The Enemy Within, page 5
‘I have.’ That cheeky smile again. God he had gorgeous lips. ‘Here, let me give you my number and you can let me know if we’re on or not.’ He tore a strip off the edge of the paper and pulled a pen from his jacket pocket.
Oh, we’re on, I thought to myself triumphantly, as I watched him scribble the number down. We are most definitely on.
SIX
It took me a frustratingly long time to track down Dexter so I could get everything sorted out for my weekend away with Liam. First I had to get his old home number off the secretary in the sociology department, who only worked part time, then it took me ages to get through to Dex’s mum in Birmingham, because it turned out she worked funny shifts, and then when she gave me the number for his shared house in Clapham it turned out there was hardly ever anyone in there either. Despite making what seemed like constant trips down to the payphone in the hallway of my own house for days on end, it was the following Tuesday evening before I actually got to speak to the man himself.
‘Oh, hi Tommy.’ He sounded exhausted.
‘Hey, Dex. How’s it going? What happened with the police?’ I’d found out the previous day that Richie, Sonya, Kelvin and the others were being charged with ‘threatening behaviour’ on top of everything else, but Dexter had been way up the street with us at the time so I assumed he must have been let off eventually too, once the police had finished having their fun with him.
‘They’re charging me with street trading without a licence.’
‘You’re joking!’ There had been dozens of people flogging dozens of different papers at every protest I’d ever been on. ‘I’ve never heard of anyone getting done for that before.’
‘It’s just today’s chosen tool of oppression against the working classes,’ Dexter assured me wearily. ‘What about you?’
‘They, er, let me go without charge,’ I had to admit. ‘Sorry.’ I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more guilty.
‘Typical.’ He sighed.
‘Hey, look,’ I pushed on, in the hope this might raise his spirits a bit. ‘A friend of mine and me are really keen to do one of the courses the WRP are putting on – you know, at the college in Derbyshire?’
‘Really?’ He sounded quite surprised, but he loyally added, ‘They’re really good. I’ve been to all the summer schools.’
‘Yeah. We were hoping maybe we could get on the one this weekend? Could you maybe put in a good word for us?’
‘Of course! We’re always happy to welcome new comrades to the party,’ he said with real enthusiasm, and it turned out that actually I could feel more guilty after all.
It turned out our little holiday would involve both of us both paying a full year’s subs to become members of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party as well as the course fees themselves – ‘and the 80p you owe me for your copies of News Line,’ Dex remembered to add. This was turning out to be an expensive date, but I was sure it would be worth it. Besides, I’d been going to cancel my Labour membership anyway: the WRP came in slightly cheaper so I could convince myself I was actually saving money. I could always cancel once it had served its purpose.
He told me he wouldn’t have an answer for me until he’d been ‘into the Centre’ the next day, but he was as good as his word and he phoned me back on the stroke of six on Wednesday evening to say it was all sorted. ‘I vouched for you,’ he said with real conviction, making me feel my most wretched yet. But I managed to put it aside, and went off, slightly ridiculously, to clean my teeth and check my hair in the mirror before dialling the number on the piece of paper I’d been carrying around like a talisman in my wallet for the previous six days.
After all that, Liam didn’t pick up. I supposed it didn’t really matter – there were still nearly forty-eight hours before we needed to be in Derbyshire – but I’d been psyching myself up and looking forward to speaking to him again for so long that it felt like a real let-down when his phone just rang and rang with no answer. I figured I could at least keep trying his number, just so long as no one from any of the other bedsits jumped on the payphone and hogged it for the rest of the evening. Then, when it rang a little while later I went thundering excitedly down the stairs before anyone else could get to it in the hope it would be him calling back, forgetting that I hadn’t even given him my number. It turned out to be my mum phoning ‘just for a chat’. It was nice to hear from her, but I’m afraid I was as terse as a teenager in the hope that she would get the message and clear the line for me.
‘Your dad’s been offered a new job,’ she told me after we’d done all the usual stuff.
