“Officer,” she said without turning around, “please escort my driver into the hotel.”
“Aw right, ma’am.”
“Thanks!”
The driver passed by on her left surrounded by uniforms. Myra took advantage of the accompanying flurry of distraction to dive behind the man who’d yelled at her, and to push herself into the small huddle of pro-ISTWR demonstrators. She glanced quickly around five shocked but friendly faces, noticing lapel badges with a flashed grin of recognition and pride—the old hammer-and-sickleand-4, a solidarity-campaign button with the ISTWR’s signature radiation trefoil, sun-and-eagle stickers…
“Comrades,” she said, “let’s go inside.”
The comrades clustered around her and together they stepped back on the pavement. The angry man was being restrained by some of his own comrades, but still denouncing Myra at the top of his voice. Myra’s group marched up the steps and through the hotel’s big swing doors into the now crowded foyer. White marble floor, black-painted ironwork, fluted mahogany at the reception and stairwell, a lot of flowers and stained glass. The militiamen and the driver were standing off to one side, some hotel-management chap was hurrying up with a politely concerned look and a mobile phone, and—looking back—she saw that everyone was inside and the steps were clear and the door was being secured.
Jesus H. Christ,” she said. By now she was thoroughly ratded. She reached inside her coat again. Everybody froze.
She stayed her hand, and looked around; smiled grimly.
“Anybody else need a cigarette?”
The iron fire-escape door was spring-loaded and would clang if she let it swing back, so she closed it slowly, letting go of its edge at the last moment.
It clanged.
Myra looked up and down the fire-escape and around the back yard of the hotel. Dripping pipes, rattling ventilation ducts, soggy cartons, moss and lichen and flagstones. She padded down the steps, almost silent in her battered sneakers, old jeans, sweater and padded jacket. At the bottom she pushed her eyeband under the peak of the baseball cap under which she’d piled her still-grey hair, jammed her fists in the deep pockets, feeling the reassurance of the passport and the gun, and strolled across the yard, through another one-way gate, along an alley to Pitt Street then down on to Sauchiehall.
She caught her reflection in a shop-window, and smirked at how like a student she looked. It wasn’t a perfect reflection, so it also made her look flatteringly young—like she’d look in a month or two, she hoped. And she already had the bearing, she could see that as she glanced sideways at the reflection of her walk, jaunty and confident. Her joints didn’t hurt and her heels didn’t jar and she had so much energy she felt like running, or skipping, or jumping about just to burn some of it off. She couldn’t remember having felt this good when she really was young.
And things were coming back, memories of an earlier self, earlier personal tactics, like, before her rejuve, if she’d got caught up in a situation like that outside the hotel she’d have turned to the Guards to protect her, as though by reflex, and no doubt sparked a riot right there; not now, it had been a lightning calculation that the demonstrators, however, hostile to each other or to the militia, would not attack an innocent minion like the driver an would not attack her while she was shielded by the comrades. No violence in the workers’ movement, no enemies on the Left—it didn’t work all the time, but by and large the truce was honoured; mutual assured deterrence, perhaps, but then, what wasn’t?
Sauchiehall, Glasgow’s main shopping street, had been depedestranised since she’d last been here and it thrummed with through traffic, electric mostly but with a few coughing old internalcombustion engines and speeding cyclists and, jeez, yes, cantering horses among them. Myra raced the red light at the end of the street, kept up her jog as she crossed the pedestrian bridge over the howling intersection above the M8 and up into Woodlands Road. There she slowed and strolled again, relishing the old patch, the familiar territory, the nostalgia pricking her eyes. (God, she’d flyposted that very pillar of that overpass for a Critique seminar in 1976!)
But the area was posh now, full of Sikh men in suits—bankers and lawyers and doctors—and women in saris accompanied by kids and often as not a Scottish nanny; pavements over-parked with expensive, heavy Malaysian cars. Not like old times, not at all, except for the occasional curry aroma and the feel of the wind and the look of the scudding clouds above.
Talking to the comrades in the New Brit, that had been like old times. It had been like fucking time travel, and far more like homecoming than any encounter she’d had in New York. After she’d thanked the militia officers, flatly refused to press assault charges, and insisted on giving a huge tip to the driver, she’d retired to the hotel’s cafe for a coffee and a smoke with the five young people who’d escorted her in: Davy and Alison and Mike and Sandra and Rashid, all proud members of the Glasgow branch of the Workers’ Power Party, an organization much fallen-back from its high-water mark in the 2020s under the old Republic but still struggling along, still recruiting and still the British section of the Fourth International.
And they really were young, not rejuvenated old folks like her; she could hardly understand it, because she’d been thinking of the International, for decades now, as a club of ageing veterans. But then she thought of how the most formative and exciting experience of their childhoods had been a revolution—the British section of the Fall Revolution, yes!—and how that might have given them an idea of what the real (that is to say, ideal, never-actually-existing) Revolution might be like.
They’d regarded her, of course, as an old comrade, a veteran revolutionary who’d actually made a revolution, and actually ran a workers’ state; but they’d soon lost their reserve, perhaps unconsciously misled (she fancied) by her increasingly believable apparent youth; and told her in more detail than she needed to know of the inevitable rancorous rivalries that had pitted them against, and the rest of the local Left for, her regime’s liberal critics and/or Sino-Soviet communist foes.
She was grateful for their support, of course, and told them so; but she thought their ingrained acceptance of far-left factionalism was blinding them to the depth of genuine hatred and moral outrage she’d aroused, and indeed to its justification. There had been nothing in the angry man’s diatribe which she hadn’t at one time or another said to herself.
You fucking sell-out, you fucking capitalist whore. Yes, comrade, you have a point there. There may be something in what you say.
At the same time she found that the comrades were over-solucitious, certain that she’d be in danger if she wandered around on her own in Glasgow. They urged her to contact the consulate, and to travel officially. Myra had demurred, pointing out that that was exactly what had got her into this trouble in the first place. She hadn’t told them what she did intend to do, however—somebody must have leaked the news of her unheralded and early arrival, and she had no reason to suppose it might not be one of them.
She passed the old church, St Jude’s, which still looked much too grand, too catholic for the tiny denomination it served, and opposite it the Halt Bar where she’d drunk with David Reid and with Jon Wilde, separately and together, during and after the brief, intense affairs that had nudged all their lives on to their particular paths.
And thus, the lives and deaths of countless others. Jon had virtually started the space movement, and founded Space Merchants. Reid had built up Mutual Protection, and Myra the ISTWR. All from small beginnings, inconsequential at the time, all eventually affecting history on a scale usually attributed to Great Men.