Children of the Sun

by Max Schaefer

  1970: 14-year-old Tony becomes seduced by the neo-nazi movement and is sucked into a world of brutal racist violence and bizarre ritual. It’s a milieu in which he must hide his homosexuality, in which every encounter is potentially explosive.

  2003: James, an aspiring screenwriter, begins to research the far right in Britain, and its secret gay membership.

  The two narrative threads of this extraordinarily assured and ambitious first novel follow Tony through the 1970s, 80s and 90s, as the neo-nazi movement splinters and weakens, and James through a year in which he becomes dangerously immersed in his research. He joins far-right websites. He receives threatening phone calls. And then the lives of these two very different men intersect unforgettably …

  CHILDREN OF THE SUN is an extraordinary debut — it is bold and panoramic, but also a work of great imaginative sympathy and range; a novel of unblinking honesty but also of deep feeling. Written with elegance and a sly wit, it illuminates the surprisingly thin line that separates aggression from tenderness, and gives us a picture of a Britain that is strange yet utterly convincing.

  Children of the Sun

  Children of the Sun

  Max Schaefer

  GRANTA

  Granta Publications, 12 Addison Avenue, London wn 4QR

  First published in Great Britain by Granta Books, 2010

  Copyright © Max Schaefer, 2010

  Max Schaefer has asserted his moral right under the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be

  identified as the author of this work.

  The acknowledgements on pp. 390-91

  constitute an extension of this copyright page.

  All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this

  publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph

  of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save

  with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. Any person who does any

  unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to

  criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  ISBN 978 1 84708 1155

  Typeset by M Rules

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  CPI William Clowes Ltd, Beccles, NR34 7TL

  For China

  ‘He reads on the brickwork: “NF fucks men.”

  And is not displeased.’

  — Iain Sinclair, Suicide Bridge

  Table of Contents

  The Woolwich Odeon

  Mr Nine to Five

  The Union Tavern

  Voice of Britain

  The Regent’s Canal

  Tomorrow Belongs to Me

  Blackheath

  Stand Proud

  The Chamber of the Sun

  Before the Night Falls

  Hill Farm

  Old Albion

  The Craven Club

  Boots and Braces

  Bressenden Place

  Hail the New Dawn

  Speakers’ Corner

  The Road to Valhalla

  The Yorkshire Grey

  Back with a Bang

  Acknowledgements

  Skins International fanzine, 1983

  The Woolwich Odeon

  Sometimes he thinks he is already living in the future.

  It is Monday, 31 August 1970. It is a bank holiday, he is fourteen, and his erection is tugging him across ground dazed by the sun. Grass barely twitches in the motionless air. The heat is amplifying: flies thud about a dog shit whose stench has overgrown it hugely, like a hothouse plant.

  The tarmac path, cracked and swollen, passes a football match and a kiosk selling ice creams, which sunbathers eat contorted, to not be melted on. They watch the match or stare dumbly at a dissipating contrail. White drips gather on the ridges of their cones.

  Past the bandstand, which is never used, is a depression he found years back: running ahead of his mother up a low hill he came suddenly upon it, like a place for soap, and a man and woman fucking on their sloughed clothes. Tony stared until she reared, her grin frenzied under blond hair mussed with twigs, to blow a raspberry at him. He ran from their laughter.

  There is an area of unchecked growth nearby, where the ground is darkened by thick trees and bracken. It is camouflage. It is where he is heading.

  This kind of horniness, like that of certain very sleepless nights, feels like it could alter things. Last week he walked home determined to greet himself in the bathroom mirror and watch himself step through: to kiss and touch himself.

  At the edge of the thicket midges vibrate in a cloud and dead leaves brush his thigh. Within it is suddenly quieter and cool. The path leads to a squat brick building and splits to symmetrical entrances. On the right is a room lit by a single ceiling lamp, its weak light marred by dust and insect carcases. There is a chemical smell trying, like a shrill monotone, to drown out several others. Tony stops to breathe it all in. When he moves again his shoes stick slightly to the floor.

