The Enemy Within, page 10
‘They’re beating them to pieces. You know they’ve set up road blocks across the country to stop people travelling to the picket? And they’ve been smashing up their cars if they refuse to turn back?’
‘Welcome to my world, Tommy,’ he said drily.
It wasn’t fair: coming from Northern Ireland he was always going to be able to out-oppress me. ‘Yeah, I suppose none of this is news to you.’
‘The RUC have been practising this stuff for years back home. Thatcher’s private army. The shock troops of the ruling classes. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better, you mark my words.’
He told me to wish everyone luck from him tomorrow, and we went over our plans for Friday once again. ‘Looking forward to it,’ he said, and I couldn’t stop myself from replying ‘not as much as I am!’
The collecting went really well. We raised about forty quid, and even got a couple of five-pound notes chucked in to the buckets. It turned out that plenty of people had been just as upset by the scenes on the news as we were. There were actually as many fervent expressions of solidarity with the miners as there were people telling us to fuck off and get jobs. I’d even had the feeling, all too rare these days, that there might really be more of us than there were of them out there on the shopping streets – but then I’d gone and ruined all sense of fraternity by mentioning me and Liam’s trip up north, which had earned me a furious lecture from Richie and Sonya about what ‘political degenerates’ the WRP were, and how I should never have had anything to do with them in the first place.
The pair of them went on about it for so long, and sounded so cross, that I could see people actively crossing the pavement to avoid us. We’d probably have raised twice as much cash for the miners if I’d been wise enough to keep my mouth shut. ‘You know they support the Ayatollah suppressing women and gays in Iran, do you?’ Sonya barked at me at one point, and I had to admit I hadn’t had a clue. You can say what you like about the Socialist Organiser Alliance, the group Richie and Sonya belonged to, but they were bang-on when it came to gay stuff. Sonya and I had sponsored a motion at a Labour constituency meeting the previous year calling for the party to commit to a policy on gay rights, and I’d watched in admiration as she completely demolished a guy who argued it was a ‘bourgeois affectation of no importance or interest to the working classes’. Mind you, he was Militant Tendency, and she hates them almost as much as it turns out she hates the WRP.
Of course I made no attempt to defend Healy and his gang. The more I’d brooded on what had happened in Derbyshire the angrier I felt about it: I just hoped I wasn’t going to bump into Dexter again any time soon because I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist telling him exactly what I thought about his so-called ‘leader’. Not that the rest of them seemed any better. The more I thought about it the crosser I felt about Andrea parroting that nonsense about groups trying to provide food for the miners depoliticising the strike while she shovelled apple crumble happily into her own big mouth. It looked like Maggie was actually fully prepared to starve the miners and their families into submission if that was what it took: she had been on telly talking about ‘the rule of the mob’ and repeating ‘it must not succeed’ in her scariest voice – the one that made her sound like she would kill you without a second thought. Arthur Scargill – who, to give him his credit, had been right there in the thick of it at Orgreave and been arrested himself – had promised to keep the picket up for months if necessary. So there was no doubt that Liam was right: none of this was going to be over any time soon.
When Friday evening finally came around I was outside Russell Square Tube a good ten minutes early. Liam got there bang on time, greeting me with a gorgeously nervous grin and a half-hug that was still enough bodily contact to have me tingling all over and drinking in the delicious scent of him. Could it be sandalwood? I wasn’t sure what sandalwood actually smelled like. He was wearing a white t-shirt with block black lettering on it. When we had (reluctantly on my part) disengaged, I made him open his bomber jacket to show me what it said: SAVE THE FUTURE.
‘It’s only a knock-off,’ he assured me apologetically.
I doubted it was a genuine Katharine Hamnett one, but I wouldn’t have begrudged her the money if it had been. The designer had turned up to a reception at Number 10 a couple of months earlier wearing one of her t-shirts with a slogan about nuclear missiles on it, and only undone her jacket to show it at the moment Mrs Thatcher was shaking her hand for the TV cameras. Maggie looked like she might be going to have an aneurysm.