‘Really?’ That did surprise me. My father had been working for the county council forever, departing each morning at the exact same time and getting home at the exact same time each evening for as long as I could remember.
‘Oh, still at the council,’ she reassured me. ‘Just taking on some new responsibilities. He’s being very grand about it because they’re making him sign the Official Secrets Act.’
‘Why?’ I asked incredulously. Dad worked in the highways department: gritter lorries and potholes were about as exciting as it got.
‘Oh, it’s civil defence stuff,’ she said airily. ‘To do with these new regulations that are coming in about nuclear preparedness.’ The receiver went muffled and I could hear my father protesting in the background. ‘Oh, don’t be silly, he knows that much – he watches the news,’ she told him.
‘Do they think something’s going to happen?’ I asked warily. Thanks to Maggie helpfully making Greenham Common, just a few miles away from my parents, one of the prime Russian targets, they were likely to be among the first people blasted out of existence if war ever did break out. The whole thing made me sick with fury: I’d have been down there protesting myself if the peace campers hadn’t made it very clear that, as a bloke, I wasn’t welcome.
‘No, I don’t think so, love,’ she assured me. ‘It’s just about making sure everyone’s ready – just in case. We’ve had briefings at the hospital too.’
‘Blimey,’ I said, my stomach twingeing. The prospect of nuclear annihilation was always there as a kind of doomy background noise: one of the top ice-breakers in the student union bar had been, ‘What will you do when the four-minute warning goes off?’ and the answers were only ever half-jokes.
‘Anyway, when are you going to come and see us?’ she breezed, changing the subject. ‘I’ve still got your easter egg here, you know.’
This was a sore point. My last visit home a few weeks before had been a complete disaster. I got on a lot better with my father than when I was younger, just so long as we steered clear of politics, religion, the royal family and, obviously, my sex life. But I’d arrived home on Good Friday to find him sat in front of the lunchtime ITN bulletin, which was still showing the exact same thing as it had been for days – the scattered police helmets in the middle of St James’s Square with WPC Yvonne Fletcher’s cap right in the middle of them. She had been shot dead three days earlier, and it turned out Dad was still apoplectic about it. ‘Have you seen this?’ he had barked by way of hello, as he gestured impotently at the Libyan Embassy on the screen. ‘They’re all still holed up inside there, and they’re talking about giving them diplomatic immunity! Letting them off scot-free! I’ll tell you what we should be doing: we should be sending in the SAS like we did with the bloody Iranians!’
I’d been determined not to rise to that ‘we’, which is something Dad had started saying whenever Mrs Thatcher did something he particularly approved of. He’d been very dubious about a woman leader to start with, but by then, he’d go to the ends of the earth for her. The ‘we’ stuff started with the Falklands, when, to listen to Dad, you’d have thought he’d been right there in Command HQ with her and the admirals. And he was definitely back on the warpath now. ‘They’ve murdered one of our girls,’ he continued, ‘and they deserve everything they get!’
He had brought his jabbing finger around from the TV to point at me instead, which didn’t help me to keep my cool. ‘Dad!’ I had said sharply. ‘Firstly, she wasn’t a girl, she was a grown woman, and it was her decision to sign up for the police force…’
‘And good for her!’ He was jiggling up and down in his armchair, he was so het up.
My own volume had risen in response: ‘…And what about the other eleven people who got shot – or don’t they count because they weren’t in uniform? Or is it because they’re foreign?’ There had been next to no coverage of the injured Libyan protesters who had also been strafed with machine-gun fire for daring to demonstrate outside their country’s embassy. Most of them had been students, like me.
‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous.’ Dad had started rubbing his moustache, which is what he always did when he was agitated.
‘And in any case, we don’t actually know who shot her yet,’ I finished slightly lamely. The Libyans holed up inside the embassy were insisting they didn’t have any weapons, and in the face of my father’s intransigence I suddenly found myself a big believer in innocent-till-proven-guilty.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Alex, you don’t believe anything that lunatic Gaddafi says, do you?’
