The Rotters' Club

by Jonathan Coe

  Bill filed the letter carefully among his papers. He would not dignify it with a reply, but nor would he destroy it. It would come in useful, he was sure of that. And besides, he made it a point of principle not to destroy any documents. He was building up an archive, a record of class struggle in which every detail was important, and for which future generations of students would be grateful. He already had plans to donate it to a university library.

  The music upstairs had been turned down. He could hear Irene and Doug having an argument; nothing too serious, not one of their slanging matches, just a bit of bickering and teasing. That was all right. They got on OK, those two. The family was secure, for the time being. No thanks to him, it was true . . .

  Next on the pile were a couple of related items: a scrap of paper he had found last week, pinned to the notice board in the works canteen and a crudely printed leaflet that had lately been in circulation among his members.

  The notice said:

  The leaflet was the latest effusion from something called “The Association of British People,” a far-right offshoot, more cranky and less organized even than the National Front. Bill found their propaganda pathetic, and would have been tempted to bin it without a second glance. But there were rumours that these people had been behind a recent attack in Moseley on two Asian teenagers, who had been found beaten half to death outside a chip shop, and he didn’t want anything like that spreading to the factory. There was plenty of scope for violence in a big workplace. All sorts of stuff could go unnoticed.

  Reluctantly, then, he glanced through the opening lines.

  Workers of Britain! Unite and wake up!

  Your job is at risk. Your home and livelihood are at risk.

  Your whole way of life is threatened as never before.

  Neither Heath nor Wilson nor Thorpe has the will to stop the tide of coloured immigration into this country. All are slaves to the liberal establishment way of thinking. These people do not just tolerate the black man, they think he is actually superior to the true-born Englishman. They want to fling the gates of this country wide open to the black man, and do not give a damn for the jobs and homes of the white Englishman that will inevitably be lost as a result.

  Look around you at your place of work and you will find that the number of black men in the workplace has increased tenfold. You are being told to work alongside them but note that you are being TOLD not ASKED.

  If this has also happened to you, you may be interested to know some of the following scientific FACTS:

  The black man is not as intelligent as the white man. His brain is genetically not so well developed. Therefore, how can he do the same job of work?

  The black man is lazier than the white man. Ask yourselves, why the British Empire conquered the Africans and Indians, and not the other way around? Because the white races are superior in industry and intelligence. Historical FACT.

  The black man is not so clean. And yet you are being asked to share a place of work, perhaps eat in the same canteen, perhaps even use the same toilet seat. What are the implications for health and the spread of disease? More scientific research needed.

  Bill did not bother to read any further. He already spent too much of his time organizing lectures and meetings to counteract this sort of nonsense, making sure the union put out its own anti-racist pamphlets, most of which he ended up having to write himself (and he was no writer). Today, taken together, the scribbled message and this putrid leaflet served to depress him profoundly. It was so easy, so stupidly easy, for the workforce to find reasons for hating each other when they should be uniting against the common enemy. For all that effort to mean nothing.

  These gloomy thoughts—made darker by the clouds of conscience-stricken anxiety that his reflections upon Miriam had gathered together—were scarcely relieved by what he saw on the television a few minutes later. Irene had brought him his tea, strong and sugared, and together they went to watch Midlands Today, sitting side by side on the sofa, her hand resting fondly on his knee. (She persisted in these gestures, either not minding or not noticing that he never returned them.) The Longbridge strike was the third item on the programme.

  “The telly people turned up, then,” said Irene. “Did they talk to you? Are you going to be on?”

  “No, they’d all gone home by the time I came out. I don’t suppose they bothered to—”

  He broke off, and was suddenly swearing at the television screen, driven to fury by the spectacle of Roy Slater—yes, Slater, the bastard!—addressing some reporter with a microphone thrust before his face. How in God’s name had he managed to get to the cameras before anyone else today? And what gave him the right to start mouthing off about the dispute before they’d had a chance even to agree on an official line?

  “They’re doing it again, the management,” Slater was saying, in that coarse, hollow voice of his. “Every time they go back on their promises, they chip away at the workers’ pay packets. It’s not good enough. It’s—”

  “It’s not about pay, you fool!” Bill was shouting, cutting across the rest of Slater’s answer. “This strike is not about pay!”

  “What is it about, then?” said Doug, who had appeared in the living-room doorway, drawn by the sound of the television.

  “This ignorant . . . pillock!” For a moment Bill was speechless with anger. “It’s about right and wrong,” he then explained, ostensibly to his son but more, you might have thought, to an imagined audience of television viewers. “They’ve been docking workers’ pay because of the time they’ve been spending cleaning themselves up in the last half hour of the shift. It’s about the right to . . . cleanliness, and hygiene.”

  “. . . just as long as it takes,” Slater was insisting, on the screen. “We want this money. We have a right to this money. We’re going to get—”

  “It’s not about bloody money!” Bill shouted, a hand coursing frantically, now, through the thinning hair above his forehead. “You didn’t even call this strike, Slater. You know nothing about it. You don’t know what the bloody hell you’re talking about.”

