by Glen Duncan
The ironic old Channel 4 News producers cut from Rumsfeld to an American marine saying that they, the marines, were going to ‘unleash the dogs of hell’ on Fallujah. He pitied ’em. ’Cos they didn’t know what was comin’. Hell was comin’. He said it all very calmly and reasonably, ending with: ‘If there are civilians in there, those people are in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ ‘You couldn’t write it better, could you?’ Vince said. I was thinking of the soldier years ago, who with dangling chin-strap had come up to the camera and said, ‘That’s all, folks.’ I smiled in a way meant to indicate beatific horror.
There are many satisfactions higher than being able to sit and eat your dinner and see on television something so obviously wrong and disastrous and know it is such and make facetious comments which reify your own liberal sanity, but this satisfaction is still pretty good. If only it wasn’t spoiled by the nag of one’s track record. Beyond Jon Snow’s birdlike integrity Jeremy Paxman and University Challenge twinkled cheerily on the televisual horizon. Beyond that (while safe at home the VCR skips into life to tape Friends, The West Wing, Sex in the City) the step out into the howl of the city, the world, the void, in search of sex. Love and sex, it used to be. It doesn’t matter what’s going on in the world: one is always going to want sex. One is always going to want love, too, but there comes a time when one stops expecting it.
Thinking this reminds me, as the look on the tanned face of an arriving granny changes from profound anxiety into beaming delight when the first grandchild ducks the barrier, of the only march Scarlet and I went on, in our last year at UCL. That spring Chernobyl had reminded everyone (after Gorbachev had spent two weeks saying nothing about it) that nuclear power was a dangerous thing. A resurgence of anti-nuclear activism–activism generally–followed.
‘I can’t stand this,’ Scarlet said, as we neared Tottenham Court Road. The procession was to take in Trafalgar Square and Westminster, culminating in a rally in Hyde Park. It was early November, crisp and blue-skied. Flares of blinding tepid sunlight, the buildings’ planes of shadow meat-freezer cold. Sometimes the sun shone through the yellow teeth or red nostrils of a shouting or laughing student. People were teary, scarved, ear-muffed, bulky with coats.
‘No,’ I said.
‘It’s making me feel ill.’
‘It’s the slogans.’
‘It’s everything.’
She was looking at a trio of fat, ugly girls, one of whom, with a bullhorn, was leading this legion’s chant: ‘Maggie Maggie Maggie! Out out out! Maggie! Out! Maggie! Out! Maggie Maggie Maggie! Out out out!’ Her face was red, porcine, frosted with eczema. There was a terrible contrast between the shouting and not-shouting versions of her face, between something bestially enraged and something humanly sulky. She had mesmerized both of us.
‘I hate her,’ I said.
‘So do I, but it’s wrong to.’
‘I know.’
The protest had been billed as anti-nuclear but the slogans reflected a wide range of causes. Free Mandela Now. Apartheid is Murder. Meat is Murder. Stop Bombing Libya. Israel Out of Palestine Now. One banner sported a caricature of Ronald Reagan with his pants down, shitting on a building marked ‘The Hague’.
‘I can’t stand this,’ Scarlet repeated. I knew she was remembering Gary and Wally Da-Da, the consultation in the head’s office. They won’t believe us. I glanced at her, the high cheekbones, the eyes saying the main object of consciousness was somewhere else, the future, the past, another place. (That look of averted attention combined with her appetite for sex kept me in a state of more or less constant desire. Elsewhereness and availability produced between them a maddening friction. I could imagine mid-coitally belting her across the mouth, throttling her, anything to finally get her.)
‘Come on,’ she said. In the street behind the Astoria (a street which in all seasons at all hours is pungent with spilled booze and old piss) we found a doorway for a joint. After we’d smoked it she kissed me, tongue flicked, intimated in the shorthand that had been ours from the start. Go on. Here. I hesitated, felt her certainty, went on. Under her long coat a V-neck green sweater over a white blouse. A grey woollen skirt, stockings. Schoolish. ‘Pull my knickers down.’
