Liberation Square

by Gareth Rubin

  There were dissidents in our society. There were the intellectuals who opposed the regime, citing long-dead philosophers – they usually got one warning before they were shipped off to be re-educated, their homes requisitioned and their families moved into the worst houses, without running water. And there was an underground of those who took more direct action: digging escape tunnels under the wall, trying to organize trades unions or holding up half-hearted banners like the couple in Liberation Square. But it hadn’t occurred to me that there were some who were open about their rebellion. They stood their ground with their clothes and their motorbikes, instead of political theories and clandestine meetings. If there was a vanguard of defiance, here they were.

  I became aware of a ripple of movement outside. A rising of voices to match those within the building. A wave of noise – the Teddies shouting to one another, kicking their motorbikes into life. Alfie dropped his hand from my back and stared at the end of the street, where a commotion was flying towards us through the smog. Scores of policemen were rushing down, batons out, swiping left and right, knocking many of the boys to the floor. Their girlfriends screamed.

  ‘The Bogeys. Blades up!’ Alfie yelled over my shoulder into the cinema. His shout was echoed and magnified within the walls until it became a roar. I felt a chill. On the few occasions I had seen real violence close to me – once a fight with broken bottles outside my local pub, once when the Nazis had caught a member of the Home Guard – I had felt every blow in my own flesh. The prospect of it happening scores of times in front of me made my chest clench around my ribs. As one, the boys snatched inside their jackets and back pockets for brass knuckles or knives, clicking out the blades and sprinting in defence of their friends.

  They surged forward to jab at the police. I could hear the blows landing and the cries of pain before a crash above us made us look up, to see a window exploding, its glass falling just metres from where we stood. Through the empty casement we could hear the music as Lorelei welcomed the brave Soviet troops filing off the Archangel.

  One of the Teddies drove his bike straight into the police ranks, leaping off when it struck home. Some of the boys, however, were riding in the other direction, away from the violence – whether scared or going for reinforcements, I couldn’t tell – and stones were flying in the air in both directions. A few cracked into the wall beside us. Alfie pushed me towards one of his friends who was about to ride from the scene. ‘You, go with him,’ he shouted to me.

  I stared back at the film poster, committing to memory what I had seen there. ‘All right,’ I said, jumping on the back of the bike. Something metallic sped through the empty air where my neck had been a second ago. The boy with the bike gunned the engine so that it deafened me and we wound through the throng. Over my shoulder I saw Alfie barge into a policeman, knocking him back, but the officer was a burly man and he grabbed the boy in a bear hug, dragging him down. In the last moment Alfie looked directly at me. Then he was lost in the tide of bodies and it seemed almost as if he had been swallowed by some sort of beast.

  As soon as we were clear of the danger, the boy whose name I didn’t even know dropped me off in a long, shabby street and roared away without a word. I was worried to see a police checkpoint where uniformed officers were going over people’s cards – it could have been a result of the trouble nearby, or simply down to the increased security we always saw for Liberation Day.

  Even though they couldn’t possibly have suspected me of anything, I still felt worried walking away from them. It’s strange, really, how successfully the government had ingrained this layer of anxiety – of paranoia, really – into all of us. I just trusted that it was a phase we would be able to leave behind when the state was more stable.

  I asked a passing cabbie for directions to the Rising Sun pub and soon found it tucked away in a narrow backstreet, with a few young men standing outside with drinks in their hands. It looked to me like the interior was packed – not surprising, when people had a rare weekday off work.

  ‘Excuse me!’

  I froze as I was about to enter. One of the men standing outside was calling to me. ‘Yes?’ I did what Tibbot had told me to do: smiled and tried to look unconcerned.

  He was a young man, with a hard body, standing with two others like him. They had barely touched their drinks. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ he said.

  ‘Me?’ I screwed up my face in a pantomime of trying to recall his. ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think we’ve met.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  He paused while he and his mates scrutinized me. ‘My mistake.’

