Children of the Sun

by Max Schaefer

  ‘You’ve got it so fucking wrong.’

  ‘He could end up put away for life, Tony. He could end up dead.’

  ‘But he’s normal as they come.’

  ‘It’s OK you trying to protect him. Listen. The Front’s on the verge of collapse. After that they won’t even pretend to be legitimate. These people are going underground. Does he talk to you about his cadre training?’

  The woman is still pushing the swing. It goes higher each time. Tony imagines the kid falling, flying away.

  Bruno says, ‘I don’t have to tell you who their backers are, it’s in the magazine. I know they look harmless with their little copies of The Green Book, but for Christ’s sake, Gaddafi’s just built a massive chemical-weapons factory. If he’ll take down a passenger jet, what do you think his friends over here could do with a bit of ricin? In that cinema on a Friday night, say. Or the tube at rush hour. You can’t tell me that’s what you want.’

  ‘You don’t really think they’d do nothing like that. The Nutty Fairies? They couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery.’

  ‘That’s what everyone always says, until the bombs go off. Don’t tell me you haven’t read The Turner Diaries. It nearly happened in America a couple of years ago. Fellow travellers of yours hoarding thirty gallons of cyanide. Now we’ve got long live Death, hooray for Palestine, little Pat Harrington defending the IRA. Don’t be so blind, Tony. It doesn’t suit you.’

  ‘You sound like fucking Searchlies. They don’t support terrorism. They’ve said that.’

  ‘I don’t support adultery. Ask my wife how reassured she is.’

  Tony says, ‘Oh this is fucking crap.’

  ‘Why are you pretending,’ says Novak to Bruno, ‘you’re asking a favour?’

  Bruno says, ‘I’m just trying to be polite.’

  Novak tells Tony, ‘He’s not asking a fucking favour.’

  ‘I’ve been helping you out for a fucking year. How long does this go on?’

  ‘Who said it stops?’

  ‘Have you got another fag?’

  ‘You’ve been fuck-all use so far, you know that? The little you do tell us we already know. Blood & Honour’s leakier than a rusty barrel these days. We’ve been doing you a favour and you haven’t earned it yet.’

  Bruno says, ‘Never been in Searchlight, have you, Tony ? We could put a lovely spread together. Copy of your conviction next to a blurry photo of you and the BM boys. You and Ian Stuart in a pub. With some sarky caption, they’re good at those.’

  ‘Stick in that note you wrote,’ says Novak.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ says Bruno. ‘What was it again: “Come over here and fuck me up the jacksie”?’

  “‘Don’t fuck me, I’m scared of Aids.’”

  ‘Oh that’s adorable.’

  “‘Sucking OK.’”

  ‘What happened to that case up near Kings Cross?’ Bruno asks Novak. ‘Ian Stuart cutting that poofs throat?’

  Tony says, ‘He never done it.’

  ‘Not enough evidence,’ says Novak.

  ‘Have you got another fag? Please.’

  Bruno tells him: ‘I want to hear who’s gone where and who they spend time with.’

  ‘I haven’t even seen Dave in months.’

  ‘Well get back in touch and make fucking nice then. Buy him chocolates and put your frilly knickers on.’

  ‘You don’t listen do you?’

  Novak says,‘Are you working these days?’

  ‘You know what I’m doing. You know when I take a fucking dump.’

  ‘Because there are certain things we have a responsibility to inform your employer about. Or potential future employers.’

  Tony says, ‘I know the fucking threats by now.’

  Bruno stands up and pats Tony’s shoulder. ‘Then we’ll leave you to ponder them on your own.’

  ‘Are you OK for money?’says Novak.

  ‘I’ve never been OK for money.’

  ‘Here’s forty. If you need more you know how to get it.’

  ‘Thing is,’ says Bruno, ‘if you don’t come up with the goods, if anything does happen and maybe if it doesn’t, everything’s out of my hands and into MI5’s. Including you. And believe me: that you do not want.’

  Tony is alone. The woman with the child has gone. He walks to the swing and touches it. He hears the car start, then stop again, and Novak returns.

  ‘Breaking news,’ he says. ‘We found the concert. Northfleet in Kent. Back all the way we come and same again. Ironic isn’t it?’

