It was the kind of place where something dearly wished to happen but never could. Patience had left the town, even though its pain of waiting for tourists, its grief at having its parks unused, its loneliness of having its high street gradually deserted had not. If the town could dream, then it dreamed desperately, and its scarred, potholed roads, whether Roman or Victorian originally, appeared to lie in anticipation of a sterner kind of people than those who drove blithely over them then.

But what was it that the town wanted? Perhaps it looked upon its denizens as a disappointed ancient ghost, who, having nourished their ancestors with her woods, her coal reserves, her fish and rivers, her corn and flour, found out too late that all of this effort had simply been to accomplish the generation of idiots before her. In comparison to the brisk miners, the able goldsmiths, the riotous bawds, the hilarious warriors, the able foresters, and the feeling and unopinionated intellectuals of previous ages, there was nothing particularly of note about the young people of the town in those days, except that a few of them cared extremely about politics and not one had any more interest than their parents in local affairs if they did not directly concern them. In another age, a scribe might have written, or a bard might have sung, that the people of Bothelford worried for others as a vain man worries for a reflection of himself. But since those ages had long passed away, nobody said anything, or nothing worth remembering anyway. In a pub, perhaps, a young man would feel out an idea and try to express it to another, his intellectual mentor, and a thought would emerge organically as of old. Yet never would it concern itself with Bothelford, with the destiny of the town, but with an infinite number of trifling foreign affairs. Or they would talk of money, of men and women—of men and women as general concepts, whilst the speakers met neither at all regularly.

In Bothelford, conversation, even good conversation, was like trying to paint faces onto ghosts. Whatever hauntings had gone on previously in St. Michael’s church (and there had been plenty), which sat at the centre of the town, were hardly as disturbing as the spectres that most people had become to each other. In fact, the visit of Marine Emery—a phantom apparently alluded to by the Venerable Bede, although that is just hearsay—was noted in the folklore of the town as a great positive. Not so with the population of the living. Marine Emery would bless those who came to St. Michael’s on the ninth of September, once every three years. This numerical significance—of nine-nine-three—was disputed by the few very, very old people who remained in the town. Some held, as former generations had informed them, that nine-nine-three referred to the number of wings, arms, and faces of a specific angel, perhaps even St. Michael himself. Yet when asked how this calculation had been made, most would be unable to answer. ‘That is how the story went…’ was what they’d usually say.

Marine Emery, who manifested with a red halo behind her head, was not prepared to answer in more detail. All she would do, according to the ninety-three-year-olds who remembered her, was walk down the aisle of St. Michael’s, bearing a kind of hollow candle that was made of dust, and fade into the woods at the exit. Reportedly, her face had no eyebrows. Her eyes were a bright, yet somehow sorrowful, reptilian green. She would be wearing a long, white, floor-length gown. Under her breath, she would say the phrase: ‘I knoo what it ‘tis tha happens…’ in a strong regional dialect, but nothing more. It was a kind of ghostly nonsense speak, unlike the all-too-accurate, all-too-discerning talk amongst the people of Bothelford.

Oddly enough, however, those dead and gradually dying people familiar with Marine Emery, or just her story, uniformly agreed that her one nonsense phrase referred to something coming, rather than something that had occurred in the past when she was alive. Given that when someone encountered Marine Emery at St. Michael’s, they were always rewarded with tremendous luck—winning the lottery, in one recorded case, and getting married in another—the elders generally assumed that whatever ‘happening’ she mentioned in her refrain would be of the same nature. To them, she was a local goddess of mercy. To young people, whether fifty or forty, whether thirty or ten, she was not anything. She was the muttering of crazy old fogies whose prejudices were as primitive as the soil and as worthy of neglect. Even more so was the ‘elf’, the wayfarer who, the most ridiculous of the ridiculous said, prophesied her coming, wearing a shawl of bark and bringing ‘faery gifts’ to those in need. Neither young nor old believed in that, not even those who still lived on their very own homegrown food and were more than strange.

The young ate imported food. They did not know how to grow a thing, and if they ever did, then they filmed it to illustrate they were an exception to the rule. Many times, when Bothelford thought and dreamed, if it dreamed, it dreamt of farms. It recalled the screams of pigs in its slaughterhouses, it remembered the culling of badgers, the cruel pageantry of foxhunts in its woods. Bothelford had been most itself in the production of cooked meats, from the calf slain by its master with a blade to the cutting up of its loins for barons and merchants, to the feeding of peasant families on its remains, to the emptying of plates as second hymns to God were said over the grace of that evening.

