Eating Air E-Book

Pauline Melville

• Herausgeber: Telegram Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

A dancer, a revolutionary, a banker and an Islamic terrorist are fatally linked in this cautionary tale for our times. Narrated by the irreverent, night-club pianist Baron S. and moving between the seventies and the present day, between London, Italy, Holland and Surinam, Eating Air marshals a brilliant cast of characters to tell an explosive story of greed, passion and dangerous ideals. A fiendishly clever novel ... Brilliantly funny and sharp.' Kate Saunders, Times Shocking and original ... One of the few novels about terrorism that may transcend their time.' New Statesman The language [is] pregnant with wit ... a virtuoso performance.' Stevie Davies, The Independent Compelling.' Lavinia Greenlaw, Financial Times [Has] a wild energy that demands attention.' Hermione Lee, Guardian

Leseprobe

Pauline Melville

EATING AIR

A Novel

TELEGRAM

First published by Telegram, 2009

This eBook edition published 2012

eISBN: 978-1-84659-112-9

Copyright © Pauline Melville, 2009, 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

TELEGRAM

www.telegrambooks.com

I eat the air, promise-cramm’d …William Shakespeare

I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.Sylvia Plath

For Angus

Note from the Narrator

I want to tell the story of these extraordinary events without drawing attention to myself or implicating myself in any way. I was involved only in the most tangential way, I can assure you – more by association than anything else. These days it is possible to be locked up for even hinting that terrorism can be glorious or for having the wrong friends and courts don’t take into account the law of unintended consequences. So it’s sotto voce for me. To be on the safe side I have to present truth as fiction.

I prefer to write in cafés. I move around. The Head in the Sand café in Camden Town is my current haunt. Every morning the proprietor brings me a glass of rum steeped in hot peppers, a black coffee, two dishes of grilled peanuts and my newspaper. I wear dark glasses with the right, coffin-shaped lens knocked out to make sure, in these lean times, that no-one steals my food. The place is a little down-at-heel but I like the sludge-olive décor and those trendily scuffed wooden floors, bentwood chairs and the menu chalked on a blackboard behind the counter. Who am I? I come from Surinam. My complexion is cinnamon. I am as slim as Barack Obama. My style is that of a graveyard dandy; black hat, black coat and a silver cane – it’s possible to dress like this in London without attracting undue attention. Oh … and I think highly of myself which is always good for one’s health. I write in the daytime. At night I play piano in an upstairs bar at Mambo Racine’s, a casino, dance hall and brothel in Brewer Street just behind Piccadilly Circus. I play bland intertwining melodies as background music. The manager makes sure that there is a glass of rum on the piano top and a small wooden box of Cuban cigarillos which I smoke at the back during breaks.

As for the rest of my biography, skip the details and take my word for it. I’m a marvellous person.

The Head in the Sand café is well placed for me. It’s at a crossroads. From an early age I have been an observer of the human race. (Nothing is more likely to dry up the heart.) Daily I watch the tame mass of unresisting citizenry, forming itself into a self-regulated slinking creature, shopping with its eye, endlessly acquisitive, nosing through the streets. Recently the sight has made me restless and impatient. Whenever I come to a set of automatically opening doors I want to rush and throw myself through them before they have a chance to open. People need a little exhilaration, don’t they? Some excitement outside the warmth of the family circle? Something to induce that endorphin spike; a few meteoric moments in the cause of an idea; some extremism to clear the pethidine from the veins? Some danger? Every narrator worth his salt likes a good war. It’s the peaceful existence which is the cause of my terror. I ask myself the question that philosophers must always ask themselves: Will my bum ever forgive me for sitting around all day like this?

I am in two minds. Should I write a sprawling, nineteenth-century, bag-of-bones novel with all the energy of vulgarity or stick to the clear austere prose style that takes its key from the dead?

There’s such a thing as too much good taste.

It is a photo of my fellow-countrywoman, Ella de Vries – taken before the catastrophe – that prompts me to write. There are few enough of us Surinamese who are famous. I cut the photo from the front cover of a magazine. Taken at night, it shows her standing on the balcony of one of Rio de Janeiro’s old colonial palaces. Her head is half turned towards the camera. She is laughing and leaning back against the stone balustrade between two dwarf palm trees. Her black hair is pulled back tightly and shines like the painted hair of a Russian doll. Her face is vital and radiant. Behind her left ear she wears the huge moon like a white carnation.

Before she returned to Surinam for good she would drop into Mambo Racine’s when she wanted a break from the formal world of ballet. We became close after exchanging intimate confessions one drunken night. Did she have any skeletons in her cupboard? Of course. A whole cemetery of them. Untold stories rustling and groaning in their coffins. Luckily the dead tell no tales or there would be a lot of bad news.

I first met her in Paramaribo in the eighties. I had gone there to consult my grandfather Papa Bones after becoming involved in yet another of my disreputable incidents.

Papa Bones used to ply his trade in the corner of a rum shop off Gravenstraat. He was a tall gangly black man with a long neck who wore a white Aertex shirt, open at the collar, and whose skin glistened permanently in the heat. His trade was to buy the spirits of the dying. He collected the names from hospitals or homes or street corners and added them to his list. What he did with them no-one knew. He had been known to rub people’s names out or add them if there were problems with payment. He was also rumoured to own a copy of Skrekibuku, the Shriek Book or the Book of Terror, an ancient book of Dutch creole spells from the seventeenth century. So no-one messed with Papa Bones.

I found him sitting in a corner with his usual glass of rum. His eyes were bloodshot. There were three people with him, a couple and their niece. He introduced me. Pa Tem and Tanta Marti were in a merry mood. They were migrating to Amsterdam for a better life. Pa Tem was an affable, bulky creole. He was accompanied by his big ebony-complexioned wife who wore a slightly mad ill-fitting straightened wig. Papa Bones then introduced me to their niece Elissa. They called her Ella. Her skin was the colour of crème de cacao. She was sitting on a high stool in an off-the-shoulder dress printed with allamanda flowers and she wore yellow sling-backs on feet that were disproportionately, almost comically long. She acknowledged me with a smile and a nod. For my part, one look at her brought about an extinction of the mind and all rational thought and induced a buzzing in my ears.

