It’s a bomb. Somebody has blown the hotel up. I can hear people say it’s a bomb, and it is, hotels don’t just fall down.
She has to get out of there, I know that. If she’s alive, they’ll get her out. If she’s alive, she won’t come out the front of the building. There’s rubble and dust where the front doors are, fire engines and ambulances parked at angles. I walk along the front. Sirens echo like the gunshot in the quarry. There’s a little side road that leads round to some doors. I’d seen them earlier when I walked round, eating a bag of chips, doing reconnaissance. That‘s what it’s called when you check on the place where you might kill someone. There are more cars parked here, police this time, more lights flashing.
And there she is, in front of me. My hand is on the gun and I keep walking towards her. There are bodyguards, SAS, Tonton Macoute, but I don’t look at them. There’s Denis, with a suit on over his pyjamas, blinking. I look at her and then her eyes meet mine for a moment, that split second, her eyes bright and alert and a look of what, recognition, briefly, that is what it feels like, that she knows I’m coming, my hand on the gun, the gun still inside the bag, and this is it, this is the moment right now I think, and BANG, can’t miss, and I step out of the shadows and then she passes, and she starts talking to a policeman and my hand is still in the bag holding the gun and they’ve gone past and I don’t move and I see a policeman look over and then another turn his head and I swear for a moment they are the ones from Dudley, who came to speak to my grandad, who brought me and Ronnie home, who questioned my dad. I think, Oh no, here it goes, my hand still on the gun, inside the bag, and I turn and walk back into the shadows, and there is no hand on my shoulder, no shout or sirens for me, and I walk back out of history, and back around into the grim, dusty, bomb-blasted morning and stand there on the front. I can’t get my breath. A woman, bleeding from the head, comes walking past me. I touch her arm, give her the towel that I’d packed on top of the gun.
Thank you, she says. Thank you.
I move away, away, lean on the railings, move back and back again, away from here, and then I see the policeman’s face again, the same one who had been next to Margaret Thatcher, and so I keep walking. I don’t know where I am going. There are people on stretchers, lights flashing. There are shouts and the caw of birds. People are dead, dying. I have the gun in my hand, my bag. I see her face, her eyes. I keep walking. I don’t know what to do.
The sun rises behind me and as I walk along the front, past the abandoned pier, I see Johnny. And he grabs me, wraps his arms around me and picks me up off my feet and I’m not surprised; of course Johnny’s here, anything is possible. I ask him if my dad is with him and he grabs me and I remember, no, my dad is dead. As Johnny holds me, by the grey and dirty English Channel, I decide I don’t want to kill anyone; I don’t want to kill anyone at all.
‘You hear about these atrocities, these bombs but you don’t expect them to happen to you. But life must go on as usual.’
I tode yer. I’ve bin tellin yer if yer would’ve listened.
This is what Johnny said to my grandad when he got back from work and they realized I had gone.
All right, son.
No, it ay all right, is it? I tode yer to watch him.
All right.
My nan came in from going up and down the street to see if anyone had seen me. She’d knocked at Paul and his mum’s flat. Paul had told them he hadn’t seen me at school since the start of term, sometimes I’d come to get my mark then get off over the fence, he hadn’t seen me for months really.
I tode yer to watch him.
Okay. I’m sorry.
My mum sat rocking in the chair, her arms hugging herself, a bunch of screwed up tissue in one hand, not really saying anything.
They checked the shed. That was when my grandad reached up for the box at the back of the shelf and found my assassination statement folded neatly in the space where the gun should have been.
Johnny got the train. He saw the bike chained to the railings. My grandad had said he’d drive, would get a car off Harry, but when they looked out into the street they decided none of the cars would make it. They talked about phoning the police. Johnny got the last train into Brighton, slept on a bench until the bomb and the chaos that followed woke him up. He’d walked the streets, same as me, trying to stay close to the hotel, but far enough away not to get noticed by the police, wondering where I was, what I’d done.
