by James Hawes
Stop now? Give up? Accept the bosses’ offer and get back to work?
Not I.
UPVC?
Oh, I don’t think so.
Not for Sarah. She had always been my sash-window girl.
Sashes and Schumann, by fuck, she would have.
Yes, sashes and Schumann and all that go with them.
I was the clever boy from the rough comp, and fuck me if I wasn’t going to make the deal stick.
It’s down by the Bogside that I long to be.
I wasted not a moment more.
I carried my doomed laptop almost tenderly out to the garden shed. There I placed it on the oil-stained sheets of The Paper, which lay there still. I opened my father‘s toolbox, bent low, inhaled deeply from its manly depths, then levered the computer bodily apart with a large screwdriver and, wielding a two-pound lump hammer (MADE IN ENGLAND), speedily reduced its Far Eastern innards to small fragments of plastic and metal. It felt bizarrely like something I should have done many years before, and left me laughing with the ancient delight of sheer liberation.
The cow was right after all: freedom is freedom is freedom!
I gathered the resulting shards carefully up within the newspaper and plunged the lot into the grease-filled suitcase. I lugged the suitcase across the garden, through the house and out into the street. I opened the boot of my car and heaved the suitcase in.
—What you up to, Prof John? Oh, nasty bump that. Awkward boots, these Mercs. Made you jump, eh?
—Yes, actually.
—Here, Prof John, you look like shit warmed up. I can smell the beer and puke off you from here. Well, leave a man alone, what do you expect, eh? Nothing good, that’s for sure! What you got in there then? You chopped up some tart and taking her to the river to dump her? Ha ha!
I looked my neighbour in the eye properly. I realised that I had never done so before. For the first time I was not trying to please him, so for the first time I held his gaze. With ancient certainty, I saw his eyes, and with them his judgement of me, change for ever even as I stared back. Still I held the look. I wondered if I should show him the Armalite under the passenger seat. How he would look at me then! But I controlled myself.
—Sorry, Prof John, you OK?
—Just thinking, Phil. You said you can get new plates for a car, right?
—Oho! You on nine points, Prof John? Fucking cameras, eh?
—No. But I have got a little job.
—A little job, Prof John?
—Tell you what, just let me dump this old suitcase, then fancy a pint later on, Phil?
PART FOUR
Homecoming
72: Et in North London Ego
Darling, it’s three a.m. and I’m sitting here in my rather large and lovely cedar-clad shed (how cleverly I got it to just scrape in beneath the height-limit of the planning regulations!) in the really almost substantial garden of our modest enough but very pleasant and these days ludicrously desirable Edwardian semi. But I’m not working on the script for the new show, I’m afraid. Instead, I’m standing on the small mezzanine platform above my writing table, looking out of my special little chapel-like window high in the eaves, making this supplementary recording exactly a year after what you’ve just heard.
I mean, it does seem rather as though I’ve got away with it, but you never can tell. Particularly as it now seems that I must, sadly, employ my little Armalite again. I have taken all the precautions a clever man can take, and my cover story will again be tailored to the prevailing mood of the country, but only God knows how it will pan out. So if you do, at some point, indeed still find yourself needing to sell my story, your potential buyers might want to know how it felt to have clawed my way back to the normality that was all I ever wanted for us.
So how does it feel, to be here now?
To have read Pooh to Mariana, to have helped Jack and Will do their interesting homework for their frankly rather posh (though theoretically comprehensive) school, then to have smoked my evening cigarette in the garden whilst secretly watching you playing Schumann to yourself until the first guests arrive from all corners of north London to help celebrate my new commission from the BBC?
How the hell do you think it feels?
It feels bloody good, is how it feels.
Just right, in fact, is how it feels.
This is what Tiggers like best!
And all because my little Armalite gained me, in less than one minute of full-auto action, the sort of name-and-face recognition that one usually only gets by slaying a Beatle, throwing twenty billion dollars at the New Hampshire primary or grilling a bit of fish on the box.