Papa Bones was drunk.

‘Elissa dances with the Ballet Rio.’ He gave her a lascivious once-over and placed his gnarled hand on his crotch. ‘She has come over from Brazil to say goodbye to her uncle and aunt.’

‘Yes. Our Ella can surely dance.’ Tanta Marti beamed with pride as she moved her hips in affirmation of the dancing spirit. Her enormous bottom was articulated in such a way that it seemed to move separately from her top like the understructure of a crinoline. Pa Tem patted his wife’s bottom.

‘We Surinamese ain’t got much.’ He chuckled. ‘But bottoms we got. Bottoms we got in abundance.’

The three of them said their affectionate goodbyes to Papa Bones and made their way out. I watched Elissa go. She left behind her a trace of the scent of fresh lemons. There was a casual artistry in her walk. As soon as they had gone I told Papa Bones about my troubles.

He frowned and shook his head as he poured himself more rum.

‘You must leave. Go to Europe. Don’t go to Holland. Holland has too much connection with us here in Surinam. Our old colonial masters. England is your best bet. There is a place called Mambo Racine’s in London. They have plenty of Surinamese and Guyanese and folk from the Caribbean. Plenty of illegal immigrants.’ Papa Bones’s face cracked open into a broad grin. ‘People who just pitch up in England for a holi-stay. They will give you work.’

Which is how I came to be living in cold-arsed England. But let me return to Camden Town and the café.

I had just settled down to write and was tossing up which of two visions of the world to adopt for my fiction, the one that celebrates the marvels of reality or the other that doesn’t, when into the café walked Victor Skynnard – a well-meaning man who makes your heart sink whenever he appears. In his usual state of despair and despite the expression on my face indicating I did not wish to be interrupted, he dragged a chair over and started his outburst without even pausing to say good morning.

‘You can’t imagine the government’s ingratitude towards me. I’ve spent months devising a way to pay off the national debt. For god’s sake, it’s into the trillions now. You’d think that in the present economic climate they would listen. I had the perfect idea which I offered to them for a reasonable fee. Hair. Hair and nails. They’re growing all the time. They grow even after you’re dead. Surely someone could harness that power and link it to the national grid. Or take electric cars! Stop income tax and give everyone an electric car. I can’t remember the details of the plan now but it would have worked. The Chancellor of the Exchequer didn’t so much as acknowledge my letter. Now look at me. Skulking in this café. Can’t even afford to pay for my toast. Could you lend me a couple of quid for one of those chocolate muffins?’

He went and hovered by the plastic display cabinet of stale croissants and pastries. I was barely listening. I realised that Victor Skynnard might be the random thread with which I could begin to unravel the whole fabric of the tale. I ordered myself another black coffee and started to write straight away. What is someone to do who has neither a conscience nor a heart? Order breakfast, of course. Then write a book. It’s one way of getting up the world’s nose.

Baron S.

Part One

I am drawn to peoples in revolt … because I myself have the need to call the whole of society into question.

Jean Genet

Chapter One

Let me introduce you to Victor Skynnard, the mixed-ability parasite, radical socio-irritant and spiritual bomb-thrower who came into the café that day.

After leaving the Head in the Sand café Victor headed straight home and sat in front of the computer in his study. The thin academic and scribbler leaned back and picked up the cheque that his father-in-law had given him, examined it and placed it back on the desk. The cheque was for less than he had hoped.

The house where he lived in Camden Town was part of a terrace of down-at-heel, white-painted houses with steps leading up to the front door and paint flaking off the portico pillars of the porch. Enter almost any such dwelling and you are likely to come across one of those pale utopian spectres from the mausoleum of seventies radicals. Enormous uncurtained windows let in the baleful light of morning. Skynnard’s complexion in the pitiless daylight was tallow. His greying hair formed a cobweb of light frizz so pale as to be almost colourless, like a dandelion puff-ball. His forehead, high enough to have been elongated by a distorting mirror, puckered with concentration on nothing in particular. The room was high-ceilinged and draughty. A sepulchral white marble mantelpiece overhung the gaping black square of an empty grate and an old sofa stood in the centre of the room covered with a damson chenille rug. Around the room, on the wooden floor and sofa, enough books were strewn to make you think a library had vomited. In the midst of it all reposed Victor Skynnard in the full bloom of his obscurity. In a city teeming with venture capitalists, business magnates and hedge-fund managers there he sat, a communist wrong-footed by history. The world had not gone the way he had planned for it.

What is a revolutionary to do when there are no revolutions? How to overthrow the state when nobody else is inclined to do so? Victor continued to wrestle with a complicated mass of ideological problems which most of the world had long given up trying to solve. He picked up the cheque again and stared at it for a while, his pen twitching faintly but uselessly between his fingers like a divining-rod.

‘Oh, what’s the use?’

He groaned and shoved the cheque back in the desk drawer. Then he threw himself full length on the sofa, put his feet up on the arm and grabbed a bag of crisps from the small table at his side. He shut his eyes and munched half-heartedly. The current plan, from his hatchery of bad ideas, was to take the medieval legend of Parzival and rework it into a modern play. Until such time as revolution was in the air again, Victor had decided that theatre was the fashionable powerhouse of radical ideas and creativity. Some years back he had written his PhD on Parzival, tracing the legend through Cuchulain and Adonis all the way back to that radiant stranger Dionysus himself. He would transform the material into a biting comment and social satire on the state of society today. It was settled. He would become a political playwright of great savagery and international renown.

The gods thought otherwise.

However, beneath Victor’s high-domed brain-pan there did exist a rich interior life. Victor settled down to the comfort of one of his daily reveries. He would join the Labour Party. He would join it solely in order to undermine it from within or to resign from it in a blaze of publicity. He imagined himself rising to his feet to address the local members in some room or other – he had no idea where these people met.

