You Say You Want a Revolution
“It’s time to do something about climate change.”
A good opening sentence, if not the most imaginative one of Saorlaith O’Connell’s impressive literary career. But she’d done well talking about Palestine and taking a stand. Now she was going to write an article for The Irish Times about toxic capitalism causing climate change, and how it could be overcome. She brushed her fringe aside with her hand – one of those winsome gestures that drove the photographers wild – and looked once again at her notes, smoothing down the pleats on her woollen skirt.
“The root of the problem is infinite growth promoted by toxic capitalism.”
It was not a commissioned piece, but the wild popularity of her novels meant she had reached sufficient eminence to be able to write opinion pieces whenever she wished, and get paid for them. And she wished to do so now. She wanted people to pay attention.
Her study looked out over the heathery slopes of Slieve Dara, Oak Mountain, though it wasn’t much of a mountain, more of a hill really, and all the oaks had long been cut down by Elizabeth I’s settlers. Saorlaith loved her remote country home, a restored cottage with an extension at the back which allowed her a panoramic view, in rain or shine.
They’d tried to stick those awful wind turbines on the slopes but she and a few others in the sparsely populated neighbourhood had banded together and got a judicial review to make sure she’d never have to look at the ugly things, or hear their endless, monotone whap-whap-whap in the background.
The open fire crackled and threatened to smoke, so she got up, put another log on it and gave it a bit of a poke. There was something so pleasing about making a fire, it made you feel like the most ancient kind of hunter-gatherer. The smoke would now go in its proper place, up the chimney and out in the raw November air. The rainy days were sometimes the nicest, she thought, though obviously not in Valencia where there had been floods. She was getting to that bit in a minute, after she mentioned the calamities in the Global South.
Allowing responsibility to fall on the individual to reduce her carbon footprint lets the global companies responsible for emissions, and rampant capitalism, off the hook. Capitalism is the true cancer.
Yes, she knew the metaphor was overdone. But it was so apt. This alien, foreign disease that had caught hold of their society. She was lucky to be apart from it now, her income coming from her words, not dependent on anything connected to corporate machinations, or grants sponsored by Big Oil.
The debating society started it all, a small voice in her head piped up. She hated that voice. The fact that ten years earlier, someone in the college debating society was well in with Huntington Publishing in London and was impressed by her bravura performance on the plinth was neither here nor there. That it was her university who was prestigious, whose debating society won all the events by default, while debaters in some ballygobackwards colleges in the west didn’t even place third – that was not important either.
What irked her was another, slyer implication in that statement – that all this polemic was just a performance to express dominance, to impress the listener. That she could just have easily turned on a dime and written a piece in defence of Shell, as an experiment. A caprice. That everything was relative and debatable. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing…
“Coffee’s up, m’dear!”
Anna, her wife, came in the doorway with a pot and mug. Freshly ground, and smelled gorgeous. The last few months she’d taken to knocking, as if Saorlaith were The Genius Who Could Not Be Disturbed, and Saorlaith had reminded her that theirs was a relationship of equals, that she never had to knock. But now she kept barging in, and Saorlaith wished she’d revert to knocking, but could never admit it. She’d lost track of her sentence now.
“Thanks a mil.” They kissed.
It wasn’t really Anna’s fault she couldn’t focus. It was surprisingly hard to write about climate change, because (a) it was depressing as fuck and (b) she kept coming up against all those individual things she was failing to do while writing about how the individual things didn’t matter. The Catholic church had missed a trick, she thought grimly as she typed and backspaced, not getting involved more in environmental issues. Forget epistles from the Pope, they needed to set up a full-on confession system where everyone who hadn’t recycled their brown bin or flown to London instead of taking the ferry could unburden themselves and buy a carbon offset like a papal indulgence. Catholic guilt, more resilient than Catholicism itself, was nagging at her like a toothache with every word she wrote.
Guilt be damned. It wasn’t her job as a writer to fix things. It was her job to observe, provoke, prompt, bear witness, lament. She wasn’t going to sully her art by getting into politics.
“Anna,” she called as her wife headed back to the main house, “could you look over this for me?”
Anna came back, pulled up a chair and grabbed the mouse from Saorlaith. “OK, let’s do this.” She was well used to these requests, having provided feedback on numberless sex scenes in past novels. That they were mostly of a heterosexual nature didn’t bother her in the slightest. “Makes the pronouns easier,” she’d commented once. “You messed that up with some of the girl-on-girl ones.”
Anna was a graphic designer and had a forensic eye for what was needed and what could be left out. Saorlaith could never give her too much these days, because she had got to the point in her career that meticulous editing was a hindrance rather than a help. If you were influential enough to avoid being edited to within an inch of your life, why put yourself through that? If she wanted to write a novel that was four hundred and fifty pages long, she fucking well would. And she didn’t want to damage their relationship by having Anna keep too close an eye on her prose.