  ‘Thanks for telling me.’

  ‘You might make it if you hurry. These things never start on time, do they? But the pub holds four hundred people and there’s twice that heading Over. Capacity issues as such.’

  Tony looks at the sky.

  ‘Tell you what,’ Novak says, ‘you could always run away with him to Denmark. They’re letting poofs get married there now. As of yesterday, which I know because I do read the papers. And it’s crawling with boneheads, that place. Be the bloody promised land for you.’

  ‘Are you still here?’

  ‘What happened to you anyway, Tony?’ asks Novak. ‘You used to be one of the smart ones.’

  ‘Yeah fuck off,’ says Tony.

  The Road to Valhalla

  It was gone eleven by the time we set out, and the streets had thickened with traffic. We stop-started over Vauxhall Bridge, sped up encouragingly past Hyde Park, then crawled round Speakers’ Corner to see metal packed the whole interminable length of Edgware Road. Neither of us had really slept, and near-immobility kept encouraging into catatonia my dull stare through the windscreen, until the memory of our situation startled me loose again. When that happened I would glance around in a sudden panic, to find Adam still somehow awake at the wheel.

  ‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on?’ he said.

  For no good reason, neither of us had changed. We had told each other we were too tired, or didn’t have time, but perhaps the truth was more that our outfits felt appropriate. I had queried Adam’s ability to drive in his boots, but he told me he was used to it.

  All at once, it seemed, we were near Hendon, accelerating alarmingly as our road became the start of the M1. As we drove fast into it the rain fell harder against the glass. The wipers scooped and smeared it in patterns that distorted in turn the quickening world outside. Reality, thus liquefied, melded with the strange detritus of my waking dreams.

  I said, ‘I thought I was just making stuff up.’ But it was noisy on the motorway and perhaps he didn’t hear.

  Later he said, ‘We should have called the police.’

  He had had Sonny since he was a kitten: nearly five years. Under other circumstances we would have found an emergency vet.

  ‘Come on, Ads.’ I imagined the conversation: I see, sir; and what is the purpose of this research, exactly? And how long have you been doing it? ‘I don’t want them going through my … fucking laptop, you know?’

  ‘What have you been up to? ’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing that you don’t …’

  ‘Fuck,’ he muttered, when I tailed off.

  ‘… I’ve been talking to this guy.’

  We stopped for food at the services at Newport Pagnell, spurning the coffee-bar clone for Burger King. We sat by a window eating burgers from a smeared sheet and drinking the hot, dirty water they sold as coffee.

  ‘Thanks for doing this,’ I said.

  ‘What else would you do, hitch-hike?’ Adam dumped sugar into his drink. A minute later he said quietly: ‘Last night. I mean at the club …’

  ‘Can we talk about it later?’

  ‘You wanted to come.’

  ‘Let’s not do this now.’

  He blinked and the skin tightened against his lower jaw. ‘I don’t know what it is you want.’

  ‘Please, Ads.’

  ‘It’s only sex.’

  I looked out to the car park, on which the rain seemed to descend like fixative, so that a hundred years from no
w it would be quite unchanged, the same Morris Minor estate still parked at the same hurried angle.

  ‘I can’t give you what you need,’ I told him.

  His reply was so low I had to strain to hear: ‘You always did.’

  In the toilets, miniature advertising billboards displayed a pair of fat, headless breasts above each urinal.

  Past Coventry it stopped raining, and the dark grey clouds that had tamped our surroundings opened into a strange yellow hiatus above our heads. Its reflection shimmered on the wet surface of the road so we seemed suspended in alien light.

  ‘I don’t know what we’ll find,’ I told Adam, ‘but it’s where everything points to.’ Perhaps it was exhaustion, or stress, but names and places, patterns and dates were aligning like sheets of tracing paper in my head.

