by James Hawes
—Well, great, yes, the Red Lion sounds … great.
—Neighbours, not strangers, that’s us, Prof John! That’s Phil’s philosophy for you! Ha ha ha. So, this the family then?
—Sorry? Oh, look, I …
Phil had walked straight past me and on into the living room, and was now standing crouched by the mantelpiece, squinting at our small collection of family pictures in their little frames. I sidled quietly crabwise behind him, in order to place myself casually on guard at the door to the kitchen.
Apart from the usual dusting of plastic crap (light-sabres, small foam rings from electric guns, game-machine cartridges), the room was dominated by the carefully laid-out parts and instructions for a large-scale Flying Fortress, which I’d been helping Jack and William with. And I was happy now to place my right foot beside Grandad’s knife, my father’s blue-grey metal-handled craft knife, which lay on the Flying Fortress’s instruction sheet. The ground seemed suddenly firmer, as if my sons’ undoubted maleness had added a few vital pounds to my own.
—Twin boys, eh, Prof John? Got her with both barrels, eh? Ha ha ha! Three boys, I got. We’ll have to get the little sods all out down the park together for a kick-about, eh?
—Great, yeah, love to!
—And a baby girl, eh? Pret-ty. That’s nice. But the words ahead and trouble spring to mind. Every little fucker in the street sniffing round. Now that’s a nice house. That where you used to live, Prof John? Come down in the world a bit, haven’t you, ha ha?
—No, it’s Sarah’s parents’ house. Down Exeter way.
—Very nice. Don’t suppose there’s many of them, down Exeter way.
—Sorry?
—Well, whose fucking idea was it to let a million illiterate medieval cunts in who think we’re all filthy fucking unbelievers and our girls are tarts because they don’t wear fucking blankets over their heads? Exactly. No one’s idea. No one wanted it. It was a fucking stupid cock-up, that’s all it was, but no one’s going to admit it because there’s fuck-all anyone can do about it except send the cunts back to Allahu-fucking-Akbar-land and no one’s going to do that, because they can’t, so we all have to pretend it’s fine. Exeter way, eh? How much’d a place like that set you back down Exeter way? I suppose you can pick that sort of thing up dirt cheap, all the way out there?
For a second or two we both looked at the picture of Sarah, the children and me standing in front of Sarah’s parents’ house. A perfectly normal, solid, three-storey Victorian semi with two bays and a real attic room above and sash windows, a proper little front garden with a child’s swing and a genuine drive, more than enough to park a car on, leading up to a neat red wooden garage door. I had always wanted a house like that. I could still remember with complete clarity deliberately stopping the first time I walked up to that door, so that I could look in for a moment at Sarah all alone at the piano, in her own perfect world. Sarah’s parents were only schoolteachers, for God’s sake, whereas I was a fully fledged university lecturer …
—Cheap? Not any more, I said to Phil. —Not even in Exeter.
—Nice-looking bird, your missus, Prof John. Often thought so in the street. This your old man, then?
Phil pointed a sausage-like finger at the other large photograph over our fireplace. This showed me back in 1989 (the glorious summer I won my first job and Sarah). I was being held playfully in a necklock by a grinning, bearded man with extremely large and hairy forearms.
—My dad? God no, that’s, it’s …
I thought for a moment about trying to explain. But I decided that this was not the time.
—… oh, it’s just a German friend of mine. A writer. And a sort of politician now.
But Phil was no longer listening. He motioned for me to be quiet, and his ears pricked visibly back on his bald head. I cocked my head as well. We could hear the yapping laughter and cheery joshing of a young male war band passing by in the street. Phil’s ears relaxed.
—Na, that wasn’t the Albanians.
—Oh, good.
—That was that little cunt Dave Phipps and his scummy brothers from three doors down.
—Oh.
—That’s why the Neighbourhood Watch pays special attention to your end of the street, Prof John.
—Right.