The TV footage was actually very good. As you’ll no doubt remember, if only because it was reused yet again in that prime-time advert I did recently for insurance to protect your loved ones in case of unforseen events …
73: Sic Incipit Gloria Mundi
We press PLAY.
I, John Goode himself, walk to the podium of the Oxford Conference with Panke beside me: I small, plump and shy; he large, loud and leader-like. The camera swings to take in the applauding lecturers, their faces fixed in the idiotic chimp-like smiles that tell you they are looking at a higher-status hominid.
Panke, little knowing what is in my notes, makes a joke in German that gets the hall guffawing, and the subtitles tell the world: My little doctor feels a little tired. Indulge him. I never saw him drink so much beer, even when we sung together while the wall was still standing! He claps me so hard on the back that I stagger and drop my notes. As I kneel to pick up the papers, Panke sighs and speaks again. The captions inform us that he is saying: I had better help. He might get my life backwards! We might end up back in the bad old days. But in fact, you know why the Chinese are so happy? They still have their wall! At this, the lecturers roar with delight.
And now the masked gunman walks into the room.
When you know what’s coming this makes a fascinating few seconds of viewing, and I have often stopped the film myself here. Look: those on the spot, who don’t have hindsight, are incredibly slow to take in what’s happening. Like all decisive events, my would-be killer enters the frame of history well before his significance is realised, and even when he’s been seen, the clearest reaction on all those unexpecting faces is simple disbelief. This cannot be happening. No doubt we will all look like that when the oil finally dries, the first vast tidal surge hits, or Iran nukes Tel Aviv.
Then he sprays bullets into the ceiling, bringing down plaster, screaming in Arabic, and they believe, fast.
Once again, the subtitles come to the world’s aid: he is demanding that the cameras should keep running in order to show the world the fate of the devil Goode, child of hellfire and servant of Zion. (I suppose I really shouldn’t have written to all the papers a week before, saying that if my union wanted to boycott Israeli academics, it should do the same to all scholars who took salaries from self-proclaimed Islamic states. Only the most right-wing of them printed it, of course, but that was apparently enough.) He grabs the podium microphone and adds, live, in shouted English: No phone or all die! Where is John Goode?
I am, at this point, less than six feet from him, but he looks around again and pauses in confusion.
This is the point at which, on that first Newsnight, the impossibly rugged ex-SAS novelist, brought in to explain the botched assassination, freezes the pictures.
He tells how, the night before, whilst I, all innocent of my impending doom, had been very openly pubcrawling Oxford with my colleagues, an email had been sent to several major newspapers from an Internet café near Finsbury Park. Coming from a group calling itself the Caliphate Committee, the message threatened fire for the enemies of Mohammed (PBUH) who succour the devil Zionism. The same terminal at the same Internet café had downloaded and printed, not two minutes beforehand, a copy of the Staff Contact Sheet from the Student Experience Assurance Unit, freely available on the UCL website, showing myself smiling plumply, hair around my shirt coll
ar, tie loose, bearded and wearing large, heavy spectacles. This document had, as it happened, recently been updated (by myself) to stress the proud fact that I was giving a plenary address at the upcoming national conference in Oxford, even giving the precise time and place.
However, by the time of the planned shooting, I was clean-shaven, crop-haired, dressed in a black rollneck jumper and sporting my new Dolce & Gabbana rimless glasses, the very model of a modern modern linguist.
The ex-SAS novelist now compares blown-up versions of these two images and explains that I have recently modified my personal appearance (a lesson to all in public life, he hints), meaning that outdated intelligence has degraded the gunman’s ability to acquire the target. It is this unexpected complication, this minor but very good example of the fog of war, suggests the shagsome former warrior, which has led to my would-be killer‘s evident combat stress, leading to the second burst of fire over my peers’ heads.
The one-time soldier hits PLAY again and the footage resumes.
That second blast of bullets sends the assembled scholars cowering even lower. Show me Goode or all die! screams the masked terrorist. This is a decisive error, says the voice of the ex-SAS man over the images, for in combat stress it is hard, terribly hard, it seems, to maintain an accurate round-count when firing automatically.
