My short story Nine Dioptres has been published in IZ Digital, joining Sunless (April 2023) and a story in 2021 in the print magazine, Interzone.
Nine Dioptres is the story of a family of bargees moored along the the River Thames, at Tilbury Enterprise Zone. A visitor asks Aminah to smuggle her south across the river. But the bargees shun modern electronic devices, and there's something strange about the visitor that makes Aminah hesitate to help her.
"The town to the north, Tilbury, had died in Aminah’s grandmother’s day, razed, ploughed and planted with Poppier. Her grandmother had told her of the souk on the north bank, where thousands of young women, hardly covered at all, haggled for fine leatherwork and embroidery. In those days, before the border was enforced, the young people crossed the bridges in cars and set up street stalls selling knock-off iPhones and MacBooks, outlawed today as instruments of Satan. Aminah’s mother, Jyutsna Begum, still lived with her grandmother on the water under Lizabeth Bridge. Their cutter’s engine had, of course, been sold for scrap many years before.
Background to the story
For those interested in the genesis of the story: Even today, London has enterprise zones between Canvey Island and Dagenham, and the government is eager to develop the zones as Freeports, or Free Trade Zones, in which excise taxes are not applicable until goods are moved out of the zone and into the UK proper. Although inside the UK physically, the zones are outside it for certain purposes.
In the story, the people living in the freeports, including on the river, cannot enter London without a passport. The sea level has risen, causing some population changes in the area (and a lot of new marshland) but a second, much larger Thames Barrier at Southend keeps floods from London proper.
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