Children of the Sun

by Max Schaefer

  Dave smiles. ‘I thought it was quite funny.’

  ‘Yeah that too.’

  ‘We’re still going to be … against it. In the ENM. Homosexuality and that. Nothing Catholic of course. More a sort of discipline thing really.’

  ‘Well you have to be don’t you?’

  ‘Just to sort of have it in the law.’

  The rumbling breaks into sudden thunder: Ian Stuart is at last on stage. He is dressed in black; his short-sleeved shirt bears a big Skrewdriver patch. He extends his right arm and holds it, immobile, impassive. The crowd returns the salute. The shouts of ‘Sieg heil!’, at first chaotic, converge into rhythm. ‘Here we go,’ Tony says again, raising his arm.

  ‘Took his time didn’t he.’

  ‘I might go a bit closer.’

  ‘I’ll ring you next week then,’ says Dave. ‘Enjoy the gig yeah?’

  Pushing forward, arm outstretched, Tony cannot feel the floor against his feet. The Skrewdriver Security boy regards the ranged salutes with a wary smile that he soon, upon visible reflection, substitutes with a scowl. Something about him reminds Tony of Dave at that age. Above, Ian persists in silent acceptance of the tribute. Nobody glassed him last night, Tony thinks first, in Burton on Trent or anywhere else, but then he sees that Ian’s lip swells slightly at its bottom left. From this distance it could be a cold-sore scab.

  Tony finishes his pint with his left hand while still holding out his right, and is already getting another at the bar when Ian lowers his salute and over the barely abating cheers nods to John, Paul’s brother, who starts a fast rat-a-tat on his drums. After a moment the guitarist joins in and they go straight into — what else? — ‘Back with a Bang’. When Ian opens his mouth wide to drive home the chorus, Tony sees he is missing a couple of teeth.

  Ian sings ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’ and ‘Europe Awake’ and tells the crowd about the glassing incident and the gang of niggers that did it (they told him, ‘The gig’s off tomorrow, you nazi bastard,’ only as Ian points out it isn’t, is it, and everyone salutes and shouts again). He sings ‘Streetfight’ and ‘The Showdown’ and lays into the reds at Waterloo who tried to stop the concert. He says, ‘Whatever the vermin does, we’ll be there with a pint and a stiff right arm.’ In support of this Tony gets another pint himself.

  Ian sings ‘Paranoid’ by Black Sabbath and ‘United’ by Judas Priest. He sings two more of his own songs, ‘Our Pride Is Our Loyalty’ and ‘Hail the New Dawn’, and in homage to a recent cross-burning ceremony up in Walsall he sings ‘Johnny Joined the Klan’, which is his version of ‘Johnny B. Goode’; the original is by Chuck Berry and that’s quite funny when you think about it.

  Tony has another pint and more guys are dancing with their shirts off. It’s dark and loud and hot and Ian shouts and growls into the microphone and sometimes stops to talk politics between the songs.

  Ian says: They keep sending us these fucking niggers, they keep sending us these Pakis, they keep sending us these dirty Jewish fuckers to take over our fucking country.’

  Tony shouts, ‘Sieg heil,’ and when the drums start again he jumps up and down and spills most of his lager on a brick shit-house of a German. He apologizes and buys a couple of pints for the German and his mates and replaces his own. Peter the Belgian watches with a little smile.

  Ian sings ‘Blood & Honour’ and ‘Stand Proud’ and a version of ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ by Lynyrd Skynyrd and ‘46 Years’ which is a song he wrote when Rudolf Hess died and appears, like ‘Sweet Home Alabama’, on the album After the Fire, which Nicky did the cover art for, an old gnarled tree on a bleak landscape, with grave markers underneath and birds tiny against the sky.

  He doesn’t sing ‘Justice’ from Hail the New Dawn, a song Nicky wrote the lyrics for, about when he was sent down for that fight at the Woolwich Arsenal, only Tony always wondered if the line ‘My poor mother’s screams numb me with shock’ was about something else as well. Nicky designed the cover for that album too.

  Tony goes back to the bar and Ian goes back to the glassing incident. He says: ‘Do we want these subhuman black bastards in this country? Do we fuck! It’s about time the lot of them were either gassed or fucking shipped out.’

