The night after that, we drove to Chelmsford, then Colchester, setting fire to a recruitment office and a Territorial Army storage depot. At each site we scattered leaflets.
FOR QUEEN AND COUNTRY
~ ~ ~
Great prospects! See the world!
What will YOU be doing in Northern Ireland? They tell you it’s for your country. They’re lying. You’ll be breaking down working-class doors, trampling on people like yourself and your family. They want you to kill and die for their profits. We’re fighting back against their power.
Rise up! Remember August 14!
We made it back to London as dawn broke, still wired on the amphetamines we’d taken to get through the night. The Rover
stank of petrol. Its upholstery was smeared and grubby. We drove it on to some wasteground near Hackney Wick and burned it out. Anna insisted we should steal another car immediately, but we couldn’t get into any of the vehicles parked on nearby streets and ended up trudging several miles home through freezing fog.
For several days we looked through the newspapers, expecting to see our actions reported. There was nothing. We read that BBCi had just started broadcasting in color; an actor from Coronation Street had gotten married. No real news, just distraction. A couple of days later we stole another car and drove to Chelmsford to check our work. There it was: a blackened building like a missing tooth in a jaw of shuttered shopfronts.
New Year came and went. A new decade. Thirteen was so cold that milk froze in bottles on the windowsill and a film of ice coated the inside of the bathroom window. A dozen of us slept close together on the mattresses, a rat-king in a midden of sleeping bags. None of us was working. We had problems with dole claims, fines, probation, unpaid debts. I wanted a life free of money, but it seemed to be plucking at me, its tendrils curling round my ankles as I shivered in my sleep. I developed a rash, which left clusters of tiny lesions round my mouth and between my thighs. It was several weeks before we realized that we were all suffering from it, scratching at our armpits, our pubic hair, infecting and reinfecting one another. We burned the bedding and got more.
We went out looking for work, pooling whatever money we could get. I labored on building sites. Leo and I stole tools and used them to open up empty houses, leaving a trail of flapping doors around the East End. We joked about setting up a squatters’ estate agency. In the face of hostility from the other women, Anna got a job in Soho, first as a cocktail waitress, then as a stripper. I think the work was important to her, part of her project. Once, or at least once that I know about, she accepted money for sex from a man she met at the club. She told me she did it to see what it was like to become a commodity. Self-denial would be the wrong term for what she was doing. It wasn’t some kind of religious
bargain: Anna certainly didn’t believe in a reward in the hereafter. She was mounting yet another assault on her own sense of privilege and entitlement, on what she considered the “excessive value” she’d been brought up to place on her life.
Sometimes I went to pick her up from the club, hanging around on the pavement outside because the doorman wouldn’t let me in. She’d come and find me and we’d go to drink frothy coffee at an Italian place on Old Compton Street. I’d surreptitiously examine her for signs of change, beyond the unfamiliar traces of makeup round her eyes and mouth. We’d talk a little, laugh about inconsequential things. It felt good, a moment of relief from the struggle. I knew she enjoyed it too, so I was shocked when she denounced our meetings in Criticism-Self-Criticism, accusing me of deviation, of clinging to the luxury of bourgeois leisure.
Someone brought a plastic bag of mushrooms back from Wales. We tripped and argued and shivered under the covers and scraped the huge pan of vegetable stew, endless vegetable stew made with whatever we could buy or scavenge, tasteless however much curry powder we added to the mix. We wrote position papers and smashed monogamy and once in a while we burned something down. Then Sean was released from prison and our hibernation came to an end.
* * *
As I watched Miles eat fish pie, it occurred to me that we were sitting more or less across the road from the coffee bar where I used to meet Anna. When I went to use the bathroom I looked out of the window. The café had gone, turned into a Thai restaurant. The club was gradually filling up, the sofas now tenanted by well-dressed after-work drinkers. In the bathroom I splashed water on my face and tried to work out where Miles was leading. I expected him to make a proposition, a demand of some kind, but when I got back to the table he’d called for the bill.
“I think that’s enough for now,” he told me. “I have things to do. I’ll drop you at your hotel.”
“So that’s it? You’ve finally got it into your head that Pat Ellis wasn’t involved?”
“Whatever, Chris. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. There’s somewhere I need to be, but I’ll come in the cab with you. I’ll pick you up at eight tomorrow morning.”
We drove to a dingy townhouse in Fitzrovia, with a card in the window saying No Vacancies.
Miles left me in the care of an elderly landlady with a floral housecoat and no small talk. Both she and her nameless establishment seemed like survivals from an earlier era, before newfangled notions of comfort or hospitality took hold in the British hotel trade. The lobby smelled of cigarettes and carpet cleaner. The leaflets in the rack by the reception desk advertised shows and exhibitions that had long since closed. There was no sign of any other staff or guests. The woman gave me a key on a heavy brass chain and walked me arthritically upstairs to a room decorated with hunting prints and the kind of geometric-patterned wallpaper last current thirty years previously.
“What time’s breakfast?” I asked.
“I understand you’ll be taking it out. Mr. Carter’s company specified when they made the booking.”
“Mr. Carter?”
“The gentleman you were just with.”
“His name’s Bridgeman.”
“I wouldn’t know about that. Will you be going out at all?” “Yes,” I said.
“Front door’s locked after ten.”
Grudgingly she accepted that the night porter would let me in if I was late, then quit the room, shutting the door smartly behind her. Contemplating the hospital corners on the bedsheets, the small cake of soap and the paper-wrapped toothbrush mug on the basin, I was filled with foreboding. All British state institutions, whatever their purpose, share an atmosphere. When I was growing up they used to share a smell too, an alkaline reek that united school and hospital and prison and dole office, and always triggered in me a kind of cellular-level panic, a fight-or-flight reflex. The smell has gone, abolished along with so many of the visible signs of power (in dark moments I think it’s all my generation achieved, killing that smell), but even without it the atmosphere remains and that room had it: old and cold and abstractedly cruel.
I grabbed my coat and half-ran down the stairs, ignoring the landlady’s barked inquiry about the key. The evening had turned cold and the few people on the street were hurrying along, hunched into coats and scarves. I headed for the tube station. At that moment my plan, in so far as I had one, was to get on a train, any train. I had a cash card. I could withdraw some money, go somewhere, start again. How far would I get on two hundred quid? Little by little, I slowed my pace. I knew I was panicking, not thinking clearly. On impulse I turned a corner. Up ahead I saw the lights of Oxford Street. Basics, Chris, I told myself. Remember the basics. Miles will have you followed.