by Max Schaefer
Tony feels like a squirrel being tested with a proffered nut. He notices the recent silence, which was internal to him, only as it is ruptured: his companions from the whitewashed wall talk loudly as they pass, a noise that slashes the seal of the moment and lets the noise of the gig flood back in. The bag hangs from the boy’s outstretched hand, weighted by the sludge at its bottom and rippling like a standard for something. Tony sits. He steadies himself, facing the boys. ‘Go on then,’ he says, reaching for the bag. He tells them: ‘I was your age once.’
He holds the bag to him, feeling the creased, cold texture of its kiss, moisture from the boy’s mouth, and breathes in hard. It’s like diving, except the rush comes with the inhalation and not after, and there’s the instantly familiar shock of the foreign chemical element so immediately invading and inhabiting you, staking its territory, swelling against the inside of your skull. Tony lets the bag drop and the world sways after it with a new lightness: the six eyes of his companions are bright marbles on a mobile. He hears his own slowed breath, as in a brass helmet, underwater: the boy was a diver after all. He takes another pull from the bag: the second dose is less violent, a confirmation almost, reassuring. When he stands he feels breached liquid tumble down his sides. He tosses the bag back. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Those were the days. Cheers lads,’ and walks into the shaky projection of the farm.
In the courtyard a song has ended, to fading cheers. In the gap before the next one both the band on stage and the crowd facing them stand awkwardly still, as if he, Tony, has interrupted something. It is not yet getting dark, but it will be in a couple of hours at most; there is an atmosphere of climax and things finishing. The space to the right is bounded by a long low building with a sagging roof, on the near slope of which a vast Union Jack is spread. Tony’s gaze follows it round, above the sheared heads of the crowd, to the taller structure from which NF banners hang, and which, before him, opens on to the stage. At its rear the familiar backdrop has been hung, a huge black cloth with skrewdriver in white like blown-up, badly photocopied text. Ian Stuart stands stage front, in a short-sleeved black shirt not quite flattering to his almost pudgy figure, but redeemed by the sheer confidence with which he faces the crowd. He is flanked by his guitarists, both taller than him. The drummer is barricaded upstage behind his kit, and they are surrounded on the periphery by other skins whose roles are less clear.
Waiting for his moment, Ian passes the mike from hand to hand. He speaks to the drummer, and when he turns forward again there is a burst of feedback. ‘It’s nice to see …’ he says, ‘it’s nice to see so many people here to celebrate GLC anti-racist year,’ and grins briefly, and there are shouts of entertainment at the joke and disgust at its subject. He waits for them to quieten down, and goes on: ‘Now I’m sure most of you have heard about a certain young student, Patrick Harrington, and the trouble he’s been having from the reds, who are trying to get him kicked out of class because he’s a nationalist. Patrick’s had to go to court to defend his right to study, and even though he won the commie bastards are still threatening him. Well, a few of us have been down to back him up. We’re restraining ourselves now but when he’s finished his course we’ll go down there and’ (louder) ‘annihilate that filth.’ Again he lets the shouts abate, then lifts the microphone. ‘This is another song from our new album. It’s about the threat to this country from immigration, and how we’ve got to do something about it before it’s too late. It’s called “Before the Night Falls”.’
He turns and nods, and the drummer taps out a couple of bars of beat before he and the guitarists come in together on the introduction. The knot of boys up front, who had been stilled by the silence, immediately start to pogo again, jumping up and down and pushing themselves up from each others’ shoulders, amplifying their momentum like trampolines. Tony should watch how he stares, but his caution is washed over by the glue and music, by Ian’s growly, slightly American-sounding singing voice.
‘They come here to this country from the jungles and from trees
The traitors in the parliament give them a better deal
Spend the nations money, to cater to their needs
They all accept our charity, then bite the hand that feeds’
On the chorus — ‘Before the night falls, heed the White call!’ — Ian takes the mike in his left hand and gives sieg heil salutes with his right that are returned by the crowd and by Tony, who now pushes forward a little into it, as if the arm is pulling him, as if the mirrored salutes attract like magnets. The core of jumping boys is swelling, pulling the crowd around into its turbulent vortex. Glenn and one of his mates, Martin, have broken free of the agglomerating mass, and bounce crazily through it in a unit, face to face with hands on each other’s shoulders, cutting swathes through the audience as they go. From the front of the stage, off to the side, Nicky Crane watches.