  Ian says: ‘Walk down the street in this country, what do you get? Some fucking big-lipped, flat-nosed black bastard walking along’ (he does an impression of this, with a comic roll of his shoulders, and people laugh as well as shout and salute again) ‘going, “Raas man,” fucking barging the skinheads out of the way. He don’t fucking do that if it was a fucking proper society.’

  Ian says, ‘We’ll have the black filth out one day, don’t worry about it. And if we don’t throw them out we’ll fucking gas them.’

  Tony stumbles from the bar. The room is a hot dark mass of noise, the songs blending into each other now; Ian is at one point singing, ‘Strikeforce! White survival …Strikeforce! Kill all rivals,’ and in what feels like the same moment but can’t be because it’s a different song, bellowing, ‘Smash! Smash! the I — R — A!’, with everyone yelling and stamping along. Ian gives a sieg heil salute on every ‘Smash!’ and Tony is lurching a bit as he watches and has the feeling of the movement around him slowing even as the sounds speed up; there is a mass before him that swells and threatens to engulf and then he is into it and it is soft and damp and smells of sweat, pushing him back and saying, ‘Whoa there’ and the mass is Steve.

  ‘Watch yourself,’ Steve says.

  Tony isn’t sure how he wants to reply but it comes out like: ‘I—ow.’

  Steve squints into Tony’s eyes. ‘You all right mate?’

  ‘Have you gu—’ says Tony, and pitches forward a few degrees.

  ‘Oh Jesus. OK come with me. Let’s get you outside.’

  Steve nudges him in little steps towards the door. Behind them, Ian is introducing another song. He says he wants to dedicate it to a new group the reds have just found out about and they’re doing a good job and something about Charlie who looks like a schoolboy but there’s never been anyone less like a schoolboy (Oh yeah, Tony thinks through his haze, Charlie) and this song is for them, Redwatch — at which Steve turns back, pulling Tony into an emetic swerve, to raise his arm in acknowledgement. As the song begins they push through the door and stagger together down the steps and fall into a seating position. When he hits the step Tony belches and he thinks he’s going to be sick. He leans over and retches but the moment has passed.

  Steve says, ‘Think you’ve had enough mate.’

  Tony says, ‘No I just …’ and then falls silent, looking out at the cars circling the roundabout ahead (red lights to the left, white to the right).

  ‘Fuck,’ he mumbles after a moment, blinking at his feet. The ground is slowing to a halt. He says: ‘I didn’t know you were Redwatch.’

  ‘I’m not anything mate.’

  ‘Thought you were BM.’

  ‘Oh does that still exist does it?’

  ‘Yeah well,’Tony says.

  Behind them Skrewdriver is playing ‘When the Boat Comes in’. Ian leads the whole audience in the chorus:

  ‘Nigger, nigger, get on that boat

  Nigger, nigger, row

  Nigger, nigger, get out of here

  Nigger, nigger, go, go, go . ..’

  ‘Anyway,’ Steve says, ‘it’s not called Redwatch no more. The organization I mean. Redwatch is the magazine.’ He pulls a crumpled copy from his windcheater and hands it to Tony, who smooths it with his palm. It uses the same three-bladed swastika for its logo as Blood & Honour.

  ‘They’ll be running this lot soon,’ Steve says, nodding back at the pub.

  On the cover is a picture of gas canisters. Across them is written: ‘zyklon-b: over six million satisfied customers. manufactured by Combat 18 .

  ‘Very nice,’ Tony says.

  ‘We’re not pissing about.’

  Tony flicks through. It’s just a few pages, mainly names and addresses: union reps, race mixers and the like. Haddo House, he thinks
, and puts it down on the step. ‘Steve have you got anything?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Nothing heavy. I just feel a bit…’

  ‘What like speed?’

  Tony shakes his head.

  ‘I’ve got some Diazepam.’

  ‘That’s more like it.’

  ‘You’re half asleep already.’

  ‘Don’t matter.’

  ‘Well it’s up to you. Tenner.’

  Tony swallows the pills. Inside, another chorus of‘Nigger, nigger’ begins.

  ‘BM’s getting sidelined,’ Steve says. ‘Front’s finished. BNP, C18: they’re the only ones doing anything. Skinheads are over: you want to grow your hair. Skinheads are wankers, they’re either queers or reds. Did you see Nicky Crane on telly? The turds always float to the fucking surface.’

