by Gareth Rubin
‘Have I done something wrong?’ I asked fearfully. I was just metres from my house but couldn’t reach it.
‘You’ll find out.’ Someone opened the van’s rear door and I was pushed inside to find two narrow little cages made of fine steel mesh. I tried to protest but the sound wouldn’t come and a slender young man who had been waiting inside grabbed my leather bag, before shoving me hard into the far cage. The van door slammed closed and for a moment we were in perfect darkness. Then a very dim blue light came on above his head. Under its pale glow, he flicked open the bag’s tarnished brass clasp and turned it all upside down. My purse and the handkerchief dropped out. I prayed that neither the book nor the card box that I had taken from Hazel’s room would fall out from under the stiff base where I had slipped them.
The guard opened the purse and turned his nose up, as if its contents weren’t even worth pocketing. ‘Load of shit,’ he muttered, tossing it aside.
‘Please,’ I said. He just snorted. ‘Why are –’ He smacked a baton across the steel and the vibrations went through me, making my teeth grind. He took hold of a hand grip set in the roof, flicked a switch and the light was off again. ‘Please, are you NatSec?’ I said, just wanting to know what was happening. The only answer I got was the sound of the engine gunning, and the wheels turning on the tarmac.
We bounced along through potholes for a while before turning this way and that. I tried to keep my mind focused, but the panic was rising and I had to fight a surge of sickness as I braced myself against the two sides of the mesh cage. The floor of the van shook hard under me and I gave in, slumping down. It was all a whirlpool.
We stopped from time to time, once coming to what seemed to be an emergency halt that slammed me against the side of the cage. The guard must have been thrown too, because he mumbled something angry under his breath. And then, finally, after what must have been half an hour, we slowed and made a series of small manoeuvres.
I stood up, trying to find some sort of purchase on the wire mesh, but didn’t dare say anything. The back door was opened and I had wild thoughts of somehow breaking free and running out into the darkness, although I knew it was impossible. Instead, I watched the young man squeeze out, his feet clunking on the floor as he went, and wondered if I would be dragged from the vehicle, to some unknown building like so many others were said to have been. But the guard’s place was instead taken by another, bigger man who clambered inside before closing the door behind him, making everything black again.
The faceless man trod gently from the back to the front of the van, shifted his weight and leaned on the side, saying nothing. In the silence I had no choice but to listen to every breath he sucked in, heavy and long like an athlete’s, until, finally, the dim bulb clicked on and I saw a face I recognized: Grest, the NatSec officer from Lorelei’s house. His eyes were no more than a hand’s breadth from mine but in the blue light everything was indistinct. He stayed silent, tilting his head to the side to examine me. His heavy muscles made him look like an animal through the mesh of the cage.
Slowly, he pulled back the bolt and opened the cage door. I began, hesitantly, to step forward, fixing on the thought that he might have come to release me; but he thrust me hard backwards so that I fell against the rear panel, before following me in and coming so close that when his chest rose, it pressed against mine. The metal tang of his sweat mixed with the smog seeping into the van, and he waited for a long time, staring straight through me.
‘Now,’ he said. ‘We’re going to talk about you and your husband.’
The faint blue glow that wept from the bulb above us threw long spindly shadows of my limbs on to the floor, making me inhuman in my own sight.
‘Please let me go.’
‘I can’t do that, Mrs Cawson.’ Despite the closeness of the cage, I tried to twist my body past his, but it was so tight he barely fitted into it. ‘What were you doing at Lorelei Addington’s house?’ At those words, my legs became weak and I nearly fell. They must have seen me there searching for the box and the book hidden in Hazel’s bedroom. I wanted to lie, to make something up, but my mind was empty.
‘I –’
‘Why did you think your husband was there?’