I count three! roars the gunman, jumping down to the front row of seats where the most senior Germanists of Britain and Ireland shrink in terror: One!
Behind him, I slowly rise to my feet.
Panke clings to the floor in a highly unleaderlike way. There is no Spartacus moment. On the contrary, a few of my colleagues actually point out to the gunman what is going on behind him. He swings. I am John Goode, I say, steadily. And without the slightest hesitation he shoots me down.
The images freeze again.
The ex-SAS man explains once more: the gunman’s unprofessional failure to maintain an accurate round-count has led to his having only one bullet left when he actually comes to neutralise the target. This means that he now has to break off the action and reload after having shot me once, which is apparently a very bad thing when in contact.
Things move once more. The world sees the faceless gunman wrenching furiously at his gun. It sees him slap and pull and push until at last a bit of the gun comes free. The bit that holds the bullets, you know, whatever you call that! He allows it to drop to the floor and starts trying to fit another one in. But it seems not to go. Pause again. Digital effects allow us to zoom in to the frozen image of the gun itself. Our expert points out the notorious flaw of the Armalite ever since Vietnam: its tendency to jam. This proves fatal, or rather (the militaristic scribe, having unconsciously fallen into the camaraderie that binds all trained psychopaths, hastily corrects himself) non-fatal.
Unpause. The gunman lets fly a final volley of Arabic oaths, kicking me and spitting at me. Pause again, so that a pixelated and voice-disguised expert from GCHQ can comment on my enemy’s language, which, like the email from Finsbury Park, apparently betrays the grammatically poor Arabic of a non-Arab Muslim, containing phraseology characteristic of the Afghani jihadist camps.
And now run on to the memorable end. A car horn is heard to blare repeatedly outside, and the gunman, after some hesitation, turns and runs from the hall. After a ridiculously long while, women begin to sob and men pull themselves cautiously upright. No viewer can see this section of the film without inwardly screaming at them all to hurry up and help me. Eventually, some do. Panke is not among them. He remains prone. Phones appear in people’s hands. Others run for the doors. I insist on being carried to the microphone, where, despite being evidently in great pain and visibly losing blood, I am able to declare that while I quite understand, and therefore forgive, my attackers, and indeed join with them in condemning Bush’s imperialism, I will never be silenced by the enemies of truth and look forward keenly to a new Democratic administration in the White House that will forge closer links with Europe to peacefully resolve the situation in the Middle East in a way that will recognise Palestinian aspirations yet guarantee the security of Israel. I finally stress my full commitment to a multicultural Britain free of all religious bigotry, apologise for being unable to deliver my paper, movingly declare my love for my wife and children, faint, and am shortly afterwards taken to the Radcliffe Hospital, where I spend the night under armed guard in what the papers call a serious but stable condition and which, in my own memory, stands out as a timeless little holiday of beatific, opiate happiness.
74: The Avoidance of Tragedy
No one was ever arrested for my shooting.
There was briefly a public appeal to locate a particular car which had been CCTVed near the scene carrying what turned out to be false number plates, but the lead came to nothing.
Two days later, the Caliphate Committee staged a just-failed attempt (using, it was soon established, the very weapon which had been fired at me) to shoot what’s his face as well. You know, what’s his face, the lecturer who’d actually started the email campaign against the boycotting of Israeli academics. Two bullets missed his head by less than a foot. Tuck-tuck. What’s his face did try, understandably, to make a bit of a fuss about it. But you see, you’ve quite forgotten about him, haven’t you? Of course. Everyone has. What’s his face is all he will ever be. We all know the name Bobby Sands, but who were the other saps who laid down their little long-haired lives so that Mr Adams could one day josh happily with Dr Paisley? No, I got my (near) martyrdom in first and I got it in live on TV. And so up I sucked it without even trying, every last drop of that sweet oxygen, publicity.