‘I like it,’ I told him.
He pulled a face. ‘I don’t know. I think Wham! might have ruined them now.’
I’d seen the band’s new video, with them wearing similar t-shirts that said CHOOSE LIFE, on Top of the Pops the night before. ‘I think you’re probably all right for a couple more weeks,’ I smiled. ‘It’ll take the teenage girls that long to save up their pocket money.’
We set off up Marchmont Street past the space-age ziggurats of the Brunswick Centre. Icebreakers met at the Gay’s The Word bookshop, though I deliberately hadn’t mentioned the name in case it scared Liam off. But as we approached the unapologetic sign, complete with two pink triangles reclaimed from the Nazis to serve as proud pointers towards the delights inside, there was no denying where we were headed. The shop was closed but, unlike all the other premises up and down Marchmont street, the lights were still on and the interior full of people.
‘You ready for this?’ I asked him.
He gave a gulp and nodded. ‘As I’ll ever be.’
I reached out and squeezed his hand. ‘Don’t worry. The first step’s the hardest.’
That’s true of a lot of things. But by that point I was so far down the road I had given up even trying to look back.
THIRTEEN
The bell above the shop door tinkled as Paud unlocked it to let us in.
‘Tommy! It’s been ages.’ He pecked me on both cheeks, his eyes already on Liam behind me. ‘And who’s this?’
‘Liam. I’m at the same college as Tommy.’
He gruffly extended a hand, which Paud grasped in his own. ‘Is that a Belfast accent?’
‘It is. You too?’
‘Derry, darling. Pleased to meet you.’
You see? I thought. Common ground already, and we weren’t even over the threshold.
‘We’re taking over,’ Paud continued, ushering us inside and locking the door behind us. ‘See that one over there at the table? The pretty one? Well, the prettiest one. He’s from Portrush. Come on, I’ll introduce you.’
I felt a pang of jealousy as I watched him take Liam’s arm and lead him over to the café area at the back of the shop. Mark was indeed undeniably the prettiest among the group of men and handful of women sitting there. Paud was very good-looking too. Stop it, I told myself. It was you who brought Liam here, and he’s leaving with you as well.
I gave myself a moment to look around the shop. It was my happy place: a haven of welcome and openness stacked floor-to-ceiling with my favourite things. Although not so much right now: there were big gaps here and there in the neatly serried spines, and an entire double set of shelves towards the back of the shop was completely empty, a forlorn label reading INTERNATIONAL all that was left. The shop had been raided just a few weeks before: unable to get them on homegrown obscenity laws, the authorities had sent Customs & Excise in to confiscate every imported book in the place, on the grounds that anything foreign must automatically be filth. It turned out that the law they were relying on dated from 1876, and the books they had swiped included such underground degenerates as Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams and Christopher Isherwood. Paud had been particularly outraged by them taking copies of a film tie-in edition of Goodbye To Berlin: he told us he had pointed at the photo of Liza Minnelli on the cover and said, ‘It won eight fucking Oscars, how can it be obscene?’ In one version of the story the customs officer replied, ‘For all we know that might be a man, sir,’ but I’m pretty sure that one has been improved in the telling.
Farcical as the whole thing was, it didn’t make it any less serious. Paud and the shop’s board of directors, all of them unpaid volunteers, were looking at criminal charges and maybe even prison. Their own homes had been raided too, the same day, with officers blatantly on the look-out not just for dirty books but anything else they might be able to use against them. It turned out they had also impounded all the stock that was on its way to the bookshop as it arrived in the country – thousands of pounds’ worth of books that had already been paid for. I was particularly put out about this because it included every single copy of Babycakes, the latest novel by Armistead Maupin, whose Tales of the City series was among the best things I’d ever read: God knows how long I was going to have to wait now to read it. I was dying to find out if things work out for Mouse and Jon.
