by John King
I can’t stay all day and go back to Red Square, sit down and eat my chocolate and cakes. When I’ve finished I walk around for a while, but there’s not much happening, some sleet falling and melting. Time soon passes and the light starts to fade, so I head back up towards Belaruski, begin to notice the drunks, hear shouting and a bottle smashing in the gutter, don’t take any notice of the three men coming my way. One of them punches me in the face and says something I don’t understand. I turn and spread my hands out, head stinging, and worse than the pain is the surprise, being sober and knowing I’m on my own. They keep going as if nothing’s happened, and I stand in the middle of the pavement wanting to follow but holding back. They disappear and I wipe blood from my nose, turn and keep going, looking for a bar or cafe to have a drink, a place to sit down.
Belaruski is home for me now, better than a street corner, and I hang around the main hall watching a line of silent men and women twist back from a drinks machine that doesn’t work. There must be a hundred people waiting for the bloke at the front, who’s banging the panels. I can’t work it out. They can see it doesn’t work, but still they’re waiting. It’s the only machine in the station. Maybe they think it will work for them and not him. There’s no laughing, no echoes in the dome. The silence is what gets me. People seem so crushed they can hardly speak. That’s what I feel. And I sit around keeping warm till eight and go out again. There has to be something open by now. I walk for ages, groups of men sitting on seats drinking, and I don’t know the places to go in Moscow. Some shout at me, then forget in seconds. Finally I see a bar, red light coming through a curtain. I look inside and a big man with a goatee steps forward. He shakes his head and waves me away, looks up and down the street, goes back inside.
I walk till my feet hurt, not used to so much exercise after the train. I want to get pissed, drink till morning and sleep it off tomorrow, but I can’t find anywhere. Moscow is different to Beijing. I always felt safe in China, even when I was wandering around late at night, but here there’s real violence in the shadows. Beijing is noisy and alive, but Moscow is dead. In China there was something going on that I couldn’t see, but here it’s much nearer. I’m alone, but hope I see the man who punched me. It’s the same old bullying, the worst sort of person. I’m an easy target, with no defence and no comeback. I wonder what I’m doing here, wandering around Moscow at nearly ten o’clock, freezing my bollocks off. Then I think of Rika and wish things were different, that she’d asked me to come and stay with her. It’s easy to see myself on the tenth floor of a granite block, looking over the twinkling lights of Moscow, a warm drink in my hand and a full-scale meal to eat, the central heating roaring away. And there I sit in my imagination, fresh out of the shower, dried and dusted, armpits in top condition, deodorant layered, the bristle covering my face shaved off, rolling the spirit back and forward in the glass, swilling it around my mouth and feeling it slide down my throat. This is Moscow and I should be doing something special, but instead I’m hungry and cold.
Back at the station I take my bag out of the locker and kip down in the same hall where I got my reservation. This is where the sleepers are, a good two hundred of us on the floor, lights beating down, lit up and safe, the building and the body heat raising the temperature. Every half an hour men in long leather coats come and look around, smoke a fag and talk quietly with each other, and it’s sad to say, but it feels good having the Moscow Old Bill as babysitters. I go to sleep wondering what would happen if the KGB packed it in, decided to let the comradeship of the people run things. The whole place would go up I reckon.
I’m not religious, never went to church as a kid, don’t believe or not believe in God, but after being in China, and going on what I’ve seen of the Soviet Union, the problem with communism is that there’s no deep feeling of unity. A war can do it for a while, and the revolution was a class war, but now that’s gone communism is just a materialistic doctrine, with rules, regulations and officials to be obeyed. There’s no spiritual side. Religion must’ve done it in the old days, provided the comradeship, but all they’ve got now is the daily grind. They say communism is the opposite to capitalism, but it’s more of a complement. They’re both rooted in science, the argument about who should get the rewards.
This journey is an education for me, and I run these ideas through my head until I fall asleep, getting the sort of rest you always end up with when you’re travelling, whether you’re in a station or on a train, waking up ten times to feel my money belt and make sure my passport and ticket are still there, on guard the whole time. I toss and turn and every time I wake up I think I’m somewhere else, in Chungking Mansions, Slough, back on the Trans-Siberian. It takes a few seconds to sort myself out, get comfortable, hold on to the piss in my bladder looking forward to morning when the bogs will be unlocked and I can have a wash, leave Moscow and go home.
