Gone
This story is dedicated to all the heroes who put their liberty on the line for Palestine, people imprisoned and attacked for refusing to accept the manufacture of genocide in Britain. Free them all.
Yvette Hartstone could not believe that they were still in her garden. Well, not technically her garden – or so she had been told, for her garden began at the gates – but at the gates. The enemy were literally at the gates! Surely that had to count as obstructing something. The police had sympathised but no, technically, what the protesters were doing was legal. The fire brigade and ambulances had been no help either. Some public services they are, she muttered to herself. She’d even tried Sally’s husband, Phillip, the PCC for the whole region and apparently his hands were tied too. Something about one of his forces having to pay out masses of compensation to a young supporter of the group who’d been injured in custody last year. Funny the things you can get away with as a child, Yvette thought.
Last week Jonathan had gone out with his Browning and shouted at them for what felt like hours and they’d still continued chanting and waving their flags. How many of them had even been to Palestine? One of Jonathan’s grandparents had been an officer there during the mandate era and Yvette could not forget the stories he’d told. ‘How long would all of you placard-wielding, paint-throwing, pink-haired virtue-signalling time-wasters last in Palestine’, she’d spat at them through her car window one morning. They’d laughed and started banging the side of the car. Animals, the lot of them. The video they’d taken of Jonathan with his gun was still doing the rounds online somewhere. Somehow it had even ended up in The Guardian. Thank God for Melissa’s connections at The Times who’d been able to run a story on the thugs at the gates and how their family had rallied together despite the constant harassment. She’d received many supportive messages since and one group of men with England flags had even offered them round-the-clock security, although Yvette had politely declined given their visit had resulted in more less-than-ideal attention from the press. She’d made the mistake of reading the Facebook comments under some of the articles and had felt sick to her stomach. Some of the things these people were saying about her husband – people who claimed to be about protecting people – made her stomach turn. ‘He’ll burn for eternity’.
She’d initially thought that these people would grow out of it, once they understood a little bit about how the world works – but it seemed to Yvette that there was something deeply unfixable about these people and that this was why they were all still in her garden. Pensioners, Muslims, Jews, university students, loud and dirty-looking trade unionists. People who will never appreciate what this country has done for them. What Jonny does for them. And now she’d heard that a group of them had graffitied one of her husband’s jets. No respect for anything. She wished she knew their addresses. Jonny could buy every one of their houses and then they wouldn’t be laughing. She thought for a moment about what she might do to these protesters and their flags and their student rooms and parents’ houses – but remembered that she had more immediate problems. The enemy is at the gates.
He’d said it was for emergencies only, but he must have known that she was probably going to try it out. He trusted her, after all. She was one of his most trusted advisors, and he hers. In sickness and in health, in business and in marriage. Go carefully, he’d said. Rich coming from Mr Waves-his-shotgun-in-protesters’-faces. Yvette knew how to be tactful, though. It’s why she was only going to try it out on the most annoying ones. Send a message to the rest of them. Some lines you don’t cross. You can’t key my Range Rover either, stupid prats.
She’d kept it by the window, and she’d waited over a day since he flew out. When he got back she had her story polished and ready-to-go. They kept getting closer and closer, Johnny. And the plane, I- I- I- was just so angry about the plane. She knew they must have some kind of rota going, because there were new faces – not that you could see many of them – every day. Unlucky day to be camping on someone else’s property, Yvette thought, taking a long sip from her wine glass and a deep breath out. If they were so happy to break the rules, it was up to citizens of conscience to make rules which were less breakable. To create a few more consequences for people who seemed so keen to break into buildings, deface vehicles or harass and libel ordinary people as ‘war criminals’. How much have these violent antisemites cost our family? In money, reputation, never mind all of the time that they’d lost as a family since this all started. Johnny has barely seen the children this year. Yvette bent down and read the instructions that Johnny had left on a post-it on the device one final time. ‘4. Point and shoot’. Apparently the range was long enough.
