Three Hours : A Novel (2020)

by Lupton, Rosamund

  ‘By August, he was spending time on far-right vlogger sites, Facebook groups and websites,’ Amaal says. ‘Britain First, the English Defence League, Breitbart, the Anti-Islam Alliance, Knights Templar International, Generation Identity, the list goes on; all viciously anti-Muslim and all legal or legal until recently. A few weeks later he joins 14 Words.’

  * * *

  In the theatre, they have stopped the rehearsal.

  ‘What does 14 Words even mean?’ Tim asks but Daphne can’t answer him.

  ‘I googled it,’ Joanna says, and she reads: ‘“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children.” That’s fourteen words.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake, that’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard,’ Antonella says. ‘Cretinous fuckers.’

  ‘But Jamie barely knows Rafi, let alone hates him,’ Josh says. ‘They’ve always been in different tutor groups. They had, what, one PSME class together?’

  ‘And Victor wasn’t even in the same year as Rafi,’ Tracey says.

  ‘He was in the theatre with him, at the auditions and first read-through,’ Miranda says.

  ‘But they didn’t argue or anything. I don’t think they even spoke,’ Tim says.

  They are trying to make sense of it, Daphne thinks, but there is no sense to be made of it.

  ‘Rafi still isn’t answering his phone,’ Benny says, looking terrified, all that teen-boy banter between him and Rafi covering a depth of love.

  ‘Probably to preserve the battery, being sensible,’ Daphne says.

  It’s what she’s been telling herself over and over since she heard.

  ‘What if Rafi can’t find Basi?’ Miranda asks. ‘Or they find him first?’

  No one replies.

  ‘So, they’re the witches,’ Antonella says. ‘These 14 Words fuckers.’

  And they are getting back on to the stage, Tim picking up two bloody daggers, to resume Act Two, Scene Two, and Daphne understands that this is their way of standing up to terror.

  * * *

  In the Portakabin, Beth feels faint and wants to black out and then she’ll come to in her old life where she’s in Waitrose and Jamie is at his school’s dress rehearsal.

  Again and again he doesn’t answer his phone.

  Another police officer has come into the Portakabin, and she can tell that this young athletic woman blames her and she’s right to blame her because with a different mother this wouldn’t be happening to him; and she’d give him up – give up his babyhood and childhood, every day of him – give him to another mother if it stopped this.

  She asks the athletic police officer if she can have a photo of Jamie today. She pretends, to herself as well as the police officer, it’s so she can look at the photo and see that there’s something of her boy in it and she’ll know for sure that they can talk to him. But truthfully she has this hope, a lifeboat as her family drowns, that she’ll look at the photo and it will all be a mistake, the wrong person, it won’t be Jamie at all.

  * * *

  Thandie comes into the command and control centre, her hair and her jumper covered in snow, and Rose realizes that she’s still wearing Thandie’s corduroy jacket. She takes off the jacket and puts it across Thandie’s shoulders.

  ‘Beth Alton wants a photo of him,’ Thandie says. ‘Bit late to take a good look at him now, isn’t it?’

  Another hefty thump to that punchbag; Rose catches Dannisha’s eye, both older women thinking Thandie harsh, because what could Beth Alton have seen? Jamie didn’t shave his head, lace up his DMs and go on a white pride march; he’s a floppy-haired, Converse-wearing kid who’s doing props for his school play. There should be sacraments of evil, Rose thinks, showing outward visible signs of an inward invisible wickedness, so that parents would see the signs and stop their kids being groomed by white supremacists or ISIS or any other terrorist group.

  But Beth Alton suspected nothing because everything is hidden. The searches on the Deakins’ and Altons’ houses haven’t found bookshelves in the gunmen’s bedrooms full of neo-Nazi literature and CDs of white supremacist music. Because Mein Kampf, The Turner Diaries, Building a Whiter Brighter World, Angry Young Aryans, Blue Eyed Devils and their ilk are invisible on Kindles, iPods and smart phones. And the time has long since passed when there was a household phone in a hall or sitting room, where eavesdropping happened as a matter of course, and parents had an inkling of what their children were up to, what they were thinking.

