Angelica kneels on the ground to smooth it out against the concrete. Yesterday’s date is scrawled at the top and after that …
But I can’t watch this in silence any more.
‘Aunty Angelica?’ I murmur.
Still on her knees, she wheels round like some small cornered animal.
‘What are you doing here?’ she hisses, clutching the crumpled paper against herself as she clambers hastily to her feet. ‘I really can’t stand the way you keep creeping and snooping round me. So like your mother. I’m a grown-up woman, for goodness sake, David. Do you really think I can’t look after myself?’
‘Well, sometimes you do need a bit of help, Aunty, and you did seem very upset earlier. I was just calling by to make sure you were alright, and then I noticed you down here by the bins.’
‘So you thought you’d have a bit of a laugh at old Angelica, did you? Have a bit of a laugh, eh, and then get in your mother’s good books by telling her the whole story? Go away, David. I don’t want you. Just go, go, go!’
But a few hours later, she calls me in tears, begging me to come back over.
I let myself into the flat with my own key and find her sobbing on the floor beside her dresser. She’s still clinging to that little piece of paper, though she’s scrumpled it back up into a sodden ball. Gently I remove it from her hand and set it down.
Some time later, when I’ve poured her a brandy and tucked her up for the night, I have a look at it, but there’s almost nothing to see. All that’s written there, apart from the date, is the single word which most letters begin with.
I meet James on my way out. He’s coming back from the shops with a few purchases in a carrier bag.
‘Good evening,’ he says blandly – whatever the truth about his memory, he recognises me perfectly well every time he sees me – and then he gives me that smile.
There is poor David, that smile seems to say. There is David with all his responsibilities and pressures and painful attachments. There is David the ever-anxious juggler, still trying desperately to keep those clubs in the air. And here, on the other hand, is lucky James, with his life-long sick note, giving him permission to let them fall.
Rage
On that particular morning I’d travelled down to London by train from Cambridge, where I’d been participating in a conference on problems of governance in emerging economies, and had stayed overnight with some friends. I arrived at King’s Cross at 8.15 or thereabouts. I stood in a queue at a food stall for a couple of minutes, meaning to buy myself a croissant and a cappuccino, then decided that I really didn’t need them. I’d already had one breakfast and I was, and still am, over two stone overweight. So I abandoned the queue and headed down to the southbound Piccadilly Line in order to travel to the Holborn offices of a certain NGO, small, but highly regarded in the field, which funds experimental agricultural projects in southern Africa. They’d commissioned me and an old colleague of mine called Emily to do an evaluation of one of their projects, and we were due to present our provisional findings at 9.30.
There was a train waiting at the platform. I climbed onto it near the front and, although of course it was pretty full at that time of the morning, I was lucky enough to find myself a seat. On the way up from Cambridge, I’d gone over our provisional report and jotted down some key points. Now, as the train moved off, I went back over the notes I’d written to make sure I’d got them clear in my mind. I was keen to make a good impression because I wanted to pick up more commissions from this particular outfit. They paid well and I needed the work. My wife and I had recently separated, so we had two houses to pay for instead of one, and my daughter Jasmine was about to start at university.
The doors closed. The train picked up speed and plunged into the southbound tunnel. I looked up for a moment at my travelling companions: Londoners – black, white, brown – reading, playing with their phones, listening to music, or just quietly sitting or standing in that little capsule of air and electric light and thinking their private thoughts as they hurtled through concrete and clay. People sometimes talk about the loneliness and alienation of big cities but I felt a surge of affection for these city folk, who every single day encounter many times more human beings than they could hope to get to know in an entire lifetime. How many other species would sit quietly and harmoniously in such a confined space with so many fellow creatures they’d never met?
I arrived at the office in time to get a cup of coffee before the meeting, and have a quick word with Emily, who’d travelled up from Brighton. Two more people arrived, Peter and Amina – we knew both of them pretty well: the overseas development community is a small world – and the four of us went through into the meeting room to wait for the most important person, Sue, who as head of the NGO’s research section, had commissioned our work.
Sue arrived late, looking very agitated.
‘Haven’t you heard the news? There’s been a whole series of bomb attacks in the Underground. The whole tube system has shut down.’
We put off the start of the meeting. Amina set up her laptop on the table so we could watch the unfolding story, both to figure out its immediate implications for our day and to process it in a more general sense. There were suggestions at first that as many as six bombs had gone off, but the reports gradually settled on three: three different trains, one at Aldgate, one at Edgware Road and one at Russell Square. But then, just when that seemed to have been clarified, another bomb went off on a bus. How many more would there be?
I don’t remember the timing of it all, but at some point I figured out that the train bombed at Russell Square was on the southbound Piccadilly Line and must have followed directly after the one I travelled on. I looked back at my peaceful space capsule, hurtling through the earth, and imagined another one just like it, another collection of ordinary London people – white, black, brown – reading, listening to music, or just thinking their own thoughts, as they followed my train into that same dark tunnel. But, in their case, this familiar scene had been abruptly torn away like some flimsy canvas backdrop. Some of them would have been buried under corpses, or trapped by bits of train, or impaled by other people’s bones. Some would have been blown to pieces. Some would just be terrified. I imagined a second or two of silence and then screaming voices everywhere, from up and down the train, like the voices of the damned in hell.
