There was a meeting. Hostile faces, searching looks. I was left in a room on my own and when they came back, they told me — or, rather, Anna told me, using her coldest and most impersonal tone— that Leo and Jay would take the train with me to Manchester, where we had a flat we’d kept empty for emergencies. We should phone in every day. We should wait for instructions.
Whether or not I’d been believed, my news precipitated a group transformation, a sudden shedding of skin. For some time we’d been laying paper trails around our new identities, breathing life into birth certificates and library cards and utility bills and fake letters of reference. We’d all practiced changing our appearance. It was time to break with the past, to go completely underground.
From that day on my name was Michael Frame. I practiced it. If Michael Frame was walking down the street and someone called out, he should turn round instantly, without hesitating. Michael Frame had short hair and a neatly trimmed moustache. He had no connection with politics of any kind. I rehearsed the names of his mother and father, his date of birth.
On the journey north, Leo and Jay behaved more like guards than comrades. I couldn’t buy a newspaper at a kiosk or walk through the train to the buffet car without one of them accompanying me.
We didn’t talk much. They both had trouble meeting my eye. I knew Leo was armed and that made me afraid.
The Manchester flat was on the sixteenth floor of a system-built block in Rusholme. It was almost bare of furniture, just a couple of mattresses and a little black-and-white telly balanced on an orange crate by the heater. We stayed there for almost two weeks, playing cards, smoking endless cigarettes. The weather was filthy. Wind drove dirty sleet against the windows. Once in a while the sun appeared, a bilious pale yellow ball like the yolk of a battery farm egg. If it hung around for more than an hour or two in the morning, it turned the treacherous film of ice on the pavement into a nasty gray slush.
A strike was on, so there were power cuts. When night fell, its reign was absolute. In the stairwell of Arkwright House, bobbing flashlight beams; dishes of melted candlewax on the kitchen counter. Sixteen floors up and the elevators didn’t work. Sixteen floors with crappy plastic shopping bags, which sagged and tore, sending cans and bottles crashing down the hard steps. When the wind was strong, rushing through the gaps between Arkwright and Stephenson and Cobden, the three towers groaned in pain.
One evening as I climbed the stairs with Jay, my pocket flashlight lit up an old man clinging to the handrail. He was like a ghost from the industrial past: flat cap, scarf knotted round his neck, his jacket unbuttoned to reveal a woollen undershirt tucked into a pair of greasy trousers. He was in a bad way, breathing heavily, the sweat pouring down his unshaven cheeks. When I asked if he was all right he mutely shook his head. “It’s Mary,” he said, expelling the words with great effort, through a curtain of phlegm.
George was probably in his sixties but work had aged him brutally, scooping out his face and clogging his lungs with cotton dust. In August his wife had slipped and fallen; now she was too frail to leave the flat. For the last couple of days she hadn’t stopped shivering, so he’d put on his shoes and gone downstairs to fetch a doctor. It had taken him the best part of an hour to make it as far as the seventh floor. We sat with him for a while, and when we
realized his asthma wasn’t getting any better, Jay went back down to the pay phones in the hall to call an ambulance. Half an hour, they said. They’d had a lot of calls. I told George they were on their way and went to check on his wife.
“Don’t frighten her,” he pleaded. “Sing out before you go in, else she’ll think you’re a burglar.”
Up on the fourteenth floor, I knocked on the door and called through the letterbox. George couldn’t remember if he’d locked up so he’d given me his key. Still calling out, I went inside. The flat smelled of bacon fat and was as cold as a tomb. The flashlight picked up patches of damp, a shelf of dusty china birds, an armchair with a stack of Reader’s Digest magazines balanced on a footstool beside it. I found Mary bundled up in bed, her eyes shut and her mouth hanging open, a little gray-faced figure with a tuft of thin hair plastered across her scalp. The bedroom stank of stale urine. I wondered if she was already dead.
“Mary, I’m a neighbor. George sent me to see how you were.”
She moaned. I couldn’t tell if she was aware of me, but at least she was alive. My foot hit an overflowing chamber pot, sitting out on the rug by the bed; I tried to master an overpowering sense of disgust. How had they been left like this? Who was supposed to be looking after them? Eventually the ambulance men came; Jay and I made ourselves scarce. We stood on the landing, just out of sight, listening to them cursing and swearing as they carried Mary down the stairs. I expect it was the smell, rather than the weight. She must have been as light as a bird.
The next day I took George a bag of necessities: candles, toilet paper, cans of food. He was too proud to admit it, but there were obviously days when he and Mary ate nothing at all, when their pension money had run out or they hadn’t been able to make it to the shops. I sat in the armchair and he shuffled around, making a slow motion cup of tea. I listened to his labored breathing, the squeak of his cane on the kitchen linoleum. It made me feel ordinary, human. I remember it as the one decent moment of my time in Manchester.
When I went back upstairs after taking George his food, Leo
thrust a newspaper into my hand. Across the front page was
splashed the story that a bomb had blown up part of the employ-
ment secretary’s constituency home. A communiqué had been
received from the bombers, which hadn’t been reproduced.
“Was that us?” I asked. Leo nodded.
“Anyone hurt?”
“No, not that it says.”
“Why wasn’t I told?”
He shrugged. “Because you’re a security risk,” he said flatly.
At last, to my face. I tried to make a joke of it. “What are you
going to do, Leo, put me on trial? A people’s court? March me into
the woods and shoot me in the back of the head?”
I wanted him to laugh. He didn’t laugh. He told me to use his
other name. Paul. I was to call him Paul Collins.
“Since when,” I asked, “are we bombing people’s houses? Did
we know nobody was in there?”
“A risk assessment was made.”
“A risk assessment was made. You know what’s going to happen,
don’t you, Leo? Someone’s going to get killed.”
Again he shrugged, the same petulant, noncommittal shrug.
“Collateral damage,” he said. “It’s inevitable in war.”
“You sound like General Westmoreland.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Callous, Leo. You sound callous.”
“Human being or pig. You make your choice.”
“So there’s nothing in between?”
“No.”
“And the pigs have to die?”
He didn’t reply, just stared at me angrily.
I gave him a slow round of applause. “Well, good for you, mate.
That’s the kind of commitment I like.”
He chose to ignore my sarcasm. “Sean’s coming later. You can
have it out with him.”
Soon enough came the death-rattle buzz of the doorbell. Sean
wore a new gray suit and a hungry look. He was carrying, of all things, a leather attaché case, the kind with a combination lock and fancy metal clasps. He loped into the flat and filled the living room with misdirected energy. “Hello, Mike,” he said.