My Revolutions, page 23
A message to all those comrades who feel that revolutionary action is not appropriate in the U.K. because this is a place where the forces of reaction are strong. If you believe, as we do, that Imperialism is a paper tiger, then nowhere can be excluded as the site of struggle. You say we are squandering revolutionary energy, that adventurism is a characteristic deviation in times of weakness. We say agitation and propaganda are insufficient. If that’s the sum of your ambitions, you should be ashamed.
Sometimes it felt as if we were spending more time arguing about money than about strategy. Like our failure to discuss the injuries at the gambling club, this should have been a warning to me, a sign that things were beginning to degenerate, but we were desperate for funding and prepared to do more or less anything to get it. A friend of Jay’s worked for a record company. Through him we were introduced to an underground character called Nice Mike, who wanted to score fifty thousand hits of acid off some Liverpool gangsters who had a lab down in Devon, at a farmhouse out on Exmoor. Nice Mike didn’t trust the people he was involved with and wanted to take along some protection. Jay suggested us.
It was risky. We knew nothing about Nice Mike’s contacts. We didn’t know a great deal about Nice Mike himself. I disliked him on sight, an overweight south Londoner with shoulder-length hair and loud Carnaby Street clothes, who set up our first meeting in a trendy bar and seemed incapable of answering direct questions. He laid out his proposition in an exaggeratedly soothing tone, as if lulling children to sleep. We told him nothing about our political activities; he seemed satisfied with the story that we were ordinary criminals, connected with some unspecified east-London gang. He was prepared to pay cash up front plus more when he’d sold the drugs. Despite our misgivings, we agreed.
He wanted to drive down to Devon, which was fine, but on the appointed day he turned up in an absurdly conspicuous car, a bright blue Bentley, loaded with gadgets that he insisted on demonstrating to us, like a salesman. The heated leather seats, the eight-track built into the dashboard. On the road he played acid rock and clicked his many elaborate silver rings on the steering wheel, bragging about the famous groups he dealt to when they were passing through London. It was all birds and backstage and Jimmy this and Mick that, clicking his damn rings on the wheel in time to the beat.
It soon became apparent that Mike was very nervous. As he drove he smoked joints, stubbing them out in the ashtray, weaving alarmingly in and out of the traffic, occasionally freaking himself out about phantom objects in his peripheral vision and pulling the wheel round to avoid them. Luckily the car handled like a boat or I swear he would have spun it. He wasn’t helped by his glasses, big octagonal things with a heavy blue tint that must have increased the weirdness several-fold. When we passed Stonehenge he insisted on stopping, as if we were on some kind of excursion. The three of us—Sean, Jay, and I—trailed after him while he wandered round the stones, waving his arms and intoning a lot of faux-Druidic nonsense, invoking the pagan gods to bless our endeavor and promising to “make a sacrifice upon our return.”
When we got back into the car, which was parked on the grass shoulder by the roadside, Mike scrabbled around in the glove compartment and pulled out a plastic bag of pills. “Want anything? We need to maintain our edge, yeah?” I told him I thought what we needed was to keep our shit together and he got very defensive. Who was I to say who did or didn’t have their shit together? Who the fuck was I? He kept repeating it, his tone increasingly self-righteous. “I mean, who the fuck are you? How do I even know you have your shit together?”
We ate a tense fry-up at a Little Chef somewhere in Somerset, wreathed in cigarette smoke and mutual distrust. In the middle of the crowded diner, Mike decided to start talking about guns. We’d brought guns, right? We were packing, because we needed to be packing, because he hadn’t paid for fucking amateurs, OK? He’d thought we were going to look heavier. We didn’t look heavy enough. He was speaking very loudly. The subject of guns seemed to tug his accent partway across the Atlantic. People were staring. Young families, truck drivers.
The only way to shut him up was to walk out, so that was what we did, leaving our plates of food half finished on the table. When we got back to the car, I took his keys and Sean shoved him into the back seat of the Bentley, still protesting about his eggs and his second cup of tea. Jay kept watch, leaning on the car, as Sean and I got in beside him and shut the door.