Smiles had dropped out and tuned in and used to come round to share the news, his eyes drilling into me as he explained how the air was alive with messages, how he’d cracked the code and was tapping into the dark secrets of the state, the long-term aims of our controllers. The Falklands War had been and gone and the right-wing press was running the country, the Tories sharp enough to see that the worker’s dream was more ambitious than a condescending nod from an Oxbridge-trained intelligentsia. People wanted to buy their council houses, to get a mortgage and buy a home on a new estate, away from the dirt and decay, keep more of the money they earned and see the petty dictators on the local council kicked in the head. The Tories were experts at simple slogans, repeated the same short messages again and again, firing the points home while the left-wing committees and chattering tendencies told us Britain was shit and, by definition, we were shit. The Labour Party disappeared up its own arsehole, student cells squabbling over procedure while the Tory press fed people a long line of shit, exploiting the usual targets, saying that millions were going to single mothers, battered wives, lesbians, refugees, heroin addicts and sun-drenched holidays for vicious teenage criminals. When I left in 1985, the same old scapegoats I’d heard about all my life were still in the spotlight, people on their own with no way of defending themselves. On a bigger scale, the state targeted the miners and eventually crushed organised opposition. The coal strike dragged on, television channels shooting their footage from behind police lines, giving the official view, the union leadership painted as bitter men who wanted the Soviets to take control of Britain. When it came to party politics, the country was split, the South mainly Tory, most of the rest of the country Labour. It was divide-and-rule tactics, based on a turnaround in class. Labour was seen in the South as posh ideologues running the ordinary person into the ground, while the Tories were presented as the hard grafters working people respect. In the South, Labour was talking with the same plum in its mouth as the Tories. The North is rooted in heavy industry and has a Labour tradition, but in the South the post-war sprawl of London and the change to light industry has made people more isolated. Labour’s biggest mistake was the way it ran down patriotism. They let the Tories decide what being patriotic meant. If you tell people their culture is shit how can you expect them to vote for you? I was never someone to wave a flag, but could see the Tory view of patriotism was a lie, that pride in your country meant pride in your culture. For me, it was the people I knew and the place I lived, the music I listened to and the way I behaved. Thing is, too many people in the Labour Party were outside the everyday culture.
Britain was in chaos, and from the mid-seventies to mid-eighties it was all-change, and with everything confused and turning bitter Smiles cracked up. His brain was melting as he listened to the arguments and lies, and, while everybody was affected, Smiles couldn’t cope. One day the phone rang and he was on the other end of the line. He was excited, told me he’d heard the Clash single ‘White Man In Hammersmith Palais’ on the radio this morning, and wanted to know if I remembered the line where it says that if Adolf Hitler flew in today they, the government, would s
end a limousine anyway, never mind what he’d done during the war? Of course I knew the line, ‘White Man’ was one of the greatest singles ever released. And didn’t I think it was strange that the radio, which only ever played shit and ignored proper music, should choose today to play the song? I didn’t see why, and he sighed on the other end of the line.
This was Gary talking, and he told me how he’d been walking along on the road behind the sorting office that same morning and a limo had passed by. The windows were tinted black so he couldn’t see in, but it was heading towards Heathrow. This proved that it wasn’t just two old dictators conning the council with false identity papers, leaving their gas-and-electricity-included box unticked so they could claim an extra six quid on their housing benefit, but a conspiracy that went even deeper, straight to the heart of government. He said I had to admit that it was true what the song said, we’d joked about it in the past. He asked when had I ever seen a limousine in Slough, and I hadn’t, that was true. It was also true that if Hitler really was alive, living the life of Riley in South America, or been deep-frozen and reanimated by a mad scientist, and if he was jetting into Heathrow, then I couldn’t see them rolling out a Black Maria to pick him up. The authorities would send a car. A limousine, or maybe a Rolls. But I kept my mouth shut and waited for the next instalment.
