Country of the Blind

by Brookmyre, Christopher

  And so it came to pass that Nicole did declare herself a Lefty. Her pal Monica, who was into Howard Jones at ten and The Smiths a bit later, had declared herself a vegetarian (her father owned a bacon-curing business).

  She met Rob at university in London, after a meeting at the student union to discuss plans for protest about some reactionary outrage that she couldn’t now remember. It had been one of the first such events she attended, a hall full of young people desperately looking for a common cause and a set of shared beliefs; what they needed wasn’t politics, it was religion. There was an overwhelming sincerity and worthiness, earnestness about it all, a reverence that seemed, well, again, religious. Until, of course, the SWP mob fell out with the RCP over some minute point of interpreted socialist principle, and the Labour Group got shirty with the Marxist Group about what slogans to put on their placards, and the Intergalactic Socialists for a Marxist Universe started a spat with the Vegan Organic Hamster Protection League . . . And so on.

  Her older flatmate, Pippa, who was in her final year and had been round the houses with this stuff before, had sung her a song when she announced her intention to attend:

  One Trot faction, sitting in a hall,

  One Trot faction, sitting in a hall,

  And if one Trot faction, should have a nasty squall,

  There’ll be two Trot factions, sitting in a hall.

  Two Trot factions . . .

  Her faith had been restored slightly in the bar afterwards, where she recognised a guy from the meeting, someone who had seemed refreshingly aloof, watching events from the back, arms folded and wearing a sardonic expression. He was very accurately caricaturing some of the speakers, and cutting ruthlessly through all the bullshit and posturing to get to the issues that the meeting should have been about. Nicole took one look at him in action, drink in hand, surrounded by a laughing audience, and would later blush at some of the thoughts that popped into her head. Unfortunately, thoughts were all she’d ever have. His name was Eberhardt – his father was German and his mother a West Indian from East Ham – and his wit, intelligence, laughing brown eyes and flowing dreads all belonged to Martina, the drop-dead blonde sitting on his right.

  Rob was the consolation prize. Nicole made the mistake of thinking, because she had seen him laugh at Eb’s jokes, that he had (a) understood them and (b) a sense of humour.

  She had seen Martina on TV in recent months, presenting some Channel Four kids-and-chaos affair, and had heard her romantically linked to several B-list celebrities. Funnily enough, the last time she saw Eb was on TV too, but it was on the news. He was working in Rwanda for an aid agency, surrounded by a rag-bag of children who were shrieking and laughing at everything he did as they followed him around the refugee camp. His hero status remained very much intact.

  By contrast, Rob’s stock had fallen, it would be fair to say. The humourlessness that she had mistaken for integrity, the ideological snobbery she had thought was political commitment. She still felt embarrassed for the green first year who had fallen for it, but she couldn’t blame her for not seeing through him right away. He was very good at emotional manipulation, at eroding your bases from within, making you feel worthless without him. Making you need his approval, making you feel that he was a pillar without which you couldn’t stand up. This, of course, he achieved by subtly chipping away at your self-respect, and cutting you adrift from the values and beliefs you had moored yourself to.

  Her most frequent mistake was thinking he was listening to her. She thought he understood what she was saying about her family, her relationship with her father, when really all Rob latched on to was that her father was an establishment gargoyle from whose clutches he could rescue her. It was his fantasised ideal of their relationship. He was always trying to take her by the hand and lead her through the streets of London, like she was the bloody pit-owner’s daughter who needed her eyes opened. The bizarre, sliding-scale inverted snobbery that made him think he had been afforded priceless insight by being brought up by parents who earned less than hers, even though it was still in a middle-class house in a middle-class neighbourhood with a middle-class school, middle-class friends and middle-class values. Amazing, apparently, the difference in your ability to understand the world, depending on your mum and dad’s combined take-home and the size of their bloody drawing room. Wasn’t this what they were trying to get away from?

  But then Rob wasn’t very big on irony.

