The Office for Unjust Obstruction

by Ben Coppin

Ministry of Permits. This had to be the right place. The Ministry of Weather had absolved itself of responsibility, even after William had told them about the fog.

The woman across the desk was saying something, but William wasn’t following. Her voice had become the elevator music to the disarray of his thoughts. He shook his head, more to clear it than to express a negative, but it got the woman’s attention.

“You disagree?” she asked curtly.

“No, but look,” he said, grasping for the point. “Don’t I already have a permit? I thought I had one.”

“Do you? Well that would be different.” She smiled for the first time, but her eyes were vacant. “Permit number?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, rubbing the top of his head. “Why would I know that?”

“Do you have the permit with you?”

He breathed in deeply and let out a saw-toothed breath. “No. Can you help me find it?”

Her expression didn’t change much; the corners of her mouth turned slightly upwards, but her eyes remained unoccupied. “Where did you see it last?”

“No,” he said, stretching out his fingers, the marks they’d left on his palms were throbbing. “I don’t mean I want you to help me find where I left it. I mean, can you look it up in your systems and find the number. I just want to get back to my work, my art.”

“When did you obtain your permit?”

He smiled, disbelieving. “I have no idea. Some time in the spring, probably.”

“I need a date. I can’t look it up otherwise.”

“You could use my name: Heritage. William Heritage.”

Her finger started tapping an irregular beat on the desk. Tap... Tap... Tap...

“Well?” he asked. “Can you look my name up? On a computer?”

But there was no computer in evidence, just piles of papers and brown folders that looked like they’d fallen from heaven and happened to land on the desk.

“We don’t use computers in Government. The PM doesn’t like them.”

He’d known that. Something about vulnerability to foreign hackers.

“So how do you look things up?”

The tapping slowed, stopped, then restarted again at a faster pace: Tap, tap, tap, tap.

“We have a very efficient filing system. If you can tell me the date of your permit, I can find it for you.”

He blinked away the first prick of tears.

“It was just after Christmas,” he said, desperately. “No, my birthday. Yes, just after my birthday. Can you use that?”

Tap-tap, tap-tap.

His breath was coming out of his nose in tiny bursts. He felt he hadn’t breathed inwards for hours. “March,” he said, finally. “The twelfth. Probably.”

Tap-tap-tap-tap. Her fingers stopped tapping. Without taking her eyes off him, she stood.

“I’ll just be a minute,” she said, her voice sounding like the automated announcements on the Underground.

As he waited, he stood and looked out of the window. He could see half of London below the clear blue sky. But he couldn’t find the department store where his latest work was on display. Or should be, if it weren’t for that damned fog.

She came back, and the expression on her face had changed. Her eyebrows were raised and her lips were separated a fraction of an inch.

“I found it,” she said, clearly surprised.

“You found it?” he said, sitting back on the chair.

“Graffiti permit, William Heritage.”

He reached out his hand to take it.

“I can’t give it to you,” she said, her expression back to its ersatz smile. “I need to re-file it after this conversation.”

“Can I get a copy?”

“No, sorry. Risk of fraud.”

“How could I commit fraud by having a copy of my own permit? That makes no sense.”

“I know,” she said, shaking her head slightly, “but I don’t make the rules.” She glanced to her left as she said this.

Following her eyes, William saw a small wooden sign hanging from a rough brown string. “I don’t make the rules,” it said.

“Look,” he said, leaning towards her, “I have a permit for graffiti, right? But someone’s interfering, getting in the way. I need to know what you’re... what the government is going to do about it, about the fog.”

“Fog?”

“I paint my paintings, my message, it’s an important message. It’s why I got the permit. I have something to say and people need to see it. I paint, and then this fog covers it up. And if you get close enough to see it, it’s not my work any more. Not really. My work is deep, multi-layered, and it speaks to people. But in the fog, it’s nothing. It’s just paint. The fog changes my paintings. I need it to stop.”

Tap... Tap... Tap.

“And you’re sure someone’s doing this? It’s not just weather?”

“The weather people said it was nothing to do with them.”

The tapping stopped. The woman leant back in her chair. Her mouth small, her eyes shut, she nodded. “You want justice,” the woman said, soothingly.

