‘My brother knew when to take action. He took the prostrate sleeping boy under the armpits. He dragged him out onto the landing. He returned and picked up the pile of black clothes by the sofa – it looked like fancy dress, and included a cape with a scarlet lining. Whether or not it belonged to the boy Marcus, he would have to do the best with it. He shut both doors, one after the other. Then he started making a cup of tea for them both. The Young Fogey and the Flapper, but they’d known each other for ever. It was like a chance meeting of the Happy Shades in the afterlife.’
Without much warning, Joaquin raised his head. He reached out to the table in front of the sofa where a box of the game Risk sat. He pulled off the lid. He was suddenly and briskly sick into the box, in two or three spasms. I leapt up. I did what I remember my mother always doing when I was a child being sick, and rubbed his back in circles.
‘I’ll get a towel,’ Pete Frinton said. ‘Bad luck. Too much walking in the sun, I suppose.’
When he came back with a towel and a bin-bag, Joaquin needed to be taken up to bed. He drank a big glass of water and took his shirt off. He sat on the edge of the bed. ‘It was not the sun,’ he said. ‘I am not troubled by walking in the sun.’
‘What was it, then?’
‘It was listening to all that crap about going to Oxford and Cambridge and your Brideshead Reunited crap.’
‘Oh, come on,’ I said. ‘Revisited not Reunited. Don’t you remember Tracy Cartwright and James Frinton? Aren’t you interested?’
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘What happened to them always happens. Weak, stupid people.’
‘You didn’t always think that,’ I said. ‘You liked Tracy, I know you did. James Frinton’s not a weak person.’
‘Weak people,’ he said. ‘You can become a leader and still be a weak person. You know that’s true. How he becomes up the greasy pole of your parliamentary politics, up and up, into the Cabinet, into government, he’s Home Secretary now and goes everywhere with six bodyguards. You know how – by being weak and saying stuff that agrees with the last powerful person he met and talked to. Everyone he ever meets thinks he agrees with him. What a nice person, how nice, and then he does something that shows he’s met someone else in the meantime. Like a little boy wanting to please his mummy and all his aunties, but in fact he is Home Secretary. Fuck. And Tracy, she was so nice but weak too. I make her a cup of tea, I cuddle up with her, I know she likes me because I’m there, that’s all. In a moment I leave the room and then she forgets I was ever there. They all change at the first chance. You know who is strong, Spike? I am strong and you are strong. Nothing has changed for you and me since that first day. That is the life of politics. Changing your mind, like this man and that woman, forgetting what you thought a week ago, deciding, okay I’m a Tory now, libertarian, not anarchist, changing what you wear to fit in and the books on your bookshelf. What everyone does. You know something, though. I tell you a lie. It’s not the listening to the stories about Oxford Cambridge, make me puke, whatever fucking place. It was the herring I ate, I promise you. That herring was shit. Don’t kiss me. Okay, I’m going to wash my mouth and clean teeth and then you kiss me, you don’t want to kiss me now, don’t kiss me, what’s wrong with you.’
We slept well. The next morning it was Sunday. By eight o’clock there was no sign of Pete Frinton. The girl Sybille gave us something like breakfast – I think it was probably exactly the same thing that she ate for breakfast, a bowl of muesli, a couple of supermarket croissants and some instant coffee. ‘He knows you too,’ she remarked, making a bit of an effort to speak in normal German. ‘He won’t be up until lunchtime. Are you going out? I can make you a couple of cheese rolls. Potato salad. Herrings.’
It was the decorous way the dog Nala was sitting by the table that made us accept. He wasn’t in a begging stance but, all the same, he made it plain that anything we wanted to reach out to him would not be refused. If Nala came, he could eat the herrings. I always believed that dogs’ digestive systems were stronger than humans’. We planned to walk the Wall in the different direction, and see how far the dog would come. In my mind I thought of finding a river to swim in – Joaquin, the dog and I.
‘Did you maybe blame me?’ Joaquin said, once we were out in the country. ‘For losing all those people, those friends.’
