by James Hawes
Asbestos sprung nastily to mind.
Well, hold on, just one minute, I was not wrestling in the dark with a bloody great lump of old and friable asbestos, not without proper gloves and a facemask at the very least, no thank you very much. True, I could recall my father happily blowing blue dust out of car brake drums (—Want a go, John?), but now even the toughest of migrant workmen knew better. If there was any chance it was asbestos there was absolutely no shame at all, none whatever, in going straight to the Yellow Pages and hiring men with tattoos.
But what if I did get men with tattoos and they found it was indeed asbestos? Well? What exactly happens if a large piece of old asbestos is found buried in your garden? Don’t the men with tattoos have to call the council? Do they seal off the road? Strip the whole garden? What a disturbance to start my precious week of work!
Or a wartime bomb?
By no means impossible. Just twenty years before my birth, one set of Northern Europeans had been trying as hard as they could to kill as many as possible of another set of Northern Europeans, right here. A doodlebug. An unstoppable V-2 even, hull oxidising slowly, warhead sweating but still ticking away a foot from my foot …
Nonsense, all nonsense.
Was I a mere four-eyed pen-pusher to be scared off by the thought of a little hard lifting? By ridiculous imaginings? Was I now going to scuttle back to my laptop, leaving the job unfinished and still hanging over me? This week of all weeks, my make-or-break time?
No, no. I would be done with it this very night.
I stalked over to my garden shed and kicked about in the dark, looking for a certain small metal crate. This was my father’s folding blue toolbox, which had been formally presented to me on my last visit, my father having decided that his days of using it were over. I knew roughly where it was, even without a light, because I had that very day taken from it his old Stanley knife, to help the boys with a plastic model. After no more than three or four trips and bouts of cursing, I found the box.
I knelt down and pulled on the cold metal handles. The halves of the lid, greased annually by my father for fifty years, slid smoothly apart. For the second time that day, smells from my childhood filled the shed. Oil and sawdust: Daddy’s toolbox. I scrabbled around in it until I located his trowel. It had been drop-forged in Birmingham, a seamless hunk of metal, back when all that China made was tea: I had often watched my father use it to chop bricks in two with a single blow. I walked out of the shed again and tossed the old trowel on a whim high in the air. It rose, tumbling upwards, above the height of the garden wall. For an instant it caught the light from the still-unseen moon. I held my right hand out and to my amazement felt the whirling handle slap flat back down into my grasp, as though drawn home by unseen wires. If only our boys had been there to see that! Daddy cool. Then I looked down into the hole, knelt, took my weight on my left hand and scraped.
My knees grew damp, the soil piled up around the edges of the hole, the hidden outlines down inside it hardened, and in two minutes I found myself crouching about a foot above the flat top of a medium-sized suitcase.
5: The Armalite
I put down my trowel and used my soft, bare hand to rub the last thin crust of earth from the top of the suitcase.
It had obviously been sealed with great care. Layer upon layer of yellowed tape had been wound horizontally round the join of lid and body, like mummy cloth, then smothered in now-hardened, crumbling gunk.
What could be inside? What did people bury in carefully sealed suitcases?
Cautiously, I dug my right hand down and in beneath the corner of the case. The earth rammed up under my fingernails, wet and gritty. I tried to lift, but found that the thing was far, far heavier than I had guessed. From my kneeling position, I scarcely managed to raise it six inches out of the earth. It seemed almost impossible that anything this size could weigh so much. Childhood visions of buried treasure flashed back across my mind. Who knew?
I leaned my right ear close to the lid, closed my eyes to hear better, then whipped my fingers swiftly out so that the corner of the suitcase fell hard back down again. There was not the slightest sound of anything whatever shifting or jingling: but the impact sent an unmistakable whiff of hydrocarbons puffing out straight into my face.
I coughed, and blinked behind my glasses. I took my weight on my left hand again and began to probe the join of the suitcase with the point of my trowel. The putty or grout had aged badly, and came away in lumps. The swathing bands of old tape beneath ripped and tore easily. Soon all that was holding the lid in place was a single modest lock, rusted almost to nothing. I stuck the point of my trowel in behind the lock and twisted gently. The rotted stumps of the rivets on the backplate creaked free of the plastic, and the whole lock came clean away with no more fuss than a child’s milk tooth.