‘You stupid, hypocritical and murderous shites,’ he would begin. ‘The Labour Party has embroiled us in tragic wars and drowned us in debt.’ He could see before him the startled faces of the local activists and held up his hand to show that he would brook no interruption. At that moment a potent mixture of real indignation and hatred for the government lifted Victor off the sofa and on to his feet. He put down the packet of crisps and started to pace around the room. He was not sure how he would continue his speech but he had the advantage of infinite rehearsal in these one-sided flights of oratory. When he got stuck he rewound the fantasy back to the beginning. He needed to make sure of his facts. Victor’s memory was an area where the real, the half-remembered and the totally imagined all shuffled around together.

He had not progressed much further than ‘hypocritical and murderous shites’ before the fantasy ground to a halt. He repeated the phrase several times and assured himself that he would work out the rest later, outlining in painstaking detail the follies, past mistakes and hopeless future of the Labour Party. Not that he wanted any of the other parties either. They were all as bad as each other. He saw himself returning to his place at the meeting amidst the awed silence of the audience. Or perhaps cheers would be better. No. He plumped for silence. Gradually, people would rise to their feet and confess to their short-sightedness and their mistaken commitment to whichever policy he happened to be attacking. Somehow, in his imagination, the occasion became confused with the sort of meeting held by Alcoholics Anonymous or the Quakers.

Having single-handedly destroyed his local branch of the Labour Party, Victor got to his feet and went down to the kitchen to look for a plum. He took one from the bowl of fruit on the dark wooden kitchen table and returned to his study to stare with morose irresolution out of the window. There had been a downpour earlier and a ghost rain hung in the air. A few orange leaves from last winter lay like sodden cornflakes against the railings of the small park opposite. He watched a squirrel move across the wet grass with the jerky arthritic movements of an old 16 mm film. Victor frowned. He was in debt. The bills had been mounting up since the collapse of his last venture which was to set up a desktop publishing house on the internet called Dot Communism. It was the most recent in the motorway pile-up of his hopes. It occurred to him that should capitalism collapse it might sweep him away with it, dependent as he was on his well-heeled father-in-law.

Just then his wife Mavis, a thin woman whose every variety of smile managed to express anguish, popped her head round the door.

‘How’s it going?’ she cringed slightly as she enquired.

‘Fine.’ He continued staring out of the window as if she had interrupted him at a crucial point of creation. Mavis waited for a few respectful moments and then discreetly withdrew.

*

As soon as Mavis left the room Victor turned away from the window and went to study his father-in-law’s cheque once more as if the amount might have increased. It had not. For a few minutes the master-builder of imaginary solutions was stumped. He spent a while hoping that Vera Scobie, his close friend and a woman for whom he had much affection, would die suddenly leaving him a shed-load of money. Vera was his political mentor, advisor and co-activist.

Since his youth Victor had moved in and out of various political groupings, all of them radical in one way or another. Rumour had it that in the seventies he had been a member of that mysterious cadre in Bradford which everyone had heard about but nobody could find and which always produced the most astute revolutionary analyses of current events. At a time of strikes, mass unrest, police raids and urban bombings their manifestos were published in a highly prized but irregularly produced newsletter. In fact, Victor had never been a member of that group, but had assiduously promoted it and had greatly admired it without really knowing anything about it – although he had been quietly gratified once when a young woman, a complete stranger, accosted him, assuming he was one of the founding editors, and screamed accusations at him that the same newsletter had ruined her life.

After flitting from one revolutionary group to another, he finally ended up becoming associated with an obscure caucus affiliated to some Situationists who lived in Woking.

This particular splinter group was best known for insulting everybody. They got furious at the least little thing. They expelled everybody – it was all in tune with some idea of keeping themselves politically as pure as crystal. They hoped to build a society which would be a shining example of this crystal ideology – although, naturally, they would be the first to put the boot into any such edifice. One of them was an architect – a utopian architect, you understand – he never built anything, obviously. That would have been entirely against the ethos of the group. He only made plans. He was expelled though, in the end, because a friend of his built something. Anyway, nobody could keep up with the level of purity demanded by the group. In the end there were only three of them left. They were against work. No-one was allowed to work because it contributed to the capitalist economy. They were supposed to live on their wits. The girlfriend of the leader did earn some money. She did horoscopes for horses and greyhounds and sold them to racing magazines so punters could see whether or not the animal was having a lucky day. The remaining three quarrelled with everybody at the drop of a hat. Victor was used as a sort of dogsbody. He himself was expelled after he had been unable to come around to the leader’s flat and help him mend a fuse.

‘I was printing the pamphlets,’ apologised Victor.

The leader screamed at him, ‘You think I can’t recognise people like you who would betray us at the decisive moment?’

But despite the vagaries, fluctuating fortunes and now near extinction of the political left, Victor had never quite been able to rid himself of the simple idea that capitalism was unjust. The great capital cities of the western world, London, Paris, New York, seemed to him like illuminated ships leaving harbour, the more fortunate immigrants clinging to the sides for the journey as the spangled vessels departed leaving untold millions behind in the darkness. And at times when he was sitting on his own in front of his computer, he was troubled by the change that had taken place in the world since the days of his youth. A system which he believed to be the cause of much suffering seemed now to be accepted as the only way of conducting economic and political affairs and it was spreading everywhere. The revolutionary ideas of his own youth were to the current generation a puzzling and ghostly manifestation of some long lost period of history. Capitalism was widely taken to be as natural as the air that people breathed and it saddened him that people mistook it for freedom.

The upshot was that Victor became anguished by the loss of any ideal by which he could live. He was confused by the pony-tailed hedge-fund managers and punk investment bankers who were hang-gliding to work; the global head-hunters with aviator dark glasses and red braces who sang gangsta-rap lyrics in their lunch breaks and exchanged high-fives with street gangs as they roller-bladed into the City. Whenever these people flaunted the Orwellian slogan ‘Hey, business IS socialism’, somehow he did not believe it to be true. He was politically lonely. Politically forlorn. There was no party to which he could attach his name. And so he worked away on his own in that chilly Camden room refusing to settle for existing evils and working out how to replace them with new ones of his own design.