I stopped short, failing to understand. Why did I think Nick was there? I hadn’t thought that. I was just going to collect what Hazel had said was hidden in her room. Then it dawned on me: Grest was asking about the first time I had gone to the house, the time when I had found Lorelei. He didn’t know that I had returned and found the ledger-like book. I forced myself not to look at the bag on the floor that held it, and stammered an answer to what he had asked. ‘I thought … I thought he was having an affair with her.’ The shame I felt at those words was nothing compared to my need to hide where I had just been.
‘Did you?’ He slid his hand across the wire mesh side of the cage. I looked at my feet, feeling guilty once more of my unfounded suspicions. ‘How long have you been married to Nicholas Cawson?’
‘Six months.’
‘Not very long.’ A pause. ‘Do you know where your husband really was this afternoon?’
‘With a patient.’
‘Who?’
He knew who. He had been there at the house when Nick told the policeman. He was testing me. ‘I can’t remember.’
‘Think.’
It came to me. ‘Taggan! Comrade Taggan.’
‘And do you know who this man, Taggan, is?’
‘No.’
‘So how do you know your husband was there?’
‘Nick said so.’ But, as I said it, I realized how weak that sounded.
Grest nodded. He stepped half a pace away and picked up the scarf I had taken from Lorelei’s house. He played with it in his fingers. I was terrified about what he might do with it. ‘But you don’t know, do you?’
‘No.’
‘So he could be lying.’
Was that right? I supposed it had to be. ‘I don’t know,’ I said quietly.
The reasons I had had for doubting Nick had been absurd when I came to examine them in the clear light of day. But this man’s questions were confusing me, making me uncertain. Had Nick really been at Taggan’s? If he hadn’t, why would he say he had, when it could be checked quite easily? ‘What other secrets does your husband keep from you?’
‘He doesn’t … nothing.’
‘There must be something that he keeps from you, Mrs Cawson,’ he said. ‘Everyone keeps something back. What would it be?’
I heard the sounds of life outside: people nearby, traffic moving. I tried to think of something to tell him – to please him, somehow, so that he would leave me alone. ‘The … maybe something about being a doctor. He can’t tell me about his patients.’
‘He could if he wanted to.’
‘It wouldn’t be allowed.’
‘He could if he wanted to.’ He repeated it in the same precise tone.
‘Yes,’ I relented.
‘Yes.’ He looked me up and down and his voice changed: curious now, instead of accusatory. He let the scarf fall from his fingers. ‘Are you a Socialist, Mrs Cawson?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not a Party member, though.’
‘No. I’ll join if –’
‘Do you support the state?’
‘Yes. Yes, I do!’ That was still true, although right then I would have believed in or supported anything.
‘Some people don’t.’ He watched for a reaction.
‘I do.’
‘I believe you.’ He seemed satisfied and retreated just enough so that I could breathe freely and let my mind and body relax a little.
He glanced at his wristwatch. ‘Where were you this evening?’ He said it plainly, as if any response held no real interest for him, and yet I realized straight away this was the question he had really wanted answered from the beginning. Somehow, though, because the other questions had been so invasive and this one was put so simply, without threat, I felt a strange urge to tell him th
e truth.
I forced myself to take a moment, however. ‘I’m sorry?’
He wound the watch. ‘You were away from your house. Where were you?’
‘I went out to think.’
‘Where?’ He looked up with an expression of mild surprise on his face.
‘I … just walked.’
‘With your husband in custody?’
‘I do it when I’m upset.’
And then he dropped the pretence, his eyes boring into me once more. ‘You returned to Lorelei Addington’s house.’
‘No,’ I cried. ‘I didn’t.’ If he found out, the consequences …
‘Why did you go back there?’
‘I didn’t. I just walked.’
‘Don’t lie to me!’
‘I’m not!’ I shouted.
‘You are!’
‘No,’ I sobbed, genuinely breaking down. ‘No.’
He waited, considering me in the blue light. Deciding whether I was telling the truth. My nerves felt like they were on fire. ‘Where were you walking? Which streets?’