‘Our forefathers fought in two world wars, they thought to keep us free
But I’m not sure that in those wars, who was our enemy
The Zionists own the media, and they’re known for telling lies
And I could see, that it could be, we fought on the wrong side.’
As Tony pushes deeper in he sees Dave and Nick by the wall, conferring through the noise near a pair of skins who stand sieg-heiling in unison to the beat, in and out from the elbow, so that they look, he thinks, like synchronized swimmers, or formation disco queens. Nick grips Dave’s shoulder and yells happily into his ear, and Tony decides suddenly that he is fed up with Nick’s academic niceties, and has the vision, which he feels he can reach out and take, of that neat hair wet and hanging over his face.
‘Oi!’ Tony surges out of the crowd and puts his hand against the wall over Nick’s shoulder, pinning him in place. Dave looks at him in surprise, Nick with a flicker of alarm that quickly hides itself. ‘Hello, Tony,’ Nick says.
‘Don’t you ever stop talking?’ Tony yells over the music. ‘It’s fucking Skrewdriver up there. All these people have paid to come to your farm and hear them and you’re nattering away like you’re better than us or something. Don’t you ever fucking shut up and dance?’
Nick looks at him with animal calculation. Tony can see him trying to gauge the seriousness of this unexpected attack — how in control of himself Tony is, the degree of physical threat — and then, in rapid succession, like pages quickly turned, the merits of the suggestion itself, what harm there could be, and (a politician) what benefits might accrue. Unwilling to let him have the dignity of a visible decision, Tony says, ‘Go on get your fucking feet wet,’ and grabbing Nick’s neck pushes him forward into the crowd, which is now almost entirely taken over by the spreading movement. Tony turns to Dave and says, ‘You won’t be twenty-two forever you cunt.’ He rubs his knuckles hard against Dave’s bristled scalp, then bounces backwards away, grinning, and turns towards the wild turbulence of the dancing skins. He pushes forward hard into it, between precipitous outcrops of saluting arms, crashing against other bodies, sinking down sides, heaving forward. A boy in braces ploughs past, shoving his arms before him in alternating salutes like a front crawl, and is lost in a swell. Tony sees Nick nearby, moving determinedly up and down with a fanged grin of performed enjoyment, his eyes ranging across the crowd, notching up gazes. With his limited careful motion, Nick is being pushed to the periphery by the big waves from the centre, to which Tony now, with all his energy, propels himself, into the heart of the maelstrom, where everything is both repulsion and embrace, the arms of strangers grabbing his shoulders and pushing off against him. Before the nightfalls, heed the White call! He grasps around him for leverage and support. His arms press against the wet slide of skin and at the feeling something in him wants to blush: it must be obvious, what else this is for him; he thinks of Glenn: ‘Imagine if they knew. They’d fucking crucify us.’ Men’s bodies jostle, lift, force him under, and it seems that he might be ripped to pieces by the consuming flood. Heaving up, gasping for air, he sees Nicky Crane holding position at
the front of the stage: poised, erect, his hands held down by his sides and slightly out, as if he might take off. Like the figurehead of a ship, tossed up against the thunderous sky above the roiling surface of the crowd. Tony tenses, strains forward at this mirror of how he should be, shoring himself up against the seething mass. He will not drown; he is a rock; the waves break over him. Then something pulls him beneath the surface, into airlessness and compression, and when he rises there is Dave, bobbing before him, the crook of his right arm warm round Tony’s neck and his left stretching out in salute, yelling against the music and into it, shouting and saluting over and over with the loudening beat. Tony salutes too, and yells, and the crowd does the same around them, heaving, pushing, and Tony sees himself repeated in every direction like a hall of mirrors, and understands that this will not wreck him, he is not distinct from it and floating fragile on its surface, but rather it is him, of him, and he is part of it, the shouts, the salutes, the sieg heil coming from within and around him alike. With one force, one voice, he fills the courtyard.
