The Cage



  The Cage

  Terry Morgan

  Copyright 2014 Terry Morgan

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2014 by TJM Books

  ISBN: 9781311155528

  The right of Terry Morgan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  THE CAGE

  "You've got a visitor, Professor. Says it's been a while. You might not recognise him."

  The elderly man in the black prison tee shirt, deep in concentration and staring at the flat screen on the wall of his small cell, stood up.

  "A visitor? For me?"

  "Sure. You are allowed them, you know - occasionally. Other prisoners get at least one a week - family, girlfriends, old buddies. You? Well, I know you prefer your own company but the guy says he's your grandson."

  "My grandson, eh?"

  "Did you know you had one?" The prison warden came further into the room, stared at the screen. "Sorry to interrupt you. What are you doing?"

  "Analysing South American population statistics, 2000 to 2050."

  "Dear me, Professor. Rather you than me, but I suppose it helps pass the time."

  "So what time is it?"

  "It's 14.35 on Sunday 4th May 2050, Professor, as you well know. The date and year is on your screen. In fact, it is now 14.36. The minutes are slipping by."

  The old man double-checked against his watch. "Visitor or no visitor, it's already past the time for my usual walk in the fresh air. Can I meet him outside?"

  "Sure, but I would put a jacket on if I was you. It might be May but it's cold. Walk with him around the perimeter fence if you like. But no jumping over, OK?" He smiled. "Come with me."

  It was the same circular walk that the old man had been taking every day for nearly three years and the view from the usual starting point at Block 36 was all too familiar.

  For an open prison built on the higher ground that once lay outside the original city limit the view was one that the old man had often thought was unintended by urban planners of thirty years ago. Regulations of the time were hardly likely to have required that prisoners be given a decent view from a hilltop. But, from outside Block 36, an extensive view there was, albeit looking down towards the haziness of the congested city centre and at eye level to the tops of the distant high rises.

  Over the perimeter fence was a road, a community transport stop and, today, a waiting bus plugged into a power recharging post. Beside the road, a row of older detached houses built around 2015 that had become, in the old language of the new generation of real estate agents, 'highly desirable'. Whatever their opinions about living opposite an open prison, affording a house separated from others and on a road wide enough to sport a bus stop and a grass verge was a notable achievement. For behind the detached houses was where the deeper and darker urban jungle started - the high density, low cost, box-sized houses built of brick and concrete that were the quick and cheap answer to previous housing shortages. Sited amongst the houses were the hypermarkets, schools and health centres interspersed here and there with remnants of older and bigger dwellings that were now the final homes of the sick and the elderly. Today, from within the depths of the urban jungle, the deep hum of thousands of electric vehicles and noisier fuel driven trucks, buses and trains could be heard rising into the thick air hanging above the city.

  'The Professor' usually walked alone in quiet, uninterrupted contemplation but today he had the visitor to accompany him. His grandson - twenty years old - was now, to his surprise, a good looking but sad-faced young man who stood several centimetres taller than he was. After polite shaking of hands, some words about the long time since they'd last met and the older man's suggestion that they take a slow stroll around the mile long perimeter fence, it was the younger man who broke the silence.

  "Grandfather, I have some questions."

  The old man removed his glasses, shaded his eyes from the hazy sun with his hand and let them roam further and higher than the line of houses on the road opposite. Behind them, built into the slope of what was once a long and wooded valley lay the vast housing estates and further into the distance stood the silent high rise apartments and office blocks that seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see but, in reality, stopped where the next expanse of high density, box-sized houses started. The wooded valley and the horizon that had once been green hills lived on, but only in the imagination. So he turned his back on the grey reality and looked up at his grandson.

  "I am allowed an hour. So, what are your questions?"

  "Long ago, when people were cold, hungry, sick or homeless, who did they call on for help?"

  It was, perhaps, an unexpected first question. It sounded pre-planned but it caused the older man no apparent surprise and neither was there a need for him to consider a reply.

  "Who, but themselves, was there to call upon for help? They might have prayed to their mystical God for release from the hardship but their lives were short and hard. Like all other animals, survival and reproduction was, just as it is now, their only real purpose."

  "But how could they suffer like that?"

  The old man now replaced his glasses, studied the serious face of the younger man. The second question seemed deliberately provocative.

  "I am thinking you are not visiting me out of a sense of family loyalty or because you feel I might be in need of some short lived companionship, but to provoke me into repeating the things that once got me into such serious trouble that I eventually found myself in this place."

  The seriousness of his grandson's face, changed. He smiled, nodded. "Yes, but I want to ask for your advice."

  "So why start with such searching questions?"

  "Because I want to know why you once wrote that it is necessary to suffer. I do not understand that. You were a Professor of Biology, a man who was supposed to respect all life, all living creatures."

  The old man turned and began to walk again. He was silent for a few steps. Then:

  "I am still a biologist. Life as a prisoner can never destroy that. But what makes you think I lost my respect for life? Was it something you read or heard said about me? It is precisely because I respect life that I said what I said and I wrote what I wrote."

  He sighed and then continued: "What is now so commonly defined as suffering was once the only way of life. There was no alternative. Even now, in 2050, there are still some remote societies that live as they did a thousand years ago, but, like all animals, humans are born into a constant struggle to survive. For humans, the normal, daily struggle to live has, for a century or more, been called, by our popularity-seeking politicians and religious leaders, suffering."

  The Professor wondered if that short explanation would be enough. He suspected not and he was right.

  "That is not all, grandfather. You wrote much more than that about suffering."

  "Yes, I wrote a lot about the subject and I tried to redefine it because the word had, like too many others, lost its significance through overuse and misuse. Politicians and religious leaders who, themselves, knew nothing about hardship had found that using words like suffering, poverty and destitution were useful. They rolled easily off their tongues to illustrate, with all the emotion they could muster, that daily struggle and hardship was an unjust infliction on the powerless."

  "But what better word is there?"

  "For an individual whose life is not at risk but who is finding it difficult to contribute and pay his or her way, then a far more appropriate, single word is hardship. They are struggling but they are not suffering. Struggling is a part of what it means to stay alive. Struggle and hardship was the way life was then and the way it is now. The controversy arose when I wrote that it is also the way it should
continue to be if humans are not to be left bereft of the understanding that they are just another form of transient life like birds, animals and insects. Our ancestors experienced severe hardship but they did not question it or try to rate the quality of their lives as we do now, because they saw no alternatives and had no way of comparing their own lives with the lives of others. Their world, the patch of land that was their home, was small. They knew almost nothing of what life was like beyond the next hill or the next valley. They accepted life for what it was because that is what it meant to be alive and to survive. For the last hundred years or so, ever since TV and the Internet, everyone can watch and hear about every minor or major event that is happening in every small corner of the planet in an instant. A flood in Bangladesh? You watch it unfold. An awards ceremony in Los Angeles, you see the trophies being handed out. Another human tragedy in central Africa and you feel you are amongst the long