by James Hawes
JAMES HAWES
My Little Armalite
Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
About the Author
Also By James Hawes
Prologue: The Primal Scream
Part One
1: What I Knew About Guns
2: The Very Important Paper
3: London, at Last!
4: Into the Hole
5: The Armalite
6: Opening Up
7: Thank You, Sir, and Goodnight
8: Not in My Name
9: The Big Match
10: Sash Windows
11: Einstein and Newton
12: The Last Person
13: Heiner Panke
14: What We Do Not Know
15: An Englishman’s Nightmare
16: Mortgage Repayment: 2/6
17: A Goal for England
18: A Shit-Hole Run by the Red Army
19: Careers Advice
20: Antarctica Breaks Away
21: Sucking Diesel
22: Archaeology
23: Liberal Blather
24: How Hard Can It Be?
Part Two
25: Power
26: A Thick Bed of Liberal Broadsheet
27: Thinking Clearly
28: An Icy Male Paradise
29: The Home of the Black Rifle
30: Special Relationship
31: The Irrational Fear of Physical Violence
32: A Lump of Metal from the World of Men
33: The Genetic Make-up of London
34: Cameras
35: Good as Gold
36: No Cameras
37: Dad Pants
38: Unencumbered by Trousers
39: Respect
40: My Little Armalite
41: Vulnerability Assessment
42: Superbug
43: Prague, Of Course!
44: The Enemy
45: Of Course!
46: Legroom
47: An Anglo-Saxon Name
48: Tons of Flab Wobbling About in a Big Net
49: Waste the Pig
50: Into the Forest
Part Three
51: Singing for the Dying
52: A Mere Liberal Englishman
53: Outside the Liberal Box
54: A Black, Bloody Insurrection
55: A Deep and Very Middle-European Ditch
56: God Knows
57: What Things Will Come
58: Erbyerk Again
59: The Shock Outrunning All Pain
60: In The Paper, At Last
61: Gunsmoke
62: A Little Speed Hump for Real-Estate Speculators
63: Leader, Lead: We Demand to Obey!
64: Women, Indeed!
65: Like any Good Teutonic Politician
66: I Have a Dream
67: Tutus for Party Bosses
68: The Global Locusts
69: Straight Down the Line
70: Low Overheads
71: Saved
Part Four
72: Et in North London Ego
73: Sic Incipit Gloria Mundi
74: The Avoidance of Tragedy
75: Normality at any Cost
Acknowledgements
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Published by Vintage 2009
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Copyright © James Hawes 2008
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First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Jonathan Cape
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To Nerys Lloyd and our three sons
MY LITTLE ARMALITE
James Hawes is the author of five novels, including A White Merc With Fins and Speak for England. He is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University and lives in Cardiff.
ALSO BY JAMES HAWES
A White Merc With Fins
Rancid Aluminium
Dead Long Enough
White Powder, Green Light
Speak For England
Prologue: The Primal Scream
Darling, it’s three a.m. and I’m sitting here in my clever little study area under our stairs, just where I should be. But I’m afraid I’m not working on the Very Important Paper. Instead, I’m recording this prologue, headset in place and hands free for … well, listen.
Do you know that sound? Of course not. Let’s hope you never will. But millions of living men know it just as our ancestors knew the knap of flint on flint, the screech of blade on whetstone, the drone of bombers overhead. The soft click of shells being thumbed home against the surprisingly gentle spring of a …
That noise again outside! Now, that one you know all too well. A carful of hooded little sods snarling and rapping past, rattling our Victorian sashes. At three a.m.! So much for on the borders of the conservation area. Yes, OK, cities have alway been noisy, but the Pooters only had trains to ignore, not deliberately unsilenced primate bloody braying. Even uPVC units would only dull it, but uPVC is obviously out of the question and we simply can’t afford quality double-glazed hardwood sashes right now. Even if we wanted to invest even more in a depreciating bloody asset. So we say (especially to ourselves) that you get used to the noise, that we hardly notice it, that it’s just part of life in this vibrant, diverse …
Fuck, ow! Sorry, darling, shit, that noise was me banging my head on the underneath of the staircase. Again! I know, I know there was nowhere else for my desk to go, even with no piano for you. I’m not saying there was, it’s just that … hardly notice? It’s three bloody a.m.! We’ve got a baby scarcely sleeping through, kids to get to school, careers to service. Hardly notice? Christ, when we were twenty (which isn’t that long ago!) you had to shove a half-warmed kleftikon around a dirty plate if you wanted a drink after eleven. At midnight, London (where ordinary people could afford to buy in Zone 2) was settling to sleep. By four in the morning (which we hardly ever saw, even at twenty) the streets we
re patrolled only by defenceless milk bottles. And now? Now midnight is just the start for the uppers-raddled shits whose little brothers and half-brothers and step-brothers will make our darlings’ schooldays hell if I don’t do something fast. What was so bloody bad about grammar schools anyway? Oh, if those little fuckers … Sorry, darling, but, well, if they knew that I could walk out now and just put a whole clip right through their tinted bloody windows and into their stinking …
… Sorry. Not very liberal. I admit that it’s hard to restrain myself from employing my new skills. When you know that you can do something, morality easily follows suit. But my sights are set higher than tactical victories, however tasty. A prophet armed at last, I’m aiming for the only thing any of us can do, nowadays: I’m going to make bloody sure that our own darlings are ahead of the pack when the ice caps finally melt, the floodgates burst and the border guards tear off their uniforms, throw down their guns and run.