It seemed impossible that even in this place someone wouldn’t pass by. She didn’t say anything about the appositeness, us skulking in alleys, didn’t have to. Pulling her knickers down hardened me, which she with her hands already working felt. I clumsily and with her help went with a little exquisite friction inside her, pushed her back against the freezing wall and filled my hands with the cheeks of her bum. Soft. Firm. The cold’s force and our little groove of blood heat. All the female life in her concentrated in these pure moments into the sly soft wetness of her cunt. She lifted her legs and wrapped them round me. (Well, where do you feel at home? In Scarlet, I should have said.) There was the world in which you scuffed and worried and didn’t make the grade, then there was this, the not being able to get any closer, further in, the addictive not-enoughness of going inside her. Before we’d turned off Charing Cross Road I’d had a vision of the march going on not to Embankment, Westminster, Hyde Park, but into a dangerous future, a landscape full of bodies and bomb craters under the same cold blue November sky. I’d watched the long line of dipping banners and thought of the delicacy of all those heads, how easily they could be cracked, drilled, blown to bits. All the eyes, watery with the cold. It was an obscenity, the vulnerability of the human eye. Shrapnel and bits of glass. A scalpel, the torturer with a look of irritable concentration, like a man forced to do an extra shift by the skiving of a colleague.
She drew her breath in and turned her face away, as Melissa had done. Her neck was warm where she’d loosened her scarf. I bit her gently there, felt calmly the gap between doing that and sinking my teeth carnivorously in, ripping her throat out. All these narrow margins crammed with the human effort at morality—
‘Excuse me, sir, do you have a few moments to spare?’
I’m flanked–out of nowhere–by two policemen. Airport policemen, with bullet-proof jackets and automatic weapons (machine-guns is how my suddenly salient eight-year-old self puts it). My stomach in two seconds fills not with butterflies but with fat-bodied and big-winged moths, not fluttering but hairily battering themselves into a frenzy. Reverie to nausea. Even now a separate inviolable observer in me says, Yes, well, that’s the great rich business of being alive, isn’t it?
‘What?’
‘Nothing to be alarmed about, sir. It’s a routine set of enquiries we’re making at all the London airports as part of the new security initiatives. You’re the twenty-fourth person we’ve done this with today. It’ll take five minutes. You’re not in trouble, don’t worry.’
The reflex thought is that I’ve been Caught and Found Out. Bound to happen, almost a relief–would be if I could remember what it is I’ve done. You’re not in trouble. This more than the automatic weapons loosens my bowels, the presence of the word ‘trouble’. Simultaneously I’m trying to get hold of the phrase ‘security initiatives’ and use it to calm myself down, tell myself there’s a context, police training, post-9/11, it isn’t me personally.
‘What is this?’ I ask. I’m convinced that if I don’t make some bodily inclination of co-operation, a step in the indicated direction, one of them, the taller of the two, with short blond hair, wintry blue eyes, aftershave and an air of scrubbed muscular vitality (all that backed-up training desperate for somewhere to go), will put his hand on me, the coercive hand between the shoulder blades. Thought-fragments whizz: ask for ID; demand a phone call; ask them if they’re arresting you; leg it. I tell myself to stay calm. I tell myself I haven’t done anything.
‘Are you arresting me?’
‘Of course not, sir. It’s nothing like that. What time’s your party expected?’
I’m so scrambled and terrified I don’t understand. Party? What the fuck? Then I get it. My party, the person I’m presumably here to meet. I’m in, after all, Arr
ivals.
‘I’m not here to meet anyone.’ I expect them to exchange a look–eh, Steve, eh?–but they don’t. The other officer is shorter, round-shouldered, with a moony, moustached face that reminds me of Beau Bridges. Manifestly when in civvies someone’s husband, someone’s dad, mowing the lawn on a Sunday afternoon, wandering into the kitchen and rubbing his paunch and saying, Is there any of that cold chicken left, love? The shirts under the bullet-proofs are crisp, white, short-sleeved. It amazes me that his freckled and soft-haired arms cradle an absolutely authentic up-to-the-minute automatic weapon.
‘If you wouldn’t mind, sir, it really will just take five minutes,’ he says.
‘Let me get this straight. You want me to come and answer a set of routine questions because it’s part of new security at airports?’