  “Is he the one that was so rude to me,” Irene ventured, “down at the club that time? When you were buying drinks?”

  “He’s rude to everybody. He’s a nasty piece of work. And he’s got no right, no right at all, to get up on the television and start—” The telephone rang, shrill and excitable. Bill scarcely missed a beat as he went to pick it up. “Here we go, then. This’ll be Kevin. He’ll have seen it. He’ll be screaming blue murder.” He grabbed the receiver and snapped: “Hello?”

  It wasn’t Kevin. It was Miriam.

  “Hello, Bill. Is this a good time?”

  He still retained, occasionally, the capacity to surprise himself: it took only a second or two to recover, and take the measure of the situation.

  “Oh, hello, Kev. Yes, I saw it. What’s . . . what’s your view, then? How do you think we should proceed?”

  Miriam, too, was accustomed to this kind of subterfuge. “Listen, Bill, I was ringing about tomorrow night. I wondered if you might be free.”

  “Always . . .”—he glanced at his wife, whose attention was concentrated on the television—“always difficult, that, isn’t it? Always a bit of a problem.”

  “But Bill—darling—” (was the word calculated, or had it come naturally? She would surely know the effect it would have on him) “—it’s Valentine’s Day.”

  “Yes, I’m aware of that. Well aware. But—”

  “And I’ve got the house to myself. All evening.”

  Bill was silenced, for a moment.

  “Claire’s going to some disco, you see. And it’s parent— teachers. Parent—teachers night at King William’s. Mum and Dad’ll be out.”

  And so will I, you fool, Bill said to himself. Had you not thought of that? I’ve got to be there too. And yet, at the same time, a heavenly vista opened up to him. An hour alone with Miriam; maybe two. Privacy. A bed. They had never made love in a bed. Every time so far
had been rushed, fumbled, in some corner of the factory, always the threat of someone disturbing them, never the chance to do it properly, to take their time, to undress. And this way they could undress. He could see her naked. For a whole hour; maybe two.

  But it was parent—teachers night. Irene would expect him to go. She had a right to expect that. And he owed it to Doug.

  “Can you not find an alternative, Kev?” he said loudly into the phone. “I have to say that of all the nights you could have chosen, that has to be the worst.”

  “Please try to make it, Bill. Please. Just think what it would be like . . .”

  “Yes, all right, all right.” He cut her off, not wanting to listen to her pleading. The picture was quite vivid enough as it was. He sighed heavily. “Well, if that’s when it has to be, then . . . that’s when it has to be.” He could hear her relief at the other end of the line. An emotion swelled inside him: pride, or gratification. A tender feeling; there was almost something paternal in it. “So what time are you calling the meeting?”

  “Seven-thirty? Can you make it by then?”

  A final sigh: thick with weariness and resignation. “OK, Kev. I’ll be there. We’ll sort this thing out once and for all. But after this, you owe me one—OK? I mean it.”

  “’Bye, Billy,” said Miriam, using an endearment he would never have tolerated from Irene.

  “Ta-ra then,” said Bill, and replaced the receiver.

  They had tea together, the three of them, sausage, beans and chips, and it wasn’t until Doug had gone back upstairs to do his homework and listen to the new record again that Irene broached the subject.

  “Do I gather that you won’t be coming tomorrow night, then?”

  Bill spread his hands in apology. “This has got to be sorted out, love. We’ll have a proposal on the table from the management tomorrow morning. We’ve got to get together to discuss it, and we’ve got to decide what we’re going to do about Slater. Disciplinary action.” He wiped his mouth with a piece of kitchen towel. “It’s a bugger, I know, but what can I do?” More softly, as if to himself, he repeated: “What can I do?”

  Irene looked at him for a few seconds, the light in her eyes warm but oddly inscrutable. She stood up and kissed him, gently, on the top of his head. “You’re a slave to the cause, Bill,” she murmured, and drew the curtains against the thickening night.

  5

  On the morning after the parent—teachers meeting, Chase came into their form room, threw his briefcase down beside his desk, went over to the window where Benjamin was sitting and made a dramatic announcement.

  “I’m going to come to dinner round at your house.”

  Benjamin looked up from his book of French verbs (they had a test later that day) and said: “I beg your pardon?”

  “My parents are going to dinner at your parents’,” Chase said, pleased with himself. “And I’m coming too.”

  “When?”

  “Next Saturday. Didn’t they tell you about it?”

  Benjamin was quietly indignant at not having been consulted or even informed about this startling proposal. He quizzed his mother about it that evening, as soon as he got home, and found out that everything had been arranged the night before, at King William’s, where Chase’s parents and his own had met for the first time.

