Late in life, I was looking for a new career – something steady but stimulating, with a modest salary to compensate for my stolen pension pot. The aptitude test suggested breaker boy or gandy dancer, so I donned my rags and packed my bait to live out my days in backbreaking labour for a pittance. I took a horse-drawn tram to an earlier age, rattling through a century with sad grey waifs, to a landscape cut from a Doré etching, where a slick rat in a suit lined us up in the rain. Your next job, he said with an ingratiating smile, could be in cyber, but for now we need you to die. We stood, and we stood, till we fell, one by one, then hundreds upon hundreds, thousands upon thousands. And the fortunate few were headhunted for grim souvenirs, but the rest of us remain, bone on bone like a Holbein woodcut, shadows at the back of children’s dreams, ghosts in the shining machine.
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Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor
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