The Enemy Within, page 8
I pushed myself up onto my elbows and squinted around the dormitory. It was properly dark now, and it was my senses of hearing and smell as much as sight that told me I was still surrounded by sleeping bodies on all other sides, but I was left with the impression that it had somehow been lighter a moment before, and as the sleep-fuddle cleared from my mind I realised that the main door to the room had just closed behind someone. And since Liam was the only person not where he was meant to be, it followed that he must be that someone.
Feeling a bit like Jane Eyre, I threw back the sheets and swung my feet down to the scratchy carpet-tiled floor, groping around until I found my jeans and pulling them on as I stood up and gingerly began picking my own way to the door, now just a faint rectangular outline. I stubbed my toe on a suitcase and walked into a protruding limb, its owner grunting and shifting in his sleep but thankfully not waking. Finally my outstretched hands found the lever handle on the opposite side of the door to where I was expecting, and I eased it open and slipped out onto the landing. It was marginally lighter out there, lit by those green-tinged safety-lights that are meant to keep going if the rest of the electricity blows, enough to see that there was no one in either direction and all the other doors were closed. The one opposite, I knew, was a female dormitory: if Liam had gone in there it didn’t bear thinking about – but no, a flicker of movement drew my eye to the staircase, where I could see a faint shadow descending and growing monstrously large as it approached another light in the hallway below.
I scampered along the corridor and down the stairs, making it to the turn in time to see Liam hesitating in the house’s wide hall between the doors to the lecture room and the dining hall. He had put on a black t-shirt, but was still just in his boxer shorts: even under the circumstances I couldn’t help clocking just how muscular his legs were.
‘Liam!’ I hissed, making him jump. ‘What are you doing?’
He spun round. ‘Tommy! I…I thought I heard something.’
I tiptoed down the last flight, wincing as my bare feet hit the cold tiles in the hallway. With the main lights off, the place had a strange atmosphere: not spooky exactly – too much of the original paraphernalia had been ripped out for the ghosts of the past to keep a hold on it – but slightly sinister nonetheless. It took me a second to locate what it reminded me of: I had spent a couple of years working as a hospital porter, and the house, with its institutional décor and safety lighting, had the same feel as the wards and corridors at night, the enforced stillness masking matters of life and death going on somewhere unseen. And the same sense that anyone caught out of bed would be in big trouble.
‘What?’
He looked at me blankly, but just at that moment, I heard it too: raised voices, a man and a woman; him angry, her sounding distressed.
‘It’s through there.’ I pointed to the dining hall.
He nodded, gesturing rather touchingly that I should stay behind him as he pushed the door open. But it was immediately obvious that the room was empty: chairs stacked upside-down on tables, the buzzing flycatcher bathing the kitchen beyond the serving hatch a bright neon blue. Liam held a finger to his lips, and we stood poised just inside the entrance for a moment, listening to nothing but silence.
‘That’s weird,’ he started to say – and at that moment a door on the other side of the dining hall was thrown open, and a woman erupted from it, head down, rushing towards us, or rather the doorway we were blocking. For a fraction of a second in the brightly-lit room beyond I caught a glimpse of Healy, his bald bullet head unmistakeable, in shirtsleeves now and with a pair of braces hanging down loose, and then he reached out to slam the door and the woman stumbled right into us, sobbing, and pushed her way through into the hallway beyond.
‘Hey, stop,’ said Liam, but the velocity that had got her this far was already running down, and she made it only as far as the stairs before twisting and sinking to sit on the second step, her hands pressed to her face, long hair hanging down like a veil in front of her misery. She was wearing a long dress with cartoonish flowers stitched to the front of it. One of them was torn, its lacy petal fringe hanging down from her left breast.
It was my turn to put out a hand to halt Liam: somehow I felt I might be better at this. ‘What’s happened, love?’ I said as gently as I could, moving cautiously towards her. She just shook her head, her shoulders shuddering as the sobs burst out of her. Steadying myself on the newel post, I squatted down so we were on the same level, taking care not to loom in too close. I wished I had more clothes on. ‘Can we help?’