I followed Paud and Liam over to the meeting area at the back of the shop, where they were deep in conversation with Mark. It seemed to be mostly about places they all knew back in Northern Ireland, so I greeted a few other people rather than try to butt in. Mark, however, had other ideas. ‘Tommy!’ he hollered across the table – Mark is generally the loudest voice in any given room – ‘What’s this about you collecting money for the miners?’
‘Oh!’ I looked at Liam, who gave me a shy smile. ‘Yeah. We did a day shaking buckets at Oxford Circus, and we’ve got collecting tins on the bar at the student union too.’
‘Fantastic.’ He beamed at me, then swivelled around to address the whole group. ‘Seriously, this is what we should all be doing. We’ve got a duty to stand together against what Thatcher is trying to do to the miners. They’ve got their defence organisation, the NUM, and we’ve got ours: this, here.’ He banged a finger on the table. ‘And we should be standing shoulder to shoulder.’
There were some scornful snorts around the table. ‘No, seriously!’ Mark protested, gesturing around at the empty shelves. ‘Look at what happened here! Look at the police raid on The Bell in March! Look what she’s doing to the GLC! And then look at Orgreave this week. The full force of the state is getting turned on anyone, everyone, who dares to stand up for their rights. The NUM is the strongest union – always has been. It brought down a Tory government in ’74 and they’ve never forgiven it. Thatcher’s not gonna make the same mistake again, even if it means starving them into submission. And their families with them. You think the Milk Snatcher’s bothered about kids going hungry?’
‘So what do you want us to do?’ a voice from the other side of the table asked. It was Ivan, an older guy who’s been badgering us all for weeks to go along to a clinic that was doing research into Aids. You had to go along every few weeks and give blood samples. I think his own partner, Paolo, was ill. He’d had very few takers, so it wasn’t surprising he was a bit grumpy about someone else’s demand for solidarity.
‘We need to collect money. As much cash as we can. That’s what they need, right? Tommy?’ Mark turned to face me, making me jump. I’d settled quite happily into the role of passive audience member, perching next to Liam on the closed lid of the piano in front of the noticeboard. I had clocked a new poster there bearing those same doomy initials: A.I.D.S. They had started turning up everywhere in recent weeks: on leaflets sitting on the bar in all the pubs and plastered all over the pages of Capital Gay and even HIM. The whole thing was just too frightening to think about; I was quite happy to have my back to the poster.
‘Er, yeah,’ I spluttered. ‘The people we’re working with are putting together emergency food parcels for families that can’t afford to go shopping. And clothes and shoes for the kids – that sort of thing. They said it’s a bit easier in the summer but if the strike goes on until winter things are going to get really difficult for them.’
‘We can put a collection box on the counter,’ volunteered Paud.
‘Right. Good. And if we get some buckets and placards printed up, we could collect at Pride too,’ enthused Mark. In his accent, the word came out as prayed. The march was at the end of this month. There had been some nonsense about not even calling it Pride this year, and rebranding it as the ‘Not Just a Phase’ march, but I think we had managed to put paid to that.
There were a few of the same sort of grumbles that had been raised at the Poly, of the ‘what have the miners ever done for us?’ variety – it hadn’t escaped my own notice that the sort of blokes we were collecting for were often inclined to kick in the heads of the sort of blokes we were – but in the end Mark called for a show of hands and the majority of the people in the room opted to go ahead with the plan. God knows if any of it would actually amount to anything, but it was nice to feel we were going to do something rather than just talk about it.
Liam seemed much more relaxed now, chatting away to Mark about various Northern Irish friends they turned out to have in common, so I sought out Paud and asked him if there was any news on the prosecution front. ‘Come with me,’ he told me, and led me through the staff door at the back of the shop and down into the basement, where he indicated a cardboard box on the floor, more battered than the rest. ‘They let us have these back this morning,’ he told me. ‘These are the ones they couldn’t make out to be dirty, no matter how hard they tried. Have a look at them.’
