1) Suspicion
The police have set a road block up at the end of the street, and they’re going door to door asking questions. I saw the man who just moved into number 38b looking through a gap in his living room curtains. Two nights ago they found human remains in a garbage container on Williston.
2) Anxiety
They say one in ten are the carriers of the plague. Down in the States a citizen’s group has begun marking the doors of the diseased. Sometimes they nail all the doors shut and burn the houses to the ground. Already the death toll is in the hundreds. Last night the rash appeared on my stomach. I want to go to the drug store for something to put on it, but everybody is watching all the time.
3) Tension
The man from the chamber of commerce says it’s all about competition now. We can’t afford to live in a socialist dream world anymore. The old ways are gone. It’s every man for himself now. Got to compete with the Mexicans and the Koreans. Without a proper education, there’ll no future for my kids, and all they want to do is moon about sleep until all hours. All the teachers want to do is fill their heads with nonsense, teaching them stuff they don’t need to know. Got to tighten our belts.
4) Distrust
Of course things were different before all the immigrants started to arrive. Stands to reason that you knew where you stood back then. Now there’s line ups for this, forms for that. Nobody will hire you if you have the wrong sounding name anymore. Christ knows where we’ll be in another ten years. And who knows what they’re planning behind closed doors?
5) Fear
It’s all in the Bible of course. And Nostradamus saw it coming too. The number of the beast is hidden in every bar code. One night the antichrist is born a village a million miles away. Soon there’ll be a blood red moon hanging over the end of our street, and the sound of hooves on the rooftops. I watch Peter Mansbridge on The National whenever I can’t fall asleep. Everything he says scares me, but I find his face so reassuring, the perfect knot of his tie, and that thin lipped smile of his. Even when he’s talking about death squads.