  Thandie prints out two stills from UAV footage and leaves.

  * * *

  The young athletic woman police officer opens the door wearing the corduroy jacket that Rose Polstein was wearing earlier, because they are still in a life where you lend a friend a jacket.

  She hands Beth a large envelope and Beth asks if she can be alone.

  When the Portakabin is empty, she takes two photographs out of the envelope. They’re large, like those professional family ones with the white background, everyone smiling and dressed in brightly coloured clothes, draped around each other; they have one in the hall – her and Mike and Theo and Jamie.

  The first photo is of a man in army combat clothes with ammunition slung round him, holding a big gun; there’s a building in front of him. The second photo is a close-up of the man’s face hidden by a black balaclava.

  She tries to imagine Jamie’s voice, what he’d say to her. She didn’t have to try before, it was remembering and daydreaming, a kind of empathetic talking.

  All she can see are his eyes in the cut-out holes in the balaclava, the same hazel as Jamie’s eyes, with thick lashes, the same eyelashes.

  This isn’t you, Jamie. It can’t be.

  What do you know, bitch?

  You wouldn’t do this. You’re kind and gentle and—

  What the fuck do you know?

  The same eyes but Jamie has never looked at her like this, never looked at anybody like this.

  I want to talk to my boy …

  Still think I’m drowning, bitch? With a fucking gun in my hand?

  Where’s Jamie?

  Fuck you, cunt.

  Who are you?

  17.

  11.23 a.m.

  The photos are on Beth’s lap; they’re slippery and she has to hold on to them to stop them skidding off. She wants to let them go, let them slide to the floor.

  She makes her fingers hold the photos and her eyes look at them.

  This gunman can’t be Jamie.

  He isn’t Jamie.

  They’ve told her that he is.

  No.

  She faces the gunman who isn’t Jamie, she’s right about that, appallingly right; because her son was being killed in front of her as she took him tea in the morning, drove him to school listening to Radio 1, kissed him goodbye. She imagines him abducted and murdered; a stranger substituted.

  His loving voice she’s heard in her head all through this is the voice she’s been longing to hear for months, but it had fallen silent.

  She remembers those spread-out small incidents when Jamie appeared for a few moments; a smile, a cup of tea, Wolf Alice, Hey, Mum – those brief moments were the ghost of her son.

  She looks at the full-length photo of the gunman in army combat clothes with ammunition slung round him, pointing a gun at the building in front of him; the pottery room.

  Rose Polstein comes in.

  ‘You said there are children inside?’ Beth asks and her voice sounds like it belongs to a woman she’s never met.

  ‘Yes. A class of seven-year-olds.’

  The Postman Pat van; the young father with the toddler in the corridor of the leisure centre, his white face. She can place his face now, one of the ‘elect’ parents as she’d thought of them, leaving the cafeteria while the other parents were waiting; but they are the parents of the children in the pottery room.

  She remembers looking inside through the clear Plexiglas wall along the corridor then hurriedly looking away; because the fear and anguish was too nakedly shock
ing. A pregnant mother sitting on the floor rocking to and fro, and nobody going to her. Remembers how the terror in that room seemed to bulge out the walls.

  ‘I can’t talk to him,’ she says to Rose Polstein. Him, not Jamie, because it’s not Jamie standing there with a gun.

  Rose Polstein takes her hand. Beth can’t look at her, just feels the other woman’s fingers pressing around hers.

  ‘Nobody can talk to him,’ Beth says. ‘Because no part of Jamie is left.’

  The words taste metallic in her mouth, the same taste she had in the first three months of pregnancy.

  ‘I can’t stop him shooting the children.’

  She says this not because she’s brave and selfless, not because she’s thinking about other people’s children and saving them, but because if those young children are killed, even the memory of Jamie, the seventeen years and two months when he was still her boy, before he was abducted and killed, will vanish; the beautiful soul of him will be lost. Dead, he can still be Jamie; can still be loved.

