This is part #4 of a freeform piece, a personal narrative and memoir that also encompasses the subject of evolutionary selection pressures.
The term NPC (non-playable character) comes from video games. The NPC has no free will; they can make no choices whereas the playable characters representing the human players can. They usually serve in a videogame for story exposition or entertainment value. They exist only in support of the story or protagonist. They themselves have no story, no agency they cannot change the script.
The term has expanded to a political term to mean people (in real life) who don’t think for themselves. Who believe everything they see on the mainstream news. Who are slaves to dogma and ideology. They don’t question the mainstream narrative.
The truth is more complex of course. People I know who would fit into this category have livelihoods that depend on supporting the prevailing progressive or “woke” mainstream narrative. Writers in Hollywood, for instance. The more prestigious the job and the rewards, the more resistant they are to challenge the narrative that pays their mortgage. There are no negative consequences for them to carry on believing what they do. As long as the cheques come in, not rocking the woke boat works very well for them. That is ecological rationality. The truth that fits with their environment and helps them maintain their evolutionary fitness.
The currency in all this is victims. Preferably ones who are dead. Victims are NPC’s.
Their individuality can be written over by ideologues in search of a supporting angle. Take, for example, Sarah Everard. This poor woman was murdered by an off duty police officer, Wayne Couzens. Sarah lived in Clapham, London, and had broken lockdown to go visit a friend. As she was walking home, Couzens, stopped her under the pretence of breaking lockdown, showed her his police ID and lured her into his car. Under such circumstances, with such a predator opportunistically using new laws (that we now know were unnecessary) which he was licenced to enforce, did not stand a chance. Little was known about Sarah as an individual. Non-the-less, the day after her body was found, feminists began using her identity as a victim to promote a false narrative about institutional misogyny in the police force. (I go into much greater detail on the feminist objectification of dead women in this essay and the wider tactics feminists use to instil fear into women here.)
Some of you may be old enough to remember Rachel Corrie who was a pro-Palestinian activist killed as she tried to stop an Israeli armoured digger destroy tunnel sites dug under civilian homes in 2003. Her story was broadcast across the world in support of the anti-Israeli cause. Like it or not, this is an example of a dead woman’s identity and memory being ethically unified after her death. Her individuality was not erased. Feminists have no such ethical boundaries.
Every women harmed or killed at the hands of a man, regardless of her character, personal preferences or political opinions, is fodder for the feminist cause. In this way, victims like Sarah Everard are victimised and objectified twice over: by their murderers and by the ideologues who find their personal tragedies useful to their cause. Friends of Sarah Everard tried to intervene, but they were ignored. The people who claimed to care, cared least.
Thomas Sowell has discussed the same tendency among Democrats, to use dead black people as “mascots”. What better way to describe George Floyd, a drug addict, petty criminal, with a history of violence towards women, reframed into a mascot of BLM. Every time I see his portrait, taken from a photograph, I can’t help but see the dead eyed look of someone who is high or intoxicated. I recognise it because I saw that look almost every day in my childhood.
Now, I left you in this series of memoirs (MacGuffin dispatched) at the moment when I was perhaps five years old and had been summoned from my hiding place under the bed by a man with such a look in his eyes, to go downstairs and submit myself to questioning in order defend the honour of my mother.
I’d been summoned because, in his estimation, I “could not lie” — an assertion he would come to regret some 45 years later when he stood in the dock of Durham Crown Court accused of numerous historical sexual crimes.
They had split up for a few weeks but (in what became a nauseating recurring event over the following decade) I woke up that morning to the pervading smell of stale alcohol and a suitcase (one that similarly would become familiar) in the hall. He was already drunk — or perhaps still drunk from the night before. Whatever sweet nothings had been shared between them the night before that had induced my mother to let him move back in had already turned sour.
As I recounted in the previous episode, he demanded of me to know if I had witnessed my mother “fucking” someone on the living room floor. I knew “fucking” was a swear word, but did not have any idea what it actually denoted. My mother had been seeing another man called Billy. A lovely man, who took me swimming and threw me up into the air like I’d seen other peoples dad’s do and made me giggle. But “fucking”? I had no idea. I glanced at my mother sitting beside Ray and saw her almost imperceptibly shake her head. I replied, “No.” Truthfully, to my limited understanding. He dismissed me in a rage and I retreated back to my bedroom, which my two sisters and I shared. They must have been at school.
The sounds of shouting, screaming, crying, things smashing, emanated up though the floor. Later, after they had stopped, I would come down stairs. My mother heard me and instructed me to put on my slippers as the whole downstairs floor was now covered in broken crockery and detritus. He’d gone to the club. The suitcase was now in my mothers bedroom. Memories of quiescence don’t stand out. There was probably a lot of tidying up.
The next notable memory, it could have been that very night or weeks later, was of me being in bed with my mother at night. I had night terrors sometimes and would sneak in for comfort if she went to bed before the club closed. She worked full time and needed to be up early every weekday morning.
My mother wasn’t an affectionate woman, at least regarding me (I’ve explained that from an evolutionary perspective in paragraph 9 here), kept me at arms length and wouldn’t answer my constant questions about my father. I was just enjoying the proximity of another human. We hear him come in (and I smell the alcohol).
We both tense up as we hear him rummaging around downstairs. We lived then in a two-up/two-down council house. No central heating and an old fashioned kitchen fire stack that also had an oven next to it. Then we heard a curse. Then a shout that, with hindsight, couldn’t be more stereotypical, “Where’s me supper?!”
My mother ignores it. “Mam,” I whisper. “Shhh!,” she replies.
He shouts the question again. This time the voice is louder and at the foot of the stairs. Stairs I’d had nightmares about already many times, of them being made of tar and of me being unable to escape from them as a red nuclear cloud erupted on the horizon and scalded my eyes.1
He then begins to ascend the stairs. My mother continues to feign sleep. I don’t know what to do. My sisters weren’t there so this may have been one of the rare school holidays that they went to stay with my paternal grandparents and I stayed home.
He’s now in the bedroom and is mumbling, slurring words and curses. He goes to my mothers side of the bed and yanks her out by her hair. Oddly, I notice that she is wearing a turquoise bikini. She hits the floor with a thump, like she is dead. She is playing dead.
She puts up no resistance as he drags her out onto the landing. I am up and I guess, screaming. I don’t remember clearly. He begins to pull her, still by her hair, down the stairs and she remains lifeless. Her feet make a sickening thump on every stair. I’m at my wits end. I grab my mothers feet and begin to pull her back. Now she comes to life.
Bewilderingly, she begins screaming at me to let go! I’m trying to save her, and she’s screaming and swearing at me! Of course, I realise now, that me pulling her back must have hurt her more as he was pulling her down. But at the time, I could not make sense of it. I’d already seen her lifeless, being dragged downstairs to God knows what. But it was not in my power to stop it happening. And my mother was screaming at me, not him.
I don’t know what I did after this. I have no memory of it. It’s likely I crawled back into her bed and sobbed hysterically, thinking he was going to kill her. Perhaps I ran out of the house, knocking on neighbours doors asking them to call the police. This happened so often I wrote a kind of snapshot ‘poem’ about it at some point:
Bare feet, running through shit, glass, snow...this was it.
Then, sometime later, police or no police, she would have come back upstairs and told me to get back into my own bed.
So it continued until I was 15. Even after that, the instruction was, “Keep your mouth shut.” I was the NPC in this narrative.
Addendum
1 This was the time of the cold-war.