  Ian had left London for good in 1989, after the public humiliation of having his redirection point for the Main Event concert taken over by Anti-Fascist Action and turned into a battering-ground for nazis. They had attacked him in person, too, several times, and on one occasion ‘fucked up his fingers with a hammer’. As for Nicky, I lost track after January 1990, when he was ‘dealt with’ by AFA during the Bloody Sunday March. By one account, they threw him ‘through a bus shelter’, by another, slammed his head in a taxi door until he blacked out. With the political soldiers meanwhile heading underground, it might have felt for a while like fascism was in retreat. But Skrewdriver carried on playing — Staffordshire, Nottinghamshire, Newcastle — and Ian made Derbyshire his new home.

  ‘Take the next turn-off,’ I said. ‘The A511.’

  Burton upon Trent had not been good to Ian; he had been injured here on one occasion, and on another, when trying to leave it, he had died. Adam pulled in by a newsagent, a plain two-storey brick building with a canopy in filthy red-and-white stripes. I sat in the car while he went inside for drinks. Ahead, in a gap between buildings, an advertising hoarding had been erected flat-on to the road, its wood since warped by time and weather into concavity, so that from this angle I could not see what it sold.

  I am not play acting.

  If your going to ask for a photo fuck off.

  ‘Is this it?’Adam said when he came back.

  ‘It’s the start.’ I pointed. ‘We want the A38 northbound.’

  ‘What are we looking for?’

  ‘There’ll be a marker, made of wood. Like a pointed cross.’

  Friday, 24 September 1993, the early morning, A Volkswagen Polo headed down this road, carrying Ian and his mates home from a night in Burton, a few pints at the Royal Oak. It was foggy, the small car heavy with five men, most of them drunk. Did they open a window? A dull route, it now turned out: the road curved, it rose and dipped a little, but there was rarely more to the side than steep grass verges, trees, the occasional glimpse of fields. Grass grew along the central divider; overhead, concrete bridges delimited distance.

  Who was travelling with Ian? I recited the names in my mind: Stephen Lee Flint, Richard Hill, David Roy Mee, Robert Sherlock. Stephen Flint, called ‘Boo’, was a young Nottingham skinhead. Richard Hill was a Klansman from Ilkeston, who had put Ian up when he first moved north. ‘Cat’ Mee was a long-time BM activist and member of Skrewdriver Security; his parents ran the Red Lion in Heanor, the pub above which Ian lived. Robert Sherlock did not appear in my notes.

  There was no. mystery about what had happened. The steering wheel caught (a blow-out), the car turned over and left the road. Boo died instantly; Ian was cut from the wreckage and taken to the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, where he was pronounced dead later that morning. The other three survived. ‘We were doing fifty-five mph,’ Cat told the papers. ‘It was as if someone up above had put their hand inside the car and said: “Come here.’”

  I watched the roadside on my left, trying to picture the crash-site photograph. A group of men facing the camera: the sky beyond, a backdrop of trees? Now the barrier’s regularity was broken by a small cross fixed to its surface. It looked normal: Christian. I let it pass.

  What was the mood like in the car? Maybe they’d spent the night discussing arrangements for the Blood & Honour social that was planned for that Saturday, somewhere in the Midlands. Or perhaps they’d been celebrating: just a week earlier in Tower Hamlets, Derek Beackon, the BNP’s chief steward, had won the party’s first-ever council seat. Ian had no time for the BNP, but this was a victory for the movement as a whole; he’d phoned a friend early in the morning, excited, when he’d heard the news. When I had first read the London Psychogeographical Society’s theory that Beackon was a magician who ensured his survival through Ian’s occult sacrifice, I had assumed it was deliberate nonsense. Now I thought of how Anton Long claimed to publish the truth in distorted form, to confuse and test. My eyes were closing again: if I did not keep watching the road I might miss it. Adam stuck to the left-hand lane, driving as slowly as he could. The view extended a few metres on each side: it was as if we were in a channel cut through a solid surface of trees, in which there was only the road, a strip of grass alongside, and sky.

  Ian died in the same year as Nicky, or the year Nicky was meant to have died. Had he heard Nicky was ill? That alternative narrative, always present in my reading, never credible but never silent, seemed to tend to just this ending. A phone call, or perhaps a note in the post, care of the Red Lion: private and confidential, children’s capitals. We’ve not been in touch but I had to let you know. It’s impossible to know how long I, so under the circumstances you . .. What he’s feared for years: the cheap cliché denouement, the great unmasking, truth rupturing skin, the body’s betrayal of the word. Interminable cascade of imagined consequence: comrades, fans, press; mates, family, wife-to-be. The knowledge weighing for how many weeks, slowing conversation, hampering the natural smile, the easy joke. And all at once a decision, simple and without passion in the stern clarity of morning. Nothing is not avoidable. He speeds up, grips the wheel, turns.

