The Notalloweds and The Pusherbackers

The Notalloweds and the Pusherbackers

We woke up one day and everything had changed. The rules had changed. The world had changed. The landscape had even changed. Suddenly our electrified fences and security gates and alarm systems were no longer enough to keep the danger out. Somehow an enemy, stealthier than we could have imagined, was able to find its way not through an open window but under the door, beyond the mask under our skin and into our very soul. It even defied the gallons of soap and sanitiser so virulent it was.

It wasn’t a virus, the one that could be debated about and put under a microscope and vaccinated against. It came in the form of something way more subtle and stealthy. It attached itself to our value system and our world view and challenged us to take our social temperature daily; to strip away the mask we’d worn for years as we started giving account of who we were and where we’d come from. 

It wasn’t a colour. 

It wasn’t a race. 

It wasn’t a religion.

It was a belief system so deeply ingrained that none of us knew we believed it until we were asked to give account. 

“You’re not allowed!” I heard the little one say as her brother came down the stone steps leading to the beach. 

“You’re not allowed! Dad!” She called for back up as her brother with a quick backward glance at his father persisted in his journey downward towards the sand, towards the water lapping at the rocky steps. 

Father cautiously looked over at me as if somehow he expected to see some kind of unspoken affirmation or condemnation in my unmasked face. 

“Dad! He’s not allowed!” The little one shouted again. As if her public disapproval would at least be accounted for when whoever it was that had said you were not allowed arrived and said: “You know you’re not allowed!”

Her anxiety resonated with me yet at the same time I found myself inwardly willing her brother and father to step out onto the beach. To do it for me and all mankind. To do it for every person who had been arrested in the preceding weeks for doing what was “not allowed”

And in that moment I found myself asking: “Who are these Notalloweds?”

Where did they come from? Why could we not distinguish them from the rest of us? Was it possible that like some cuckoo nestlings they had simply always been there? Maybe they did look a bit different. Maybe in the thin pursed lips, maybe in the slightest of narrowing of the eyelids, the subtle cocking of the head and the downward disapproving look. Maybe they had so mastered the “notallowed” look that they could mask it at a moment’s notice so that they could fit in. 

But then all hell broke loose and suddenly there they were: Basking in their new found freedom; pointing their bony fingers at the Pusherbackers. Now at last they were vindicated. Like Midwich Cuckoos  the Notalloweds grabbed their phones and clicked and reported those Pusherbackers for every small offence. 

The king of The Notalloweds made so many rules that they had to put them into Levels which only the very clever understood. For a little while everyone hid away and waited. They didn’t really know what they were waiting for because the rules made by the Notalloweds changed so often but one day The Pusherbackers said: Enough! We ARE Allowed. We’re not afraid. And they started pushing back. 

The little boy and his father walked into the sand and laughed as the water whooshed over their feet. The father held out his hand to his little girl and smiled:”But Daddy. You’re not allowed!” She said 

“Come” he said

“You are allowed because I said you are.”

And that was that. Just like that she became a Pusherbacker like her father and her brother

And they laughed and walked in the sea as the Notalloweds slunk back into their lairs. They would come back out again and sometimes they even managed to sneak into a little voice in our head but now that we knew they were there, we could tell them very loudly:

“We ARE allowed”