  Benjamin had, incidentally, been nursing fond hopes for this particular parent—teachers session. Not because he expected to receive glowing reports from the masters, but because it meant his mother and father would be out for most of the evening, and there was every possibility that Benjamin might have the living room—and more importantly, the television—all to himself for some of that time. This was a fantastic stroke of luck, because there was a film on BBC2 at nine o’clock that evening, made in France and billed as a “tender and erotic love story,” which was almost certain to contain some nudity. Benjamin could hardly believe his good fortune. By dint of reasoned argument and persuasion—backed up, as always, by the threat of physical violence—Paul could easily be packed off to bed by 8:30 at the latest. His parents would not be back until ten o’clock. That allowed a whole hour in which one—surely, at least one—of the three lovely young actresses featured in this “intense, provocative and revealing study of amour fou” (Philip Jenkinson in the Radio Times) would have the opportunity to strip off for the cameras. It was almost too good to be true.

  And Lois? Lois was going to be out. Lois was doing what she did every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday night. She was having a date with the Hairy Guy.

  They had been going steady now for almost three months. His name was Malcolm, and although he had rarely been allowed by Lois to cross the threshold of the Trotters’ home, her mother had seen enough of him to form a distinct impression, and found him shy, courteous and appealing. He kept his thick, vinyl-black hair at a respectable length, his beard was well trimmed and his wardrobe ran to nothing more outlandish than a rust-coloured corduroy jacket worn over a fawn cheesecloth shirt and flared denim loons. He called her “Mrs. Trotter” and his intentions towards her daughter seemed entirely honourable. To the best of her knowledge (and the best of Benjamin’s), her daughter’s dates with Malcolm comprised nothing more racy than a few hours down at The Gun Barrels or The Rose and Crown, huddled in smoky conversation over pints of Brew and halves of bitter shandy. Very occasionally, they would branch out by attending musical events to which Malcolm referred— indecipherably, at first—as “gigs,” and which sometimes conjured up, to Sheila’s worried mind, images of pot-crazed teenagers gyrating to the thrashings of hirsute guitarists and drummers in an atmosphere thick with sexual abandon. But her daughter seemed to return from these fancied orgies well before midnight, and looking none the worse for wear.

  The sing-song chime of the doorbell announced Malcolm’s arrival shortly after seven o’clock. Lois was running late, detained in the bathroom by the mysterious ablutions which invariably occupied the three-quarters of an hour before one of her dates, and her parents were busy too, smartening themselves up for their visit to King William’s. It fell to Benjamin, therefore, to entertain the hopeful suitor as he hovered awkwardly by the living-room fireplace.

  They nodded at each other, and Malcolm’s muted greeting— “All right, mate?”—was accompanied by a reassuring smile. A fair start, on the whole. But Benjamin still couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Who’s the axeman?” Malcolm asked. He pointed at the nylon-string guitar which had been left leaning up against one of the dining chairs. It was Benjamin’s, a birthday present: his mother had bought it two years ago, for nine pounds.

  “Oh. I play, a little bit.”

  “Classical?”

  “Rock, mainly,” said Benjamin. Then added, hoping that it would sound impressive: “Blues, as well.”

  Malcolm chuckled at this. “You don’t look much like B. B. King. Are you a Clapton fan?”

  Benjamin shrugged. “He’s all right. He was one of my early influences.”

  “I see. You’ve gone past that, have you?”

  Benjamin remembered something he had read in Sounds, a quote from some willowy prog-rocker. “I want to push back the boundaries of the three-chord song,” he said. He didn’t know why he was suddenly confiding in this person, sharing ideas about music which he normally kept under close wraps. “I’m writing a sort of suite. A rock symphony.”

  Malcolm smiled again, but said, without condescension: “This is the right time for it. The scene’s wide open.” He sat on the sofa, his hands clasping at the knees of his loons. “You’re right about Clapton, though. No real ideas of his own. Apparently he’s doing Bob Marley covers now. That’s pure cultural appropriation, if you ask me. Neo-colonialism in a musical setting.”

  Benjamin nodded, trying not to appear baffled.

  “Are you in a band?” Malcolm asked.

  “Not yet. I want to be.”

  “If you’re serious about this,” said Malcolm, “I could lend you some records. There’s some pretty
far-out stuff being laid down out there. Freaky times on the event horizon.”

  Benjamin nodded again, more and more fascinated the less he understood.

  “That would be great,” he managed.

  “There’s a guitarist called Fred Frith,” Malcolm continued.

  “Plays with a band called Henry Cow. Does amazing things with a fuzzbox. Imagine The Yardbirds getting into bed with Ligeti in the smoking rubble of divided Berlin.”

  Benjamin, who had no experience of The Yardbirds, Ligeti or indeed the smoking rubble of divided Berlin, might well have found his imagination taxed to the limit by this task; but Lois now arrived to rescue him.

  “Blimey, love,” said Malcolm, rising promptly to his feet. “You look cracking.” He seemed to be able to switch between these different modes with some agility.