by Graham Joyce
In fact, there was always something unpleasant about Charlie Fraser. Right from the off I saw the words suicide nominee scribbled on his forehead in worry-lines. The thing about associating with Fraser was that the condition could become contagious. Back in my college days, I had no interest in spending any more time with him than it took to find out what the hell he was up to.
I fetched him a tissue for his bleeding nose, just as he asked. Though he hadn't commanded me with any confidence, he was a shrewd judge of psychology, and he'd correctly assessed that no further blows would follow the first. He'd spotted that I instantly regretted punching his face. He sat down and held his head back, stemming the flow of blood with the paper tissue I'd just handed him.
"I don't care what that shit is up there," I said, "but I want to know what it's got to do with me."
He shook his head slightly. His voice was distorted. Blood was trickling back from his nose into his throat, so he now had to lean forward. "You wouldn't begin to understand," he said. Or something like that. "It won't come back on you."
"What won't? What won't come back on me?"
He waved a hand through the air. "You're going to have to drive me to hospital. I need to get this looked at."
I stepped across the room and squinted at his nose. There was a lot of blood, most of it down the front of his shirt, but his nose looked pretty straight. I touched it with my forefinger.
He screamed the house down. It was obvious he was faking it now. There was nothing wrong with his nose, and I told him so. I grabbed it and gave it a waggle.
This scream, much louder than the first, left me in no doubt that he was just playing for sympathy.
"I'm going to faint. Call me a cab, then. It's the least you can do."
"Fuck off, Fraser! I don't punch people on the nose only to phone them a cab five minutes later."
He got up, wavered to one side and then staggered out of the room, still nursing his nose with the sodden, bloody tissue. It was easy to see this was all theatre. If I'd had an ounce of vindictiveness in me I would have clouted him again, harder. I followed him out into the corridor.
I thought he was headed back to his own room, and I intended to pursue him. Instead he went to the back door of the Lodge and out into the car park. "Where are you going?" I shouted.
Again he waved me away. He had a Fiesta with multiple dents and a holed exhaust pipe and he climbed in and started the engine. Working the gear stick with his free hand and steering with the crook of his elbow, he roared the throaty vehicle out of the car park.
I returned to my room. Blood had squirted up the wall in a precise diagonal. There was also blood on the carpet. I spent the next forty-five minutes cleaning it all up with an almost forensic care. I do wonder, in retrospect, if I had intuitively felt that Fraser's blood was contaminating.
I tried to put it all out of my mind by going down to the Students' Union bar and drinking six pints of bitter. "What's that on your neck?" said the girl behind the bar. It was Lindi, a half-Chinese student, one of the girls in the photographs.
"What?"
"On your neck. Looks like blood."
"It isn't blood."
"What is it then?"
"Blood."
I turned away from Lindi and within five minutes got into a senseless and aggressive argument with another student about whether Bob Dylan was fundamentally any good.
When I got back to the Lodge, I saw light leaking under the door to Fraser's room, which incidentally was located directly beneath mine. My dander was still up, and fuelled by the beer I decided to go and have it out with him again. I went to hammer on his door, but something made me tap very gently, almost furtively.
There was the sound of a brief scuffle from inside the room, and then silence. I listened at the door. I could hear things being packed away. I tapped again.
"Just a minute."
Soon enough, Fraser opened the door. He beckoned me in and closed the door behind me.
Something about the room took me by surprise. All sorts of crap was pinned to the walls: yellowing pages torn from books; newspaper articles; photocopies with lines illuminated by a highlighter pen. But distracting me from it all was the fact that his nose was up like a prize-winning tomato from the horticultural tent. Perhaps it was the beer but I had to suppress a snigger. He saw it.
"Glad you think it's funny. And the hospital confirmed that it is definitely broken, so I'd be glad if you wouldn't touch it again. They said it will heal on its own but it's still very painful."
"Sorry," I said.
"Apology accepted."
"I'm not apologizing!" I said.
"You just did."
"No, I said "sorry," but I'm not apologizing. That is, I'm sorry I'm not sorry I broke it. The waggle yes, the break no."
"You're pissed."
I sighed. He was right, I was: I'd drunk six pints of wallop on an empty stomach. I looked round for a chair and let myself collapse into it. "Talk," I said.
He put his hands on his hips and looked hard at me. "I will talk. I'll tell you everything. In fact I desperately want to tell someone, so I'm glad it's come out. But I'm not telling you while you're drunk."
"Glad what's come out?"
"The thing I will tell you about when you're sober."
"Tell me now."
"When you're sober."
"Tell me now or I'll break your other nose."
"See, you are pissed. Forget it. In the morning I'll tell you everything. But right now I'm going to bed. You can stay there or you can go."
