Eating Air

by Pauline Melville

  After flitting from one revolutionary group to another, he finally ended up becoming associated with an obscure caucus affiliated to some Situationists who lived in Woking.

  This particular splinter group was best known for insulting everybody. They got furious at the least little thing. They expelled everybody – it was all in tune with some idea of keeping themselves politically as pure as crystal. They hoped to build a society which would be a shining example of this crystal ideology – although, naturally, they would be the first to put the boot into any such edifice. One of them was an architect – a utopian architect, you understand – he never built anything, obviously. That would have been entirely against the ethos of the group. He only made plans. He was expelled though, in the end, because a friend of his built something. Anyway, nobody could keep up with the level of purity demanded by the group. In the end there were only three of them left. They were against work. No-one was allowed to work because it contributed to the capitalist economy. They were supposed to live on their wits. The girlfriend of the leader did earn some money. She did horoscopes for horses and greyhounds and sold them to racing magazines so punters could see whether or not the animal was having a lucky day. The remaining three quarrelled with everybody at the drop of a hat. Victor was used as a sort of dogsbody. He himself was expelled after he had been unable to come around to the leader’s flat and help him mend a fuse.

  ‘I was printing the pamphlets,’ apologised Victor.

  The leader screamed at him, ‘You think I can’t recognise people like you who would betray us at the decisive moment?’

  But despite the vagaries, fluctuating fortunes and now near extinction of the political left, Victor had never quite been able to rid himself of the simple idea that capitalism was unjust. The great capital cities of the western world, London, Paris, New York, seemed to him like illuminated ships leaving harbour, the more fortunate immigrants clinging to the sides for the journey as the spangled vessels departed leaving untold millions behind in the darkness. And at times when he was sitting on his own in front of his computer, he was troubled by the change that had taken place in the world since the days of his youth. A system which he believed to be the cause of much suffering seemed now to be accepted as the only way of conducting economic and political affairs and it was spreading everywhere. The revolutionary ideas of his own youth were to the current generation a puzzling and ghostly manifestation of some long lost period of history. Capitalism was widely taken to be as natural as the air that people breathed and it saddened him that people mistook it for freedom.

  The upshot was that Victor became anguished by the loss of any ideal by which he could live. He was confused by the pony-tailed hedge-fund managers and punk investment bankers who were hang-gliding to work; the global head-hunters with aviator dark glasses and red braces who sang gangsta-rap lyrics in their lunch breaks and exchanged high-fives with street gangs as they roller-bladed into the City. Whenever these people flaunted the Orwellian slogan ‘Hey, business IS socialism’, somehow he did not believe it to be true. He was politically lonely. Politically forlorn. There was no party to which he could attach his name. And so he worked away on his own in that chilly Camden room refusing to settle for existing evils and working out how to replace them with new ones of his own design.

  It was at times like this that Victor turned to his mentor. One of the few people with whom Victor shared a political framework was the actress Vera Scobie. Considerably older than him, she was his most illustrious contact in the world of theatre, a celebrity whose political activism was known throughout the country. He had met Vera when he was a student at Cambridge, a contemporary of her son Mark, whom he had come across once or twice before latching quickly on to his mother. Vera had taken Victor under her wing and encouraged his political development and forays into playwriting. Despite the generational difference they became staunch allies. She had even appeared in one of his plays. One factor in particular bound them together.

  Some years earlier, in the late eighties, Vera had divulged to him a great personal secret. It happened during an intense period of rehearsal. She had invited Victor to her house in Kent for the weekend so that they could work on the text together. When he arrived, the cleaner told him that Vera was in bed suffering from a migraine. The cleaner was clearly worried although, in fact, like many actresses Vera was as strong as a horse.