  He couldn’t see the joke in his class-warrior act any more than he could see that his use of – for want of a better expression – “political correctness” was in itself a vehicle for his own prejudices. Actually, there wasn’t a better expression, that was the problem. Nicole didn’t think political correctness existed as an entity or a code or a system or anything else. It was a phrase that certain conservative elements had thought up because they needed a stick to beat back at the liberals with. It was a phrase coined by people who resented the fact that you couldn’t treat niggers, yids, shirt-lifters, bints and cripples the way you used to, who wanted to believe that it was all part of some organised agenda (and therefore reversible), rather than a natural, gradual, evolved process of increased understanding and therefore tolerance, which was leaving them all behind.

  Rob, however, used it to look down on people and social groups in what he thought was an ideologically sanctioned way. A new snobbery for the Nineties. His sneering disdain when he heard someone address a woman as “luv” or “pet” or “darlin’ ”, for instance, thinking there was a crime in the language, unmitigated by innocuous intent. People who didn’t recycle their newspapers. People who bought the wrong newspapers in the first place. People who talked about “girls”, not “women”. He never realised that what he was really sneering at was that they were somehow less than him, beneath him. And the fact that they were almost invariably working-class was probably significant. (Just maybe.)

  God knows how, but they lasted more than eighteen months. In the end it was taking him to actually meet her parents that finished it, but then maybe, in a devilish way, taking him to meet her parents had been her way of finishing it. She must have known what would happen.

  Rob just wasn’t programmed for it. It did not compute. Her father was warm, welcoming, genuine, generous and, above all, magnanimous. Rob must have been shattered not to find himself perceptibly disapproved of, nor any great strain between Dariusz Carrow and his younger daughter. Her dad didn’t agree with her politics, but had (almost infuriatingly) refused to be upset by her apostasy; indeed he seemed amused (in a not quite the full hundred per cent patronising manner, though close) that she had turned out this way. But that was him through and through. He was someone who was entertained by life’s twists and surprises, rather than constantly disappointed by its failure to meet his expectations (which, she too late understood, rendered her efforts at rebellion rather futile).

  To Rob, politics was about good guys and bad guys, knights and dragons. He never had the grace to acknowledge positive aspects of political opponents, couldn’t admit to qualities of humour, wit, generosity or conscience in a Tory. He saw them as non-persons, sub-human, or (of course, thank you Mr Bevan) vermin. Nicole had heard such terms before, but more importantly, so had her grandmother, in Poland.

  She could read his mind at the dinner table, see him find all sorts of ideological significance in the constituents of the delicious menu her mum had prepared for them (he must have been shattered at the absence of servants), but the overall atmosphere of warmth and civility was what finally flipped him out. He was one of the knights, and he clearly felt duty-bound to slay the dragon, despite the dragon’s hospitality and conspicuous failure to breathe any fire.

  Her dad didn’t rise to it at first, trying to be both diplomatic and polite in changing the subject. But Rob had to fight, needed to fight. Even though this was being served up unprovoked at his own table, Dariusz was clearly prepared to let it go rather than cause a scene that would upset his daughter. However,
a combination of annoyance that Rob was upsetting his daughter and the fact that his wife had already weighed in and been subject to some moral accusations that were as insulting as they were bizarre, meant that the gloves had to come off.

  And Nicole enjoyed it. She really, utterly, massively enjoyed it. It was like watching the All Blacks against her old school team. Her father was a trial lawyer, for God’s sake – what chance did the goateed pipsqueak think he had? She could see the look on his face, the defeat, the self-disgust, the realisation that he was finally playing for his team, fighting for his side, wearing the jersey – and getting an absolute trouncing (or gubbing, as they’d say round here). The desolation of seeing his supposedly infallible moral sword blunted and useless, the first time he’d ever really got to unsheathe it.

  And it wasn’t fair. Not fair at all. She knew that. She could not possibly have condoned some of the stances her father took or the tactics he employed, but his technique was nonetheless breath-taking to watch.

