A short story concerning Fed, born Frederick, a young man who considers Julian Assange to the messiah.
Fed squatted naked in his bedsit, holding a penknife, staring at the orange jumpsuit on the coat rack. He flicked open the blade and took it to the crotch, delicately using the tip to unpick a line of thread. The material flopped open. He removed the travel toothbrush and a £50 note he’d stashed in that secret, sewn-in pocket above the groin. Emergency supplies. In case of arrest or abduction. He clamped the fifty between his teeth, chucked the toothbrush on the bedspread, and leaned in closer, inspecting the suit’s knees, flipping it around and eyeing up the seat.
It was disgusting. Covered in dried slime and bird shit. It was Pighead’s fault. Fed stripped the suit off the hanger and shoved it into a Sainsbury’s bag for life. Then he took the miniature chalkboard, hung on a lanyard, off the coat rack, and considered the words he’d written on it last week:
DEAR GOVERNMENTS IF YOU DONT WANT YOUR FILTH EXPOSED STOP ACTING LIKE RATS, SIMPLE.
It was a good line. A bit of a mouthful, perhaps. The ‘SIMPLE’ only just fitted, slammed up against the edge like an intrusive afterthought. Even still. It was a good line. Fed spat on the chalkboard and smudged it clean with his thumb. He tore open the curtains, let the early light stream in, and looked down the street. Things shone. Leaves glittered. He marvelled at the world. It was a special day. It was the day after the truth had been set free.
Several hours earlier, in a court in Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, Julian Assange had pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiring to disclose U.S. national defence documents. It was the final act in a 14-year legal odyssey. 14 years years of persecution, torture and betrayal, capped off by this climactic magic trick, Julian’s coup de grâce, his victory: a plea deal that ensured he would be set free.
Yes. It was a beautiful day.
But Fed looked again at the dirty, balled-up jumpsuit. A wrinkle of unease moved across his face. Pighead. Fed snapped the penknife open-and-close, and replayed last week’s events. At the demo, Dan – whom he knew as Pighead, because he bore an uncanny likeness to the old sow at City Farm – had shoved him, and he fell into the fountain.
It had been an ordinary demo until that sudden act of violence: 5pm in the city centre. Speeches from Pighead and the ratbags at the Grassroots Action Group. A man in a trench coat stood on the edge of the crowd. Fed suspected he was a plant, an agitator-in-waiting, probably wearing an invisible earpiece, cameras in his coat buttons. Good luck to him, Fed thought. There was really nothing to agitate. That purple-haired woman read another poem about war and climate change, fattened with whole rhymes. Drones/bones. Flood/blood.
But then Pighead had done something out of the ordinary. He invited anyone to come up and speak, to express themselves in solidarity. He held out the microphone. It hung there like an orphaned exclamation point. No one wanted it, except Fed. He walked right up to Pighead, snatched the mic, and bounced up the fountain steps. His heart thrummed. Fed assessed his audience, and waited. You had to wait. You couldn’t just start speaking. You had to let an anticipation build. It was meteorological, this thing about crowds. All pressure and charge and currents. It required intuition, a nowcasting of collective temperament. When the time was right – just right – Fed spoke.
‘We have to start with the truth!’ he shouted.
The words rang out strong and clear.
‘The truth is the only way we can get anywhere!’
Someone cheered. The agitator, maybe.
‘Power is only the illusion of power!’
This, they liked. Fed felt it. Two dozen sets of ears pivoted, like little satellite dishes, to eagerly receive his transmissions.
‘Elephants, it seems, can be brought down with a string. In fact, perhaps there are no elephants…’
They loved it!
‘Let me frame this. We should celebrate censorship.’
Fed put a tonal spin on that line, a puckish slant.
‘That’s right, I said celebrate censorship.’
Jaws dropped. It was coming. The payload.
‘Because when those in power censor the truth, it shows us how weak power really is!’
Delicious! He had them in the palm of his hand.
‘One man knew all this. And they locked him up. Tortured him.’
His name needed to be spoken. Fed would speak it.
‘The revelator, Julian Assange. Champion of freedom. His persecution is the persecution of us all!’
Suddenly, Pighead’s hands were on the mic. Fed was airborne, and there was blunt pain in his tailbone. He’d slipped on the fountain steps. Had he? He’d been pushed. Yes. Pighead had pushed him. Fed sat up in the shallow puddle in the disused fountain. He was covered in slime. His arse was wet. Tears stung his eyes. Two women in mime makeup – blushed cheeks and upside-down smiles – stood at the fountain edge, looking down at him.
Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clowns. One of the women scrunched up her fists and made a mock-crying gesture. He hated them! Who wants to live in a world full of people who’d rather fool around than lift up a fallen man. But then, the other mime had offered to help? And Pighead was there, too, holding out his hand. Insincere gestures, Fed thought. Affected empathy. Plain old bullshit. He refused them all, crawled to the other side of the fountain, got up and limped home.