  Upstairs, Victor found her in bed. The bed-head was piled with cream lace-edged pillows that matched the duvet. Dried flowers, a half-drunk glass of wine, scripts and a pen were on the bedside table. Her glasses were on her nose. Victor looked at the famous face resting against the pillows. She had good bone structure and paper-fine skin over which stretched a crazy paving of lines. She leaned back against the pillows and patted the bed for him to be seated.

  ‘Victor. I’m sorry about this. I’ve had a terrible shock.’ She reached for a tissue and blew her nose. ‘I’m very upset about something. Come in and sit down. I think I can trust you.’ Her husky gut-bucket voice had a catch in it. ‘I’m sure I can. After all, you were a member of that famous Bradford group in the seventies that was so wonderful, weren’t you.’ She took his hand. ‘You must never tell anyone about this.’ She took a gulp of last night’s unfinished wine.

  Vera’s first marriage had been to a high-flying left-wing barrister who went on to become the Attorney-General. They had one son, Mark. In the seventies Mark Scobie became involved with the revolutionary politics of the times and had been active in a clandestine group of saboteurs and urban bombers in Britain. Although Vera held up her son as a paragon of revolutionary virtue, Victor gained the impression that she was secretly rather afraid of him. The urban guerrilla group operated in England and was linked to, amongst others, the Brigate Rosse in Milan. In August 1971, when the international police hunt for these bombers was at its height, an unexpected visitor from the intelligence services turned up at the Attorney-General’s office and asked to see him as a matter of urgency. The short, squarely-built young man with a pink complexion had just started his career in intelligence. He was clearly uncomfortable.

  ‘I’m sorry to interrupt you, sir …’ The caller went on to introduce himself and explain his presence.

  ‘My name is John Buckley from the Secret Intelligence Service. This is embarrassing for all of us … and very embarrassing for me to have to tell you. But here’s the situation. Special Branch and MI6 have been working with our Italian counterparts for some time. There is about to be a series of coordinated arrests for recent terrorist attacks in Britain and Italy. One of the people at the top of the arrest-list is your son Mark.’

  The Attorney-General said nothing but rose to his feet and walked towards the window. Buckley waited for the Attorney-General to absorb the shock before he continued:

  ‘It would be very awkward for the government if the son of such a highly placed official as yourself were to be arrested for trying to overthrow his own father and … the state. To use a tabloid expression, sir – this is a tip-off. I am asked to advise you that your son Mark should leave Europe immediately. On no account can you allow him to warn any of his contacts and comrades otherwise all deals are off. Nor will he be able to return to England in the foreseeable future. I’m really sorry to be the bearer of such news. It must be very distressing for you.’

  Vera Scobie was extremely practical in a crisis. As soon as she was told the facts she picked up the phone and arranged a one-way ticket to Australia where she had friends. She then contacted Mark in Milan. After a furious conversation with his father, Mark agreed to leave. The following day he was on a plane to Sydney.

  ‘And I had to play Medea that night at the Apollo,’ Vera continued. ‘Can you imagine?’ She put her hands up in an expressive gesture to cover her eyes then placed them palms down on the coverlet. The hands were delicate and wrinkled. She threw Victor an angry look. ‘Frankly I agreed with everything they were doing anyway. He was right to attack the establishment. He was a revoluti
onary.’ She sighed. ‘But we didn’t want him serving a long jail sentence. What would be the point in that?’ A look of regret passed over Vera’s face followed quickly by a look of determined common sense. ‘Of course he wanted to warn the others. But his father spoke to him and managed to make him see reason. He had one friend in particular – you might know him. Hector Rossi. A lovely boy. I adored him. Long flowing hair. Passionate. Serious. Absolutely committed. Unfortunately, Hector spent a long time in jail in Milan because of it all. I always felt bad about that. It’s all water under the bridge now. Hector is back living somewhere in Kent, I believe. But Mark still has to stay away. It’s so unfair.’ She shook her head. ‘It left such a hole in my life. I’ve just heard that Mark has been hospitalised in Perth with peritonitis. And I can’t be there with him. I feel terrible. I’ve only managed to get over to Australia twice in the last ten years. There is still a warrant out for him over here, I believe. I didn’t want to burden you with this but I had to speak to someone.’

