by J. S. Monroe
“Can we go, now the spiritual bit’s over?” the bomber asked.
“Take off your clothes,” I said, ignoring him and pointing at the guard. “Jacket, trousers, hat.”
The man looked at me disbelievingly, and aged another year.
“Now?” he whispered, desperate.
“Now. You, do the same,” I said, gesturing with the gun at the bomber. “Put his clothes on.”
The bomber looked less surprised. I watched as the two men began to undress, the old man stumbling on his trousers.
“Hurry,” I said, trying to keep things tight. The bomber was being too compliant, too cool. I watched him put on the guard’s black, chevroned jacket. It was large for him, ridiculous in its bagginess. He looked up, checking to see if he was meant to fasten all the buttons. I nodded. “And the hat.”
I didn’t insist on shoes. Time was running out.
“Oxford Street, 22nd December, was that you?” I asked.
“Does it matter?”
“Don’t fuck about. Was it you?” I shouted.
“I was there.”
“With Samantha West?”
“Was that her name? We were never introduced.”
“Was there anyone else?”
He scrutinised my face.
“We’re all going to die, pal,” he said.
“Just fucking tell me,” I yelled.
“Okay, okay. It was me, and her. No one else.”
“What did she do?” I asked.
“Do? She got herself killed. Did you know her or something?”
I wanted to shoot him and he knew it. He was taking me to the edge.
“Before that,” I said, closing my eyes, trying to remain composed. “What did she do before she got killed?”
“She picked up the Semtex.”
I felt a pang of relief, but I still needed to know more, to hear it for myself.
“And did she detonate it, too?” I asked.
“Why does it matter?”
“Tell me.”
“No. She handed it to me. Then she died. It was an accident. She got in the way.”
Walter had been right. I hoped he knew that.
“Today,” I continued, “you picked up the Semtex and were meant to give it to someone else, right?”
He didn’t answer.
“But they didn’t show, so you had to do it all yourself. Risky, but there was no choice. The same thing happened at Moorgate. Someone else said they would pick it up. Me, as it happens. You waited and waited but I never arrived, did I? Thanks but not for me. So you did it all yourself. The bomb was an hour late, but it worked, re-drew the A to Z.”
“What a waste,” the bomber said. “So much satisfaction, so little time to enjoy it.”
He had a point.
“You, by the hatch,” I said to the guard. Walking towards the bomber, I pushed him backwards. His cap slipped forward over his eyes.
“Hey, steady,” the bomber said, tilting the peak back on his head. “Easy now.” He held his hands up in front of him.
I pushed again, harder, watching him stumble. I could feel Annalese tugging at my sleeve, pleading with me to stop. I felt then that I wasn’t going to survive, but it didn’t trouble me. If I went, he went, and so much had already been resolved. Slowly I raised the gun.
“Go ahead, shoot me,” the bomber said, standing his ground. “Then pull it on yourself, him too if you’re feeling kind. We’ve run out of time. Bombs, they can be untidy things, really messy. Just look at Samantha. Hey, give me the bullet any time.”
I saw the man’s blue lips moving but I was no longer listening. I didn’t even notice his uniform. All I could think of was the study, years ago, where my world had stopped and another had started. I was back there, smelling the furniture polish, listening to other boys playing in the street. My housemaster had never touched me before, except to beat me. But suddenly he was ushering me into a chair, resting rigid, pianist’s hands gently on my shoulders, comforting, preparing me.
“I’ve got some very bad news to tell you,” he had said, steepling his finger tips together, as if in prayer. “Very bad. Your mother died in the night. A heart attack. The doctor said she would have felt little pain. Like a bee-sting, nothing more.”
Like a bee-sting? The words fell on to the floor, deadened by the thick carpet.
“Your father will meet you off the train. We’ll say prayers for you tonight, at assembly.”
From that moment on the world outside had looked just the same, but I knew it had cracked beneath the surface, slipped and separated in two.