It was at times like this that Victor turned to his mentor. One of the few people with whom Victor shared a political framework was the actress Vera Scobie. Considerably older than him, she was his most illustrious contact in the world of theatre, a celebrity whose political activism was known throughout the country. He had met Vera when he was a student at Cambridge, a contemporary of her son Mark, whom he had come across once or twice before latching quickly on to his mother. Vera had taken Victor under her wing and encouraged his political development and forays into playwriting. Despite the generational difference they became staunch allies. She had even appeared in one of his plays. One factor in particular bound them together.

Some years earlier, in the late eighties, Vera had divulged to him a great personal secret. It happened during an intense period of rehearsal. She had invited Victor to her house in Kent for the weekend so that they could work on the text together. When he arrived, the cleaner told him that Vera was in bed suffering from a migraine. The cleaner was clearly worried although, in fact, like many actresses Vera was as strong as a horse.

Upstairs, Victor found her in bed. The bed-head was piled with cream lace-edged pillows that matched the duvet. Dried flowers, a half-drunk glass of wine, scripts and a pen were on the bedside table. Her glasses were on her nose. Victor looked at the famous face resting against the pillows. She had good bone structure and paper-fine skin over which stretched a crazy paving of lines. She leaned back against the pillows and patted the bed for him to be seated.

‘Victor. I’m sorry about this. I’ve had a terrible shock.’ She reached for a tissue and blew her nose. ‘I’m very upset about something. Come in and sit down. I think I can trust you.’ Her husky gut-bucket voice had a catch in it. ‘I’m sure I can. After all, you were a member of that famous Bradford group in the seventies that was so wonderful, weren’t you.’ She took his hand. ‘You must never tell anyone about this.’ She took a gulp of last night’s unfinished wine.

Vera’s first marriage had been to a high-flying left-wing barrister who went on to become the Attorney-General. They had one son, Mark. In the seventies Mark Scobie became involved with the revolutionary politics of the times and had been active in a clandestine group of saboteurs and urban bombers in Britain. Although Vera held up her son as a paragon of revolutionary virtue, Victor gained the impression that she was secretly rather afraid of him. The urban guerrilla group operated in England and was linked to, amongst others, the Brigate Rosse in Milan. In August 1971, when the international police hunt for these bombers was at its height, an unexpected visitor from the intelligence services turned up at the Attorney-General’s office and asked to see him as a matter of urgency. The short, squarely-built young man with a pink complexion had just started his career in intelligence. He was clearly uncomfortable.

‘I’m sorry to interrupt you, sir …’ The caller went on to introduce himself and explain his presence.

‘My name is John Buckley from the Secret Intelligence Service. This is embarrassing for all of us … and very embarrassing for me to have to tell you. But here’s the situation. Special Branch and MI6 have been working with our Italian counterparts for some time. There is about to be a series of coordinated arrests for recent terrorist attacks in Britain and Italy. One of the people at the top of the arrest-list is your son Mark.’

The Attorney-General said nothing but rose to his feet and walked towards the window. Buckley waited for the Attorney-General to absorb the shock before he continued:

‘It would be very awkward for the government if the son of such a highly placed official as yourself were to be arrested for trying to overthrow his own father and … the state. To use a tabloid expression, sir – this is a tip-off. I am asked to advise you that your son Mark should leave Europe immediately. On no account can you allow him to warn any of his contacts and comrades otherwise all deals are off. Nor will he be able to return to England in the foreseeable future. I’m really sorry to be the bearer of such news. It must be very distressing for you.’

Vera Scobie was extremely practical in a crisis. As soon as she was told the facts she picked up the phone and arranged a one-way ticket to Australia where she had friends. She then contacted Mark in Milan. After a furious conversation with his father, Mark agreed to leave. The following day he was on a plane to Sydney.

‘And I had to play Medea that night at the Apollo,’ Vera continued. ‘Can you imagine?’ She put her hands up in an expressive gesture to cover her eyes then placed them palms down on the coverlet. The hands were delicate and wrinkled. She threw Victor an angry look. ‘Frankly I agreed with everything they were doing anyway. He was right to attack the establishment. He was a revolutionary.’ She sighed. ‘But we didn’t want him serving a long jail sentence. What would be the point in that?’ A look of regret passed over Vera’s face followed quickly by a look of determined common sense. ‘Of course he wanted to warn the others. But his father spoke to him and managed to make him see reason. He had one friend in particular – you might know him. Hector Rossi. A lovely boy. I adored him. Long flowing hair. Passionate. Serious. Absolutely committed. Unfortunately, Hector spent a long time in jail in Milan because of it all. I always felt bad about that. It’s all water under the bridge now. Hector is back living somewhere in Kent, I believe. But Mark still has to stay away. It’s so unfair.’ She shook her head. ‘It left such a hole in my life. I’ve just heard that Mark has been hospitalised in Perth with peritonitis. And I can’t be there with him. I feel terrible. I’ve only managed to get over to Australia twice in the last ten years. There is still a warrant out for him over here, I believe. I didn’t want to burden you with this but I had to speak to someone.’

Vera’s eyes moistened with tears. Victor was something of a weed in the battlefield of political honour. He listened in alarm, his raised eyebrows winching up his forehead to give him the air of a startled peahen. However, then and there he swore every sort of solemn oath that he would keep the secret. Vera rapidly pulled herself together and they settled down to work on the text. When he left the house the next day Vera seemed to have recovered her spirits. She saw him off waving a pair of scissors at him as she clipped the dog roses framing the door of her house in Tenterden. He walked down the path to the garden gate. Since the death of her Attorney-General husband she had shared her life with a radical journalist twenty years her junior, but he was away in South America covering the story of a coup.