  He looks in both stalls to check they are empty, then unbuttons his shorts and pushes his underpants down. He lets the pants and shorts fall to his shoes. The cool air is clammy against him.

  He shuffles forward, each foot in turn describing ah arc about the other to keep the shorts taut off the floor. He stands at the urinal with his feet apart and his hands by his sides. His dick bounces like a vessel planing over waves. The urine is hot as it leaves him and cool in the fine spray against his knees. He pulls his shorts up and leans against the wall, waiting.

  On a window above the sink someone has drawn a penis and balls, in three loops like a cartoon cactus. Spraying from it are the words paki’s out.

  A shape moves past the window and Tony quickly buttons his shorts before a man enters, stooping in the doorframe. He is very tall, middle-aged, with a monk’s fringe round a head pink and sweaty from the sun. He wears spectacles, thick lenses in huge frames, above a thin and delicate mouth; the arms emerging from his short-sleeved shirt are wide and hairy. The man looks at Tony, who could wash his hands or make some other show to explain his presence, but instead leans against the sink and returns his gaze.

  The man looks quickly away. He glances at the stalls, but seems to know it would be conceding something to use one. Instead he turns to the urinal and unbuttons his fly. He lowers his head. There is a pause, and a muffled cough.

  His shirt carries a vast, cruciform sweat patch on its back.

  When Tony steps closer the man stiffens with the effort of feigning ignorance, his head staring fixedly down at the penis that his whole body is rigid with the desire to make urinate.

  Tony stands at the urinal alongside. He aims his hard dick at the porcelain, a challenge, and whistles a couple of notes in pantomime expectation. The man stands hopelessly next to him, stoppered. His face is covered in fat pebbles of sweat, as if he has some tropical disease. It is the panic of complicity.

  Deliberately, slowly, Tony turns. He affects to notice, just now, his own dick and strokes it once, curious. He glances at the man’s: it is thickening nervously, in hesitant interrogation.

  Tony sidesteps closer. The man lets out a tiny gasp and after a last pause takes his own penis in his left hand while his right now moves with infinite slowness across the space between them. The hand is shaking. It seems blind to any target; it is edging towards Tony’s shoulder, perhaps. It stops just short of him and begins to descend, tracing his left side at an inch’s remove.

  When the door bangs open they spin round. A young ma
n regards them, a teenager with heavy boots and close-cropped hair. A skinhead, realizes Tony, and as he does hears the sound of falling liquid: the shock has jump-started the man’s bladder, which cast an arc of urine as he turned.

  ‘Shit!’ yells the skinhead, with an instinctive, undignified backward leap. The man reverts panicked to the urinal, his shoulders hunched. For a moment the only sound is of his gushing waste.

  ‘Fucking disgusting,’ the skin remarks, frowning at the long involuntary puddle. ‘Nearly got on my boots mate.’ He could be addressing himself.

  The man is tethered in place, cradling in horror the source of an unceasing flow which a minute before he was nearly praying for, and now cannot staunch.

  The skinhead repeats: ‘I said that nearly got on my boots.’ The skinhead’s boots are a deep dried-blood red, rising an inch or so past his ankles. His Levi’s have been cut and re-sewn to stop short above them. He has thin red braces over a white short-sleeved shirt. His short hair extends in sideburns down his cheeks.

  The man stuffs his penis back and scuttles to the door, steering a wide berth around the skinhead and trying not to look at him. He is still buttoning his fly, about which a wet patch blossoms.

  ‘Yeah piss off you old fairy,’ the skin calls after him. He watches the door close with a brief, punctuating laugh, then looks at Tony. ‘All right?’ he says.

  Tony nods. The skinhead steps carefully across the slick and takes the man’s place next to him at the urinal. The skin’s Levi’s, it turns out as he opens it, have a zip fly.