She waited for it to warm up and sipped her wine, finishing the glass. It’s a Tuesday afternoon and this is how they’re choosing to spend their time: protesting someone’s house. Just so jobless, on top of everything else. She thought about all of the people who seemed to prioritise waving the flag of some country on the other side of the world when people in this country are queuing for foodbanks and eating rubbish. Disgusting, it really is, she thought as she walked to the wine rack while the machine was warming up. The more she thought about it, the angrier and more riled up she became. There was a beeping in the living room. Excellent. Yvette was ready.
‘Excuse me!’ She knew that they could hear her from the window. ‘Excuse me!’
Down below, the protesters started jeering at her, then moved seamlessly into one of the chants that she hated the most. ‘From the river to the sea-’
She was thinking of something witty to say but one of them had already started filming. She needed to act quickly. She lifted the tip of the device onto the window-ledge and pressed the ‘shoot’ button with her thumb. Then – nothing.
She’d thought that there would at least be a green ray or a red laser but no. The chanting stopped. No more tents or marquees, no megaphones, no placards, no music, no people: gone. Yvette felt a surprising disappointment in her chest. Well, that was easy. She poured herself another glass of wine.
She took the children for dinner that night, although she wasn’t in an especially cheery mood. She kept looking around in case any of them jumped out at her and this was all just another part of their psychological terror plan to ruin the family. Dinner passed slowly and Lawrence was on his phone the whole time. I wish you wouldn’t do that, darling. She’d managed to get a few details out of them both about school but neither of them had asked about her day. She’d thought about bringing it up herself but couldn’t really see the conversation going anywhere. I made twenty-five of the horrible people who’ve been harassing us disappear without even a puff of smoke. She’d texted Jonathan but he hadn’t replied. She didn’t know what the time difference between England and India was, but guessed that he’d probably be out with the Americans whatever time it was. She smiled at the empty gates as they opened when they came home, and she lay for hours listening to the quiet of the night. All those protesters had stolen from her the silence of nature. There was no shouting or chanting in the natural world. The house creaked its deep, low groan of satisfaction. They were so lucky to live somewhere with so much history. You could hear it in the tenor of its voice. A home with gravitas. Its gentle noises felt oddly pained and sharp that night. Even in a week, they managed to make me forget the sound of my own home. She strained to feel a deep sense of peace, but settled for satisfaction of a job well done.
Yvette woke with a jolt after a long and shallow sleep and ran to the window. It was just after seven. She hadn’t thought about this possibility. A whole new hateful horde at my door. She could see one of them on the phone, the others were talking hurriedly amongst themselves. They hadn’t spotted her upstairs so she pulled the curtain back gently and ran to the living room. She switched on the device and put some toast on for the children while she was waiting, drumming her fingers on the kitchen island. She hated that her children might wake up to the disgusting shouting of the protesters. As a child, there is nothing worse than hearing such hate. She knew the other children must talk. The parents certainly did, although any gossip was reported back to her by the more loyal parents before it could spread too far. People know what he does. People with any decency or class respect it, too. How anyone could claim that defense is anything but a good thing was beyond Yvette. It’s the bedrock of peace. The foundations of all the freedoms that all these people take for granted. She parted the living room blinds just wide enough to see the protesters and aimed the machine.
She smiled when her children came downstairs to a clean house and an empty garden.
That afternoon Yvette bought six metal posts and a roll of barrier tape to fence off the area where the camp had been. She wondered whether anyone who drove past – or, worse, more protesters – would ask where the tents had gone, so she printed and laminated a notice saying that the area was under an injunction granted by the High Court that morning. Not a huge stretch, given Johnny had been granted one at the factory last month. The airfield had been an oversight. She hoped that faced with the vanishing of forty of their comrades, the protesters would have more pressing issues than questioning the legality of her injunction.
