My Little Armalite

by James Hawes

  As I worked away, I pondered this new ability to accept pain and endure fiddliness. I had often wished to feel like this. My father, who was by trade an electrical engineer, was so inured to volts and amps that he could hold a wired-up spark plug with his bare hands whilst the engine was running and happily show off the leaping blue sparks. I once saw him send an incautious friend flying across a garage by smilingly inviting him to do likewise. Perhaps it was just a question of becoming accustomed to anything? For example, if I had been systematically head-butted every day for some weeks, back in the early seventies, rather than repeatedly being surprised by spontaneous and unexpected nuttings every now and then over a period of dismal years, would I have become head-butt-proof? Perhaps Dad should have beaten me when I did wrong or acted spinelessly, not simply sighed and gone back to his shed?

  Insert spring and detent into receiver. Compress detent in recess using 3/32” punch and rotate tool. Shit, this is a bit tricky …

  My God, imagine it! Walking into a rough pub with absolute confidence that if any little drunk decided to have a go at me, I could simply take his first shot smack on the nose or cheekbone, then say, in good Devon:

  —Right, mate, now we know you can dish it out, so let’s see if you can take it …

  Yes, perhaps after the Very Important Paper was done, I would sort out this irrational fear of physical violence once and for all. Push out tool with pivot pin and rotate until detent is in groove of pivot pin. Gotcha! Hey, why not? I could find a local gym where they taught boxing. Phil was bound to know of one. I could pay someone to hit me in the face, very gently at first, of course, until I simply grew to accept pain and became unafraid of it, and then of punching back.

  How different my life would be. I could teach my new skill to Jack and William so that I need never worry about them being bullied again. Perhaps I should start tomorrow? It wouldn’t take me long, surely? It wasn’t as if I was that unfit. I could still swim a length underwater. By the time I came to give the Very Important Paper, I could’ve learned enough so that if any pebblelensed, stoop-shouldered, bearded little shit dared to bring up Panke’s membership of the KGB again, I could just step down from the lectern, walk through the rows of chairs with a bare-toothed smile on my face and deck the four-eyed little pen-pushing bastard with a single right hook to his flabby, chinless …

  I pushed my spectacles back up on to my nose, and yawned. The drink had ebbed away, leaving a sour tidemark somewhere behind my eyes. My skin felt like thin old newspaper and I realised that I had, bit by bit, become thoroughly chilled out, here in the shed. I was grey. Perhaps I should just call it a night right now and crawl to bed and …

  I finished the bit of gunsmithing I was doing and looked blearily down.

  I blinked.

  There, on the shed floor before me, quite unexpectedly, was a gun. A whole and entire assault rifle.

  32: A Lump of Metal from the World of Men

  Kneeling, I looked down at the finished gun and felt life prickle back quickly into my cheeks. I stood quickly up and shifted my weight this way and that, to look at the gun from every possible angle, as if I might thereby suddenly understand it. I leaned and peered. No secrets were revealed. I knelt again, stretched out a hand, and speedily withdrew it, as if the gun were some sleeping but highly aggressive animal.

  Ridiculous. It was not alive. It was just a passive thing. It would do exactly what I wanted it to do, no more, no less. As the AR-15.com site had said a hundred times, guns don’t kill people, people kill people. This object would, could, no more attack someone without me explicitly ordering it to, by a complicated and conscious process of loading, readying, pointing and shooting, than, for example, my laptop would or could send a lascivious email to one of my female students unless I myself typed one in and clicked it away with full intent.

  Exactly. If I walked away right now and left the gun, it would just lie here for ever until the dust of centuries covered it. It had no will and no desire. It was neither good nor evil. And after all, when you thought about it, to know something of the feel of a gun was, for many males, indeed quite probably for a majority of males now living on earth, simply par for the course. Just another part of life.

  I lifted it cautiously, only to get the heft of it.

  There, you see? Was that so hard? Just a power tool, really. And one I had myself just put together. Nothing scary or mythical whatever, once you got your hands on it and your brain round it. Lite indeed. My father’s old metal-shelled electric drill had been heavier than this, surely? And smaller than I would have thought. Just a normal lump of metal from the world of men who bowl tyres, flip manholes, hump crates. A thing cleanly made in a perfectly proud and legal factory somewhere, like anything else you care to name.

  Now, why not try it? Just fit on the buttstock (ha, I knew it was something to do with butts and stocks). Simple. And see how my hands, which I normally assumed were just much too small for manliness, curled perfectly well around what I would until that evening have called the handle thingy but which I now knew was properly known as the pistol grip. We live and learn. No trouble at all for my index finger to slide into the trigger guard and on to the trigger itself.