With that Fraser kicked off his shoes, peeled off his socks and jumped into bed. That he was otherwise fully dressed didn't surprise me. He always did look and smell like he slept in his clothes, and this confirmed it. He'd turned his back on me, and had either closed his eyes or was staring at the wall. I was faced with the choice of rousting him out of his bed or leaving.
I surveyed the room again. The newsprint and the pages ripped from books and the photocopies spoke of a mind out of control. I wondered what Dick Fellowes had made of it. Though when I stepped across to look at the untidy collage more closely, some of it was just football league tables, but pinned up next to scraps torn from a Bible; or lecture notes adjacent to full-colour magazine adverts for lawnmowers.
Fraser was snoring—or pretending to. Maybe it was the effect of the swollen nose. I thought about punching him again, hard, maybe on the leg. Instead I left him to snore.
Chapter 11
On her return from lunch, Val told me that someone had chained himself to the railings at Buckingham Palace. Just the kind of everyday lunch time report you look forward to while working in one of London's many offices. Meanwhile I had to telephone the junior minister's office about the wretched government youth initiative. A chirpy female switchboard operator put me through to a decidedly non-chirpy staffer—the one who puts-the-powder-on-the-noses-of-the-assistants-to-the-junior-minister—who told me he was unavailable.
"Not chained himself to the railings, has he?"
"Pardon?"
"A joke. A small jeu."
"Who is this?"
I'd already told the dolt who I was, but I repeated my name, rank and number.
"Ah," said the staffer. "I think we just needed to know whether we had your support, that's all."
"I'm calling to discuss that very matter with the junior minister."
"So is that a yes or a no?"
"Oh, for God's sake," I almost shouted. "Tell him I returned his call." Then I put the phone down.
Some days are like that: you can't get hold of anyone and a sense of enfeeblement proceeds slowly down the spine and sets hard somewhere in the kneecaps, thereby stopping you from being able to stand up. But on such days you can return calls safe in the knowledge that the people you don't want to speak to won't be available. Then they have to return your return-call, and on it goes. I stacked up seven of these. Though it's a bit like gambling: you have to keep pressing your luck just for the fun of it, and it r
an out on the eighth when I had to call the Scouts who were trying to downplay some unpleasantness involving a member of their executive board caught accessing paedophilic images from the Internet. They wanted to know if it might threaten their funding. I wanted to tell them: I'd say it will.
It was while I was trying to advise them on a press statement that my mobile phone went. It was Antonia. She very rarely called me, and almost never on my mobile.
"Hi, Antonia. I'm busy on the other line. Can I call you back?"
"It's pretty serious, my love."
Something about that my love made me get rid of the Scouts rather quickly from the other line. "Okay, Antonia. What is it?"
"Remember Seamus? The old soldier you sent me?"
"Yes. What about him?"
"Does he have anyone at all? Any family anywhere? I mean, anyone?"
"Heck, I don't think so. He's on the streets when he's not with you. I don't think there's any family."
"Anyone who might know a little about him? I mean anything at this stage."
"What's happened?"
"He's chained himself to the railings at Buck Pal."
"Oh, it's him! I'd heard something of that!"
"It's worse than that. They went to cut him free and he says he's got a bomb under his coat."
I felt my scalp flush. Then I remembered Otto. "Antonia, there is a guy. Served with him in the Gulf. Maybe he can help."
"I'm up here at Buckingham Palace now. Well, I'm with the police. Seamus told them he'd come from GoPoint and they drove me up here. It's a stand-off. They don't know if he's bluffing or not. But if Otto would talk to him it might help."
"I'll call him. Are you there now? I'll get to you as soon as I can."
Antonia gave me a number for the officer in charge, so that I could let him know we'd be coming. I called Otto in his toyshop. I got a silly laughing-policeman message from his answering machine. I left an urgent message and luckily he called me back instantly. I explained the situation and arranged to meet him so that we could go there together.
I knew it would take Otto at least forty-five minutes to get into town, so I finished up at the office, advising the Scouts to distance themselves from the paedophile and recommending that they move away from short trousers altogether. Just as I was pulling on my coat the phone went again. Val took the call and whispered that it was the junior minister's powder-boy. Or words to that effect. I waved her away and as I left I heard her lie sweetly that I'd already left the building.
I met Otto at Victoria and we hotfooted it up to the palace. The police had cordoned off Birdcage Walk and Constitution Hill, and a quite sizeable crowd had been pushed back way behind the Queen Victoria Memorial. A police officer in a flak jacket put his hand out to stop us getting any nearer, but I gave him the name and number of his commanding officer and after radioing ahead he let us pass. We were then escorted up to the command point.
