My Revolutions, page 6
Cold spray spatters against my face as I lean over the side rail of the ferry. The water, far below, is gray and choppy. Beside me a pair of girls, Sam’s age or a little younger, are telling each other how sick they feel, taking drags on a shared cigarette. By now Miranda and Sam will know there’s something wrong. Miranda will be phoning the bookshop, trying to get God to pick up. Walking carefully so as not to slip on the wet metal of the deck, I go inside, where it smells like all cross-Channel ferries, that queasy cocktail of lager and snack foods and exhaust fumes and cleaning products that doesn’t quite mask the acid stink of vomit seeping from the toilets.
On impulse I feed some change into one of the arcade games in the corridor. Lights flash and writing races across the screen, too fast to read. The rules are incomprehensible. Colored blobs race around. Little dots and spinning things, which look to me like pieces of fruit, blip in and out of existence, seemingly at random. I press buttons, push and pull the joystick. It’s impossible to tell what I’m controlling, which of the little creatures is me. YOU DIE! says the machine. YOU DIE! TRY AGAIN!
The last time I played a computer game was at Christmas, when Sam’s not-boyfriend Kenny came over with a PlayStation. I’ve always liked Kenny. He’s awkward and slightly nerdy, which is why he’ll never ascend to the position in Sam’s affections he so transparently craves. Sam likes sporty boys—uncomplicated squash or tennis players who can drive her to the pub and talk to her about jobs or holidays. Kenny has a mop of dyed hair and a collection of T-shirts bearing the names of Japanese garage bands. Occasionally Sam allows him to escort her to the cinema, but whenever I ask if they’re “together,” she rolls her eyes and adopts a long-suffering expression.
When am I going to see you again, Sam? And what will you think of me when I do? You’ve always lived in a bounded, knowable world: a triumph for Miranda, I suppose, keeping you safe all these years. I find it very hard to think of you as nineteen; that’s almost the age I was when I went to prison. You seem so young, young enough for me to wish I wasn’t the one smashing up your happy home. I can’t ask you not to hate me, or not to be frightened. I think the best I can hope for is that one day I’ll be able to sit down with you and explain. You’re too old to be saying to me, as you did recently, that you weren’t “interested in politics.” You want to be a lawyer. Well, a lawyer needs to know something about politics, even a corporate lawyer who just wants to climb the ladder, to buy the things her friends buy and go to the places they go. You’re lucky that politics feels optional, something it’s safe to ignore. Most people in the world have it forced on them. To be fair, I suppose you’re just a child of your time. Thatcher’s gone, the Berlin wall’s down, and unless you’re in Bosnia, the most pressing issue of the nineties appears to be interior design. It’s supposed to be the triumph of capitalism—the end of history and the glorious beginning of the age of shopping. But politics is still here, Sam, even in 1998. It may be in abeyance, at least in your world. But it’s lurking round the edges. It’ll be back. You ought to give Kenny a chance, by the way. He’s a decent kid.
I realize I’m forming words with my mouth, muttering to Sam under my breath as I feed the last of my change into the machine. A voice comes over the ship’s public address system, saying we’re entering port. We’ve arrived in France. As I line up on the narrow stairs down to the car deck, I still can’t stop myself. Explanations, justifications, like a crazy old man. Logic says there has to be a beginning, a first moment of refusal. I’m not sure. There’s the usual Oedipal tangle: Mummy-Daddy-me. There was my brother and Kavanagh the junk man, the Russians and nuclear war. There was my need to be better, more decent, to deserve. None of these. All of them.
My earliest memories are of red bricks and high green hedges, of being walked past endless garden walls down roads that always brought us to the shop or the white pebbledash and well-oiled gate of our house, number-three-avon-close. Depending on how you looked at it, we were either on the way into or out of London, part of its great westward sprawl. In the mornings a line of men walked past the end of our street on their way to the station. In the evenings they walked back again. On Saturday mornings the men came into our shop, Parker’s Electrical, to buy fuses and lightbulbs, staying to turn over the price tags on transistor radios and what Dad always called “labor-saving devices”: vacuum cleaners and kettles, gadgets for the wives. I remember feeling slightly cheated that Dad didn’t go into London to work. I wanted to have more to do with “town,” where things mattered, where the goods we sold were made.
