The Enemy Within, page 4
He caught me looking at it. ‘You like?’
‘Yeah, absolutely.’ I wasn’t going to risk offending him by saying anything else. I’m not exactly all over the Irish stuff, but of course I supported Troops Out. You only had to look at a map to see that a united Ireland is just logical. And anyway, Iain Paisley bellowing about ‘Saving Ulster from Sodomy’ had made it pretty obvious which side I had to be on. But faced with someone who had actually lived through it all, I wished I had paid a bit more attention. ‘Brilliant.’
He grinned. ‘I’ll get you one.’
There was a snort of disgust from behind the custody desk, and the plastic tray with my own belongings in it came crashing across the counter with slightly more force than was necessary. ‘Thanks so much,’ I made a point of saying.
I only had the one badge to put back on – the slightly pathetic Fight Education Cuts – but, pleasingly, it took nearly as long for me to thread the laces back into my Dr Martens. I couldn’t help wishing I’d bought the thirty-two-hole boots instead, just so we could annoy our captors for even longer. I asked after Dexter again but was brusquely told to mind my own business, and although I didn’t feel great about leaving him there it was pretty obvious there wasn’t much more we could do for him right now. I would have to catch up with him later in the day. Quite apart from it being my fault he’d been involved at all, I had just been handed back five copies of News Line which hadn’t been paid for along with the rest of my stuff.
‘Fucking filth,’ Liam muttered, just loud enough to be heard as we walked out through the back doors of the station into the bright spring sunshine.
FIVE
‘What time is it?’ asked Liam, shielding his eyes after the indoor gloom.
I glanced at the watch I had just put back on. I haven’t got used to a digital yet, and I still have to do a little adjustment in my head every time I read the numbers. ‘Twelve fifty-three – nearly one o’clock.’
‘Want to head back to the Poly and see what’s happening there?’ he suggested.
‘Absolutely.’ There was no way I was letting Liam out of my sight now. ‘We can get some lunch at the cafeteria too,’ I said brightly. ‘Or a coffee,’ I added, just in case that was too forward for him, my spirits plunging a little when he didn’t respond to either.
The Poly was only a few streets away. ‘So you’re from Northern Ireland?’ I asked as we set off walking.
He nodded. ‘If you want to call it that. Belfast born and bred. My grandaddy was a Connemara man.’
‘So did you see a lot of it? The violence?’
I snuck a sidelong glance at him. His face was grim. ‘My fair share. You can’t not. People over here have no idea what it’s like, Tommy. You pop out to the shops for a tin of beans or a pack of fags and they’ve put up a checkpoint in the road since breakfast time. A man in another country’s uniform pointing a gun at you and telling you what you can do in your own street, in your own home.’
‘It must be mental.’
‘That’s the word for it. You thought this morning was over the top; try and imagine every police car on that street was an armoured car and they were chucking tear gas at you for trying to have a say on who gets into your own college. When I was twelve they kicked my uncle’s door down and dragged him off to prison for going on a march. A civil rights march! No trial, no nothing, and when my auntie asks where they’re taking him she gets a gun pointed in her face in front of my wee niece who’s no more than four years old. And when she finally gets to see him again three days later, he can’t tell her either, because the bastards have had a bag over his head the whole time. Sure, you can’t even imagine it living over here.’
I could, actually. A good friend of mine had been put through something pretty similar a few years back after I’d got him tangled up in a plot to cover up crimes by some very senior politicians, but that was another story. Besides, Liam didn’t seem in the mood to be interrupted.
‘I stuck it out until, a couple of years ago, a friend of mine took it into his head to steal a car and take it for a spin. Just like a lot of other silly young boys in Brixton and Toxteth and Handsworth and plenty of other places have done. But the difference was that he drove this one up the Falls Road, and the British army shot him dead for it. That’s when I decided it was time to get out.’
‘God.’ I didn’t know what else to say.
Liam nodded fiercely. ‘And I’ll bet you never saw that on the news, eh? But there’s things like that happening day in, day out on the streets of Belfast and Derry that no one here ever gets to hear about. You know how long the military occupation has been going on for now, Tommy? Fifteen years – fifteen, Tommy. It’s Britain’s Vietnam. But if it goes on for another fifteen years, or another hundred years, we’re going to drive out the imperialist forces in the end, just like India, and Malaya, and Kenya, and Rhodesia did before us.’
I thought back to the news footage of the brand-new Zimbabweans dancing to Bob Marley at the independence celebrations a few years back, and their new prime minister, Mr Mugabe, bopping away while Prince Charles stood beside him in a silly uniform looking even more awkward than usual. It had been impossible to watch without a smile.
‘It’s surely got to happen soon, hasn’t it?’ I ventured. Even my father regularly said we should just wash our hands of Northern Ireland and hand it back, and you’ve never seen anyone as keen on wrapping himself in the union jack as he is.
‘Our day will come, Tommy, our day will come.’ Liam lifted one hand up in a clenched fist. I wasn’t sure if I was meant to bump it or not, and opted not to, which I think was the right decision.