  Rob couldn’t face her, and she knew that too. There was no big scene, not even a heavy phone-call. In fact he never rang again, and tended not to be around the same bars, clubs, meetings or buildings as her after that either.

  She saw a bit more of her parents, though. There had been a few shared glances between her and her father during his demolition of Rob, a few mutually noted glints of enjoyment, a joke just the two of them were in on. So she made a greater effort to go home the odd weekend, and her father made a greater effort to be there when she did.

  They were able to talk politics together from time to time, and although he never attempted to change her views, and she definitely couldn’t accept his positions, he did nonetheless teach her a few things.

  “We’re not monsters, Pepper, that’s the first thing you’ve got to appreciate,” he once said. “This demonisation, it’s not healthy, not constructive. You know I’m not some rampaging oppressor; neither are my family or your mother’s family. And we’re not ‘the exception that proves the rule’, either. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking everyone who doesn’t agree with you is some kind of alien whom you can’t possibly relate to or communicate with.

  “I know that shouting a few slogans and lobbing some metaphorical rotten apples at a few aunt sallies can help get a head of steam up, but it’s no substitute for political debate. It’s also not a million miles away from what your man Orwell was on about. You go back and read about the Two-Minute Hate next time you see a bunch of protesters chanting hysterically on some demo. What this country needs, as a democracy – maybe now more than ever – is an exchange of ideas, some discourse. And you can’t have that if you don’t respect the other side a little.”

  “Well I don’t think anyone ever told Thatcher that, when she was talking about ‘wiping socialism from the face of the Earth’,” Nicole replied. “That didn’t exactly do a great deal to engender an atmosphere conducive to reasoned debate, did it?”

  “No, it didn’t,” he conceded. “It certainly reduced the currency of debate – I think deliberately. After years of consensus politics, she knew it was going to be a time for really taking sides, and it stiffened a few spines to mix it like that. Some would see it as a deft political manoeuvre, but certainly it left a bad taste in a few mouths. None more than your grandfather’s. I know you’ll find it hard to believe, but we used to argue about politics a great deal, while you and Gillian were tucked up in bed upstairs. Your grandfather was what was called a ‘Wet’. An Old School Conservative who saw politics as a more gentlemanly affair than it has become today. He always said he found Thatcher and her accomplices . . . rather ‘thuggish’, was the word he used.”

  “And you?”

  “I was younger, and it was a climate for a younger generation. I’ve got my reservations in retrospect, but at the time, Pepper . . . Well, it was exciting, let me tell you. It was intoxicating. Things were really changing, rapidly. And I know you’ll tell me that while the champagne was flowing and the Porsches were lining up around the Square Mile, the bill for the party was being met else-where – in the North and in Scotland - but by God it shook the country up. It changed it, moved it forward. And there will be winners and losers every time there’s change, so don’t tell me to feel guilty because I was one of the winners this time. For despite the aspects that seem rather distasteful in hindsight, if I went back there I’d sign up to be a part of it all again.”

  “You’d vote for her if she made a comeback?”

  “No, no. I just mean that I don’t regret the choices I made back then. Different measures suit different times. I don’t believe I was wrong, we were wrong or even she was wrong, even though I do regret some of her legacies.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, like this mutually suspicious politics of hatred that we’ve been talking about. I know it’s hard, but you’ve got to put it behind you, rise above it. It’s no good me saying ‘don’t reduce polities to a slanging match’ and you replying ‘well, your lot started it’. At some point you’ve got to write off the old scores and look ahead to a new game. And although I know you don’t respect the people in the Cabinet just now, you have to look beyond them, too. It’s about ideas and values, not slogans and personalities.

  “I don’t know, maybe I’ve turned into an old Wet like your grandfather, or maybe it’s just the lawyer in me, but I think polities is more fun when there’s two strong sides squaring up, no quarter asked or given, and respect on both sides. Because if you don’t respect your opponent, you’re not respecting the game, and that means you’re not respecting our parliament.”

