Children of the Sun

by Max Schaefer

  When you’re young [I complained to Philip] and from a certain background, you’re encouraged to ‘express’ yourself. Then you hit adolescence and the virulence of life crashes into your veins.

  Everything now begins to encourage you against yourself. Your fellow adults lock themselves down into a death-rictus washed by the thick current of cathode fantasy. They will brook no attempt to disrupt this.

  Do you remember what I said to you last summer? Because I was right and have forgotten. Something almost happened to me, and I’ve slipped back.

  Confirmation emails for flights long past. Exchanges, clumsily intimate, with boys met online. One American, younger than me and closeted, had talked of suicide: our correspondence tailed off.

  At 3.20 a.m. there were 4,078 men logged on globally, 291 in London. I had no new messages, so browsed my tabulated fellow citizens. At this hour their profile taglines became more urgent, more despairing. Anyone up 4 it now? Horny and waiting in SE8! Looking for meet this eve.

  COME ON GUYS WHERE ARE YOU

  I edited my own to read Everything now begins to encourage you against yourself. Underneath, my portrait, snapped by Sarah at a family gathering, smiled unaffectedly back at me. It was two years old: false advertising.

  Adam, I saw, had new photos. Horny 25yo sub skin in Kennington. Into BDSM, CBT, CP and more. No BB. Have great BF only looking for fun. He stood shirtless in boots and combats by a low hedge, grinning and squinting at the sun behind the camera. In the background were what looked like the sails of an old mill. The ground at his feet was thick with grass. Where had it been taken, and by whom?

  You could search the profiles by keyword. I tried windmill. There were no results. I tried BDSM and got several hundred: even more for CP.

  I tried death-rictus. Nothing.

  I tried LOG. Ditto.

  I tried not even amusing myself now.

  I tried nazi, and the site returned fourteen profiles.

  A grey man in SS leathers. More than one skinhead saluting the camera (one with the note Vote BNP Hull, Derringham 18 Jan!). A Jewish teacher into concentration-camp role play. Somebody grimacing in poor lighting asked, What is the nazi leather movement? A rhetorical question: It is a movement for men of all races and sexual preferance!

  One man billed himself as Hard sskjn top iso ssubs who can clean boots properly, also bruders alpha dogs and m88s. Whites only. Stay safe to stay pure. Later I would search for bruders and m88s, and get several results for each.

  The last profile of the fourteen used the handle ‘arealnazi’. There was no photograph. The text said: Nazi skinhead thug, fat, middle aged, tatts, will abuse worthless scum. I will hurt you & rape you if I want & take your money if I want & leave you bleeding. If thats not what your looking for fuck off. If your going to ask for a photo fuck off. I am not play acting I am a fucking nazi.

  ‘Come back to bed.’ Adam stood in the doorway.

  I closed the laptop. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘Look at yourself.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m not saying anything.’

  Under the duvet he said, ‘You’re freezing. Why couldn’t you sleep?’

  ‘How much are boots?’ I asked.

  ‘What sort of boots?’

  ‘Proper boots. Like yours.’

  ‘Good night.’ He kissed my hand.

  I said: ‘It says on your profile that I’m a great BE’

  ‘I’ve been meaning to update that.’

  In the morning we went shopping. Philip was due for dinner with his new boyfriend Tom, to whose irritating vegetarianism I felt the need to respond with some sort of casually achieved triumph, as if by providing better food than he was surely used to I could allude to pleasures beyond his prim horizons. But my couscous didn’t turn out as I’d imagined. ‘Sorry it’s rather tasteless,’ I said. Tom, blond and three years my junior, smiled cutely: ‘It’s very nice.’ He had expected nothing better.

  ‘Oh,’ said Philip, ‘I’m always up for couscous.’

  I said, ‘Well, if you will date vegetarians.’

  He ruffled Tom’s hair. ‘I fry myself a steak once in a while.’

  ‘When I’m not around he does. I can’t stand the smell.’ The grains were claggy and dry, and the vegetables that sat on them harsh with raw spice.

  ‘So,’ said Philip, ‘have you actually written anything yet?’

  ‘I’ve made a lot of notes.’

  ‘James is writing a screenplay,’ he told Tom.

