Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

She sighs. ‘Then please record that I am a woman in the prime of life, whose powers are severely limited by authorities perishing with thirst, and now demanding that I make a gift to them of the waters of memory.’

In my case, as in almost all of them, the Witness is actually quite correct. I am a traitor to the System, to the society we have constructed around it. I have hidden from the Witness, which is in itself antisocial and grounds for closer examination. I have used paper and ink to send private messages, bartered to conceal my transactions, done favours and had them returned in order to avoid listing my transactions on an accessible database. I have taught these skills: writing, hiding, haggling, the ad hoc measurement of value. I have proselytised about their use, advocated opacity. Shame on me.

But nothing is free: the reality is that anonymisation is no more effective than one of those hilarious nose-moustache-and-spectacle sets that are a staple of office parties.

I allow people to borrow books and I keep no records of the loans. Do you know, in fourteen years I have never once had a book stolen? How remarkable, that people will behave so well without being indexed. It’s not scalable, apparently; not realistic in the wider world. Above a certain threshold, it’s no longer a personal trust governed by the rules of friendship, but a tragedy of the commons, and people just steal. That’s always been the problem, I’m told: we need a better sort of human being, not a more just law. We need to change the way people think.

I teach them reading and disrespect for authority, and I consider my work well done.

Yes, I know, I am a witch and I traffic in dark magic. I warp the fragile grey matter of vulnerable infants.

‘Nothing lasts for ever.’ I lift my palms to the ceiling in a gesture which my Cultural Semiotics in Business trainer tells me could signify helplessness or honesty and generosity. ‘You swim, or you sink.’

It wasn’t that they had no sense of spirit or depth. Rather they reserved it for the truly wondrous, and for everything else they made tools.

In between tales of their mendacity, the tabloid press sprinkled references to the Spitfire Summer of 1940 when Britain stood alone, alongside hints and allegations of migrant rape. The headline splashes were surrounded by teasing portraits of the child daughters of celebrities.

The only right that cannot be debated – if you acknowledge any kind of right at all – is the one that asserts a boundary at the skin, and says that anything within its boundary is the business of that person and no one else. The right to avoid self-incrimination, the right to die, the right to live, the right to freedom from slavery, freedom of conscience and religion, of opinion, and the right not to be tortured − all these exist as subheadings of that one, simple statement: I am me and I am not yours.

Poetry is a shotgun aimed at our shared experience, hoping to hit enough of the target that we all infer a great bulk of information conveyed as implication and metaphor in an approximately similar way.

Well, so what? The place itself is a ghost now, bricked over for the African Union’s new headquarters, and good riddance – but to me it still will exist, for ever, and for all that I know it is gone I will never stop thinking of it as a thing that exists in the world. Somewhere there is always Alem Bekagn, be it in Syria or Poland or somewhere with no name or notoriety, and it will always be waiting for me.

Alas, it is a persistent folly: when eventually the Emperor was deposed for good, his reign was followed by a resurgence in the ugly shape of fatasha: soldiers of the Derg prowled and pounced, arresting, interrogating and executing anyone who was thought to be insufficiently fervent in support of the new order. Since the World Trade Center fell, these same vices have come to the so-very-modern worlds of London and Washington. How many harmless young black men have been injured or killed in modern cities in white countries this year, for the crime of exciting someone else’s racism? Too many, and it must end.