The Tottenham Outrage

by M. H. Baylis

  It was another oddly warm day, but that made no difference to the scrawny, elderly black man. He wore a thick sheepskin coat in all weathers and spent his days shouting abuse, chiefly at the various offices and officers of Haringey Council. Years ago Susan had tried and failed to find out what the man’s beef was with the Council. Today, Bird’s refrain was ‘Evict me, Turkish bitches!’ along with something less distinct about ‘budgets’. Or maybe that word was bitches.

  Rex hurried past, head down, keen to avoid eye contact. He wondered briefly why they’d come up with the name ‘Navigator’ for a drink that could only make you feel as if you were lost in a storm.

  Under normal circumstances a trip to Sylheti Stores was a treat, a form of low-cost tourism. The place was a narrow but deep prefab, like an aircraft hangar, with a covered porch piled with exotic vegetables. But the real treasures lay inside: row upon row of spices and snacks, betel nut and henna and drums of ghee, in a riot of oranges and greens, with a different scent every ten paces, and nasal Dravidian show-tunes rattling from the loudspeakers.

  Today, though, there was no chance to enjoy it. The owner, a dapper old gentleman with a soft, wavy beard, marched Rex down the aisles, straight to the back of the shop.

  ‘You’ve had some funny stuff in the mail, is that right?’ Rex asked.

  ‘Can’t talk here,’ muttered the man, opening a door to a storeroom at the back. Rex paused. It was pitch-black in there. The man urged him in. He obeyed instinctively, only to find the door shut, then locked behind him. Panic rose, fell and rose again as the darkness was displaced by light from a single bulb.

  The first thing he saw was a video camera on a tripod. It stood facing an Islamic flag, tacked on to a tower of rice sacks.

  Then he saw the four young, bearded men. The largest of them, tall, hefty and hawk-featured, was dressed in a combat jacket and keffiyeh. They were the boys from the park.

  Rex glanced back in alarm to the video camera, the Islamic flag… He’d seen this before. On TV. It was an all too familiar set piece – and one that only ever ended messily. What the hell were they planning?

  ‘Relax,’ said the big man.

  ‘Easier said than done,’ Rex said.

  The big lad handed him a DVD in a see-through case. ‘My name’s Anwar Hafeez. We want you to release this on your website. It’s important.’

  He set down a folding chair, inviting his guest to sit. Rex began to take in more of his surroundings. Cutting through the aroma of spices was a powerful tang of body odour. Around the room, amongst the oil-drums of ghee and the man-size sacks of gram flour, were rolled-up sleeping bags and blankets.

  ‘You’ve been sleeping in here?’

  ‘His mum’s uncle owns the place,’ said Anwar, nodding towards an acne-scarred boy with a straggly beard. ‘But he wants us out. That’s why we’re trying to get this sorted.’

  ‘Sorted?’ Rex echoed. It seemed an odd term for a terror cell to be using. He glanced at the DVD in his hands.

  ‘This was never meant to happen!’ said the spotty lad bitterly. ‘It’s fucked-up, man.’

  ‘What wasn’t meant to happen? The Bettelheim family dying?’

  ‘We weren’t nothing to do with that!’ said Anwar. He sounded like an aggrieved schoolboy. ‘I just… I lost my temper with them a bit. Because of the way they was looking at me.’

  ‘We’d been at a meeting,’ the other young man broke in. ‘A khutbah off a geezer who’d been in Syria. A talk. I filmed it for our brothers who couldn’t be there. Then we went on the boats at the park – none of us had college in the afternoon. And that Jewish lady left, like, some perfume in the boat.’

  ‘So I goes up and says, is this yours?’ Anwar continued. ‘And she just flinches, like, and backs away. And they’re all just sitting there, staring at me. I’d just had enough of it. We’d been getting evils from all those kuffar in the park ever since we got there. So I sprayed it at them and I chucked it in the bush. That’s all I did, man. It was just perfume…’ A helpless terror appeared in Anwar’s eyes. ‘We need your help, man.’

  ‘So your mum’s uncle’s message about strange packages – that was just to get me here?’

  There were nods all round. Rex looked at them. They all spoke like black boys. Not sprayed – sprrehd. Not chucked – chokk. Jaminglish, it was sometimes called: a hybrid of Caribbean and Cockney that all the kids did round here, wherever their parents or grandparents had come from. They spoke like that because they belonged here – not doing jihad duty in Syria or Somalia.