Anna scrolled down, zooming up the text because she was too vain to get reading glasses. Then she scrolled up again and put her finger on the screen, a habit that drove Saorlaith mad. “This bit. ‘You can still choose to support the few radical left-wing parties that are trying to understand the scale of the challenge, like the Socialist People’s Party here in Ireland.’” She looked up at Saorlaith. “You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t.” Though she did.
“The Greens. We have a Green Party and they’re in government right now.” She must have seen Saorlaith’s face darken a good few shades more than she would allow any of her fictional characters to do in her books, because she added, “You have to mention them.”
“I’m not putting in the Greens. They’re a sellout and a let-down. The fact that they went into government says it all.” She put her face in a firm line that meant, “This is not to be discussed”, but Anna sailed on nevertheless. “Saorlaith, they’ve massively increased public transport for rural areas and reduced fees for train travel. There’s loads of investment in offshore wind. They’ve introduced a Deposit Return Scheme. They’ve also put more investment in the railway network than has been done in decades, as well as Bus Connects.”
“That’s a scam. Making old people get off their bus in the middle of a scumbag neighbourhood instead of being able to go across the city.”
“Not that you’ve been on a bus for some time,” Anna said slyly. Out of view at the front was their Land Rover Defender, a huge pickup with a high front, bought with Saorlaith’s last advance, which had earned out in a week.
“This isn’t about me!” Saorlaith snapped.
“Yes, it is,” Anna replied, “it’s about you being still mad about your cat.” Marx was the couple’s calico cat, Saorlaith’s before they’d moved in together.
“Well, can you blame me?”
“Saorlaith. The Greens had nothing to do with Marx’s disappearance.”
“He’s gone a month now. A week after they came around with the wetlands people and started giving out about the bloody sand martens.”
“Marx was hissing at them, Saorlaith. He was stopping them from nesting, and they’d built a sand marten wall especially. They were only asking that you don’t put him outside. Anyway, I think only one of them was a Green.”
“Cats kill birds. It’s that simple.” Saorlaith was prim. “People need to get over it.”
“And yet here you are writing about toxic capitalism causing climate change and we lack the courage to take it on? And you won’t even keep the cat indoors?” Anna started to sing: You say you want a revolution, weeeeellll you kno – owww, you need to keep your cat.
The slap Saorlaith gave Anna resounded through the extension’s concrete walls. “How dare you!” She felt it all, the warmth of Anna’s cheek, the upending of the coffee pot as Anna staggered backwards, the slow, black mud of grounds and liquid spreading along the coir mat under Saorlaith’s desk.
Anna, mortified, put her hand to her cheek and started backing away further, her eyes huge. A wave of shock at her own actions overcame Saorlaith. Yes, she loved that cat, but she loved Anna, too, didn’t she? And now her action could not be undone. It was too late. Where had it come from, that rage? One thing for sure, she could never write about it. Too shameful. And that she was even thinking about writing just now, when she’d struck Anna…what the hell was wrong with her?
“I’m going to my mum’s,” Anna said in a strangled voice. “I don’t know if I’ll be back.”
“Anna, no, please!” Saorlaith called after her, but realised the foolishness of trying to stop her. That was just more coercion, and Saorlaith did not coerce. Saorlaith was not an abuser. Not a hitter. She just loved her cat, Marx, and hated the Greens. She hated them because they kept putting up a mirror to her. Worse than the nuns, and she was young enough that the nuns were already on the decline when she was growing up. And the Greens had killed Marx. She knew it.
Anna had gone into the bedroom and Saorlaith listened to the sounds of her crying as she packed. Saorlaith desperately wanted to comfort her, but knew she couldn’t. Because Anna would never understand or forgive Saorlaith’s rage. Saorlaith barely understood it herself.
It’s because the very foundations of your argument are weak. If this weren’t a maiden speech, you’d be laughed out the door.
It had never been about Marx. It was something more ancient and spiteful, rising up from the ground and taking over her body like poison in her veins.
The tap running. Toilet flushing. The jingle of keys. Front door neatly, quietly closing. Then the virulent brightness of the car’s LED headlights molesting the peace of the darkening countryside as Anna reversed out of the driveway and drove the twisty, narrow road to Bantry, then onwards to Cork. The light sweeping, then fading. Now there was nothing in that whole empty house but Saorlaith, the humming fridge, the stained rug and the unfinished article.
Capitalism is the true cancer.
The cursor blinked under that sentence. So Saorlaith O’Connell did the only thing she could do when the world made no sense; she kept on writing. Even behind a veil of tears and shame, even with her hands shaking and with the knowledge that in a few days everything would change, that she would soon no longer be the moral arbiter of anything, she finished the article. Then hit Send. It was done.
She didn’t hear the tapping at the window. It was Marx, begging to be let in.