‘I’ve just heard from Alex,’ she called after him. ‘The president of wherever he is has been shot. I hope he’s all right. He’s so brave to be there.’ She stood in the doorway waving goodbye. ‘Thank you for everything, my good friend. Victor you must keep writing your wonderful plays. And not a word about our secret. I’ve told Mark what a staunch comrade you are.’

That had all been several years ago. Now, as Victor studied his father-in-law’s cheque he thought of asking Vera for a loan but decided against it. She could turn quite vague and irritable at times.

Unable to make up his mind what to do Victor retreated into another of his heroic daydreams. This time he found himself conducting a citizen’s arrest on the foreign secretary in the full glare of lights and television cameras outside the Foreign Office. He was arresting him for war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. The minister’s Special Branch minders stood in his way. Victor explained in a loud voice that he had a legal right to do what he was doing and that the Special Branch must step aside. Step aside they did, bowing to the law. At that point the prime minister appeared and Victor took the opportunity to arrest him too. With a startled minister on each arm he tried to lead them away to the nearest police station. The fantasy faltered a bit at this stage and Victor had to start it again until he reached his favourite point where the minders stepped aside and the small crowd cheered him on. He revisited that point in his daydream several times.

After a while the apocalyptic dreamer fell fast asleep where he sat on the sofa. During his sleep he was betrayed by his subconscious and dreamed that he was taking Prince William and Prince Harry on holiday and looking for somewhere to buy them fish and chips.

Chapter Two

Hector Rossi needed a breath of fresh air. He excused himself and stepped out into the street. A sweet metallic odour from the workshop hung in the air where he stood. The smell reminded him of his youthful days as a printer in Italy. On Saturdays he attended a copper-engraving and etching class in Folkestone. Fine particles and the cinnamon smell of copper dust had made his nostrils tingle and given him a sneezing fit. That day he had been trying to master the art of using the burin, a sharp tool held in the palm of the hand which is used to push through the copper engraving plate. It removes a small amount of copper that twists away like an apple paring. But the burin had slipped and gouged a lump from his thumb. He wrapped a tissue around the cut.

Across the road from Hector a shopkeeper with a pale gibbous face sat wedged in a chair on the pavement reading a newspaper. The dark interior of his second-hand shop was stacked with dusty old furniture, grimy crockery, oddments and sundries. Hector’s mood dipped. The sight of all those remnants of past lives oppressed him and he felt suddenly suffocated by the unchanging face of the town. Stacked against the shop front was an array of different-sized mirrors with curly metal frames. Hector caught a glimpse of his own reflection – an unexceptional middle-aged man in blue shirt and trousers. His brown hair, streaked with grey, lay swept back behind his ears like two bird wings. The slanted reflection made him appear to be standing at an angle to the pavement and to the rest of the world, leaning away backwards with his head towards the sky.

He decided to leave the class early and walk home to Hythe along the seafront. The walk might help him shake off this feeling that his life had silted up and he was being buried alive.

The previous week a small incident had unsettled him and remained in his mind. He had been returning home on the train. Just as the train was leaving Ashford station and before it had gathered speed there was a disturbance at the other end of the compartment. When Hector looked up he saw a tall, good-looking man with silver hair and a handsome silver waterfall of a moustache arguing fiercely with the ticket inspector. Both men were partly obscured by the half-open doors that linked one carriage to the next. The folding doors swung open and shut with the swaying movement of the train. The inspector’s voice was raised in anger:

‘Well I’m telling you to leave the train at the next station if you have no ticket. Are you going to pay for a ticket? If not I’m going to take your name and address.’

‘You’re not taking my name and address and I’ll leave the train when I want, you shitty little arsehole,’ yelled the passenger.

Suddenly the train door opened and a roaring wind entered the compartment. Hector saw a brown suitcase fly out and tumble down the grass embankment. The next minute the silver-haired man leaped out after it, his black raincoat billowing out behind him. Leaning backwards the man staggered down the bank too fast to keep his balance. He skidded on the tall grass, put his arm back to save himself and sat down heavily on the slope. Turning towards the train he caught Hector’s eye. His face was alive with a mixture of fury and laughter. For a second he looked at Hector and raised his eyebrows as if in a challenge or invitation. A minute later the man was out of sight.

Hector walked home from his engraving class slowly. For some time now he had been feeling paralysed by an enervating discontent. He regretted the loss of all the revolutionary possibilities of his youth; that search for justice which he seemed to have exchanged for everyday realities; realities that had the warmth and smell of freshly baked bread but did not seem to be enough.

To his left on the English Channel a fluffy grey angora haze blotted out the horizon. The milky sea gave slow sluggish sucks at the shore. Hector was hoping that the walk might shift his headache. The headache was nothing much, a sort of malaise, probably the result of tension at home. When he reached Hythe he stood on the low stone promenade looking out over the blue and orange pebble beach. He stood there for nearly half an hour.

*

It was two o’clock in the afternoon before Hector let himself quietly into the house.

For several days his wife Barbara had been walking around the house wearing her silence like a bridal gown. He could hear the floor in the bedroom over his head creak accusingly as she moved from the dressing-table to the window. She let out a variety of audible sighs. Under this pressure he remained politely upbeat and resolutely unapologetic.

The problem had arisen two weeks earlier when he told her that he was going up to London to see an old friend. Probably he shouldn’t have told her. He knew she would react badly. She was always fearful that he might become involved in some sort of political activity, frightened that his past would catch up with them. He had gone up to her workroom to tell her.

Barbara’s hobby was furnishing dolls’ houses and selling them. The back room was a city of miniature houses. The room had a workbench where she sewed the curtains and glued tiny pieces of broken furniture together. He watched her for a minute or two as she worked. His wife was a short, squarely built woman with a straightforward moral face and short feathered hair that was turning from blonde to grey. She bent down to adjust the placing of a tiny table then straightened up and looked directly at him.

‘Which friend?’ Already she sounded grim.

The shutter on the window was only partly down and the sunlight shone on her face so brightly that he could see the light fuzz of transparent hairs beneath her chin.

‘Khaled.’

