The wind whipped at my face. I lingered outside a cinema on the Tottenham Court Road, using the glass window to watch the
street behind me. Then I made my way into Soho, loitering in alleyways, ducking in and out of video stores and bookshops, trying to spot my tail. In a basement, as I pretended to browse bondage magazines alongside a row of suburban commuters, I finally picked him out, a young guy in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt who looked out of place among the briefcases and thinning hair. I led him toward Regent Street and lost him in a department store, shouldering my way back out through the late-night shoppers and jumping on a bus outside. It was only then, as I sat on the top deck, breathless, eye-level with the advertising hoardings of Piccadilly, that I realized how I’d been addressing myself. Turn left, Chris. Don’t look behind you, Chris. For years I’d trained myself to be Mike Frame. I’d settled down in him, ceased even to think of who I’d been before, but Miles had uprooted me with a few short conversations. In itself that didn’t matter, except that if Mike Frame went, Miranda and Sam would go with him.
Oh, Sam.
Once upon a time I’d been prepared. When I worked at Olla’s new age shop I’d kept a metal cash box hidden in the storeroom, containing money and an American passport I’d bought on the street in Bangkok. Then Miranda and her fatherless baby had come into my life. Mike Frame had applied for a bank account, a national insurance number. The identity held up. After a couple of years he renewed his British passport to go on a camping holiday in Spain, where he baffled his partner with his nervousness at the airport and his interest in relics of the Civil War. Chris Carver had tried to escape the state, but Mike Frame eagerly embraced it. Each database record, each countersigned form confirmed his reality, put flesh on his bones. Little by little, the running money got spent. The American passport expired. Michael Frame started to seem like an end, a final destination. Looking back, I think I closed my escape routes deliberately. I didn’t have it in me to run again; which is, I suppose, another way of saying I’d gotten old.
I stepped off the bus near Victoria station. In a brightly lit Indian restaurant tricked out with laminate flooring and contract furniture,
totally unlike the flock-wallpapered haven I’d hoped for, I ate chickpeas and drank several pints of lager. I paid the bill and stood swaying slightly on the pavement, knowing that I was going to have to face whatever Miles had in store for me. I went into an off-licence and bought a half-bottle of vodka, then hailed a cab and went back to the hotel, where I lay on the bed and drank shots out of the tooth-mug, embalmed in the swirling patterns and petrol fumes of 1970.
* * *
Sean raced out of prison like a greyhound chasing a hare. Before we’d even got him back to Thirteen he was making war plans. The Tupamaros had shown the way in Uruguay. Urban guerrilla: a small band, operating in the city, using the terrain to our advantage like peasant revolutionaries used the mountains. Street corners and tower blocks our Sierra Maestra. And cars. Cars featured heavily in Sean’s plans for our future.
We were the vanguard party in embryo. We would lead the way. We’d be exemplary and we’d be self-sustaining. So there would be fast cars, stolen and stored in lock-ups or sold to get money. There would be money and with the money we’d buy arms. There would, above all, be no more waiting, no more frustrating attempts to persuade others of the urgency for change.
It felt like spring twice over. Without Sean, Anna’s intense cold had spread through all of us, sealing us into a sort of mute despair. Now the ice had gone from the windows at Thirteen. At the back of my mind there was a twinge of resentment at the way Sean could push things forward so easily. He and Anna spent long hours on the mattresses, plotting and whispering to each other. In Criticism-Self-Criticism I chipped away at their exclusivity. We were still opposed to monogamy, weren’t we? Anna accused me of being manipulative. I had a misogynistic desire to dominate. I was trying to force her back into my bed. I told her she was being arrogant. My only concerns were political.
We got the explosives out of the phone book. Sean had formulated a baroque plan to stake out construction sites and mines, then follow trucks to find out where they went. Without directly contradicting him, Anna visited the local library and came back with a list of ten demolition contractors, all within fifty miles of
London. The theft went smoothly enough. There was a company out in Grays, along the Thames estuary, which had a yard by the river, at the end of a desolate lane strewn with car tires. The only guard was an old man who sat and read model-railway magazines in a hut by the gate, his head framed in a little yellow square of electric light. We parked on a patch of wasteground and watched the oily black water, waiting for a cloud to obscure the moon.
I remember the sound of my breathing, ragged and heavy and somehow detached from my body as I carried a wooden box across the yard toward the hole we’d cut in the fence. Light rain falling on my face, the endlessness of the space between the warehouse and the gap in the wire. The open steppe.
Back at Thirteen we sat around the kitchen table, staring at our haul. It looked like bars of some kind of confectionery, each yellow block wrapped individually in waxed paper. We had a hundred and fifty charges of nitroglycerine gel, a spool of safety fuse and fifty PETN detonators. I don’t think any one of us knew what to say. There was no exultation, no sudden release of tension. We just sat there. I don’t know about the others, but I didn’t sleep that night. The mere presence of the stuff, hidden in a metal box under the floorboards, imposed a density, a pressure on the atmosphere that made it impossible.
Since none of us knew anything about explosives, our plan was to do some tests, drop a stick down a hole somewhere and see how big a bang it made. We told ourselves we’d proceed slowly. We’d take care.
Richard Nixon put an end to that. On May Day we woke up to his announcement that he was sending U.S. combat troops into Cambodia. It was a massive escalation of the conflict. “This is not an invasion,” said the President, describing the movement of several thousand troops across the border. America couldn’t be a pitiful helpless giant while the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy were threatening free nations everywhere. Here was the man who’d told voters he had a “secret plan to end the war,” shuffling his notes
and gesturing vaguely at a map on an easel as he told us why more killing was the right thing for everyone.
We had to respond. He’d given us no choice.
In principle the device was straightforward. An electric current initiated the detonator. The detonator initiated the gel. A kitchen timer from Woolworths would close the circuit. The timer was shoddy and imprecise, but as long as you didn’t set it too short, it would do the job. I was the one who knew about electricity, so I was the one who sat down at our long wooden table and spread out tape and tools and wire and batteries and made a bomb. I told the others to go out for the afternoon. As I worked, all I could think about was what would happen if I made a mistake. I could already feel the explosion welling up inside me, as if merely thinking about it tapped a disintegration already latent in my body. Only a month previously, a group of New York radicals had blown themselves up in a Greenwich Village townhouse. Rich kids, said the newspapers. Stupid nihilistic rich kids who got themselves killed. Nothing was mentioned in the articles about their politics.