  ‘I can’t grow my hair. What am I meant to do, dress like you?’

  “What’s wrong with how I dress?’

  ‘Can’t afford it can I. All these labels.’

  ‘A few of us went down a queer pub in Kings Cross the week after that programme went out. Squared the balance a bit. You should have been there.’

  ‘Too old to change anyway.’

  ‘Look at Rostock,’ says Steve. ‘That’s the way to go. Barbecue a few gooks and they start deporting them. Gets results that Althans bloke.’

  It’s too early, but Tony feels like the Diazepam is already working. Sounds and objects are retreating a little. ‘We’ll get him soon enough,’ Steve is saying, ‘old Craney,’ but his words are shrinking, solidifying, becoming an object themselves, a little marble Tony could flick away. He peers at it.

  ‘Can’t see me going round in football shirts,’ he tells the marble.

  ‘Well,’ says Steve, blowing smoke from a cigarette Tony hasn’t noticed him light, ‘I suppose you never was much of a football fan was you Tony?’

  ‘I’ve been Millwall,’ Tony answers, ‘since I was a kid.’

  ‘If you say so mate.’

  Something is uncomfortable where Tony sits, against his arse. It’s not the pencil in his right pocket but something wide and thick, which he pulls out and puts at his feet. Steve picks it up. ‘That yours?’ he asks.

  Tony squints at it: The Kent Crusader. He thinks. Oh right.

  ‘Dave,’ he explains. ‘He’s here tonight. Did you see him?’

  ‘Still into this shit is he?’ Steve tosses it to the pavement. Inside, Skrewdriver are playing ‘White Power’: it must be the last song, at least before the encores.

  ‘National revolutionary,’ says Steve. ‘I should go back in.’ The marble is still there, hovering about a foot off the ground. Tony could reach forward and tap it. It catches the light as it spins, distractingly.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ he asks Steve, staring at the marble.

  ‘Do what mate?’

  Tony’s not really sure himself but he carries on, curious to find out:

  ‘Tell them that about Dave and me. You knew, it was bollocks.’

  Involuntarily, Steve sits up.

  ‘What did they have on you? Was it the dealing?’

  He can feel Steve tensing. Steve says, ‘Don’t talk shit.’

  ‘It’s not his fault how I look at him. How could you do it?’

  ‘Mate I haven’t got the first fucking idea what you’re on about. Go home Tony. You’re wasted.’

  ‘Yeah I will. But …’

  Tony turns and looks into Steve’s face.

  ‘Well,’ he says.

  Maybe it’s the way they’re sitting, or maybe alcohol and Diazepam have somehow fused into a passing clarity, but it shouldn’t be nearly this easy for Tony to stab his sharpened pencil into Steve’s throat. He finds it already in his right hand, by his side, and just swings round and thrusts. Steve knocks him away but Tony pushes back and with hardly any apparent resistance (it feels almost exactly like popping a balloon) the pencil is stuck in the side of Steve’s Adam’s apple. The protruding half wobbles vaguely, a misplaced cigarette, and a small amount of blood runs from the hole. Steve hardly moves.

  He stares at Tony and makes an unpleasant noise, a choking rasping glug, one hand circling nervously around the pencil but unwilling to touch it, as if the pencil is a ghost he doesn’t believe is there. Tony wonders if Steve would be better or worse off pulling it out. That’s not what it was for, anyway, he thinks, just to use all of a sudden, without a fight or nothing. Oh well. After a moment Steve fumbles clumsily at his pocket (his coordination has gone, he looks like a spastic doing it) and, not wanting to find out what he’s going for, Tony stands and kicks him hard in the head (much more of an effort, that) and Steve rolls down the steps. Inside a song is ending; probably the last one, from the loud response. Tony is a few feet away when remembers the cellular. He leans over Steve, feels at his waist for the phone and yanks it off, snapping some attachment. Then he crosses the road away from the roundabout and heads into Sutcliffe Park.

  Eltham is dark fields at random angles and houses huddled under the pensile branches of trees, and Tony walks through damp grass on an erratic surface (brittle and then a sudden sinking) or passes mainly unlit windows to the sound of muffled televisions and sometimes shouts and sobs, not running because he doesn’t have the energy and he’s not sure what the point is but not stopping either. The Diazepam is definitely doing something now: he’s tired, massively so, as if gravity has increased its pull on all his organs, but somehow it isn’t making him want to lie down or even stop; all he can do is continue at this dragging pace and let inertia play itself out.

