It was probably the proudest moment in the history of British democracy. I watched it in the basement of a safe house on an illegal Iraqi satellite channel, and it made me vomit.
I knew I should be working; there was always another article to send out on the net, another friend or foe to contact, another militia unit’s fate to check; but I was hacking German casualty lists, searching for a name I hoped against hope that I wouldn’t find. The Israelis had tipped their long-range missiles with tactical, not strategic, warheads. Even in Berlin there were more survivors than anyone had expected. There was always a chance…
The phone rang.
‘Dad?’
‘Eleanor!’
‘Yes. Are you all right?’
Was I all right. I felt as if it was I who had come back from the dead.
‘Of course, oh my God, are you?’
‘I’m fine, I saw some terrible things but I’m okay. So’s Colin. We’re at the airport.’ She laughed. ‘Like you said. Sorry I’m a bit late. My flight boards in ten minutes, due in at 1545.’
It was 2.15. I said I’d be there to meet her. After she rang off I immediately called Annette with the news.
‘Is it safe for you to come out?’ Annette asked after we’d finished telling each other several times over of our joy and relief and assurance that we’d neither of us ever given up hope.
I shrugged. ‘I’m not on any “wanted” lists. The mobs have been brought to heel. Looks safe enough to me.’
‘From where you are, I’m sure it does,’ Annette said wryly. ‘Some of the movement people –’
‘Yeah, I know,’ I said. They’d got involved in resistance. Some had got themselves interned, or shot. Others – such defence companies and militias as I could influence – had tried to avoid engagement, but found themselves fighting the Yanks whether they liked it or not. I was uncomfortable talking about it even on a secure line. ‘Still,’ I went on, ‘I’ve got a list as long as my arm of messages and articles urging them not to do it, so…’
‘Anyway,’ Annette said, in sudden decisiveness, ‘you can’t stay down there forever. OK, I’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes. Broadway at the lights. Usual.’
She was in Acton, not at home but not in hiding either.
‘Right, see you there love.’
I gathered my gear, swept up any traces of my presence, and when the basement looked again like nothing but a computer hobbyist’s cubby-hole, climbed the swing-down aluminium ladder and stepped out from a cupboard under the stairs into my host’s hallway. It had that dead aroma of a house where nothing had moved all day but the letter-box flap, the thermostat and the cleaning-machines. I left an envelope containing a few gold coins on the umbrella-stand and let myself out.
The house was on a street behind Ealing Broadway. The chestnuts lay like green sea-mines on Haven Green. A light drizzle was falling. I remembered a spray-bombed slogan from the Chernobyl year: it isn’t rain, it’s fallout. I turned up my collar and hurried. There were cops outside the Tube station – Republican Guards, to my surprise. I didn’t give them a closer look.
I crossed the Broadway and walked away from, and then towards, the traffic lights. The Odeon across the way was showing The Blue Beret, advertised by a huge back-lit poster of some grizzled veteran played by Reeves or Depp (I forget) holding a bayonet’s edge to a Peruvian peasant’s throat.
I turned back, spotted Annette’s black Volvo a hundred metres away in the sparse traffic and turned again and sauntered to match velocities as she slowed to a stop. I leaned over, opened the door and got in. There was always that moment of checking that you hadn’t given someone the shock of their life.
We laughed, and she accelerated away from the lights.
‘Everybody all right?’ I asked.
‘Everybody we know,’ she said, her voice taut.
‘Tell me later about the comrades,’ I said. ‘We’ll do what we can.’
She nodded, concentrating on the road and the traffic-screen updates. Our route was charted along the Uxbridge Road until just past Southall, then sharp left along the Parkway to Heathrow.
‘What’s wrong with the Great West Road?’
She grunted. ‘Troop transport.’
Hanwell, a middle-class residential suburb, was quiet. Southall, an Asian immigrant area, solid Republican, had dozens of gutted shopfronts.
‘What happened here?’
‘A mob from Hayes,’ Annette said. We went up and across the bridge over the Grand Union Canal. The factories of Hayes, to our right, had been precision-bombed to charred splinters by the Yanks. I admit to feeling a certain grim satisfaction: the area had been a racist, imperialist bastion for years. Even the Trotskyists had given up selling their Red weeklies to its White trash.
‘What goes around comes around.’
‘Rather a hard lesson,’ Annette said.
Every park we passed had its encampment of black plastic domes, lurking cowled aircraft, black helicopters. As we neared the airport the numbers of black-uniformed US/UN troops increased. No need for roadblocks – a wave of an identity-reader did a neater job. The lasers made you blink, always too late: the retinal scan was in.
Heathrow was like a scene from the twentieth century. Nobody was flying but those who had to: refugees from the war zones, wounded soldiers and civilians, desperate emigrants. It had a Third World of people waiting for flights, waiting to get through the re-imposed immigration barriers, waiting to die; and a Second World of officials and officers ordering them about. In this bedlam the First World consisted of volunteers trying to help and entrepreneurs trying to help themselves. Each passenger lounge had its field hospitals and hawkers; each gate its unpaid advisers and legal sharks and medical aid team.
We arrived at the international terminal, but the flight had been switched to the domestic. The rolling walkways were over-loaded with disembarking troops and their kit. Walking between terminals was a Brownian motion through a Hobbesian crowd. Time dragged, stopped, passed without being noticed. Annette and I clung together and struggled forward.
Hours later, when Eleanor and Colin at last appeared in the stream of arrivals, we were as haggard and ragged as they. After hugging and crying and talking, we turned around and fought our way out again. We got to the car, paid the parking surcharge, paid a hawker another outrageous sum for warm coffee, and set off for home. It was about 10.00 p.m.
I drove: Annette was exhausted, I was manic with relief.
As I edged the car around the junction for the M4 a laser’s ruby flicker hurt my eyes. Blinking away the after-image, I was blinded again by a torch, waving us in to the side of the road. On the pavement was a unit of five soldiers with black uniforms and M-16s. I thumbed the car-phone switch and pulled in, turned with a hopefully reassuring smile to the others and stepped out. Other cars inched past me. Everyone in them took great care not to look. I kept my hands on top of the car and moved crabwise around to the near side.
Hands groped around my collar, my torso, down my legs and between them. Then my shoulder was grabbed and I was spun around and thrown back against the car. I froze in the light and kept my hands up. Behind me, through an open inch of window, I thought I heard Annette’s quiet, urgent voice.
The soldier covering me lowered his beam, raised his rifle and loomed close. His visor was up, revealing an impassive, Andean face: I was reminded of the peasant in the poster. What goes around comes around…
‘Jonathan Wilde,’ he said. It wasn’t a question. I didn’t answer. My mouth was dry.
‘Come with us,’ he said.
I felt the window at my back roll down.
‘No!’ Annette shouted.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Go. Go now.’
‘Yes,’ said the soldier. ‘Go.’