  Tony watches baldly as the skinhead pisses with his hefty dick. The skin grins back at him: ‘What are you staring at?’ Tony looks down: ‘I like your boots.’

  ‘Oh you do eh?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Yeah I bet. Want a pair do you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Got six quid?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well then.’

  The skin arches to face the ceiling. He shakes his dick and tucks it back without zipping his fly. Tony says: ‘I like your hair.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Can I feel it?’

  ‘Number-four crop that.’ The skin leans forward, then seems to change his mind. ‘What are you here for anyway?’

  ‘Needed a slash.’

  ‘Yeah? Well don’t let me stop you.’ The skin folds his arms expectantly. Tony faces the urinal, holding himself, willing a few drops.

  ‘Thought you needed a piss,’ says the skin.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Gone away has it?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Got something there though haven’t you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come here. That.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘You suppose. So what are you here for?’

  ‘You’ve got one too though.’

  ‘I have now. Whose fault is that?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘Don’t muck me about. Whose fault is that?’

  ‘ … Mine?’

  ‘Well then—’

  —and it is Friday, 28 March 1980 and he is twenty-three, adjusting his braces in the mirror, in the toilets of the Crown and Cushion.

  ‘Well then,’ Tony tells himself, and goes back inside the pub. It is heaving with skins: a compact mass of boots and noise and smoke. The other punters left some time ago: He finds Steve by the bar, guarding his pint.

  ‘Fucking buzzing in here,’ Steve says, handing it over. ‘Cheers,’ replies Tony. ‘Nicky about?’.

  ‘His do isn’t it. He’ll be here somewhere.’

  Tony cranes round, looking. Right now, he thinks, it would be hard to tell. He is on his fifth pint and everyone is starting to look the same.

  The bell goes for last orders. Tony calls: ‘Two more here sweetheart.’

  ‘Make it three,’ says Steve. ‘You met my mate Dave?’

  Just arrived is a short lad, younger than both of them, with cropped strawberry hair. A few hairs emerge from the open neck of his white Fred Perry. His blue eyes shine as if with tears but he smiles uncomplicatedly, dimpling his freckled cheeks.

  ‘Dave is it? Tony. You all right mate.’

  They shake hands.

  ‘Thought I’d missed my chance there,’ says Dave. ‘What do I owe you?’

  ‘On me. You up for this are you?’

  ‘After the day I’ve had.’ Dave shakes his head in emphasis. ‘Yeah thanks then Tony. Cheers.’

  ‘Your health. So how do you know this’ (indicating Steve) ‘fucking mug?’

  Dave laughs. ‘He was at school with my brother.’

  ‘I didn’t know Steve went to school.’ Steve waves two fingers at him. Dave is smiling and has started to say something when Steve adds:

  ‘Well not an all-girls’ one like you did.’

  ‘You can’t have two goes at a comeback,’ Tony tells him.

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘You already gave me a V-sign. That was quite articulate for you. You can’t try again when you’ve had time to think up something else.’

  Dave laughs. Steve says: ‘Cunt.’

  Things are moving. People are finishing their pints and there is a sudden queue for the toilets. ‘Looks like we’re off,’ says Tony. He crouches to check the laces on his boots, twenty-hole black Docs.

  Steve is zipping his coat. ‘Got your gear then?’

  Tony looks around, thrown. ‘Shit—’

  ‘Under here, brainbox.’ Vindicated, Steve hands it over: a WH Smith carrier bag. Someone near the entrance is yelling; it could be an announcement but it is hard to hear. Tony takes the bar from the bag, which he drops.

  The doors are open and the exodus has started. Tony drains his glass. ‘Have a good one lads,’ he says. They move forward, shuffling in the crush, but as it narrows towards the exit the crowd picks up pace. Tony hefts the bar beside his thigh, feeling its weight.

