Read by Sarah Feathers (final story in podcast, here)
We accept your demands.
There is a flurry of static and she can’t be entirely sure what she’s heard. She presses the button again: What?
We accept your demands.
You accept?
That’s what I said (says the voice). We accept.
Oh, she says. They accept. Wren turns to address those around her: the fifteen linking arms, the group secured to lampposts with cable ties, the Painted People, The Tattooed Man, the students glued to pavements, the elderly couple handcuffed to the railings.
They accept, she says.
Well, this was thoroughly unexpected.
What do we do now then? asks a young girl with cornrows who has superglued herself to the pavement. Because of her position, and the already-set glue, she is forced to look directly upwards. It gives her words a throwaway wistful quality as if she were contemplating something greater than this historic moment.
I guess we go home, Wren says, the radio still clutched in her hand, index finger hovering.
Let me just double-check. She puts the walky-talky to her lips again, and the pressure of her finger ignites a blizzard of static.
Just to double-check: you said you accept our demands?
We accept, the voice on the other end says again.
All of them?
We accept all of them.
Even the ones about telling everyone the truth and rethinking your investments?
Yes, says the voice, and the ones about the food systems and the tax changes too.
Oh, she says again. She turns to the group: Well, they definitely accept.
How are they going to do it then? asks the girl on the floor.
Good question. She presses the button. How are you going to do it then?
Well, we’ll start by closing tax loopholes that benefit mega-corporations while providing incentives for companies to go green, simultaneously withdrawing investments from fossil fuels and raising taxes on meat to subsidise plant-based produce instead. Then we’ll inflate the cost of air travel to encourage vacations at home, making flight the luxury it once was.
There is silence. And then the man comes back on: Oh, and we’ll increase investment in renewable energy.
Wow, Wren says. That all sounded pretty good, didn’t it? She turns to the crowd around her. One of them is holding a bright green flare that stutters and goes dead in his hand.
That does sound pretty good, says the girl glued to the floor.
Right then. Wren presses the button: Well, you better do all of those things that you said just now.
You can count on it, says the man on the other end.
Most of them disperse not long after that. They move the concrete blocks out of the road, they stop linking arms, stand up, stretch their legs, shake hands, exchange contact details. Those with handcuffs retrieve the keys and release themselves. Those who have swallowed the keys take the railings with them. Those glued to the floor stay where they are until the adhesive becomes weak enough to let them leave. They will end up being trapped for a further four days, but people provide them with blankets and sandwiches at regular intervals, so it isn’t really all that bad. Strangers in the street applaud them when they finally stand up and stretch their legs.
Wren heads back to her mum’s place because her refusal to partake in capitalism also includes property rental.
I heard they accepted your demands, her mum says as she walks in the door. Well done.
Yeah, says Wren, thanks. She is carrying a bundle of placards under her arm and a loud hailer with a red mouth. Her throat is a little hoarse from shouting slogans all day.
Want a cup of tea? her mother asks, I went out and bought oat milk.
Wren stares at her. Less than a month ago her mother had ended an argument by drinking a four-pint of cow’s milk in front of her, spilling it down her chin and soaking her top.
I won’t be lectured on what I can and can’t eat by a child! she had spluttered through gulps of white liquid.
Wren opens her mouth but finds words lacking in a space where there has always been an abundance.
I’m going to bed, she says.
In her room, there are unused placards covered in words like There is no Planet B, The Time is Now and Think of the children. She has the words Fuck Government sprayed in neon green paint across the wall above her bed, but they suddenly feel a little aggressive.
Her anger is a panicking bird against a windowpane.
The alarms had roused them at 3am to block off the roads before the morning commute. They’d prepared thermoses and enough food to last them at least a week. Beyond that, they’d rely on donations or sympathetic parents. In the end, they had been out there for half a day. Overcome with tiredness, Wren lies in bed and falls instantly asleep.
She wakes up the following morning and cannot think of why she might need to get out of bed.
At breakfast, she shouts at her mum for burning the toast.
I can’t un-burn the toast, her mum says.
*
Do I still have to call you Wren? her mother asks some weeks later when the initial shock of the acceptance has faded, and people are back to living their now radically-altered lives. Since there won’t be any more protests, she says.
My name is Wren, Mum.
Your name is Angela, and it’s such a pretty name.
I’m called Wren, Mum, and there are always going to be more protests.
In reality, Wren isn’t so sure. She has spent several days Googling worthwhile causes, but it seems they are suddenly in short supply. Equal pay for women has been neatly incorporated into the bill remedying the climate crisis, and even starvation in the Third World will apparently be fixed when the new investment in renewable energy comes through. Endangered species, are, ironically, a dying breed. Slaughterhouses are a thing of the past, and lion populations are on the rise again. The government is temporarily abstaining from any unjust wars.
