La Belle Epoque Part 8 Copyright Robert Fullarton 2013

La Belle Epoque Part 8
by Robert Fullarton

Copyright Robert Fullarton 2013

The Underground sector had been opened, the people rejoiced, spirits were high, expectations ran wild and the allegiances of the people were firmly rested and tucked comfortably within the bosom of the state. The lights shone out from the tunnels, the sights of clouds and of faint dust rose up from where the construction teams were busy night and day. Man rested on the seventh day not in lofty admiration of what he had made, but in exhaustion at what he had been coerced into completing. Surely there was no time for aesthetic comforts. 

The labour marks, the bruises and the long hours had taken their toll in the bodies of the workers. The workers rested in muddy huts, like caves etched into the side of the earth, the faces comprehending the future and nothing but the future, based on the radiant hopes that were offered by the establishment.

The curriculum was based on the repression of information for state purposes. Scientific Evangelism was promoted for the utility and mechanics of human production and labour. The information and the sources were mere footnotes to the real records and annals of the “lost civilisation” that once existed before its own inexorable destruction. For all anybody knew, every book on the curriculum could have been forged or re-written by state censors in the Northern Sector.

When Zero had returned to his dormitory that evening he found the room filled with twelve more beds, single beds pressed and pushed against each other. The smell of sweat, the sounds of grown men moaning and leaving their washing out to dry on the railings above, the muck off labourers boots that left wet trails and marks on the floors and the sight of half naked men screeching at the sight of Zero arriving in through the door.

“Oh damn it!”

Said one man, whose armpits were almost as hairy as the greasy brown mullet on his head.

“Not another tenant to rob us of the last cubic metre of space!”

“Well”, said a stocky brown skinned man beside him. “Next thing we know well be sharing our beds, two man a bed and I believe that’s the beginning of the end.”

“I did hear that once upon a time married men were allowed to sleep in the same bed with their wife and even exchange in the business together.”

Muttered another man randomly at the back of the room.

Zero’s face grew bright red with anger, he had held himself together before in the past, but now things had gone catastrophic.

“You lot, are the intruders here, not me. I have been living in this dormitory for ten years now. Everything was different this morning when I left for work; there were twelve of us here, now there are 24 beds with twelve sweaty, disgusting labourers that have mouths that never quit. I have my lease signed and agreed to by the landlord and you can see it if you like. I’ll put my foot in your ass if you don’t shut up and stop harassing me.”

“Hey”, said the hairy man with the mullet. “You come in smelling of soap and bath oils, because you can afford it, you come in with more food rations and tokens because your richer than we are, I can see that, I don’t need to guess it. Your blue overalls look like they've been specially stitched in the Northern Sector, ours have been stitched badly by the feeble sore hands of working children. Do you know what that smell is that you detest so much? It’s the smell of labour, the smell of two hundred men stooped down in the tunnels together, in the semi-darkness covered several times a day in several inches of thick muck.”

“Well, I work for my existence too, you damn Yeti.”

“What’s that?” Asked the man with the brown mullet.

“You don’t know because you don’t possess any books or have any knowledge of history and the way the old world was!”

“Why do you?”

“Yes, because I’m a social educator, I too work, I was apparently born to work this role as you were all meant to be miners and to live and suffer the miners fate.”

“Well”, said the leader of the group of moaning new tenants, “I do apologise then if I have over stepped the boundary with my comments and my behaviour.”

“No, I don’t care what you say, its your physical presence that irritates me. Your in my bed for a start, you have fouled it with your body odour and done this all at 6pm in the evening before I have even had my dinner.”

“Well think of it from our point of view, twelve miners were contacted by your landlord and given the right to move another eleven beds into the dormitory, with the right to sleep after 12 hours of hard labour, he told us that we could become a permanent fixture so long as we paid him the rent each week.”

“Ahh..but you have not got the right to take my bed, for I pay my rent as well, under a signed agreement, I’ll give you ten minutes to move, I’ll go and have a word with the landlord about this and if things deteriorate I’ll contact the authorities as well.”

Zero left the room hastily and sat in the landlord’s office of administration for over an hour trying to argue his case and understand why the landlord had broken their original landlord and tenant agreement. These men were squatters and under the new squatters’ legislation, squatters had the right to overthrow a tenant so long as they could prove that they were squatters and that they could oblige the landlord in either rent or labour. Zero however could not be left without a bed that night- it was a contractual obligation for a tenant of a stature such as himself to find an alternative bed in an alternative dormitory. Zero reluctantly agreed and hoped that perhaps he might find himself in a dormitory with a more enlightened bunch of men –and not bunched in with a pack of slacks and hacks- or one with more breathing space.