It had been a dark day. But that was a lifetime ago. Everything was different now, and not even Pighead could ruin it. Fed dressed in civvies – white underpants, blue jeans, a lumberjack shirt – and pocketed the note and penknife. He left the bedsit with the Sainsbury’s bag in tow. He’d drop the jumpsuit with Leo at Fresh & Pressed, get a receipt and send it to Pighead. Might hand-deliver the receipt. Demand cash money. Demand justice. An inspired idea! This is how Fed always got his ideas. They arrived fully formed, with the power of revelation, bolts of lightning directly through the skull.
Fed was born Frederick, and arrived to the world on the day the Berlin Wall fell, a synchronicity that made him feel, later in life, that his destiny was bound up with revolution. He was raised by his mother and an inconsistent cast of strange women – errant childminders, his mother’s co-workers at the nursing home, their teenage daughters. He had never known his father, who was 20 years his mother’s senior and died the year he was born. His dentures had fallen into the sea during a fishing expedition and he had drowned trying to recover them.
As a child, it became apparent that Frederick had a speech impediment that made it difficult for him to pronounce a hard ‘R’. His mother chastised him for this. She accused him of wilting his words, as though this atypical relationship with rhoticity was indicative of some inner weakness, an irrepressible softness, a propensity to go limp. Speak properly! she’d shout. Stop wilting! By the time he reached secondary school, he had decided to speak as little as possible, and dropped the ‘R’ from his name entirely, having no desire to be further rebuked for simply uttering his given name. Fed sounded better than Frederick, anyway. It was clean. Impactful. Hit hard, like a fist.
It was during Fed’s preadolescence that he first experienced a phenomenon he would come to term ‘the cloud’. The cloud was a jagged-edged, translucent, scintillating shape that appeared in random quadrants of his visual field, and disappeared if he tried to focus on it. Initially, the cloud only popped up during especially stressful moments in his life. Like when his mother lost her job and had the landline disconnected. Or when Fed tried to kiss Sammy Plymouth after chess club, and she screamed and kicked him in the shin. The cloud would appear then – flashing, veined with green and purple threads – and hang around for a few hours, causing him a considerable amount of discomfort. Then it would vanish, and his sight would once again become clear.
By the time Fed reached his twenties, however, the cloud was a regular occurrence. It was there the day he moved away from home, itchy to escape the grime and decrepitude that had taken hold throughout his mother’s long unemployment. The cloud obscured his mother’s face as she stood in the doorway, issuing a stream of lies: that Fed was abandoning her, that Fed had been ungrateful. Later, the cloud hovered over the face of his college tutors. It spiralled in the eyes of his line manager. It covered the mouth of Evil Emily at the Job Centre. These people told lies as egregious as his mother’s. That Fed had a short attention span, for example. That he was detached, aloof. No ambition. No respect for authority.
Eventually, the cloud appeared when Fed simply walked down the street. It blotted out the dumb, unthinking strangers as they went about their errands, pretending that everything was okay, convincing themselves that they were content with their humdrum existences. But Fed knew that, in those catacombs of the soul, these people were desperately confused, like him. How could they not be? Only an insane person could read the headlines and feel content. Only a liar could look at himself in the mirror and smile.
Then it happened. He was watching TV one afternoon in The King of Wessex. WikiLeaks was in the news again. But the latest development had everyone talking about it in a different way. A new cache of secret documents had been made public, and this time, they were unredacted. Newscasters obsessed over this point. This wasn’t the partial truth, not the edited, ethical, manicured, responsible truth. No. This was the whole truth. They were unequivocal in their condemnation of the leak. Talking heads barked about uncertainty, unfairness, risks to individuals, risks to national security. It was irresponsible, they said. The decision to publish had not been collaborative, they said. It was the decision of one man. One man alone. Julian.
And then Julian Assange was on the TV, speaking. Fed looked at him, and saw how the truth rushed from him. He saw how Julian spoke in revelations. When Fed watched Julian, the cloud evaporated, and he felt an overwhelming tranquillity, a feeling of correctness and satisfaction, like pressing the final piece of sky into a jigsaw puzzle. In that moment, Fed understood the cloud. It was a reaction to a world full of lies, how lies contaminated reality. How they made the world a no-man’s-land of untruth, disconnection, misdirection and isolation. The cloud was his body’s attempt to counteract this, an optic cookie-cutter that excised malicious parties and bad actors, lest they pollute him, infect him, dirty him with their lies. Julian made Fed understand, because Julian spoke in revelations, and revelations dispelled the darkness. And how appropriate, thought Fed, that the face of the truth-teller should so resemble the face of an angel – blonde, smiling, beaming with light.
