Orders

Published by Shorts Magazine: https://madmagz.com/magazine/1954254#/page/14

July 19, London. 29°C. 
In the rattling underground carriage, air still and stale. My trousers stick to my legs.
Through the window of the car at Warren Street a homeless man looks irate, impatient, ignored.

Outside Westminster station the way is blocked: stab vests, truncheons, black and yellow - police line. Lockdown protesters. I keep my mask on crossing Parliament Square Garden in suit and tie. On the grass beside statues of Peel, Palmerston, Gandhi - brace for heckling. 
“Take off the mask ginger!”
“This is a mask-free zone!”
“Take the muzzle off!”
Faces deep red and veined, eyes bulging. Angry. Others skinny, leathery, tattooed. Strong smell of hash. An odd cross-section. Don’t linger. 

Remove from my pocket a guest invitation, a red square of card:
“The Most Honourable Order of the Bath...Arrive at the Great West Door where guides in red gowns will be positioned to direct you.”

Slink through the door. The air is cool. 
Near the West Door of Westminster Abbey the East India Company erected a monument to Major-General Stringer Lawrence:
“For Discipline Established
Fortresses Protected
Settlements Extended 
French and Indian Armies Defeated
And Peace Concluded in the Carnatic.”
A quiver of arrows lie at his feet.

On the opposite side of the Abbey to William Wilberforce a monument to Cecil Rhodes - don’t draw attention to that.

Poet’s corner - Chaucer, Keats, Auden, Eliot, Hughes, Carrol. Dylan Thomas:
“Time held me green and dying 
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

Walk alone by Caithness slate, Purbeck and Belgian marble, the vault a hundred feet above. Listen in to Knights and Dames and their guests: 
“I was trying to tell you - you had mother’s wheelchair parked on top of Steven Hawking!”
“I was briefed by their president and I can tell you - I won’t be running. Very corrupt lot.”

Out of the Abbey with the light fading. There had been scuffles with police. Roads closed. Eleven arrests. Behind my shut eyes flash the inside of the intensive care unit. Ranks of bodies ventilated and prone.

For W.B. Yeats, “The history of a nation is not in parliaments and battlefields, but in what the people say to each other on fair days and high days, and in how they farm, and quarrel, and go on pilgrimage.”

In Camden the daughter of a Pakistani General places a raspberry as a votive offering to a tree.

All manner of things are celebrated. Freedom Day.