“I do,” he said, although he could sense a trap.

“You want the Justice Department,” she said, her chair falling forward with a clack. She let her elbows rest on the desk. “You need the Justice Department. It’s not far. Jamie will see you out.”

Jamie, the lanky kid that had shown him in, was behind him, helping him up from his chair. “This way, sir,” he was saying.

The woman behind the desk shuffled through papers, her fingers moving like the thin metal arms of a typewriter.

And before William had time to react, he was outside, on the street, and the door to the Ministry was shutting behind him.

He walked towards the Underground station. The walls of the buildings he passed were splattered with propaganda posters.

The Internet lasts forever. It is dangerous to post.
Paper never leaks. Use paper.
You don’t matter. You never did.

What? He looked again. It was a wordless advertisement for milk. Did it change?

As he approached the entrance to the Underground, he was aware of a shape, something black in his peripheral vision. It had been there since he left the Ministry of Permits, and now that he was thinking about it, he remembered that it had been there before that too. He stopped at a newspaper stand, picked up a newspaper, pretended to read it.

The dark shape stopped, too, crouched as if to tie a shoelace.

He looked over the top of the newspaper. It was a woman, dressed in a long black coat and a black beret. He couldn’t see her feet, but judging from the rest of her outfit it seemed unlikely that her shoes had laces. He dropped the newspaper and ran to the Underground. He took three steps at a time and at the bottom he threw himself to the left, flattened against the wall. People rolled in, but the woman in black seemed to have given up the chase.

* * *

The Ministry of Justice looked like a cathedral, with its arches and spires.

As he walked towards it, something flickered behind him. He couldn’t stop himself turning his head. There she was: the woman in black, walking past him as if he didn’t exist.

“Who are you?” he asked, but it came out as a whisper. He cleared his throat and called, “Why are you following me?”

A few people altered their path to give him a wider berth, but otherwise the question had no effect. He watched her back until she disappeared into the gloom at the end of the street. He tightened his jaw and made his way into the building.

Immediately inside the door was a huge board, like the ones in department stores, listing all the offices of the Ministry:

The Office for Marital Strife.
The Bureau of Old Debts.
The Department of Petty Revenge.

And it looked like the whole of floor five was given over to online disputes.

He eventually found the department he needed: The Office for Unjust Obstruction. Floor three, West Wing, Room 100.

The building had no lifts, just stairs and corridors and endless lines of doors.

Inside room 100 he found himself at the back of a long queue. Standing on tip-toes, he could see the full extent of the enormous room and the queue that covered the space like a completed game of Snake.

The queue moved more quickly than he expected, and before too long he was near the front.

Click-clack-click. A set of black shoes walked confidently to take their place behind William in the queue. He held his breath. He didn’t dare to look, but he knew who owned those shoes. Was she really this brazen? She must know she had revealed herself. How could she not?

“Next!”

A woman was standing just a foot or two in front of him, looking expectantly at him.

“Permit?” she said.

“What?”

“Do you have a permit?”

Did he?

“Yes?” he said. It seemed to satisfy her.

“Follow me,” she said.

He followed her down a narrow corridor and through a door marked “Brown.”

“Brown,” said the man behind the desk, his hand reached out towards William. “Pleased to meet you. Do have a seat. How can I help? It’s what I’m here for, really, to help. To help ensure that the people of this fine city get the justice they need. So what is it I can do for you? Hmm?”

William shook his hand, but remained standing. He was struggling to remember how Brown could help him. Something to do with his art. The fog. Right.

He sat down. “It’s a fog,” he began. “No, let me start again.”

“Of course,” Brown said, leaning back in his chair and smiling encouragingly. “Take your time.”

“I’m an artist. A graffiti artist.”

“Ah,” Brown said, closing his eyes in rapture. “I do love graffiti. It really has livened up our city since it was legalised. But do go on, please.”

“My work is so important,” William began, and Brown nodded enthusiastically. “People need to see it, to hear its message, to understand what I have to say. But every time I paint something, this fog descends.”

“You get angry?” Brown asked. “Or lose concentration?”