My mind sped. I picked a route – the one I took to go to the bakery and greengrocery. ‘Calward Road. Then into March Street.’ His eyes moved to the side, as if he were picturing the path, mentally checking if it were possible. I prayed he wouldn’t find some fault, such as a road closure that would have prevented me from taking that route, or a street that I had missed out along the way. Then his eyes returned to mine.
For what seemed an age he simply stared, unblinking, at me before thumping twice on the panel separating us from the driver. The engine started up again and we began to move.
He was silent while the van shuddered and the wheels turned through potholes. Eventually, with a whining of the brakes, the vehicle stopped. ‘Do you know where we are?’ he asked. His voice was calm again. I shook my head.
He stepped out of the cage and pointed to the rear door. Hoping that this really was the end, I frantically scrabbled on the floor for my purse and bag, before shuffling to the back of the vehicle, grabbing the handle and turning it.
‘Have you got a stepdaughter?’
I froze, my back to him. His words echoed metallically off the sides of the van. It took me a while to answer. ‘Yes.’
For a moment there was silence. ‘How old?’
‘Fourteen.’
Another pause. ‘Nice age.’
The air was damp as I hauled myself out, clutching the leather bag.
8
I found we were in a little side street facing Liberation Square, site of the People’s Hall of Solidarity – the great grey dome of which had dominated London’s skyline for four hundred years. But the golden cross that had once adorned the former cathedral had been melted down and turned into the hammer and compass on the main door; and inside you could see the bullet holes that the trigger-happy Soviet troops had made when they tore into the city. There were no priests there now; those licensed by the state conducted their services in grey concrete basements, regularly harried and harassed by the authorities but clinging on to what they could of the old ways. For how much longer? It was anyone’s guess.
With a hum, the NatSec van pulled away and I collapsed on a wooden bench to catch my breath. I had never been so close to one of these men before; I had never been able to smell their sweat. I wish I could say that it had demystified them, that up close they were just flesh and blood, no more terrifying than the local drunken bully in a pub. But he had been just as inhuman as the pamphlets or the broadcasts on Radio Free Europe portrayed them. I wondered what had made him like that. We had seen it with the staring-eyed Nazis who had marched through our streets in ’44, but that had taken years of brutalizing propaganda. I couldn’t understand how it had come down on us. The Marxism that I had read, and of which Blunt spoke, was about peace and cooperation. It said nothing of such savageness.
From where I sat, I could make out the northern side of the former cathedral, which now seeped stone blocks twenty metres into the square. The blocks formed a platform where the high and mighty would stand to give all the Liberation Day speeches tomorrow, marking the seventh anniversary of the day that the Soviets arrived to drive out the Nazis. If the Red Army had pressed on right up to the North and Scotland when they arrived, of course, the whole island would be celebrating their arrival. Instead, the Soviets had been as surprised as the rest of us when American paratroopers dropped into the Midlands a month later, closely followed by their ships docking in Liverpool. And a year later, as Churchill said, ‘The iron curtain fell across our land.’ So tomorrow we would all cheer the streams of tanks, troops, Pioneers, bands, boilermen and fishermen as they paraded past us after marching defiantly along that curtain.
It was a day when we all felt we could do anything as a nation, and when I had first moved to London, I had been excited that I would be able to watch the parade and go to all the celebrations afterwards. But the prospect had soured for me somewhat when I had passed by the square one afternoon in mid-July and stopped to watch a platoon of Pioneers drilling in preparation.
‘Platoon will advance left turn,’ their CO had barked, although their fifteen-year-old faces showed they weren’t entirely concentrating on their task. ‘Platoon right turn.’ Behind scaffolding, I had seen red marble panels with the unmistakable outlines of Marx, Engels and Blunt lining a platform that was still being constructed, while, tucked away in a corner of the square, a gang of cleaners was attempting to scrub away something that had been crudely painted on a plinth: a sort of vampire with blood-dripping fangs, wearing a military uniform and cap. STALIN, its artist had scrawled below. Nearby, soldiers manned little machine-gun turrets on strange beetle-like armoured cars. There were a few people milling about, but it was a dreary day so the square was largely empty.