  Meanwhile, the left hand presumably goes here, under that fat waffly bit around the barrel, in fact aka, to we in the know, the handguard assembly. Like so. Yes, no doubt at all about that. Lift the barrel to horizontal, nothing to it really. Now, if I recall, you pull back that slide thing to cock it (really, does it all have to be quite so Freudian, tee hee?). It’s perfectly safe, I know the thing is empty because I just built it myself, ha ha! Now, draw the buttstock into my shoulder. See how well it fits! And now close one eye, lower my head, squint along the sights and …

  Clack!

  Quite fun, actually.

  I lowered it slightly and turned it in my hands. It shone darkly. There really was something about it. Like a fine camera, an expensive watch, a Mercedes engine. Chunky, sort of, yet light and exact. Purely functional and, perhaps for that very reason in a way, yes, in a very real way, beautiful. You had to laugh, really, at the ridiculous English fear of this inert and guiltless piece of precision machine tooling. Really, we are just so tight-arsed. Or indeed, assed, ha ha!

  Yes well, but that was enough laughing.

  Now it was time to go and get rid of it.

  With playful reluctance, I lowered the gun. I taped the magazines to the sides of the handguard. I snapped two links from a roll of stout bin bags and soon had the entire thing swaddled in black plastic. Jauntily, I slung it under my arm like an umbrella. How easy it all was. How ridiculously scared I had earlier been. A gun, so what? Into the river it was going. Yes: so easy to throw, now.

  I stepped outside the shed and tested it, spear-like. Absolutely. If I wanted to, I would from here be able to guarantee clearing the garden wall without the slightest difficulty. I could do it, right now, were it not for my responsible fears as to who might discover it. Much, much better than trying to control a whirling bolas of metal weights flying about loose inside a bin bag.

  You see? The practical application of pure reason. Excellent.

  Away with it, then, and tomorrow back to normal. Back to work!

  In fact, it had been an interesting evening, one way or another. Quite refreshing, really. Not often something unexpected happens, these days. God, how I was going to work tomorrow!

  I yawned, left the shed and marched across our stupid little garden, my secret gun casually held in my arms. Little did anyone know, ha ha.

  Through the house, grab the laptop and so briskly out, for the second time that evening, into the darkly luminous bowl of the London night.

  33: The Genetic Make-up of London

  I set happily off for Tower Bridge.

  Geography, hydrography and psychology agreed on my destination: Tower Bridge was easy for me to reach and the water must be pretty deep that far down the river. I had visited it with the boys only two weeks before and I recalled the lo
w railings beside the narrow pavements. An easy throw. And anyway, we all like the big moments of our lives to have good backdrops: it makes us feel as if nature gave a damn. Suicides choose beauty spots. Once the gun and laptop were safely drowned, I could stop and walk around in the quiet of the night, have a cigarette as I sat on the old cannons, where I had sat as a boy, and watch the wintry dawn.

  I would make it memorable. From tonight, whenever I got bored or annoyed with life, I would recall this moment of picturesque liberation and be content.

  That was the plan.

  But as I drove northwards I found myself vainly trying to work out what the hell was going on in London tonight.

  In my mind’s eye, I had clearly seen myself cruising towards the big river along streets as deserted as in some sixties TV programme about an alien invasion. So why were there so many people about? It was an ordinary weekday night, for God’s sake, and four-thirty a.m. Could Londoners really so deeply hate the Congestion Charge? What else could possibly send so many of them setting off for work so early in the late-November darkness? Had flexitime gone totally mad under the merciless assault of the global free market, forcing all these poor sods out of bed so early? Had I missed a general-election night or a moonshot?

  At length, of course, I had to admit that the roads and pavements were alive not with determined or exploited workers fighting their way to their jobs, but with drugged-up, drunken little arseholes who were still out partying. Our vile neighbours, who evidently considered it perfectly normal to start after midnight, were in fact merely like everyone else.

  I drove onwards, stunned, now merely trying to avoid a crash, but my cheeks and stomach grew cold with the knowledge that I had set out, with an assault rifle under my passenger seat, into a world whose most basic coordinates were completely unknown to me.