‘We’re trying to avoid saying it’s a training exercise,’ he says, with a wry look that further says to me, bloke to bloke, It’s bollocks, but what’re we going to do? Fucking idiots in Whitehall. ‘Twenty-five punters and that’s our quota for the day.’
It nearly works. The hint of English blue-collar solidarity, the suggestion that they’re fucking-up by even telling me it’s a training exercise, the little collusion in fallibility. I feel myself relaxing, smiling, inanely–but pull up: it’s a con, a masculine seduction. Oldest police trick in the book. I must be an imbecile.
‘I don’t believe you,’ I say. Saying it I realize I’m trembling. You’re in trouble. For the umpteenth time my childhood says, Yes, still here, all the feelings. Owen Monroe, you’re to go to the headmaster’s office immediately. Oh God. Shit. Fuck. I haven’t done anything. Hold on to that. I haven’t done anything.
‘Okay, sir, fair enough,’ Beau says. ‘Have you got any identification on you?’
‘Look, what’s this about?’
‘Do you have any identification, sir?’ the blond one says.
I exhale, heavily. Tut. This is what you do, take all the shitting yourself and turn it into a grotesquely transparent performance of exasperation. I reach for my inside pocket and am freshly, electrically astonished when Beau says quietly but clearly, ‘Very slowly there, sir, if you don’t mind. What is it? A driving licence?’
‘Yeah, actually, I do have my driving licence. I don’t usually, but as it happens I do today.’ This also is what you do, frothily blab irrelevant details, that you’re not the sort of anal psychopath who always carries ID (that would be suspicious) but a person so far removed from criminality, with such a heady quantity of mentholated Nothing to Hide that the thought of carrying ID just in case would never normally enter his blameless head. Maude’s cast-off Fiesta needed a new rear number plate to clear its MOT last month, to buy which, these days, you need your driving licence. It’s been in my pocket since then. There’s all the usual crap in my wallet: Switch, Visa, Mastercard, stamps, receipts, Blockbuster, Balham Library. All the pertinent plastic says Owen G. Monroe. Who can they possibly think I am?
‘Okay, Mr Monroe,’ Beau says (the accent’s Midlands, maybe ten years’ London influence), ‘here’s the situation. We’re speaking to you because you match the description of an individual we’re looking for to help us with our enquiries.’
‘Hang on a—’
‘Now, since you have ID, and since I’m sure it’s genuine, I reckon we can have this cleared up in two shakes if you come along and let us run a check on your licence.’ His walkie-talkie crackles. Something indecipherable comes out. ‘Roger,’ Beau says. Then, to me, ‘What do you say? Okay?’
‘What enquiries?’
‘Sir, come on. Let’s go and run the licence check and you’ll be on your way.’
‘But who can you possibly think I am?’
‘Let’s go,’ Blondie says, and there is the coercive hand, not between the scapulae but in the small of my back, which on top of everything makes me feel like a woman wearing a backless dress. I’m very aware of my heart, the thuds sounding like gulps or glugs, as if it’s being forced as at Caligulan whim to drink until it bursts. Bits of my consciousness not waltzing with terror are busy with things like me saying later to Vince, I was manhandled by an Aryan policeman today. People have noticed, are nudging each other, staring. I look over my shoulder at the gaggle of hire-car drivers with their passenger placards–SABADZE; COOLIDGE; SWEENEY; KIRSCHENBAUM–and think they must be prone to varicose veins, all that standing and driving, automatics, too, those airport cars, not even a clutch to keep your left foot busy. I can’t believe I’m walking along with two armed police officers. Floating along. Those television phrases, ‘match the description of…help with our enquiries’, they’re supposed to stay on television. They’ve got no business in my real life.
Off the Arrivals lounge through an alarmed door for which Beau punches in an access code. My armpits push out the week’s E numbers. I think how good it’ll feel to get home and take my clothes off and have a slow and gently purgative shit in my own bathroom, which from this hell seems like a beautiful ceramic nook of heaven, with its window of frosted glass and stack of out-of-date magazines by the loo. How thoughtlessly we consume pleasures, take for granted great gifts such as being able to sit naked on your own crapper with the door locked and no one home, soothed by the white tiles and friendly toiletries, reading a feature on Cate Blanchet in an ancient Sunday supplement. Down a corridor, left. A door marked IR 07. Beau knocks and enters. I follow. Heinz brings up the rear.
