“Not calling me ‘sweetheart’ would be a good start.”
I don’t hide my laugh. The guy stares daggers at me.
• • •
LESS THAN A hundred yards later this knackered Ford Escort van pulls over. It might’ve been orange once, or perhaps that’s just rust. The passenger winds down the window. “Hi.” I’ve got a gobful of Ritz biscuit and must look like a total spaz, but I recognize who it is straight off. “It’s not quite a shiny Jaguar,” the woman with the raspberry-red hair slaps the door cheerfully, “and Ian here definitely isn’t a knight,” the guy driving does a little lean-over and a wave, “but if you’re after a lift to Sheppey, we’re going nearly to the bridge. Guide’s honor, we’re not axe murderers or chainsaw killers, and it’s got to beat standing on a slip road for six hours waiting for someone like that”—she cocks her head towards the Texaco garage—“to stop and ‘What can I do for you, sweetheart?’ all over you.”
My feet are killing me, and a lift off a couple’s safer than a single man, she’s right. “That’d be brill, thanks.”
She opens the back of the van and shunts some boxes to make space. I wedge myself in, but there’s windows on all sides so I’ve got a nice enough view. Ian, who’s midtwenties, baldish, and has a nose as big as a Concorde, asks, “Not too crushed back there, I hope?”
“Not at all,” I say. “It’s dead cozy.”
“It’ll only be twenty-five minutes,” Ian says, and we move off.
“I was saying to Ian,” the woman tells me, “if we didn’t give you a lift, I’d spend all day worrying. I’m Heidi, anyway. Who are you?”
“Tracy,” I answer. “Tracy Corcoran.”
“You know, I never met a Tracy I didn’t like.”
“I could find you one or two,” I say, and Ian and Heidi laugh, like that was pretty witty, and I s’pose it was, yeah. “Heidi’s a nice name, too.”
Ian does a dubious mmm, and Heidi gives him a poke in the ribs. “Stop interfering with the driver,” he says.
We pass a school ordered from the same catalogue as Windmill Hill Comprehensive — same big windows, same flat roofs, same muddy football pitch. I’m actually starting to believe I’ve left schooclass="underline" It’s like old Mr. Sharkey says, “Life’s a matter of Who Dares Wins.”
Heidi asks, “Do you live on Sheppey, Tracy?”
“No. I’m going there to work on a fruit farm.”
Ian asks, “Gabriel Harty’s place, would that be?”
“That’s right. D’you know him?”
“Not personally, but he’s known for having a subjective grasp of arithmetic when it comes to totting up your pay, so keep your wits about you. Errors are likely to be in his favor.”
“Thanks, I will. But it should be okay. A friend at school was there last summer.” I find myself gabbling to make myself more believable. “I’ve just done my O levels ’cause I’m sixteen, and I’m saving for an InterRail in August.”
That all sounded like I read it off a card.
“InterRails look great fun,” says Heidi. “Europe’s your oyster. So where’s home, Tracy?”
Where would I like home to be? “London.”
The lights are red. A blind man and his guide dog step out.
“Big city, London,” says Ian. “Whereabouts, exactly?”
Now I panic a bit. “In Hyde Park.”
“What—in Hyde Park? Up a tree, with the squirrels?”
“No. Our actual house is closer to, uh, Camden Town.”
Heidi and Ian don’t answer at first — have I said something stupid? — but then Ian says, “I’m with you,” so it’s okay. The blind man reaches the other side of the road, and Ian struggles with the gearbox before we move off. “I stayed in Camden Town when I first went to London,” he says, “sleeping on a mate’s sofa. In Rowntree Square, by the cricket ground next to the Tube station. Know it?”
“Sure,” I lie. “I go past there, like, all the time.”
Heidi asks, “Have you hitched from Camden this morning?”
“Yes. I got a lift off a truck driver to Gravesend, then a German tourist brought me to Rochester Bridge, and then you pulled up. Jammy or what?” I look for a way to change the subject. “What’s in all these boxes, then? Are you moving house?”
“No, it’s this week’s Socialist Worker,” says Heidi.
“They sell that in Queen Street,” I say. “In Camden.”
“We’re with the Central London branch,” says Ian. “Me and Heidi are postgrads at the LSE, but we spend our weekends near Faversham so we’re a sort of distribution hub. Hence all the boxes.”
I pick up a copy of the Socialist Worker. “Good read, is it?”
“Every other British newspaper is a propaganda sheet,” replies Ian. “Even The Guardian. Take one.”
It seems rude to refuse, so I say “Thanks” and study the front page: the headline is WORKERS UNITE NOW! over a photo of striking miners. “So do you, like … agree with Russia?”
“Not at all,” says Ian. “Stalin butchered Russian communism in its cradle, Khrushchev was a shameless revisionist, and Brezhnev built luxury stores for Party sycophants while the workers queued for stale bread. Soviet imperialism’s as bad as American capitalism.”
Houses loop past, like the background on cheap cartoons.
Heidi asks, “What do your parents do for a living, Tracy?”
“They own a pub. The King’s Head. Near Camden.”
“Pub landlords,” says Ian, “get bled white by the big breweries. Same old story, I’m afraid. The worker makes the profit and the bosses cream it off. Hello-hello, what’s all this about?”
The traffic ahead’s come to a standstill, halfway up a hill.
“An invisible war’s going on,” says Heidi, which confuses me till I realize she doesn’t mean the slow traffic, “all through history — the class war. Owners versus slaves, nobles versus serfs, the bloated bosses versus workers, the haves versus the have-nots. The working classes are kept in a state of repression by a mixture of force and lies.”
So I ask, “What sort of lies?”
“The lie that happiness is about borrowing money you haven’t got to buy crap you don’t need,” says Ian. “The lie that we live in a democratic state. And the most weaselly lie of all, that there is no class war. That’s why the Establishment keeps such an iron grip on what’s taught in schools, specially in history. Once the workers wise up, the revolution will kick off. And, as Gil Scott-Heron tells us, it will not be televised.”
I don’t know who the heron is, but it’s hard to think of our history teacher Mr. Simms as a cog in a vast plot to keep the workers down. I wonder if Dad’s a bloated boss for employing Glenda. I ask, “Don’t revolutions often end up making things even worse?”
“Fair point,” says Heidi. “Revolutions do attract the Napoleons, the Maos, the Pol Pots. But that’s where the Party comes in. When the British revolution kicks off, we’ll be here with our structure in place, to protect it from Fascists and hijackers.”
The traffic inches forward; Ian’s van rumbles on.
I ask, “D’you think the revolution’ll be soon, then?”
“The miners’ strike could be the match in the gas tank,” says Ian. “When workers see the unions being gunned down — first with laws, then bullets — it’ll be clear that a class-based revolution isn’t some pie-in-the-sky lefty dream, but a matter of survival.”