by Carl Neville
An Interview with Robert Gillespie: Part 3
Gillespie: You should talk to Goodridge about all this stuff. Goodridge was actually the one who found him.
Verona: You mean discovered his work and…
Gillespie: No, literally found him. He was down in Castleford, still is, at a time when that area was very tense, lot of the miners and ex-miners, heavily fortified, I mean heavily, they had decided they were going to have armed insurrection if necessary, guns were coming in from across the sea.
Verona: The US?
Gillespie: Aye, well, indirectly, yeah. No, Ireland, everyone likes to sing the praises of the Russians you know and sure y’know, at the macro level, but at the micro level, in terms of making the population a credible threat, targeted use of force and so on and getting organized, it was the Irish and the Africans. Anyway, lots of checkpoints from both sides and no-go areas and all that, and Goodridge was coming back from London with a boot full of books, y’know, possibly subversive material, taking a bit of a winding route back through the country lanes and he runs out of petrol, hard to get it then, a deliberate strategy of limiting supply to the proles at that point, make sure the factories the transport networks wouldn’t run and all that, nice idea if we hadn’t had control of the rigs you know (laughs). Where was I?
Verona: Goodridge.
Gillespie: Anyway, he runs out of petrol right next to the Avenstone quarry, right. You heard of that? No right? PRB folklore. Anyway, bad place to find yourself in the middle of the night in the United Kingdom in 1996, because this where the security services have been dumping bodies, in the lake there, there’s all kinds of rumours about the area: Ministry of Defence bunkers, Russian psy-ops labs, Irish Republicans bivouacked in the hills, all that. So anyway he goes down to have a piss you know, (laughs) I mean Goodridge is as big a coward as you’ll ever meet so he must have been shitting himself out there at that time, right, and he’s having a piss by the side of the lake and he hears something moving about in the water, too dark to see anything, so he goes back to the car to get a torch and as he’s going back he sees Crane chest-deep in the water, this big kit bag up over his head struggling out towards him and he’s too stunned to even help, he just stands there as Crane comes up out of the lake in a kind of trance soaking wet and shaking and Goodridge said he had thought Crane had swum across the lake but it’s too big, plus he was fully clothed, wearing, interestingly enough, a pair of army trousers and boots, British army, and he goes over to this tree that’s there and starts digging in the ground there with his bare fingers and so Goodridge snaps out of it y’know and goes over to him and says you know are you alright mate? and, fucking do you need a hand there or something, and do you know what Crane said?
He said, this is my grave. Where is my body? Who has stolen my body?
Rose
She will take a Maglev train from London to Vladivostok, the ferry across to Hokkaido, then a Shinkansen to Kyoto, the whole journey less than twenty-four hours. She passes the first leg sipping tea laced with Russian Deveretol and floating at incredible speed in the reclining seat of the viewing car, through mountains and plains, cities, forests, stations, until, hitting the vast white emptiness of the Siberian tundra they accelerate. Time evaporates, hurtling them on into some territory between this world and the next, all that undifferentiated blankness thronged with ghosts, selves prepared for lives never lived, worlds that have never come to pass…
….and on into nightfall and the thin lit band of the unreachable horizon, the distant port to which for a moment she is certain they will never come, until sleep steals over her and she awakes to a fellow passenger nudging her and saying, last stop, end of the line, terminus.
On to Kyoto. She remembers how in one of the temples there she had crawled down underground, into the pitch black dome where the priests retreated, ice-cold with no sound filtering in from the outside, only a single beam of light coming in through a central hole, the omphalos of this dead stone womb, and discovered nothing but the blood decaying in her ears and her heart hammering itself to dust, angry at its own existence.
Perhaps she thought if she went fast enough and far enough she could outrun the messages that are pursuing her, but they catch her anyway as she checks her ROD: the obituaries.
Vernon Crane is no longer in this world.
And your and Crane’s daughter Rose? Well, you must know.
She clicks open the message from Firetrace.
An Extract from Resolution Way (Repeater Books, 2016)
He comes in, sits down in the living room, head bowed, hair thin, hands clasped, angled down between his thighs. He’s not aged too badly, got a tan, must have been looking after himself. On the TV beside him, paused, vibrating, his own face twenty years before, turned up to the sky, eyes rolled back, ecstatic.
No one speaks, the whole room vibrating from the impact of falling into the gap between worlds.
I owe you an explanation, he says. His voice unmistakable. His mother raises a trembling hand to her mouth as she lowers herself into her chair.
Well, his father says. This better be a bloody good one.
Barrow
Here is the tree, the old lake, the earth between the roots looks undisturbed, despite Goodridge’s claim to have buried the files recently. Barrow pauses with the spade held up and ready to strike, he imagines tracing everything back to the start, thinks perhaps if he took the wrong first step how everything might lead, misstep after misstep, to a concrete but unalterably wrong conclusion and the world might be the very opposite of what it seems. He fears, for a moment, that if he punctures the earth at this precise spot, this flaw, this weak point where the barriers grow thin, this world will slowly leak out through the tear as another floods in and in that he might see himself, pass through himself, as the whole universe swirls and involutes around this single point. This is the true Partition.
VC961-5/5. Where are the other four files? He hunches down on a piece of plastic he has spread out on the floor of the cottage. He has chosen the back room because there is an escape route out through the broken window, down the lightly sloping outhouse roof and into the fields beyond, along with the view of the road and the surrounding area it affords. Is he being paranoid? Perhaps, but he is about to inspect classified documents, documents which Goodridge has accessed somehow, which he claims will explain something vital, fill in the gaps and blanks in Barrow’s own memory. Barrow imagines his own life and Crane’s as two texts that, combined, would offer a full, complete narrative, but perhaps the ways they interlock and interact would only lead to further suggestions, hints, puzzles.
He sits with his back to the wall, pushes the old army kit bag and the plastic folder the file has been buried in to one side. A series of reports on Crane’s examination and interrogation in this very house or perhaps in some buried complex under the fields behind it. Barrow stands, stretches and looks out over them again. Nothing but clouds and a distant horse grazing. What was the place in the Nineties? He swivels and sits again, is strangely restless, perhaps reluctant, to read, and the echoes of Squires’s question is with him: do you want to look in your own file Barrow?
Takes out the top sheet of the transcript of an interview between Zoloff and Crane, looks at the personnel present. Waterston, Squires, Bewes.
Barrow.
The date: 1996. He was undercover in the area. Perhaps this sudden memory of Crane, the fire, the morning mist over the quarry is…
A noise outside and he pauses, puts the sheet down to one side, swivels up into a crouch. Now perhaps is not the moment for this, nor the place. The old cottage creaks and shifts in the softening dusk, the breeze from the quarry whispering in through the cracks. Instinctively he checks his ROD and finds it is blinking as though it has been reset, waiting for him to input the date and time, looks at his watch, uncertain of his next move, caught on the threshold of night.
Thanks to: Alex Niven, Tariq Goddard, Rhian E. Jones, Simon Reynolds, Owen Hatherley, Josh Tur
ner, Michael Watson, Louise Norris-Hunt, Alex Coombes.
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