‘My feeble attempt at dieting hasn’t succeeded in reducing my weight,’ I told the others, my voice wobbly, ‘but it may quite possibly have saved my life. If I’d bought that croissant, I’d have missed the train I came on, and caught the one after.’
I was pretty shaken for many days afterwards, but I didn’t suffer the survivor guilt that some people report after a close shave of that kind. I guess one day I may eat these words, but I’ve never really got that ‘Why me?’ stuff. The answer, it seems to me, is quite simple: I didn’t buy the croissant. What more do people expect? How exactly do they imagine this universe is arranged?
And as to the question of why anyone could feel justified in killing and maiming people who he or she didn’t even know, well, that wasn’t a mystery to me either.
Nowadays, when white British folk like me hear the word terrorist we think of some fanatical Islamist dreaming of martyrdom and paradise, his beliefs utterly alien to our own. My neighbour George, for instance, is a philosophy lecturer who is irritated to distraction by anything that isn’t logical, and he blames the whole phenomenon, firstly on the backwardness of the Islamic religion, and secondly, and more generally, on religion itself. If only these people could be weaned off their medieval belief in a superior being and persuaded to embrace secular, scientific, progressive modernity, then, in George’s view, this irrational and ugly behaviour would cease.
But George is very young, and I’ve reached the age when even philosophers look like kids. I remember the terrorists of the sixties and seventies: the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Pale
stine, the Basques and the IRA. None of them were motivated by religion, and most of them, including even the Arabs, were Marxists: which is to say that they subscribed to an ideology that saw itself precisely as secular, scientific and progressive. What’s more, the European terrorists often came from very similar backgrounds to my neighbour George and myself. Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, for instance, both came from middle class academic families, just like the family I grew up in, or George’s family now.
So, yes, in these present times, it is young Muslims who are being drawn to the possibilities of random murder as a way of making a political or moral point. But in my teenage years that particular pressure wave was passing through a different medium, and was much closer to my own world and my own experience. And, sequestered though I was in the bubble-like environment of a private boarding school, I myself felt its pull.
I fancied myself as a writer back then and I remember writing a story when I was fifteen or so, which contrasted two figures. One of them was a kind of Christian guru, a bit like Mother Teresa, to whom the famous and powerful came for spiritual guidance; the other was a greasy-haired loner who built bombs in his mouldy bedsit and threw them randomly into crowds. The point of the story was that it was the terrorist who was the truly good person, even though he had a crappy personality and everyone hated him. The guru bolstered an unjust world by making the powerful feel good, but the terrorist, by making everyone feel bad, was driving the world towards change.
The school was called Shotsford House and its main building was a former stately home, surrounded by woodland and chalky hills. It saw itself as progressive – no fagging, for instance, no cane and no cold showers, though these were all still common at that time – and it had a sort of Christian humanist ethos of a kind that was more widespread in those days than it is now.
Here, for instance, is the headmaster, standing at his podium at morning assembly. His name is Mr Frobisher. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ he booms out, ‘for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.’ He pauses for several seconds, his great head bowed over the book, wind whistling in and out of his nostrils. Christ, that man could ham it up! Then suddenly he looks up at us with fiery and accusing eyes. ‘Blessed are the poor – in – spirit,’ he repeats, and begins to speak with passionate intensity of the selfishness, greed and crass materialism of the modern world. ‘Grab what you can,’ he hisses, clawing at the air, his whole face distorted by the ugliness he wants to convey. ‘Grab what you can by whatever means you can get away with, and to hell with everyone else.’ The country is in the middle of a railway strike – large industrial strikes were pretty frequent occurrences back then – and Mr Frobisher uses this as an illustration of his point. The railwaymen, he says, are ‘opportunists of the worst kind, holding the whole community to ransom, not for the sake of some great cause, but for colour television sets and bigger cars.’ He almost spits out the words.
Now comes the pause again, the bowing of the head, the whistling wind. ‘You are very privileged,’ he concludes in a new soft voice. ‘You will have many opportunities. You could very easily use those opportunities for purely personal gain. But I beg you, I beg all of you, to make them into opportunities to serve.’
After another silence, he lifts his head, and becomes suddenly brisk and business-like as he turns to the more mundane everyday business, of which we all of us must take our share. He makes various announcements. And finally he issues one of his regular reminders that ‘decorum and courtesy’ are expected at all times when potential pupils are being shown round the school with their parents.
These people might arrive in brand new Jaguars, the tense-faced little boys in the uniforms of expensive preparatory schools, the mothers in furs, the fathers with heavy Rolexes on their wrists, but their crass materialism will never in any circumstances be pointed out.
I planned a terror attack with my best friend Jules. We’d recently seen the Lindsay Anderson film if … and it almost perfectly encapsulated our mood.
‘We could do something like that,’ said Jules.
