The Enemy Within, page 27
It wasn’t until a couple of days later that a possible solution to my problem occurred to me. I was coming back from taking my last lot of library books back to the Poly when I bumped into my neighbour Shafiq in the hallway. He had his prayer cap on and a long creamy-yellow tunic, so I guessed he was on his way to Friday prayers. We nodded and said hello to each other, and I held the front door open for him, and was about to let it swing shut when something made me call after him.
‘Yeah?’ He turned, half way down the steps to the pavement. He’s got a really nice smile. The tunic was quite clingy, and really flattering too – if that’s not sacrilegious.
‘You work in computers, don’t you?’
He nodded. ‘Yeah.’
I was thinking on my feet. ‘A…a friend of mine’s lent me one.’ Somehow even that didn’t seem quite enough distance. ‘It’s…um, it’s actually his dad’s, not his, but he says he’s happy for me to use it. Only I don’t really know what I’m doing. Is there any chance you could show me how it works?’
‘What sort is it?’
‘Um… I’m not sure. It’s got a picture of an owl on it.’ I felt like a right idiot not being able to say any more than that.
‘OK,’ he said with a grin, ‘a Beeb then, innit. Yeah, I can show you round one of them. I could come round tomorrow morning?’ It was funny hearing such a broad London accent coming from someone dressed like him. I liked it.
‘That would be brilliant.’
‘No worries.’
He knocked on my door just after eleven the next morning. I’d already managed to get the thing set up and switched on, and it was showing the same infuriating screen it always had done.
‘Yeah, nice one,’ he said, folding himself down to sit cross-legged on the floor in front of the keyboard. He was in jeans and a t-shirt today. He still looked nice though. The way he was sitting the jeans opened up slightly at the back and I could see a tantalising glimpse of darkness at the very top of his bumcrack.
I suddenly realised he’d asked me a question. ‘Sorry, what?’
‘You got a cassette recorder? Or a disc drive?’
Bewildered, I started to move towards my hi-fi, which has a double tape deck, and then suddenly remembered the mystery object in the box. I scrabbled beneath the desk to retrieve it, its wire trailing behind and bringing out several kitchen utensils it had tangled in. ‘Is this it?’
‘’At’s the one.’ Shafiq took it from me and plugged the other end of the wire into the back of the computer. ‘Any discs wiv it?’
Now I just looked completely blank. ‘Floppy disks. ’Bout this big,’ he prompted, holding his hands out to the size of a 45rpm single. ‘Only square.’
‘And floppy?’ I asked, ducking to look in the box again, even though I was sure there was nothing of the sort in there.
‘Nah, not very. If you ain’t got no programmes, there ain’t much you can do without… Oh, ’ang on.’ His attention was drawn to the screen as he tapped at the keyboard. I was impressed. He didn’t even have to look down at his fingers.
‘He’s installed some extra Rom on ’ere,’ he announced. ‘What’ve we got? Oh, its Wordwise.’
‘What’s that?’ He might as well be speaking a foreign language for all I understood.
‘Word Processor, innit. For writin’ letters an’ that.’ He tapped a couple more keys and a screen came up that looked exactly like Ceefax: WORDWISE was written at the top in bright yellow capitals, with a numbered list in light blue stretching down beneath it: Save Entire Text, Load New Text, Save Marked Text, Load Text To Cursor… Fascinated, I found myself drawn towards the screen, crouching down on the carpet beside Shafiq so I could look at it properly.
‘Can we see what he was writing?’ It felt as if I might have finally stumbled across the key to Liam’s soul.
He tapped a few more keys. ‘Oh. No. All the files have been deleted.’
‘Really?’ The disappointment was crushing.
‘Yeah, look.’ He pointed to another list that had appeared on screen. Every item on it carried the message
‘Into cars, is he? Your mate’s dad?’
‘What?’ I had no idea what Shafiq was on about. It took me a second to remember the story I had spun him about the computer’s owner.
‘Looks like he was writing a Haynes Manual or summfink.’ He put his finger right up against the screen and I followed it to the column of words on the left-hand side. Handling. Ignition. Timing.
