by Jonathan Coe
‘Doesn’t it worry you? The risk? I mean … supposing there’s another crash?’
‘There will be,’ said Mike. ‘But with any luck I’ll have left the crime scene by then. I only want to do this another couple of years and then I’m getting out.’
‘To do what?’
‘Something completely different. Setting up a charity, maybe? I want to give something back.’
‘You see what he’s like?’ said Sohan. ‘Totally idealistic. An altruist. He wants to save the world, just like the rest of us.’
‘Do you go back home much?’ Sophie asked, ignoring him.
‘Not very often. Sadly, the last fifteen years have put quite a distance between me and my parents. I used to go back. I used to give them money, as well, but they didn’t like it, so I stopped. I think it embarrassed them.’
‘Do they know you’re gay?’
‘I’ve no idea. I’ve never come out to them.’
‘Anyway,’ said Sohan, ‘Comrade Corbyn will put a stop to your nasty little financial games when he becomes prime minister. Your days of making money out of nothing are numbered.’
‘Maybe,’ said Mike. ‘But most Labour governments end up making friends with the City after a while. The tax revenues are very useful. Perhaps the next one will be different, we’ll see.’
Jeremy Corbyn had become leader of the Labour Party in September. The surprising – even astonishing – election of this obscure but long-serving, rebellious backbencher had been seen by many, including Sophie, as a welcome sign that the party was planning to return to the principles it had abandoned under Tony Blair. Less welcome was the fact that, as far as she and Ian were concerned, it placed their own political differences under a harsher light than ever. He saw Corbyn as a Trotskyist; she saw him as a wise, avuncular socialist. He warned her that Corbyn would transform Britain into a repressive dystopia reminiscent of the old Eastern bloc, that people like her were the enemy as far as his followers were concerned, and if she voted for him she would be acting like a turkey who voted for Christmas. This was one reason why she did not intend to share with Ian the information that, according to the Facebook page she had visited that afternoon, among the many political societies of which Corrie Anderton was an enthusiastic member was a newly formed group called Students for Corbyn.
In the last few hours Sophie had almost forgotten about all this; forgotten about her nemesis and the havoc she had already managed to cause within the department and on social media. Now it all came back to her. Despite his semi-drunken state and the air of beaming smugness he could not help radiating in Mike’s company, Sohan noticed her change of mood and knew what had provoked it.
‘Come on,’ he said, taking her hand. ‘Time for bed.’
The three of them took a taxi back to Sohan’s flat in Clapham. Sophie made up the sofa bed with which she was now so familiar, and lay there, unblinking and wakeful for more than an hour, listening to the sounds of Mike and Sohan making love in the room next door. She was still awake when Mike emerged from the bedroom, naked except for a towel, and padded past her bed on his way to the kitchen to get some water. On the way back, he noticed her eyes shining in the dark.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Were we being a bit noisy?’
‘That’s all right,’ said Sophie. ‘It’s nice to know that people are enjoying themselves.’
He paused in the kitchen doorway, and said: ‘Don’t worry. I’m sure everything will be all right.’
‘Of course it will.’
She turned over and snuggled down beneath the duvet, facing towards him.
‘Well, goodnight,’ he said.
‘Goodnight.’
She felt oddly comforted by his reassurance, and touched by the note of sympathy in his voice, but even so, he was wrong: the next morning she received an email from Martin announcing that she had been suspended from all teaching until further notice.
28.
January 2016
Benjamin was driving from Shrewsbury to Rednal again, following the course of the River Severn, through the towns of Cressage, Much Wenlock, Bridgnorth, Enville, Stourbridge and Hagley. He didn’t even dare to calculate, any more, how many times he had driven this route. The only difference these days (and it was an important difference) was that the journey took him close to where Jennifer lived, and sometimes in the late mornings he would call in at the estate agents’ office where she worked, and take her out to lunch, or in the early evenings he would call at her house as he drove home, and they would go out to dinner, and afterwards make love. They had settled, much to his surprise, into a low-key but perfectly satisfactory relationship. They saw each other about once a fortnight, sometimes more, sometimes less. Their sex life had recovered from that initial fiasco with the wardrobe. They found that they enjoyed each other’s company, although Benjamin was plagued – much as he had been forty years earlier – by the suspicion that in essence they had little in common. But then he had at least developed enough self-awareness, in his mid-fifties (better late than never), to admit that there were very few people who had anything in common with him. He was a quiet, introverted writer, as much preoccupied with his inner imaginative universe as with the world around him. And Jennifer seemed happy with that, for the moment. It would have been nice if he had won the Man Booker Prize, or even got as far as the shortlist, but there had been tangible benefits from his evanescent period of fame. A London publisher had offered him a small advance for his second, as yet untitled, as yet unwritten (and indeed yet to be conceived) novel. He had been invited to speak at one or two literary festivals, and to be one of the tutors on a week-long residential writing course later in the year. Sales of A Rose Without a Thorn had been modest, and nobody had snapped up the film rights, but for Benjamin it was enough. He felt vindicated. He felt lucky.