The trade routes established by the empire made inadequate the palate of the area; even potatoes—originally an American crop—were not given birth to by the land of Bothelford. Progress took its course. The almost imaginary world of foreign farms and distant goods and many thousands of aeroplanes and ships and production lines became so massive that most who lived off of them in Bothelford generally regarded the food that they consumed as simply blossoming into existence, much in the same way that a young boy imagines babies to emerge of their own accord from the Earth. In these years, all the intimacy which grew from desperation was lost.

Bothelford was a polytechnic converted into a university, an understaffed hospital, a barren, ruined mine, a half-polluted river, and a Dark Age church. But it was first a set of farms. First, it was grain, maize, fertile soil, and potentially an Earth goddess. About seventy years ago, an archaeologist had investigated the area for engravings of a ‘Demeter equivalent goddess’ on the side of the mine’s entrance. This entrance existed perhaps long before the development of dynamite—the cave or shrine of a divinity that money, hunger, and hope saw fit to destroy during the Victorian era. After it was blown up, the sealed iron and coal within became available. Bothelford doubled in size.

The elder Jeremiah, the only still-living man in the town of English descent with such an irrefutably Old Testament name, came up with the theory at the age of ninety-seven that there had lived a Pagan community in the town once. He said it must have confronted the Great Heathen Army (known colloquially as the Vikings), and yet had not, could not join them in an alliance against Anglo-Saxon Christianity. Such were their religious differences, these villagers of what became Bothelford, that they would rather establish their own stone castles, their own temple—probably the wrecked ceremonial cave—before lifting their own hammers and sharpening their own axes against the North to face the Viking scourge. Yet if Bothelford dreamed of the cult of its forebears, if it yelled in its stones for the awakening of strange carvings older than Christ and Rome, the town did so rarely at the beginning of the twenty-first century. For there were so few worth speaking to. Or perhaps it dreamed of the old cult constantly, thinking all the time of the forgotten past.

Of ‘the castle’, which might not have been a castle at all, there remained a grass blob, or artificial hillock, and some large stones with markings that were more likely the scratches produced by the blade of a disobedient shepherd than runes of a priest. By the river, which the town faced sneeringly from its hill, there had been discovered more recently—in the last twenty years—gravestones recording a primordial tongue. So the burial site had come first. The church had come second. Bothelford, like so many other places, was blessed by the religion of Christ while the roots of its oldest trees trembled with the darkness of a different faith. Whether in a site like this, Marine Emery, as a living woman, once lived and spoke was anyone’s guess. What is the Frisian or even Old East Norse equivalent of ‘I know what it is that happens…’?

All this was remembered in the never forgetting ground of Bothelford. And even if every elder died and every youth forgot, someday the folk instinct of that place would come back. Independent bands would invent weird instruments inspired by the wind blowing through the rows of poplars around the castle. Artists would seek to root themselves among the stones before painting images of bees. The grass verges would call to the footsteps of babes. Even drunk teenagers visited the broken alcove at the front of the mine once in a generation. And to them, sometimes, even the mine called though its furnaces had long lain asleep, ‘What would it mean to really work hard?’

All this could be so again, though there were but fragments of ruins, if only someone could hear and listen to the world under the town, the seeds from which its now extensive, decaying branches, mutilated with glass and concrete, first grew. But most didn’t care.

Did the forgetting begin in the imperial era? This was when Bothelford’s best and boldest men were drawn off to distant parts of the British Empire to decimate but also to civilise whole other tribes of people that did not even come into the imagination of the town. Yet the old times passed, and in time, Bothelford was no longer Bothelford. It became a collection of useful men that the new imperium of Britain would find useful for itself. Many days, Bothelford dreamed, if it could dream, of being the feeder fish on the side of a great white shark rather than an entity—an older Pagan entity—in its own right. Even great white sharks, it had only heard of through the whisperings of Victorian schoolboys with printed textbooks, with diagrams that put the old Medieval etchings of sharks, those strange sea beasts, into a kind of professional shame. The old drawings, the old songs, the whispers of the Biblical Leviathan, and more ancient sea serpents had no register of fact anymore next to these neat informative pictures of jaws and their diameters, these numbers, this diligent inorganic employment of words. Embarrassed perhaps at the stupid old stories that had little to no use anyway and did not deserve to be taught, between the middle of the nineteenth and the twentieth century, the children of Bothelford forgot most of the old tales, even the tales of England and Britain. They did not teach them when they themselves grew up. Marine Emery remained because, believe it or not, she kept coming back, appearing in the church with supernatural regularity.