  One of the boys who hadn’t spoken was openly snivelling. There was a biochemistry textbook on the floor at his feet. The cops and the spooks and the more panicky sections of the press would have a field day with that book, though it was quite clear to Rex now that these were just college boys who’d had a bit of fire put in their bellies by a lunchtime sermon. The streets of Tottenham and Wood Green were full of them: setting up trestle tables, dishing out badly-worded pamphlets and getting into verbals with passing Christians. They were the new Mods and Rockers, he often thought – and in most cases no more likely to bring society to its knees. He wiped sweat from his forehead and cleared his throat.

  ‘What’s your connection to Dr Kovacs?’

  ‘Who?’ Anwar looked at his co-conspirators, who seemed equally puzzled.

  ‘Old bloke, short beard, nasty blazer. Ended up dead shortly after witnessing your little display at the park.’

  ‘Brother, I swear, we didn’t notice no one ’part from that Jew family and that white bitch with the ponytail.’

  Rex looked at them. They seemed to be telling the truth.

  ‘I can do three things. I can write about this on our website. I can put you in touch with the best solicitor in town. Who will not, I guarantee, let you down. And I can ring a policeman who – I promise – isn’t an agent of the Zionist Kuffar CIA conspiracy, and get him down here.’ Anwar made to object but Rex interrupted. ‘One thing I’m not going to do is put your film on the web.’ Rex waggled the object at them. It rattled in its cheap plastic case. ‘If you want people not to think you’re terrorists, don’t release a bloody video message like you’re the Voice of Al-Qa’eda in Haringey!’

  ‘I told you it was stupid,’ muttered Anwar.

  ‘Shut up,’ said his lieutenant. ‘It’s all right for you. My dad’s going to kill me.’

  Rex homed in on the ringleader. ‘Can I also suggest that if you choose to dress up like a Chechen warlord, then you accept that people are going to look at you a bit funny from time to time?’

  * * *

  Mr Park his name is but the old lady calls him Mr Parkses. So she says, Leah, set Mr Parkseses gloves by the stove to let them warm. I know what he wants to warm. Pink face like a boy, with wet lips and shifty little eyes. I catch him looking at Leah sometimes and when he knows I caught him a flush goes up his neck and his cheeks, like a young girl. Good position, clerk at the bank they say, so he can lord it over me, with my rough boots and my bent back. Your accent has a touch of the Scotch in it, Mr Smith, surely? Surely not, sir. Bit east of that, you sow’s teat. So what work do you do? he asks me grandly one Saturday over the tea. Ho, bombs and dynamite, Mr Parkses. Terror, by the individual and by the masses. What I should have said.

  Missus Cutter’s got him lined up for a suitor for Leah. So she has him to tea on Saturdays. Feeds him up. ‘Mr Parkses might take a little more jam.’ And when she sees me putting butter on my bread she says, ‘Mr Parkses, help Mr Smith finish up that butter will you?’ meaning I’m to hold off and he’s to latch his little wet mouth to the nipple in my place when I’m the one as pays rent. I roll my eyes at Leah and she half-smiles I think. May be wrong, mind. Got it badly wrong about a girl before.

  Missus Cutter has taken to leaving the two of them alone in the kitchen. Going out to fuss around her hens so he can press his case. Or press something. I’d have hung about today, sat there at the table and polished my boots and got right in the fucking middle
of the pair of them, but I’d got to meet E and T downstairs at the bookshop.

  You say the word for birch-tree – bereza – to the damp old Litvaker behind the desk and he lets you down to the basement. There’s a mimeograph down there, and books. Ought to be an all right little hidey-hole but across the yard at the back there’s a Schochet, and when the slaughterer’s not singeing feathers, he’s letting the blood and fat into the drains, and it sits there and it stinks. Better now in winter, at least. In winter it only smells of the Litvaker upstairs.