  My smile was fixed as I moved away. Did I know him? I didn’t think so. But perhaps he knew me because my photograph had been handed around in Great Queen Street. Or was it a genuine error?

  I fought my way into the rammed saloon bar to find the air wet with breath and a television bracketed to the wall showing the parade. Tibbot was at a table, nursing a drink.

  ‘He hasn’t come,’ he said quietly as I reached him.

  ‘Can you think why?’

  ‘No.’

  A sudden cheer rose from the bar and I turned to see what had caused it. The picture of the parade had disappeared from the television, to be replaced by a single fading white dot – the power cuts got even worse on Liberation Day as people held parties in their homes – but the cheer slid into a groan when it quickly flickered back to life.

  I examined the lapel of my jacket and rubbed away at a stain. ‘Is it a worry?’

  ‘Could be,’ he muttered. ‘Let’s go outside.’

  ‘I think I know how the code works,’ I said, as we shuffled towards the front.

  ‘The key?’ He sounded impressed.

  ‘I think I’ve got it. Well, part of it,’ I said. ‘There was a fight near Liberation Square. The police went after the Teddies. I saw it there.’

  ‘How?’ I was about to tell him. ‘No, wait. Outside.’

  At the bar, the landlord was arguing with two men who were trying to persuade him to turn the television down and switch on the radio so they could hear the Liberation Cup final about to start at the Tottenham ground. ‘No one wants the parade on, mate,’ a thick-set older man was saying. ‘Kick-off’s any minute. Go on.’

  ‘I can’t turn the parade off, can I?’ the landlord said, subtly nodding outside to where the three young men were sipping their drinks. ‘So no.’ The telephone behind him rang and he picked it up as we stepped out the door. ‘What? No. It’s the Rising Sun pub, mate. Frank who?’

  ‘Wait!’ shouted Tibbot, whirling around. ‘Wait, that’s for me.’

  16

  The landlord handed Tibbot the telephone. ‘It’s me,’ he muttered into it. ‘Yes.’ The landlord gave us a suspicious look, but obviously decided it was nothing to do with him and went off to collect some glasses. I leaned against the back of a chair and glanced at the men outside. They didn’t appear to be watching us, but how could I really tell? ‘Why would that be?’ Tibbot mumbled into the mouthpiece, resting his elbow on the bar. There was an undercurrent of concern in his voice, but also curiosity. ‘How recently? I see.’ He tapped his fingers on the bar. ‘Yeah. But she … Who could authorize that? Right. Yeah, please.’ He took a notepad and pencil from his pocket and wrote something down. ‘All right, ta. Take care.’

  ‘Did he find it?’ I asked, as soon as the receiver was down. He kept looking at the telephone, tapping his thumb on the bar thoughtfully.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘But there’s something strange.’

  ‘What?’ He looked over at the landlord, who was watching us through the corner of his eye. ‘There are three men outside,’ I muttered.

  ‘I’ve seen them.’

  We chatted about the parade as we headed out, towards the end of the street, and as soon as we were out of earshot, his features clouded. I looked at him keenly. ‘It took Kenneth longer than he thought to find the file; and som
eone came back from the parade early so he couldn’t leave without it looking a bit off,’ he explained.

  ‘But he got it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I waited. ‘You said there was something strange.’

  ‘Yeah, well, we have the name of the woman who bought this car. For now, we’ll presume she’s the one in the photo you found. She’s Rachel Burton of 2 King Henry Road, Gravesend, Kent. She bought it in 1943. In 1950 it was requisitioned by the government as common property and transferred to the oversight of one Dr Richard Larren. No address for him, though.’ I was impressed by his precise recall without recourse to his notebook, but no doubt he had spent forty years committing such details to memory.