The bell rang above the door to Fresh & Pressed. Gold text on the doormat read THE MUCK STOPS HERE. Fed wiped his shoes. Leo, leather-faced and hoary, looked up from his crossword, saw who it was and grunted. Fed liked Leo. He was about the only person left in the city he could truly say that about. There was an inherent honesty about him. How he’d stood there year after year, at the worn wood-topped counter, smoothed – Fed supposed – by the millions of garments he’d trafficked across its grain. Yes, Leo was honest. And he gave honest prices. Fed was beginning to feel better in his presence.
‘It’s a fine day,’ Fed said, and dropped the bag on the counter.
‘Beautiful,’ Leo replied, and immediately erupted into a coughing fit. Slime, thought Fed, in the bronchial tubes. Accumulated after decades of inhaling chemical aerosols, the dirt and skin deposits of strangers, loosened acrylic and polyester fibres. The very texture of the air, in this room, was underwritten by the supply chain’s invisible geography. Fed felt dizzy just thinking about it. Synthetics from Taiwan, China, Indonesia, wherever. All splintered and shedding into a fine powder. Microplastics. Inorganic nano-materials. In everything. In everywhere. When it rains, thought Fed, it rains endocrine disruptors. It rains carcinogens. An epidemic of cancer and infertility. The end of days. Fed felt a pain in his balls.
‘It’s hard for men like us,’ he said.
‘Men like who?’ Leo replied, and sneezed into his elbow.
‘Honest men. When they’re so determined to poison us.’
‘Who’s poisoning us?’ Leo spluttered.
‘The governments.’
Leo pried the Sainsbury’s bag open with a well-chewed biro.
‘Jumpsuit?’
‘Yes. Deep clean, please. This will be the last time. It’s going into storage. Perhaps a museum.’
Leo was unmoved.
‘Pay on collection,’ he said, and handed Fed a ticket.
‘I’d like to pay now.’ Fed produced the fifty. ‘I would like a receipt, please.’
Leo shrugged and rang it up.
‘I won’t need it cleaned again,’ Fed repeated, pausing for emphasis. ‘Because the truth has been set free.’
Fed had bought the jumpsuit not long after Julian had been taken to Belmarsh. It suggested itself to him, modelled on a headless mannequin in the window of a vintage shop off Park Row. Thick, heavy cotton. Bright orange. The real McCoy. It needed some taking in around the waist, but that was fine. Fed was nimble with a needle and thread. As a child, he’d taught himself sewing, knot-tying and cordage, navigation by stars, fire-starting – survival skills that forestalled an inarticulable fear that he would meet the same fate as his father, that he’d get caught short by some fundamental misapprehension of the elements.
Initially, Fed intended to wear the jumpsuit in order to rile up his comrades at the Grassroots Action Group. He’d learned about GAG during his fourth year in the city, from a flyer pinned to the noticeboard at Sainsbury’s. CHANGE THE CITY, CHANGE THE WORLD, the flyer said. SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER. It was an admirable mission. It was in accord with Julian’s. So Fed joined up, and began attending the group’s weekly meetings at the community centre on James Street. Folding chairs, coffee in styrofoam cups, gypsum board and bad lighting. And Pighead, of course, who chaired them. As chair, Pighead was exemplary. He ensured that all members had a chance to express themselves and be heard. He made everyone feel comfortable. And this, in turn, made the group effective. Under Pighead’s stewardship, GAG led countless direct action protests, persuaded dozens of small businesses to join divestment zones, and established five fully staffed food banks across the city. Like all swine, Pighead was highly intelligent, clean and beautiful besides.
Over the first year or so, the cloud didn’t appear when Fed attended meetings, because everybody in the group cared about Julian. Fed made a point of mentioning him each week. ‘Free the truth!’ he’d say, fist raised, when it was his turn to speak. He’d give updates on Julian’s legal case, peppering these with direct quotes, maxims and adages of Julian’s. His comrades listened. They were interested in Julian’s revelations. The war crimes, the collateral murder, the endless assaults on human rights.
But then the arguments started.
Assange was a populist, they said. Assange only cared about celebrity. He was a rapist, probably; a chauvinist, certainly. What about Assange and Trump. What about WikiLeaks and antisemitism. What about this, what about that. Endless whataboutery! These ratbags had got things mixed up. The subject was the act of revelation and its consequences. How we live under a world order that derives its power from the obliteration of truth. If GAG wanted to change the world, they had to understand that everything went back to Julian and what was happening to him. Soon enough, Pighead issued a decree: Julian Assange was off the docket. He was not on the GAG agenda. Full stop.
That’s when Fed started noticing inconsistencies in the group’s politics. All their talk about carbon footprints, when half the ratbags seemed to spend their lives flying to Marseille. Or the endless fawning over non-hierarchical organisation, when there was a very obvious hierarchy, with Pighead at the pyramid point. In fact, GAG was practically a dictatorship, given he could strike things from the docket at a whim. And the cloud came back, to shield Fed from all the filthy lies.