—I mean, they say crime doesn’t pay, right? Well they’re almost right. It doesn’t pay very well. You tell me, Prof John, how much d’you reckon those little cunts make, selling a bit of dope and coke and nicking phones and doing motors over?
—Is that what they do?
—Don’t you worry, even those cunts have got enough brains not to shit in their own nest. Not when they know the Neighbourhood Watch is watching them! I’ll tell you how much they fucking make. Not much, is how much. Not enough to fucking live. Except, guess what? You and me and everyone else pays those thieving cunts dole on top of it. Which makes it worth their fucking while to go out thieving! Now whose bright idea was that, you ask? No one’s, is whose. It’s just another fucking cock-up and no one’s going to do anything about it, because there’s nothing they can fucking do about it, except abolish the fucking dole full stop for every little cunt under twenty-one with no kids and no one’s going to do that.
—Well, yes, Phil, I see your point. But isn’t there something that can be done about them? I mean, like call the council? Or the housing association?
—Na. It’s their own place.
—What?!
—Well, their dad bought it before they was born. Like mine, see. Lucky, I suppose. Not like the stupid sods who come along nowadays and tie their bollocks to a huge fucking mortgage for the rest of their lives just so they can pay silly fucking money for … no offence meant, Prof John. Present company excepted, eh? Ha ha! You put that study thing in, under the stairs, did you? Can you really work in there without banging your nut all the time?
—Oh, yes. Well, just about.
—I see. Course, they put an extension on for the kitchen. Always wondered. Units not bad. French windows, very nice. What you got outside in the garden, Prof John? All down to lawn, is it, what’s left of it? What you been planting? Apple trees? Thought you said you was oiling the mower? Mind if I take a look? Think you’ll get enough light for apples? Or are they plums?
—Plums, yes. But no, stop, Phil, wait!
My hand shot out of its own accord and grabbed at hairy muscle and bone. It felt as though I had taken hold of a horribly warmed-up leg of raw, bristly pork. I looked down. My grasp scarcely reached three-quarters of the way around Phil’s big wrist.
—What? You OK, Prof John?
—Phil, listen, this is, aha, well, ha, sorry, love to show you the garden, but, but … but look at the time! I mean, hey, what about the England match?
—We still got half an hour, Prof John.
—Yes, that’s true, but, Phil, what about the, the warm-up! We can’t miss the warm-up, down the pub, for an England match! Can we?
—Now that’s what I call philosophy, Prof John! You are so right. What’s the England match without a few pints in the warm-up first, eh? Yeah, the lads’ll be there already. Here, if that’s what you teach them at college, I’ll send my boys after all, ha ha ha!
—Look, I’ll just, I’ve just got to send a quick email. Why don’t you go and get the first one in, get us good seats? Here, I’ll give you the money.
—You’re on, Prof John. What you drink? Nice cold lager?
—Um, yes, yeah, great.
—We’ll save you the best seat in the house, Prof John. Meet the lads. Go on then, send your message, chop-chop, don’t want to let your beer get warm and flat. You be there, or I’ll come back looking for you, ha ha! Come on then, Uncle Joe, the words beer and lots of spring to mind, eh? Ha ha!
—Rrrrrr!
11: Einstein and Newton
In the garden, the moon was now high. I raced out from my back door, half-expecting to find that the Armalite had in the meantime escaped from the suit-case by itself. The suitcase
was still closed, of course, just as I had left it, with the Armalite within.
Or at least I assumed it was, because nothing had moved. Even so, I found myself already about to lift the lid of the case, just to make sure.
I forced myself to stop. There was no rational way, no way at all, that anyone without superhuman powers could have sneaked over the wall and dug the gun from out of the grease whilst I was talking to Phil. It was impossible. Which meant that if I now really did allow myself to open the lid of the suitcase to make sure the gun was still there, this would cleary imply that I, (Dr) John Goode, had in fact accepted that the impossible was at least theoretically possible and that the laws of nature might in principle have been suspended tonight in SE11.