Gary started shouting down the phone at me, angry like I’d never heard him before, telling me that this was the big time and something that couldn’t be ignored. He screamed at me to wake up, that the government were rubbing our noses in it, taking the piss. It was bad enough Hitler and Stalin were living on benefits, love on the dole in a council house that could’ve gone to a needy family, and this was in Slough, a town that still voted Labour. It was bad enough how the state had allowed two mass murderers to assume new identities and escape justice, but now they were even picking them up in high-class luxury automobiles—while he was forced to catch two buses to get to the airport. Because that’s where he was. He was at the airport waiting for the Führer’s plane to land. And when he touched down, Gary would be ready. He was going out on the runway as Hitler crossed the tarmac, before he reached customs and entered the country, and that way Gary couldn’t get done for murder. He had a knife and was going to kill Hitler.
I told Gary he was talking shit, that he was a sick man and needed help. I was trying the direct approach now, but when he started shouting down the phone again I knew it wasn’t going to work. I had to think fast, and tried to reason with him. Hitler couldn’t be arriving at Heathrow if he was already here in Slough, shacked up with Stalin. What did he think, that the Führer had been over to Spain on holiday, two weeks swanning around Benidorm getting a suntan, pissing it up on San Miguel, chasing the girls. Hitler was too old for that, and Smiles had told me himself that Hitler and Stalin were a couple of poofs, two ageing sadomasochists who didn’t let their political views or something as minor as a world war get in the way of a good torture session. It didn’t make sense. Did he think Hitler was strolling along the promenade in San Antonio in his Union Jack shorts and string vest, dancing all night to Shalamar and Shakatak? That wasn’t the Führer’s style. Smiles knew he preferred Skrewdriver. If he was a shirt-lifter, then he’d book into a sleazy hotel on the coast somewhere with Uncle Joe, resting on his Zimmer frame as he gave the red dictator’s arse a pummelling. I could hear Smiles laughing and told him to ignore the messages he was getting. He had to get out of there and catch a bus home. Or better still, tell me where he was so I could come and get him. There was silence for a few seconds as he thought about things. I heard him laugh some more, as he ran the image of Adolf Hitler and Joe Stalin on the seafront at Bournemouth, the rock breaking their teeth, wind howling in off the Channel, a long way from the world supremacy they’d dreamt of as young men. But then Smiles stopped laughing and said he had to go. He was in a hotel waiting for the flight to arrive. He couldn’t tell me which one in case the phones were tapped. If he died on the runway, in the engines of a jumbo, he wanted me to tell everyone that he’d done his best.
Gary was off his head, the words flowing like he was on some serious whizz, speeding right over the edge into this paranoid world where he saw conspiracies and secret plans in everything around him, tapping into colours and following imaginary trails through Slough, up and down the terraces and over the train tracks, reading the posters in Queensmere and breaking secret codes, making connections where connections didn’t exist. He came out with some mental stuff, and the worst thing was that sometimes it made sense, or made you laugh. He’d watch my face and grin, but inside he was serious. He hadn’t done anyone any harm, so there was no way you could force him to see a doctor. He was clever enough to tell me things when we were alone. Other times he was quiet, kept the mad stuff to himself. There’d be things he said that I wondered about, whether there was some truth in there or if it was just rubbish. Ideas spread so I suppose insanity can spread as well.
I phoned Tony and he came round right away, gunned the engine as we crossed Slough and took the A4 through Colnbrook. We raced down the wider road lined with parked lorries, gravel pits and long-distance cafes, makeshift car parks jammed with containers, rubble lining the ditches, stones and mud covering the road, spitting up and scratching the paint, pebbles stuck in the wheel sounding like the big end was going, the thunder of jets coming in to land. We were passing through a long-distance world of half-sleep and burgers, tired men catching some shut-eye before they collected their loads from the airport. The lay-bys were full of deep mud tracks, rubbish filling the nettles and grass. We were in a hurry, Tony following the white line down the middle of the road, cars and lorries coming the other way shifting left, a cabbie keeping his nerve and flashing his lights. For a few seconds I thought Tony was going to wipe us out, but then they both veered left just in time. I looked at Tony and he was panicking, seeing the madness in his mum spreading through the family. It was an illness, the same as cancer, except it was mental and not physical, mixed up with ideas of right and wrong, good and evil. None of us knew what to do, how to deal with it.