I often asked why we didn’t change the name of the shop. Our name was Carver. Why wasn’t it Carver’s Electrical? Dad told me it would only cause confusion. Litter, teddy-boys, sons who asked stupid questions: confusion could take many forms and my father was enemy to them all. It was, I think, the reason he moved Mum out of Kennington when he came home from the war. Ruislip was, above all, an orderly place.
Where we lived was distinctive for only one reason: the airfield. During the war, as I learned at school, gallant Polish airmen had flown out of RAF Northolt to fight the Germans. Down by Western Avenue there was a memorial to them, with lists of battles and difficult names, all zs and ws. A little farther away was the American airbase, USAF South Ruislip. When you went past on the 158 bus, the conductor sometimes called out, “Next stop Texas!” as a joke. Every day military transport planes flew directly over our house, the rumble of their engines cutting through the sound of the Light Programme as we ate our tea in the kitchen. Like the other Avon Close children, I sometimes went out to watch them land, taking turns at peering through a hole in the hedge that masked the airfield from the road.
As I watched the planes I would think about war. War was the midnight raids and lost patrols I read about in Adventure and Wizard. It was Banzai! and Hande hoch! and being wounded but still crawling forward to lob your grenade into the machine gun nest. It made boys like me into men like my teachers and the shopkeepers of North End Parade, who’d all seen and done wartime things yet mysteriously chose to mark physics homework or sell pork chops to my mother. All the fathers carried war around with them every day, buttoned up tight inside their shirts. War was secret knowledge. But war had changed since the fathers went to fight. Now it was about the planes that made the cutlery rattle on our Formica kitchen table, planes that flew so high they couldn’t be seen or heard from the ground.
I had good ears; Mum always told me so. Perhaps I’d be the first to hear it: a drone, a faint humming in the empty sky, out of which would tumble the Bomb. I tried to picture everything, which I hoped might be done by listing all the things there were until they ran out. I always failed, which made it even scarier. Each time you thought of anything, anything at all, you discovered it, too, was part of everything, which was what would blow up if they dropped the Bomb. I tried out survival techniques in my imagination. Ducking, crawling under the kitchen table, running down into the cellar we didn’t have. Even the tube trains went above ground at Ruislip. Where would we go?
My dad was frustratingly inscrutable on the topic of how we’d survive the Bomb. Whenever I asked (which was often) he told me not to worry and went back to the paper. I interpreted this as courage, but wasn’t reassured. There was something closed about my dad, and it made me think he knew more than he was saying. What little I learned about his own war was extracted from my mum. He’d served on corvettes, escorting convoys across the North Atlantic. His ship was called HMS Primrose, which sounded disappointing to me, unmartial. He didn’t like to be seen without his shirt, even at home, because of the smear of livid red scar tissue that covered his left side, from hip to chest. There was a fire at sea, was all Mum would say. I could never get her to tell me any more. I imagined my dad’s skin melting from the effects of the Bomb. Its searing fireball is as hot as the sun’s interior…Radiation is particularly dangerous because it cannot be felt or smelled, tasted, heard, or seen…
As I got older, I roamed around on my bike, discovering a world with no obvious center, an unfocused sprawl of 1930s houses that gave way in surprising places to open fields where cows grazed or football goals stood waiting for Saturday league matches. The boundaries of this world were main roads. You’d come up hard against them, screaming with traffic, intimidating, uncrossable. The planes took off and landed. Sometimes I got up at night and opened kitchen cabinets to see if my mum was stockpiling enough canned food.