‘No,’ she managed to gasp, shielding her eyes with her hand. ‘Please, please just go away.’
I looked over my shoulder at Liam. He shrugged helplessly.
‘Is there someone you’d like us to get? A friend? Upstairs?’
Suddenly panicked, she looked up with wild eyes. ‘No! Please! I don’t want anyone to know!’
‘OK, OK, don’t worry.’ She had returned her face to her hands, pulling her feet up onto the first step so she was almost in a foetal position. The brief glimpse I had got of her face, however, had disturbed me: she looked incredibly young.
‘It’s fine. Don’t worry, it’s our first time here; we don’t know anyone anyway. What’s your name?’
I couldn’t hear her the first time, and had to ask her to repeat it. ‘Sarah.’
‘OK, Sarah. Was he – was Healy trying to get you to do something with him in there?’
It was pretty obvious he had been. Dresses don’t rip themselves. But she was shaking her head vehemently. ‘No. No. I’m just being stupid.’
‘You’re not being stupid. Not at all. Oh – thanks – here.’ Liam had quietly gone to the toilets and fetched a handful of loo roll, which she accepted gratefully and pressed to her eyes. Her breathing was gradually becoming less ragged. But I couldn’t get over how young she looked – she was a teenager at most. Healy must be in his sixties at the very least. Another dirty old man pushing his power. I’d met plenty of Healys when I was working the Dilly: men who thought their money, or age, or respectability, or political importance bought them the right to do whatever they wanted with you. To you.
‘You haven’t done anything wrong,’ I assured her. ‘It’s him who’s bang out of order.’ I straightened up and looked at Liam, a sudden rush of fury surging through me. ‘I’m going in there to have a word with him.’
‘No, please!’ Sarah gasped, rising and grabbing my arm to stop me as I set off back through the empty dining hall. ‘You can’t go in there; it’s the leader’s private quarters!’
‘I don’t care if it’s Buckingham bloody Palace, he hasn’t got the right to behave like that!’ I wasn’t bothering to lower my voice any more: better to wake the whole place up and show them how their precious leader behaved behind closed doors.
‘No! Please! I don’t want anyone else to know! Please!’
She was clearly desperate. And she had the right not to be humiliated in front of her friends, bunch of weirdos though they appeared to be. ‘All right.’ I turned and held my hands up, and she sank gratefully back onto the steps. ‘But promise me you’ll talk to someone about this.’ I couldn’t think who would be most appropriate. She really did look young. ‘Maybe your mum and dad?’
She shook her head desperately, pressing the sodden wad of tissue to her mouth. ‘I can’t. They’re party members. They’ve known him for years. They’d be so ashamed.’
‘They’d be ashamed?’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘Listen, Sarah, the only person who should be ashamed is him. He’s the one that took advantage–’
She wouldn’t, couldn’t listen. ‘No, I – I must have got it wrong. Please. I just want to go to bed now. Please.’
I looked at Liam again. He gave a helpless shrug.
‘OK. We’ll take you up.’
‘No.’ She stood up hurriedly. ‘I don’t want anyone thinking – I’ll be OK. It’s fine. Thank you.’ And before we could move, let alone assure her she had nothing to fear from our company, she was off up the stairs. We both listened to the sound of her sniffing fade away up the corridor above us, and a door opening and softly shutting.
‘Bloody hell,’ Liam said finally.
‘Jesus Christ.’ I couldn’t remember when I’d last felt so angry, or so useless. ‘How old do you think she is?’
‘Sixteen? Seventeen?’ He shook his head sorrowfully.
‘And him!’ I gestured furiously through the dining hall wall at the leader’s lair.
‘He’s a monster.’
‘No he’s not; he’s a man,’ I said bitterly.
‘Are you OK?’ He could see I was shaking, but maybe he thought it was from fear rather than rage.
‘Yeah, I’m fine. It’s just’ – I gestured around us, at the house with its soul ripped out – ‘this place.’ But it wasn’t just this place, it was everywhere. Only these days I allowed myself to forget it sometimes.