She waited for the six o’clock news and found nothing on any of the main channels. Taking Lawrence to his karate class she saw nobody agitating in the streets or outside the police station, just a couple of men shouting at each other near the bank and a woman banging her head against a wall by the leisure centre. Things were finally going back to normal. She could focus on getting her house in order: Jonathan had promised her a new kitchen last year, and she’d longed to convert the cellar into something useful since they’d moved in. Given she’d sorted out the issue of the picket on their lawn, Jonathan definitely owed her something.
She waited in the car and scrolled on Instagram, searching for any sign of the disappeared activists. Nothing – good. The group had posted that morning about her husband’s business in India, connecting it to Israeli technology and “US imperialism”. These idiots see conspiracy everywhere. Just get on with your lives and stop begging for attention. Stopped at a traffic light on the way home, a woman started banging on Yvette’s car window and asking for change. She hated it when they came up to you. Instinctively she pretended to rummage in her coat pocket, but her fingers brushed a cold metal corner. Shit. She thought she’d taken it out of her pocket. Her hand found its way around the device and held it to her body. Her cheeks flushed with something that, had he been looking, might have scared her son. The woman backed away from the car and Yvette sped off, though the light had not yet turned. A car jammed its horn as she sped over the junction. She felt strangely nervous. There was a new power at her fingertips and nobody knew it. Not the woman at the window, not her son on his phone in the back of the car, not the people calling for her family’s blood.
‘Have you seen this, mum?’ Lawrence cut short her train of thought.
‘I can’t see, honey, I’m driving.’
‘I thought you said they’d gone –’
This got her attention. ‘What?’ She turned and watched a short video of a group of five or six people pitching two tents on her lawn.
‘The caption says “Hartstone Industries: merchants of death. Jonathan Hartstone’s company made £2.7 billion from tax-payer funded drones sold to Israeli Occupation Forces and the US army in the last year alone. These drones have been used to kill thousands of men, women and children in Palestine, Yemen, Iran –”’
‘That’s enough, Lawrence, I don’t need to hear everything. It’s disgusting the way they smear your father.’
‘They’ve said they’re not going to give us any peace until “their death factories are dismantled”.’
‘It’s blatant harassment, and the police are letting it happen. They’ve come through for this family before, though, and they’ll back us up this time too. In the meantime, you just leave it to your mother to sort this out.’
Lawrence had gone back to scrolling on his phone, and barely had time to look up to locate the source of the loud beeping in the front. He couldn’t see anything. The gates of the drive opened and Yvette parked in front of the house. ‘Where are they, mum?’
‘Who?’
‘The Palestine people.’
‘Must’ve packed up. Come for the photo-op and left. It’s all performance, remember that, Lawrence, and a pathetic one at that.’
The wind rattled her windows that night – the beams of the bedroom felt like they bent with each gust. Yvette reread her husband’s most recent text and tried to sleep. You did well my love. Home Friday not Thursday now. Deals to be done. Kiss the kids for me. J x
She’d brought the device up with her and its standby light cut through the blue light on her phone. It was years ago now that he’d first brought it up, at dinner one night after she’d put Lawrence to bed, and she’d written it off as one of these dorky things he would get lost in and try to explain to her at length. He’s really made it happen. This could change the world, she thought. In the right hands. She texted her friends and invited them for drinks on Thursday night. In the meantime, now that it was fully charged, she decided to guard the device with her life. Plenty of people would kill for a thing like this.
She’d known that she only had so long before the families of the missing began to talk to each other. The organisation must’ve put them in touch. There was a protest outside the police station three days after the first few had disappeared. Half the town showed up. ‘Pressure on police as more activists go missing’ was the headline the following day. She’d done her best to keep it out of the nationals but it still found its way onto page 20 of The Times and somewhere near the back of The Telegraph. She was grateful that The Telegraph included her as a ‘worried local resident’ fearing ‘attention-seeking activists going underground to sow more terror and violence across our community’. Sadly no other outlet had picked up her angle. Nevermind, if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s damage control.
