Love on the NHS Read Online Free

He felt the hospitality offered to him would not extend into friendship, it would be best to leave on a high note. As he ascended to the hall he looked into the kitchen but there wasn't a soul.
    He quietly tiptoed up the stairs and peered into the bedrooms. Everyone was fast asleep. He descended the stairs and left through the front door, carefully closing it. He was overcome with strange feelings. The evening had been great yet it was so strange. He had never been with women of an evening before, nor men really for that matter unless family counted.
    As he approached the bus stop where buses headed to Woecaster, there were eight other people, mostly young, waiting. Dressed in his usual fair trade clothes, people looked on bemused and he was very embarrassed. The worse for wear from last night, he avoided eye contact. When the bus came and he boarded he started to cry. He wept mutely, large tears running down his cheeks. Once he reached Woecaster, he quickly caught the bus back home, grabbed hold of his passport and rushed out. The sky was falling, his world falling apart. He had failed in making friends. He did not belong here. Even when people were kind to him he was out of place. He was heading for France. Maybe it would be different there.
     
     
     
     
     

VI
     
    Paris made Luke's heart flutter. On that day, at the age of twenty, he caught the train to Paris. The squalid, claustrophobic tract house in that long forgotten suburb was behind him. England was disintegrating; con artists were robbing the old and the naive left, right and centre. Everybody was on the make.
    All people cared about was football. Company bosses would pay their employees as little as they could and spend their surplus money on flashy cars, holidays in Turkey and beauty treatments. It was a dark age for England. Luke had began to read prolifically upon his dad's encouragement when he quitted school. He learned so much about the world that was beyond the little island he lived on. After years of Thatcher, Major and Blair the United Kingdom had become America's playground. It was digesting the worst aspects of the fascist turn of the United States. For fascism was the collusion between government and private corporations to enact laws and run countries for their own profit at the expense of everyone else. Phony wars were waged for oil, the armies bankrolled by indebted taxpayers.
    Luke despised the conditions people were held in at Guantanamo Bay and how there were no fair trials for the detainees - most had been locked up for years without being found guilty. Anti-protest laws, the ever expanding prison population and hysteria about terrorism were poisoning the country's atmosphere. In the English-speaking world in particular Luke noticed that the word terrorism was being banded about to deny people due process; to arrest and contain people for long periods without justification. Even secret courts were being used to deny people true justice and only give the authorities the result they wanted. The argument presented was that terrorists, in killing civilians or plotting to, did not deserve the usual legal rights. Yet in America the constitution was supposed to protect the rights of all people. Even in England human rights laws enacted after the second world war should have safeguarded liberties. When countries zealously incarcerated people without a jury trial, arrested people for thought crimes - so-called crimes that it was claimed were going to be committed - and treated them awfully, labelling them terrorists without a chance to defend themselves, those countries themselves had become tyrannical extremists.
    A British man called Syed Talha Ahsan  had recently been deported to America, accused of terrorist charges - apparently relating to running a website. Luke read that this man had Asperger's syndrome and had been sent to a maximum security prison in which prisoners were made to stay in cells for twenty three hours a day. Psychiatrists had