I could see Antonia in a borrowed police coat, talking to an officer of rank. They were standing next to a police Land Rover, surrounded by a lot of armed officers in flak jackets. They all seemed to have earpieces and mouth-mikes. Up by the railings lay propped the lonely figure of Seamus. I could only see his head, because the area immediately in front of him, and the palace forecourt behind the railings, had been sandbagged.
Antonia introduced me to the commander, a tall, grey-haired figure with a long jaw and a jovial expression. "We've just worked out we were at school together," Antonia said.
"Who, you and Seamus?"
"No," the commander said, rubbing his large white hands together, "me and Antonia here."
That was Antonia. Give her two minutes and she'd establish the common ground. Five minutes and she'd have the commander on her committee. They both looked at me as if they expected me to join in the chat about schooldays, then the commander pulled himself up. "Are you the fellow who knows him?"
I said I wasn't, and introduced Otto. "We were in the Gulf together," Otto said. He sounded apologetic.
"He says he's wired. Was he trained in explosives?" the commander asked Otto.
"Yes. He was a colour sergeant. Knew a bit of everything. But he's not wired. You can take it from me."
"I'm going to need a lot more than that," said the policeman.
"He's not a bomber. Let me talk to him. I'm all he's got. I'll talk him down."
The commander glanced up at the heavens, which were filled with plump dark clouds. He seemed to bring the threat of rain down from the sky when he fixed Otto with his gaze. You could feel clouds moving overhead.
"He's just a dosser," Otto tried again.
"All right. We'll stand back."
"You've got to treat him well," Otto said. "He's been to hell, that man."
"Go and have a word," said the policeman.
"I'll come with you," Antonia said.
Otto looked at her. "No." Then he turned to me. "You come."
I looked at the commander and he nodded assent. For the first time the implications actually dawned on me of what might happen if Seamus had strapped himself up with explosives. But like Otto I knew that he had neither the means nor the resources, and together we walked across to the railings where the old soldier had chained himself, watched by TV cameras and a thousand eyes.
We stopped just in front of the sandbags. A long way behind Seamus, in the palace forecourt, the royal guards in their bearskin hats stood to unflinching attention, just as they did for the tourists every single day of the year. The commotion hadn't even scratched their routine. How very English, I thought. How very fucking stupid. Come the hour, I had no doubt they would change the watch with all pomp, utterly regardless of what was happening outside the railings.
"Seamus," Otto shouted, "what the fuck you doing?"
"Who's that?" croaked a voice from the other side of the sandbags.
"It's Otto, mate. Otto."
"Otto? What you doing here?"
"More to the point is what you are doing here, Seamus. Can I come and have a word?"
"Who's that with you?"
"A mate of mine. You know him. Can we come and have a little conflab? Talk tactics. Eh Seamus? Eh?"
"I don't mind."
Otto turned and signalled the thumbs up to the police clustered around the Land Rover. We stepped inside the sand-bagged perimeter.
Seamus looked very different. He'd shaved his head. Something very large was bulking out his coat. I didn't like being there one bit. I wondered why Otto had asked me to be with him.
Otto said, "Well, this is a right bloody caper."
Seamus turned his gaze on me. A fleck of hoar frost glittered in his eye. I thought again of the Ancient Mariner, and I wondered if I'd ever see another wedding. "Who's he?"
"We met before, Seamus," I said. "I sent you to GoPoint."
He wrinkled a leathery nostril. "I don't know you."
"You want a ciggie?" said Otto. "Go on, have a smoke. Go on."
"I'll have a smoke off you. Yeh, I'll have a smoke."
Otto lit a cigarette and passed it to Seamus. Then he lit one for himself. I don't smoke, but I asked for one, too. Otto said, "What's this all about, then."
Seamus tapped the side of his nose. "Special ops."
"There is no ops, Seamus. We don't do ops any more, you and me. We're in civvies. Better off, too."
"Not on about that."
"What you on about, then?"
"All a fuck, isn't it? It's all about a fuck."
Otto looked at me and wiped a finger under his nose. "What's all this about bombs? What you got strapped under that coat? You've got nothing there. Tell me there's nothing there. What do you expect to get out of this, eh?"
"I want an audience with the Queen. I want to tell her what I know."
"Eh? The Queen? Queen don't give a fuck about the likes of you and me, Seamus."
"I've been a fucking loyal soldier to the fucking Queen. I want to tell her what I know. And if she won't come down here, she can ride raggy-arsed to B
irmingham." Whatever this phrase meant, Seamus found its utterance very funny. He tipped back his head. "Ha ha ha ha ha!"
Otto looked to me again. "Tell him the Queen won't come. Tell him she's eating pie in the palace, and too busy."
"He's right, Seamus," I said. "The Queen won't come here."
The old soldier looked around at the gritty pavement on either side of him. "Yeh," he said seriously, "it's a bit mucky, innit? Maybe we should sweep up a bit."