It started with the prying local journalist – related, apparently, to one of the disappeared – who decided to come up to the house. He must’ve snuck in while the gate was still closing to snoop around; I couldn’t have known who he was. She had aimed and fired from the upstairs bathroom. Elizabeth opened the door to an empty drive. ‘Did anyone else hear the doorbell?’
Then it was the man who came up to her in the street stinking of whisky and pulling at her sleeve. That had been too public for her liking. The Deliveroo driver who’d been so rude on the phone. Gone with his bike by the gates. The couple in the ‘Queers for Palestine’ matching t-shirts that she’d walked past in the woods. That one too, she reflected that evening, had likely been rash. ‘You know what I mean though, don’t you? My brother was gay and he fought for this country. People are just trying to use anything to excuse terrorism and violent disorder?’
The others nodded in agreement. Melissa was the one to suggest that she needed more of a plan. ‘This device needs to be keeping us safe out there’, she gestured loosely to the patio and koi pond. ‘Not just in here.’
More nodding. ‘I have been thinking this, too’.
‘Phillip says that he’s expecting riots’, Sally chimed in. ‘His men could probably use something like this device.’
‘They do already have tasers’, said Paula, although Yvette ignored her. ‘But I’m sure they could use all the help they can get.’
‘Can I tell Phillip about this device?’
‘Johnny says that he’s already well aware’, Yvette tried a knowing nod but Sally wasn’t looking. She took a long sip of wine. ‘They’ve been trialling them out with different forces for a little while. Between us, of course.’
‘That does scare me a little’, Melissa was not usually this cautious. ‘What if it falls into the wrong hands?’
‘I was worried about this too, but then I remembered that my husband is the manufacturer.’
Everyone summoned a giggle.
Melisa continued: ‘And the government? Where are they in all this?’
‘Our biggest customer’, Yvette was growing confident now, feeling her cheeks flush with wine. ‘They’re more than happy now that one of the most persistent thorns in their side has just vanished into thin air. What does Pete say, Paula?’
‘Apparently they’re all thrilled – secretly, of course – Pete’s come home whistling the last few days. The welfare bill is paused while all of this is heating up. I tell you what, I would love it if we could use this device to get rid of some of the constituents who are whinging in his inbox.’
‘We can still think bigger’, said Sally, who was not one to be outdone. ‘Enemies of the state. If we were threatened by our enemies we could just -’ she paused to press an imaginary giant button, ‘ – poof. Disappear their leaders. We could say “he should not exist”, and then poof: he wouldn’t.’
They all laughed and the walls and floors shook. ‘What was that?’
‘This weather is not making the house happy’, said Yvette, moving to refill her glass from the cabinet. ‘Comes with the territory. Built too big for its own good. Clueless tradesmen don’t help either. If I could have a word with the man who said he’d sorted the roof, I would -’ she made a poof gesture with her hands ‘- repay him for his shoddy efforts.’ The windows rattled. ‘More wine, anyone?’
The families held a press conference on the third day of Jonathan’s return. More people than Yvette would have liked had showed up to film it. She watched it live-streamed on her phone, a man in a suit and keffiyeh looking directly at the cameras.
‘... and their fight is our fight. The state is afraid. Its brutality knows no bounds. Our family, our comrades knew that, that’s why they were on the streets every day, exposing the violence, the complicity, the active participation of our government in genocide, in Palestine, and the world over. Our comrades decommissioned the factories of death, they revealed the nodes which sustain the imperial war machine and they shut – them – down. For good. So we’re here tonight to say that not only will we find our mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters, and we will not stop their struggle. If you’re profiting from genocide, from apartheid, from ethnic cleansing, we will shut down your factory, we will expose your lies, and, don’t doubt it, you - will – know – no – peace. If you think that you can disappear a movement, then you really don’t know anything at all. No politicians, no courtroom, no prison, no amount of repression and murder can stand between this global movement and our lib–’
She turned off her phone. Fantastic. More of them coming to her front door. Let’s see how they fare.