In truth I hadn’t been remotely convinced by the attempt by the Libyan leader to blame the police themselves for the shooting. I knew well enough that our coppers were both violent and inept but, thank God, we haven’t started giving them guns yet. Still, somehow I’d got myself into a position where I had to take a foreign state’s side against my own father, and I’d only been in the house five minutes. Luckily my mum came in at that point and managed to calm things down, but when the news came on again that evening and it turned out a bomb had exploded at Heathrow and the Libyans were being blamed for that too, it had all kicked off again and I’d once more found myself cast as Gaddafi’s biggest fan. Which was very unfair, given that I barely knew anything about the guy except that he was quite handsome but tended to overdo it a bit with the medals and the gold braid, making him look like a bad Michael Jackson impersonator. The one fact I did manage to raise in his defence was that he was running Libya as a socialist republic, which went down exactly as well as you’d expect. My father called me a ‘bloody Bolshevik’. I told him I’d rather be a communist than a fascist and then my mum started shouting at both of us – and that pretty much set the tone for the rest of the weekend. By Saturday morning my father and I weren’t speaking to each other, and I had cut my losses and headed home that lunchtime.
Now my mum seemed determined to make up for lost time. ‘Could you come down at the weekend?’ she suggested hopefully. ‘I’m not on duty until Tuesday morning, and we’d love to see you.’
‘I’ve got plans,’ I said brusquely. That was assuming I managed to get hold of Liam before Friday. Where could he be? Would it be worth me going over to the other campus tomorrow to see if I could catch him there?
I did my best to ignore the disappointment in my mum’s voice. ‘Oh. Well, come soon, anyway.’
‘Yeah, I will. I’m pretty busy with work for my course,’ I lied. Mentioning academic work was always a trump card. My mum was ridiculously pleased I’d gone to poly. My dad too, actually; it was probably the only thing he had ever been proud of me for. His delight at me being the first in the family to go into higher education even overtook his shame about me being almost certainly the last in the family – full stop. They kept the photo of us all at my graduation in a frame above the telly – me in my mortar board and all of us smiling outside the Great Hall on Holloway Road.
Hang on. The hall. That was where all the big events at the Poly were held. It suddenly struck me that I knew exactly where Liam was going to be that night. And, even better, that it meant I could deliver my message to him in person rather than hanging on the telephone. So long as I moved quickly.
‘Mum, I’ve got to go,’ I announced, standing up from the bottom of the stairs where the phone cord just about reached if you stretched the coils right out. ‘I’ve got a…meeting I’ve got to get to. At college.’
‘Oh! Of course, love.’ At some point I would allow myself to feel guilty about this – running away as a teenager had left me with guilt as the primary emotion governing all interactions with my mother – but not just then. ‘Nice to talk to you, anyway: your dad sends his love.’
At least that meant we weren’t going to have to go through the painful ritual of the phone being handed to him, which was a blessing for both of us. ‘I will come down soon, I promise. I’ll sort something out,’ I gabbled. I’d got the receiver down before she had even finished saying goodbye.
I’d been seeing posters for the Irish Society’s meeting all week: they were plastered all over the Kentish Town site. It was a bigger deal than usual – a discussion of the Annie Maguire case that was due to be addressed not just by Jeremy Corbyn, as Liam had told me, but a man from Sinn Fein and a representative of the family too. It was only six-thirty: it would already have kicked off but hopefully I still had time to get there before it was all over.