  Rose Polstein has taken her hands into both of hers, as if Beth is slipping down a cliff face and she’s trying to hold on to her, but surely Rose Polstein wants to rest one hand on her bump, check that her baby is moving; this new innocent beginning, a tabula rasa, which once Beth had too. For a few moments, the time for the midwife to hand him to her, Jamie had been the newest person in the world.

  ‘I think Jamie was killed by Victor and these terrorists a long time ago,’ she says. ‘But nobody noticed. I didn’t notice.’

  She remembers the dead bird in the makeshift stretcher of Jamie’s jumper. She remembers the feathers, smooth under her fingertips, and Jamie’s tears.

  ‘Take him to the vet, Mum, please, please, you have to make him better.’

  ‘He’s already dead, Jamie.’

  ‘No, he isn’t dead! Look at his feathers. His feathers are still alive!’

  It hasn’t hit her yet, what’s happening, what she has made happen. But she knows what’s coming, she does; the hell that she’s sliding and falling towards.

  * * *

  Rose is giving an on-screen briefing to Bronze Command and other senior officers.

  ‘Jamie Alton’s mother says that she can’t reason with him, even if she can get through to him. She thinks he’s been entirely radicalized; that her son no longer exists. There is no chance of negotiation.’

  As she speaks she looks at the live drone feed, watching the gunman in the balaclava and combat clothes, once Jamie Alton, facing the pottery room; his converted semi-automatic against his right shoulder, his finger on the trigger which will shoot fifty bullets in three seconds.

  Camille Giraud is just visible at the window; maybe she’s trying to talk to Jamie Alton or is back at work putting in her clay tiles. Both are futile. Perhaps Camille already knows that, but cannot bear feeling as useless as Rose does right now.

  Lysander comes on to the screen.

  ‘A heavily encrypted announcement on the dark net has been accessed. I’m sending it to your screens. Presumably it was meant to be about the children in Junior School but is now applicable to the children in the pottery room. It was scheduled to be released at 12.20 p.m. today on to Aryan Knight’s Twitter and Instagram accounts.’

  He sends through the announcement.

  I am Aryan Knight.

  When you read this I’ll be firing until they take me out.

  Cliff Heights School took in Muslim scum.

  Doesn’t matter how young the cucks are, they’re traitors because their libtard parents are traitors.

  This is a warning.

  Collaborators in white genocide will be punished.

  Put your own first.

  When you read this, I’ll be firing. The announcement was programmed to be released at 12.20 p.m. It’s now 11.26 a.m. They have fifty-four minutes to rescue the pottery-room children and their indefatigable teacher. It’s a respite from the immediate pressing danger and gives them a chance. Around her, Rose sees her team’s and Dannisha’s relief and breathes out before she realizes she’d been holding her breath.

  ‘We have fifty-four minutes to kill Alton and rescue the children and their teacher,’ Bronze Commander says to all the unit commanders listening and watching this. ‘Unless we’re seen, in which case, he opens fire. So we make sure we’re not seen. We find any terrorist drone and take it down. Yes, visibility is atrocious, but we have a window of opportunity. So we hunt hard. We take their drone down and then we close in and shoot him dead.’

  Shots to his medulla oblongata, so there’s no involuntary muscle movement, so his finger won’t press the trigger.

  ‘Will they know we’ve seen this?’ Bronze Commander asks Lysander.

  ‘No, there was an alarm on it, but the ghost— the person who found it lives in a totalitarian regime, she’s good at not tripping alarms and hiding what she’s up to. Though I very much doubt Alton thought anyone would get close to accessing it with that level of encryption.’

  Rose thinks again about the timing of the announcement: 12.20 p.m. UK time is 7.20 a.m. on the east coast of America – timed to grab headlines on US primetime breakfast shows.

  ‘Anything more on a third terrorist?’ Bronze Commander asks.

  No one in the briefing speaks, which is good, Rose thinks, because hopefully he doesn’t exist and Rafi and Basi are safe.

  * * *

  Beth Alton sits in the Portakabin, waiting in a six metre by three metre hell for her son to be killed. Because of her.