‘I thought you’d put all that behind you. You swore that you would always put your family first. You, me and Dawn. Before anything.’

‘I do.’ He became annoyed with himself for the pleading tone in his voice.

‘Who else are you going to see there?’

‘Nobody.’ Stubbornness set in. ‘For goodness’ sake. I’m going to see Khaled. He’s in England for the first time for years. We’re going to see the Albrecht Dürer exhibition at the National Gallery. I suggested that because I want to see the engravings. Nothing more. Anyway, I’m going. I’m just letting you know.’

Barbara was still in bed when he left to go to London.

‘OK. I’m off now,’ he said airily, poking his head round the door of the darkened bedroom. The lightness of his tone belied the weightiness of the atmosphere between them. She turned over in bed away from him to face the wall.

*

They had arranged to meet inside the gallery in case it was raining. The exhibition room was warm and smelled of beeswax polish. Hector’s shoes squeaked as he walked around. There were not many visitors but he worried that he might not recognise Khaled after so many years. He studied the wood-carvings and engravings on display. One copper-plate engraving interested him. It was called The Knight, Death and the Devil. He went up close to examine the techniques which enabled Dürer to engrave the horse with such magnificent swirling lines.

There was a tentative tap on his arm. Hector turned. The man who faced him had the same slim figure as the Khaled he had first met in Paris, but now he stooped a little and his receding hair was streaked with grey. The long humorous lop-sided face, one eyebrow higher than the other, was still the same. The two men embraced. Khaled spoke first.

‘Good to see you. You’ve put on weight.’

‘It was the prison diet in Italy.’

Khaled threw back his head and laughed.

‘That’s no excuse. That was light years ago. Shall we look round the exhibition a bit then go and have coffee or a meal or something?’

*

They first met under a brilliant blue Paris sky on 13 May 1968 – the day on which a whole nation decided to leave the beaten track. No-one had seen it coming. There had been a few skirmishes throughout the city a few days previously and then millions of workers took to the streets. From the police helicopter hovering overhead it looked as if someone had sprinkled multi-coloured hundreds and thousands in the streets below. Hector was eighteen and on his way back to England from Italy where he was an apprentice printer. He caught the mood of exhilaration as he found himself lifted up and carried along in that outburst of pent-up hope for a new future. Medical workers in their white coats, printers, drivers and workers from the Renault factories had taken over the streets of Paris, each group singing its own songs. A man dressed in a white clown costume clambered onto a traffic bollard with a whistle and pointed the way ahead for the demonstrators. For Hector everything felt clear. His head caught fire and his heart opened up. It was one of those rare moments when people feel they belong to something bigger than themselves, a Dionysiac explosion.

The march swung round past L’Eglise St Ambroise and Hector was swept along with it. The huge studded doors of the church were open and a wedding was taking place. The bride was visible at the altar in her white dress. Some people broke away from the demonstration and went into the church shouting: ‘Don’t do it. Come and join us. Join the revolution.’

To Hector’s amazement the bridegroom exchanged brief glances with his bride-to-be and they joined hands and ran together up the stone aisle and out of the church into the open air. The marchers hoisted them up and the couple were carried along on the shoulders of an enormous cheering and baying crowd. The bride leaned backwards in her white dress trying to hold on to the uplifted hands of the crowd and at the same time hold down her skirts, but every time there was a glimpse of her white stockings and garters the crowd roared approval.

Next to Hector marched a young man with a light brown skin, wearing a djellaba. There was a look of triumph in his eyes. After a while he introduced himself:

‘Je m’appelle Khaled. Khaled. Je suis arabe.’

‘You’re a what?’ Hector Rossi had been in Paris only two days. His ear was not attuned to the language.

‘Je suis arabe,’ Khaled yelled over the noise of the singing crowd. ‘I am an Arab.’

‘Oh.’ Hector laughed. He had collar-length tawny hair and pale brown Italianate eyes. His gaze was direct and curious. They shook hands. ‘My name is Hector. You speak English then?’

‘I should. I was at school in Berkhamsted until I was twelve. My stepfather is a rich Arab banker called Eddie Sursok. You might have heard of him.’ Khaled held up his hands to his head and wiggled his fingers like devil’s horns. ‘I personally am marching against him and all he stands for.’

The two young men became instant friends. They were exuberant. That afternoon they went back and smoked kif in Khaled’s shabby apartment which smelled of used cat litter.

‘How did you come to go to school in Berkhamsted?’

‘My family is Palestinian. They escaped to Tunisia in 1948. I was born there when my mother was only sixteen.’

Khaled put some Arab music on his old record player and explained how his birth had been a major scandal. He spoke about it with equanimity, shrugging as he told Hector that he did not know who his father was but rumour had it that he was a Scottish soldier, one of the British army left behind to mop up after the North Africa campaign.

‘It was a huge disgrace which drove the family briefly to Paris where we lived in luxury in the Avenue Foch. When I was about two my mother, who was still very beautiful, married Eddie Sursok from another wealthy Palestinian family. We went to live in England until I was twelve when that marriage broke up. I was sent to school in Lebanon but hated it. At fifteen I went back to live with my grandparents in Tunisia then came to the Sorbonne as a student. That’s me. C’est moi.’

That evening the two of them, still chattering, were out of breath as they made their way through the back streets towards L’Odeon Theatre.

‘I don’t want to stay at the Sorbonne,’ Khaled announced. ‘I want to go back and see what is happening at home. I live in Tunisia. Apparently loads of resistance fighters are passing through on their way to the Palestinian camps in Jordan.’

‘Things are moving in Italy too.’ Hector spoke seriously as if the weight of the world were on his eighteen-year-old shoulders. ‘I’m apprenticed to printers in Milan. When I go back I shall work with the anti-fascists. I would join the Italian Communist Party but it’s a bit stick-in-the-mud.’

