Eating Air

by Pauline Melville

  Jaap agonised on the pavement outside as to whether to follow Donny or not. From inside the lobby came shouts and the tinkle of breaking glass. Jaap crept away. Back in Bethnal Green, Jaap told the others what had happened. A mood of self-righteous disdain overcame the people around the table.

  ‘That’s not class struggle,’ said a thin-faced activist known as Weasel. ‘That’s just a street brawl. It doesn’t achieve anything. There has to be discipline. You have to submit yourself to a party or organisation or whatever.’

  Donny, that connoisseur of pure rebellion, became the topic of conversation. Weasel’s lank hair hung around his face like two brackets.

  ‘Donny’s a liability. That’s not revolutionary behaviour. It’s counter-revolutionary. Adventurism.’

  There was a sober nodding of heads. It had proved impossible for them to impart to Donny anything to do with ideology. He would not take on that apparatus. As soon as anything became set in its ways, Donny was part of the urge to overthrow it. He seemed to think it was a curse to take sides for any other reason than contrariness. He was against all titanic sterility and preferred to settle for ecstasy, terror, brutality and liberation – all at once and this minute. In his absence, Donny was accused and found guilty of political deviance – individualism and spontaneism – by those sitters round the table.

  When Donny came home there was blood in his hair and a crescent bruise under his swollen eye. He put his head around the kitchen door and looked with scorn at the disapproving faces that greeted him.

  ‘Too much Seneca, not enough Caligula,’ he announced. ‘No risk, no joy.’ He slammed the door behind him, then popped his head back in to say: ‘Have you ever noticed that when you’re lying on the pavement waving your arms the taxis won’t stop for you?’

  While condemning his behaviour, everyone in the room felt secretly that what they stood for was rigid and harsh and that an onslaught from Donny could sweep it all away letting milk, honey and wine burst through everywhere and that maybe Donny was some sort of wounded god living amongst them incognito.

  Upstairs in the flat Donny was in an expansive mood.

  ‘You see, what you have to do,’ he said, ‘is ride a donkey against the titans in the hope that the braying and confusion will make them run away.’

  Ella, wearing shorts and a loose vest, was bathing her feet in a tub of hot water. The steam dampened her loose hair and her face was flushed.

  ‘What’s happened to your nose?’ she asked.

  ‘My nose?’ He touched it and raised his eyebrows in surprise at the blood on his finger. ‘Who knows?’ he cackled.

  Donny gave her a blood-stained, whisky-fumed kiss and switched on the TV, then flung himself on the sofa and lay looking at her.

  ‘You’re beautiful. You’re so beautiful,’ he said in an onrush of love and warmth. Then he lay looking up at the ceiling. ‘What nobody seems to understand is that I need to live in a house with seventeen doors so I can get out quickly.’

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Michael Feynite the Situationist architect was more tolerant of Donny than the others. One night in Donny’s flat he described the surreal graffiti he had seen in Paris in 1968 that persuaded him to join the Situationists.

  ‘I like graffiti.’ Donny was cleaning his boots. ‘I like it because it has a writer but no fucking author. The anonymity of the murmur, that’s what I like. It doesn’t matter who’s speaking. That’s the glory of rumour – there’s no fucking flash cunt taking credit for it. Let’s go and see if Mark has any cigarettes. I’ve run out.’

  ‘I’ve got Gitanes.’ Feynite offered one.

  ‘Nah. Mark smokes Senior Service. I like them.’

  Mark was working but had forgotten to switch the light on. There was a ghostly crepuscular air to his room and they did not see him for a moment.

  He switched on the light and tossed Donny a cigarette. His tone was almost apologetic and he was so quietly spoken that at first Donny did not hear what he said:

  ‘Donny, I wonder if I could ask you something. Can you get hold of some gelignite from your demolition site?’