Of course, there’s a chance it’ll blow up in my face.
Not literally, I mean. But figuratively it’s possible. My cover story of Muslim extremists is good and timely. In the present funding-friendly climate it’s hard to see why any thinking copper would want to challenge it. But I still might get caught.
In which case you’ll need financial support. Which is why I’ve recorded my story for you to sell. I don’t believe my fate will be without some resonance. The world must be full of ex-lefties riddled with despair, bafflement and shame. If it isn’t, it’s full of cretins. This might tide you over until my pension kicks in. As far as I know they can’t strip me of my superannuation rights for having stepped a wee bit beyond the liberal consensus! Knowing that you’re financially catered for, I’ll sit happily in my prison cell, vastly respected by my stupid and violent companions due to the nature of my offences, as smooth and smug as those men in every life-insurance junk-mail flyer: men who have provided for their loved ones adequately and protected their mortgage.
Christ, that bloody word again, that primal scream of our times!
What? Did we ask for the earth? For gravel drives, lofty gables, double fronts and all-round gardens? No. All we wanted was the sort of everyday thing navvies chucked up by the tens of thousands all over north London between Dickens and Hitler to house medium-grade clerks. Just the usual modest period semi, for God’s sake, with a pair of tallish bays and four half-decent bedrooms, set ten feet or so back from the pavement of an averagely quiet residential street within realistic toddler-wheeling distance of a fair-sized park with the standard ducks and suchlike in any, repeat any, repeat any, old part of Zones 2 or 3 that lies a safe-ish height above sea level and diesel fumes, with ordinary human neighbours who sleep at night and reasonable schools where our children will not go in fear because they speak normal bloody English.
Well?
Sorry?
Was that really so much to ask in return for twenty years’ unbroken CV in a highly respectable graduate career?
Ah.
I see.
Of course. Silly me. I was forgetting we’ve committed a mortal sin that will blight the rest of our lives and our children’s too: we didn’t buy a house in London last millennium. End of family story. Social mobility crash-stops. History swallows us up.
Oh, but I think not.
Do you hear this noise, darling?
Listen.
Cthlick!
I’m pressing the last round down. My clip is full.
So be it. The world has chosen to renege on the clear agreement I made with it back in nineteen eighty-four. All I am doing is setting things right. There is a fine Anglo-Saxon tradition which holds that crime is in fact not crime, riot not truly riot and even revolution not really revolution at all when it aims merely to restore good old normality.
Result? Happiness.
If all goes well tomorrow, if my gun doesn’t jam and shoots straight, if I don’t lose my nerve at the vital moment (which would be quite understandable), none of the friends who will, in the fine years to come, gather from the neighbouring streets to eat no doubt organic meat and drink good red wine around our big old table in our high-ceilinged home whilst we discuss the burning cultural and political issues of the day, guided, as we have ever been, by the wise and liberal comments in The Paper that morning, will ever suspect me. We’ll simply have become what we always were, round pegs in round holes, with no gap for darkness to shine through. Even you’ll never know.
I’ll have come back from my war and I’ll never speak of it.
We’ll have not truth, but love.