If Smiles was in a hotel, and stayed there, we had a chance of finding him, but we had to guess right. We checked the first hotel and Tony went over to the phones and got hold of a Yellow Pages, called them one by one. He gave a description and was lucky fourth go. The woman on the other end could see Smiles in the bar, watching the planes coming in to land with a drink in his hand. We drove over, parked and went in the foyer. The clientele was all well-heeled tourists and businessmen, piped muzak and rubber plants. We got a couple of looks, like we’d come to fix the bogs and should’ve come in the back way, but it didn’t matter. We didn’t want Smiles to see us and do a runner, stood by the door of the bar plotting our next move. He turned suddenly and spotted us, waved us over. He was good as gold, talked about the jumbos and Boeings coming in to land, and how he wouldn’t mind flying on Concorde one day. It was easy getting him to drink up and come with us. It was like he’d forgotten about Hitler and the limousine. There was no problem, no punch-up, and I sat in the back of the car with Smiles so he joked and said Tony should have a uniform if he was going to be a chauffeur. He was unpredictable, and you never knew what was coming next.
Once we were on the move he started drawing this picture for me in a notebook he had, arrows pointing up and down the page towards boxes he’d marked HEAVEN and HELL. It was black ink on white paper, so in triangles he’d written YELLOW, RED, BLUE, GREEN. I didn’t know what it meant. Maybe it didn’t mean anything. He held his hand over his mouth and whispered that there were bugs everywhere and we were being tracked, but if you knew the magic word you could turn things around and hear the voices passing through us, tap into the airwaves, and he asked me again why the sick cases, the perverts and mass murderers, were being protected by Thatcher, rehoused and allowed to live normal lives, by the end his voice loud so Tony could hear. Smiles tried to pull me in, said I could hear the truth if I wanted, if I listened hard enough and did
as he told me. It was a bad time, that ride to the hospital, walking around trying to find someone who would section him, talking to a doctor who explained the situation, going back out to the car where the two brothers were sitting and persuading Smiles to come inside. And we spent three hours talking to him till he agreed to admit himself.
All Smiles’s madness comes back to me as I try and get comfortable on the floor of the station, the man next to me snoring, dreaming of a new life in the West. And my journey will be over soon, reliving the trip from the airport to the psychiatric unit. We did what we thought was best. I was just his mate, didn’t see any other answer. When Smiles hurt himself they sectioned him, but up till then it was his choice. We thought he’d be better off with professionals. They tried different drugs, worked on the chemical levels in his brain. The doctors were honest people, and when I went back to visit him in the months that followed we’d sit in the television room of a run-down NHS building, a one-storey, wartime building, and he’d come out with some real gems, putting me to shame. Nothing was changing, but at least he was being supervised.
Smiles said he was a free spirit and superior to the people around him, that he’d sunk to the lowest depths and reached the highest heights. We sat in a corner of the room with the evening news on and Thatcher was inside the set, her face lit up by studio lights, and I looked at Smiles and started whistling the tune of a Fun Boy Three song, ‘The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum’, and he laughed, clicked back from this story of Mao running the chippy, repeated the words under his breath, tapping his hands on the arms of his chair. In front of us a middle-aged woman and teenage boy played ping-pong, and he switched to the Clash’s ‘What’s My Name’—‘I tried to join a ping-pong club, sign on the door said ALL FULL UP, I got nicked for fighting in the road, the judge didn’t even know, what’s my name’—and he got angry suddenly, said that was the worst insult, when people didn’t even know your fucking name. And he asked if I remembered being chucked in the canal, and it was because we were punks without names, cartoons in a Sun headline. Just like Gotcha, where the same paper trivialised the death of hundreds of Argentinians. He shuddered, music forgotten, told me to imagine those men stuck down below as the ship went down. He gobbed at the face on the screen. He knew what was going on. And that’s why we handed him over to the doctors.