There was a brief silence between us while I thought carefully about how to phrase what I wanted to say. ‘I’m sort of surprised you wanted to live in London after all that. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you did,’ – this was the understatement of the week – ‘but I’d have thought you might have preferred to go and get a job with the Greater Dublin Council or whatever they call it?’
He shot me a glance and a grin. ‘The Corporation, as it happens. No, I came over on a bit of business a couple of years back and was stopping with some friends of me da’s in Kilburn, and then I saw the job advertised and decided to go for it. Your man Ken Livingstone’s one of the good guys; he knows the score. I thought there were worse people I could be working for.’
‘Absolutely. I’m a big fan.’ We had arrived back in Prince of Wales Road. Things looked very different from a couple of hours ago. The street was abandoned now, and the only sign that anything had been going on was the No Nazis at NLP banner flapping forlornly in the breeze and an enormous amount of litter blowing around the place. But it was a different story once we pushed through the main doors: the crowd from this morning hadn’t dispersed, just relocated. While there was nothing but abandoned placards to be seen on the stairs, the doors to the cafeteria beyond were crammed with people and the sound of speeches was issuing from inside, which put paid to my hopes of a romantic dinner-à-deux with Liam. We joined the back of the throng and stood on tiptoes to see who was speaking. It turned out to be the local MP, who was standing on one of the long refectory tables and holding forth. He was an ex-student here himself, I remembered, and he both looked and dressed like a lecturer, albeit one of the ones you saw late at night in the Open University programmes on BBC2 – all beard and big hair and clothes that looked like they’d been borrowed from someone slightly bigger than him and with very bad taste. Jeremy Corbyn – that was his name. I’d done my bit to put him in place: Richie had strong-armed a load of us into joining the local Labour party the year before to make sure we got a left-winger in the constituency after the previous MP defected to the SDP, but his constant badgering to attend interminable meetings had slacked off once his man was safely installed, and I hadn’t been able to face going back since the general election because it was just all too depressing.
‘What we saw today was disgraceful,’ Corbyn was saying, to a murmur of approval from the mass of people squeezed in around the benches and tables. ‘Over two hundred policemen – we counted seventeen of them equipped with riot shields – in order to force entry into an educational institution for the benefit of one member of the National Front. A member of the National Front, I might add, who claims to have been a student here for two years despite the fact that he has never even taken out a library card at this institution.’ A gasp ran round the packed room – possibly the first in history at the mention of a library card.
‘I will be bringing up this matter in the House of Commons at the earliest opportunity,’ he continued, to a ripple of applause. ‘And I will be telling my parliamentary colleagues that this is a most serious matter; that the arrests were disgraceful, that the presence of the police on such a large scale was intimidating not only to the students and staff of this college but to the wider local community, and that what is more it played directly into the hands of the National Front, who are running a disgraceful propaganda war against the many students of all races who study together peacefully in this college, and who have shown their absolute abhorrence of the National Front and its racist attitudes. Thank you.’
The wider local community looked to have been thoroughly enjoying it from where I was standing, but I joined in the applause nevertheless as the MP clambered awkwardly down from the table. ‘Well I think we can safely say he thinks it’s disgraceful,’ whispered Liam in my ear. A big grin burst across my face, and I felt the need to clap harder to disguise my disloyalty as the two of us enjoyed a moment of naughtiness together. Laughing at your political comrades wasn’t exactly banned here, but it was very definitely frowned upon. In fact you sometimes got the impression laughing at all was a bourgeois preoccupation.
‘He’s all right really,’ I muttered back as the applause began to die down. ‘I helped get him into the seat; he was a lot better than the alternative.’
He looked at me in surprise. ‘You a Labour man?’
I pulled a face. Strictly speaking the answer was yes: I hadn’t got round to cancelling my Labour subs, which I really should have done, because even at student rates they were still a drain on my finances. ‘To be honest, I’ve sort of given up on parliamentary politics. It feels like you have more of an effect with his sort of thing.’ I gestured at the abandoned placards behind us.
‘Direct action? I hear you. Nah, he’s another sound one, is Jeremy. He’s coming to talk to the Irish Society next week.’
That was interesting. I’d gone to the Irish Society St Patrick’s Day Party the previous year, but I was sure I hadn’t spotted Liam there. Mind you, I couldn’t remember much about the night. I’d been hungover for the best part of a week.
The MP’s place on the table had been taken by Dave, the president of the Spartacist Society, who had unsuccessfully run for union president the previous term. Richie and the rest of the Soggy Oggies were going to be furious when he got out of custody.
‘Comrades,’ Dave yelled to the crowd, several of whom were beginning to mutter and shift about restlessly. ‘What we saw today was the capitalist state leaning over backwards to protect their friends the fascists. As the working class rises up against them, and in the midst of mobilisation for anti-Soviet war, Mrs Thatcher and her claque of bourgeois reactionaries recognise that they may have to call on the fascists as a last measure of desperation, to completely exterminate all opposition to their class rule, by crushing the organised labour movement and wiping out ethnic minorities, as in Germany in the 1930s, and that’s why we see them supplying their courts and cops to protect the so-called “democratic rights” of these racist, terrorist filth…’
He’d lost the room, and despite the best efforts of his pals, who were clustered around the table gazing up adoringly and cheering his every word, it didn’t look like he was going to get it back. People were beginning to drift out of the doors at either end of the cafeteria, or to pick up trays and start to queue at the hotplates behind which the dinner ladies had been standing looking bored. I got the feeling the speeches had already been going on for quite a while before we arrived.