I saw myself now, from the side, pointing the gun at the bomber, my arm unsteady. Two men pretending to be brave, about to die. In that snapshot I knew I couldn’t pull the trigger. The bomber knew it, too. Imperceptibly he moved towards me, eyes locked on to mine, his hand rising tentatively. This is what I had rowed with Annalese about. If you didn’t retaliate first, you died. But I could do nothing about it. Annalese felt very close, stretching out under my skin. I felt my fingers go limp. We were doing things her way now, but it wasn’t Annalese’s hands sliding down the barrel, taking the gun from my grip.
Then I noticed the bomber’s eyes widen and crease.
He fell easily, his indignant face twisting with pain. I turned at the sound of gunfire and saw Charlotte’s head and arms in the hatchway, a hand-gun in front of her. She fired again, loosing bullets into the luminous void. Silhouetted, the bomber was a simple target.
I looked at her for a second, then glanced at the guard, still shivering in his shirt and Y-fronts. I turned and stared at the bomber’s leaking body, crumpled on the floor.
“The bomb,” I muttered, “there’s no time.”
Charlotte’s gaze lingered on the bomber as she slid back down through the hatch. She had intruded, made a decision for me. Stirring, I walked over to the corner, nodded at the guard. The old man fell to his knees and climbed through the hole, slipping on the rungs. I followed. There was a strong smell of urine.
“Come on, come on!” Charlotte shouted from the narrow door of the service lift. The guard was a sobbing heap on the floor. I jumped the last few rungs, grabbed his arm and dragged him into the lift. The doors rattled shut and we started descending. A second later the lift shaft shook with a deafening blast. I tried to imagine how the pyramid would look now, smoking as usual, but with a little more conviction. Charlotte glanced up at the ceiling. We were still descending at a steady pace.
28
Dawn was breaking when I finally arrived in the Kenidjack valley. I had hitched a lift the night before from Plymouth to Penzance, but the final twelve miles I had walked, hiding in the hedgerows whenever cars passed. I was tired and had been travelling for four days. The place was much as I remembered it, ochre soil and dead gorse, marinated in reds and browns. The skyline to the right was dominated by the rig of an old tin mine, the chimney like a Norman tower, sheer and impregnable. Ahead lay the sea, salty but still out of sight.
I walked down a pockmarked track, following the course of the stream. It had recently flooded and the puddles were deep. I passed two rundown stone farm buildings, boarded up and empty, and startled a goat. It was hidden behind a corrugated shed, chewing at grass growing up through the carcass of a 2CV. Another car had been abandoned on the far side of the stream, its rusting metalwork blending in with the gorse.
On the corner, where the last farm building stood, I climbed around the edge of a vast puddle, more of a lake, deep enough to warn off innocent walkers, and made my way on up the bleak hillside, leaving the stream below me. Cape Cornwall was on the other side of the valley, St Just behind me. A group of boulders and small islands tailed off from a shoulder of rock into the sea. A thin plinth stretched up from one of them. Ten years earlier, long before I had lived here, there used to be a bender village down at the water’s edge, near a small quarry. They lived like Stone Agers and it had become a tourist attraction until a local councillor took umbrage and decided to evic
t them in the middle of winter (the coldest night of the year, as it turned out).
I neared the top of the hill and stopped. In the dim charcoal light the Atlantic stretched out before me. My eyes were drawn to the distant horizon, where the sea blurred with the sky. A myriad lights were shining, dots of white littered across the black water like glow-worms. Some of them were from tankers, waiting to enter the Channel, but most of them were fishing boats, beamers from Newlyn and Normandy.
I breathed in deeply and looked around. The tops of a few caravans were visible above the hedge to my right. Everyone would be asleep. It was over a year since I had left here with Annalese for London. I wondered who would still be about. Tricky, probably, and Snap. There were fewer caravans than I remembered. The National Trust had been threatening to buy the land. Perhaps some people had left already, too cold to fight.
I knew I could live here for a while, provided I collected firewood and water from off the moor. I had never been close to any of them, apart from Annalese of course, but I liked their attitude. They never asked questions, and had offered sanctuary to any number of people on the run. (Once, according to Tricky, the Mil gunman had even spent a few days with them.)
