Postcard Perfection
Harrison Abbott
His articles had branched into the erratic before. But his writing had lost all discipline by the final incident. They had to fire him after that, even though all of them were afraid of what he might do next.
It all erupted after Peter McGraw’s filmed rant outside Westminster Palace. He spoke with such a frenzy that it gave a violent soundtrack to the murky accusations clasped against the government. His video rampaged across the media. And yet, it was only McGraw’s one use of a curse word which technically got him sacked. Which was ludicrous, considering the content pouring from his tongue. By firing McGraw, the national media had given him a new kind of power.
Because his words, after he continued to blog and preach non-fiction, with that same rollicking frenzy, adopted an international momentum. This was one man flirting with the very tenements of lofty London. And the city’s inhabitants began to mobilise in response, a grass-roots form of unrest, which had been building for generations. And not just within the capital, but across the entire British Isles, which had juggled control of four nations for centuries, and never as precariously as now.
Things were scary. And in Peter McGraw’s hard, handsome eyes, wild with the pent-up sickness of the U.K., the fear was finally being channelled somewhere. McGraw was good-looking, yes, and young, and belonged to neither left or right political wing. And had his gloves within the fickle influence of the media. He was loved by a whole mass of people, and quite hated by another. Or rather, he was not loved, so much as clung to by the distraught chunk of a population. A beacon of current affairs.
A beacon which proclaimed the phrases the national media avoided. University closures; Supermarket vegetable shortages; Fruit price pandemic; Visa fraud scandal; Nationalist pipe bombs; Homelessness explosion; Martial law in Northern Ireland; Constitutional blackout in Scotland; Industry exodus from London; Retail giants enter administration; Passport applications suspended; Acid attack crime soaring; Drone crime soaring; Football hooliganism makes a comeback; Church of England collapses.
This had all been growing for an era of which none of the bespectacled gentlemen within Whitehall could fathom. They’d been childish enough to augment the ideal of the Empire for the length of their lives, and now that civil war was making its foundations all around them, they were too ancient to see it coming.
And thus, it only took two things to finally tip London, and then Britain, into pandemonium.
One thing was the murder that Whitehall sanctioned, which had been caught live on film. The other thing was the fact that it was August, and temperatures were astronomical.
A white man from Manchester was shot just outside the House of Commons. A student, 23, who fashioned a thick black beard and who had naturally-dark skin. He was on holiday with his girlfriend, walking by the Parliament gates, when four robotically-clad policemen shot him dead. For what, the video couldn’t show, because there was no apparent reason. The ‘mistaken identity’ excuse had been used too many times before, and when they did try to use it again, the media had already been beaten to it by an individual reporter.
Peter McGraw, on the 6 o’clock news, venting his outrage over the death of this young man. Gunned down in silhouette before the postcard perfection of Westminster Palace.
That, and the temperature. It had been a solid average of 30℃ for weeks. The scientists couldn’t predict how far the heat would rise. The climate was doing unprecedented things, surpassing statistics. One would have expected full sunshine to weather the first riot. But it was raining heavily, which caused a great humidity, when the rioting began – the day after the murder of the student.
Beginning as a march to Parliament, the protesters darkened the city centre, thickening it with bodies. Tourists had vacated, and vehicle transport was rendered impossible. Then when the protestors cordoned off Westminster Bridge, across to Tower Bridge – all the famous parts of the city centre – the authorities evacuated Parliament. They sent up helicopters, where they could scout the best angles of black-billowing cars, hooded youths, megaphones, the flaming Union Jacks … Yet they couldn’t trivialise the event by solely depicting such aggression. For there were so many other people present, elderlies, children, who were simply standing around, holding their city’s stance.
An arrest warrant was issued for Peter McGraw. Guido Fawkes reincarnated 400 years later, with a successful dose of gunpowder. In a strange push for conformity, the national media repeatedly replayed McGraw’s televised rant on the dead student. They didn’t omit the swear-word, as if the old British sense of etiquette would revolt against such profanity.
And perhaps it did, because McGraw was forced to escape London. And couldn’t blog or communicate for fear of being tracked by the State. Had he partaken in the Westminster riot? Nobody knew, and yet he was being labelled as its mastermind. Was he masterminding the subsequent riots? Glasgow, Birmingham, Manchester; shopping mall shut-downs; high street bank sieges; petrol bombs in rich suburbs. This was anarchy in Great Britain; the Europeans were wide-eyed, the Americans thrilled.
Eventually, the rioting stopped. It was both quelled, and lost its own determination. The protestors grew hungry, and the police had better gear for fighting, and the sun and rain were too powerful for any of them. Simple as that. It had lasted for a fortnight. More people had died within the U.K. in the last two weeks than in the last two decades’ worth of terror attacks and police-custody-killings combined. Now that the whiff of revolution was over, Mr McGraw needed capturing. Even the demonstrators had attributed him with an iconic status. He was the public symbol of the riots.
McGraw had fled to the obscure north of Scotland. An old friend of his had a remote cottage in the highlands where he could hide. In the deep wilderness, of lochs and mountains, where McGraw could pretend to be safe for a while. Except, he’d already executed himself, and was too unselfish to become a martyr by handing himself in.
For three weeks, McGraw was quarantined inside that tiny cottage, left alone with his mind. He couldn’t follow the media, or contribute to it. Nor contact his friends save the one who’d helped to hide him. All he could do was write. Write his epitaph, his final treatise on the subject of the United Kingdom, and what he felt had happened to it across his thirty years as an eye witness.
This mammoth piece of writing was sprawled out on his laptop. And was never read by anyone, or released to the web. The police destroyed the laptop when they stormed the cottage. McGraw’s friend had betrayed him to the police, misled by the promise of a pardon should he leak McGraw’s whereabouts. The police shot the friend upon entry. McGraw, hearing the police race up to his room, dashed his wrists with a penknife.
They kicked the door in and barked orders for McGraw to raise his hands. McGraw didn’t answer. He sat in a chair by an open window, which overlooked the vast loch and mountains outside. The August air was now cool, and the evening light in the sky aquiline. His wrists were painless, and the surface of the loch completely seamless with the sky’s reflection. As if his eyes saw little need to differentiate between what was happening on the land and in the water, and what was happening within the air.
Harrison currently works as a writer in Edinburgh. He has been published in a variety of genres and mediums, the links of which can be found amongst his other writings on his blog.