  ‘They’ll shoot him, Beth, if we can’t talk to him.’

  She needs Mike to know about the children in the pottery room, their parents waiting; needs him to see these photos; to catch up with her to the point where you know that your son is already dead; that there are ways of being killed and remaining alive; that you want him to be killed so that he can still be loved.

  She is aware of the jeans she put on this morning, the socks and the bra and pants and shirt and jumper, which belong to a different woman, as if she is wearing a dead woman’s clothes.

  She woke up this morning loving Jamie more than anyone else on this earth, would gladly have died for him, still would. She has a physical yearning for him, back to when he was little and wanted her as only a mother can be wanted; such a physical thing, parts of you that aren’t loved by a husband or lover; small arms around your leg, your waist, your hair stroked and tugged, your lap climbed into. She wants to kiss his cheek, stroke his forehead, gather him up into her arms.

  She looks down at her lap, at the enlarged picture of Jamie’s face, covered in the balaclava, looking at his eyes in the cut-out holes.

  Who is this person?

  I don’t know, Mum.

  He doesn’t even look like you, not when you look really closely.

  The mask makes things a bit difficult, Mum.

  But I can see the eyes. They’ve blown the photo up really big. The eyes are the right colour and shape, I can see the eyelashes too. You’ve always had such beautiful thick eyelashes. But they’re not your eyes.

  No.

  He’s talking to her again and his voice in her head isn’t delusional; imagined, yes, but not mad. It’s the Jamie he was six months ago, her son that she loves, the teenager he should be now.

  This man is going to shoot children, Jamie.

  I could never do that. Never.

  I know that. It’s like you were possessed. Like the devil came into your body and took it over.

  Mum, that’s really crazy talk.

  Yes. Bit crazy. But it’s true. In the old days—

  The olden times …

  Yes, people believed you could be possessed by the devil. It wasn’t a person’s fault that the devil got inside them.

  And you could have an exorcism?

  Yes. And the devil was cast out.

  And you’d be back to your old self again.

  Some countries still do believe that.

  But not in the UK in the third millennium.<
br />
  No. They’re going to shoot you. Because of what I said.

  It’s not me they’re shooting, Mum. You know that, right? You keep telling yourself that but you really need to know that. You must tell Theo and Dad too. You’re crying.

  Yes.

  Heart soft as a baby bird.

  I lost you, Jamie, and I didn’t even know.

  I was getting lost too.

  Didn’t even know to look for you.

  Have you found me now?

  *

  Will they let her hold him when they’ve killed him? She imagines his soul free again.

  * * *

  The library is shrinking around Frank. They’ve made a toilet area in one of the library alcoves, with two waste bins for pee, one for vomit, and the smell is putrid. He and Ed with their backs shoring up the books barricade, and Hannah by Mr Marr, have a bin liner because they cannot get to the toilet alcove. The gunman – they long ago stopped calling him by a name, because it’s wrong for him to be allowed a name that was on a class list and a rehearsal schedule and a locker, he doesn’t deserve a name – the gunman hasn’t tried pushing the door again, not yet. His footsteps have remained outside Mrs Kale’s classroom, having a cigarette outside their door now. Desks as barricades. They’ll be okay. Please let them be okay.

  Hannah is just a foot or so away, in touching distance. Mr Marr keeps losing consciousness but then his eyelids jerk open again, staying with them.

  There has been a spate of emails from people in the theatre, all outraged that white supremacists have come into their school and attacked them, because of Rafi who is their friend, because of his little brother. There’s so much spirit in their anger, Frank heard it in their emails and he envies it. They are still rehearsing Macbeth, taking a stand against people who they call ‘cretinous fuckers’ and liken to witches. No one in here has called them ‘cretinous fuckers’ or likened them to witches; fear has tired them out too much to come up with such energetic words and analogies.

  He thinks the footsteps have turned them into different people to their friends in the theatre, to his twin. Fear and imprisonment have eroded who they are. It’s not just that the people in the theatre are safe – just! – but they have phone chargers and loos, and they might seem like small things, but they aren’t at all small.