Sometimes it felt as if we were spending more time arguing about money than about strategy. Like our failure to discuss the injuries at the gambling club, this should have been a warning to me, a sign that things were beginning to degenerate, but we were desperate for funding and prepared to do more or less anything to get it. A friend of Jay’s worked for a record company. Through him we were introduced to an underground character called Nice Mike, who wanted to score fifty thousand hits of acid off some Liverpool gangsters who had a lab down in Devon, at a farmhouse out on Exmoor. Nice Mike didn’t trust the people he was involved with and wanted to take along some protection. Jay suggested us.
It was risky. We knew nothing about Nice Mike’s contacts. We didn’t know a great deal about Nice Mike himself. I disliked him on sight, an overweight south Londoner with shoulder-length hair and loud Carnaby Street clothes, who set up our first meeting in a trendy bar and seemed incapable of answering direct questions. He laid out his proposition in an exaggeratedly soothing tone, as if lulling children to sleep. We told him nothing about our political activities; he seemed satisfied with the story that we were ordinary criminals, connected with some unspecified east-London gang. He was prepared to pay cash up front plus more when he’d sold the drugs. Despite our misgivings, we agreed.
He wanted to drive down to Devon, which was fine, but on the appointed day he turned up in an absurdly conspicuous car, a bright blue Bentley, loaded with gadgets that he insisted on demonstrating to us, like a salesman. The heated leather seats, the eight-track built into the dashboard. On the road he played acid rock and clicked his many elaborate silver rings on the steering wheel, bragging about the famous groups he dealt to when they were passing through London. It was all birds and
backstage and Jimmy this and Mick that, clicking his damn rings on the wheel in time to the beat.
It soon became apparent that Mike was very nervous. As he drove he smoked joints, stubbing them out in the ashtray, weaving alarmingly in and out of the traffic, occasionally freaking himself out about phantom objects in his peripheral vision and pulling the wheel round to avoid them. Luckily the car handled like a boat or I swear he would have spun it. He wasn’t helped by his glasses, big octagonal things with a heavy blue tint that must have increased the weirdness several-fold. When we passed Stonehenge he insisted on stopping, as if we were on some kind of excursion. The three of us — Sean, Jay, and I — trailed after him while he wandered round the stones, waving his arms and intoning a lot of faux-Druidic nonsense, invoking the pagan gods to bless our endeavor and promising to “make a sacrifice upon our return.”
When we got back into the car, which was parked on the grass shoulder by the roadside, Mike scrabbled around in the glove compartment and pulled out a plastic bag of pills. “Want anything? We need to maintain our edge, yeah?” I told him I thought what we needed was to keep our shit together and he got very defensive. Who was I to say who did or didn’t have their shit together? Who the fuck was I? He kept repeating it, his tone increasingly self-righteous. “I mean, who the fuck are you? How do I even know you have your shit together?”
We ate a tense fry-up at a Little Chef somewhere in Somerset, wreathed in cigarette smoke and mutual distrust. In the middle of the crowded diner, Mike decided to start talking about guns. We’d brought guns, right? We were packing, because we needed to be packing, because he hadn’t paid for fucking amateurs, OK? He’d thought we were going to look heavier. We didn’t look heavy enough. He was speaking very loudly. The subject of guns seemed to tug his accent partway across the Atlantic. People were staring. Young families, truck drivers.
The only way to shut him up was to walk out, so that was what we did, leaving our plates of food half finished on the table. When
we got back to the car, I took his keys and Sean shoved him into the back seat of the Bentley, still protesting about his eggs and his second cup of tea. Jay kept watch, leaning on the car, as Sean and I got in beside him and shut the door.
Sean was direct. “Now, look here, you decadent little fucker. If this goes bad I’m going to cut your balls off and make you eat them, you understand?”
Nice Mike’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Don’t you dare rip me off. If you rip me off you’ll regret it. I’ve got friends, man. You touch any of my money and I’m telling you right here and now that you’ll regret it.”
We quizzed him again about the people we were going to meet, what he knew of their background, who else he’d told about the deal. He was evasive, panicky. Then we locked him in the car while we went for a quick walk round the forecourt.
“You know what?” said Sean. “We should just dump the cunt. Take the money, take the car and have done with it. We don’t need to go to Devon.”
“It’ll come back to us,” argued Jay. “He’s not kidding about having friends.”
Like Sean, I’d had enough of Nice Mike. “Fuck his friends,” I said. It was two to one, so we went back to the Bentley and told him how it was going to be. When he argued, Sean stuck a gun in his mouth, to prove he was “packing.” We took Mike’s briefcase of cash and his bag of pills and drove away in his ridiculous car, leaving him kneeling by the side of the road, his eyes tightly shut and his hands clasped in front of him, as if in prayer. If he had friends, they never found us.
Was that before or after Anna went to Paris? I’m honestly not sure. Maybe it’s the stress we were living under or maybe it’s just too long ago, but that year exists for me only as a series of fragments, shards of memory I can’t fit together and don’t quite trust. I know my mind is capable of playing tricks, not just in sequencing but in deeper, more subtle ways. For example, I remember daffodils in the graveyard where I walked with Anna, looking for dead babies.
It was a little Norman church with a lychgate and moss-covered gravestones leaning at drunken angles. The light of my memory is golden-hour light, warm and diffuse. Sunshine-yellow daffodils are scattered in the long grass. Sunshine-yellow and paper-white. But that would place it in early spring, and it was certainly later than that, months later.
I remember, very clearly it seems to me, what she looked like and how she was dressed. Her hair was cropped short, her arms and legs bare. There was a softness about her body that I associate with periods when she was happy, when she allowed herself to be less rigorous and austere. We were laughing, strolling through the churchyard like conventionalized lovers, bathed in the yellow light that’s now eternally the light of i97i, not just for me but for everyone who saw a film or looked at a magazine that year. Dazzle and softness and lens flare.
We held hands. I can’t have concocted that. She talked about her childhood. For most children, the world is defined by the sensory; by likes and dislikes, favorite smells and tastes. Anna’s narrative was mostly about ideas. Witness, duty. It’s the only time I remember hearing her speak about her family. She was an only child, precocious and diligent, the repository of all her Quaker parents’ wishes for the future. She didn’t say much about her mother, but spoke of her father with respect and what sounded like regret. He’d been, she said, like an exam board, asking her general knowledge questions at the dinner table, testing her on her memory for various prayers and catechisms. She recited for me, in an ironic sing-song voice: We utterly deny all outward wars and strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end or under any pretense whatever; this is our testimony to the whole world.