‘Coffee?’ I asked Liam. ‘You grab us a table and I’ll get them in.’
‘Right you are,’ he said, with another one of those heart-melting smiles, and I practically floated across the room before remembering I needed to check if he took sugar or not, because the caterers had started keeping it behind the counter since we made them switch to Nicaraguan fairtrade.
‘Two please,’ he confirmed when I caught up with him. He’d already found us a table, so I left my stuff with him while I went to fetch the coffees. I took two sugars too. I was feeling so happy that even having to queue up behind a girl who was suspiciously demanding full ingredient details for the vegetarian option couldn’t bring me down.
When I got back Liam had the paper he’d bought from me spread out on the tabletop in front of him, which gave me another twinge of guilt about the spare copies sitting in my haversack – not to mention whatever might be happening to Dexter now.
‘It’s good stuff, this,’ remarked Liam as I put his cup down in front of him.
‘Yeah, it’s great.’ I hadn’t got further than the front page of the paper myself, but I wasn’t going to contradict him. ‘A really good read.’
‘Full colour.’ He riffled through the pages. ‘Must cost them a bit to produce.’
‘Yeah.’ I wished I had a bit more to contribute. Fact was, I hadn’t considered the paper as anything other than an alibi. ‘Did you see the Sun the other day?’ I asked.
I got a sharp look in return. ‘I don’t buy it, or anything!’ I assured him. The paper was officially banned on campus. But this particular edition had been worth seeing, nonetheless. ‘It had a big blank space on the front page, because the printers downed tools when they saw what they wanted to put there. Apparently it was a photo of Arthur Scargill made up to look like Hitler.’
‘Oh yeah, I did hear about that,’ Liam nodded. ‘You know what the headline was supposed to be?’
‘Mine Führer,’ I confirmed. It had been on the news. ‘Disgusting, isn’t it?’
‘Good on the print unions for standing up to them. It’s about time someone taught Murdoch a lesson.’ He spun the copy of News Line round on the polished tabletop, tapping a finger on a box-out on one of the inside pages. ‘I was wondering about these.’
For a second I thought he was showing me an estate agent’s advert – there was a photo of a big detached house with rolling lawns in front of it and bushes clipped into topiary shapes – but then I read the heading above it: College of Marxist Education. Beneath it was a timetable for various weekend courses: the first one, the weekend after this one, was titled ‘The Dialectical Path of Cognition’, and the one the week after, ‘Empiricism in England’. It all sounded horribly like the sort of word soup I’d struggled through on the semiotics module in my third year, but I tried to look enthusiastic.
I obviously failed. ‘You probably get enough of that theoretical stuff here anyway.’ He moved to take the paper back, but I stopped him. I’d just noticed the small print underneath: Fee: £20 or £10 for students/unwaged, includes accommodation and meals. A vision of dormitories popped in to my head, closely followed by communal showers. My own cognition is, I’m afraid, very shallow.
‘No, it sounds good,’ I gushed, adding ‘I’ve heard their courses are really interesting’ for good measure. It was nonsense: I’d never heard of this college or the lecturers – listed only as Geoff Pilling and G Healy – in my life. They were both listed as ‘WRP Central Committee’. Come to think of it, that was the group Dexter was in. They were quite a glamorous lot, unlikely as it seems: I remembered him organising a screening of Vanessa Redgrave’s The Palestinian in the second year and she actually turned up to give a talk afterwards. For quite a long time afterwards, as it turned out.
‘D’you think we’d be too late to sign up?’ Liam looked genuinely excited about the prospect of a weekend discussing dialectics, but then maybe if you’re on an accountancy course that’s what counts as a good time. Since I felt genuinely excited about the prospect of spending a weekend with him, I wasn’t going to knock it.
‘Well, they’re still advertising it in today’s paper,’ I pointed out, checking the date on the front. ‘Shall I try and see if they’ve got any places left?’ My enthusiasm for the idea was rising along with his. A whole forty-eight hours in his company. Sleeping right next to him, if I could be canny with the bunk beds.
‘There’s no phone number on it,’ Liam pointed out, pointing to the cut-out form on the bottom of the advert.
‘No problem; I know the people to call.’ This was a bit of an exaggeration, but I was sure Dexter would be able to help me out: I needed to get in contact with him anyway and apologise for what had happened this morning. ‘Leave it with me, I can sort it.’
He was looking pleasingly impressed. But then I spotted something in the small print that wiped away all my smugness: ‘Hold on, though. It says it’s in Derbyshire. How are we going to get there?’
‘Not a problem,’ he grinned. ‘I can drive us.’
‘You’ve got a car?’ For a second I’d forgotten he was an actual grown-up rather than a full-time student like the rest of us.