It felt like all the air had been sucked out of the room. The incriminating words sat there burning out of the screen. Surely any moment now Shafiq was going to put two and two together? Would he see it as his moral duty to report me to the police? I didn’t know much about how Muslims had to behave over things like this. My one comfort was that I hadn’t mentioned Liam, or even my fictional friend’s father, being Irish. Hopefully that meant Shafiq wouldn’t jump to the immediate conclusion anyone else would be bound to reach in the circumstances. A racist one, sure, but in this case it wouldn’t be a wrong one.
When I still hadn’t managed a response a few seconds later, Shafiq looked round from the screen. He was obviously taken aback by what he saw. ‘Don’t worry, mate, you can still use it! Look.’ He tapped a button that took us back to the first menu, and I exhaled with relief. ‘Just go to Load New Text, number two, and then you can just…’ He flexed his fingers across the keyboard to demonstrate. ‘Wooah! That’s pretty mental.’
The top of the screen had filled with gobbledygook. Not even letters, just squiggles and dashes. I was still trying to get my head round the last thing I’d seen, and could only mutter a vague ‘What is it?’
He leaned forward to squint at the screen. ‘That’s Arabic mate. Your pal’s dad must have’ – another combination of keys, too quick for me to take in – ‘yeah, he’s got another Rom installed to do Arabic text. Sweet! I didn’t even know you could get that.’
‘Are you sure?’ I was asking just for the sake of saying something. What I wanted more than anything was for Shafiq to shut up and switch this awful machine off and go away and leave me in peace to think.
‘Yeah, man, I got taught the alphabet at mosque. Can’t understand a word of it, mind!’ He grinned, the screen holding his full attention, completely oblivious to my discomfort. ‘Don’t worry, there’s gonna be a way to switch it off. Tap tap tap. Yeah, there you go.’ The screen went blank again, and he quickly tapped out the words the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. ‘Sorted!’
He looked at me in triumph, and his smile faltered. ‘You OK, mate?’
‘Yeah. Yeah.’ I scrambled to my feet, my head swimming – only partly due to the sudden movement. ‘That’s brilliant, thanks. You’ve been great, only I’ve just remembered I’ve got to go out somewhere.’ It wasn’t even a good lie: he was going to notice when I didn’t go past his door. ‘Sorry.’
‘Oh! No worries.’ Looking understandably confused, he got up and followed me to the flat door, babbling something about games and how I should try to get hold of something called Elite. I really wasn’t listening. As soon as I managed to get him out of the door I strode back over to the computer, which was still displaying its inane message on the screen, and pulled its plug straight out of the wall. The TV filled with a chaotic fuzz of static and an agonising high-pitched whine. But it was nothing compared to what was going on inside my head as I sank back down to the floor, wishing once again with all my heart that I had never met Liam Delaney.
THIRTEEN
New start. Clean slate. Back to the beginning.
‘So your last job was as a hospital porter. Is that right?’ droned the woman at the Job Centre, looking at my file instead of me.
‘That’s right.’
‘And you’ve been in full-time education since…September 1980?’ Now she did deign to look up, giving me a glance that also conveyed an unspoken At your age?
‘Yes. So I’ve got a BA, and I’m waiting to get the results of my PGDip.’ I wasn’t telling her anything that wasn’t written on the form in front of her, so I wondered if a joke might help. ‘You know, like the teabags?’
Not a flicker. ‘And what were you hoping that might qualify you for?’
I sighed. ‘I don’t know, really.’ I suspected she wouldn’t react well to my admitting I’d only really signed up for the course to keep me out of places like this. I’d already scoured the cards displayed on the rows of noticeboards that stretched the width of the Job Centre as I waited for my appointment. They were well spaced-out, with an awful lot of the garish orange background showing. None of them seemed to require a detailed knowledge of Shakespeare’s problem plays. At least the orange made the place brighter than the Unemployment Benefit Office where I’d signed on for the first time that morning: it was an institutional beige that sapped your will to live just looking at it, which was probably the intention. I’d spent an hour and a quarter with nothing else to do but stare at it while I stood in the queue. I would definitely be taking a book with me in future.