I now slowly inserted my trowel between the lid and the body of the suitcase. Boldly, I twisted and flicked. As I did so, I sat swiftly back a bit and turned my face away, just in case. The lid shot up, reached vertical, ran out of momentum, hung for a second, then fell slowly backwards on to the earth. The suitcase now lay there, broken-backed, wide open to the moon.
The reek of old, damp garages filled the night.
I leaned forward once again, to look. The suitcase was packed almost to the brim with some sort of yellow-grey grease. I caught a glimpse of bright white and saw that a large, tough, see-through plastic envelope had been carefully taped to the inner face of the lid, evidently to keep it free of the thick gunk. Inside was, clearly visible, a card with words written in black felt-tip pen:
MAY 1989
Also in this envelope, wrapped yet again in even more plastic, possibly vacuum-sealed by the look of it, was a wad of fifty-pound notes. The wad was very fat and tightly packed indeed.
I had seen impossible, absurd amounts on paper when house-buying, of course. But never this, in all my life, never such actual cash. For several heady seconds my heart leaped with breathtaking daydreams. A vast and shiny new Volkswagen MPV (—What do you think of her, boys, the Mystery Machine or what, eh?). A deliriously uncapped, full-month family holiday at last (—How do you fancy the Peruvian Andes and the Inca Trail, boys?). A serious chunk off the top of the bloody mortgage (—Yes, that’s right. I believe there are no penalties involved? Excellent). Then I realised that although these notes seemed so familiar and real, having been used for many years of my very own adulthood, they were in fact as worthless now as a suitcase full of East German marks.
The full burden of my years and my repayments settled again on my shoulders. Absent-mindedly, I knelt closer once more. The knuckles of my left hand sank, cold and wet, into the soil. I leaned forward and slid the blade of the trowel carefully down into the petro-chemical goo. I stirred. It was as thick as old, cold porridge. In the depths, the point of the trowel nudged a hidden lump.
An unseen something gave and the trowel slipped quickly another three inches down. I turned it this way and that, but could sense nothing more.
Up I pulled, and whatever it was came too. A shape broke the surface and the fat grease started to slide from it in a slow, thick waterfall, as if it were a damaged submarine rearing up into the night from deep down in some slimy sea.
Curiously, I lifted the trowel up to the pale light of the moon. The object was strangely lumped and deformed-looking, about two feet long and perhaps four or five pounds in weight. My trowel had evidently gone clean through the plastic wrapping at some point where there was a hole or gap inside, catching fast.
I turned and held it up against the moon, so that the light could shine through the plastic. Yes, I had hooked on to some kind of handle on the top of a …
—Jesus Christ almighty, a fucking Armalite! I yelped. I threw the thing hastily back into the suitcase, stepped back, tripped over the spade and fell heavily on my back, my specs flying from my face. My eyes now blurred by astigmatism and short sight, I watched while the package sank away again in unnerving slow motion. As it disappe
ared, a stony shower passed across my cheeks and neck, a river of tiny, icy pebbles.
—Hey, what’s up, mate? called a deep, male voice some six feet away in the darkness. — Oi, you deaf or what? Hell-o?
I froze.
6: Opening Up
The estate agent’s cheaply photocopied brochure had not lied. Ours was indeed a most secluded and private end-of-terrace garden. Actually, secluded meant that it was small and overshadowed, and end-of-terrace meant that beyond it lay a ghastly alleyway, always half-blocked with burst-bellied plastic rubbish sacks heaped up like the uncollected dead of some merciless urban war.
How had we failed to notice all this when we were house-hunting? Because by then we knew, having slogged for weeks around low-ceilinged, Artex-ridden hovels with white plastic windows, that this little house, jerry-built for the nineteenth-century working classes, its smattering of garden completely sunless, was, incredible as it seemed, the only bloody period three-bed property we could afford in the so-called Clapham Borders that was in the catchment area of the supposedly sort-of-OK-ish school. We could believe the estate agent, or despair. So we believed.
But as I now lay here, flat on my back in the moon-light, three feet from a real live Armalite machine gun, with a voice in my head asking how the hell I knew it was an Armalite anyway and another questioning me loudly from the alleyway, the garden just seemed very, very lonely.
I stayed there and scanned the darkness, keeping absolutely quiet, trying to give no sonic clue away, whilst at the same time patting the grass for my specs. At last my hand fell on them. I hooked them behind my ears and pressed them silently back on to my nose.