  ‘What?’ Donny frowned. Mark’s heart-shaped face was even paler than usual. The bare light bulb over his head moved in the night breeze from the window and made the shadows in the room shift. He looked directly at Donny as he said again: ‘I was wondering if you can get hold of any gelignite from your building site. Or dynamite. We want to set some explosives off outside the Explosives Branch of the Ministry of Defence. A sort of poetic statement. Redecorate the outside of the building a little. It’s the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment at Fort Halstead in Kent. Do you think you’d be able to get your hands on anything?’

  ‘I might,’ said Donny.

  Feynite was standing in the doorway in a halo of smoke. He winked at Donny.

  ‘Sometimes blowing things up is just a little exclamation mark. It’s like the graffiti you said you enjoyed – an imaginative reminder to the authorities that not everyone submits.’

  *

  The next week Donny came back from work bringing with him eight sticks of gelignite: long sausages covered with waxy greasepaper. He went down to knock on Mark’s door. When Mark unlocked it Donny went in and flung the explosives down on the table. Mark flinched. Donny looked at him with distaste.

  ‘Don’t worry. They won’t go off till the detonators are fixed.’ Donny reached into his top pocket, pulled out eight detonators: aluminium tubes about two and a half inches long and an eighth of an inch wide. He put them on the table where they rolled a bit and shone like dull silver pencils.

  ‘Now stop bothering me with all this fucking business. I’ve had enough,’ he snarled.

  *

  Ella was not due at rehearsal the next day and spent the morning tidying up the flat. It was nearly lunchtime when she went down the two stairs off the landing to see if the hoover was in Mark’s room. She had the key. On the table by the bed under the skylight were the sticks of gelignite which she had seen Donny bring back from work. Standing next to them were three packets of non fire-suppressed fertiliser from Boots, several two-pound packets of sugar, two bottles of sulphuric acid, a dozen or so small screw-top medicine bottles with the circular top cut out and several sheets of greaseproof paper. Then she noticed the electric fire which Mark had recently borrowed from their flat. It had been dismantled. The resistance wire from the fire had been taken off and pinned with two metal pins to a large square battery.

  She slipped out of the room, her heart beating fast with a mixture of fear and delight. She ran downstairs out of the house and walked towards the parade of shoddy shops. In the small, brightly lit supermarket she picked up two packets of cereal and put them down again, hardly aware of what she was doing. For a long time she stood staring at a shelf of detergents and kitchen cleaner. Then, reluctant to go home, she went to the cinema and bought a ticket for The Thomas Crown Affair, which she sat through without seeing anything on the screen in front of her.

  When she came back to the house at four that afternoon, to collect her things for the theatre, she peeped into Mark’s room with a sense of dread. The table had been cleared. There was nothing on it.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  The kitchen was abuzz with anger, fear and danger.

  ‘They’ve been arrested.’

  Mark was on the telephone talking to a solicitor, one hand over his ear to block out the noise. Six or seven people were standing in the kitchen, their faces tense as they listened to Mark’s conversation. Ella paused, shocked, on her way to work.

  ‘Who’s been arrested?’

  ‘Jaap and Weasel. They picked up Michael Feynite too. There was a raid on a house in north London. It happened on Wednesday. They’ve all been charged and taken to Brixton prison.’

  ‘Charged with what?’

  ‘We’re not too sure. Conspiracy. Fraud. Deception. Mark’s trying to find out now. They’ve raided loads of places all over London. Someone threw a
petrol bomb at the Army Recruiting Centre.’

  ‘No, it was just a firecracker,’ said a breathless girl who had just arrived. ‘And that explosion at John Davies’s house – apparently they used a tiny amount of gelignite with a detonator inside a condom that was inserted into the lock of his front door and held there with chewing-gum.’ She gave a sudden giggle.

  Mark seemed calm and euphoric. There was an aura of invincibility about him. He put down the phone.

  ‘The solicitor doesn’t think they will get bail. What is needed now is for more attacks to take place so that the police realise they’ve got the wrong people and there are many more of us out there.’ He gave a smile: ‘Fire-bombing is just one way of serving the community.’