Inside the room there’s another (unarmed, older, bald) policeman, the Friendly One, I decide, and two men in the sort of plain clothes I imagine are supposed to fool drugs dealers but never do: leather bomber jackets, jeans, trainers. Furniture is a wooden desk between two orange plastic chairs. There are no windows. This is ridiculous. My assumption is that Beau and the Aryan, having delivered me, will leave, but they don’t. The Friendly One (it’s based on nothing more than his resemblance to an old maths teacher of mine who despite my numerical dyslexia never lost his patience and always spoke gently to me) steps forward, smiles and says politely, justifying my suspicion, ‘If you wouldn’t mind just raising your arms for me, sir, so I can check your person…’
It occurs to me, with a muscular spasm I just manage to conceal, as I’m being patted down that it’s not absolutely impossible that if they go through every pocket in this jacket they might find an old forgotten baggie with a few wisps or nodules of grass in it. I close my eyes. There’s that whirling circus of adrenalin. Oh please dear sweet Christ but it’s a ridiculously remote possibility but what if Vince for some reason borrowed and or left a spliff half-smoked oh dear sweet Jesus God in Heaven—
‘Thank you, sir. All done.’
But what if there’s a sniffer dog? Those little bastards—
‘Have a seat, Mr Monroe,’ one of the plainclothes says. ‘I’m Detective Reece. This is my colleague Detective Keogh. Do you know why we wanted to speak to you?’
Reece is late thirties, attractively pock-marked, with an expensive brown and blond haircut which shows blatant application of product. His pale blue eyes are large and almond-shaped, and his mouth in repose looks like it’s just about to do a satirical offended-homosexual pout. Keogh’s probably the same age but looks younger. Long body and lightbulb-shaped head with receding hairline. There’ll be an occipital bald spot soon if there isn’t already. Small mouth, weak chin, but the rosy look of a long-distance runner.
‘Because you think I’m someone else?’
‘Well, there’s a resemblance,’ Reece says, ‘but frankly, face to face it’s not compelling. In any case, that’s easily dealt with.’ He hands the driving licence and wallet to Keogh, who without a word or a glance at me slips out of the door and closes it behind him. ‘Won’t take long,’ Reece says. He sits back in his chair and the leather bomber creaks. Head slightly on one side, he takes a look (meant to express careful weighing up) at me. ‘Our guy’s bearded,’ he says. ‘Surprise. We can do a projection of what he’d look like without it, and on the CCTV footage you’re clo
se enough. But not in the flesh.’
‘So why am I here?’
‘You’re here, Mr Monroe, because CCTV keeps picking you up. In the last six months alone you’ve made eight visits to the airport. You’re not flying anywhere, you’re not meeting anyone, you’re not plane-spotting and you’re not shopping. We’ve checked surveillance at Gatwick and you’re on their footage, too. So in short we’d like to ask you what you’re doing here.’
Ah.
Silence. The silence they resort to with such brutal effect in films when someone goes off the edge of a cliff or tower block, the silence of time purified, not seconds, milliseconds, nanoseconds, but a soundless, seamless continuum that brings your own naked existence right up to you and shoves it under your nose. Now that this has happened, I realize that for months there’s been at the back of my mind a small cloud of objectless anxiety attendant on these visits. Objectless no more. The object was something like this happening. I think of the Malaysian’s bubble-bursting pronouncement: Brass. My father’s feeling of relief. God’s making a fool of him proof that God was there. But God isn’t there, Dad, I said to him, last time round. No one’s there. He and my mum smiled and shook their heads: Poor Owen, telling himself what he needs to hear.
‘I come here…’ I say. ‘I come here to watch people.’
Reece stares. The Friendly One is taking notes. I laugh, and it sounds like a bad actor doing a nervous laugh, badly. ‘Look I know this may seem bizarre and tragic but I come here because I like airports, always have. You’ve heard of people-watching.’
‘What’s wrong with Oxford Street?’
‘Nothing. But I prefer airports, watching people arrive. It may seem stupid to you, but…’
‘Yes?’
I can’t continue. I look down and shake my head, as if we’ve reached a sexual fetish too embarrassing to discuss.