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘No idea. But it’s strange to transfer ownership. Requisition cars, yes, but it’s not normal to transfer to another private citizen. Even less so back then. So what’s special about this Richard Larren?’ I wanted to know that too. Someone profiting, somewhere along the line, meant someone who had knowledge and influence over what was going on. Profits certainly hadn’t been banished to the old pages of history, they had simply been disguised as favours and rewards for loyalty. ‘Of course, it doesn’t mean he’s in on anything. He might just have been given the car for being a good boy, or he knows the local Party chief, or he paid a backhander for it. But, whatever it was, it’s something. So, we’ll call on Miss Burton, if she hasn’t moved, and hopefully she can also point us in the direction of Dr Larren. He might be able to fill in a few blanks.’

  ‘All right.’ Things were looking up.

  ‘What was it that you found? The key.’

  ‘I don’t know for sure if it’s right, but it could be. It’s to do with the names and the dates on her posters. Think about Victory Nineteen Forty-Five. VN came up twice, remember? We need to go back to her house to check the other posters – they’re in the bedroom, I’ll show you.’

  He mulled it over and sounded cautiously positive. ‘All right.’

  We turned on to the main road. A big car with darkened glass in the windows slowed beside us and I tensed. It had the hammer and compass in the centre of the registration plate and was immediately followed by another car, this one with the Soviet flag – their sickle in the place of our compass – indicating that it contained some of the Soviet officers who were here with their troops at the long-standing invitation of our government. A policeman waiting in front of a pair of solid gates stopped the traffic to let the two dark cars turn right across the road and in through the gates. Before they closed, I caught sight of a large, old house set back from the road.

  ‘What is that place?’ I asked.

  Tibbot cleared his throat. ‘I’ve only seen two types of people enter those gates,’ he said. ‘Party officials and young women. And I don’t think it’s a secretarial college. I suppose that’s them celebrating Liberation Day.’

  God knows my own background wasn’t privileged, but I had never had to consider some of the ways people survived now. I wondered more about those girls than about the men – their backgrounds, their families, the homes they had left or never had. And I remembered that, while Tibbot was helping me save my family, he too had had one once. I had been fearful at the thought of a life alone, but he was already living it.

  I placed my hand on his arm. ‘What happened to your daughter?’ I asked.

  He took off his square glasses to clean them with a handkerchief from his pocket, and I saw his eyes properly for the first time, the wrinkled bags under them hanging from age and drink. He was struggling with the memory and I wanted to console him, but I could sense an old-fashioned pride in him that wouldn’t have it.

  ‘Wasn’t far from here, actually,’ he said eventually, still looking at the spectacles in his hand. ‘No, not far. There were rumours that NatSec wanted wider powers of arrest, but the police persuaded Blunt to refuse because we didn’t want the Secs stepping on our toes. Julie was on her way to work in her pub and got caught up in a demonstration against the government. Students. About the elections and the Party winning like they did. No better than the Nazis, they were saying. They didn’t know better back then.’ We knew better now. He slipped the glasses back on and his eyes became bigger and less distinct for me.

  ‘What then?’ I gently prompted him.

  ‘Some NatSec stooges, agents provocateurs, went into the crowd and started throwing stones at the police so the police charged at them. They knocked a few of the students about – not too badly, but enough to make the others start running, and Julie fell over.’ His voice was a whisper for the final words. ‘She’d had asthma since she was a kid.’

  ‘She had an attack?’ He nodded. I felt a deep mix of sorrow for him and outrage for all of us. ‘You’re sure they were NatSec people who started the trouble?’

  ‘Yeah. I did some asking around after, had a few words with some of the coppers who were there. The ones who started it were older than the students, dressed differently. All men. No girls. It was called a riot on the news and the Secs got their way because they convinced Blunt that these students were going to bring down the new state and the police were thugs. We knew what really happened, but we couldn’t say nothing. Just had to cut our losses.’

  I didn’t know how to ask. ‘Were you there too?’

  ‘No,’ he sighed. ‘No, if I had been, I might have been able to do something.’

  I gazed along the road. ‘Do you have other children?’

  ‘Just Julie. When I got a bit down with the job, I would think about her growing up.’