I loved that boy. He was never still. He thought three times as quickly as anyone else, talked three times faster, laughed and raged three times as often, burning up so much nervous energy that he always looked half-starved, like some beautiful, penniless Romantic poet. He was constantly thinking of new ways in which he and I could step out of the dreary consensual world and into the forbidden brightness beyond. It was him who decided one night we should walk right round the stone cornice of the main school building, four storeys up in the dark. It was him who got hold of those two tabs of LSD, the first of many, which we took one October day on top of a hill and watched the whole red pile of Shotsford House below us reveal itself to be nothing larger or more significant than a gaudy cake, iced in vulgar pink and white, and crawling inside with maggots. And it was him now who was proposing we become terrorists.
He suggested it on a Sunday afternoon, when we’d driven down to the coast in a beaten up old car the two of us had managed to acquire for a few quid from an elderly local. We’d stopped at a pub and were sitting outside in the sun. Gulls were wheeling above us. The forbidden beer was pure ambrosia, our forbidden white Cortina a celestial chariot that would carry us between the stars.
‘We should do something like that,’ Jules said. ‘Get some guns and shoot the place up. Think of the impact! The whole rotten system would shake in its fucking boots.’
Shotsford House had a rifle range, and we knew that guns were stored in a metal cupboard in the basement corridor. Things were much more casual in those days. Nowadays an expensive boarding school like Shotsford has a whole team of uniformed security guards equipped with vehicles and radios, and each pupil has an individual room, complete with en suite shower. But we washed in communal bathrooms and slept on sagging mattresses in chilly dormitories, while the entire security of the great dark building around us was entrusted to a single elderly man from a local village who wandered round the place with a torch. His name was Eliot, and, for strategic reasons, Jules and I had made a friend of him.
So now, sitting there in the pub with seagulls wheeling above us, and our chariot waiting for our return, we made a plan. In the early hours of the last day of term, Jules would meet Eliot near the science block, some distance from the main building, and engage him in conversation long enough for me to saw through the padlock and get out the guns. Eliot was very fond of talking and didn’t see school discipline as being part of his job. On the basis of previous experience, we could be quite confident that, at the end of their conversation, he’d just tell Jules to go to bed and carry on with his rounds. Jules would then meet me in a hiding place of ours under the roof: a disused storeroom with a tiny window which we normally used for smoking out of, but from which it was possible, with a bit of effort, to squeeze out onto that high stone cornice. In the morning, when the parents came purring up the drive in their Jaguars and Rovers to pick up their darling boys, we’d be up there to greet them. Our backs against the sky, we’d fire down on them like avenging angels.
‘Are we just talking here, Jules, or are we serious?’ I asked, coming back from the bar with two more pints, and a new packet of rolling tobacco.
Jules was beautiful in my eyes, and I in his and we ached with desire for one another. We never expressed that desire in words, let alone through actual sex, and maybe I’m just repressed but I don’t think I would even have wanted that. But every touch was a delight, and when we were together, it was as if we lit up the whole world.
Jules grabbed the tobacco and ripped off the cellophane, and we each tugged out a moist bundle of treacly strands. That stuff was especially delicious when it was completely new.
‘Let’s do it,’ he said, as he exhaled his first rich cloud of smoke. ‘Come on, let’s really do it. I mean, why not? Apart from fear, what reason is there to hold back?’
Various answers do now suggest themselves to me – the desire not to kill people who had done us no harm, just t
o pluck a for-instance from the air – but at the time his question was rhetorical, and the moral objections carried so little weight that we didn’t even speak of them. The following week I stole a hacksaw from the metalwork room and experimented with it on various pieces of iron-mongery to see how much time I’d need and how much noise I’d make.
But then Jules got talking to someone in the gun club and discovered that it was actually only air rifles that were stored in that metal cupboard, and that there was no ammunition there at all. Everything suddenly became rather dreary and complicated, and the whole project simply petered out.
I guess we wouldn’t really have done it anyway. Neither of us were psychopaths. On the contrary, we were both in our own way the kind of people who have a strong need to do good. When I was expelled a year later, I went to work in a school in Africa and, from that starting point, gradually built up a career in international development. Jules, always more radical and daring than me, rebelled against rebellion itself, finding God, and celibacy, and submission to authority. He trained for the Catholic priesthood, fighting heroically all the time against doubts and forbidden longings. He was working in a dismal council estate in Liverpool when his ferocious inner struggle finally became too much for him, and he killed himself at the age of 28.
‘I don’t know what I believe in any more, Matt,’ he said to me in a letter shortly before he died. ‘I know I don’t believe in God or the church. I think I believe in trying to make things better. But if you don’t know what this world is or how it works, how can you make things better? How can you be sure you’re not making things worse? It’s like there’s this huge machine towering over us, sucking people in, mangling them and spitting them out, and I know I’m part of it, I know I’m tainted by what it’s doing, and I badly want to make it stop, but I’ve no idea which are the levers that turn it off and which make it go faster still. And the hardest part is that even my own motives are unclear to me, my own levers. I don’t trust my impulses. I don’t trust my judgement. Whatever I decide to do, I find myself wondering: who am I really doing this for?’
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