Old Albion
At the library, whole years of National Front News turned out to have disappeared entirely. When I enquired about them the Indian woman at the desk told me, ‘Well, don’t expect me to help you!’ She added, ‘I’m only joking,’ but was clearly discomfited, because after making a few suggestions she said, ‘If you do find them make sure you tell them an Indian helped you, so we’re not all bad.’
‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘I hope you don’t think I’m reading this stuff out of sympathy for the—’
‘No,’ she said hurriedly, ‘no, I just needed to say something.’
We were both embarrassed now, visibly, shakily so, and I ended the conversation as quickly as I could. Describing it later to Adam and Sarah, as we walked the Regent’s Canal, I kept going over her odd formulation, ‘tell them’, who they might be simultaneously obvious and baffling: did she believe that fascists had sent me to find their paper? ‘I needed to say something,’ she had explained, as if by just referring to the Front I had somehow helped it breathe.
Sarah’s completion of her PhD had made good the prospect, which she had long been nurturing, of a research post at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her team was to investigate what she glibly described as ‘the sex life of malaria’. It was led by an old colleague of her supervisor, with funding underwritten by the Gates Foundation. I felt oddly excited that my sister’s salary would be met by the world’s richest man, but Sarah was more preoccupied by her switch to a ‘mainstream’ parasite: she had a proprietorial attachment to the undistinguished trypanosome whose promastigote stage was the subject of her thesis, and was sorry to be moving on. When I suggested malaria was big money for a reason, and that no matter how small the part she played, the possible glory of an eventual vaccine would be large enough to share, she claimed that ‘her’ organism still killed several thousand people a year, and that measured by, say, dead humans per researcher, she was almost certainly losing out. Still, the job, and her consequent return to London, deserved celebration, as did the news that same week of John Tyndall’s death, so I had suggested the canal, which had long been on my list, for a Sunday walk. ‘We’ll end up in Limehouse,’ I had added, ‘so we can go to the White Swan for amateur strip night.’ That had long been on my list as well.
We started at the earliest point possible, where the canal emerges from its passage under Islington, and a gate in the road above the tunnel opens on to a path that seems to promise a secret garden: you have to part thin, dangling stalks of trees and swarming midges on the steep descent, and there’s the sudden ancestral comfort of woodsmoke from the houseboats moored below.
‘The thing is,’ I was saying, ‘when I started I thought the point was that Nicky lived this amazing double life — neo-nazi by day, homosexual by night. Deceived his comrades for years and devastated them when he finally came out. Right? But it doesn’t hold up — Searchlight outed him from the beginning. There’s an article from ’85 about how he’s been involved in various attacks and so on, which ends something like: “On Thursdays you can find him at Heaven in Charing Cross.” That’s within a year of the first time he had gay sex. Later they do an expose on a security firm he works for, and it turns out that Nicky and some other nazis went on the Pride march under a “gay skins” banner. Later again they say he’s building up this gay skins movement, which meets on Fridays at the London Apprentice.
‘They out him over and over again. And not just vague rumour: they say these are the clubs he hangs out in and these are the nights he’s there. Well, all the fucking nazis read Searchlight. They were obsessed with it. It’s basically impossible that the stuff in those articles wasn’t widespread knowledge among the right, the way they always knew about Martin Webster. So I’ve begun to think that the story isn’t about Nicky hiding his sexuality, it’s about his nazi mates ignoring it. They had to know, all of them. They knew all along.’
In the summer evening the towpath was busy with families, groups of teens, shirtless joggers with iPods strapped to their arms like medical devices or tefillin. A young couple passed us in three-quarter-length trousers, with a young boy in tow and a baby in an expensive stroller, and I thought I saw Sarah frown at them. ‘So it was all one big gay club,’ she said.
‘Well, exactly. I mean obviously it wasn’t. But you do feel a bit Pink Swastika after a while — you know, all of them fairies. There’s a group of out gay nazis in the States — of course there is — who insist that Ian Stuart himself was gay. Stewart Home implies the same thing.’