It was eleven o’clock at night when they reached L’Odeon. Hundreds of students and demonstrators were pushing past the theatre-goers and pouring into the building. Khaled and Hector joined them. Inside it was warm and dark and full of people. The interior of the theatre was a seething indistinguishable mass, a swarm of humming bees in the darkness of a hive. A young student spoke from the centre aisle of the theatre. Someone else answered from one of the gilt-edged boxes. The debate flowed backwards and forwards. Arguments swirled to and from the balconies.

Working lights lit the stage and a thin man with a delicate face stood there giving instructions to the theatre electrician. At that moment the dim lights of the auditorium came on at full strength illuminating the flamboyant portraits on the ceiling, figures from mythology inspired by Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Aristophanes.

‘Did you ever see Les Enfants du Paradis?’ Khaled pointed to the stage. ‘That man on the stage is Jean-Louis Barrault.’

The man on stage in the grey suit gave a cursory look around the auditorium before leaving. Later Barrault was to describe how hurt he had been by accusations that his theatre was for the bourgeoisie and how he had turned the theatre over to the mob for fear that they would otherwise tear it to pieces. For a month Barrault’s theatre was occupied and used as a forum for housewives, shopkeepers, factory workers and intellectuals. Barrault was sacked for turning on the lights.

‘In Paris lightning struck,’ said Barrault. ‘The storm came from far away and it is still wandering around the world.’

By the end of June it was all over and Paris had returned to the daily grind of rumbling metros and commuters travelling to and from work.

‘The mistake was to take over the theatres,’ said Khaled when the two friends next met in the Palestinian camp at Irbid. ‘We should have taken over the law courts.’

*

It was October 1970, a month after Black September, when the two met again in Jordan. At Khaled’s invitation Hector arrived at the Palestinian camp in Irbid by truck late one night. Someone took Hector to one of the tents and showed him to a camp-bed the width of a stretcher alongside the thirty other young soldiers who slept there. Despite being wrapped in two blankets he was freezing cold. He shivered with excitement. At last he was on the front-line of a just war. Two youths waited outside with their hands on the pins of their grenades in case Hussein’s army or the Bedouins arrived. Somewhere behind his head he could hear the torrent of an icy running stream. That night he could not sleep and spent most of it propped up on his elbow staring through the open flap of the tent. He watched as the black sky became tinged with blue and the Milky Way dissolved into an Arabian morning.

Early next morning Khaled approached him with his hand held out. He wore a green combat shirt and camouflage trousers. Khaled was now a commander in charge of fifteen men. Hector noticed a new gravitas about his friend since their time together in Paris. He invited Hector over to a trestle table where they tucked into pancakes, lettuce, boiled eggs, cheese and sardines. Globules of light filtered through the trees and bobbed around on the rough wooden table-top. Hector fished in his pocket to find the ‘permission’ papers signed by Arafat. Khaled waved them away.

‘I know. I’m to take care of you and see you across the border when you leave. The Syrian border is like a sieve. Any amount of people come streaming through. But you have to know when. Sometimes the authorities shut down the exit points.’

In the bright sunshine the two of them talked against a constant drumming noise from tents flapping in the breeze. ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ by the Stones blared out from a radio. Khaled was tired from being on duty all night but his manner was open and friendly:

‘What’s happening in Europe?’

‘Bombs and strikes all over the place. Northern Ireland has gone up in flames. Have you heard of Gladio? It’s an Italian government plan connected with NATO. It’s neo-fascist. I’m involved in organising a defence in Milan to fight against it. Some comrades have gone underground. That’s why I’m here. You said come for a visit but I also need training with arms and explosives.’

Khaled grinned at the earnest face of his friend who still wore his dark honey-coloured hair at the collar-length fashionable in Europe.

‘You look like Mick Jagger. Where did you get that jacket? I want one. I can organise arms training for you. Just the basics anyway.’

They were like lovers, serious and chaste but speaking only about explosives: Kalashnikovs, grenades, rocket-launchers, remote control mechanisms, gelignite, fuses. The conversation resembled the language of love with its meaningful glances, tenderness and offers of help, tips and advice. It was love, in its own way.

At that moment the exchange was broken by a boy of not more than fourteen who passed behind Khaled, swinging his rifle as casually as a young girl swings her handbag, and who clipped him playfully on the back of the head. Khaled leaned back in his chair and acknowledged the boy with a friendly touch on the arm then turned to Hector. He gestured around him at the other young soldiers.

‘For me, this was bound to happen. Everything was so dull when I went back to Tunisia after Paris. I was helping out as a waiter in my grandparents’ hotel in Sfax.’ Khaled pulled a face of mock despair. ‘Tunisia is a nation of waiters. Head waiters, hotel waiters, restaurant waiters, café waiters. I was in a café with a friend one day when a hump-backed old waiter in a black jacket passed by our table. “That’s my destiny if I stay here,” said my friend. “Your family is rich. But I will end up like him.” I just said: “Let’s go.”’ Khaled laughed. ‘It was a hot afternoon. I went back to the house and grabbed some stuff. I set off with that same friend while my grandfather was snoring on his back taking his two o’clock siesta. We jumped on a train. Ticket inspectors always look the other way for people like us. Twenty-four hours later I was here with the fedayeen.’

Later that morning a young fedayeen called Wazir taught Hector some elementary techniques with munitions. Hector pushed his hair behind his ears and squatted in the sand behind the tents. The grit penetrated his clothes and a warm breeze blew tiny dust-devils into his face. Wazir showed him how to load and handle a variety of handguns; how to make incendiary devices with non fire-suppressed fertiliser, sugar and sulphuric acid, and how to use them to set off gelignite; how to make clock-timed devices with resistance wire and batteries. Hector wanted experience with machine guns but there were none available so he learned how to make up cartridges for shotguns. He practised pouring small amounts of grey glittering gunpowder into cartridge cases and rolling the wad of thick tissue to insert in the cartridge, tamping it down to make sure it was a tight fit. Then came the little balls of shot. Then another wad of tissue and finally the rest of the cap was fitted over it. That night in the tent with the help of a torch under his blanket he studied the notes and diagrams he had made, panicking that he would get it wrong and forget how everything worked.