Sean was direct. “Now, look here, you decadent little fucker. If this goes bad I’m going to cut your balls off and make you eat them, you understand?”
Nice Mike’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Don’t you dare rip me off. If you rip me off you’ll regret it. I’ve got friends, man. You touch any of my money and I’m telling you right here and now that you’ll regret it.”
We quizzed him again about the people we were going to meet, what he knew of their background, who else he’d told about the deal. He was evasive, panicky. Then we locked him in the car while we went for a quick walk round the forecourt.
“You know what?” said Sean. “We should just dump the cunt. Take the money, take the car and have done with it. We don’t need to go to Devon.”
“It’ll come back to us,” argued Jay. “He’s not kidding about having friends.”
Like Sean, I’d had enough of Nice Mike. “Fuck his friends,” I said. It was two to one, so we went back to the Bentley and told him how it was going to be. When he argued, Sean stuck a gun in his mouth, to prove he was “packing.” We took Mike’s briefcase of cash and his bag of pills and drove away in his ridiculous car, leaving him kneeling by the side of the road, his eyes tightly shut and his hands clasped in front of him, as if in prayer. If he had friends, they never found us.
Was that before or after Anna went to Paris? I’m honestly not sure. Maybe it’s the stress we were living under or maybe it’s just too long ago, but that year exists for me only as a series of fragments, shards of memory I can’t fit together and don’t quite trust. I know my mind is capable of playing tricks, not just in sequencing but in deeper, more subtle ways. For example, I remember daffodils in the graveyard where I walked with Anna, looking for dead babies. It was a little Norman church with a lychgate and moss-covered gravestones leaning at drunken angles. The light of my memory is golden-hour light, warm and diffuse. Sunshine-yellow daffodils are scattered in the long grass. Sunshine-yellow and paper-white. But that would place it in early spring, and it was certainly later than that, months later.
I remember, very clearly it seems to me, what she looked like and how she was dressed. Her hair was cropped short, her arms and legs bare. There was a softness about her body that I associate with periods when she was happy, when she allowed herself to be less rigorous and austere. We were laughing, strolling through the churchyard like conventionalized lovers, bathed in the yellow light that’s now eternally the light of 1971, not just for me but for everyone who saw a film or looked at a magazine that year. Dazzle and softness and lens flare.
We held hands. I can’t have concocted that. She talked about her childhood. For most children, the world is defined by the sensory; by likes and dislikes, favorite smells and tastes. Anna’s narrative was mostly about ideas. Witness, duty. It’s the only time I remember hearing her speak about her family. She was an only child, precocious and diligent, the repository of all her Quaker parents’ wishes for the future. She didn’t say much about her mother, but spoke of her father with respect and what sounded like regret. He’d been, she said, like an exam board, asking her general knowledge questions at the dinner table, testing her on her memory for various prayers and catechisms. She recited for me, in an ironic sing-song voice: We utterly deny all outward wars and strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end or under any pretense whatever; this is our testimony to the whole world.
“He knows someone has to fight,” she told me. “That’s what makes him unforgivable. He’s just too finicky to do it himself.”
Later, I saw a picture of her father, a gaunt man in an old-fashioned woollen waistcoat, staring defiantly at the camera as he defended his dead terrorist daughter to a magazine journalist. He’d taken her on demonstrations, taught her that it was sometimes necessary to exercise dissent if one wanted to have a conscience void of offense toward God and toward men. The journalist described him as a religious zealot.
Anna remembered playing at the back of meeting halls during lectures, whispering to her doll. She looked so lonely, as she told me that; I reached for her instinctively. I was hurt when she started to speak to me in the jargon of Criticism-Self-Criticism, reproaching me for allowing myself to get distracted. “What about pleasure?” I asked, trying to sound sarcastic. She told me flatly that our pleasure wasn’t relevant to the struggle. It was only through the struggle that we could materialize ourselves in a meaningful way. If I wanted to fuck, she said, we could fuck; but politically she was sick of fucking.