  They push through the doors and on to the street like a football team from the players’ tunnel. Outside the night is cold. They fall into line, four abreast, spilling off the pavement into the oncoming lane, making cars swerve to avoid them. Tony looks behind him for Dave and Steve, who has thrown back his head to howl, a conscious animal sound. There are at least ten rows of skins ahead and as many following, perhaps a hundred in all. Most are teenagers, like Dave.

  Some lads up front are shouting: ‘Sieg heil!’ and the chant spreads down the line. Tony shoves his iron bar in the air. Others hold up knives and pickaxe handles, and those without weapons raise their arms in salute. Ahead of them Woolwich High Street curves left in a wide sweep, dipping and rising as it does, and he thinks of a rollercoaster, the deliberate accumulation of manic cranks that heave it to its brink. Few cars pass them now — they must be noticing, diverting — and one that is foolishly parked in their path, on the kerb the march straddles, has lost its windows by the time he reaches it. The Sieg heils are fading out and losing rhythm, and Tony yells, ‘Kill the wogs!’, bringing his crowbar down on the car’s bonnet in clanging punctuation. The cry is taken up around him, and feeling good with the success of his innovation he looks back to see Steve and Dave shouting along. Dave’s grin seems out of place among so many purposeful scowls.

  As they approach the roundabout Tony gets a clear view of the Odeon ahead, a pink 30s picture palace with its name in lights astride its tower and the spy who loved me beneath its curved hoarding and there, queuing in the space below, a vast herd of blacks. It must be a gig or something, he thinks, and you have to admire Nicky’s organization because there’s a good hundred and fifty of the bastards. The first skins are crossing the roundabout now and Tony watches the appalled faces of the blacks as they cotton on. They’re young and mostly male, like the skins, but unprepared: there is pointing, jostling, visible alarm. A few slip away and the queue loses its shape as more quickly follow, round the cinema or inside, and like chemistry as this disper
sal reaches a critical point the skins break step and start running full-tilt, shouting, ‘Skinheads rule’ or ‘Niggers go home’ or just shouting. The ground opens up before Tony and casting a this-is-it look back at Dave and Steve he throws himself into it.

  A few lads have pulled some black off a motorbike in the roundabout and are laying into him with their boots as he curls foetally to protect his head (Should have worn a helmet shouldn’t you? thinks Tony) but the crowd’s too big to get one in himself so he moves on, charging into the mêlée that spills down the steps of the Odeon.

  There’s fighting going on but many blacks have run, or holed up inside the building. Some lads are running up and down in front of the cinema trying to kick the doors in, and Tony joins in for a while, smashing a fanlight with his crowbar. He jumps up at it, scrambling over massing skins, and through the hole he made sees blacks in anxious conference. One girl looks him right in the eye and he starts to shout something at her but then a huge weight lands on his neck, the crowbar is yanked from his grasp and two black teenagers are on him. They bring him flat on the concrete where he can’t kick easily. One boots him in the stomach and aims another at his balls. It doesn’t hit full on but the pain still stalls him when he tries to lift himself. Then he spots the other raising the crowbar. He is, too slowly, changing his plan, from grabbing the leg of the one that kicked him to rolling away from the crowbar now approaching his head, when the black wielding the bar is jerked sideways as something smashes the ribcage beneath his raised arm, a voice yells, ‘You all right mate?’ and Tony is staring into Nicky’s face, Nicky is over him in towering perspective. Sweat bounces bright light from his face and scalp and his weapon swings triumphant in his grasp. ‘All right mate?’ he repeats, leaning closer, and Tony wants to say something, is surely about to speak, when ‘Craney!’ someone shouts and Nicky turns and the first black is coming again for Tony who scrambles to his feet and when he looks back Nicky has gone. Someone else seems to have the crowbar now and the black has lost interest so he breaks away to find another weapon. Besides, he can hear sirens and still feels dizzy from his aching bollock.