“About what?”
Anna, I expected him to say. I needed to hear her name from someone else’s lips. Anna. Instead he made an offer. “Why don’t you come and see me in London?”
“Why?”
“Come on, Chris. Don’t be such a spoilsport.”
“Mike,” I said, walking away, “my name’s Mike.” I turned down a side street that led in the opposite direction from the bookshop.
Halfway along it I ducked into a narrow lane and waited in a doorway. When I was certain he hadn’t followed me, I doubled back toward Pelham’s. The streets and the shoppers felt remote, as if they were on the other side of a pane of glass.
At the bookshop, I turned the sign on the door to “closed” and wondered, for the first time, about running. I’d done it before. I imagined packing a case, heading to an airport. There was money in our joint bank account. How long would it last me in Asia, in South America? The idea of leaving Sam and Miranda was unthinkable. I sat frozen in God’s worn leather wing-backed chair, trying to work out the angles. What did Miles want? What did it have to do with Anna? I knew that if I was to save myself, I’d need to face certain things I’d always avoided; I’d need to go over it all again. There was an unsorted box in the basement I’d looked into just once, then ignored. I went down to fetch it. Underneath a layer of old sociology textbooks and blue-spined Pelican paperbacks was a cache of pamphlets and yellowing newspapers that I tipped out onto one of the frayed Persian rugs. There were copies of International Times and Frendz and Black Dwarf, flyers for meetings and demonstrations. In a slew of handbills and pamphlets, I found what I’d been looking for: traces of myself. There were several copies of Red Vanguard, a socialist paper that had, for a few issues, been printed in a workshop below the room where I slept. They’d run one of our communiqués, an early one, written before we got tangled up in self-justification. I remember lying with Anna on the mattresses at Thirteen, drafting it in a notebook:
CONFRONTATION! CONFRONTATION! CONFRONTATION!
CONFRONTATION dramatizes our condition, which is struggle.
CONFRONTATION gives a lead to the apathetic. CONFRONTATION is a revolutionary role model for disaffected youth.
CONFRONTATION is a bridge from protest to resist — ance.
CONFRONTATION helps combat so-called mental
illness and disorders of the will.
CONFRONTATION gives you insight.
CONFRONTATION is your path to revolutionary self- transformation.
Action is movement, movement is change and process. Accelerate the process: CHOOSE YOUR TARGETS! ACT NOW! CONFRONTATION! CONFRONTATION! CONFRONTATION!
We worked together, scrawling phrases, calling them out to one another, little fragments of polemic we delivered like orators, taking pleasure in the force of the words, their potential to make change. Often these documents were just a record of arguments, each line bitterly fought over, picked to pieces and reconstructed. This one had come easily, I remember, like making up a song.
On the evening of the riot at Grosvenor Square, I was moved to a cell of my own. Wrapped in a thin, scratchy blanket, I spent the night dozing fitfully. In the morning I was given a fried-egg roll and a cup of tea, then transferred to Bow Street magistrates’ court. My trial, such as it was, lasted under five minutes. A dog-faced policeman described how he’d bravely tackled me as I was running toward the embassy to throw a missile. I was, he said, looking savage and shouting words it would embarrass him to repeat before the court. When he attempted to effect an arrest, I had punched him in the face. I shouted out that he was a liar. The judge, a lantern-jawed man with a drinker’s swollen nose, sentenced me to six weeks’ imprisonment. I was taken directly to HMP Pentonville.
* * *
Cold spray spatters against my face as I lean over the side rail of the ferry. The water, far below, is gray and choppy. Beside me a pair of girls, Sam’s age or a little younger, are telling each other how sick they feel, taking drags on a shared cigarette. By now Miranda and Sam will know there’s something wrong. Miranda will be phoning the bookshop, trying to get God to pick up. Walking carefully so as not to slip on the wet metal of the deck, I go inside, where it smells like all cross-Channel ferries, that queasy cocktail of lager and snack foods and exhaust fumes and cleaning products that doesn’t quite mask the acid stink of vomit seeping from the toilets.
On impulse I feed some change into one of the arcade games in the corridor. Lights flash and writing races across the screen, too fast to read. The rules are incomprehensible. Colored blobs race around. Little dots and spinning things, which look to me like pieces of fruit, blip in and out of existence, seemingly at random. I press buttons, push and pull the joystick. It’s impossible to tell what I’m controlling, which of the little creatures is me. YOU DIE! says the machine. YOU DIE! TRY AGAIN!
The last time I played a computer game was at Christmas, when Sam’s not-boyfriend Kenny came over with a PlayStation. I’ve always liked Kenny. He’s awkward and slightly nerdy, which is why he’ll never ascend to the position in Sam’s affections he so transparently craves. Sam likes sporty boys — uncomplicated squash or tennis players who can drive her to the pub and talk to her about jobs or holidays. Kenny has a mop of dyed hair and a collection of T-shirts bearing the names of Japanese garage bands. Occasionally Sam allows him to escort her to the cinema, but whenever I ask if they’re “together,” she rolls her eyes and adopts a long-suffering expression.
When am I going to see you again, Sam? And what will you think of me when I do? You’ve always lived in a bounded, knowable world: a triumph for Miranda, I suppose, keeping you safe all these years. I find it very hard to think of you as nineteen; that’s almost the age I was when I went to prison. You seem so young, young enough for me to wish I wasn’t the one smashing up your happy home. I can’t ask you not to hate me, or not to be frightened. I think the best I can hope for is that one day I’ll be able to sit down with you and explain. You’re too old to be saying to me, as you did recently, that you weren’t “interested in politics.” You want to be a lawyer. Well, a lawyer needs to know something about politics, even a corporate lawyer who just wants to climb the ladder, to buy the things her friends buy and go to the places they go. You’re lucky that politics feels optional, something it’s safe to ignore. Most people in the world have it forced on them. To be fair, I suppose you’re just a child of your time. Thatcher’s gone, the Berlin wall’s down, and unless you’re in Bosnia, the most pressing issue of the nineties appears to be interior design. It’s supposed to be the triumph of capitalism— the end of history and the glorious beginning of the age of shopping. But politics is still here, Sam, even in 1998. It may be in abeyance, at least in your world. But it’s lurking round the edges. It’ll be back. You ought to give Kenny a chance, by the way. He’s a decent kid.
I realize I’m forming words with my mouth, muttering to Sam under my breath as I feed the last of my change into the machine. A voice comes over the ship’s public address system, saying we’re entering port. We’ve arrived in France. As I line up on the narrow stairs down to the car deck, I still can’t stop myself. Explanations, justifications, like a crazy old man. Logic says there has to be a beginning, a first moment of refusal. I’m not sure. There’s the usual Oedipal tangle: Mummy-Daddy-me. There was my brother and Kavanagh the junk man, the Russians and nuclear war. There was my need to be better, more decent, to deserve. None of these. All of them.