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘A screenplay probably. Or a novel possibly. Or a performance piece or maybe a haiku. He hasn’t decided. But he’s made a lot of notes’

  ‘What about?’Tom said.

  ‘Don’t get him started,’ Adam advised him.

  ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘it’s been getting quite interesting:’ Among the ‘special material’ in the library I had located certain underground texts of the British Satanist group the Order of Nine Angles. Their author, who signed himself ‘Anton Long’, was widely identified as David Myatt, the neo-nazi ideologist whose writings had inspired the London nailbomber David Copeland. Myatt had disavowed more than a brief, youthful involvement in the occult, and repeatedly denied being the same person as Long, but Long’s satanic autobiography read like a dark-glassed version of Myatt’s own, and in it he claimed authorship of poems and translations of Greek classics published in Myatt’s name. Some of the library’s texts had been numbered or amended by hand, in the same script with which Long signed himself. This, and their content, had made the experience of reading them quite unsettling.

  Long (I told the others) elaborated an extensive system of Satanism, the Seven-Fold Sinister Way. It was a process of individual personal development, which demanded rigorous self-testing, pushing limits on both physical and moral planes: on the one hand, for example, walking fifty miles over hilly terrain, and on the other conducting human sacrifice. This last, he insisted, was central to satanic practice; he claimed to have performed it more than once.

  ‘Nice,’ said Tom.

  ‘I thought you were writing about Nicky Crane,’ Philip said.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like it.’

  ‘Putting it together is the fun part. It’s degrees-of-separation stuff. Like, what has David Myatt got to do with Nicky? Nothing directly — well, they were both in the British Movement—’

  ‘I can’t keep track of all these groups,’ Adam said.

  ‘I don’t think anyone can. Probably including the members. The factions split every three weeks, and they’re all named using some combination of the same ten words. I wouldn’t bother, frankly: just go with the flow … Anyway, back to my Nicky—Myatt degrees-of-separation thing. There’s a guy called Tony Williams who was Myatt’s protégé in the National-Socialist Movement — the ’90s NSM, which splintered out of Combat 18, not the ’60s NSM run by Colin Jordan and John Tyndall after they were kicked out of the BNP — which is not today’s BNP, which was started by Tyndall after he left the National Front. The ’60s NSM is what became the British Movement. See, I can keep track of them. So, it was Williams who let Copeland into the NSM. But a few years earlier, Williams had helped organize Rock Against Communism and Skrewdriver gigs — the Nicky link. It was also Williams whom Colin Jordan sent as his representative to Savitri Devi’s funeral. Jordan’ (I footnoted for Tom) ‘is basically the godfather of British fascism, and she was this mad Greek Hindu woman who created a sort of Hitler religion — Hitler never died or was coming back or whatever — but Savitri Devi did — die I mean — on a visit here in ’82, on literally-and-I-am-not-making-this-up the very same night that Skrewdriver held their comeback gig at the 100 Club. Death and rebirth, see? In fact that was probably the concert where Ian Stuart finally came out as a nazi; he gave a sieg heil salute and sang “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”, which of course is actually a pastiche nazi song from Cabaret, written by two Jews … You see, the stuff’s all there, I’m
just tracing connections.’

  ‘You’re writing conspiracy theory,’ Tom said.

  ‘Well, speculation. Or alternative history. I mean, technically speaking it’s fiction, so you have a lot of leeway. You just ask, what might have happened? Like suppose Savitri Devi was spreading some much darker, secret tradition that went back to the Third Reich — she was totally plugged in to the Odessa network through Otto Skorzeny, so it’s entirely plausible. And maybe through her connections over here that stuff gets passed on to Anton Long, who works it into the Seven-Fold Way. Then maybe Long gets obsessed with Nicky Crane. After all, Myatt idolizes skinheads — calls them heralds of the new aeon — and Long says the aim of Satanism is to produce a new species, a master race to inspire fear and admiration in the supine majority. Doesn’t that sound like Nicky to you?’

  Philip said, ‘If you’re using Myatt, sweetheart, I’d consider changing his name. Besides, isn’t this all rather juicy? I thought your interests were a bit less … you know, Channel Five.’

