Stripping the plastic coating from the wire to expose the core, twisting the ends. My hands shaking. It was, essentially, no more complex than wiring a plug, but it seemed to take forever.
Late that night we put the bomb in a blue leather handbag (a jumble-sale purchase of Helen’s) and left it against the front door of an American bank near the Mansion House. It was a weekend and the City of London was deserted. A stage set, waiting for the play to begin.
A BOMB TO HALT THE MONEY MACHINE
Nixon invades Cambodia. More blood on his hands. Bankers and arms companies pull the levers.
THEY profit. WE die.
U.S. trade supports mass murder. U.K. government wants a piece of the action.
* * *
It’s time to RESIST.
Numbers for Nixon:
U.S. military spending 1968, 9.4 % of GDP. U.S. soldiers killed last year, 9,414 killed, 55,390 wounded.
Vietnamese and Cambodian dead are not counted, hundreds of thousands so far, maybe millions.
We are acting in solidarity with all oppressed people across the world. Our attack is violent because violence is the only language THEY understand.
RISE UP!
MAY DAY 1970
We posted copies of our communiqué to mainstream newspapers and the underground press. From telephone booths we phoned the BBC and ITV, claiming responsibility. Then we waited. Three days later there had been no response. No news reports. No commentary. No acknowledgment at all. It was as if the bomb hadn’t detonated. But we’d heard the sound, a muffled crump. We’d seen emergency vehicles racing toward the scene. The day afterward the bank was closed. Wooden boards covered the building’s ground-floor façade.
Does something exist if it’s unobserved? Does something happen if it is not reported?
* * *
Renounce anger, forsake pride. Sorrow cannot touch the man who is not in thrall to anything, who owns nothing. This car, with its silt of water bottles and maps and fast-food packaging in the footwell. This body.
It smells, this body that is not my body. These unwashed clothes, these furred teeth. This face coated with grime and sweat.
South of Paris the country has changed. The air is warm and pine trees line the road. I catch a glimpse of a river, a flash of blue water scattered with white boulders. On impulse I take the next turning and make my way down toward it. Leaving the car in a clearing carpeted with pine needles and scraps of blue plastic, I pick my way to the water, where the light is harsh and bright. I take off my shirt and shoes. The stones are painfully hot, a bed of coals for me to walk across. No one seems to be around, so I strip naked and wade into the deepest part of the river, where it’s slimy underfoot and the shock of the cold, up to my knees, thighs, chest, persuades me that I’m still more or less alive. I stay in until I’m shivering, then clamber onto a large flat boulder and lie down. The sun quickly begins to dry off my skin.
I’m exhausted.
An orange bloom of light on my closed eyelids. Orange wallpaper in a hotel room, nauseating op-art swirls rotating as I drink and fret and wait for Miles. Heat like the fierce heat of the dry season at Wat Tham Nok, when the ground hardens and the grass underfoot is parched and brittle. The lizard that squats for hours on the wall of my cell. It’s there when I go out to do my chores, still in the same spot when I get back. I sprinkle water on the ground in front of the farang block to lay the dust, sweep the flagstones, line up the battered metal buckets for the morning
purge, then walk over to the monastery office to help Phra Anan with the accounts and the registration letters. Translating the letters, learning scraps of French and Dutch and German: I pray for you to help my son with his addiction. I feel you are his last chance. . Every day the lizard is waiting for me, judging me with its little liquid eyes. How have I done? Have I trodden lightly? The tinselly promise of religion: follow the instructions, find the exit. Orange, fading to guilty red, flaring up to an unbearable dazzling white as I open my eyes, then fading again as I drowse, watching seven-year-old Sam playing with a bucket and spade, pottering around and chattering to some invisible friend. Her arms and legs are less chubby than last year, her game more organized. My daughter, not by blood but because I notice such changes. My daughter because I love. Miranda, some way down the beach, looking for fossils, stooping to examine a find. Anna, walking away up the hill. Tall, rangy Anna, smoking a cigarette. What will I say to you? I’m driving south because I have something to ask you, but do I know what it is? I think I want to ask why you carried on, even when you must have known the revolution wasn’t getting any closer, when it must have been obvious you weren’t changing anything, just piling up horror. Did you still have a choice, by then? Grainy photographs of the burning embassy building. Uniformed police gesturing, looking up at the balcony. How did you survive? Who was the dead woman if it wasn’t you? And who helped you, Anna? What deals did you have to make to be allowed to live in peace in your little village, to walk up the hill carrying a string bag of melons, smoking a cigarette? When you cut up the fruit at your table, what do you feel? When you look back at your life, does it make sense? That’s what I want to know. That’s the answer I need from you.
For a year after that bombing, we fought a strange, silent war. Our first targets were corporate, because we believed corporations were pulling the strings of government. After the bank bomb, we attacked a chemical company, a subsidiary of a group that sold defoliants and white phosphorous to the American army. VICTORY
TO THE NLF AND ALL THIRD WORLD REVOLUTIONARIES. We bombed the head office of a construction firm with a contract to build new prisons. We bombed a bank that financed the regime in South Africa. WE ARE EVERYWHERE, we wrote. WE ARE IN YOUR OFFICES YOUR FACTORIES WE ARE THE MAN AND WOMAN NEXT TO YOU ON THE TUBE THE BUS THE TRAIN. Anna and I composed them together, lying on the floor or sitting at a rickety Formica table in one of the flats we rented after we closed down Thirteen.
Their school is a concentration camp. Their factory is a concentration camp. Their prison is a concentration camp. Their hospital is a concentration camp.
Concentration Camp Britain.
We are the Jews.
Can you smell smoke?
We’d argue about the tone, veering between a terse, tabloid style we hoped would speak to the masses and the technicalities of an argument we wanted to make to other revolutionaries. As we wrote them, our statements felt reasoned and sober. If they sounded harsh or hysterical, we felt it was only because we were speaking truth to power and the truth was bleak. We drafted them in a notebook, then made copies with a child’s printing set, sealing them and giving them to militant friends to circulate to the media.
Lessons: how to police each other, how to persecute the weak. State machine, making the citizens it needs. Bells telling you when to sit, when to stand. Can you handle it? Always productive, always on time. Ring ring! Mummy, Daddy,
Janet, and John. Open up, pop it in. The State installs the cop in your head.
SMASH THE STATE! OFF THE PIG!
The silence was eerie, absolute. Nothing in the papers, nothing on the TV. We tried to seed rumors, put out feelers to the underground press, who were running lurid stories about the Brigate Rossi in Italy, the German RAF, the PLO, the Weathermen. Nothing came of it, nothing reflected back to us at all. It was obvious the mainstream media had been instructed not to run the story, but why was no one else asking questions? How many accidental fires and midnight gas explosions would people accept? Richest one thousand have more than poorest two billion. A billion live and die on a dollar a day. It was as if we were shouting into a vacuum. I began to wonder what else took place in this silence, how much dark matter there really was in the universe.