Wren sets up a protest outside a large clothing company demanding that they stop making throwaway fashion. Within ten minutes the manager of the store comes out and hands her a leaflet explaining how everything is now made of recycled hemp. For every sale, they plant a new tree. Wren reads the leaflet twice before packing up her things. It is made of recycled paper. She enters the store and buys two t-shirts for herself before heading back home.
She finds she doesn’t really have anything to talk about any more. Adversity had felt so at home on her tongue. She sits with friends in a silence that is only broken by brief reminiscence.
Do you remember when we flew that drone and stopped the planes from taking off? Remember the confused look on their faces? God that was a good one.
They talk about communism, but only half-heartedly – it seems this new world they’re living in has found an impossible equilibrium where they can also buy fair-trade trainers and electric cars if they’d wanted to. She wants to be angry at The Establishment, but for once it appears The Establishment is trying its best. Nothing boils over.
They watch reality TV so they can at least get angry at how stupid some people are: laughing at the screen and jeering at their stupid shining torsos and gravity-defying breasts. But even these apes are drinking from reusable aluminium water bottles.
Some days she wonders if she is going insane, if one of the canisters of tear gas from the protest in Paris had actually melted her brain and right now she is lying in a hospital bed with people beside her crying, eating meat-laden lunches in plastic containers with tiny plastic soy-sauce fishes and 50cl plastic water bottles. They will drive their diesel cars back and forth to stroke the hair on her unconscious head and replace the flowers that are wilting and dying in front of her sightless eyes.
She tries to argue with people but is incapable of conjuring resistance.
Yes, I see where you’re coming from, they say. I do need to be better.
It seems that everyone is transitioning toward being a better person. Everyone is doing everything they can because actually, you were right, they say to Wren, this is bigger than anything else I was worried about before.
But you didn’t worry about it before, Wren wants to say.
She feels as if the lines that hold her form are being erased. There is less and less to define her.
A newsreader sports dreadlocks and so she cuts off her own.
If she is honest with herself, she never really liked the smell of them in summer.
She begins setting fire to things. Small objects at first like envelopes and empty pizza cartons, but then larger things like the garden shed. Her mum is angry about the shed, and so they shout at each other for a good forty minutes. Wren justifies it as an act of self-expression, but lacks any real conviction. She regurgitates facts about her generation’s mental state that she’d memorised that morning. It feels good to silence someone. The two of them go to bed without making up and Wren sleeps well for the first time in months. She thinks her mum might now be The Establishment.
Wren’s soul has been shaped in the shadow of lunacy, her every thought braced against tides of injustice. In the face of understanding, she feels bloated, weightless.
She writes angry songs and poems but finds it hard to define exactly what she’s so mad about. She has all of the beginnings but no endings.
She thinks she may have never before envisaged an ending.
*
Wren takes to the streets again demanding change. She had awoken in the night with a sudden clarity that finally chiselled a point to her anger, justifying her inability to feel contentment of any kind.
To stop.
Because people don’t care – that is what she has come to realise. As much as they appear to have changed, in a moment of lucidity at 3am, she understood that no one has changed at all. None of them were out there on the streets when it mattered. She knows her mum only buys local because of the judgmental whispers of neighbours; that people only fly less because prices have gone up; that mindfulness is a workplace requirement and yoga is less effort than going to the gym.
Phoneys.
The clarity of the thought is almost orgasmic in its simplicity. She hates phoneys; detests inauthenticity to the point of revulsion. She demands that people embrace their true selves and stop pretending. That they burn their fossil fuels and throw plastic into the sea and kick pigs to death and support child labour. That they stop wearing this mask of false-empathy, of telling her she is right, of pretending to understand. She refuses to be fooled any longer.
Her friends join her cries because they too were raised on a diet of rage. Everyone is there except for The Tattooed Man who has been hired as a middle-manager at Starbucks and can no longer take the time off.
The loudhailer throws her words across a disinterested plaza.
People Don’t Change! she shouts atop a stone lion. People Don’t Change! The chant takes on a mantra-like rhythm.
Wren glues herself to the walkway, and although Parliament tries to contact her, she doesn’t tell anyone she’s taken the batteries out of the walky-talky.
A middle-aged woman carrying a yoga mat politely asks what she can do to change, and Wren informs her that she is sorry, but people never change.
(c) Oliver Bussell, 2023
Oliver Bussell is a graphic designer and copywriter, writing part-time from Barcelona. He’s had short stories published by Didcot Press, Storgy magazine and Reflex Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Grindstone Literary Short Story Prize and the Hammond House Literary Prize. He is currently working on his debut novel.
Sarah Feathers regularly narrates audiobooks including novels by Philippa Gregory, Sarah Vaughan, Adele Parks and Amanda Reynolds. She has been reading for Liars’ League periodically for many years including at their online Lockdown Literature events. Sarah is an actor and has appeared in many theatre productions, films and commercials.
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