My Little Armalite

by James Hawes

  —You used to come down so much more often.

  —Mmm. Mum, look, it’s just, I’ve been sort of, well, nabbed into going out and I’m trying to work.

  —How is your work, dear?

  —Fine, fine. I’m giving a paper at the Oxford conference. A plenary paper, actually.

  —Are you still writing about that man of yours who was really a spy?

  —Yes, actually. Look, Mum, could you call my mobile in about half an hour? I need an excuse to escape from these people so I can sort out the bloody machine … the washing machine. Which is broken.

  —You’re not going to try to mend it yourself, are you, John dear?

  —Mm? Oh, no, just, well, you know, Mum, just take a look.

  —You’ve got better things to do with your time than that!

  —Of course, Mum.

  —So, how is London? Have you been to any interesting lectures and concerts?

  —Oh, well, you know, it’s early days, Mum, and with the kids and work, and …

  Cha-chonk!

  —John? My father’s voice came in on the line from his shed. I licked my lips and swallowed. I could picture my father out there at the end of the garden. He had been out at work or out in the shed all my life, content to spend his days with no distinction other than having been the only conscript in his platoon of the Gloucestershire Regiment to have come back entirely whole from Korea.

  —Aha, hi, Dad, there you are. So, how are you?

  —Middling. Have you tried looking in Kentish Town?

  —Dad, it’s too late, we’re here now. Anyway, I told you, yes, we looked everywhere in north London.

  —You should have asked your mother and I to come up and help you.

  —Your father and I did live in London for many years, you know, dear.

  —Mum, Dad, I know, I can even remember bits of it. But look, it wouldn’t have done any good. We paid the going rate and that’s all there is to it.

  —Oh, but those ruddy estate agents can pull the wool over anyone’s eyes, John. Bloody vultures. The lot of them deserve to be shot. They’ll skin you alive unless you know the area, you see! Have you looked in Finsbury Park? Or Archway?

  —Dad, we looked everywhere. There isn’t anywhere people didn’t find years ago. We even looked in Hackney, for God’s sake, even though Christ knows what we’d do about schools there.

  —Well, I don’t understand it. Your mother and I are only ordinary working people …

  —… Workers of the brain, John, but workers!

  —Yes, Mum.

  —John, when you were born we almost bought a semi in Cricklewood. And we could have done it too, quite easily, you know. Have you looked in Cricklewood?

  —Way out of our league, Dad.

  —That was before we decided to move back to the West Country, for the air, dear, for your health. And your father’s nerves, of course.

  —Yes, Mum, I know all that.

  —I suppose we were silly sods, looking back. I suppose we should have bought the bloody thing and kept it for ever. Bought in to capitalism.

  —Mmmm, yeah, maybe, Dad.

  —But you see, dear, we all thought that with the White Heat and everything, well, that was all going to change, wasn’t it? It was going to be what you did that mattered, not what you owned.

  —Yes, Mum, that would have been nice.

  —John, look, I don’t bloody well understand it. You’re a university lecturer, for God’s sake. Your grandmother in Cricklewood cleaned for several university lecturers and they all lived in St John’s Wood and Hampstead. Or Swiss Cottage, at least. Have you tried Kilburn? It’s full of Irish, of course, but it’s not too far out, by tube. What did you say you were earning now, John? How much? Are you sure? Your cousin earns well over double that and he’s only an accountant. Christ, in my day accountants were just glorified bloody bookkeepers, that’s all we thought of them and that’s all they were paid …

  —Dad, I’m fine, don’t worry about me! We’re very happy here. Look, Mum, Dad, I’ve got to go now. Will you call me in half an hour, Mum? We can have a proper chat then.

  —That’ll be nice. Don’t worry about things, John dear.

  —John, take my advice: if you just tighten your belts for a bit, you’ll soon be able to pay off some of that bloody mortgage.

  —Yes, Dad.