It turned out I did, but no thanks to me spending twenty minutes deciding what I was going to wear and doing my hair again so as to be sure I was definitely ready to see Liam. The speeches were mostly finished by the time I crept in at the back of the great hall, but I knew a bit about what had happened and I picked up the gist of what had been said while sitting at the back and scanning the rows of seats in front of me for the unmistakeable back of his head. It was a really shocking story: Annie Maguire had been living peacefully in London for twenty years when she was arrested along with her husband and teenage kids and charged with running a bomb factory for the IRA, all on the say-so of her nephew, who the police had picked up in Belfast and dragged off to England so they could knock him about until he started naming names. There was plenty of evidence she’d never been anywhere near a bomb in her life, and the nephew had withdrawn his testimony and blamed police brutality at his own trial, but it hadn’t stopped Annie from being sent to prison for fourteen years, along with the nephew’s dad, her brother-in-law Giuseppe Conlon, plus her own husband and two teenage sons, and even a friend whose kids Annie had been babysitting that night. Conlon died in prison a few years into his sentence, protesting his innocence all the way; Annie was still inside. But as the men on stage made clear, there was more and more evidence coming out every year that the entire family were innocent: there was a professor of forensic science who said the tiny trace of nitro-gylcerine – ‘one millionth of a sugar lump’ was the phrase everyone kept incredulously using – that convicted them all was way too dodgy to rely on, and there was plenty to suggest that the police had fitted the whole family up.
I knew how that worked all right. It was petty stuff in my case, but over my years on the Dilly I’d accepted cautions and fines for plenty of things I hadn’t done just to get out of cells and interview rooms and save myself a further kicking. I’d got a truncheon across the back and a punch to the head the previous week for absolutely nothing: I could only imagine how much worse things were for someone suspected of a really serious crime. Especially if – because – they happened to be Irish.
Awful as the story was, it wasn’t the only thing people wanted to talk about: when the meeting was opened up to questions from the floor, most of the discussion was about the recent changes to the Prevention of Terrorism Act – a ‘racist trawling expedition’ according to the man from Sinn Fein – and the unfairness of political prisoners from Northern Ireland having to serve their sentences on the mainland to make it more difficult for their families to come and visit them. I’d clocked Liam sitting in the front row pretty early on – I’d know that neck anywhere – and I was just starting to think that I was never going to get the chance to actually speak to him when the man in charge, an older guy who I thought was one of the lecturers at the Poly, said he had an announcement to make about something called the Archive of the Irish in Britain and invited Liam to stand up and take a bow. ‘We learned this morning that our application to the GLC minorities unit for a grant to expand the collection has been successful, and this is the man we have to thank for it,’ he said, as Liam awkwardly bobbed his head to acknowledge the ripple of applause from the audience. ‘Next stop a full diploma in Irish Studies!’
‘Hero of the hour,’ I smiled, as I made my way through the dispersing crowd to greet him as the meeting finally ended. He had a maroon shirt on: it really suited him. Set off the colour of his eyes.
‘Tommy!’ His face lit up. He looked genuinely delighted to see me. ‘I didn’t know you were here.’
‘I was a bit late.’ I wavered over whether to go in for a hug, decided not to, and then immediately regretted it. The speakers were making their way down from the platform. Corbyn was talking intently to the lecturer and the Sinn Fein man had made his way over to talk to a couple of burly blokes with beards who were sitting in the front row. I caught them looking curiously in our direction.
‘I just wanted to tell you: I’ve got this weekend sorted,’ I told Liam. He looked at me blankly and my heart broke a little bit. ‘The college course? In Derbyshire?’ I prompted.
‘Oh, grand!’ He beamed again, and I couldn’t help smiling back. ‘Nice one, Tommy.’
‘Yeah, they’re expecting us on Friday evening.’ Now I’d started, I didn’t seem to be able to stop smiling, however gormless I must look.
‘So I’ll pick you up and run us over. Where is it you live again?’
‘Finsbury Park.’ I don’t think I’d actually said so before. ‘Are you sure? It’s not too out of your way?’
‘Ach, it’s no bother.’ He clapped me on the shoulder and looked towards the men in the front row. ‘Listen, we’re all going for a wee drink, will you join us?’
‘Um…sure,’ I said, with a doubtful glance towards his companions. They didn’t exactly look like the friendliest bunch. ‘If you’re sure I’m not intruding.’