After much agricultural chaos, much leakage of its population to North America and Canada—India, once in a while—Bothelford was punished for reaping the rewards of empire, for the massive stretch of the British lion’s claws into part of every continent on the planet. The mechanisation of farming, the decline of infant mortality, the desolation of Medieval Feudalism, the availability of better gowns and clothes, and more bread for even poor women—all this depended on the transformation of men into cells in the body of the lion. No more were they men in their own right, citizens and locals of Bothelford, but weapons to be wielded in the name of the imperial crown if only her majesty or the oligarchy behind her so demanded. Hence war eventually. Hence international war, the Great War, and the transformation of so many cells of the lion into dead men. And then another war.

In the newer sections of the graveyard around St. Michael’s, barely one hundred years old, were the white war graves of at least five hundred men, the others cremated and memorialised by writing on a wall. So similar were these graves, so uniform, that those who first mourned them had the impression that the dead they represented were not even human beings in death. They had become parts of an enormous legion of machines. They had driven machines and fought machines, and they had psychologically become machines inside them, in their brains. They were meant to wage war and die in war, not to fight chivalrously for their own, for Bothelford. Certainly, they had suffered as men, and those who returned home with wounds not seen since the sacking of the Vikings continued to suffer as men. But they had gone to war as automata and were buried as such. Upon one grave, due to a design flaw, the name and date had already faded from its white surface, so it came to resemble something chrome and shining from a far distant future of seamless industrial floors. To some extent or another, all of the graves had this strange sheen.

Therefore, after so much agony, and the exhaustion of so much money in maintaining the empire, and in funding the enterprises of former parts of the empire—most of all the emergent, powerful Americans—Bothelford, like all of Britain, forgot what the purpose was of maintaining the empire to begin with. Bit by bit, the lion released its claws from its former possessions now that London, the beast’s own heart, was so war-wounded that it struggled to justify its own existence, let alone holdings in Delhi, Kingston, or Islamabad. When Bothelford dreamed in that period, only ‘Kingston’ sounded familiar to it, and yet if you could enter that dream and ask it about ‘Jamaica’, it would have no idea what you were talking about.

As this era of conflict ended, whatever cells remained in the British imperial lion, now nothing more than a tattered, barely sentient head, were absorbed into the body of the American eagle. The eagle dined heartily on Europe with the Russian bear, just as it dined heartily on the debts of Bothelford. Soon enough, its wings would swell so obesely over the surface of the cratered Earth that it would begin to show signs of dropping under its own weight. But these are international concerns. And what concerned Bothelford then was itself. For now—in the aftermath of the Second World War—it had been opened to the men of Delhi, Kingston, and Islamabad who, under the British Nationality Act of 1948, could come to Bothelford, though they did not come from Bothelford or know the ways of Bothelford, but those of Delhi, Kingston, and Islamabad. These men, formerly conquered by the most terrifying British, now saw the opportunity to take their place in the dying heart, the heart that was as welcoming as it was soft.

So many had heard hymns of London in their Nigerian, Indian, and Pakistani schools. So much work had the missionaries done to export Anglo-Christianity to the rest of the world that now the rest of the world felt magnetised towards Britain, even after the empire was done with. Perhaps, in many cases, it was because the empire was done with that they wanted to come—and after their era of civilisation and submission, they, the colonised, the crucified, wanted revenge on London, and England, and Britain, and Bothelford, according to their own ways. Much of their hatred began as unconscious and gradually became conscious. Yet some of it was from the start self-aware, disciplined, and smiling about what was to come.

Whatever residues there were in these former colonial populations who now came to colonise London, and eventually, Bothelford, some were always terrible. The races and the cultures that had produced the Thuggee murder cult, the Haitian Revolution, Sati, and the crazed warrior women who gutted with knives many a British soldier, this deluge who had looked on the pale, blonde wife of the Viceroy and thirsted after her, then they saw fit to obtain the only opportunity they would ever have of possessing her descendants in revenge. And in the dark of the night, the first night one of these rapes was perpetuated against the Master’s children, they felt it was revenge. They had been allowed into England because England truly believed in Christian Liberalism, which posited that all men, all the wretched of the Earth, deserve the same prosperity regardless of their qualities and virtues. But they had brought themselves, their heaving masses, for revenge, amongst other things. Revenge, like the Pagans of Bothelford once wrought, was long forgotten by the English. And so, eventually, in the rubble of Bradford, in the stabbed signs of Peckham, in what would become of Bothelford, it was just revenge, their revenge. And more than revenge; there were things that were done to the wives and daughters of England that their husbands and sons would not want to revenge, could not revenge, because they could not imagine them.