  Ella’s heart was thumping as she went to work. When she reached the stage door of the Royal Opera House she tried to look calm as she said good evening to the stage-door keeper. She wanted to warn Donny to stay away, but there was no way of reaching him. He was working in Northampton and would not be home till midnight.

  *

  That night’s performance was Beauty and the Beast. When it was over, Ella left the theatre without even taking off her make-up. Beauty and the Beast was not a ballet she enjoyed. It opened with so many confusing exits and entrances outside the castle that she always feared she would make mistakes and appear at the wrong place. She hurried from the dressing room and clattered down the spiral metal stairway to the stage door. When she emerged from the theatre everything around her seemed bright and unnaturally clear, as if she were on the verge of a migraine. The streets were full of late-night revellers. She dashed down the stairs into the underground. At Holborn station she waited on the draughty platform in front of a poster advertising the Tutankhamun exhibition, feeling that the inside of her stomach had been scraped out. She feared what she might find when she reached home. It was Donny’s safety that concerned her.

  Donny was already asleep when she let herself in. He had fallen asleep with the gas fire still on. She turned it off and crept into bed beside him. She felt for his shoulder under the sheet and shook him awake.

  ‘Did you know Jaap and Weasel and Michael Feynite are in jail’ she whispered.

  He lifted his head.

  ‘Good for them. I don’t give a shit.’ His mouth made a chewing sound and he went back to sleep.

  For an hour Ella lay next to Donny in the darkness, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep for the feeling of free-floating rage at the arrests. Occasionally, the lights from a passing car made a travelling pattern across the walls. She lifted herself up and strained her eyes in the dark to see the shape of Donny’s head on the pillow. After what seemed like an age she drifted into sleep.

  That night she dreamed she was in the sky trying to reach a circular hole above her. She swam upwards through blue space towards the opening but two doors, like the doors of a tube train, slid shut together in front of her. She turned around in the air and suddenly the whole earth lay bathed in glorious sunlight below her. There was a bear in the sky floating towards her. As she took the bear’s hand, they danced floating down to earth together and patches of his fur came away revealing gold underneath. Together they alighted on the flat sand of the shore. She knelt by the scalloped waves and fashioned a heart out of foam and mud. Then she woke.

  In the morning she ran downstairs to look for milk in the communal kitchen. The kitchen was deserted. Someone had cleaned up, done the washing-up and emptied the roaches from the ashtrays.

  Upstairs she heard Donny singing in the bathroom between spits and gurgles as he cleaned his teeth. He called out.

  ‘I’m tired of this Northampton job. I’m going up to Scotland to see about working there for a bit. I’m only going for a few days. You’ve got a few days off, why don’t you go to your mum’s if things are getting a bit jumpy around here?’

  She was relieved that Donny would be going away from any danger.

  ‘OK. I think I will. We have a week off while the opera is playing and I haven’t seen mum for a while. I’m worried about the others in the house though.’

  ‘Look.’ Donny came out of the bathroom with his mouth full of toothpaste froth. ‘Don’t bother with them. Nothing matters, OK?’

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Ella spent the next week with her mother. She pottered around the Kent cottage, restless and unable to relax, but pleased to give her bruised feet a chance to recover.

  On her return to London she noticed something odd as she approached the Bethnal Green house. It was when she crossed the road that she realised the front door had been smashed down and someone had reboarded it with two criss-cross planks of wood. Her key still worked. She let herself in with a sense of foreboding. The house looked different: empty, as though it had been swept out and nobody lived there any longer. There was none of the usual junk-mail and debris cluttering the hall. From upstairs she could hear a woman’s deep smoky voice.

  ‘He was always such a wonderful child. Full of integrity. He would say, “Mummy, I can’t do such a thing,” and I would say, “No darling, then you won’t have to,” and he was so sweet and I was so moved. I can’t believe this has happened. I’m distraught. Do you think we should take this writing-desk? It’s worth quite a lot. It belonged to my father-in-law.’