Parker’s Electrical stood at the end of a parade on a long straight road, next to a butcher, a florist, a funeral director and a junk shop, whose window was almost obscured by clutter. The junk shop was run by an Irishman called Kavanagh, who, for reasons I never discovered but probably amounted to nothing more than the standard English stew of race and class prejudice, was roundly hated by the other shopkeepers. Kavanagh was scruffy. His horse left droppings on the pavement. He was rumored to deal in stolen goods or pornographic pictures. When Dad came home from meetings of the North End Parade Traders Association, Mum would ask if they’d “come to any conclusions” about him. There was something sinister in her tone.
My brother, Brian, heard what was said about Kavanagh. Brian was two years older than me and I did what he said. One night, under his direction, I sneaked out of the house to the lock-ups round the back of the parade. Kavanagh’s was at the end and its wooden door was half rotten, a sad contrast to ours, which was royal blue and had the words “No Parking in Constant Use” neatly painted across it in white letters. Brian put his hands on his hips and used one of Dad’s words. “Disgraceful,” he said. He made me hold the flashlight while he wrenched out one of the rotten planks and poured something from a bottle through the hole. I had to light the matches. It took two or three goes. As we ran away, a faint orange glow was coming from inside.
I lay awake listening for the fire engines, but they never came. The next day we went to see what we’d achieved. I was nervous. If there was a detective, he might be waiting for us to return to the scene of the crime. The door was charred, but otherwise the lock-up was intact. There was no sign of a detective, or of the devastation I was expecting. Brian was disappointed. I pretended I was too.
A couple of months later, just after my thirteenth birthday, Kavanagh’s closed down. The man and his junk disappeared, leaving an empty shopfront, its glass whitened by smeared arcs of window-cleaner’s soap. I had visions, influenced by Saturday matinées, of my father and the other shopkeepers taking Kavanagh “for a ride.” An unshaven man in a greasy gray jacket, falling to his knees out in the woods.
Kavanagh’s departure did nothing to appease my father’s anger. He was always up in arms about something or other—rude customers, articles in the paper. It was a trait my brother had inherited. Brian became a very angry man, a shouter in saloon-bars, a puncher of walls. There were evenings when we’d sit round the kitchen table, eating the food Mum had cooked, and she would try to listen to The Archers while Dad held forth about Malaya or the West Indians or de Gaulle, banging the table with the heel of his hand while Brian and I competed to express our vocal agreement.
Then there was Mum, who had her good days and the other kind. One weekend I stood in the garden with a spool of copper wire in my hand. My father, cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth, was up a stepladder by the back fence. I remember him silhouetted against the sun, a smoky black outline, the wire gleaming as he looped it over the trellis. Mum ran out of the house, wiping her hands on her apron and shouting at us in a high, strained voice: “What are you doing? For the love of God, what are you doing?”
“It’s for my radio, Mum,” I told her. “We’re testing my radio.” The wire hung slack over the bare branch of the elder tree, running back down into the spool, into my hands. Crystal sets needed long aerials. We were going to set it up so I could listen in my bedroom; it had to go all the way back to the house and through the upstairs window. My mother snatched the spool from me. Strands of hair fell across her face, which was red. So were her hands, from the washing-up. She was red and white, her breath making a little cloud in the cold as she screamed at me. Another smoking head. “You’ll electrocute someone! Burn the whole house down! We’d be trapped! Don’t think you’ll get away with this!” This last sentence was spat at my father, who climbed down the stepladder, telling her to shut up and go inside. Grabbing her by the arm, he pushed her back into the house. It was no use telling her my crystal set didn’t use electricity, just the energy of the radio waves. When Mum was in one of her moods, she didn’t listen. She broke things in the kitchen. She went to bed and cried. Twice that year (the year I was nine) she phoned the police and told them stories about Dad. The first time, when they got to our house, they wanted him to go with them. He had to explain for ages before they went away.
Nothing was ever said in our house about my mum’s “moods.” As far as I know, she’d never seen a psychiatrist or talked to anyone else about why she found the world such a hostile place. She didn’t really have friends, at least not the kind who did more than say good morning when they saw her at the front gate. The local GP kept her supplied with pills, a row of little bottles that took up a whole shelf in the medicine cabinet. On a good day she’d go about her business with slow deliberation, like someone moving under water. On a bad one I’d sometimes find her stalled completely, staring straight ahead, a wooden spoon or a tea towel in hand and an expression of bafflement on her face. Speak to her and she’d come to life again, shuffling round the kitchen as if nothing had happened.