Two days later Khaled himself drove Hector to the border and they said goodbye.

‘Good luck. I’ll keep in touch whenever possible,’ said Khaled, his asymmetrical face breaking into a grin as he waved goodbye from the window of the truck. ‘Send me that Dusty Springfield album.’

*

Many years later, when Hector looked back on the way they all gambled so freely with their lives – tossing cigarette packs, cartridges and grenades between each other as casually as if they were fielding in a ball game – he reflected on how those brushes with death seemed to give the young fighters an airy elegance and lightness that made them almost skyborne – as if they were eating air. Fleet, breathtaking decisions were taken easily with a light heart and unshakeable certainty. They were not weighed down with personal plans. They possessed nothing. Hector wondered whether that lightness existed amongst them all because they had no future.

*

Hector and Khaled ambled through the gallery studying the exhibits. Khaled called Hector over to look at a wood engraving.

‘Here. Come and look at this.’

The work that had caught Khaled’s attention was entitled The Four Avenging Angels of the Euphrates. Khaled raised a quizzical eyebrow.

‘Do you still feel the same about things?’

They sat down together on a bench in front of the artwork and regarded the scene of angels bent on slaughter. Hector shifted his raincoat from over one arm to the other.

‘I’m not active now but I believe in the same things.’ He looked at Khaled and smiled. ‘Once the political bug has bitten it’s impossible to remove it from the bloodstream. I feel sorry for youngsters now. They have nothing to believe in. It’s not their fault. A huge sand-blanket of commercial pragmatism has fallen over them. Still, you can’t buck the times you are born in. I’ve learned that people are more like their times than like their parents.’

Khaled got to his feet. Hector stretched and joined him. Khaled noticed an unfamiliar scar on Hector’s lower lip.

‘What’s the story with the scar?’

‘The Italian police. They gave me electric shocks. I bit through my lip. The ridiculous thing is that it happened when I was anticipating another shock and before they actually gave it to me. I’m fine except that I can’t bear to use an electric toothbrush or shaver.’

Khaled put a hand on his shoulder.

‘I’m sorry. We all had problems in those years.’ He stopped and frowned for a moment. ‘The trouble is that when you’ve invested your suffering in an idea, you become unwilling to give up that idea. Everything in the world just seems to confirm it.’

*

They found a cheap Italian restaurant just off Leicester Square full of bright plastic surfaces, fairy lights and cheerful clatter. Khaled broke off part of a bread roll and dipped it into his minestrone as he spoke:

‘I left the Middle East for good after Beirut in 1982. My wife Nabila was killed there. It was hopeless. We’d all been heading into a web of treachery and deceit woven by the Israelis, the Jordanians, Bedouins, Syrians, Lebanese Phalangists – the whole blasted lot of them. Fatah was corrupt.’ There was an air of humorous exasperation as he spoke. ‘I should have realised that in the very beginning when I saw the Palestinian taxi driver calmly taking down the picture of King Hussein stuck in the front window of his cab and replacing it with one of Yasser Arafat as he neared the camp.’

Khaled exhibited a moment’s bitterness.

‘The invisible Palestine. The phantom nation. The fulcrum around which the whole of the Middle East turns. Everybody is frightened of a people without a country. I had a dream just before I left. I dreamed of graves falling from an aeroplane. And suddenly I saw all my comrades as if they did not have their own shadows, the shadow of a human figure, but instead they had the rectangular shadow of a grave at their feet. I looked down at my own feet and saw that I still had my own properly formed shadow. I left while there was still time.’

A Ukrainian waitress with a chalk-white face and a vicious slice of red hennaed hair that swung across her forehead cleared their plates. Khaled smiled a sad one-sided smile then immediately cheered up.

‘I married again ten years ago. I’m living in Hamburg. We have three children. I’m happy. I speak good German – with the verbs at the end of the sentences. I work for a software company. It’s not much. And I’m a cinemaniac now. I love movies. I swap old for new. Well, we live in the age of image. Now I understand why all those photographers got us to stand on a rock with a Kalashnikov and the desert sun setting behind us before they flew off to cover the Oscars.’ He shook his head in rueful amusement.

‘What about you?’

Hector frowned.

‘Well, it’s a long time since revolution was in the air – and a lot of air freshener used by governments ever since to get rid of the aphrodisiac smell of it. What am I doing now? Just working quietly in a small firm of printers and bookbinders in Kent. I’m still married to the same woman, Barbara. We have a young Down’s syndrome daughter. She came late and she’s adorable. My wife says that we were all losers with pie-in-the-sky ideas – that all revolutionaries end up dead or in jail and that after every revolution comes the guillotine. I used to argue with her. I don’t any more.’

‘Have you given in to her ideas?’

‘No. I’m just frightened of having a stroke.’

They laughed. Hector paid the bill while Khaled put on his jacket.

‘What brings you to England?’ asked Hector.

‘I thought it was time to find out about my real father. The Scotsman. I have children now and they should know their true history. Apparently my father was already married when he met my mother and he had a son in Scotland before me. What is really driving me is that I have this brother – a half-brother. I want to find him. I’ll give it a shot anyway. I’m going to see Eddie Sursok, my ex-stepfather, while I’m here. Always good to see how the other half lives.’

Outside the two men exchanged mobile numbers.

‘You see that cinema?’ Khaled pointed over at the Empire. ‘Once in the eighties I came to England. I took my mother to the movies. Standing in the foyer of that cinema was the notorious leader of the Lebanese Phalange, the group I hold responsible for killing my wife. He went up to the cashier’s desk and bought a ticket for the movie. Why should I have been surprised? Terrorists go to the movies. Of course they do. Terrorism is only a part-time occupation. Terrorists live most of their life outside their balaclavas. A few hours later he was probably giving orders to the Druze militia back in Lebanon. I was close enough to have killed him. But I just went in and watched the movie.’

They embraced with affection as they said goodbye. Hector watched Khaled’s back as he disappeared into Leicester Square underground station.