—I said you all right, mate? shouted the voice from the alleyway again. —Oi, we know there’s fucking someone in there. The words behaviour and suspicious spring to mind, mate.
I swallowed as softly as possible. As far as I knew, the alley was used exclusively by criminally inclined teenagers in hoods. But this was not a teenage voice. It was the voice of a fully grown, mature male. A man loud and confident in his pure and unmistakable local accent. A man happy to walk dark alleyways by night and confront total strangers on a whim.
A man, moreover, who had said we.
Who was we? Could it be the police? Surely, though, the police would have said they were the police? And not have said fucking? But if it was not the police, well, who else, what we else, would dare to address me in that tone, in my own garden, in England? The silence seemed to creak. A sweet tickling cloud of cigarette smoke drifted in from the alleyway.
— Oi, this is the Neighbourhood Watch here, mate. You going to answer? Last chance, or Uncle Joe’s coming over that fucking wall!
—Neighbourhood Watch? I asked, and scrambled to my feet.
—Aha, there you are then. That your garden, mate?
—What? Mine? Well, yes, of course.
— Oh. So, you must be Doctor John Goode, neighbour?
—Um, yes, yes, that’s right, that’s me!
—We heard someone shouting and screaming and moaning, didn’t we, Uncle Joe?
—Rrrrrrrr! said what had to be a large dog. I was not keen on large dogs, or on people that kept them. I considered that owning a large dog was a statistical indicator of fascistic tendencies.
—That’s OK, that was just me! I called over the wall.
—The words shagging or fighting or dying sprang to mind, Doc.
—No, no, I just, I was just, oiling the mower, and I, um, hit my thumb, you see. And I must have shouted a bit. Sorry. Well, thanks for, um, for taking the trouble to ask. Goodnight!
—Oiling the mower, Doc? This time of night?
—Sorry? Um, well, yes, oiling it, for the winter, you see.
—Oh yes. Very sensible.
—Right, well …
—Well then, Doc, you going to open up?
—Open up?
—See you round the front, yeah?
—The front? I asked moronically, as though I had indeed heard this word used once, but not in my last several incarnations on earth.
—Come on, Uncle Joe, time to meet and greet the new man on the block.
7: Thank You, Sir, and Goodnight
I stood and listened to the merrily retreating steps of man and dog, my own feet rooted far more firmly than either of the little trees freshly planted beside me. Why the hell had I ever left my quiet little desk under the stairs?
Well, call the police, obviously.
What else can you do if you find an Armalite in your garden? Actually, it might be good to have the Neighbourhood Watch as a witness, to prove to the police beyond doubt that I had simply unearthed the gun right here and now.
Ridiculous. There would be no doubt anyway. I was a respectable lecturer, for God’s sake …
Dang-Dong! went the front door bell.
I jumped, found I was still standing over the hole and suitcase like an idiot, hurried to my back doorstep, struggled to get off my muddy boots, fell over, banged my head on the door-jamb and swore. I raced through the kitchen, sliding sock-footed on the tiles, and hurriedly washed my hands as well as I could.
Dang-Dong!
—Yes, yes, coming!
I dried my hands, oh God, grease on the dishcloth, and grabbed for my week’s packet of cigarettes. The Neighbourhood Watch had been smoking. So if I was smoking as well, that would make me seem, and therefore feel, tougher and more like him. And anyway I was suddenly dying for one. Christ, yes, I was going to give up, all right, —Yes, yes, Daddy is going to stop completely very soon indeed, promise, but not on a day when I had just found a bloody Armalite under my lawn and the police were about to come charging round and …
Wait.
I stood stock-still. From here I could see, at the end of the short, narrow hallway, the figure standing as a shadow against the streetlight beyond the original Victorian stained-glass door about which the estate agent had made such a ridiculous (but successful) fuss.
Think.
I mean, this is serious.
What exactly do the police do if you call them and say you’ve just found an Armalite in your garden?
Christ, they turn up by the dozen, no doubt. If not the score. The hundred. Yes, with guns and dogs and flak jackets. All wired and cocked. Better make bloody sure they know that it was you who called them! Give them an exact description of yourself, stressing the middle-aged, the specs and especially the white.
And even assuming they do not just blow your head off by regrettable mistake, what do they do, once they have got the gun? Just say thank you sir and goodnight?
As if!