I had watched, curious, when the armoured cars suddenly started up, pouring thick black exhaust fumes into the air, and the soldiers began shouting to each other. In a rush of sound, they sped off into the square and I followed their path, trying to work out what was happening. Then I saw: an aged-looking couple – in their sixties or thereabouts – were hurrying towards the platform. The man was carrying something in his arms.
The few sightseers stopped. Workmen who had been bolting together the scaffolding let their tools fall idle and watched as the couple scrambled to the front of the stage, jointly took a hold of whatever it was the man was carrying and stepped apart to unfurl a home-made banner: a sheet, with the words DEMOCRACY NOW in red letters roughly made from sticky tape or such like. I had only heard of this sort of thing – the weak political protests that happened occasionally. What did they really expect to come of it? A public uprising? After thirteen years of conflict and upheaval, all we wanted was peace. No one was going to join them to see their last remaining friends and family destroyed by more war, whether it was against a foreign enemy or against our own countrymen. And out of the corner of my eye I noticed a young man discreetly taking photographs of them. His presence was no coincidence.
The old couple stood there for a second before two of the workmen gingerly took hold of them and tried to push them away – probably more for the pair’s own protection than out of loyalty to the state – but they were too late: the soldiers were already jumping from the back of the screeching armoured cars. At that, the workers slunk into the background – they could predict what was coming next. Seeing the soldiers’ arrival, the young man also realized it was time to leave, placing his camera in his coat pocket before quietly but rapidly walking away. He didn’t see one of the soldiers smack the butt of his pistol across the old man’s cheek and kick his legs away; or how, when the woman screamed, they hit her too. I, however, winced with each blow.
Between them, the two soldiers – boys no more than twenty – shoved the man from the platform down to the concourse of the square, and I felt another shiver of pain as his head connected with the ground. For a moment, no one moved: we all just watched him lie there, complicit in our inaction; and
then, haltingly, he tried to push himself to his knees. But there was something impossible about his attempt – the lower half of his left leg had broken clean away and I realized that it wasn’t made of flesh, but of wood and metal, articulated at the knee: a product of the Blitz or a battlefield mortar.
One of the soldiers made a beckoning gesture across the square, and I looked around to see a tarpaulin-covered army truck burst into view. Four more soldiers scrambled out – their insignia showed them to be a sappers’ regiment – and surrounded the injured man as he tried to crawl off, with his broken false limb still dragging uselessly behind. He was thrown into their truck before the troops jumped in after him and I heard him cry out an indistinct word or two. I could do nothing except watch.
The woman was also pushed into the van, albeit less harshly, and, as soon as the vehicle’s wheels could turn, they careered on to the main road, leaving only a strange silence. It had all taken barely more than a minute.
The air was broken then by a new sound: a mocking, whining human voice. It was jeering, coming from the ranks of the Pioneers – just one boy at first, and then a few more joining in, until they were all doing it. One pretended to break his leg and hop in mockery of the man until their grinning CO quietened them down with a ‘That’s enough, now’ and had them return to their drilling. I walked away, my feelings about Liberation Day a little more subdued.
That had all happened in the summer, and now I sat on a bench in the November evening smog, recovering my breath and thoughts after my ordeal with Grest. It felt so raw. After a while, my hand fell on something poking up between the bench’s wooden slats: a little piece of paper that had been folded up and stuffed there to be found. I would have ignored it but it had been placed so as to expose large bold type at the top, with words that couldn’t be missed. POLITICAL PRISONERS HELD AGAINST INTERNATIONAL LAW IN MENTAL HOSPITALS. I pulled the page out, to find it was a small sheet of closely printed black type: the sort of cheap samizdat that one saw gummed to walls here and there before it was ripped down.