‘Have you considered teacher training?’ It was clear from the practised way she said it that she was speaking from rote rather than out of any personal inspiration. I guessed it was what they said to anyone who turned up with a degree.
‘Um…no, not really,’ I admitted. The idea had never really occurred to me. There were a couple of teachers I’d quite liked at school, but for the most part they were grim authority figures like policemen or priests who definitely belonged on the other side of some grown-up divide that I hadn’t crossed yet, even if I was nearly thirty.
The woman looked at me sceptically from beneath her bubble perm. ‘D’you like kids?’
I didn’t dislike kids. I hadn’t had much to do with them since I was one. ‘Yeah, I suppose so.’
She sniffed and turned to delve in a desk drawer. ‘Something to think about. Here’s some information.’ She plumped a carboard folder stuffed with papers down on the desk between us: Careers in Teaching With ILEA. It had a photo of a young, rather sexy teacher with shoulder-length hair on the cover, grinning enthusiastically beside a blackboard as a forest of little arms in a carefully-arranged selection of skin hues rose in the foreground.
A teacher-training course would surely mean at least a couple more years at college. If I could make it all the way to 1987 as a student, there was a chance Maggie could finally be out by the time I finished: there might actually be some jobs to apply for again. Plus it would get me out of contributing any tax to pay for more nuclear missiles or arming the police or reopening workhouses or whatever mad scheme she was going to come up with next. Not that I’d ever paid much in the way of tax in the past of course, but it was the principle of the thing.
‘Thanks.’ I took the folder and slid it into my haversack. This clearly signalled to the woman that she had done everything that was expected of her. She closed my file and put it away in a drawer with an air of finality.
‘Thanks very much then,’ I said as I got up, but she was already looking behind me and asking, ‘Who’s next?’
And with that my duties were done for the next two weeks, until I had to go back to the UBO to sign on again. I had exactly twenty-seven pounds and five pence to last me till then. The man at the benefit office had told me it would be going up by an extra seventy pence a week in November, which was nice of him but didn’t make it seem like he was holding out a great deal of hope for my immediate employment prospects. I was now officially one of the ‘One In Ten’. Or were we up to one in nine, or even eight, these days? I’d lost count.
Thankfully we were enjoying a bit of an Indian summer – some days it felt more like July than September – so I spent much of my time lying in the sun in Finsbury Park, working my way determinedly through the stock of Stroud Green Public Library. I would make myself Marmite sandwiches and fill a bottle with squash every morning before I went out, because I really did have to watch the pennies now, and I spent my evenings at home in front of the telly watching rubbish like Lace and the Hot Shoe Show rather than out on the town, but it wasn’t such a terrible way to live your life. Except, of course, for the aching hole at the centre of it, and the fact that now when I was lying awake in the darkness at four in the morning, I wasn’t just worrying about where Liam was and what he was doing, but how many people might be going to die as a result.
I was unable to do anything except watch the news each night with a mounting sense of panic that they would say a bomb had gone off somewhere in England and dozens of people were dead. Although I knew, logically, anything like that would be in the headlines, I couldn’t relax until they’d got right through to the ‘and finally’ silly stuff at the end of the programme. It started to feel like a religious duty for me to sit there every night, as if by willing the newsreaders not to mention anything, I could prevent something awful from actually happening. There might not have been any bombings mentioned, but what was talked about hardly helped lift my mood: it seemed like Thatcher’s determination to use the forces of so-called justice to destroy anyone who dared stand up to her was hardening by the day. One night brought the news that the government had got another court order to evict the Greenham Common women; the next that they were prosecuting a civil servant who had leaked stuff showing Maggie had ordered an attack on the General Belgrano and slaughtered more than three hundred Argentinians, even though they were sailing away from the Falklands at the time and not threatening anyone. A war crime, for Christ’s sake, but it was the man who had exposed it that they were trying to throw in prison. Another bulletin showed Leon Brittan, who, as home secretary, was supposed to keep himself out of court decisions, announcing that picketing miners deserved to be jailed for life. ‘Jack-boot methods have no place in this country,’ he thundered, totally ignoring the fact that if anyone was wearing the jack-boots it was the bunch of blue-shirts under his personal command. And then, just as it looked like talks between the miners and the National Coal Board might actually be getting somewhere, came the news that Maggie had gone on the radio – in between the easy-listening records on the Jimmy Young Show, of all places – to declare in that gleefully cruel voice that ‘we can carry on for a very, very long time – and shall’, so it looked like everything we had said at Icebreakers about her starving families into submission over the winter was going to come true. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so angry, or depressed, or so helpless about everything.
