Swithun Cooper

Extract from The Interruption

Silja stood alone in the meeting hall – the room everyone hated but her, the room they could not do without – and took a ragged angry breath. The cold air stung her throat in a good way. Her pulse was still up but at least she was no longer trembling. She peered through the wintry dark at the broken windows letting in the rain, and the high, vaulted ceiling where the ugly English pigeons hid, shitting, pecking, and shuffling filth from their wings. This is why everyone hates it in here, she thought. But right now it was what she needed. Her argument with Kim had left her hot and brittle, lost in rage, as if she might weep and the weeping would split her limbs. She needed to be alone, to calm down, to take on a task she could actually achieve.

The argument had been unwinnable for both of them. Here at least her work would have results. The meeting began at seven. It was six. The hall now needed light, warmth, clearing. She moved to the wall where the generators stood. When they’d moved in Kim had offered to rewire the meter, but Silja said no. It’s a disgusting habit, she’d declared, when squatters abdicate from the system but still want to feed off its benefits. It’s ideologically impure. We have rejected the old world and we will live with our constructed alternatives! Now she resented her principles. In each room sat a stubborn little generator, donated by Kim’s friends from HomoCamp, loaded with extension cords and portable heaters and standing lamps that shorted their fuses. Kneeling, she picked at the cables in the dark, checked the plugs, ran her hands down the generator’s edge. Slapping its face with the flat of her palm – expecting nothing, more to vent her fury – she

heard a buried hum begin. The string of lights beside her flashed and glowed. Delight ran through her and she felt the worst of her anger fade. No string of lights could reach around the whole room. Turning on her knees she looked at the rest of the hall: it was mostly still in shadow, but the space around her glowed and grew warm. She had a sudden image of herself as mysterious and inviting: a figure in a jewelled cave discovered by explorers who’d crawled through mud. There would be perhaps fifteen people at the meeting. They could gather in this small space, be held in light. Behind her the doors came cautiously open. She knew it was Kim. Who else, once Silja had stormed in here, knew to give her time to herself but also knew it was worth trying again? And who else but Silja knew this about Kim? Most people found Silja tunnel-visioned and rigid – she talked too much of their goals, their actions. How does it help us? How does it help others? Often she felt to herself like a small boat, struggling towards a distant land; she wanted only what helped her reach that shore. Kim alone seemed to see this as passion, a desire to find a better life for everyone. She knew that Silja was always open to ideas as long as she felt they would achieve this. But tonight she did not feel it would achieve anything. Kim wanted to upend the whole evening. She was waiting by the door: Silja could feel her. She was sucking her tongue, no doubt, as she chose her words. Before she could speak, Silja rose and walked away. Putting space and silence between them would, she hoped, tell Kim the debate was over. “Sil. Please. It was only a request.” Silja cast an eye across the meeting hall floor. Casually strewn around were blankets, cushions and coats: whatever the group could gather to form the nest-like beds they made here every night. “A request?” she said, refusing to look at Kim. “A request can be turned down. But you keep on.” She stalked about, snatching up pillows and sheets and bundling them in her arms. First thing each morning they were meant to clear the floors, but someone had slipped, got lazy, and not been called on it. And now, Silja thought,

we’ve all slipped. Look at this. She knew it was the fight with Kim infecting her: two hours ago she’d hardly cared, but now she felt wretched about the mess of the room, and about the thought of the house rules being ignored. I’ll put it on the agenda for tonight, she decided; then she remembered the agenda was why she and Kim were fighting. She heard Kim approaching, carefully, quietly, gathering rugs and sheets as she came. “Eight new names,” Silja said. “Eight. Why do they get to be Lainie’s eight?” Kim’s hand went to her forearm; they faced each other. With it, Silja felt the usual sensations that came whenever she was with Kim: as if something was plummeting wildly inside her, throat to groin, while its counterweight raced upward. It happened when she woke with her each morning, feeling the warmth of her at night; it happened during meals and meetings. She was two inches taller than Silja – it felt like five – and her rough, curling hair was always held back in a rubber band. Her pale face seemed to hang just in front of her body. She had a constant grace and gravitas: wherever she stood, she seemed to have grown from the ground, naturally occurring. Nothing naturally occurred to Silja except Kim. “I don’t – I do not care about Lainie,” Silja said. “I care that after all our work” – she gestured to the room, meaning the whole school – “you want, now, for this to be about her.” “Not everything.” “Tonight.” And tonight was important. They had been squatting here since the summer – quietly at first, just the two of them, but then with confidence and rising numbers. She and Kim had searched out empty mills, abandoned factories and stores, until they found this rotting Edwardian schoolhouse. It was tall and cracked and smelled of stagnant water, but walking around it that first night Silja had known this was the place she wanted to live. Here she could build a new world in the shell of the old. She’d been travelling, by then, for seven years – countries, communities, generous families, always in search of a life

that was not a sickness. The poisoned gruel of tradition and ingrained ideas, spoon-fed to her until they became her bones. She had lost too many years to the silent shaping laws of government authority, the people around her who took these in and repeated them without even noticing. Silja wanted a life with others, but she wanted them to make it together, on their own terms. She wanted to build and re-build as they went. She wanted to learn to hold everyone equal within her, no single person with dominion over another, and she wanted everything done through agreement. In the schoolhouse, she and Kim could begin this work. The poison the world had fed them – the diseased old ways of thinking, being, relating – she would sweat out with hard work and support. Then, in November, Lainie arrived. Lainie, with her flip chart and thin lips, thumping a closed fist against a cupped palm, blinking like a shrew behind oval lenses. Your fucking hippy garbage isn’t going to fly, she’d said without speaking. There are real people, being really oppressed, being killed, deported and killed. Lainie’s wife had been deported. Silja had said that in the schoolhouse no single person controlled another – it was built on the notion that everyone was of equal importance. So, what Lainie wanted was as fair as what Silja wanted. There was nothing she could do. Welcome, she’d said. Yes, we too want a life free of those laws. And now each day there were plans, discussions, long conversations about the nearest detention centre and how they were going to infiltrate it. Every day Silja felt that poison returning, the blood-thinning world that had so nearly killed her. It ran up through her organs into her brain. And now Kim was on her side, for this meeting at least.