‘Hey,’ he said sharply. ‘You did good, Tommy. With Sarah. Looking after her.’
I was about to protest – doing good would have felt more like actually doing something – but he stepped forward and wrapped me up in a hug. ‘You did good,’ he repeated, close to my ear. And squeezed.
It was the closest contact we’d ever had – the close contact I’d been craving ever since I first set eyes on him. Our bodies pressed together in the cold hallway, me topless in just my jeans, him in his pants and t-shirt. But I can honestly say I’ve never felt less sexy.
TEN
As if by unspoken agreement we both stayed in bed the next morning, letting the rest of the dormitory get on with using the bathroom and heading down to breakfast before getting up ourselves. Neither of us said anything about what had happened in the night, instead just enjoying (at least as far as I was concerned) a moment companionably brushing our teeth at side-by-side sinks before pulling on our clothes. I put on my favourite red sweatshirt under my leather jacket: I’d brought all my best stuff with me for the weekend. Then we followed the crowd downstairs and into the dining hall.
It was like another place – another planet, even – compared to a few hours earlier; full of noise and bustle, with people queuing up at the serving hatch and roaming between tables. I scanned the room quickly, but there was no sign of Healy. Sarah was there, looking pale, but sitting at one of the tables among a group of girls who looked about her own age, so that was something.
Clive, the man we had met last night, was standing next to a trestle table that had been set up just inside the door of the room and covered with piles of newspapers and books. As we came in he held out copies of News Line expectantly towards each of us. There was an open cash box on the table, almost overflowing with small change.
‘No, you’re all right,’ I told him. He looked nonplussed. Everyone else in the room seemed to have bought a copy: they were spread out colourfully across the tables as people tucked into their bacon and eggs.
‘I’ll take one of those,’ said Liam behind me, pointing to another newspaper – the equally Technicolor Labour Herald – that was laid out in a considerably smaller pile on the table.
‘Oh – right.’ Clive looked almost as surprised by this, but rallied swiftly. ‘Twenty-five pence please.’
I glanced over the other titles on offer while they were sorting out coins. It’s a rare bookstall where I can’t find something I’d like to read, but the selection here was pretty uninspiring: International Marxist Review, a pamphlet called Leninism 60 Years On and no fewer than seven volumes of Trotskyism Versus Revisionism: A Documentary History. And a small pile of green hardbacks called, rather unimaginatively, The Green Book. I picked one up and looked inside.
The Solution of the Problem of Democracy, The Solution of the Economic Problem and the Social Basis of the Third Universal Theory, I read, by Muammar al-Qaddafi. It took me a second to place the name. ‘Colonel Gaddafi?’
Clive nodded enthusiastically. ‘It’s very interesting. Would you like a copy?’
I scanned down the title page. English edition issued by the Libyan People’s Bureau – Printed by New Park Publications, Runcorn. Runcorn was where Clive had said he had to go the night before, I remembered. As for the Libyan People’s Bureau, the whole nation, not just me and my father, had spent night after night staring at it on the news just months previously.
‘D’you want to buy one?’ Clive repeated. For a second I thought about getting it for my dad for Christmas, just to really annoy him, but it cost a tenner, and the idea wasn’t quite that funny. ‘No, ta.’ I put it back down on the top of the pile and the pair of us headed towards the steaming trays of fried eggs and sausages and bacon rashers on the opposite side of the room.
The crowded tables meant we didn’t have time to discuss it during breakfast, and no sooner had we finished than we were herded through to the lecture room once more, where Healy was stood waiting at the lectern. This time there were several other people at the front with him: half a dozen or so men and women sitting on a row of plastic chairs facing the rest of us like teachers at a school assembly. None of them looked very happy, but I was getting used to that here.
‘Before we begin, there is an issue that must be addressed,’ he began, once everyone had settled into their seats. Sarah was sat on the far side of the room, with the girls she had been with at breakfast: I was keeping an eye on her.
