Trade associations, that kind of thing. I help them get what they
want from the political system. In the seventies I spent some time
working in the media. You remember I was interested in film-
making?”
“I remember that.”
“I ended up in television for a while. Current affairs.”
“You were a journalist?”
“Briefly. Mostly management. I had contacts. I got to know how
things work.”
“And now?”
“Now I want to know what you thought of Patricia Ellis.”
“She’s doing very well.” I shrugged. “She seemed to have a lot
of flunkeys.”
“She used to be a real firebrand, remember?”
“Did she?”
“Oh, come on. What about during all that Leyton business?
Quoting Mao in meetings. Talking about expropriating this and
smashing that.”
“I don’t remember you being at any meetings, Miles. I remember
you turning up one day out of the blue and asking a lot of ques-
tions. I remember you getting thrown out. I remember Sean Ward
punching you. Do you remember all that?”
“It was a misunderstanding.”
“Of course. And is this a misunderstanding too?”
“This is lunch, Chris.”
“At least call me Mike.”
The waitress came with our drinks. Without thinking, I gulped
my gin and tonic. Miles looked at me, his lopsided smile creeping across his face. “Well that seemed to go down easily. I knew your whole teetotal Buddhist thing was a con.”
I felt I’d tripped up. “It’s not a con. At least it wasn’t, not at the time. I don’t consider myself a Buddhist now, but I was. I’d be dead otherwise.”
“What happened to you?”
“When?”
“After you left.”
“I couldn’t deal with — anything. What had happened, anything. I drifted around in Asia, did too many drugs. It got very bad. Someone scraped me off the street in Bangkok and took me to a monastery. The monks used to treat addicts.”
“And they cured you.”
“That’s right.”
“They cured you and along the way they made you into a believer. So God got you in the end!” He did a little trumpet call, trilling his fingers in front of his face. “After all that!”
“Buddhists don’t believe in God.”
“But a believer, nonetheless.”
I had no comeback to that. First the revolution, then the Four Noble Truths. A compulsive believer, always mistaking my ideas for the world. “Wisdom is not scholarship,” said the monks. How I’d studied that saying!
The waitress returned with our food. I watched Miles fork fish pie into his mouth. It was frightening to hear my life tossed about in trite phrases, a joke to be capped with a punchline. It made me feel temporary, disposable.
His long jaw, masticating and grinding.
At Wat Tham Nok we stayed in huts, a wretched, emaciated crew, our jaundiced skins crossed with track marks and blackened by tattoos. We pottered about in our red pajamas, Thais and bird-shit foreigners together, looking at the floor, racked by withdrawal. The village of the damned. “Drink, drink.” Every morning, kneeling before a bucket, we downed a beaker of the mixture and waited
for the spasms to come. The acid reek of my vomit. The sounds of the men beside me, groaning and cursing. “Drink, drink.” The monks paced up and down behind us like drill instructors. The whole bucket of water was to be ingested, then spewed into the trough. Hard men, the monks. In their quarters they had pictures of accident victims, syphilitics, horribly mutilated corpses. Aids to contemplation.
“You know,” Miles was saying, “I’ve thought about you quite a lot over the years. I always felt you got caught up in something you had no control over. You didn’t seem like the others. You didn’t seem like an extremist.”
I had to smile at that. Miles was still the same, untroubled by doubt or hope and incapable of understanding it in others. He could live in the world as it is, which (depending on your point of view) is either pragmatism, coarseness, or a particular kind of heroism. Whatever it is, I’ve never been able to do it. The world has always seemed unbearable to me.
He called over the waitress to ask for a second glass of wine. “Sentiment aside,” he said abruptly, “you’ve made a mess of your life. You had brains and a certain amount of talent, unlike — let’s just take an example at random — the Minister for Police and Security, who’s generally considered around Westminster to be a dull biddy whose main talent is for worming her way up the greasy pole.”
“I don’t really follow politics, these days.”
“Is that so? You must admit it’s strange. To think about what she once believed and the job she does now.”
“She’s not the only one to have changed, is she?”
“We’ve all changed, but she’s the one in charge of a major Home Office portfolio. And when her boss is forced to drink hemlock, which can surely be no more than a few months away, she’s odds-on favorite to become Home Secretary. I mean, for Christ’s sake, be as zen as you like, but you have to see that’s some career trajectory. She was a self-proclaimed revolutionary. She was plotting the violent overthrow of the State.”
“No, she wasn’t. She was a voguish liberal who went with the
flow. She was following fashion.”
“I’m sorry to say not everyone shares your sanguine view.” “Meaning?”
“Meaning there’s a public-interest question.”
“Speak English, Miles.”
“It’s the Home Office, not Culture, Media, and Sport. There’s a feeling that someone with her background isn’t suitable for the job. A former revolutionary in charge of the security services? That’s a little too much baggage, don’t you think? She’s not a safe pair of hands.”
“So she’s not a safe pair of hands. What of it?”
“It’s a widely shared opinion.”
“She must have been security-vetted. Isn’t that what you do?”
“Oh, absolutely, but vetting committees can make mistakes. They found no connection between her and the fourteenth of August actions, for example. Completely in the clear. But there were dissenting voices. Some people don’t think the checks were thorough enough.”
“I’m telling you, she had nothing to do with fourteenth August.”
“Let’s take it by stages. When did you last meet her? You saw her after you got out of prison, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Did she come to your squat?”
“I suppose she must have done. I have a picture of her at the women’s group, but that might have been earlier on.”
They picked me up outside the prison. Leo, Anna, and Claire. I was expecting Sean’s old van. Instead they were driving a big blue Rover, an expensive car.
Anna kissed me on the mouth. “We got rid of Rosa,” she explained.
It was about time. Back in Notting Hill the van’s loud exhaust and distinctive pink paint job had become a liability. By the time we moved out of Charlie’s we were spending half our time by the side of the road, watching sour-faced constables kick her tires and
poke around under the seats. Eventually we’d taken her to a friend’s garage in Shepherd’s Bush and had her sprayed white, but it was a sloppy job. You could always see a faint pink sheen on the hood and the back doors.
“Where did you get this from?” I asked, running my hands over the car’s creamy upholstery.
“Somewhere in Belgravia,” said Anna.
“I thought Sean was still in prison.”
“He is.”
“Anna and Claire took it,” muttered Leo.
“Leo says it’s too flashy, but really he hates it because stealing cars is man’s work.”
“You should bloody get rid of it.”