And I’ll remain for ever the boldly liberal man whose story I’ve set down over the last few long, lonesome evenings but who now, as I sit here under our stairs at three a.m., trembling somewhat, it is true, at what I am to do tomorrow, as well I might, but firm in my intentions, my little Armalite and I all ready at last (at last!) for manly action, seems so very far away from me that I find I can scarcely recall his name …
PART ONE
Summons
1: What I Knew About Guns
I, John Goode, was a normal, liberal man who, apart from stoning policemen during the Miners’ Strike (as I frequently admitted at dinner parties), had honestly never even fantasised (as far as I could remember) about seeing anyone getting physically hurt (apart from Maggie and George W. Bush, obviously).
I’m sure I would have stayed that nice man my whole life long, but one November evening, while I was out planting some young plum trees in our small London garden, I found a machine gun buried under our little patch of lawn.
Actually it’s an assault rifle.
But how was I to know the difference (if any)? What did I know about machine guns? Nothing. I wasn’t American, so I’d never met otherwise-sane folk whose domestic equipment included machine guns. I wasn’t European, west, east, north, south or middle, so I’d never been made to spend time in a barracks, learning about machine guns. And I wasn’t from the Rest of the World (pretty well all of it, except for the bits that still have Elizabeth on their coins), so I hadn’t been used from birth to seeing snappily dressed paramilitary policemen swanking around the place, slinging machine guns.
No, I was English, and though my militarily useful years (now gone) had coincided almost entirely with an era (now past) when her central foreign policy was readiness for a war (now unthinkable) in which national annihilation was the probable outcome, England had never remotely expected me to go soldiering. So like most normal Englishmen, I had never felt the slightest need to concern myself with developments in personal weaponry.
It’s true that some three months before, while sitting in a taxi from Paddington to WC1, feeling important (because I hadn’t been in a black cab for years, let alone when someone else was paying) and excited (because I knew I had a real chance of getting this job, which meant London was beckoning me home at last) and scared (because I might yet blow the interview, thus probably dooming myself and my beloved family to northern cities for ever), I had seen quite a few guns.
Amazed and affronted, I had seen English bobbies swanning toughly about with small machine guns and stylish earpieces as they patrolled the concrete-block ramparts of the American Embassy. The mere fact of cradling guns seemed to make them swagger heavily from overfed hips, in a deeply un-English fashion. Next thing, they would be wearing reflective bloody shades. Oh, some of them already were.
I laughed with outrage at this charade and asked my cab driver (until then we’d been happily chatting about the weather, as required by local custom) what the hell good were machine guns against suicide bombers, eh?
What, for God’s sake (I demanded roundly), did the famously incompetent, historically corrupt and structurally racist Metropolitan Police intend precisely to do if somebody suddenly tugged sweatily at a suspicious belt amid those innocent visa-queues of people? Just open up, with no doubt inaccurate little machine guns, from every angle? In the middle of London? Ridiculous. Even if it really was a terrorist for once and not just some p
oor bloody Brazilian plumber with skin a shade too dark for his own good, adjusting his trousers at the wrong time and place! They would probably kill more people that way than would ever be hurt by a small bomb going off in an open space. You didn’t have to know a thing about guns (and thank God we don’t have to, here!) to see that the whole, well, yes, charade was complete nonsense. Just the government trying to make us feel under permanent threat, obviously. And how did we get into this mess in the first place, with terrorists in London? By kowtowing to the bloody Yanks and their insane neo-imperialist war of choice!
My arguments were so clearly sound that the cab driver contented himself with chewing his gum and looking in his rear-view mirror.
No, I knew nothing about guns and had no desire to know more. Naturally, I had been taken, as a boy, and had, just two weeks ago, taken our own children, now that we were living in London (at last, at last! Daddy has delivered!), to see the chocolate soldiers in Whitehall, horse and foot. But when I noticed that my sons were more interested in the flak-jacketed police standing nearby with their stupid bloody real little machine guns again, I hurried us on, with a stout huff of public annoyance, assuring little Mariana, for all around to hear, that we would come here again to see the funny soldiers and their nice horses, for longer, properly, once London got back to normal!
I was, in short, uninterested in guns. I recall, for example, one Sunday some few weeks ago, shortly after our arrival here, when I was out with one of my new colleagues, shopping for the lunchtime joint, and we popped in somewhere for a quick sneaky schoolboyish one on the way back, to chat about matters sporting and cultural, the way liberal Englishmen do. Guns did, in fact, enter the conversation, but only as follows:
—Hey, here’s one. Before the Civil War, the American one, I mean, not ours, what was the most popular sport in America?
—God knows. Shooting bison? Shooting Native Americans?
—Ha ha! No. Cricket!
—Cricket? In America? You sure, John?
—Well, it said so in The Paper.