I was so angry that I couldn’t speak. Was that what she thought? That I only wanted to fuck? She walked a few feet away, looking down at the line of headstones.
“Here’s one,” she said.
And there it was, in gold letters on a little white marble slab.
MICHAEL DAVID FRAME
4.10.48–1.12.50
“RESTING WHERE NO SHADOWS FALL”
“That could do for you.” She got out a notebook and started taking down the details.
In the car on the way back to London she told me, almost casually, that she’d been approached, through one of her Paris friends, by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PFLP had offered us funds and training. She was going to Paris to meet one of their representatives.
I was stunned. Why hadn’t I been told? This was the most important news imaginable and she hadn’t even discussed it with the rest of us before agreeing to a meeting. There were a thousand political questions. There were security issues. I started to argue with her but she brought me up short by telling me that the others had already agreed. She and Sean had discussed it in some detail, she said. Sean thought it was the right move. Leo and Jay were in agreement too.
“The revolutionary is a doomed man,” wrote Nechayev. “He has no interests of his own, no affairs, no feelings, no belongings, not even a name.” The monks at Wat Tham Nok would recognize that, I think. If to be a revolutionary is to be nameless, without attachments, then a revolutionary is simply a person who has understood the first three of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. He sees suffering, sees that its cause lies in greed and craving; he also sees that it could potentially come to an end. But what’s the right way to end suffering? The revolution, giving yourself up to history? Or Nibbana, giving yourself up to transcendence? Phra Anan, whose English was good enough to discuss such things with me, had no time for history. “Too much history in Indochina,” he’d say, shaking his stubbly head. “Less history needed, not more.”
After so long living as Mike Frame, it’s sometimes hard to find my way back to Chris Carver, to remember why he made the choices he did. There seems such an obvious split between how I wanted things to be and how they actually were, not just in the world but in our group, our little cell. We were supposed to be a band of equals, committed to abolishing every trace of power in our relationships with one another. But once Anna and Sean started taking decisions on their own, that was self-evidently no longer true. I was twenty-three by then. Not so young. Old enough to know that taking your desires for reality wasn’t a straightforward answer to anything.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see that Anna and Sean had always been in front, daring one another to go further out onto the ledge. In a way it seems extraordinary that they took so long to fuse together, to start acting in concert. When they did, they ran the rest of us off our feet. The PFLP contact was the first incontrovertible sign that I was no longer in control of my life. I should have seen I was heading into the darkness. I should have gotten off the bus.
At the time I got bogged down in detail. I knew very little about the Middle East and, unlike a lot of my friends, I had an instinctive sympathy with the Israelis. After the concentration camps, who could deny them a home? On the other hand, the cruelties inflicted on the Palestinians were undeniable. Anna poured scorn on my confusion. The PFLP were Marxist-Leninists. They were fighting Imperialism. That should be enough. It wasn’t necessary to get into the intricacies of their political position, or to agree with everything they did. It would be a pragmatic alliance. Their contact in Paris would pay us three thousand U.S. dollars a month, which would solve our money worries at a stroke. Our people could go out to Lebanon and receive proper weapons and explosives training. We’d become an effective fighting force. What was there to discuss?
So Anna disappeared to Paris and stayed away for weeks. Sean organized his disastrous bank raid. I sent off for a birth certificate in the name of Michael Frame and used it to apply for a passport. We were all doing the same thing, developing aliases, preparing to go underground.
Finally I turn off the main road and start to pick my way up the pass toward Sainte-Anne-de-la-Garrigue. It’s after midnight and the petrol gauge has dipped into the red. I drive very slowly; my tired eyes are producing phantoms, shadows that race across the road and flicker in the rearview mirror.