Would his mother, he sometimes still wondered, have been proud of his achievement? His father rarely mentioned it. Colin had become ever more taciturn and ever more morose; his face, his occasional words, his very posture and body language ever more expressive of a generalized sense of existential doom. On top of which, Benjamin was pretty sure that his memory was starting to fail now. During the 1970s, Colin had worked as a foreman in what had then been the British Leyland car plant in Longbridge; in the early 1980s, he had been promoted to a desk job, from which he’d retired in 1995. Everything that had taken place before that year, the year of his retirement, still seemed to be vivid to him; everything subsequent to that date either seemed to be a blur, or to be forgotten altogether. He knew who Benjamin and Lois were, certainly – and Christopher and Sophie, and to a lesser extent Ian – but he couldn’t keep track of what was happening in their lives, or at any rate had no interest in doing so. He still had the Daily Telegraph delivered every day, but Benjamin was not convinced that he read it, although he did know the name of the current prime minister, and the current leader of the opposition (who he detested). There was no doubt that Colin remembered the Tory and Labour administrations of the 1970s, though, and had excellent recall of the confrontational politics of the Longbridge factory itself during that decade, when production was often halted by the calling of strikes and (in his version of events, anyway) barely a day went by without thousands of workers gathering for meetings in Cofton Park and being provoked into a state of obdurate militancy by some troublesome shop steward such as Derek Robinson or Bill Anderton. He had been bitter about it at the time, and – it sometimes seemed to Benjamin – was still bitter about it now, four decades later.
Colin rarely left the house these days, and when he did it was always with either Lois or Benjamin, who both invariably drove him out into the countryside, towards the west, away from the urban sprawl of Birmingham. He was too slow and too frail to go for a serious walk, but he could still be manhandled – sometimes with difficulty – in the direction of a garden centre or the lounge bar of a village pub. But he had not been near the site of the old Longbridge plant for years, even though it lay little more
than a mile from his house. Today, then, Benjamin was surprised when, fifteen minutes after his arrival, when they had already run out of things to say to each other, his father announced: ‘I want you to take me to Longbridge this afternoon.’
‘Longbridge?’ said Benjamin. ‘Why?’
‘I want to see the new shop.’
‘What shop?’
‘There’s a big new shop opened there. Right in the middle of the factory. It was on the telly last night. I want to see what it’s like. And you never know, I might run into some of the old crew while I’m there.’
‘But Dad –’
Benjamin decided to hold his tongue. From the way his father was talking, it sounded as if he had no idea what had become of the old factory buildings. They had, almost without exception, been demolished, wiped from the face of the earth. Apart from a tiny remnant up by the old Q Gate, where a rump of small-volume manufacturing was clinging on, providing fragile employment for a few hundred people, it was all long gone. The West, North and South Works had been the first to go, and then for a long time the site had stood empty, providing a desolate reminder of the decline in British industry; but now most of it had been filled again, with housing, retail units and a new technical college. Did Colin know any of this? Benjamin was not sure; and he was not sure, either, how his father would respond when confronted for the first time by such a complete transformation, such a radical rewriting of all the history that had once been familiar to him.
‘Are you sure that’s what you want to do?’ he asked. ‘I thought we could go to Woodlands again.’
‘I’m sick of that place,’ Colin snapped. ‘Why does no one believe me when I say that I want to do something?’
*
Benjamin took a long way round to the old factory, approaching it from the west, driving along the A38, past the cinema complex and the bowling alley and Morrisons and McDonald’s. At two o’clock on a winter’s afternoon the light already seemed to be fading. As he swung right at the roundabout on to the Bristol Road, his father craned his neck in the other direction and said:
‘Where are we?’
‘You know where we are. This is the Bristol Road.’
‘No it isn’t. The conveyor bridge goes over the Bristol Road. Where’s the conveyor bridge?’
The conveyor bridge was a local landmark – or at least it had been, for thirty-five years. A narrow stretch of the Longbridge assembly track, carried over the busy dual carriageway on a covered bridge in order to provide an efficient link between the West and South Works, it had been built in 1971 – Benjamin could pinpoint the date exactly because that had been his first year at King William’s, and he’d had to travel beneath the bridge on his bus twice a day while it was still a work-in-progress. But those had been busier, more optimistic times for British manufacturing and the bridge, having long outlived its usefulness, had been torn down in 2006 – almost ten years earlier. Had Colin really never noticed, or had he forgotten?
‘It’s gone, Dad. They demolished it ages ago.’
‘So how do they get the cars from one side of the plant to the other?’
Benjamin didn’t answer. He took the first left turn, into a wide lane between rows of identical, newly built houses, and drove another few hundred yards until they reached a spacious car park surrounded by shops: not just a gigantic branch of Marks & Spencer but also Poundland, Boots and a few others.
‘Where are we now?’ Colin said, bewildered and exasperated.
‘We’re where you wanted to come,’ said Benjamin. He pointed at the massive department store. ‘This is the big shop that was on the news.’
‘I didn’t mean this one,’ Colin insisted. ‘I wanted you to take me to Longbridge.’
‘This is Longbridge.’
‘No it isn’t.’
Grumbling, he got out of the car and started shuffling towards the enormous shop, while Benjamin locked the door and put on his coat and hurried to catch up with him.