I refused to countenance this notion. According to the rules believed by Newton to be absolute at every time or place, the gun must still be there, was still there. Yes, of course, I knew that Einstein had shown (apparenty) that Newton’s laws are subject to infinitely small (yet, in the infinite vastness of infinity, eventually infinitely significant) variations at vast speeds or tiny measurements (or whatever it was that Einstein said). But SE11 was a normal place. Well, comparatively.
Enough. I planted my feet and my mind firmly. The world turned normally. Normally, for the world. Einstein might be fine for subatomic particles, but Newton still ruled in my garden. So I acted logically. I quickly spaded a thin covering of earth back over the suitcase and towed the unplanted tree across the dug patch. It lay there, now irretrievably unpotted. Pale fingers and hairs of root trailed feebly from the big lump of earth, undefended from the killing night and cold. In the wet darkness, it looked too much like something you might dig up in a nasty Bosnian forest. But I had no time to worry just now about the tree.
My course was rationally clear.
I was going to go the pub, come back, go out again, dig the garden again as if nothing had ever happened just to get some fresh earth on my hands and boots, then call the police as if I’d just found the gun.
Yes, my work time would be disturbed, but there was no helping that. What else could I do? I was a normal Englishman; I had found an Armalite; I would call the police. So long as there was no reason for them to be at all suspicious of my story, no complications about what I might or might not have said to Phil and why, they would have no reason to ever suspect me of anything, or check up on my past or …
Stoutly, I turned my back on the hole and marched back into the house to find clothes for the pub, suitable for watching England in
I opened my wardrobe and swiftly grabbed a pair at random from the monoculture pile of 34/30 Levis which were all I had bought in the way of jeans for the past twenty years. I struggled into them. Shit, come on. Must’ve shrunk in the bloody tumble dryer. I was not a 36 waist, I refused to be a 36 waist, I had always been a 34 waist and … aha! There. Fine, really.
I bounded down the stairs, got to the front door, patting my pockets to make sure I had grabbed my keys and money.
But at the door I stopped dead.
Christ, I didn’t even know what the hell the England match was!
How could I walk into a south-London pub not knowing that? I raced back down the hall, diving into my little study area to check on the web. In my hurry to reach my laptop, I thwacked my head solidly on the side of the staircase.
—Ahh! For Christ’s sake, stupid fucking ridiculous little bloody … ! I roared, and sank to my knees, blinded with the pain.
When I looked up, I found that I must have managed to hit a key before being felled. The Very Important Paper had leapt out of hibernation and was standing there once more on the screen before my eyes, bright and mocking.
For a vertiginous second, as my brain settled back from the thump, I was absolutely convinced that my work had somehow converted itself into a bizarre and completely illegible font. Then I found that I could indeed read the letters but that the words now refused to combine into any meaning. I stared at my work and felt panic rise.
I shook my head, like a dog shaking off water. I had more important things to do. Survival things. I had to make sure that no one down the pub would realise that I knew absolutely nothing whatever about soccer.
12: The Last Person
My lack of devotion to football had been, of course, nothing unusual among the youthful intelligentsia of my college days. It was in fact highly fashionable. In 1980, sport was for rugger-bugger Tories and their lumpen lackeys. Sexy post-punks and their radical ilk smoked rolling tobacco, drank Guinness, talked revolution.
At some point in the late eighties or early nineties, this all died. Soccer mushroomed even in the liberal pages of The Paper. I, though, took no more part in this sea change than I had in the Summer of Love. I was rarely even aware of who was leading the Premiership, and for my national team, I felt emotions which only a good German or a decent Yank can possibly understand: mere relief whenever the gang of repulsive thugs allegedly representing us got kicked out of whatever, thus ending the revolting hysteria.
Ah yes, here it was. Sports News on Virgin Media. The Big Match.
