Our information came from a friend of a friend, a girl who used to have a secretarial job at the GPO. At night, she said, the only person on the upper floors was a watchman. Jay and Leo checked it out. One evening Jay wandered around the building for almost half an hour without being challenged. He was the one who found the storeroom.
But the door’s locked.
What a farce. The door’s locked and there are gun battles on the streets of Belfast and children are dying in Biafra and in their infinite wisdom the British people have elected themselves a Conservative government. The right wing press is whispering to its readers about the enemy within, but despite our best efforts we’re still just a rumor, part of the toxic atmosphere of this old, cold, gray little country. Not for long. This action will make us real. Undeniable and real. But the door’s locked.
Here I am, surrounded by bovine executives and their
frozen-haired mistresses, proud members of the ruling class squatting in a hermetically sealed revolving bubble, chowing down on duck à l’orange: bland and selfish, totally unconcerned with all the horror inflicted in their name. I’ve made hating them into such a habit that I don’t really see them anymore, don’t regard any one of these rich white people as more or less attractive or clever or cultured or better-dressed than the others. They’re an abstraction, a quantity of power that has to be moved from one side of the balance sheet to the other. As individuals, they have no substance for me at all.
But we are agreed. We respect human life. That’s the difference between us and them. We’ve taken care not to hurt anyone with our bombs. But we need to make a point. It’s time to put an end to the silence. In Britain, established power likes things discreet. Confrontation is always a sign of failure. When the system’s working, the energies of those who resist it are always diffused, our anger spiraling down into some soft and foggy place where there’s no obvious enemy, just a row of civil service desks and a faint, receding peal of trumpets.
I can’t taste my soup. Mechanically I spoon it into my mouth. The door. The fucking door.
“Give me the bag,” I say to Anna.
“You can’t carry a woman’s bag through the restaurant. People will notice. It’ll be too obvious.”
“Just give me the fucking bag.”
I have to do something. I can’t sit and eat. My stomach has cramped up.
“I’ll do it,” she says, and gets up again, toting the heavy bag over her shoulder. I’m left in my seat, slowly revolving. I try to control my breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth.
“Is everything all right, sir?” asks the waiter, and I stare at him as if he’s speaking a foreign language.
I don’t want death. I try to remember that. I’m twenty-two and I want life. Life for myself, life for the world, all the people of this fragile blue and green disc. This is my hope, as I sit at the table,
scraping breadcrumbs into patterns with the side of my knife: that the revolution can happen through an accretion of small actions, like moth holes on a suit left too long in a closet. Because what’s the alternative? 1917. Executions and prison camps and civil war and tens of thousands dead.
Cleansing, Anna calls it. I hate that word.
I wish she’d come back. Panic is bubbling up inside me, a primal scream, all the psychic pain knotted into my muscles. Just as sitting still is about to become intolerable, she slides back into her seat. She hasn’t got the bag with her. At the same time the waiter arrives with our main course. In answer to my unspoken question she just nods.
I stare down at my plate. A fussy little pile of mashed potato. Green beans. A pork chop.
At three A.M we phoned in a warning. At four-thirty our bomb blew up part of the thirty-first floor of the Post Office Tower, sending chunks of concrete and shards of glass showering over the roofs of Cleveland Street. By morning we were the lead item on BBC News. London landmark a target. No one was hurt, though the night watchman phlegmatically reported being “lifted two or three inches” out of his armchair. A government minister gave a statement calling it an act of insanity.
SHUT DOWN THE SPECTACLE!
Last night Post Office Tower bombed.
Because it is the lobotomy machine
the pacifier
Microwaves sent out across Britain
Television transmission
the dead hand of technology
their means of control
their communications
their message
* * *
fairy stories to distract you
REALITY: Imperialism, Colonialism, Dictatorship
REALITY: troops on British streets
REALITY: an international state of war
REALITY: the mental patient spasms with
electricity
REALITY: dead-eyed mothers on Merseyside streets
REALITY: not a GAME SHOW
We demand complete withdrawal of American troops from Indochina, British troops off British streets.
WE ARE EVERYWHERE
SHUT DOWN THE SPECTACLE
DESTROY THE RULE OF CAPITAL ARMED RESISTANCE NOW!
Even though the news report didn’t quote our communiqué I was still ecstatic, hugging the others, even punching the air, the idiotic gesture of a football player celebrating a goal. For a day or two I felt slightly manic and walked the streets in an attempt to calm myself. I covered miles of pavement, feeling the world had subtly changed. Faintly but unmistakably our idea had been absorbed into the air. Every passerby had been touched by it. There we were, a headline behind the grille of the newsstand outside the tube. There we were, propagating through the radio spectrum. Eventually my euphoria dissipated and I found myself on London Bridge, pushing feebly against a pinstriped tide of evening commuters, feeling naked, surveilled. I went home and slept, the covers pulled over my head.
I was in a Camden café with Sean when an unfamiliar face appeared on the television above the counter. The man was a chief
superintendent in the Met, an unremarkable-looking official in his fifties or sixties, with thick-framed glasses and graying combed-over hair. It was hard to catch what he was saying over the noise of the diners. He stood outside Scotland Yard and spoke to an interviewer in an unhurried, languorous voice, “educated” vowels pasted over a Black Country accent. . Entirely in hand. . the object of attention. . who sees anything suspicious is urged to come forward. . I examined him, this bomb squad detective, soothing a troubled situation with the balm of euphemism. Businesslike and professionally unemotional, a man who’d never understand that his own impersonality was at the root of our so-called crime, that we’d placed our bombs to destroy the rule of men who’d evacuated themselves of their humanity, functional men like him. The enemy.
The police acted quickly. Within the next day or two, we started hearing about busts. In Notting Hill detectives turned over every underground household in the area. During the next few weeks, it seemed as if every squat and commune in London got raided. Bizarre tales filtered back: a feminist bookshop in Stoke Newington whose entire stock was confiscated, an International Marxist Group organizer taken for questioning because he had fencing equipment in his room. We’d got what we wanted. Reality. War on the state. War, or at least talk. We were being talked about all over Britain.
the saturation of our minds with the poison of subversion has become so constant that we are no longer even aware you say we can support the aim while disagreeing on methods but they should think about the damage they’re causing to legitimate organizations trying to do real creative grassroots work opinions that once would have been thought frankly treasonous are openly as a tactic it’s useless actively promoted by at least thirty known Communist organizations and many thousands of unassociated