They drive you away to some bombproof cell for questioning, then order half the street out of bed and take the house to bits looking for more Armalites, is what they do, of course. And what exactly happens if the police decide to take your house apart? Do they put it back how it was? Or just roughly? Or not at all? Do they pick up the bill? How long does it take? Does insurance cover it? Does the trashing of one’s property by the anti-terror police count for insurance purposes as a side effect of terrorism? Or of war on terrorism? And does a war on terrorism, having being called such by the Prime Minster of a country, count within that country, for insurance purposes, as a normal war, i.e. not count at all?
What would happen to my precious, unique, once-in-a-parenthood week of pure work? How would I ever get the Very Important Paper finished?
Dang-Dong!
—Rrrrrr!
—Yes, yes, coming!
Well, I had no choice.
Shit.
The police would question this maniac with the dog as well. Of course they would. Very carefully. I’d already behaved suspiciously. I hadn’t told him straight away. I’d lied about a lawnmower. What would they make of that?
—Now, sir, it seems that your first reaction was to lie to the Neighbourhood Watch, doesn’t it? To try to cover up the fact that you’d just found an Armalite. That’s rather strange isn’t it, surely, sir? Can you perhaps explain?
The bloody anti-Iraq-War march last year!
8: Not in My Name
I slumped against the wall of our little hallway and my fresh-scrubbed palm went unbidden to my forehead.
The Iraq march.
Oh God.
All goes well until William needs a pee. The police are gazing very coldly on anyone who looks like trying to break ranks from the planned route. They seem in no mood to listen to hasty explanations, shouted desperately over the noise of those stupid bloody SWP chants and ridiculous whistles. We decide we must just stop, home-made banners and all, mid-march. It is only a child peeing, after all. A bit old to be doing this normally, true. Especially in his own eyes. We have to stand around to shield William from pre-teen embarrassment as, red-eyed with resentment, he pisses in the street. Our friends half-heartedly offer to stop along with us, but are more or less forced onwards. The small, still-childish trickle comes with maddening slowness as the great column of people shuffles unstoppably by (—Sorry, sorry, William. For God’s sake, darling, pee straight. No, no, not if straight means straight on people’s shoes! Christ, sorry, er, mate. I mean, um, Imam. No offence intended, I didn’t mean Christ as in, well, I mean, I know you, your religion respects Christ too. Anyway, I’m not a Christian as it happens. Not that I’m anti-religion as such, of course, it’s just … anyway, sorry …). William has finished at last and now Jack, quite predictably, quite understandably and yet very, very irritatingly, decides that he, being undeniably a twin and thus clearly entitled to fully equal rights of parental fussing on the basis of perceived rather than actual need, also needs to do a wee.
By the time the boys are both done, rezipped and once again holding up their touchingly miniature NOT IN MY NAME banner (on which we spent most of yesterday afternoon), we are hopelessly separated from the happy gang of like-minded old college pals with whom we were planning to spend the rest of the day marching and picnicking and finding child-friendly north-London pubs that serve real ales, and suchlike jollity. We try to call mobiles, try to make ourselves heard over the din, try to make back-up plans. Then we look around, our spirits in sudden free fall. We have been engulfed by wild-eyed SWP members, pale faces alight with the unholy glow of certainty. There is no escape. With Sarah heavily pregnant, we can hardly try to barge speedily forward through our fellow marchers. Nor do we feel like risking a confrontation with the brooding line of armoured policemen. Christ, in my days on the Miners’ Strike they still just had ordinary helmets and coats and looked like humans! Hmm. Perhaps if we hadn’t thrown bricks at them back then? Yes, well. There they are, anyway, looking as if they might quite like to make a fight of it, and here we are surrounded by loony Trots and the stream of protestors surges on about us, all shoulders and elbows, eventually forcing us to shuffle on regardless. We stall and slow as much as possible to let the screaming SWP overtake us. Perhaps we can find the Quakers? If we march with the Quakers for a bit, singing and smiling inanely, the police might see that we are essentially harmless and let us leave the march. But it is not the Quakers who now envelope us. It is, instead, the toughly silent, semi-masked Northern acolytes of some aged and bearded Muslim cleric. This ancient scholar-cum-tribal-chieftain smiles with Olympian, or at any rate Araratian, condescension at me and even absent-mindedly ruffles the hair of our sons (they smile nervously, sure of parental approval later), but he does not seem to even register Sarah’s existence.