I crest the col and see that the tower is illuminated, its blocky form like a lighthouse guiding me in. I bump my way over the cobbles into the main square, where I park in front of the church, on the spot where the righteous Christian knights burned the heretics on their pyre. Miranda: Why should I care what happened here?…It’s just a pretty little village square on a very hot day. Well, it’s cold now, the air whipping round me in icy gusts as I get out of the car and stretch, trying to work the cramp of two days’ driving out of my body. Though there’s a light in the Bar des Sports, the door is locked and no one answers when I knock. I had some idea of getting a drink, perhaps a sandwich. Now that I’m here I don’t know what to do. I fish a sweater out of my bag and walk around, feeling the blood gradually returning to my legs. I peer up at the looming frontage of the church, with its massive bolted wooden doors; I run my hands over the cold lip of the drinking fountain, a carved stone bowl with a copper spout, dribbling away in front of the mairie. Finally I force myself to head up the steep street that leads to the tower. The houses are mute, shuttered; there’s not a radio, not a chink of light to indicate occupation. I can’t remember which of the line of identical doors is Anna’s and something in me recoils from the idea of knocking. When I see her, it ought to be in daylight, so there can be no mistake, no misrecognition. As I hesitate, a cat emerges from the shadows. I watch it stalk down the hill, the only sign of life in a scene as desolate and hermetic as a de Chirico piazza. Inevitably, I end up climbing toward the tower, wreathed in a jaundiced yellow glow at the summit of the hill.
After my trip to London I didn’t hear from Miles for a long time. It seemed that Pat Ellis had decided to comply with the demands of her “stakeholders,” whoever they were.
At home things had reached a new low. I’d given up hiding my drinking and sometimes brought home bottles of wine to nurse in the study or in front of the TV. Miranda didn’t comment; she’d more or less stopped speaking to me. We moved around the house in a strange silent dance, trying as far as possible to stay in separate rooms. At God’s, I leafed through old pamphlets and thought with increasing regularity about heroin. I’d noticed a drop-in center near the leisure park, a nondescript building where the county Drug and Alcohol Services ran a methadone clinic. Two or three shell-suited men were always leaning against the wall outside, slouching in the unmistakable lizard posture of dealers. It would take half an hour at most to score and make it back to God’s. I could sit and smoke and think without having to care about what I was thinking. If the dealers at the drop-in center couldn’t help me, Portsmouth, a few miles away, was teeming with junkies. You saw heroin faces everywhere, shuffling about behind shopping centers, sitting disconsolately on garden walls. No problem scoring in Portsmouth. It was Oblivion-on-Sea.
I kept answering the phone to someone named Carl, who needed to talk to Miranda about business. She’d always take the calls upstairs in the bedroom. As I put down the receiver I’d hear her greet him, an unfamiliar warmth in her voice, a breathiness. Was he her lover? It wouldn’t have surprised me. There were so many secrets between us that one more wouldn’t really have made a difference. I felt happy for her: she deserved someone who could share her ambitions, her hopes for the future. She certainly deserved better than me. Yet this new mystery, this sense of possibilities away from our shared life, suddenly made her seem desirable again. It was like some bad behaviorist joke: me in the dunce’s cap, salivating on cue. I found myself watching her as she dressed to go to the office, her trim bottom wiggling into a pencil skirt, the nape of her neck as she twisted sideways to brush her hair.
One evening I was in the living room, half watching Pat Ellis on the news. I had a bottle in front of me on the coffee table, a Portuguese red that I was trying to make last. Miranda came in and sat down beside me on the sofa.
“Want one?” I asked, trying to sound playful.
She shrugged. “Why not?”
“Really?”
She nodded. I muted the TV and went to fetch her a glass. She took a couple of sips and set it down on the coffee table. She looked very tired. A sudden deep silence fell between us, a mutual ease I didn’t want to break.
“How was London?”
“Fine. Busy.”
“I can’t remember who you were meeting.”
“No reason for you to remember. Someone was showing me retail units.”
“Retail?”
“I haven’t decided yet, but I think we’ll open a little boutique. Somewhere to showcase the new range.”
“That’s a big step.”
“Not so big. Not since the investors came on board.”