  ‘A bit of meat won’t hurt. Besides, my whole point is that all of this stuff actually existed together. I haven’t made up the Order of Nine Angles any more than I have the BNP.’

  ‘Do you have a producer or something?’ said Tom.

  ‘It’s all early stages so far.’

  ‘And are you working as well — I mean, a job?’

  Philip shook his head and mouthed, Parents.

  ‘Ah,’ said Tom. ‘One of those.’

  ‘An honourable tradition.’ Philip topped up his wine. In the gesture I saw the four of us, suddenly, as an illustration: the modern gay dinner party, as conducted on a certain budget. Two couples: an anthropological commentary would elaborate on the nature of open relationships, the ostensible ease with which the participants accommodated a complex network of prior and ongoing interactions. Or had Tom turned Philip monogamous? It had happened before, with these young boys. That brought to me with a jolt that I had never thought about the obvious likelihood of sexual history between Philip and Adam — had never thought to ask either of them. The voiceover in my mind now murmured that Philip was the only one to have slept with everyone else at the table; Tom the only one tied by just one thread.

  ‘I joined Stormfront too,’ I said cheerfully, and Philip groaned.

  ‘It does sound unhealthy,’ Tom said. ‘Like it’s getting inside your head.’

  ‘I’m not going to become a nazi just by reading about them.’

  ‘Are you sure? I mean, sorry, but you sound obsessed. Not to be rude or anything, but these people are losers. Wankers and nut-jobs. Just because one of them blows people up or thinks he’s a Satanist doesn’t make them interesting.’

  Tom was getting on my nerves. I thought of Long’s advocacy of the selection of opfers — his term for human victims — through a series of tests. ‘Opfers,’ he wrote, ‘are examples of human culling in action.’ I shrugged and played with my wineglass. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ I said. ‘I don’t feel like a nazi, but … I have been having weird dreams.’

  ‘ What kind of dreams?’

  ‘Like … I’m walking through a town centre late at night. All the locked shopfronts with their merchandise lit up to deter thieves. And I know that I’m just going to start killing people.’

  ‘Killing people?’

  ‘Taking them out. Ten or twenty at a time, whoever comes along.’

  Adam frowned: ‘That is a bit fucked,’

  ‘How do you kill them?’ asked Tom.

  Why had I told him that? I frowned, considering. ‘I poison their couscous. Would you like some more?’

  ‘Unfortunately I’m stuffed. In fact will you excuse me?’ When Tom was in the bathroom I told Philip, ‘He seems nice.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘He does. For a twelve-year-old.’

  ‘He is nice. He’s very sweet and sexy and I like him quite a lot actually, so watch it.’

  ‘What do you do in bed? Teach him to read?’

  ‘Enough now, thanks. Besides, he rather had a point.’

  ‘Funnily enough I did dream about Charlie Sargent the other night.’

  ‘Is this another joke?’

  ‘Scout’s honour. He accused me of stealing his Smirnoff.’ ‘What did you say?’

  ‘That I didn’t drink vodka. And if I did it wouldn’t be a cheap brand like his.’

  The young man on screen wore a queer as fuck T-shirt. ‘Jesus,’ said Philip, ‘those were the days.’ We saw a skinhead follow him menacingly down an alley. Once inside it they kissed.

  ‘See?’ I said. ‘You need to see things from more than one angle before you can truly understand them.’

  ‘Very deep.’

  ‘What are we watching?’ asked Tom.

  ‘The Channel Four programme where Nicky came out,’ I told him. He was at one end of the sofa, fondling Philip’s leg; I perched by Adam on the other arm.

  ‘Oh,’ said Philip. ‘I thought you were showing us one of his porn flicks.’

  ‘I would if I had any. I have been looking — I mean, I’ve asked in a few shops. I don’t know how you track down old amateur porn.’

  ‘Well, you’ve lost my interest now. Although: what the fuck is Patrick Harrington doing there?’

  Harrington, in a jacket and tie, was telling the camera, ‘I think that the skinhead image is a potent image of working-class aggression.’

  Tom asked, ‘Who?’ and Philip told him: ‘He ran the National Front in the ’80s, with Nick Griffin and some other lunatics.’