  “What, so you’re telling me after all this time that you respect the Labour Party? That you respected Neil Kinnock?”

  “I respect the fact that the Labour Party has always been an advocate for, well, sections of society that have perhaps not been so high on the Conservative agenda. And you have to respect the fact that the Left’s agenda doesn’t cover the whole spectrum either. I know it sounds trite to say that ‘it’s all very well looking after the poor but someone needs to look after the rich’, but there’s a grain of truth in it nonetheless. And that truth is that in Britain we need two sides, two advocates, each reminding the other about the issues that aren’t on their agendas, the parts of the board that their plans don’t cover.”

  “It might help if a few of the current cabinet thought that way too,” Nicole said.

  Her father had arched his brows, seemingly troubled by unspoken thoughts.

  “Yes, well,” he said. “I’d have to give you that one. I do often wonder what your grandfather would have made of the likes of Portillo and Swan. He was a great admirer of Lord Home in his day, of men who saw their role in government as one of service. The problem with those two is that they are very much creatures of current politics. One gets the impression when one of them drafts a paper or makes a speech, they’re less concerned with how the idea would affect the country than how its reception will affect their standing within the party. I never thought I’d hear myself say it, Pepper, but I do fear that it’s a symptom of a party too long in government.”

  “Well, it seems there’s at least one thing we’re agreed on.”

  However, there had been another consequence of her father’s humiliation of Rob back then, something that strengthened Nicole’s resolve to make her own way in law, something that confirmed the difference between them. She had enjoyed his mastery, certainly, and thrilled at his oratory, but was disturbed not only by his use of arguments that she found abhorrent, but more by his use of arguments that she knew he found abhorrent.

  There were lawyers, she knew, who although they would (obviously) never admit it, nonetheless took pride in achieving a verdict they knew to be unjust, considering it a testament to their own prowess that they could play the game so expertly. Lawyers who well knew that their client had done it, for instance, but whose egos it boosted to win the case, to let their own abilities wield more power than the facts. And she knew that it wasn�
��t all down to egotistical misanthropy; whatever his or her beliefs or intentions, a lawyer has to do whatever is in his or her power to win the case, and can soon forget the morality of it as the race gets faster, the contest heats up.

  But there was still something very distasteful about it, something that underlined how it was just a game to the lawyers when it meant a hell of a lot more to the other people inside and outside of the courtroom. Gods playing with the mortals for their sport.

  There was a look on Rob’s face, fed up with him as she had been, which she recognised and which bothered her. She knew it from courtrooms, from the many spare mornings and afternoons she had spent watching trials. The bewildered, frustrated and – most significantly – impotent look on the face of the poor sod on the stand, as he sees truth, fact, logic and reason implode and disintegrate under an onslaught of semantic gymnastics, molecule-width hair-splitting, near Dadaist reinterpretation, and mean, downright sophistry. And she didn’t just mean the accused or the plaintiff; how often had she seen the honest eye-witness, or the casualty officer who treated the victim, or whoever, stagger back into the body of the courtroom feeling like they had been unmasked up there as a malignant liar, an incompetent moron, or both?

  The devil, it seemed, was never short of an advocate. The ordinary punter, however, was often less spoilt for choice in his representation. And so what if it sounded naive? She wanted to assist people as they cowered before the imposing and forbidding complexity of this machine which otherwise sucked them in, twisted them, stretched them, turned them inside out and upside down, and then spat them out, telling them as they lay there, dazed, whether it had (by the way) found for or against them.

  A guide through the maze, a Sherpa on their climb.

  Nicole’s real sin hadn’t been a rebellion, but a vanity. While her father expertly worked the machine, she thought she could take it on. This is what you want: to defend the ordinary Joe who is being buffeted, abused and toyed with at the unknown whims of a shapeless entity he can no more understand than he can control.