‘I’d have to think about that,’ I said. It is our style, I think, not to offer an easy answer to the other in order to soothe or give way. And it is true that after Joaquin came along, quite soon none of the others from the group had stuck around. Tracy and James Frinton had transformed themselves. Perhaps everyone else transformed themselves. For each of them, there had been a small window in a train. An opportunity had presented itself. They had forced the remnants of their previous selves through it, like old clothes, abandoning those previous selves for ever. It was just Joaquin and I who never had. They would hardly have wanted to sit down with someone so different, someone who was just as they had always been. In any case, Euan and Kate had been Joaquin’s friends. They had taken a stern, inventive line, in the end, about me being in the flat all the time. You would have thought that Joaquin had misled them from the start. Sometimes, after they had gone, we heard hair-raising stories about things that he or I were said to have done. (Only last month an activist asked us whether it was really true that we’d had three-way sex with a policeman who was trying to arrest us, back in the 1980s. We’d heard the story before, but not for years.) Ogden had stuck around, really until the trip we took to Germany after university. Eric was perfectly pleasant whenever we met, until one day it occurred to me that I hadn’t laid eyes on him for five years. I hadn’t missed him at all.
I think my time at university was a lesson in solitude or, rather, a lesson in the fact that solitude was not a punishment for me as it would be for most people. I doubt that I appeared especially solitary. I joined a couple of organizations – not university political societies, but radical town organizations. I made some connections there that have gone on being useful. I was friendly with the six other kids who were doing my subject in my year. They were fine. I had people who ate supper with me. I had friends from home who came to stay. Joaquin came twice a term, sleeping in my narrow bed – there are times when even two big men of six foot three don’t object to sharing a single bed. I went back to the place I was born, once a term, and I stayed with Joaquin. My father did not know that I had come back for those weekends. One day I heard from the college porters that my father had killed himself. I had friends. I enjoyed my subject and did well at it. I dressed much as I had dressed in the sixth form. The day I left that university I was much the same as the day I had arrived at it.
It was a hot day, that Sunday. After three hours we sat down under a tree, Pete Frinton’s dog at our feet. We drank from the water bottles we’d filled up after breakfast. We’d thought to bring a plastic dish. We filled it for Nala the dog to drink from, too. We were shirtless in the hot sun. Now Joaquin took off his boots and thick walking socks to massage his feet. It was only eleven o’clock. There was no reason to hurry back to the hotel. I felt full of energy, buoyant, thrilled. There had been days when our walks had lasted for ten or twelve hours; days ending in a tiredness so heavy that there was something luxuriant about the physical sensation, a tiredness so wonderfully overbearing that it could keep you from sleep, like pain. Comfortably, our thoughts were running along the same lines.
‘This dog has no idea,’ Joaquin said, ‘what he has let himself in for, walking with you and me.’
‘He’s going to find out,’ I said. ‘How are you feeling? After the herring, I mean.’
‘I was thinking last night,’ Joaquin said. ‘That James Frinton. He used to come round to our place. Our place before it was our place, I mean. Didn’t he? There was a group of them. I can’t remember, though, who was the first to come round, how they got involved.’
‘You thought James Frinton was the leader, I
remember,’ I said. ‘I was really surprised when you said that. For me it was Percy Ogden who was the important one. James Frinton never really said anything. He was just the guy who agreed with things, or not that far from it. A sort of camouflage ideologue, only not that, because he’s conspicuous, he’s on a stage, he looks like a hero … Those politicians. They aren’t driven by principle. They don’t believe in anything that can’t be erased. They’re not like us. Are we political, Jo?’
‘Of course we are,’ Joaquin said. He lifted one of his walking socks to his face. ‘Hey, you know something? These socks – they fucking stink. Two days’ walking. I love it. You know we know what we think about all that shit, politics.’
‘But everything changes,’ I said. ‘What use is it thinking the same that we thought in the 1980s? Everything has changed so much. Why shouldn’t people change everything they think, like James Frinton, once they start being surrounded by different people?’
‘It didn’t happen to you,’ Joaquin said. ‘It hasn’t happened to me. That university you went to, the one that people say, oh, it changed me, changed everything about me. It didn’t change you. You knew what you thought when you went there. That’s okay too. What do you think it was like, when, you know, like the brother was saying, when James Frinton knocks on Tracy’s door? I liked that Tracy. She was crazy but she was okay. And he comes in and she’s changed, like she’s a party girl with nothing in her head, just wearing her bra, knickers, and he’s dressed up like it’s the 1920s. What do they say? Do they say, “My God, what happened to you, you crazy?”’