We go to a café and watch the news and eat bacon and eggs. I’m starving. It’s the best food I’ve ever tasted, shivering, my shoes off, resting my feet on a big heating pipe as Johnny goes to the phone at the back of the café. I can see him looking now, to check I’m not going to run off. I’m not going anywhere. Everybody’s eyes are on the television set apart from Johnny looking at me. They keep showing Norman Tebbit coming out on a stretcher. There are people dead. They’re not sure how many yet. The sun is shining.
Where’s the gun? Johnny says quietly.
In the bag, I say.
Okay, keep it there. You haven’t fired it?
Onny at the quarry. I fired it at the quarry. For practice.
Fuckin hell.
To check it worked.
He looks at me.
Where did you sleep?
On the beach.
You tired?
I nod.
It wouldn’t do any good, would it? I say.
No.
Shooting anyone, I mean.
No.
There’s a big ship out on the sea, white spray at the prow as it moves slowly on.
Where’s the letter I wrote?
In my pocket, he says.
I doh wanna kill nobody.
Good. That’s good, Sean.
We can throw the letter away, in the sea or summat. I doh think all that now.
Okay, he says. I’m sorry, Sean, about everything.
Me too, I say. I don’t want to kill anyone.
On the screen, Margaret Thatcher walks into the conference hall. It’s down the road from where we’re sitting. All the people are on their feet. Some workmen in the corner of the café start to clap. They clap and cheer in the hall as Margaret Thatcher gets to the podium, they wave their Union Jacks. They love her. She will be prime minister for ever. They’ve won. They’d have won if the bomb had blown her to kingdom come, if I’d shot her when I had the chance. They’ve won and there’s nothing I can do about it. It isn’t going to bring my dad back. It isn’t going to bring anything back. She’ll be there for ever.
‘The fact that we are gathered here now – shocked but composed and determined – is a sign not only that this attack has failed but that all attempts to destroy democracy will fail.’
We stayed with Ronnie and his mum and sisters that night. Johnny had got the address from Natalie before he dashed for the train. They lived in a caravan park outside Worthing. Vanessa, Ronnie’s mum, had taken up with the caretaker of the site. Ronnie woke up every day looking out at the sea. He didn’t go to school much, like me. He helped out with odd jobs. People lived on the site in the winter while they looked for work; families who’d lost their houses or were on the run from something. There was a lot of that then, the whole country on their bike. I noticed the Man United Subbuteo team all standing up in a basket his mum had planted outside the caravan door.
Ronnie stayed down there, though his mum and sisters moved on over the years. He ended up caretaker of the site. We’ve been to visit a few times. The kids wake up in the caravan, gaze out at the sea; we walk down to the rock pools to look for crabs.
Johnny got the sack for not turning up for work. He tried to talk to his gaffer but it was no good. They were looking to get rid of people anyway. My grandad said he should go back to college. Johnny said it was too late now, and so he drifted in and out of work over the years.
My mum died. I couldn’t help her, didn’t help her. She went a few months after I came home in 1997. I
should’ve done more sooner. By the time I came home there really was nothing to do. My nan sat with her every day, held her hand, sometimes lifted her drink to her lips, told her everything was all right. My nan and grandad dealt with it all at the end.
‘I willingly grant the influence of free market economists, like Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman. But the root of the approach we pursued in the 1980s lay deep in human nature, and more especially the nature of the British people.’
Johnny’s still here, the same; he’s past fifty now, thirty-odd years in and out of work; in and out of something with Natalie. He helped her through the years with Leah; helped Leah as much as he could. There’s been no one else for either of them. I don’t know why they didn’t get together properly. Michelle tried to talk to him about it once but got nowhere. Maybe he still paints her sometimes. I saw him the other day, getting off the bus with Natalie, carrying her bags of shopping. She was leaning into him in the wind. He stood on the pavement edge like it was a clifftop, waiting for a gap in the traffic, equal parts timid and brave.
Johnny’s not the only one. You see them here all the time, lost boys, men. I’d put him on the payroll but he prefers it this way now. He collects glasses, waits on tables, changes the odd barrel. I slip him a few notes from the till on a Friday afternoon. They send him on courses every now and again to try to get him into work, threaten to stop the little money he gets. He scrapes it together for a couple of pints and a game of snooker on odd afternoons, sits endlessly watching the news and bickering with my grandad. My nan died too, a few years ago, in her sleep, just past her eightieth birthday. No one killed her.