  ‘Your wife?’

  ‘Oh, Elsa’s gone too now. So the answer to your question,’ he said, ‘the one you haven’t asked me, is that I’m doing this because I’ll be put out to pasture soon and this is all I can do against them. Not much. But it’s something, isn’t it?’

  A strike back against the people who had taken his daughter from him. Yes, it wasn’t much but it was something. What he wasn’t speaking of, but I could sense, was the guilt he felt over his daughter’s death, the guilt that he hadn’t been there to protect her.

  And that meant that I was taking advantage of a decent man’s burden. Like everyone else, I suppose, I thought of myself as a good person but the new era had brought about changes. ‘You’re not frightened of them?’ I asked.

  He rubbed the bridge of his nose. ‘Oh, what can they do to an old man like me?’

  I thought for a second. There was the ageing man I had seen holding up a banner in Liberation Square, thrown into the back of an army truck.

  The truth, really, was that they could do a lot.

  It felt different being in Lorelei’s house with someone else – this time the weeds outside were just weeds, rather than creatures to grab hold of me; the seeping smog was just the weather and not some smothering blanket. ‘Nice place,’ Tibbot said under his breath as we moved through. ‘Hardly noticed it yesterday.’

  ‘Nick lived here, with her,’ I said.

  ‘Very nice.’

  As I passed the bathroom door, I couldn’t help but look in. A thin shard of smoky light was slipping through the gap between the curtains and glittering in the long gilt mirror. Dust seemed to swim hypnotically in it, and, as I stared at the dark glass, straining to make myself out, pressure built in my head. And then, without warning, another figure slipped in from the edge of the glass, just as it had the first time I had seen it, when the room had been hot and damp and Lorelei’s eyes shone under the water. I yelled and spun around straight into his outstretched hands.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Tibbot said urgently, searching my face for the cause of my fear.

  I pushed away from him. ‘Nothing,’ I said, shaking my head, annoyed at myself. ‘Nothing. Let’s just get on with this.’ He stood back and watched as I hurried to Lorelei’s bedroom. ‘There,’ I said, as he entered the room, doing my best to sound grounded. I pointed to the posters on the wall. ‘That’s where the key comes from.’ I showed him the list of codes I had copied fro
m the book.

  DD2261033445298 wfn

  VN1081209994632 str cor

  TW3284408109028 pro wfn

  AM7126026369346 cor

  VN4653310089328 cor str

  DO5574301038201 wfn pro

  TL2159414038033 nor

  ‘Look at the first letters: DD; VN twice; TW; AM; DO; TL.’ For each one, I indicated the corresponding poster on the wall: ‘Daisy, Daisy; Victory 1945; The Whole Deal; A Month in the Country; Double or Quits; The Lucky Lady.’

  ‘Yes, I see,’ he said. ‘But what’s the actual key? We have some posters and a string of numbers. How do the numbers relate to them?’

  I pointed to Victory 1945. It was her attachment to that film that had given it away – using its title twice had been the detail that let me in. ‘There are numbers on each of these posters. The date that the film or play is showing. Those must be the keys.’ I wrote them down.

  The Whole Deal 08/10/48

  The Lucky Lady 15/04/38

  A Month in the Country 16/06/39

  Double or Quits 05/01/47

  Daisy, Daisy 26/03/42

  Victory 1945 10/09/46

  ‘I hope you enjoy long division,’ he muttered. ‘You know …’ He drifted off thoughtfully.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘These dates.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, no. It’s nothing. Forget it. Let’s go downstairs and see what we can make of them.’

  In the kitchen, we stared at the page again. I tried every mathematical formula I could think of to relate the date figures to the strings of digits in the book – taking one from the other, multiplying, dividing. None of the products made any intelligible number, though – nothing that was the right length for an identity card, telephone number or anything else. I had presumed that, having realized the posters were the key, it would all be over from then. That had been hubris and now I was being punished for it.