Coal

Coal

Coal

Aneurin Bevan woke up in the Lodge, in Canberra.
Julia Gillard was on the TV. Bevan
inhabited the Lodge because Julia
was not moving in until the election, and
the cellar was particularly fine. Julia
disturbed him, however: he recognised
the defensive studied affability, soul
of a Welsh seaside town built on coal, but
could not dismiss her in an epigram: voice
whose lilt was abraded to a level, which
was not his opinion of Socialism: rather that it
was ‘a biological necessity’, that ‘rabbit
warren accommodation leads to rabbit
warren minds’, when he had organized
the last sixty years of Britain’s Health
and Housing. Socialism was a mountain
range. He adored all mountains, felt delight
at Canberra’s closeness to them. Negotiate,
he wagged his orator’s finger, my dear,
of course, or perish, but all the numbers
which preserve us will burn us like dry ice.
He saw the problem was that those numbers
had already owed her the leadership, and no carbon
credit, even from Wales – the blackness
of mines like closing lungs – was ever
as powerful as that level-headed waiting.
Entitlement, he thought, is just asylum-seeking, if
the Lodge air restored mountains, like champagne.