“No,” William said, although both of those things were true. “No, I mean a literal fog. It envelops my work, hides it. My message can’t get out. I need whoever is doing this to stop. I need justice, and that’s why I came to you, Mister Brown.”

Brown nodded. “You did the right thing,” he said, “in coming to me. Now, let’s start with your permit. Could you show it to me?”

Brown held out his hand, flat above the desk, palm upwards. William looked at it, despair welling.

“I went to the Ministry,” he said.

“Permits?” Brown asked, a note of distaste in his voice.

“Yes, and they had my permit, but wouldn’t let me take it. Not even a copy.”

“Oh, I know them. I see them,” Brown said, withdrawing his hand, and lowering his eyebrows.

“They think permits are at the root of our constitution,” he went on, “that we built our land on permission. But we didn’t. Do you know what we built our land upon, Mister Heritage?”

“Ju-Justice?” William stammered.

Brown leapt to his feet and clapped his hands, making William jump. “Indeed, Mister Heritage! Justice. Justice is king. And justice is what you did not obtain at the so-called Ministry for so-called Permits. But justice is what you shall receive in this office. Ministry of Justice in name, and also in attitude. Do you understand me?”

Brown’s face was turning red, and his voice had gone up in volume and pitch. He took a few deep breaths and started again. “Let’s not worry about the permit, William. A quick call to a friend of mine. That’s all it should take.”

He picked up the telephone from his desk and entered a long series of numbers.

“Hello? Yes. Brown. Get me Smith, will you? Quickly. It’s important.” He winked at William and waited.

“Hello? Smith? Yes. Strange case. William Heritage. Graffiti permit.” He almost spat this last word.

“Yes. Fog. Yes. Yes. Apparently so.”

William was straining to follow the side of the conversation he could hear but it was telling him nothing.

“Oh? Oh yes? Well isn’t that interesting? Righto.”

Brown hung up and smiled at William. “Well, now, what did I tell you? We soon got to the bottom of that. My friend Smith, you see, has the best filing system in the city. Country, probably. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but he uses a computer.” He whispered the last word.

“What did he find?” William asked.

“He found you, for a start. William Heritage, citizen number 9,192,631,770. And he found your graffiti permit. And there, right next to the permit, was a big black mark. An obliteration order. You know what that is?”

It sounded somewhat familiar, but William couldn’t bring it to mind. Tap... Tap... Tap...

“Oh, don’t mind that,” Brown said, noticing William’s reaction to the sound. “It’s just Miss Lively. She taps when she’s thinking. That obliteration order, it’s a permit to obliterate.”

“So... So someone has...”

“Yes, I’m afraid, Mister Heritage, William, that the obliteration of your work is entirely legal and above board.”

“So who was it?” William asked. “Who did this to me?”

“Oh, did I not already say? It was you, William. Your permit, your obliteration order. I wonder how you didn’t know it yourself.”

Tap... Tap... Tap...

“It can’t have been me,” William said, his throat tightening. “It must be a mistake.”

“No mistake,” Brown said, shaking his head kindly. “Smith checked twice: same citizen number.”

“Can I just cancel it? It’s my request. I can just cancel it.”

“You can lodge an appeal, of course, with the Appeals Department, but that could take years; it takes decades in some cases. And even then success is a nebulous thing. Hard to pin down.”

William’s face felt hot. “You said you’d help me. You said you’d make sure I got justice. Where’s my justice?”

“But Mister Heritage, you must see: justice against whom? Yourself? What would that even mean? I’m afraid we really have done everything we can here. Miss Lively!”

The door opened. William glanced at the young woman who had entered. He started. She was no longer wearing her black coat, but he knew it was her.

“You,” he said to her, standing up. “You’ve done this. Why are you persecuting me?”

The woman frowned, confused. She tilted her head slightly.

“Miss Lively, would you please show Mister Heritage out.”

She took William’s arm gently but with a solid grip. “Mister Heritage, let me show you out.”

Outside on the cobbled street, William sank to his haunches and wept. He lifted his face to the sky. He cried out, and as he did so, a fog descended.

Copyright © 2022 by Ben Coppin