  Elephant and Torch were – believe this – taking it in turns to read out loud from Bakunin. Like a pair of yeshiva-boys at their Talmud. Torch was reading when I came in, and he doesn’t stop, neither of them look up even, so I have to sit down and listen. He reads like the stupidest boy in my village chedar class, Torch does, all slow, stumbling on every third word, as he bites his knuckle and blinks. Elephant just sits there, that pair of big caterpillars on his forehead all knotted up in his effort to look pious and serious and clever. Why did Velkis stick me with them? Revenge? Penalty? Test?

  I said ‘Amen’ at the end, because that’s how they read it. Not like it’s meant to be understood, like it’s magic words, like the old grannies say their Hebrew tongue-twisters over the heads of babies with the ague. Idiots.

  There’s been word from Riga. The Leesma needs money. And men. One of us must go back.

  ‘It should be you, Kuznetz,’ Elephant says, with his little dark bushy face. Rat peering through a shithouse brush. ‘You’ll be wanting to see that flame-haired beauty of yours. Is she back, I do wonder?’ Says it with a dirty smile, tip of one little yellow tooth hanging over his lip because he knows what happened. My girl vanished, just took off and vanished, and it drives me sick if I give any thought to it.

  ‘It’s to spread revolutionary consciousness amongst the dock workers and organise a strike,’ Torch adds. I see the blinking fool take a sideways glance at his master to check he’s done right and get a pat on his pointed skittle of a head. Elephant smiles again.

  He smiles because he enjoys seeing me pulled in two this way, like the Tartars did to their enemies. I don’t want to go back to Riga. Because of her. I’m better off here, like Velkis said, not knowing where she is. Or whether she is. But still, it’s what I want to be doing: mobilising the workers, educating them to see the obvious, so the State just withers away. That’s my anarchism. Not this. Skulking like a pack of Bessarabian bandits in the woods. Plotting little robberies and fires.

  I’m ready to give them full cannons on their stupidity, how little they’ve done for the Cause since getting here, apart from finding this room and nearly getting us all arrested when we stole the printing equipment. But upstairs in the bookshop, the Litvaker stamps his foot three times on the floor. Dust showers on our heads. Means a customer has come in. Or police. So we all just go still and glare at each other until we hear the bell on the door and two more stamps.

  Elephant wipes the dust from his eyebrows and says he’s signed on at Schnurrman’s, the Rubber Factory on Chesnut Road. Tomorrow Torch starts too. It’s a big old place with a clock tower. So many Russians working there now they call it the Spasskaya. Here’s the interesting thing: what looks like just one boy, a sickly type, carries the wages from the bosses car to the clerk’s room.

  But – back to Riga? I’ll be thinking I’ve seen her everywhere, my heart seeking the shadows of her out and tricking my eyes. On every corner, a kvass stand where they know me, a gypsy cigarette-seller who’ll ask me about her, maybe tell me some rumour about her.

  Velkis had sent me on a little job. Cross to Kaunas with some twenty-rouble printing plates in a case of herring. Strange lot over there, I remember. Made out they weren’t expecting me – or my ‘herrings’. Point is I was only gone three weeks, and she knew how it was, how I couldn’t always tell her when I’d be back. Still, this time, my girl had had enough. When I got back, she wasn’t there. No sign of her anywhere. No one knew. Nothing. I waited so long outside the dressmakers they asked me if I wanted to model evening gowns for them.

  Then Velkis: dark, heavy, priestly Velkis at the back of the dockers’ tavern in his army coat. You’re letting this girl dilute your revolutionary fervour. Loses the broom up his arse after a couple of vodkas. She was just a girl, man. A fuck. Let go. Move on. He tells me he’s sending a cell to London. Lovely irony to it, don’t you think? The Tsar’s Navy taught you such good English that you’ll pass for an Englishman. Stay six months, a year. Forget.

  So I came. Riga – Hamburg – Tilbury on a ship sweet with the scent of dirty wool and sheep-shit. Never forgetting her one minute of it. Still not, now.

  It’s snowing when I come out of the bookshop. Only the end of October – early, at least for this damp, crowded little island. I walk out to the edge of the Marshes, away from the smoke and the dust and my confused mind. The snow is all pure white on the trees and the ground. Cools my fevered thoughts. I can fool myself I’m back, gone to the dunes around Ainava to catch hares in the holidays from the Naval Academy, met up with the old pack. Down to town, all glowing, sell the hares because our mothers won’t cook trayf, forbidden meat. Buy vodka and beer with the money and pretend one of us has the balls to approach a whore. Bicker and joke around all night like that in the bright, fierce cold. Not sick and twisted-up yet. No soldiers hauling your little sisters away in a dog-cart. No Cause. No Struggle. No Fight. No her. Wish it was still like that. But history calls men.