As imperial success had furnished such ‘revenge’, so it brought Bothelford the ingenuity of inventions from the world over and the despair they carried with them.

The first television was stored in the front of a shop. Many came to watch. There were three networks during the Second World War, though all were one in the hubbub of their message (fight it!). A bard of the town, Robert Brennam, long since forgotten, had written of the TV press that they ‘saw fit to inform in place of telling the truth’. The truth, which you might infer, he supposed came from the stirring up of folklore, and in making appeals to archaic wood carvings and hand-drawn maps of the world. For most, his words were as redundant as the idea that the Earth was at the centre of the universe, that the stars told a story, and that, in place of their own increasingly ironic Protestantism, time was not linearly awaiting the arrival of Christ. No, he supposed, time was cyclical! He went to his grave unmourned.

Meanwhile, the TV seemed to have been invented and celebrated everywhere at once. Large vans delivered one, then another, then another, under the cover of night, unseen, unknown. They were brought in like prisoners, like terrorist cells. On what day were they activated? Where was the big switch that the mastermind pressed? They were established over the course of weeks, not months, as an ordinary part of life. Their hypnotism justified their own dominion, rewrote past history in order to include them. Brains were unwound. There was the world before the screens came in, and then there was the world electrified. It was turned on. Screens appeared in the living rooms of houses. Ghost voices chattered through cold nights and warm nights. At first, you might have assumed the population of the town had doubled. There was much more noise. But then, as pubs emptied, as men ceased their ball games beyond puberty, as women did not leave their houses to visit friends, to mind other children, but defaulted from life, paralysed before the light, complaining ever increasingly to their own children about getting ‘square eyes’, you would have assumed it had halved. That half had died.

How did this happen? The ghosts on the screens first overwhelmed the town, migrating into its offices and bars relentlessly. Then they began to possess the bodies of the living, diminishing their own number in turn. The lights went out of their eyes. Drowsy faces, like the limp bodies of fish, pressed up against pub tables for the match of the day. The phones came later. But by then, men were already more excited on such occasions than by their own wives. Some dreamed that each TV had limbs and arms of its own, could love, could hate, could instruct such love and hatred from its viewers that it might as well do so! Well then, was TV more capable of hate or love? In its ecstatic glow, few ever wondered.

Those that felt the majority of people were ugly, that it would not be worth looking the checkout lady in the eye, who did not want to engage in the tiresomeness of human relationships, who were born oglers, who could love—in a deep enough sadness—the image of a woman before a real one, those that sought pleasure, those who had never received the encouragement necessary to make them want to try, to make them want to be fathers or mothers, having none worthy of their own, even in the fifties, they willed this global gift into existence. And it replaced most things. The colonial genius of the English and of the Americans, their children, turned on itself. The mind was laid bare. Its several regions, its imaginary lands, its strange territories, its sexual paraphilias, all were stimulated. Most were mined for great electric joys.

The outgrowth of Feminism, of women seeing that labour no longer relied on any real separation of the sexes, or at least believing that to be so, entwined in this device. The shameful, embarrassing, undesirable male majority became subject to recordings, to rumours, to more gossip than their forefathers had ever known. This fear, inseminated in the youth of the twenty-first century since the inception of puberty, led the image of the female to triumph in the mind of the male over the real thing. The male phantom of money and the female phantom of ideology made love with each other during this period like scarcely any young men or women of Bothelford.

There was also a third power involved: denial. For it was always easier for the sorry, pale victims of these spirits to turn to their phones, into consuming and making porn, than ever to acknowledge their displacement and the ongoing colonisation of Bothelford by the families of Delhi, Kingston, and Islamabad. Few even allowed themselves to imagine that the black mother with three babies who passed by their window, followed by an older white mother with only one, might mean something overwhelmingly significant. As for the war memorial in the centre of Bothelford, a tall limestone design with a Celtic cross shooting up from it, none disturbed the Arab who sat there and smoked and poured Red Bull on the names of the men, the dates of their deaths. None even thought of him. Minds glimpsed him and deleted him, having learned how to neglect the real world for the phone.