I climbed over a gap in the hedge and walked quietly amongst the caravans. Tricky’s was still there, the only one looking cared for and painted. I saw a burnt-out shell by a pick-up truck near the cliff edge and went over to it. It had been stripped of aluminium and somebody had tried unsuccessfully to incinerate the remains. It would do for the night, breaking the cold wind coming in off the sea. I lay down in one corner, resting the crystal beside me.
“Sleep in that one tonight,” Tricky said, nodding at another caravan. “You should have woken me.”
I watched as Tricky went over to a van brought up the valley by the pick-up earlier in the morning. The sound of the truck’s asthmatic exhaust had woken me. I had slept deeply despite the gaping wound in the ceiling and the broken windows.
“You heard about Annalese then,” I said, wandering over to him.
“Yeah. We went to the funeral.”
I didn’t know where to start, how to explain. “I couldn’t face it,” I said weakly, hoping that would do for now.
“Snap sang a few songs.”
“Is he still around?”
“Cutting cabbages.”
“Anyone else?”
Tricky shook his head. He was wearing a woollen hat, glasses and a lumberjack shirt. A man of few words, he had lived here longer than anyone, and felt stronger for it. The site was located on top of an old uranium mine, and possessed a rare energy. (Aleister Crowley, another Kenidjack regular, had believed there was a serpent coiled up beneath the rock.)
“They’re moving us on,” he said.
“Where you going?”
“Other side of town. Snap found it. There’s porridge if you want some.” His head was now hidden under the bonnet.
I sat in my new caravan, a marginal upgrade from the previous one, and spooned down breakfast. It had a wood-burning stove, and a car battery to power a small radio, but the window facing the sea had been blown in. The seam joining tire walls and ceiling also looked split. That was the problem with old caravans. If a wind found a way in during a storm it could pop the whole thing apart.
*
We had pushed the security guard out on the twelfth floor and descended in silence, not knowing what to expect. Outside in the sunset as sirens approached, the scene was one of confusion. A police officer helped us to safety as we walked innocently out of Canary Wharf station, mistaking us for shaken victims.
The tower had been evacuated, it seemed, and hundreds of people were standing around on the dockside boulevards, looking upwards, talking on mobile phones, chatting to police who had formed a loose cordon around the complex. Using loudhailers, they were trying to get people to move further away, but either people weren’t listening or didn’t know where to go. A few tactical punches, and it had the makings of a healthy riot, but I had other things on my mind.
I managed to thank the officer, explaining that I hadn’t heard the alarm, and in the confusion I lost myself quickly in the densest part of the crowd. I wanted to get away from Charlotte as much as anything. I heard her calling but I kept going until her voice was lost in the throng. Only once did I allow myself to stop and look back. A plume of black smoke was rising from the top of the tower, the pyramid pierced by a neat hole on one side. Charlotte was nowhere in sight.
*
Cornwall felt reassuringly far from Docklands. The distance gave me a breathing space, time to think. All I wanted was a few days on my own. I felt close to Annalese here. I needed to go where we had been together, to Treen beach, to the Merry Maidens. I should have come straight away, as soon as she had died, but I had gone to Walter instead. I felt ready to mourn now.
Would anyone come after me? It depended on whether Charlotte could find people to listen. I didn’t know what I felt about her. In my defining moment I had been shown up, by the bomber, by her. I had to believe that I would have shot him, and I resented her interference. She had saved my life, though, and I hoped she was alive.
*
For the next week I pulled my weight on the site, cooking stews and gathering firewood. Tricky talked honestly with me about Annalese but it was more difficult with Snap. Perhaps he had been in love with her. A lot of people were. I stood on the cliffs at Treen, looking down at the beach, wrapped in mist, and I walked along the coast to the Minack theatre. In Penzance I listened to a band playing badly on Causeway Head. For a moment I thought I saw Leafe, but it was someone else. When I rang Annalese’s mum from a phonebox, there was no answer.
