keep their relationship on a professional basis. They worked separately. Dave travelled ahead, made contacts and organised events. Kim followed and spoke at the rallies.
Three months ago, Dave brought Kim the news that her mother had died in hospital. She had been ill for a week, but Kim had been unable to visit her as she would have been immediately arrested.
Kim rubbed her stomach. This child growing within her, this tiny sign of life and hope, had grown out of her grief and anguish. For one last time, Dave had held her in his arms, comforting her, telling that her mother had been proud of her.
Kim looked at Dominic, wondering if he knew. “I’m pregnant.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and the gun seemed to waver. “But if I don’t do this, a lot more people will be killed. They’ll plant a bomb at one of your rallies and blame it on the terrorists.”
Kim heard the click of the trigger, metal against hard metal. In that moment, she saw many things.
#
Kim saw Dominic, his thin face so pale that the acne scars stood out in great purple blotches, step out of his car on a stretch of moorland. Although she was looking at him, she could sense his feelings and the tension in his shoulders and arms as he zipped up his jacket against the chill morning air.
The sky was pale and cloudless and the sun had not yet risen over the shadowed hills. A landrover drove past and turned in a layby on the single-track road so that it was facing back the way it had come. Two men got out. Their faces were expressionless beneath their sunglasses.
Dominic opened the boot of his small hatchback and all three of them rolled out a heavy, awkward bundle wrapped in a blanket. As they carried it towards the landrover, the blanket fell open and Kim glimpsed a puppet-like parody of her own face.
They pushed the body into the landrover and slammed the door.
“I’ve left a letter to be opened if I don’t come back,” Dominic said.
“You don’t trust us?” The men in sunglasses seemed to find this funny. They handed Dominic an envelope which held three hundred thousand pounds in cash. More importantly it also contained his pardon for deserting the army. Like Kim, he was no longer on the run.
Dominic drove north with the envelope which he thought would bring him peace of mind until he reached the desolate place which his grandparents had loved but left.
Modern bungalows squatted low against the wind. Daffodils shivered in the gardens. Tiny, stunted trees, their branches swelling with buds grew in the shelter of walls. Further up the valley on the more fertile land were stone walls almost one metre thick, the remains of earlier houses. Less than two hundred years ago, the Duke of Sutherland’s men had set lighted torches to the roofs and burnt the people out. “But that was another story,” as Dominic’s grandfather had said. His own clearance had been less dramatic. The tiny, battened-down village offered no work and no opportunities. He had gone to the city to work in a hotel and never come back.
But Dominic was back and he was hungry for land. He bought a field, or rather several fields along with the laird’s house which had been empty since the old man’s death thirty years before. The roof was collapsing at the front and the floors were rotten. It was far too big for Dominic, but he felt good about buying the house of the ‘big man’ who’d dominated the village in his grandfather’s day.
He fixed the fences, bought sheep and Highland cattle, and began clearing ground for growing. He worked hard turning over the sour, peaty soil, lifting stones, trying to forget the feel of his fingers on metal, the pull of the trigger, the look on her face: shock, the briefest moment of rejection and struggle, and then acceptance.
A man limped along the road by the edge of the field. He stopped, eased a large, tattered rucksack off his back and leant against one of the fence posts. “You need more drainage,” he said glancing up at the sky. “There’s a dry spell now, but when the rain comes the soil won’t hold the water. Put in potatoes first. They’ll break up the soil and then you can add other things.”
Dominic stuck his spade into the soil and straightened his aching back. “I haven’t quite decided where it would be best to put in a trench.”
“I’ll help you with it,” the man said.
He stayed and worked, stretching out his sleeping bag in one of the drier downstairs rooms. After a while they were joined by a quiet, young man who couldn’t find a job and was going from place to place, asking for food or money. He fixed the roof and started work on the house, one room at a time. Every time he finished another room, someone else turned up. An old woman came along. No-one needed her and no-one wanted her. “But there’s still some life in me yet,” she told Dominic. She fed the hens and cooked them meals with the first harvest of potatoes. She was followed by a girl with a dazed, distant look who didn’t speak at all until she had coaxed the plants in the polytunnel into life and health.
Kim saw Dominic many years on. He had reached the age she was when he pointed the gun at her. The community was thriving. They had built a walled garden for vegetables, and bought more land and planted trees and put up windmills and solar panels. People came, some for a short time, others for longer. All took away with them more life and peace than they came with.
Dominic stayed. He marvelled at times at how he was at the centre of a community which had grown up around him. He hadn’t founded it. He had just let it happen.
At night the peats glowed in the stove, giving off a fragrant smoke. He stretched out his long legs, rubbed his gingery beard and smoked a pipe, putting off the moment when he would go up to bed and lie between the cold sheets, alone with his memories.
He saw Kim, girlish and earnest, as she addressed a rally. She held an old woman’s hand listening to her story and promising help from the relief fund. He saw her in meetings, her face closed and determined. She wasn’t going to give up, wasn’t going to compromise. He brooded on what he had seen in her face as he pulled the trigger: shock, acceptance and something else, could it even be compassion?
He thought about his time in the army, when he had fired his gun and seen bodies bloom with blood, and fall in front of him. He hadn’t looked into their eyes, had only thought of them as the enemy, but he now knew that they, too, had had families and friends, beliefs and hopes. Dominic had no-one with whom to share the burden of his thoughts. Everyone looked up to him. They called him “Dom” and thought he was wise and kind and generous. Only he knew what he really was.
#
Kim felt the sadness of her life cut off, the deep wrench of pain that her baby would never draw a breath, and then she let go. She forgave Dominic, and became light and free, floating away to a different time and place.
She saw David weeping, gasping air in great wrenching gulps and then giving himself up to the quiet emptiness after tears and the determination that Kim would not be forgotten. He stood before meetings, quiet and dignified and told people that Kim had disappeared and was presumed dead. His words left a quiet restlessness. People could no longer think that no harm would be done if they just kept their heads down and out of everyone else’s business.
A swell of resistance grew. A person’s worth was no longer measured in their balance sheet. People stopped to ask if others were well. They gave and received. They held silent marches holding candles and pictures of those who had died from lack of food and medical care. Some of the images were of Kim. Her face, litho-printed in blocks of black and white had become an icon.
Kim saw all this in the fraction of the second that it took the bullet to leave Dominic’s pistol and plunge into her chest.
When the regime finally changed, people were once again free to express their opinions and vote and campaign for changes in the law. However, the real revolution had already taken place in their hearts.
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