—Oh no, for God’s sake, I groaned. It was the worst possible result. England were playing France tonight.
I loved France dearly. France was the main surviving alternative model to free-market neo-con American ultra-liberal imperialism. France was cultured. France resisted Coca-Colonialism (as I intended boldly to call it in the VIP). France had workers’ rights and a concern for social traditions. And splendid wine and attractive cafés and bold strikers and people who drove tractors through the walls of McD’s. France had not invaded Iraq. It was true that most of these could be said of Germany as well, but, like most people who study Germany, I did not really like the place very much. I found it fascinating but entirely unloveable. France, on the other hand, was very highly loveable. It was European. It was Europe. Yes, there was the odd glitch in liking France, such as Greenpeace boats being bombed and nuclear tests being continued, despite worldwide pleas, on the orders of Machiavellian Presidents who called themselves socialists but had collaborated with the Nazis. And the fact that France’s multi-ethnicity seemed confined to the football team. But these were aberrations. Without France, and hence without the EU, where would we be? A mere client state of America! Had I found myself in a friend’s or colleague’s house with England vs France on the telly in the background, I would have openly applauded every French goal, as in all likelihood would the friend or colleague. But I could hardly do it in the local bloody pub, sitting next to Phil.
In any case, what was I thinking of? I couldn’t stay and watch the match anyway. I had to escape from the pub soon and get back home to sort out the bloody gun.
But how could I leave an England match halfway through without making Phil and all Phil’s mates think I was a weirdo who merited a nutting and whose sons deserved a good kicking? There was only one way: I had to get someone to call me away from the pub on some urgent pretext.
Who?
Sarah would still be on the plane. I could hardly leave a message asking her to call me as soon as she landed. Telling her that I had found a machine gun in our garden might well worry her somewhat, possibly even ruin the holiday. If I tried to tell her any other story she would know I was lying and suspect the worst. But I had to call someone, to get them to summon me from the pub.
There was only one person left.
13: Heiner Panke
As I waited for the phone to be answered, I drummed my fingers and looked absent-mindedly at the photo of the bearded man with his arm round my neck.
The man in the photo was, of course, Heiner Panke, the subject of my PhD thesis (‘Heiner Panke’s Stories: The Strategic Self as Literary Resistance in the GDR’, Frankfurt, 1989). We had become good friends and in 1991 Panke had sworn to me personally, in writing (I still had the letter), that I need have no fear of the revelations flooding out of the old East Germany. My little doctor, I can swear to you here and now that no one will ever find my name on a list of
Stasi agents, those scum who betrayed their friends for peanuts. Armed with this scriptural promise, I had continued to make sure that Panke’s books stayed on the reading lists (we academics may be appallingly underpaid these days, but we are still the gatekeepers of literary immortality, backlist sales and British Council grants). In 2003, files from the former Soviet Union revealed that Panke had indeed never been a wretched little Stasi agent who spied on his friends for peanuts. No, he had been a fully paid major in the KGB from 1977 to 1989, spying on everyone, including the Stasi itself.
A blow, of course, but fortunately no humanities lecturer has ever been kicked out just for being utterly wrong. After all, not a single university expert on East Germany in the summer of 1989 had predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall at any time in the foreseeable future. No one lost their job over that little matter, did they? Certainly not. And things blow over. Those were confusing times, after all. We all made mistakes, back then …
—Hello?
—Oh, hi, Mum, it’s only me. Look, just a quick one to ask a favour.
—Of course, dear. How are the children?
—What? Oh, fine. Away, actually, with Sarah and her parents.
—With Sarah’s parents? They could have come to us.
—Oh, I didn’t want to bother you.
—It wouldn’t have been any bother, dear. I would have liked the visit. Still, you know best. Have you got them started on the piano yet?
—Well, no, actually, you see, Mum, the house is a bit small and …
—Oh, you can always make room for a piano! Are you coming down then?
—No. I mean, not just yet.