  ‘There was a big fuss,’ I said, ‘when he was studying at North London Poly. Harrington’s fellow students picketed to keep him out. The Front took photos of the student leaders, and the judge — who by the way was one Justice Mars-Jones, father-of — ordered the lecturers to name them. They refused and it went on for ages. Anyway, the Front had collapsed by the time they filmed this.’

  ‘The average skinhead on the street, I would say,’ said Harrington, ‘would react emotionally against any homosexual behaviour.’

  ‘Father of who?’ Tom muttered to Philip.

  From Harrington the tape cut to Ian Stuart, who seemed to be sitting outside a pub. ‘I don’t think a gay person should be a skinhead at all,’ he said. ‘I just don’t think it’s got anything to do with skinheads, gays.’

  ‘This,’ I said, ‘from the man who got a makeover from Steve Strange.’

  ‘No’

  ‘Honest to God.’

  ‘He had a nice voice, didn’t he?’ said Philip. ‘All Northern and gentle.’

  I said, ‘He’s coming up now.’

  Nicky sat in what must have been his Soho bedsit, illuminated dimly behind him. A television, a cupboard in dark wood veneer, square silhouetted items on a shelf. He wore a green camouflage T-shirt and pants, hands folded in his lap, his posture that of some guru of hard-won knowledge. ‘Adolf Hitler was my god, he was sort of like my Führer and my leader, and everything I done was like for Adolf Hitler.’ We panned over what must have been his scrapbook. Cuttings from local newspapers — Hitler in birthday trick; skinheads in race rampage. Something, amazingly, from Socialist Worker. I wondered, again, where the book was now.

  The camera lingered in close-up on Nicky’s hands, his tattooed arms. I had watched this section frame-by-frame when I got the video, noting the visible tattoos. There were nearly thirty, swastikas and slogans like i hate niggers, and various insignia of the British Movement. One I couldn’t interpret: the initials LOG, the O quartered into a sunwheel. When I pointed it out now, Philip said, ‘League of St George, maybe?’

  ‘I thought that too, but wouldn’t it have an S?’

  In close-up you could see moisture on Nicky’s upper lip, but he spoke with astonishing calm: olive-green eyes steady at the camera, at you. Adam was stroking my arm. When Nicky said, ‘It’s actually then that I started to feel like a hypocrite,’ furrows of concern appeared between his brows, his eyelids lowered, and he glanced down and to his left: the directi
on associated with remembered feelings and internal dialogue. Ian Stuart, by contrast, seemed jumpy as hell. In the time it took him to say, ‘To me, what a skinhead … part of being a skinhead is to be a nationalist, to be patriotic,’ his gaze swerved left and then forward three times in a row, and on the word ‘nationalist’ his eyes lurched so far to the right (the direction of lies and invention — assuming Ian was rights handed) that his head turned to follow them. Had he known, when this was filmed, what it was for? (‘Mr Stuart, we’re from Out, the Channel Four slot for lesbians and gay men, and we’d like to interview you.’) Had he known of Nicky’s involvement, of his announcement? This statement of Ian’s was later used on a neo-nazi DVD, which did not cite its source.

  Sonny, Adam’s cat, wandered in from outside. He walked in front of me, brushing my feet with his tail, and I held out my hand to him. He moved past, nuzzling Philip’s legs for a moment before jumping up and settling across his lap and Tom’s. ‘He likes you,’ said Adam. ‘He’s normally shy with strangers.’

  ‘Cats do,’ replied Tom, stroking him. ‘Like me. Hello,’ he told Sonny. ‘Hello, you.’

  Nicky said, ‘A lot of people who I used to hang around with like, they did sort of, like, hate, as I said, queers, and would go out queer-bashing. It was something, like, that I never did myself.’

  ‘Oh, listen to him.’ Philip was rolling a spliff. ‘Bless. Sumfink I never did.’

  A gay BNP member spoke next, his face in shadow. ‘When I get a partner they want to be pissed over, scat over, beat up, whipped, whatever, strapped up and abused and that.’ I squeezed Adam’s hand on that.

  Nicky: ‘Once I just walked into the toilet to go for a piss and this black man followed me in, he actually went down on his hands and knees and like started licking my boots and I was actually very embarrassed’ (here his face broke into, very precisely, an embarrassed smile) ‘and just walked straight out of the toilet.’