Eight days after I arrived, I was walking early with Tricky towards St Just. We were going to cut cabbages in a field near St Buryan. It was hard work when the ground was frozen, and there were the inevitable problems with the DSS, but on a good day it was £35 in the back pocket. As we dropped down the hill towards the track we looked up and saw a black Daimler in the distance, pushing around the corner towards the farm buildings.
“Who the fuck’s that?” Tricky asked.
I didn’t answer. My mind was racing. We both stood still and watched as the car pulled over and stopped, still five hundred yards away from us. A woman got out of the back seat and started walking up the track.
Tricky turned to me. “Friend of yours?” he asked.
It was Charlotte.
Tricky decided not to be introduced. Presuming it was someone from the Social, he climbed back over the hill and cut across a field, hidden from the track below. I sat down on a rock and waited. I suddenly felt very tired, too exhausted to think, to react. Charlotte was picking her way carefully through the puddles, carrying a black case in one hand. She saw me and gave a wave.
“Hello Dutchie,” she said, five yards below me. “I thought I’d find you here.”
I said nothing. She was dressed in tight red jeans and an Aran sweater. She looked relaxed, healthy.
“What a view,” she said, looking beyond me towards the Atlantic.
“I don’t imagine you’re here on a sight-seeing trip,” I said. “Are you arresting me?”
“Arresting you? Why would I be arresting you?”
“You tell me.”
I looked at the Daimler and wondered who was employing her now.
“You look thin,” she said. “Are you alright?”
I didn’t answer. She was holding the case in front of her with both hands, like a schoolgirl with her books.
“I’ve come to give you your file back. It’s the least we could do.”
“Who’s we?”
“The government. Number Ten.”
I smirked.
“You’ve done the country a great service.”
“Please, cut the crap.”
“Really. You have.”
She went over to a gate and rested the case on one of the bars. Opening it, she pulled out a thick file, boxed and ring-bound.
; “Stella wanted to meet you herself,” she laughed. “She took a great interest in all this. I told her you probably weren’t so keen. Everything’s here. Photos, newspaper cuttings, confidential reports. You should read it all some day. Not now, a few months’ time.”
She passed me the file.
“Thank you,” I said. It was pleasantly heavy. But I couldn’t believe she was just here to give me my file back. Too much had happened. “Have the bombings stopped?” I asked, indifferently.
“Completely. Touch wood. They were old school MI5, much as Walter suspected.” She paused awkwardly. “I’ve got to be getting back to London. If you ever need anything, give me a call. The number’s in there, at the front.”
We were silent. I looked up at her, standing confidently against the bright sky. I was pleased she had come.
“You went without saying goodbye,” she said quietly.
“I know.”
“I was worried.”
“Were you?”
“Yes, I was. We went through a lot together.”
“Not by choice.”
“No.”
She hesitated, then leant forward and kissed me gently on the lips. “Thanks, for everything.”
I watched her walk back down the hill, breaking into a run where it was steep. It still didn’t add up, her coming all this way. Before she reached the car I had picked up the file and opened it. There were photos resting on the top, pictures of me and Annalese on the barge. Charlotte must have developed the film left in the camera. I sifted through some other photos, riot shots, the ones Walter had blackmailed me with at the house in Clapham. I wondered when the funeral had been, if my dad had gone. There was also a small bag of blow. I smiled as I read the label attached to it. “Lot number 48.” Charlotte was alright, in her way.
Then I saw a sheet of paper, covered in red italic ink. It was Annalese’s handwriting. There were more sheets below it. I pulled one out, curious, grateful for another souvenir. But I began to read and my mouth went dry. I read on, more about myself, my politics, my friendship with Leggit, background information on Class War, addresses of South London houses where I had once got drugs and bats for riots. Every sheet had been stamped with “Confidential – Metropolitan Police”, and then the date. I sifted through them relentlessly. They were in chronological order and I soon found the first report. It had been written shortly after we had talked outside the Minack theatre. My face flushed hot and cold. But I had approached Annalese, hadn’t I? I tried to think back through the sequence of events, but already my memory of them was confused, corrupted by the knowledge I was holding in my hands.