The TV images flew around the worlds real and virtual. My stoical acceptance of the fact that I would probably never be able to move my left shoulder much again was impressive. My absolute forgiveness for, and understanding of, those who had tried to kill me was saintly. My absolute refusal, once I had recovered consciousness, to accept any security precautions at all in hospital was heroic. And I had the required bomb-shell to drop whilst everyone was briefly looking my way.
Upon leaving hospital, I told my press conference that I had dark suspicions. I had been about to denounce the ex-KGB man Panke’s DEBB as a neo-Nazi party (I waved my notes at them like a second Churchill). Few hacks could resist the idea of a conspiracy linking those three epochal foes, Muslim extremists, Russian agents and German Nazis. The resultant speculation ensured that having got into the media, I continued, for those vital follow-up few weeks, to be chatted about in ye olde saloon bar of the global village.
I had broken with Panke at last. I was no one’s little doctor any more. I was in the media, therefore I was me.
Eamon was the first to see what this meant and to call with his congratulations:
—Jaysus, Johnnyboy, talk about putting away a smash! Advantage you, and championship point, my man! Just don’t fucking choke now!
—Does that mean I’m back in your phone book, Eamon?
—Straight back in at speed-dial number one, Johnny the Goode. Now, go make hay!
The hay pretty well made itself, actually. There was no need to employ researchers to seek out further information about me. It provided itself, drawn by the irresistible magnet of airtime. Past and present colleagues queued up to confirm my unimpeachably left-liberal credentials by quoting our long-standing email exchanges on the evils of Bush, Blair and suchlike. Middle-aged veterans of the Miners’ Strike dredged themselves up from the slag heap of history to describe how I had, in my youth, stood boldly up for the rights of the working man. Hairily Gaelic folk with fiddles popped out from pubs around the Holloway Road to relate, watery-eyed, my staunch championing, Englishman that I was, of Irish freedom. A stout, salt-of-the-earth type from my own street in SE11 was interviewed, describing how We calls him Einstein down the pub, see, on account of his brain, but there’s no side to Prof John, mate; he buys his wheels in the Free Ads, he knows his footie and he loves a few pints watching an England game, just like the rest of us. Doesn’t
mind a scrap either, and he looks after his old mum. A poor-quality phone video, recorded in a sports hall in Dresden, showed me making unmistakable homage to the great Dr Martin Luther King and lambasting globalisation.
Some people feared that the hatred of the Caliphate Committee (a small breakaway group, it was thought) might be replaced by a full-on fatwa as my fame grew. Speculation about whether (or why, exactly) one might be pronounced kept the opinion columns bubbling away. I maintained, of course, a flawlessly liberal position on the whole business, absolutely deprecating violence of any kind but perfectly willing to cede the right of a minority community feeling itself under attack to defend itself on issues central to its cultural values. When The Paper (acting on an anonymous tip-off) obtained and published police photographs of me marching amidst young and serious Muslims two years before, on the vast anti-Iraq War demonstration, pregnant wife, sons, home-made NOT IN MY NAME banners and all, several of the more liberal radical imams in Britain went so far as to almost unreservedly condemn the notion of killing me.
The timing was happy.
Up was coming the twentieth anniversary of the Warsaw Pact’s collapse, that sea change which had caused my career such inconvenience. Those mysterious, omnipotent telly people at the BBC needed a plug-worthy person to front the requisite HBO co-production on this weighty subject. They felt obliged to use someone who was actually qualified. Say what you will, poor old Auntie is the last bastion. Who else, then, but the liberal champion of truth who was undoubtedly an expert and now had a Unique Selling Point as You Know, That History Bloke Who Got Shot by al-Qaeda or Was It the Nazis or the KGB?
Nor do I let people forget it. In my first series, Europe Chained (a history of the Warsaw Pact countries 1945–89), I never failed to heft, load or mount whatever weapons were in question (a Panzerfaust from Berlin, 1945; a petrol bomb from Budapest, 1956; a Soviet tank from Prague, 1968; a border guard’s AK-47 from the Berlin Wall, 1989) with manly yet sorrowful asides about my own personal encounter with ballistics.