  Ella climbed the stairs. The skin on her neck prickled. She stood outside Mark Scobie’s room. The door was ajar. The lock had been broken and one of the door panels shattered. From inside, the woman’s voice was echoing as if the room was empty. Ella could see in at an angle. It was denuded of most of its furniture. A middle-aged woman with glasses and prominent cheekbones stood running her fingers along the edge of Mark’s desk. His bed had gone. The woman wore a brown cape with a check pattern and expensive brown leather boots. As she turned towards the door, Ella recognised Vera Scobie. The other woman was a sharp-faced creature with darting eyes who, Ella learned, was a friend who had come to help.

  Vera jumped as she saw Ella.

  ‘Oh my goodness. You gave me a fright.’ She swept towards Ella holding out her hands.

  ‘My poor girl. Do you remember me? We have met. I’m Mark’s mother.’ Vera radiated sympathy as she embraced her. She screwed up her eyes to examine Ella. ‘You must be in shock. The police have been here as you can see. Is your husband with you?’

  Ella shook her head. She felt sick.

  ‘No.’

  Vera raised her hands in disbelief at the turn of events. She put an arm around Ella.

  ‘Try not to worry. Mark has had to go away. Don’t ask where he is, dear. I don’t know. I’m just getting over the shock myself. And we’ve just heard that Hector has been arrested in Italy. Mark won’t be coming back here so we’re clearing things out. This is Molly, a friend of mine who’s helping.’ Vera frowned as she gazed around the room: ‘We must get the place cleaned. You and your husband can stay here as long as you need until you find somewhere else. We wouldn’t dream of making you homeless. But we will be giving up the house eventually. It feels unlucky.’ She shuddered. ‘Now then Ella, would you like us to come upstairs with you to your flat? I’m afraid the police have been in there too. What monsters. I’ve been saying for years we were headed for a police state. Now it’s here. What are we to do?’

  Ella nodded. Her heart beat fast and there was a sort of singing buzz in her ears. They trooped upstairs to the top flat. The door had been forced. The flat had been entered and searched. There was a note from the Metropolitan Police Special Branch pinned on the door with a copy of the warrant, granted by a magistrate, to search for explosives.

  Vera looked at the note:

  ‘I’ll show this to my husband. He’s a lawyer. It’s outrageous. What right have they?’ She consulted her watch looking pale and tense. ‘I must rush to the theatre. Will you be all right, dear?’

  ‘I think so.’ Ella’s stomach tightened into a knot. She came downstairs to see them out.

  Ella saw the two women conferring in the street outside before they d
rove away in separate cars. As soon as they had left she darted back upstairs and went through the flat looking for any evidence that could link Donny with the robberies or the gelignite. She racked her brains trying to remember if they had left anything incriminating behind. When Donny telephoned later she told him what had happened.

  ‘Mark’s disappeared. Even his mother doesn’t know where he is. There’s no-one here. I don’t think you should come back.’

  He cursed and hung up.

  *

  The next day Donny was back. He went through the house examining the damage. Ella took him down to see the basement. Everything was a mess, as if the police search had been hurried. The Gestetner machine had been taken away. Newspapers, pamphlets and documents were scattered everywhere. A dirty white T-shirt and a tracksuit lay on the floor. Drawers had been upturned and emptied, ashtrays upset. There were heaps of index cards, scraps of paper and press cuttings strewn about. Upstairs, Donny pushed open the door to Mark’s room with his foot. Ella explained that Mark had disappeared, that his mother had taken his stuff and that his parents were giving up the house.

  ‘Fuck them,’ said Donny. ‘Dirty no-good rat-faced bastards. I hope they don’t die before I have time to kill them.’

  ‘Who? The police or Mark or Mark’s parents?’

  ‘Everybody.’ He kicked at a pile of newspapers on the floor of Mark’s room. Ella tried to calm him.