  Vera’s eyes moistened with tears. Victor was something of a weed in the battlefield of political honour. He listened in alarm, his raised eyebrows winching up his forehead to give him the air of a startled peahen. However, then and there he swore every sort of solemn oath that he would keep the secret. Vera rapidly pulled herself together and they settled down to work on the text. When he left the house the next day Vera seemed to have recovered her spirits. She saw him off waving a pair of scissors at him as she clipped the dog roses framing the door of her house in Tenterden. He walked down the path to the garden gate. Since the death of her Attorney-General husband she had shared her life with a radical journalist twenty years her junior, but he was away in South America covering the story of a coup.

  ‘I’ve just heard from Alex,’ she called after him. ‘The president of wherever he is has been shot. I hope he’s all right. He’s so brave to be there.’ She stood in the doorway waving goodbye. ‘Thank you for everything, my good friend. Victor you must keep writing your wonderful plays. And not a word about our secret. I’ve told Mark what a staunch comrade you are.’

  That had all been several years ago. Now, as Victor studied his father-in-law’s cheque he thought of asking Vera for a loan but decided against it. She could turn quite vague and irritable at times.

  Unable to make up his mind what to do Victor retreated into another of his heroic daydreams. This time he found himself conducting a citizen’s arrest on the foreign secretary in the full glare of lights and television cameras outside the Foreign Office. He was arresting him for war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. The minister’s Special Branch minders stood in his way. Victor explained in a loud voice that he had a legal right to do what he was doing and that the Special Branch must step aside. Step aside they did, bowing to the law. At that point the prime minister appeared and Victor took the opportunity to arrest him too. With a startled minister on each arm he tried to lead them away to the nearest police station. The fantasy faltered a bit at this stage and Victor had to start it again until he reached his favourite point where the minders stepped aside and the small crowd cheered him on. He revisited that point in his daydream several times.

  After a while the apocalyptic dreamer fell fast asleep where he sat on the sofa. During his sleep he was betrayed by his subconscious and dreamed that he was taking Prince William and Prince Harry on holiday and looking for somewhere to buy them fish and chips.

  Chapter Two

  Hector Rossi needed a breath of fresh air. He excused himself and stepped out into the street. A sweet metallic odour from the workshop hung in the air where he stood. The smell reminded him of his youthful days as a printer in Italy. On Saturdays he attended a copper-engraving and etching class in Folkestone. Fine particles and the cinnamon smell of copper dust had made his nostrils tingle and given him a sneezing fit. That day he had been trying to master the art of using the burin, a sharp tool held in the palm of the hand which is used to push through the copper engraving plate. It removes a small amount of copper that twists away like an apple paring. But the burin had slipped and gouged a lump from his thumb. He wrapped a tissue around the cut.

  Across the road from Hector a shopkeeper with a pale gibbous face sat wedged in a chair on the pavement reading a newspaper. The dark interior of his second-hand shop was stacked with dusty old furniture, grimy crockery, oddments and sundries. Hector’s mood dipped. The sight of all those remnants of past lives oppressed him and he felt suddenly suffocated by the unchanging face of the town. Stacked against the shop front was an array of different-sized mirrors with curly metal frames. Hector caught a glimpse of his own reflection – an unexceptional middle-aged man in blue shirt and trousers. His brown hair, streaked with grey, lay swept back behind his ears like two bird wings. The slanted reflection made him appear to be standing at an angle to the pavement and to the rest of the world, leaning away backwards with his head towards the sky.

  He decided to leave the class early and walk home to Hythe along the seafront. The walk might help him shake off this feeling that his life had silted up and he was being buried alive.