  —Oh, and next time you come down, take the old A304. It’s much shorter. You see, if you come off at …

  Listening to my father’s useless information, I suddenly realised that my utter ignorance of Wii games and the latest bands would soon become an inability to say anything meaningful to our sons about anything. I would be able to tell them about what had worked for me in the last quarter of the twentieth century, but that would be just as much history to them as my father’s insights into how one got on in the world, or got from A to B, in the fifties and sixties.

  —The A304. Right, Dad. Look, I’ve got to shoot. I mean, I’ve got to shoot off. Go back to work. Mum, call me later then?

  —I will, dear. Don’t worry, I’m sure something will come up.

  —Oh yes, Mum, don’t worry.

  —Here, what about looking in West Hampstead, John? Or Queens Park?

  —Bye-e!

  I slotted the phone back into its wall-mounted recharger. It bleeped. I looked down at the toy-littered floor and wondered for a second where the hell I was.

  Christ, what a time to find a bloody gun in the garden! Just when I was …

  Stop!

  Suddenly I knew exactly what to do.

  14: What We Do Not Know

  Three minutes later I stepped back from treading down the earth in the refilled hole.

  So simple! Sod the bloody police. This was my week of work to save my life. It was my last chance to make things right, to have my education pay off at last, restore justice to the world. The gun could wait there safely until I came back in triumph from Oxford.

  There are many things hidden in the earth. Roman coins pour out on to the boots of men digging for gas mains. Cattle plod about upon the gold-stuffed ship graves of Saxon kings. Priceless chalices, buried in fear, their sole keepers hacked to death without talking, wait for millennia a mere foot too deep for the yearly plough. Things get forgotten. Whole valleys full of kings. The Warsaw Pact. The gun had lain quiet for twenty years: it could stay there for one more bloody week.

  Yes, once the VIP was safely done and delivered, I would call the cops and they could hold me for as long as they liked! Of course, it would be pretty stressful for Sarah and the kids to find the house full of armed police and myself under arrest, but everything would soon be cleared up. Hmm. And actually, Sarah could hardly expect me to pay back all those nights and days of childcare if I was in a police cell, could she?

  True, it might feel bizarre, this week, to look out at my garden and know there was an Armalite lying there. And obviously, I’d never be able to tell Sarah that I’d deliberately waited a week before calling the authorities. For the rest of our lives I would have a little, tiny, harmless secret from my darling wife.

  Well, so what? I was man enough for that. It was a marriage, for God’s sake, not a confessional. I mean, it would not be the first time I’d kept a meaningless little secret from Sarah.

  Had I told her that the first-choice candidate for my new job had in fact dropped out because he had taken a serious look at house prices and decided to keep his family in their leafy, well-schooled suburb of Leeds? It had seemed unnecessary. Had I told her that among my many reasons for wanting to leave Sheffield had been the fear that a certain little affair with a postgraduate student (not strictly speaking one of my own students, of course!) was getting a wee bit out of hand? Why would I tell her that? I mean, for God’s sake, I’m a humanities lecturer. What does anyone expect?

  What we do not know …

  That was OK then.

  I walked out of the front door for the first time since Sarah and the kids had left. The small, quiet h
ouse leaped away from behind me and gave way to the big loud London night. Our Victorian ceilings, high perhaps by modern standards but still low by human standards, were replaced instantly by the vast and timeless sky. I looked up at the stars and breathed deeply: my troubles fled from me at the speed of light.

  I headed for the pub.

  15: An Englishman’s Nightmare

  My pubbing days lay deep in the last, lost century. Of course, as you age, pubs naturally turn from exciting places where you never know what is going to happen into boring places where the same old thing happens into gruesome places where nothing is ever going to happen again. But in my case this natural process of disillusion had been underlined by geography.

  When entering upon my chosen career, you see, I reckoned without the plain statistical fact that most university lecturers in England end up working for most of their lives in (and hence dragging their wives around) cities in the North or the Midlands.