What I had found out about Liam was affecting my day-to-day life, too. I’d always known about the warnings about looking out for unattended items on the Tube, but I realised when I went into St Marys that I’d spent the whole journey ignoring the book on my lap and instead scanning up and down the carriage, fretting at every station that someone was going to leave a bag behind and it would be the last thing any of us saw. I was in such a state that they couldn’t get a drop of blood out of me at the clinic, and I had to get buses all the way home because I couldn’t face going back down into that stifling hole in the ground packed with people again, even though I had bought a return ticket. Even then, as the Number 7 crept along Oxford Street, I found I was looking at the front of Selfridges and picturing all its plate-glass windows blowing out in razor-sharp shards that would slice through all the shoppers on the pavement in front. Some of it was down to watching Threads the night before: a horrific drama about nuclear war that had shown Woolworths and British Home Stores getting blown to bits and people being crushed under the rubble – and that was one of the least horrible bits in it. But whatever it was that set me off, I had to close my eyes and work hard to get my breathing under control, while my armpits went into overdrive and started practically squirting out through the arms of my t-shirt. At least it meant I got a whole seat to myself for the rest of the journey.
I’d never been like this after Luke was blown up. I’d been sad, sure – devastated – but on the Dilly it had felt like we were taking chances with our lives each and every day and I had just accepted what had happened to him as one of the many other dangers that London held. All the more reason to live every day like it might be your last, as I, never short of a cliché in those days, liked to spout. Then I never thought I’d make my thirties. Never thought about anything much at all if I could help it. Now here I was, on the very verge of my fourth decade and, whether it was university or life that had done it to me, I found myself thinking way, way too much.
What would Luke be doing now, I wondered? He’d been the same age as me, until he wasn’t any more. Would he have made it off the Dilly like me? Would he have done something with that artistic talent? He never got the chance. Cut down before he could get anywhere near his prime. While the warmongers and fanatics responsible for the situation that swept him up, entirely innocent, and snuffed out his life, marched on, unrepentant, blinkered, never once glancing back or down, not giving a damn what, or who, was left broken and bleeding by their actions. We can carry on for a very, very long time – and shall.
In the end it came as a weird sort of relief when the news I had been dreading finally arrived. It was on a Saturday night – Dynasty had just finished – and it came right at the start of the bulletin with Moira Stuart announcing that ‘police have intercepted a massive shipment of arms from Libya that they believe were destined for the IRA’.
I sat up very straight on my futon as a reporter in an overcoat came into view on a dark harbourside. ‘The police say the cargo included Armalite rifles and ammunition and almost three tons of plastic explosive – enough for hundreds of bombs, along with hundreds of electric detonators and fuses,’ he announced, and the screen cut to a map of Europe, across which red dotted lines started to creep. ‘It is believed to have been supplied by Libya, whose leader Colonel Gaddafi recently publicly pledged his support for what he called “the IRA’s struggle, that of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and that of anti-Imperialist forces everywhere”. Police sources have indicated to the BBC that the consignment was shipped out from Tripoli into the Mediterranean off the Maltese island of Gozo, where it was transferred onto the Irish-registered 65ft fishing boat, the Mary Ann, which had been moored in nearby Valletta for the previous two nights. The Royal Navy, who had been tracking the boat for several days as part of a joint operation with British and Irish police forces, were able to intercept it as it entered British waters in the early hours of this morning, and everyone on board was arrested.’