I squatted down and opened up the box. There were maybe three dozen books inside, mostly heavyweight academic titles. ‘Go on, look at the state of them,’ urged Paud. I pulled out a copy of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, which fell heavily open at a point about halfway through. ‘Spine completely cracked,’ Paud confirmed. ‘There’s ones in there with the covers ripped; pages actually falling out. One of them looks like someone’s spilled a cup of coffee all over it. There’s no way we’ll be able to sell them at full price. Which probably means selling them at a loss – and these are just the ones we’ve got to sell at all. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I know there’s people worse off than we are’ – he glanced upwards to the meeting room above us – ‘and of course I’m happy to have a collection box out for them, but if they go ahead and prosecute us there’s not going to be a shop to put it in much longer.’
I put the book back as carefully as I could and straightened up. ‘Do you think they are going to charge you?’
He shrugged despairingly. ‘Our lawyer thinks there’s a good chance. There’s a Danish book about a girl with two dads – Jenny Lives With Eric and Martin – that they seem to be very excited about. They think they might be able to get us for importing child pornography. It’s a kid’s picture book, for Christ’s sake!’
‘I’m really sorry,’ I said helplessly, reaching out to rub his shoulder. ‘You know if there’s anything more I can do...’ I was already an active member of the defence campaign, as were most of the guys upstairs. We’d picketed the Customs and Excise building in Euston a few weeks ago, handing out leaflets to passing commuters that emphasised the free speech aspect of the whole thing. They tended to go down quite well until people got as far as the actual name of the bookshop.
The door at the top of the stairs banged open and Mark’s voice came from above. ‘All right you two, finish up and put your cocks away now. ‘We’re all going out to show the new boy how we party. Are you coming?’
Paud shook his head, eyebrows raised, smiling despite himself. ‘All right then. Give me five minutes to lock up.’ He lowered his voice and nodded towards the stairs. ‘You’d better keep an eye on that one. Poor young Liam might not be ready for the full-on Mark Ashton experience.’
I grinned slightly uneasily. ‘I’ll make sure he gets home safely.’
‘Right.’ Paud ushered me back towards the stairs. ‘But I was more thinking that you’d better make sure it’s your home he’s safely getting back to.’
FOURTEEN
We went to The Bell – pretty much the whole crowd of us from the bookshop. We must have made quite a sight: a couple of dozen men marching through Bloomsbury’s elegant squares, several arm-in-arm (I didn’t chance it with Liam, though I did make very sure it was me he was walking next to). At one point, after an elderly woman hissed ‘disgusting’ at us from across the street, Mark tried to get up a chant of ‘We’re here, we’re queer, we’re going for a beer’ but it didn’t really catch on. It didn’t really need to, the volume he was singing it at.
The Bell was at the dodgy end of Pentonville Road – well, the dodgier end – and I found myself once again keeping a wary eye on Liam’s reaction. For my part I’m quite at home among prostitutes, and perfectly capable of politely declining the inevitable offers of drugs you get whenever you go near King’s Cross station too. I think I’m probably too old for drugs these days. Or maybe just too middle class, at least for the ones on offer round here. To do heroin you seem to either have to live on a council estate or be heir to a baronetcy, and nothing in between.
‘They do all-night gay film shows there,’ I told Liam as we passed the Scala Cinema. ‘I saw Pink Flamingoes there – you know, the one with the dog poo?’ He looked blank, and I thought it was probably best not to enlighten him. ‘I’ll take you some time. And then just round the corner there’s the pacifist bookshop, which has got its own big gay section, and then if you carry on up Cally Road you’ll get to the lesbian squats. Honestly, it’s all going on round here.’
He smiled at me nervously as we turned and filed in through the doors of the pub. It was still pretty quiet, and it had the fresh-new-start smell it has at the beginning of the weekend, when the floor isn’t sticky yet and the air-freshener is still winning its battle with the amyl nitrite. The disco lights were already going and the music was pumping out, but not yet at a level when you couldn’t hear yourself speak, and we bagged ourselves a big table towards the back, which we managed to keep for the whole of the evening, with various other people coming and going as the night wore on.