  I did not like cities in the North and the Midlands. They made me feel foreign. The drinking folk in these places (from whom, as the people, I expected great things) read newspapers I despised, passionately followed entire sports of which I knew nothing whatever (rugby league, for God’s sake) and, while being authentically pro-Trades Union and anti-Tory, happily voiced opinions on immigration, asylum and punishment, corporal or capital, which left me blinking into my beer with the effort to avoid fatal eye contact. So, what with my responsible career, beloved wife and young children, I had not spent much time in the saloons of Sheffield, Leeds and Birmingham over the past decades. I had not been into a pub of an evening since we moved.

  But tonight I was going out in the night to a London pub for the first time since 1989, and so I strode up to the Red Lion with a certain long-forgotten excitement. I may even have been softly whistling a jig or reel. I cannot swear against it.

  Then I found myself in an over-heated miniature Sky-TV multiplex that happened to serve unbelievably expensive lager and amazingly cheap spirits. I stopped dead and gazed around me through my misting specs.

  Apart from the Big Screen there were four high-mounted television sets of large domestic size, making sure that no corner of the pub could possibly escape the Big Match. The Big Screen itself, with its ceaseless, insane bombardment of pub-quiz information zipping below the pictures and scrolling to the right of them, was half-masked by the heads of standing male drinkers, of whom a statistically improbable proportion were shaven-headed, their ringed ears standing out in alarming silhouette against the bright plasma.

  I had landed myself in every liberal and cultured Englishman’s worst nightmare: I was alone and surrounded at night by illiberal and uncultured Englishmen of perfect head-butting age and size, in noisily festive and patriotic mood, wearing replica football shirts.

  —Mind your back, mate, said a voice, as three pints of lager sailed choppily past my left ear and a large beer gut squelched across my back. I turned, trying to smile in a bluff way, making sure I did not look down my vulnerable nose from on high. I never actually got as far as the manful quip, because the England teamsheet went up on the Big Screen. Everyone cheered and looked round. An Englishman amidst Englishmen, I could hardly do otherwise.

  Each of the England players now got a few manic seconds of dedicated screen time, a flick-cut montage of their palatial homes, all-blonde girlfriends and bizarre celebratory routines that their semi-human ancestors would no doubt have understood perfectly well. In order not to seem completely ignorant of the dramatis personae if forced to chat about them later, I hoovered up the information flashing madly over the screen, selecting useful information for storage in the temporary files of my mind.

  I was good at this sort of thing, having spent twenty-five years speedreading weighty tomes that would quite possibly never make it out again from the deep, ghostly stacks of university libraries. I now filled my brain RAM swiftly with faces, names, dates, teams, transfer values, salaries …

  Salaries.

  Bloody hell!

  16: Mortgage Repayment: 2/6

  I had, of course, heard about footballers’ absurd salaries. But it was the sort of unbearable fact that I was normally able to blank out. Tonight there was no escaping the truth. These brutish young men earned in six months of kicking a ball about more than I would earn in my entire career. Or, not to beat about the bush, my life.

  Yes, I knew pretty well exactly how much I would make in the remainder of my time. Enough to pay off our brand-new twenty-year mortgage by the time I retired, that was how much. By the time I finished working I would own outright a small terraced house in SE11, hoobloodyray, and be unable to afford to go on nice holidays or to help my sons or my little daughter to buy houses.

  It could not be right. It was simply not possible that thick little head-butting bastards who had never even heard of Schumann could throw their money about on multiple Ferraris, hideous so-called mansions in Cheshire and ludicrous houses on artificial islands in Bahrain while I myself would quite probably never be able even to own a house with four proper bedrooms, enough space to walk past the pram in the hall and a nearby school that vaguely approached the national average.

  It was plainly and simply wrong.

  Their stupid kids, named after American bloody states, for God’s sake, would swan about buoyed up by unearned income, whilst my children, my hard-working, lovely, clever children, were drowning in impossible mortgage repayments, with me powerless to save them.