‘Time and time again,’ Healy spat with a sudden vehemence that made us all sit up, ‘I have had to urge on party members the vital importance of putting the class struggle ahead of their own individual requirements. We are in a revolutionary situation which is deepening every day – the most favourable situation ever seen in this country – and yet some younger party members insist on pursuing their own bourgeois preoccupations over and beyond their duties to the party.’ He banged the lectern with his fist. ‘This is unacceptable!’
Everyone shifted nervously. Even I was feeling slightly guilty, and I owed the bastard nothing.
‘Stand up, Comrade Sarah Jenkins,’ he suddenly barked. To my horror I saw his victim from last night rise to her feet, eyes downcast as everyone else in the room stared at her. She was swaying slightly. She looked like she might be about to faint. ‘Are you committed to the party?’ demanded Healy, flecks of spittle flying from his twisted mouth. ‘Are your family committed to the party? Your parents?’
She nodded jerkily, but if she actually answered it wasn’t loud enough for anyone to hear it. Healy, by contrast, was bellowing. ‘And yet you refuse to open yourself to revolutionary training. You are so backward, clinging on to petty bourgeois feminism and your right-wing tendencies!’
‘Oh, fuck this!’ I found I was on my feet, and shouting just as loud as Healy was. Heads turned in my direction.
‘It’s not right-wing to not want to have sex with someone old enough to be your granddad!’ I don’t think I’d ever been so angry. Liam, Libya, everything else was forgotten as I yelled at the room full of freaks who were all staring at me. ‘Yeah, that’s right – your precious leader is a dirty old man who tries to force himself on teenagers.’
The room erupted. One of the women who was sitting up at the front with Healy jumped up, pointing in my direction. ‘Who is this? Who is this?’ she was shrieking.
I realised Liam was standing up beside me, which gave me the extra spurt of courage I needed. ‘Go on! Deny it, you randy old pervert!’ I yelled. ‘I bet she’s not the first, either! Who else have you tried it on with?’
Healy’s face was going purple. But before he could say anything, the woman pushed her way in front of him to the lectern. ‘This is a provocation!’ she snapped, flapping her hands at us all to sit down. ‘This man is not a party member and he has no right to make such allegations! This has no political relevance! He should be removed!’
‘Don’t worry, I’m going,’ I started to say, but at that point I was suddenly seized from behind and yanked off my feet. I couldn’t see who had grabbed me, but as I fell, my feet tangling in the legs of my chair and bringing it skittering along towards the door with me, I saw Liam leap forward and start grappling with whoever it was. ‘Get your hands off him!’ he yelled.
‘Who are they?’ shrieked the woman from the lectern. ‘Who brought them here?’
Remembering what my friends Sasha and Maura had told me about being removed from Greenham Common, I stopped trying to find a purchase on the slippery parquet floor and let my body go floppy instead. The unexpected weight took my assailant off balance, and he stumbled into the row of seats in front of us. Most of their occupants were already on their feet, and the movement propelled the empty plastic chairs forward and at least one other person came crashing down with us. All was chaos and noise, and I can’t tell you exactly what happened next, except that I found myself being dragged out of the room and back into the hallway by at least two pairs of hands. I couldn’t see Liam anywhere, which worried me. I wasn’t exactly happy about leaving Sarah inside, either.
‘Get off me!’ I bellowed, trying to yank my arms out of their grip. I didn’t succeed. Instead I was rolled over onto my front and my arms yanked up behind my back, a great weight pressing down on me. I felt cold tiles against my face, as someone began to rifle through my pockets. A hand went up my sweatshirt and groped around too. God knows what they were expecting to find up there.
Behind me a door banged. ‘Get him up,’ said Healy’s voice.
I was pulled to my feet and turned to face him. He didn’t look much like Captain Mainwaring now. He was glowering, and had taken up a boxer’s stance in front of me. With his legs wide apart he barely came up to my chest, but it didn’t make him any the less threatening as he drew back his right fist and punched me hard in the stomach, knocking all the breath out of me.
