‘Sure,’ I said. ‘“Not those rich imperialist tit-bits.”’
‘Yeah,’ he grinned. ‘Well, back to the Judean People’s Front.’
‘What!?? Don’t you mean the People’s Front of Judea?’
Reid smote his forehead. ‘Of course. See ya mate.’
He edged through the crush and vanished into the crowd.
We finished up our fast-food in a defiantly leisurely way. The queue, as apparently unending as the demonstration, shuffled forward. My father spotted a young woman carrying a bundle of papers whose headline – no, it wasn’t even that, it was the actual masthead – read ‘Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!’ and asked her in a tone of polite curiosity: ‘Why don’t you fight capitalism, for a change?’
But after the young woman had said only a few sentences, he stopped her with a smile and an uplifted finger. He looked at his watch, and brought the finger down to tap it triumphantly.
‘One minute, twenty-five seconds,’ he said to the puzzled cadre. ‘Congratulations. That’s the shortest time yet for a member of – let me see –’ he made a pretence of counting on his fingers ‘– a split, from a split, from a split, from the Fourth International to call me a sectarian!’
He stood back as we all rose to sweep our detritus onto trays.
‘Wasse on about?’ the young woman said indignantly, seeing a look of surreptitious sympathy from Amy. ‘Wassis Fourf Inte’national?’
‘Don’t you worry, dear,’ Amy said, squeezing past. ‘He’s a terrible man.’
But she slipped the girl a leaflet all the same.
Amy believed there was hope for everybody yet.
Except, possibly, Martin.
In the play-park off Holloway Road, Eleanor paced along painted lion-footprints and suddenly scooted off to the swings. We’d taken her here to run about after all the Tube and bus rides she’d sat through.
Annette flopped on a bench. ‘I’m knackered,’ she said. ‘Long walk.’ She leaned back, eyes half-shut against the sunlight but still watching Eleanor.
I sat down beside her, leaning forward, elbows on knees.
‘Long talk, too?’
‘Oh yes. Dave.’ She sighed and shifted, half-facing me, an arm draped along the back of the bench. ‘I came across him selling his Socialist Action faction rag at the assembly area, and I’d lost the Islington lot so I ended up marching along with all those Scottish trade unionists. Dave and I talked the whole way.’
I smiled. ‘Like old times.’
Annette ran her upper teeth over her lower lip, looked in her bag and reached for a cigarette.
‘Yeah, well…’ She lit up and inhaled hard, sighed smokily. ‘You could say that. Shit, this is difficult.’
‘What’s difficult?’
‘I should’ve told you this before, but there never seemed to be a good reason, or a good time. The fact is, for quite a while now David’s been, well, kind of gallantly flirting with me, you know?’
‘Of course.’ I smiled sourly, feeling tense and cold. ‘That’s understandable. And I suppose you would coquettishly flirt right back?’
‘How nice of you to put it like that.’ She leaned forward, eyes bright, and laid a hand on my knee. ‘But Dave’s stubborn, and literal, and he’s so goddamn serious…’
‘And he got the wrong idea,’ I said, my voice heavy and flat. Eleanor came off the swing and ran up a grassy mound, like a long barrow, and began climbing a wood-and-metal artificial tree.
‘Yes.’ Annette sounded relieved. ‘Maybe that’s why –’ She stopped for a moment and sucked air around the cigarette, as if it were a joint. ‘Today,’ she continued in a firmer tone, ‘God, my ears were burning. He told me that letting our…relationship, or whatever it was, break up was the worst mistake he’s ever made, that he’s never got over me and…’ Her voice trailed off and she stared into space. ‘He’s always loved me and he wants me to come back,’ she concluded in a rush.
I stared at her. ‘You mean to tell me –’
‘Daa-ad!’ Eleanor wailed from the top of the climbing-tree. She wind-milled her arms as she swayed, her feet on the top grips. I jumped, I warped space – it seemed only a moment later that I was reaching up to catch her and lower her to the ground.
‘Stay on the swings,’ I said. ‘Please!’
I sat down again beside Annette, shaking my head. My heart was thumping for several reasons.
‘He really just blatantly told you that?’
‘Yes,’ Annette agreed.
‘Jesus!’ I exploded. ‘What the fuck does he think he’s up to?’ I thought of our casual, friendly banter and felt sick.
‘I’ve told you,’ Annette said, ‘what the fuck he thinks he’s up to.’
‘And what did you say?’
Annette lit another cigarette, her hands shaky, the flame invisible in the light. ‘I said he was crazy, he was pushing it too far and that I was perfectly happy and I love you and Eleanor and there’s no way I’d leave you for him. I told him to forget it, basically.’ She smiled at me wanly. ‘What did you expect?’
‘Well, that, obviously.’ I squinted into the sun at her, smiling with relief. I was angry, not at her – at him. But some of it must have leaked into my voice as I said, ‘But did you say to him that you don’t love him?’
‘No,’ Annette said. ‘I couldn’t. It’s not that I still love him!’ She laughed. ‘I don’t, not…like that, but I still care about him. As you do too, yes? And I don’t know if you know this, but I got the feeling he’s really unhappy, and confused and frustrated, and it woulda been like a kick in the teeth.’
A kick in the teeth, I thought – that could be arranged. But I breathed out, and relaxed and forced a smile, and said, ‘Yeah, OK, I’m glad you said what you did. To him and to me.’ I smiled at her more genuinely, and leaned forward to put my arms around her and as I did so realised that I had a cigarette in my hand and that after five years off the damn’ things I was smoking again.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘fuck me.’
‘Yes.’
Which was all very well and wonderful, but afterwards, lying staring at the ceiling, I thought about all she had said, and – more worryingly – all that she hadn’t.
Looking back, I could see that Annette had understated the length of time in which Reid had been ‘gallantly flirting’ with her. He’d done it from the first evening he’d met us after we’d started going together. I’d thought it a joke on me, a compliment to Annette, in as much as I’d thought of it at all. Shortly afterwards, Reid had – to everyone’s surprise – had a brief and tempestuous affair with Myra. Now that I’d thought showed a flash of male-primate teeth, a gesture at me. But strangely, he’d seemed more cutup about its predictable breakup than he had ever been about the ending of his relationship with Annette. Perhaps, like me, he’d unwittingly fallen for Myra, and she hadn’t for him.
Sexual competition had been intertwined with our friendship from the start, and whether we were close or distant, so it apparently remained.
I rolled out of bed and padded through the flat to the kitchen. I sat in a pool of light and smoked another cigarette. Outside, in the black window, my reflection looked ironically back. The government health warning (always an occasion for ironic reflection) told me things I didn’t need to know, and didn’t warn of the real killer: the slight, the subtle, the incremental and irreversible hardening of the heart.
I was working at the college three days a week, and Monday wasn’t one of them. Annette left for work, I cleared up the breakfast stuff and walked Eleanor to the school gates. I picked up the papers, almost bought ten Silk Cut, returned to the flat and whizzed through the housework like a student on speed. Then I sat down with a coffee and a Filofax and a savage bout of nicotine withdrawal.