  My eyes glazed over, screening out reality. Of course, they would say, —The market decides, tough. Twenty years before, I might have had a counter-argument. I might well have argued, twenty years before, that the government should intervene to limit such ludicrous incomes, reapportion such blatantly unfair wages, block tax-evasive trusts or redistribute a little of such clearly undeserved wealth by inescapable taxation on luxury goods. Twenty years ago, I might well have pointed out the fact that in the GDR there was no unemployment. I would almost certainly have pointed, as everyone else did twenty years ago, to the striking progress of literacy in Cuba.

  I had not suggested these particular alternatives for some years. Even Cuba was looking rather dodgy these days. But alternatives there still had to be, surely? To prevent thick young footballers from earning in a month what normal, decent people earned in ten years. Or people buying football clubs with the billions they had made trading shares acquired cunningly from economically illiterate, indigent pensioners in Siberia. Or a thousand number-crunching arseholes in the City getting million-quid bonuses and thereby inflating alleged national wages and property prices so much so that the rest of us poor sods had to suffer another hike in interest rates rather than tax those few bastards a teeny little bit more?

  How had it happened?

  Why?

  Who asked for a winner-takes-all world?

  What makes us think there is nothing that can be done about it?

  Q: Which major Western nation state one hundred and twenty years ago forced, repeat forced, all the big landowners in approximately one-third of its sovereign territory to sell all but a few hundred acres of their land to their small tenant farmers at a government-set fair price, and even gave those small farmers one-hundred-year, negligible-interest, state-backed mortgages to buy the land with?

  CLUE: In 1989, an elderly farmer I knew laughingly showed me the receipt for his family’s last-ever payment of 2/6.

  Q: 2/6?

  A: Indeed. Half a crown. The country was Britain. The elected British Government in then-British Ireland did it. Because they had to. Because people were so furious about blatant unfairness that they had started making British Ireland ungovernable. Did they want Revolution? No. Communism? God forbid, they were decent Catholics. They just wanted the chance to buy, repeat buy, the little bit of land they worked. They just wanted fairness. And they demanded it with boycotts, then riots, then guns. So they got it.

  Things do change. Things can change. Things must change. It is not enough to say that th
ings are the way they are, full stop. That is simply the idiotic voice that says, —Whatever is, is right, the crass metaphysics of pure contingency. No, no: the way things are means things cannot stay the way things are. Discuss.

  But change which way?

  How done?

  By whom?

  Decides who?

  —There you are, Prof John. Where the hell you been? I been fighting every cunt off this seat for you. You missed the warm-up, mate. Only just in time. Two pints behind already.

  —I, um, sorry, Phil. My mum called.

  —Oh, well then. Mums is mums. Boys, this is Prof John, our new neighbour. I also calls him Einstein. On account of his brain. Doctor of fucking German. Bit posh for us, eh? But he likes a scrap too. Going to come out on patrol. Tell you anything about Hitler and the Nazis, he will. Try him.

  —Hi, er, boys. Lager, Phil?

  —Yeah. Get two in for yourself, you’re behind.

  —Sure. Good idea, Phil.

  Now I had been seen talking to tough men I was better able to engage in the Darwinian struggle for bar space, and was soon inserting myself crabwise into a fine space directly before the beer pumps. Suddenly it occurred to me.

  What if I finished the VIP, emailed it to a colleague and then called the police on the evening just before the Oxford conference. Imagine: Plenary national peer-group paper given in absentia at Oxford as Newsnight East Germany expert questioned by police over machine gun in garden. Enough to make The Paper, surely? Maybe even the TV news. God, if I just got the chance, just one chance, to make that one vital, memorable sound bite on the box! Someone has to get the next BBC series, after all. Someone has to be catapulted out of all this crap and into …

  —Yes please, I can get you?

  I looked up and found myself staring into a pair of cool blue female eyes.

  17: A Goal for England

  I blinked, and in a flash, with the edge-of-vision skills common to my profession, I had also taken in a fine pair of breasts without in the slightest appearing to look at them. The Polish barmaid Phil had spoken of, presumably. Pretty? Yes. But there was something else about her that made me stare.