On a typical Sunday, Mum would be lying in bed, listening for the rats and cockroaches she suspected were scuttling about in the attic over her head. Dad would sit downstairs with the newspaper and I’d be in my bedroom, attempting to summon the outside world. The first time I fitted the pink molded earpiece of the crystal set into my ear, I heard a tiny crackle, then, very faintly, a voice singing a few words in a foreign language, accompanied by a violin. Like all first things these sounds were powerful. I felt they were being born out of the noise just for me, as if I was creating them through some special skill, coaxing them out of formlessness.
As a hobby, crystal sets occupied me for a year or so. Then, as a birthday present, my parents bought me a Japanese transistor radio. It was like hearing the world think. There were stations on pirate ships out at sea, stations playing advertising jingles and pop music and sports matches. Stern voices read out news items or religious texts, spoke terse messages in accents from the other side of the Iron Curtain. On short wave there were mysterious phenomena, urgent bursts of Morse code, mechanical voices reciting meaningless lists of numbers. I heard whispering, women crying, once a pilot or lost sailor calling, “Come in, please, come in.” There was something angelic in the surf-sound of white noise between stations, the whoop and whine of travel across the bands of the spectrum.
The radio was a way to escape from downstairs, from my deep-sea diving mother, wading in lead boots toward the sink. Aged fourteen, I tuned in to the missile crisis. I call upon Chairman Khrushchev to halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace and to stable relations between our two nations. I call upon him further to abandon this course of world domination, and to join in an historic effort to end the perilous arms race and to transform the history of man. This was it. The Bomb was coming. Making the most of what I thought were my last few hours on earth, I stayed up all night, listening to short-wave artifacts, the noise between stations. Afterward, noise would be all that was left.
After thirty-eight days the crisis ended, and I was still there, lying in bed with my radio. The following year the leaders signed a treaty saying they wouldn’t test nuclear weapons in space or the earth’s atmosphere or the sea; people acted as if this was some kind of victory. But what about the missiles? I wanted to scream. They’re still there, pointing at my house. So when I ran into the couple outside the tube station, with their painter’s table and their colored leaflets weighted down with seaside pebbles, it felt as if I’d found the only other sane humans on the planet. They were old, in their mid-twenties. Colin had a scraggly blond beard and a CND badge pinned to the lapel of his pea coat. Maggie wore a long peasant skirt at which I stared intently, because each time I glanced up at her face, I started to blush. She looked like Leslie Caron, an actress whose picture had recently joined a growing collage on the wall above my bed. Beat-band singers, models, artists: people from the Sunday Times color section, from the new world growing a few miles away in town.
Maggie chatted to an old lady, trying to get her to sign a petition, while I hovered around, reading a leaflet about the government’s advice to householders on protection against nuclear attack. We were to survive using whitewash, brown paper, and dustbin lids. Colin introduced himself, made a joke about what he’d really do if the air raid warning sounded. I liked him. He didn’t speak to me as if I was a child. Nor did Maggie. When I said I wished I could do something, they told me I wasn’t alone. Millions felt the same. If I really wanted to make a difference, I should come over to their house the next day. There would be a meeting. “It’ll be very informal,” said Maggie, “but you’ll get a feel for what’s going on.”
I left with a copy of their newspaper and an armful of leaflets, which I promised to put through doors in Avon Close. That night I read about Distant Early Warning Stations: tropospheric scanners, enormous parabolic dishes looking out over the Yorkshire moors. Two minutes was all they’d give us. Two minutes to do what? Make love to Maggie. As I fell asleep I worked it all out, in the weird, narcissistic fashion of teenage boys. We’d be on a hill. I had an American accent. Where Colin was in all this I can’t remember.