During the fifties and sixties, when many of the first interracial rapes entered Britain shortly after the docking of Windrush, and Notting Hill burst with fury as a number of black men were found pimping out pale-faced, drugged women, the papers, then the television, then the schools worked tirelessly to install the contrary attitude. They put the issue on ice, forever. They installed a mechanism of surrender in Britain, in England, in Bothelford—in the children of each, so that, despite everything that occurred around them, and everything that the foreign, colonising populations would do, especially to women, the natives would lie inert. Sometimes they would actually say sorry.

Here, the lessons that the descendants of the British imperialists had learned from controlling and subduing distant nations were used to subjugate those that did not have the money to keep moving to vanishingly whiter towns. Whether or not a foreign power, or an ancient hatred of the English, was involved in this process was unknown to most. And yet the English Christian Liberals (now more Liberal than Christian) were consumed by the foreign logic of colonial revenge. In truth, they were so eaten up by it that they would lead invading armies against their own, and plan and volunteer to serve in ‘refugee’ schemes whilst smiling over the dilapidation of towns filled with vile Brexiteers more closely related to them than any other group of people on Earth. Certainly, the hatred of middle-class upstarts for the humble origins of their forebears served the effacement of England wonderfully when many of them began to funnel into government during the seventies and eighties.

And did they have a plan, a plan to do all of this? If not a plan, there was a tendency, a demonic impulse, that might as well have been one. For it was decided, without being stated, that the political class would trade one group of subject working people for another, and in enriching themselves by lowering the cost of labour, feel that they were saving the world from the dreaded white race. Therefore, ‘revenge’ continued uninterrupted for three generations, and nobody in power, lest they call forth the ghost of Adolf Hitler or the unsightly implication of being working class (and so unavoidably aware of race), ever said a word. How many thousands of white children were raped, beaten, and in some cases mutilated beyond recognition, or impregnated by cackling foreign men, was never investigated. For peace and the dreams of Liberals, it stayed unknown.

Yet Bothelford had nightmares. When, for example, Bothelford dreamed of Natalie McPherson, bound to a table by four cousins from Hyderabad, and used as a device for their enjoyment, to the extent that her eyes were bruised, blackened, and she was so unable to process what had happened to her that her parents discovered her hanging body when she was only thirteen, then it dreamed madly and it screamed in its sleep and it tried to scratch out one of its own eyes, or a young man who lived in it did. Slowly, painfully, Bothelford was going insane. Bothelford was itself being shredded and torn up and uprooted, and though nobody spoke of it, let alone anyone in London—a place already mad—the truth was felt, deeply, agonisingly, like a stomach ulcer inside every Englishman, an open wound in the hearts of fathers and sons. Young white men looked at each other in pubs, once in a while, and knew what had happened somewhere in Bothelford. They also knew, or felt, that they were occupied, as the colonies of Britain had once been occupied, to which the only appropriate response would be revolt. For if the logic of revenge held that Pakistan could ravage England’s daughters for their being conquered, then there would come a time when the colonial rebellion of the English would be justified, for they, for ‘we’, would be a subject population. And on the first appearance of the spectre of Marine Emery in St. Michael’s in that decade, in the year 2005, the man of a hundred years who confronted her with his grandson saw the red halo that famously hovered behind her, dripping with blood.

The seeds of future ethnic violence had been sewn, though few could describe their gestation, who and where they had come from, why they were beginning to sprout and grow, flower redly like knife wounds in the sides of flannel shirts. Yet despite being aware of Bothelford’s deterioration more than most, or perhaps because she could already picture to herself the new dawn that ridiculously waited on the other side of it all, the waitress Mary Phillips, descended from the local singer Theresa, decided that she would have a child instead of going to university. Her parents protested that this was not what they wished, not good for her future due to her potential, and yet she knew what she wanted. She married a man named John Grundon. The couple would divorce after she found him in bed with another woman one drunken night. But when she felt her child kick within her, Mary could not say she regretted her decision.

In Bothelford, late in the year 2007, Jack Grundon was born. He had a long nose, brown hair, and blue eyes. He stared in wonder at everything before him like many a child. His first memory, recalled by him even as an old man, formed two years later when he stood in the shower, stared through the Tudor windows in his mother’s house into her bright green garden, and saw the sun play along the sprayed water near to his eyes.

It might have been a glorious childhood and a wonderful life, but little did he know what had already happened, and, because of that, what was going to happen to him.