Once inside, Colin looked all around, left and right, confused by what he saw and staggered by the scale of everything. He took a few more steps into the ladieswear department and found himself confronted by row after row of stockings, bras and lacy pants, as far as the eye could see. If he had been expecting to find the overwhelming noise, smell and testosterone-fuelled atmosphere of the old Longbridge assembly track, his confusion was understandable.
‘What’s going on here?’ he said, turning to Benjamin.
‘It’s a shop, Dad. It’s a Marks & Spencer. They don’t make cars here any more.’
‘Where do they make the cars, then?’
That was a good question. They wandered a little further until they reached the ground-floor Prosecco bar, which was empty apart from a young, well-dressed couple enjoying what looked to Benjamin like an adulterous date.
‘This is never the new canteen, is it?’ Colin said.
As they walked on into the Food Hall, and drifted up and down the seemingly endless aisles of pre-packaged salads, cooked meats and imported wines, Benjamin tried to explain.
‘Look, Dad, don’t you remember that protest rally we all went to in Cannon Hill Park? The Rally for Rover?’
‘No, when was that?’
‘It was about fifteen years ago. Anyway, it did no good. Four local guys ended up taking over the company but instead of saving it they ran it into the ground and then sold it off in 2005. There’s been hardly anything made here since then. Everyone buys their cars from Germany and France and Japan now. They flattened all the factory buildings, and for years there was nothing but empty space here. Come on, Dad, you must remember some of this. You and I went to have a look at it once, when they were in the middle of demolishing the South Works.’
‘The South Works is all gone?’
‘We’re standing in it now. Where it used to be.’
‘CAB 1 and CAB 2?’
‘Both gone.’
‘What about the East Works? Down by Groveley Lane?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what’s happened down there.’
‘Take me there.’
‘Really?’
‘Take me there now.’
They walked back to the car park. The drive to the site of the old East Works only took three minutes, but in that time the sky seemed to get even darker.
‘Looks like rain,’ Benjamin said.
All they found, when they reached the site, was a vast expanse of wasteland, hemmed in by tall metal fencing. Signs posted at regular intervals along the fence warned prospective visitors to keep out. There was also a large billboard announcing the imminent construction of yet more two-, three- and four-bedroom homes.
‘Well, there you are,’ said Benjamin. ‘What do you want to do now?’
‘Park the car,’ his father said.
Benjamin parked by the side of the road. To his surprise, Colin unfastened his seat belt and got out. Slowly, effortfully, he began to walk towards a set of double gates emblazoned with the logo of the construction company. Benjamin followed him.
Colin stopped when he got to the gates. There was a gap between them which was wide enough to see through. He stood there for several minutes, squinting through the gap. Benjamin stayed beside him, standing on tiptoe and peering over the gates at the same view. There was nothing to see. Hundreds of acres of mud, deserted and featureless in the failing light, stretching right up the hill towards the street where a row of interwar houses could dimly be made out. There was thin moisture in the air – more like mist than drizzle – and the afternoon had turned wincingly cold.
‘Come on, Dad,’ Benjamin said. ‘There’s nothing to see here.’
‘I don’t get it,’ said Colin.
Benjamin had turned back towards the car. Now he turned again, to face his father.
‘What? What don’t you get?’
‘I don’t get how they can just knock all that down. Something that was here for so long, something that …’
He stared again through th
e gap between the gates. But his eyes were glazed and unseeing; and his voice, forcing out more words than he had perhaps spoken in the last twelve months, was as flat and toneless as the landscape.
‘I mean, a building isn’t just a place, is it?’ he said. ‘It’s the people. The people who were inside it.
‘I’m not saying … I mean, I know we made crap cars. I know the Germans and the Japanese make better cars than we ever did. I’m not daft. I understand all that. I understand why people want to buy a car from Japan that’s not going to break down after a couple of years like ours used to do. What I don’t understand is …
‘What I don’t understand is, where it’s going to end? How we can keep going like this. We don’t make anything any more. If we don’t make anything then we’ve got nothing to sell, so how … how are we going to survive?
‘That’s what worries me. I mean, this doesn’t worry me. This big empty space here, that’s just … nothing. When you knock down a factory, and all those jobs go, that’s what you expect to see. Nothing.
‘But that shop – that bloody great shop? And all those houses? Hundreds and hundreds of houses? What’s that about? How can you replace a factory with shops? If there’s no factory, how are people supposed to make the money to spend in the shops? How are people supposed to make the money to buy the houses? It doesn’t make sense.
‘I think that’s what made me … come over a bit funny, back there in the shop. I just couldn’t take it in, how everything’s turned out. And my memory does get a bit fuzzy sometimes. I’ve noticed it happening. I don’t know what it means. It’s a bit scary. Everything’s a bit scary, when you get to my age, because you know what’s waiting for you, just around the corner. But I do still remember a lot of things. Like I said, I’m not daft. Not yet. Of course I remember them knocking the buildings down. I knew they’d done that. I didn’t know … didn’t realize it was all of them, though. And there are things, older things than that, much older, that I remember even more clearly.