‘The one thing I know,’ I said, ‘is that James Frinton wrote her a lot of letters during that summer. Pete Frinton was right about that. Maybe two a week, all summer. He wouldn’t have carried on if she hadn’t loved getting them. She showed them to us, whenever she got one. I don’t think she’d have shown them to you. Those letters, I bet she kept them. She’d have told him she’d kept them, too, straight away. He’d have been pleased at first. She was seeing Mohammed all that summer. He would have hated that. She’d have taken the first chance to let him know it was him that mattered. That first meeting, they’d have read some of them together. I reckon he was thinking things through in those letters, talking to her about why they’d smashed stuff up with the Spartacists, what they’d been thinking of, maybe saying he wasn’t sure he was in favour of nuclear war any more.’
‘That is what is called the young love. He’s come round in a big circle,’ Joaquin said. ‘He wanted a nuclear war then because, you know, the workers’ paradise in the ruins, you know. These days, he wants a nuclear war because that’s what’s needed, he thinks, him and his friends in America, waving weapons at North Korea, whoever.’
A thought came to me. I couldn’t share it with Joaquin. It was too inchoate. In the newspaper we had brought with us there was a photograph of James Frinton, the British Home Secretary, with the new Saudi prince who was supposed to be running things. The fat prince had had some journalists killed last week. On the other hand he was supposed to be thinking about letting women drive. (Give a head of state the choice between doubling the size of a consumer market and his mental religious convictions – the money wins.) They were in some opulent interior. In the photograph, Frinton was grinning wildly. His stance was not conventionally statesmanlike. He was actually winking in an exaggerated way, his face half folded up. Some comment had been made in the press, I knew, which described Frinton as embarrassingly sycophantic on the basis of this gesture. I had seen it, and instantly remembered the insulting wink Frinton had given me, years before, as we were being carted out of the CND gathering. Behind the fat prince was America, paying for his genocidal war in Yemen. Did Frinton have any American friends in the sense that Joaquin meant? Was he under any illusions about the fat Saudi twat? That photograph made me think he was taking the piss. It gestured over everyone’s head at those who had known him years ago. Look at this wanker, the wink said.
‘I guess he wouldn’t see the connections,’ I said. ‘You love oil. You love the genocidal maniac who owns it. You love the Americans who fund them. You love the nuclear threat the Americans have.’
‘They are fucked, those guys,’ Joaquin said.
Those letters. I wondered what happened to them. The next time I saw them, she mentioned them to us, again, but this time it was in front of him. I got the sort of impression that she’d been dangling them in front of him. I don’t know why – whether it was like a gesture of fondness, I’ve loved seeing what’s in your mind, or whether it was a kind of threat. I don’t know what she was going to get out of the threat. Did she even know she was threatening him? Or was it more like a tease, in her mind? Hey, you big Tory – my God, I’ve got some funny stuff you wrote to me, two years back. That CND meeting we smashed up! And kicking that monsignor in the head, the peacemongering friend of capitalists! I love that letter you wrote me about it ‒ it’s so funny. The gap is small between blackmail and recording what has been done and said. It depends not on what has been done and said. It depends on how we have changed ourselves in the interim.
Two weeks after arriving at university I had a letter from Mohammed. He was probably the one in the group that I felt least connection to. He lived down the hill, you see. There is so much difference between the espousal of principles and the living of lives.