  When I got home the house was in darkness, cold, just a couple of tiny red pinpricks from the embers in the grate, smells of boiled pigmeat and beeswax. The old lady’s nostrils whistling upstairs. But something else as I took off my jacket in the blackness and wrapped myself in camphor-smelling blankets. Thought it might be a cart, way over down the High Road, with a squeaking axle. Then she sniffed and I realized it was her. It was Leah: crying, high-voiced, quietly, in her room.

  I put my arm out through the blankets into the heavy cold air and I touched the wall between me and her.

  * * *

  By late afternoon, images of four sheepish young men emerging from Tottenham Police Station in the company of their solicitor were being shown on Sky News. The on-site anchor even graciously mentioned a ‘local newspaper’ as being responsible for the breakthrough. Rex watched the broadcast on the flat screen in Susan’s office, while her laptop displayed the ebb and flow of traffic to NNL’s website. The ‘I’m Innocent’ page for Terry had drawn a modest audience, rising slightly as the story about the Muslim boys had gone online with it. By rights, the TV news coverage ought to be helping, too.

  ‘If anyone would actually mention us by name, the stats would be through the roof,’ Rex said. ‘Maybe we should text Sky News and ask for clarification.’

  Susan grunted sceptically. ‘Most of the visitors we’re getting are just click-throughs. Thirty seconds on the site, max. The BBC gets these kind of figures on a wet Sunday tea-time.’

  ‘Of course they do,’ Rex said. ‘They’re the BBC.’

  ‘Exactly. And we’re not!’ Susan sighed. ‘Sorry, Rex. Sorry. It’s just… People can get this shit –’ she waved at the TV screen ‘– on their watches now. Why do they need us?’

  ‘It’s called repositioning,’ said Lawrence Berne, Laureate of the Ladders, as he breezed in, clad in a houndstooth jacket and navy slacks. ‘All the big papers are doing it. Stop concentrating on news. No point, is there? You can’t compete with Twit-book, or whatever it’s called. So you give ’em all the other stuff. Debate. Lifestyle. Arts. Comment.’

  ‘But mainly comment, huh, Lawrence?’ Susan said, glancing at Rex. He said nothing. He’d never seen his boss so gloomy. Normally Susan was the one urging everyone on, filling the sails with wind even if there was little other than wind on offer. A lot of the time he was sceptical of her transatlantic, positive-attitude stuff. Right now, he missed it.

  He remembered that Susan had said something about going to the bank. Perhaps her moo
d was connected to that. He was about to ask when she swept out into the main office to talk to the Whittaker Twins.

  He turned back to the screen, where the newsreader formally identified the victims. They showed a holiday snap of the Bettelheims, all together, looking happy at an airport. The baby was wearing a bunny-ears hat. Rex found he had to look away.

  ‘It’s a shame Di missed your big scoop,’ Lawrence said, planting himself in Susan’s vacated chair. He examined his big, gold watch, which, like much else about him, seemed to belong to another time and place – a Rotary Club Luncheon, perhaps, circa 1984. ‘She’ll be somewhere over Riga by now.’

  Rex frowned. ‘Diana’s coming back?’

  ‘She’s been back,’ Lawrence said. ‘Now she’s gone again. Didn’t you know?’

  Rex felt an irrational stab of anger towards Lawrence, with his bouffant hair and perma-tan, but it didn’t last. If Lawrence’s niece hadn’t contacted him, it was no one’s fault but his own.

  He had behaved badly out in Cambodia. So, perhaps, had she. But she hadn’t made any promises. They’d had a brief fling in London, then Diana, a GP – his own GP in fact – had decided to go off and save lives in a Cambodian children’s hospital. She’d suggested he visit. Furnished with a ticket paid for by his workmates, he’d done just that, only to find there was a motorbike-riding Norwegian doctor called Kjell in the wings and then, increasingly, centre-stage. There’d been an angry, somewhat unhinged night in a beer garden, swiftly followed by Rex catching a plane out of the place. He still shuddered at the memory of it.