Yvette was ready to fight. There were six police officers stationed around their house. One of them was having a beer with Jonathan on the patio. She felt the house shudder. In the distance she could hear shouting.
‘Aren’t you worried, Jonny?’
‘Why would I be worried?’ He smiled at her as if to say, go back inside. She smiled back, did as he instructed and poured herself a glass of wine. The last bottle on the rack, gone. She hated going to the cellar. What’s got into me? Trembling and ashamed of this sudden fear, she wondered how many were marching towards her right now. The house was a good three miles outside of the town, the village surrounding it sleepy and empty. So what do I have to worry about? The crackle of a police radio. Through the window she watched the man who’d been talking to her husband strolling down to the gate. Safe hands. She glanced towards the device which was charging by the window.
The night crept in slowly. The winds picked up. The sound of distant drums. Shouting. The house began its usual howl. The police at the end of her drive were just standing around chatting. ‘What are they doing?’ She turned away from the window. Jonathan was sat reading in bed.
‘Just a precaution, really, sweetie.’
‘They were coming here though, weren’t they? That’s why I sent the children to their grandparents’.’
‘Oh they won’t have made it past the city limits. They’ll riot and rage and they’ll be thrown in cells for the night if they’re lucky. If they’re unlucky…’ his eyes looked towards the device.
‘What about the march?’
‘Check the news, honey.’
She opened her phone for the first time in hours. A text from Melissa: Just seen the news. Are you okay? She frantically opened her news app and saw the headline. ‘Dozens feared missing in night of clashes and riots.’ She scrolled to the only video in the article. The caption read “A livestream of the protest ended abruptly as the march approached a police line protecting access to residential neighbourhoods”. ‘Oh my god, Jon.’
‘It worked.’
‘All of them?’
‘As many as they needed to. Pete texted about 40 minutes ago. They responded exactly as expected. It’s a battle on the streets now. We can easily find a way to spin it.’
‘This article is saying that the protesters were shouting violent and antisemitic slogans.’
‘Oh good work BBC! They’re way ahead of me.’
Yvette felt a creeping chill up her back. A gust of wind at the window. A chill from the empty house below. Another quiet night won with a bit of hard work. She was proud of her husband, though, and happy to have him home. Where has he been? Why did he leave us with those animals for nearly a week? The thoughts came thick and fast. She was good at pretending not to panic. ‘I hate when you’re away. Will you find someone to sort out the cellar this week please, Jonny. I’m certain that’s where the cold is coming from.’
The next few days passed slowly, each of them longer than the last. The house was making its nightly groans. She sank into the sofa next to her husband who was watching the football highlights with the sound off. The boilerman had been, the windowman had given her a quote for the windows, the plumber for the dodgy downstairs bathroom, and she’d even managed to get someone to sort the lock which had broken on the cellar door. She watched the moving mouths on the TV and sipped her wine. The device was charging on the coffee table next to Lawrence’s Xbox controller. She realised that they were both staring at it. ‘Can I ask you one more thing about the device?’
‘Of course, fire away’, Jonathan turned to face her. ‘Can I just say: it feels so liberating to be able to talk to you about everything we’ve been working on and not have to be cautious or cryptic. I don’t mean to gush, but I haven’t found a better time to tell you this. I’ve always known that we could trust each other, but the last week, the last week Yvette, I- I- I’ve never appreciated you more.’
She found herself blushing. She was not feeling soppy. The question had been playing on her mind. ‘Where do they go, Jonny, when we make them disappear?’ She lowered her voice. ‘Does the device actually kill them?’
‘Good question. A very complicated one.’
‘How can killing be complicated?’
‘Well, if killing was uncomplicated, a man in my position would be in serious trouble’, he chuckled. ‘With anything I make, you could argue that the person pressing the button is the one actually doing the killing. So it wasn’t the device that disappeared all those people. It was technically you.’
‘So they are dead?’
‘Depends on how you define it –’
‘I’m not a politician, Jonny. Be straight with me, for once!’
Jonny’s smile dropped. ‘You really want to know?’