  The previous week a small incident had unsettled him and remained in his mind. He had been returning home on the train. Just as the train was leaving Ashford station and before it had gathered speed there was a disturbance at the other end of the compartment. When Hector looked up he saw a tall, good-looking man with silver hair and a handsome silver waterfall of a moustache arguing fiercely with the ticket inspector. Both men were partly obscured by the half-open doors that linked one carriage to the next. The folding doors swung open and shut with the swaying movement of the train. The inspector’s voice was raised in anger:

  ‘Well I’m telling you to leave the train at the next station if you have no ticket. Are you going to pay for a ticket? If not I’m going to take your name and address.’

  ‘You’re not taking my name and address and I’ll leave the train when I want, you shitty little arsehole,’ yelled the passenger.

  Suddenly the train door opened and a roaring wind entered the compartment. Hector saw a brown suitcase fly out and tumble down the grass embankment. The next minute the silver-haired man leaped out after it, his black raincoat billowing out behind him. Leaning backwards the man staggered down the bank too fast to keep his balance. He skidded on the tall grass, put his arm back to save himself and sat down heavily on the slope. Turning towards the train he caught Hector’s eye. His face was alive with a mixture of fury and laughter. For a second he looked at Hector and raised his eyebrows as if in a challenge or invitation. A minute later the man was out of sight.

  Hector walked home from his engraving class slowly. For some time now he had been feeling paralysed by an enervating discontent. He regretted the loss of all the revolutionary possibilities of his youth; that search for justice which he seemed to have exchanged for everyday realities; realities that had the warmth and smell of freshly baked bread but did not seem to be enough.

  To his left on the English Channel a fluffy grey angora haze blotted out the horizon. The milky sea gave slow sluggish sucks at the shore. Hector was hoping that the walk might shift his headache. The headache was nothing much, a sort of malaise, probably the result of tension at home. When he reached Hythe he stood on the low stone promenade looking out over the blue and orange pebble beach. He stood there for nearly half an hour.

  *

  It was two o’clock in the afternoon before Hector let himself quietly into the house.

  For several days his wife Barbara had been walking around the house wearing her silence like a bridal gown. He could hear the floor in the bedroom over his head creak accusingly as she moved from the dressing-table to the window. She let out a variety of audible sighs. Under this pressure he remained politely upbeat and resolutely unapologetic.

  The problem had arisen two weeks earlier when he told her that he was going up to London to see an old friend. Probably he shouldn’t have told her. He knew she would react badly. She was always fe
arful that he might become involved in some sort of political activity, frightened that his past would catch up with them. He had gone up to her workroom to tell her.

  Barbara’s hobby was furnishing dolls’ houses and selling them. The back room was a city of miniature houses. The room had a workbench where she sewed the curtains and glued tiny pieces of broken furniture together. He watched her for a minute or two as she worked. His wife was a short, squarely built woman with a straightforward moral face and short feathered hair that was turning from blonde to grey. She bent down to adjust the placing of a tiny table then straightened up and looked directly at him.

  ‘Which friend?’ Already she sounded grim.

  The shutter on the window was only partly down and the sunlight shone on her face so brightly that he could see the light fuzz of transparent hairs beneath her chin.

  ‘Khaled.’

  ‘I thought you’d put all that behind you. You swore that you would always put your family first. You, me and Dawn. Before anything.’

  ‘I do.’ He became annoyed with himself for the pleading tone in his voice.

  ‘Who else are you going to see there?’

  ‘Nobody.’ Stubbornness set in. ‘For goodness’ sake. I’m going to see Khaled. He’s in England for the first time for years. We’re going to see the Albrecht Dürer exhibition at the National Gallery. I suggested that because I want to see the engravings. Nothing more. Anyway, I’m going. I’m just letting you know.’

  Barbara was still in bed when he left to go to London.

  ‘OK. I’m off now,’ he said airily, poking his head round the door of the darkened bedroom. The lightness of his tone belied the weightiness of the atmosphere between them. She turned over in bed away from him to face the wall.