  But I still didn’t believe that. And anyway, Ian wasn’t driving.

  By many accounts, since leaving London Ian had begun to want out. His mother had died after a long illness; he was engaged to his on-off girlfriend and under pressure to complete the deal; the violence of the opposition was getting too much. He was ‘depressed’, one friend later told a journalist. ‘He was starting to doubt it all. But it was the others wouldn’t let him go. People like Charlie and that.’

  ‘People like Charlie’: in the last year of Ian’s life, Combat 18 had taken control of Blood & Honour; it was pulling in, by some estimates, hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. How could Ian leave? Besides, he was a figurehead for the movement; abandoning it would have destroyed people’s faith as well as the business, whereas his death consolidated both. Combat 18, like Mark Collett after them, would later claim that Ian had been murdered by the state (in their jargon ZOG, the Zionist Occupation Government), but it was not the state that most benefited from his death. David Myatt had written of his own ‘personal pledge of loyalty to Charlie Sargent’, and steadfastly condemned later rumours that Sargent had been a state asset.

  Anton Long called acausal existence ‘the secret of true Immortality’. He added that, though unusual, ‘consciousness can be transferred to inhabit another causal body’. Long wrote: ‘The ideal candidate for Satanism is the individual of action rather than the “intellectual”.’

  Skrewdriver was reborn on the night Savitri Devi died. What, or who, was given new life by Ian’s death?

  So what tattoos do you have?

  ill show u when we meet

  . There was a blow-out. Ian grabbed the wheel. The car lifted, span.

  A flash of red and white on our left. ‘What was that?’ I asked Adam. He signalled and slowed, pulled into a lay-by twenty metres ahead. ‘Wait here,’ I said, and got out of the car.

  Where we had stopped, empty lager cans surrounded a sign: no litter, penalty £100. There had been a gathering here, not long ago. I walked back towards the thing I’d seen,
along the strip of wild grass that fringed the steep incline of the bank. There was no barrier; cars and lorries came past barely metres away, at speeds around seventy. I was walking as carefully as I could, but in my tiredness seemed to tick left and right in my boots, like the needle of a metronome. The bank on my right was thick with nettles and hawthorn bushes from which random trash sparkled, garish flies in their web.

  The St George’s flag lay in the grass where I had seen it. It was thin, cheap plastic, its white barely dulled by the layer of moist filth on its surface. Untangled from the twigs it clung to, unfolded, it was slightly smaller than an A4 sheet. I held it by my side, wondering how this looked to the passing cars, and scoured the scrub for something more, without success. A small printed note nearby briefly intrigued me until I got close and saw it was a packing slip for some building product — pre-cast concrete and then something illegible — perhaps a remnant from work on the highway.

  I stood with my back to the road, looking up at where thick trees lined the ridge. I could spot no runic totem, nor any person watching.

  ‘Maybe it’s not the right place,’ I told Adam. ‘Or maybe the marker got moved. There’s all these beer cans where they’d have stopped, and I found this lying on the ground.’ I showed him the flag.

  ‘This came off a car,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps it’s still ahead.’ But we didn’t see anything else before the turn-off to Heanor, which Ian, on his drive, had never reached.

  Without signs the town would have been indistinguishable from the muted continuity it was part of, brick homes and businesses long drained of ambition. We left the car in a small, empty lot behind a boarded house. Across the road another, larger St George’s cross, ripped and frayed at its free edge, flapped on a pole above someone’s garage. We walked back to the main street, which sloped steeply down. The Red Lion stood on one corner of a T-junction, opposite a tanning parlour and a café unconvincingly called Happy Chef. It was the town’s oldest pub, a two-storey building bigger than the local average, but in the same rust-coloured brick. There were large windows on the upper floor, behind which, I’d read somewhere, Ian had practised martial arts. In this building, too, he had been initiated into the Klan.