‘Of course I do. Aren’t we supposed to be a team?’
‘Yes honey, but does it really matter to you what happens to them? They’re gone. We can get on with our lives. That’s always been the main thing. That’s why I do what I do, all of it, so that we can get on with this beautiful life of ours.’
Yvette wasn’t sure how to respond, she was growing nervous and she could feel a draught pushing its way through the cracks by the cellar door. ‘Do you feel like the device is too good to be true? I worry that they’ll just come back. I- I’ve been having the most horrible dreams.’
‘Okay, but you’re not going to believe me’. Jonathan sipped his wine and leant back on the arm of the sofa. ‘A few years ago, while we were playing with some of our more explosive material, one of my researchers managed to locate the dead –’
‘Wait, which dead?’
‘The dead. The place where people go after they die.’
‘What?’
‘None of us believed it at first, obviously. We still don’t know where it is. We know where we can access it, but we’ve removed any traces of that location. All we know is that it’s very dark and very far away and not a place that you can come back from. Weeping and gnashing of teeth is right. After that, it was years of figuring out a way to send people directly into that place. Trying to cut out the middleman of the killing mechanism itself. That’s what we managed to do with the device. Point and shoot. Poof.’
‘So it teleports them.’
‘I suppose so. It’s not like transporting people between two points on a map. The best way I can describe it is like cutting a small hole in the map and letting things fall onto another map entirely.’
There was a long pause. She thought of at least ten different things to say, hundreds more questions, but decided to go with her gut instinct. ‘I enjoyed cutting that hole’, she said at last. ‘They were so annoying. Coming to our house.’
‘Our lives get a lot easier from now on’, he put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Aren’t I lucky, to be married to someone as understanding as you.’ His hand was cold on her shoulder. ‘I hope you don’t mind, a couple of the Israelis are coming for dinner next Saturday. They’re looking at investing in another factory. I told them that we have got some newly optimistic investors and a favourable wind in our political sails.’
Yvette finished her glass. ‘Lovely. I can make that ragu that you like.’ Jonathan had turned to watch the TV again.
Nights are peaceful now, she thought as she made her way down the steps into the cellar, leaving the door open behind her. No more intrusions of noise and nastiness. No more Palestine. Foreign flags all over my driveway. She turned on her phone torch and looked around for the wine racks. Jonny must’ve done some rearranging. It had always smelt slightly rank down here; tonight it was edging on putrid. Smells like someone died down here. No wine anywhere to be found. Yvette refused to go upstairs empty-handed. Why doesn't he tell me when he moves things around?
She shuffled along each of the cellar walls and found a cardboard box which he must’ve unloaded the wine from. She kept looking. There was a cupboard at the far end that she couldn’t remember seeing before. The damp was beginning to overwhelm her. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck. She couldn’t remember feeling more disgusted in her life, although her memory was prone to these bouts of hyperbole. She edged closer to the door and placed one hand on the dusty handle. Why would he put them in there? It was heavier than she thought and she managed to prise it open with both hands. The door made an almighty CREEAAAK. The light from her phone torch barely penetrated the dark. How hard can it possibly be to find where we keep the wine in this house? The walls of the cellar shuddered and there was a low rumble which rose and surrounded her. By the light of her phone Yvette watched the darkness shaking in front of her. She tried to shut the door as quickly as she could but found that it would not close. She thought again, why did he put them in here? She suddenly remembered all the times she pressed the button. The protesters. The homeless men. The Deliveroo rider. She thought of the police vanishing a whole march. The ground shook. Yvette was frozen to her spot. Thousands of them. Not in my house. Still waving their flags. Not in here. Still flesh and bone and furious. In my house. The world was giving way. She felt the floor tear. I thought we were safe. That you were go–
Upstairs, Jonathan Hartstone was wondering when his wife was coming back to top up his drink.
On the edge of the village, near a familiar factory, a group of black-clad figures crouched in silence awaiting the arrival of their comrades. They would not be long.