‘Do you think he was?’ said Adam.
‘Unfortunately, no. Though I am starting to wonder about Savitri Devi.’
‘You,’ said Sarah, ‘love her.’
‘Well, she gives good subject matter. Her marriage was never consummated, by mutual consent apparently. And in her account of being imprisoned in Germany after the war, when she was done for spreading Nazi propaganda, the mad old bitch, she goes unbelievably Cell Block H-lyrical about a fellow inmate who’d worked at Belsen. You know: her pale blond silky hair, her beautiful blue eyes …
‘Meanwhile, she had a close lifelong friendship with one Miss Muriel Gantry, also unmarried. Which despite Miss Gantry’s evident dislike for her friend’s rampant Nazism lasted until the moment she died, in Gantry’s house, in 1982. Now, Muriel Gantry is an interesting figure. She was a “theatrical costumier” who published a novel in the ’60s. I read it in the library — well, scan-read it. It’s called The Distance Never Changes — rather feverish story of ancient Crete, very Mary Renault, who apparently rather liked it.’
‘Who’s Mary Renault?’ Adam asked.
‘Google her later, I’m on a roll. So the heroine of this novel is a young girl who dresses up in boys’ clothes and ends up in an explicitly non-sexual relationship with a boy who sleeps with other boys—’
‘Do you think,’ interrupted Sarah, ‘that you might be overdoing the research just a bit? So Savitty-thingy wore comfortable shoes?’
‘Actually, right into old age she claimed she’d never had intercourse. Maybe that’s true. All I’m saying … she was an old lady who was fond of cats. I mean, I know all ideologies embody contradiction, but neo-nazis do take it to extremes. You know: the Holocaust never happened but it was completely brilliant. Queers are Untermenschen and can I suck your racially pure knob?’
After delivering this pre-prepped punchline, which fell flatter than I’d hoped, I felt suddenly empty and fell into a vague, embarrassed silence. I had been planning to outline to Sarah the wilder aspects of my developing plot: the clandestine order, Lanze O-something Geheimgesellschaft, custodians of the true Spear of Longinus, as used in Himmler’s most secret rituals at Wewelsburg and transported in the final days of the war by U-Boat to the secret Antarctic base of which Donitz had hinted in his speech at Nuremberg; retrieved in 1979 on the orders of Hans-Ulrich Rudel, the Nazis’ most decorated fighter and Hitler’s own intended successor
as Führer, who later, sensing his own death just months away, entrusted it to Savitri Devi when she visited him in Kufstein in 1982; and upon her own unexpected death in Sible Hedingham soon afterwards, recovered from among her effects by an emissary of Colin Jordan. Jordan had already begun to develop his masterplan, as later published (perhaps in muted form) under the auspices of the League of St George, for his elite task force of guerrilla activists modelled on the Werwolf of Otto Skorzeny; and with his guidance the spear, and the traditions and esoteric wisdom of the LOG, found a new home among the strange nexus of skinheads, political-soldier revolutionaries and nazi occultists that emerged during the Thatcher years. Was the astonishing possibility of Nicky’s continued survival somehow linked to the fabled powers of the spear?
But now the energy of performance had ceased to drug me. I thought how hopelessly arcane all this was, not to mention silly; and how only someone already seduced by the minutiae of fascism could think, like a stamp collector or a comics geek, that normal people might find it interesting. I felt like a child at a family gathering, grabbing at adult attention with a card trick and realizing, with a flood of shame, that what I got was only charitably given. We approached a bridge, where steps led up to the road above, and for a moment I thought I might run up them and flee. ‘When Nicky was my age,’ I said in the echoey space beneath, ‘he had nine years to live.’
‘Adam’s gone quiet,’ Sarah said. She nodded to where he walked ahead of us, with that familiar, toe-rocking gait. His braces, hanging down, swung gently around his arse, and his head rocked from side to side, as if there were a rhythm in it. It wasn’t like him to be so unsociable.
‘What’s up with him, do you think?’ I asked.
‘Just a guess, but really: “Google her later, I’m on a roll”?’