  He knows where he’s going without really thinking about it and certainly without planning a route but part of him is still taken aback when after a lot of this lost time he rounds a corner and sees the vast emptiness of Blackheath — the name makes sense at night — like reaching the world’s edge and peering out past. That orients his consciousness so he crosses another street and soon he is outside Niven’s house. The front door is bolted and heavy, with small, dense arrangements of thick stained glass, but the kitchen door to the back garden is two long plain panes with a thin strip of wood between (and the cat-flap in the base which creaks when he prods it). With the glass broken the separator is a trifle to snap and having knocked the bigger jags from around the edge he can step carefully through. He stands in the kitchen and waits for Niven to creep down at the noise or the arrival of telephoned police but nothing happens, not in all the time it takes to drink a can of beer from the fridge, listening to its hum strain louder the longer he leaves it open for the light. There’s no sign of the cat and Tony wonders if it died.

  When he has finished the beer he fishes through the cutlery drawer for a knife before he notices the block on the counter. He takes a big Psycho number with him when he climbs the stairs. The Nivens’ bedroom door is closed. He opens it and feels around inside for the light switch, finding it at roughly the same time that Niven’s wife gives a little gasp, far less than a scream. When the light comes on they are both watching him.

  ‘Don’t worry about this,’ Tony says, gesturing at the knife, and sits on the edge of their bed with it in his lap.

  ‘Oh Tony love,’ says Niven’s wife.

  ‘What do you want, Tony?’ Niven is scared, and trying to look stern.

  ‘Cup of tea would be nice.’ Niven’s wife actually begins to move at this, so he tells her, ‘No, stay here.’

  ‘Are you looking for money?’ says Niven. ‘Are you on drugs?’

  Tony tells him, ‘We’re all on fucking drugs Arthur.’

  It might have been a mistake to sit down; he could practically curl up between them and sleep.

  ‘Didn’t make it to the gig then,’ Tony remarks.

  ‘You know I don’t like that stuff,’ says Niven.

  There is a long silence. He turns the knife about in his palm and bounces a little on the mattress. Niven mutters, ‘There’s … a hundred pounds or so in the top drawer of my desk. It’s in a blue envelope.’ Eventually he
says, ‘Tony, have I upset somebody?’ He cannot prevent his voice cracking at this, and his wife reaches out to him.

  ‘No nothing like that. Anyway I wouldn’t know if you had. I just wanted to talk to you.’

  Niven says, ‘We could meet in the morning …’

  ‘Why haven’t you been in touch Arthur?’

  ‘In touch?’

  ‘You used to ask me to do stuff.’

  ‘Oh, it’s — nothing personal, Tony.’ Niven seems genuinely confused. ‘I just haven’t needed very much help recently. And there were always people around.’

  ‘I had to tell the police a few things.’

  Niven says nothing. He looks surprised, though whether at the information or its admission is not clear.

  ‘I never gave them nothing important. Things they probably knew already. I don’t hear much anyway these days. I thought maybe you knew.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Only they had me for soliciting you see.’

  After a pause Niven says, carefully, ‘Tony, why have you come here? You broke into my house.’

  ‘Yeah sorry about that. I wanted to tell you because I stabbed Steve. At the gig down in Eltham. I don’t think I killed him. Well I don’t know to be honest. But he was doing it too. Grassing. I don’t know why, maybe because he’s been dealing — drugs I mean — and they got him. Or maybe just for cash. But he told them — you remember Dave Masters? He went Third Position — he told them Dave was with me. Which is out of order because Dave’s not queer. Well I’m not having that. So. I don’t know what else he said but you might want to be careful because he’s in with Redwatch — Combat 18 — and I know the League’s been working with them so you might want to look into it. I took his phone — his cellular.’ He puts it on the bed.

  ‘If the police come round you don’t need to lie. I mean I know I’ll get done for this. By the law or Steve’s mates or both. But I want people to know I never sold out the movement. Not really. I may be queer but I’m not a traitor. And I want them to know what Steve done. That’s it I suppose. Sorry Janet I didn’t mean to scare you.’