That last summer before university, Mohammed and Tracy had had their affair. It was engineered by Ogden. Sometimes Tracy performed in front of Ogden, and the rest of us. Perhaps Mohammed wasn’t performing. She definitely made what might have been passion our entertainment. Mohammed couldn’t help himself – he might have preferred to snog in private, but a look would pass from Tracy to Ogden, a look of innocent temptation. Her arm would snake out around Mohammed’s waist, a head descend on his shoulders. She would start pecking, licking, groping, a full-on snog. Around us, strangers looked away. I never understood whether she was doing it to please Ogden, or whether he had gone as far as giving her instructions. There was no doubt in my mind that it was for him. That initiating look was always quite clear. Mohammed was lost. Each time, he tried to continue with whatever we were talking about for a while. Then her tongue and mouth silenced him. She would continue to snog him, her arms around his torso, until his little dick rose stiffly in his pants, a solid presence, stabbing upwards in his loose cotton trousers. The end had been attained. She sat back in her chair, wiping her mouth, smiling. Ogden, Eric Milne and I would carry on talking all the while – I remember that summer we were all reading Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? Those ancient arguments about whether the coal miners could ever spontaneously generate a fundamental change hit the wall of their lechery, their not listening. Sometimes I almost reached the point of carrying on the debate on my own. ‘“Without a revolution in Germany we are finished,’ I said, quoting. ‘This is our Germany. It really is.”’ There was no answer. James Frinton was in Leeds. Both Eric and Ogden were, in my memory, distracted by the spectacle of those two snogging, forgetting that breathing was necessary to life.
There was no question that Mohammed was swept away, even if he understood that his passion was being observed and dissected at every stage. Some time in August we all took a day trip to Scarborough in Ogden’s car. At some point during the day, Ogden arranged matters so that we all found ourselves outside a tattoo parlour. We should all get tattoos! Wouldn’t that be great? In the year I left school, I knew nobody at all who had a tattoo. The only people you ever saw with one were very old men, bikers, sailors and labourers. But somehow Tracy was saying to Mohammed in an exaggerated way that if he really loved her, he would get her name tattooed on his arm. He laughed: she wasn’t serious. She was serious. If not her name, then something that would always mean something to the pair of them. Those roses he had given her on her birthday, they were beautiful. A rose on his arm, around her initials. He wouldn’t go for the initials, but wherever Mohammed is, thirty years later, he has a badly drawn tatto
o of a rose on his arm. I imagine that he is a father and a grandfather by now. He would never have shirked that responsibility. He did what people asked of him.
He wrote to me, saying he’d like to come to visit the following weekend. He wouldn’t stay with Tracy – it had finished in an okay way, but he thought it would be weird to sleep on her floor. He had told Frinton and Tracy that he was coming, but I dropped them a line in any case. I picked Mohammed up from the bus station at five o’clock on a Thursday. He’d decided to skip his Friday classes. We walked back to the college. That walk through the town, or maybe through the university, was one of belonging or not-belonging. There were those, I remember with shame, who made a performance of who they were, or what they had become, a kind of uniformed embodiment of status that extended beyond clothes to the way they stood, carried themselves, spoke, looked about them. In retrospect they filled the streets. Mohammed and I walked along, talking quietly, like manly revolutionaries. I don’t suppose the sort of people I’m talking about saw us like that, or saw us at all. ‘There’s a hell of a lot of idiots around,’ Mohammed said at one point. ‘It’s only Thursday night. It’s not like this on a Saturday at home.’ I had to tell him that it was like this all the time. There were idiots in the university where Mohammed was, too, but they mostly had the excuse of being drunk. This lot – were they all rich? ‘You don’t have to have anything to do with them if you don’t want to,’ I said.
Like me, Mohammed had joined a couple of university political societies, but most of his attention was with radical groups in the town where he studied. There was a Spartacist group he had signed up with. Joaquin and I had left the Spartacists in the course of the summer – for once it had been a decision based on personal matters, not on ideological differences. If we left, then Euan and Kate could stay in, Joaquin said, with a remnant of that Latin consideration of private connections. We’d been talking to the Revolutionary Communist League for a while. They had a division in Oxford. I explained all this to Mohammed as we walked. I’d been along twice to the group. The leader was only a couple of years older than me, but he’d taken a trip to Democratic Kampuchea. He knew all about it. When Joaquin came to visit, the week after, we would go together. He thought he knew the chair from a congress in Salford in 1980. It was the congress that had broken up in a fist-fight. Mohammed had already taken part in a piece of direct action – he’d thrown a bag of his own shit in a branch of Barclays Bank, a popular target of the time for its investments in South Africa. The RCL had its own approach to direct action, but they were a bit more cautious. They hadn’t talked to me yet about what they’d done. I got the impression, too, that bags of shit were lower down their list of priorities than other strategic aims. When someone arrived out of the blue, they would have been crazy to open up on the spot. You need to have some trust before you start explaining what you hope to achieve in twenty years’ time.
A Small Revolution in Germany Page 23