When the fight broke out I was asleep. I had a splitting headache and the mid-morning light was making me nauseous, so it took a while before I could make sense of the shouting in the street. It seemed Claire had woken up to find Miles going through her things. She’d alerted some of the others and they’d thrown him out. Miles was still talking, trying to get back into the house, but Sean and Claire were blocking his way. Sean was throwing punches. I leaned
out of the window and Miles shouted up, pleading with me: “Chris, it was a misunderstanding. I thought it was my bag.” He wanted his camera, which he’d left upstairs. Eventually I threw the thing to him and watched him jog off down the street, casting little nervous glances behind him.
Why did I vouch for Miles? Because I wanted to. Because I didn’t believe there was anything sinister about him. Claire said she’d found him looking through her address book. Though I told her she was being paranoid, I didn’t really know what to think. I didn’t have much time or mental space for Miles. Sylvan Close was obviously going to end badly. We were down to ten people and there seemed to be very little support for our cause. No press, no demonstrations. We retreated into one house and spent the next twenty-four hours working continuously, building a wall of breeze-blocks downstairs, filling buckets with sand and water, constructing an escape route across the roofs. We decided there was no point in everyone getting arrested. Six people should go back and reopen Workshop Thirteen. The others should stay. Sean, Claire, Anna, and I volunteered.
As we waited for the final assault, the Apollo ii crew landed on the moon. Tranquility base. Up there the crew-cut astronauts could see the whole world as a blue-green disc. Down below, we were in our bunker. We stayed awake for forty-eight straight hours before the attack came. A massive battalion of police blocked the end of the street, guarding vanloads of council workmen. There was no sign of Mallory: it was obviously going to be a completely different operation. As a small group of supporters shouted slogans from behind a cordon, an inspector with a sergeant-major’s penetrating tone told us through a bullhorn that we had twenty minutes to get out. We refused and they moved forward, forming a ring that closed in through the backyards until number thirty-four was surrounded by a triple row of uniformed officers. We had a huge red and black flag, which we waved out of the window as the workmen swarmed into the empty houses around us with crowbars and sledgehammers.
Within half an hour most of Sylvan Close had been rendered uninhabitable. Floors were torn up, toilets smashed, pipes and cables pulled out of walls. The council was evidently determined that, whatever else happened, we weren’t going to be able to move back in. Watching the ruin of the rest of the street was somehow more frightening than listening to the bailiffs breaking down our barricade. They weren’t just smashing up our crude repair work but all the things we’d imagined: the long refectory table, the kindergarten, the workshops. When they finally broke through the wall we retreated to the roof. My lasting memory of that day is the shudder of the bricks under my hands as I clung to the chimney, watching the black slates tremble and spray upward as the council workmen battered their way through.
* * *
Sylvan Close was on Miles’s mind too as Pat Ellis left the room after her press conference. I craned my neck to watch her leave, followed by a train of advisers and assistants. Miles studied my perspiring face. “She did legal work for you after Leyton, didn’t she?”
“That’s right.” I felt like a lab animal, skull shaved for the probe. “So now you’ve performed your little experiment, you can tell me the results.”
“What?”
“Stop baiting me and tell me what you want. What have I got to do with Pat Ellis? I haven’t seen her since — for longer than I haven’t seen you. You know she had nothing to do with anything. Whatever you’re involved with, I won’t be part of it. It’s not my business. I just want to be left alone.”
“For God’s sake, Chris. Let’s at least get out of the building. Stop raising your voice and we’ll go and find something to eat. Eat, then we’ll talk, I promise.” He gripped my elbow and steered me outside. On the street he hailed a taxi, giving the driver the address of a members’ club in Soho.
All four of us pleaded not guilty. Hoping to turn our trial toward some political purpose, we disrupted the proceedings, shouted at the bailiffs and policemen who were giving evidence. Sean and I were given short prison sentences. Claire and Anna were fined; I think the judge was feeling chivalrous. While I was locked up in Brixton there were riots in Northern Ireland and British troops were sent over to keep the peace. I heard later the soldiers were welcomed by the Catholics, who thought they were going to protect them against a police force staffed and controlled by their Protestant neighbors. To the Thirteen collective it looked like one
thing only: the British state was beginning to make war on its own people. Tanks on working-class streets. Soldiers taking aim behind garden hedges. Our boys, the Fascist regime. The Prince of Wales’s Own went in on August 14, 1969. It became a kind of shorthand for us, August 14, proof that the logic of confrontation was being followed by the other side too.
Miles’s club was in a Georgian townhouse. We climbed a flight of narrow stairs and Miles signed us in, flirting with the young woman at the front desk. Heavily, deliberately, I wrote Michael Frame in the register. We sat on broken-down leather armchairs and I squirmed agitatedly around, trying to brace myself against sinking. The room projected an artful air of shabby comfort. Discreet waiting staff, discreet touch screens to process your order. It wasn’t one of those places where they make you wear a tie; if Miles had taken me somewhere like that I’d have been less disoriented.
“Would you like something to eat, Chris?”
“What exactly is it you do, Miles? I’ve never known what you do.” “You wouldn’t like to see the menu?”
“Not really. I want to know who you work for.”
“Christ, Chris, you might as well get lunch out of it. I’m not going to pretend this is all fun and games for you. I know what’s at stake.”
“You’re a consultant. That’s what you said. A political consultant. So who are your clients?”
“Like I said, I know what’s at stake. You’ve got a nice niche down there in Sussex. I can understand you want to hang on to it. And if you want this done with the minimum fuss, you need to get it into your head that I’m not going to answer all or even most of your questions, so you might as well calm the fuck down and order some lunch. Everybody needs to eat. I certainly need to eat.”
He realized the waitress was hovering, nervously. “Oh, hi. Let’s get two large gin and tonics and then I’ll have the fish pie. Glass of sauvignon with the pie.”
She turned to me.
“You have a vegetarian option? Fine. I’ll take that.”
The waitress left. Miles nodded gnomically. “OK,” he said. “Now
we’ve actually taken a breath, maybe we can do this in a civilized
fashion. In answer to your question, I work for myself.”
“You’re lying already.”
“I own and run a public-affairs consultancy, which has a number
of clients, some of whom you no doubt disapprove of. I’ve worked
for multinationals. I’ve worked for various special interest groups.