The jumpsuit was Fed’s protest. He wore it to weekly meetings. It was a troll, to be sure, but also an insurrectionist act, an act of solidarity – and how the ratbags loved to harp on about solidarity! This is what real solidarity looks like, thought Fed. This is a reminder of revelation. He started wearing it daily. After all, Julian didn’t get to swan around in civvies. And Fed liked the way the jumpsuit made him feel. It drew people’s attention in the street. Subliminal messaging. Conscious manifesting. People saw a man in a prison suit walking around in broad daylight, and they thought of a liberated convict, they thought of freedom. Transmit those thoughts into the universe and – who knows? Fed no longer needed GAG. The attire of the revelator was wasted on that sorry crowd. Fed’s audience would be the common people.
The chalkboard was another happy accident. He found it in his mother’s house, during a half-hearted attempt to clear it out after she passed. It was propped against the fridge. She had evidently used it as a combined grocery and to-do list. It still had her handwriting on it, when Fed discovered it. The text looked ancient, hieroglyphic. Eggs, it said. Milk. Bananas. Bread. Pay council tax. Call Freddy. Fed spat on it, wiped it clean and took it away with him. He bought some paracord from Leo, and fashioned a sturdy lanyard from which to hang the chalkboard, so that he could wear it around his neck. He cleaned the board again, then a third time, before adding his own text. He started with simple messaging. FREE ASSANGE, FREE THE TRUTH. Then he tried words that had more potency. Direct quotes: CENSORSHIP REVEALS FEAR. Pure, diamantine truths: I AM NOT A RAPIST. Prophecies: CURIOUS EYES NEVER RUN DRY. Deft interpretations of Julian’s teachings: PODESTA + HILLARY = SATAN. And something just plain cool, words of Julian’s that showed he was a real man: I ENJOY CRUSHING BASTARDS. After all, the truth was not some meek, subdued thing. The truth had muscle. The truth had spunk.
Fed sat on the bench outside Central Library, stroking the penknife in his pocket, waiting for Pighead to take his lunch break. He worked there in the Community Learning team, a position that Fed had come to believe was a front for something sinister. Surveillance. Spying on library users’ web searches, flagging anyone who searched certain terms, went sniffing down the wrong rabbit holes. And there he was. Pighead himself, tottering down the library steps, taking a fat bite from a sandwich. Fed walked toward him.
‘You owe me!’ he shouted.
Pighead looked up.
‘Hello, Fed,’ he garbled. ‘How are you?’
The cloud came, then, and obscured Pighead’s face. It was particularly intense. It rotated and cast off sparks, like a circular saw in the centre of Fed’s field of vision. Pighead swallowed and cleared his throat.
‘You’re looking sharp. That’s a nice shirt.’
Fed blushed. God, how his eyes hurt. How his head hurt.
‘Years since I’ve seen you in a shirt,’ Pighead continued.
‘Today is a special day, ’ Fed said. ‘Haven’t you heard?’
‘Yes,’ replied Pighead, looking up at the blue sky. ‘Absolutely gorgeous.’
‘That’s not what I mean.’
Pighead was pettifogging. Distracting him on purpose. The penknife felt heavy in his pocket.
‘You owe me!’ Fed repeated, and thrust the receipt at him.
‘What’s this?’
‘Cost £9.50. It’s an honest price for my jumpsuit and you should pay it. You made it dirty. You made it disgusting. It needs cleaning because it could be in a museum one day.’
Pighead blinked.
‘Don’t you know what day it is?’
‘I think so, Fed. Are you hungry?’
Fed was hungry.
‘Here’s an idea. Let’s have lunch together and take in the sun. You can share my sandwich. Do you like cheese and pickle? It’s very good. There’s a touch of mayo, too. We can sit together on the grass in the sun and eat.’
Deceptions. Distractions. Dissimulation.
‘And we can talk about the jumpsuit,’ Pighead went on, getting close to Fed. ‘I’d like to hear your side of the story, Fed. I’d like to understand where you’re coming from. I’ve got plenty of time and it’s a gorgeous day.’
Pighead’s outstretched hand pierced through the cloud and hovered there, shimmering. OK, thought Fed. He’d play along. He’d go through the motions, pretend he’d been fooled. Let Pighead think he had the inside track, for now, and bide his time. Fed took his hand. When they touched, there was a static shock, and the cloud dispersed – evaporated away, just like that. Pighead’s face was there, smiling at him, teeth from ear to ear. A fantastic smile. Magnificent. A smile that could convince you of anything. It must be true what they say, Fed thought, as Dan led him to the green. Every tooth in a man’s head is more valuable than a diamond.