I help my grandad, eighty-nine now, down the steps of the pub and into the taxi and back to Crow Street. It’s no place to live these days, but they carry on, my grandad and Johnny; Natalie and Harry. Someone underpinned the allotments, built new flats on the narrow strip of land there.
That world I grew up in has gone, transformed, but there are traces that remain; this pub and these streets; a cenotaph.
I hose down the concrete in front of the cellar doors. The draymen have been, like every Thursday, and left a trail of beer from the empty barrels, that goes sticky like blood on the pub yard. Charlie Clancey chimes the bell to get some service in the bar. He still brings his black wagon out and goes clip-clopping past the pub before he comes in for fish and chips; sometimes I take his money and sometimes I don’t. In a minute, I will go and pour him half a mild, wait for Johnny and my grandad to come in for their dinnertime pint, wait for my grandad to ask me to put the news on the television and then wait for him to ask me to turn it off. As it’s a Thursday we might get Harry too; Natalie brings him in near the end of the week if his legs are good enough. Michelle will come back from the day centre; she still does the odd shift there, although I tell her we don’t need the money any more even though we do, holding the hands and wiping the snot from kids who can’t look after themselves, and then she’ll start the menu for the weekend, collect our own kids from school. Josh has got football tonight; Lily has dance class.
The sun catches the drops of water held in a spider’s web woven in the old brickwork in the corner of the yard. The web trembles with the weight of the water but doesn’t break. And for all I’ve said that I didn’t want to kill anyone, I wonder if I did the right thing after all. I can’t say there aren’t days when I wish I’d just pulled the trigger.
Quotations from Margaret Thatcher
The words of Margaret Thatcher used in this novel come from the following sources (page numbers are links but also refer to the print version):
20 February 1975, speech accepting the Conservative Party Leadership (p. 15); 4 May 1979, remarks on the Conservative Party election victory (p. 25); 20 September 1981, News of the World (p. 33); 2 May 1979, Sun (p. 43); 14 May 1981, letter to United States Senators Kennedy and Moynihan, Congressman O’Neill and Governor Carey, justifying government policy on political prisoners in Northern Ireland and conditions in The Maze prison. (p. 51); 1 May 1979, Yorkshire Post (p. 55); 13 May 1983, speech in Perth to Scottish Conservatives (p. 64); 10 October 1986, speech to the Conservative Party Conference (p. 75); 31 December 1979, New Year statement (p. 91); 6 January 1980, interview on ITV’s Weekend World (p. 96); 31 October 1987, interview published in Woman’s Own (p. 110); 30 November 1984, TV interview for ITN (p. 137); 8 December 1980, press conference following Anglo-Irish Summit (p. 143); 16 October 1981 Speech at Conservative Party Conference (p. 146); 12 March 1980, Party Political Broadcast (p. 159); 30 December 1979, News of the World (p. 166); 25 October 1984, interview for Birmingham Post (p. 173); 25 October 1984, interview for Birmingham Post (p. 179); 18 May 1983, press conference to launch 1983 Manifesto (p. 183); 16 October 1981, speech to Conservative Party Conference (p. 193); 25 April 1982, on the recapture of South Georgia by British Forces (p. 197); 18 May 1983, Conservative Party Manifesto (p. 206); 19 July 1984, speech to 1922 Committee (Backbench Conservative MPs) (p. 222); 12 October 1984, TV interview outside Lewes police station (p. 234); 12 October 1984, speech to Conservative Party Conference (p. 238); 20 April 1999, a speech at the International Free Enterprise Dinner (p. 241)
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Alan Mahar, Luke Brown and Emma Hargrave at Tindal Street Press for all their work in bringing this novel to publication. Likewise, Hannah Westland, my agent at Rogers, Coleridge & White, for her promotion and support. As always, I would like to thank my family and friends for their love and encouragement of my work.
How I Killed Margaret Thatcher Page 17