  The last time I had been out anywhere near this time of night in London had been on my twenty-seventh birthday. Which was not that long ago, for God’s sake! We pub-crawled down Holborn to hit the late-night Fleet Street pubs (which had an extension, oh, holy word!), then wandered Smithfield, looking vainly for this amazing pub someone swore he had been to, where we could get a drink even at 3 a.m.! We never found it, and had headed back to Soho, where there was allegedly a Greek restaurant that would serve you wine all night if you kept buying food. We did not find that either, and ended up drinking coffee in Bar Italia, with Soho stone-dead around us, before walking back home to that rough, cheap place, Notting Hill.

  Was it possible that during the span of my full-blown adult lifetime someone had fundamentally altered the genetic make-up of London’s humanity, erasing all biological need for rest? How could people cope with this? Did nobody work any more? Or sleep? For a hundred thousand years, Homo sapiens had, unless excessive heat demanded a siesta or excessive latitude made everything nuts, gone to bed roughly when it got dark and risen roughly when it got light. Night had always been for thieves and troubled minds. I had been pissed many, many nights as a student but could count on one hand the times I had actually stayed up all night. No one stayed up all night. There was nothing to do if you did, and nowhere to do it, and no cheap substances to make it physically possible anyway. You couldn’t even watch telly.

  But now here everyone was.

  I was still trying to adjust to this new reality as I arrived at the final approach to Tower Bridge. From the high Victorian iron walkways, lasers flashed and music blared. There was some kind of bloody night-club up there for God’s sake, in full swing, at this time in the morning. On a weekday! And the pavements down here at ground level were thronged with drunken idiots photographing each other with telephones.

  A billow of human seaweed suddenly washed out right in front of me: part of a large scrum of pissed gits had overflowed from the pavement and on to the roadway. I had to brake hard. The gun slid forward. I bent sideways in order to reach down, to shove its bagshrouded butt back under the passenger seat. The bloody black plastic had snagged on something. I leaned further, feeling with my hand for what the hell was going on under the seat. I looked down too long, veered the car slightly, scuffed a kerb. Wild-eyed pedestrians shouted and spat. A horn sounded long and hard behind me. Headlights flashed angrily in my mirrors.

  I looked hastily up from the gun and found myself staring right into the lens of a CCTV camera mounted high on the ironwork.

  34: Cameras

  I froze. Somewhere a monitor must be showing, and a hard disk must be recording, a pale monochrome image (or did they have colour, these days?) of my amazed face looking up through my windscreen.

  Of course, I knew theoretically about CCTV now being everywhere. Indeed, The Paper had expressed outrage many times over the last few months, (a) at the fact that Big Brother Britain apparently had more CCTV than anywhere else in the world and (b) that Britons themselves seemed perfectly happy with this state of affairs and, rather than taking to the streets in defence of their liberties, as demanded by the stout burghers of N1 and NW3, usually demanded only to know how come their street had not got cameras yet.

  So yes, I knew about the cameras all right: I had simply not factored them into my plans. CCTV belonged to the realm of MyFace, SecondLife and YouTube. I knew about things like that, and here and there I might even name-drop them into the odd lecture just to keep up the fiction that I was a relatively young lecturer, but I had no real conception of them, having grown to full adulthood in a world without them. They were not on my working maps of the world. They existed and I knew that they did, but they concerned me no more than online multiplayer gaming.

  Except now one of the bloody proto-Fascist things must have just recorded me weaving slightly but definitely as I leaned over to do something under the passenger seat while driving through a mass of partying drunks on Tower Bridge.

  Hastily, I thrust the gun back out of sight, snags and all.

  Christ, what kind of country had this become? A place where everyone was under surveillance all day every day (or 24/7 as the idiots would no doubt say now)? Where we were all assumed to be vaguely guilty until proven innocent?

  But calm down.

  Surely to God, the cameras would not be sharp enough to actually have seen the gun winking out from under the seat? Unless they really could see number plates from orbit. Could they? Could the police really say enhance, enhance, enhance and zoom for ever into the picture, the way they do in all spy films these days? Surely not? But what did I know about CCTV technology? Nothing. And now that my eye was in, I could already see the next bloody camera rearing up before me.

  Fear gripped me. Not fear of the cameras as such, but fear of my own horrific ignorance, of my insane stupidity. My intelligence about this world was hopelessly out of date. I simply had no chance out here. I had to get back to safety, that was all.

  I forced myself to drive slowly and carefully over the bridge. It was OK. The little shimmy had been nothing, really, had it? Surely, even if the CCTV were connected to some actual screen being watched by real live people, my tiny loss of direction would not be thought enough to send out a car to look for me, let alone make it worth checking up on me tomorrow? Of course not. And yet, I had an Armalite under my passenger seat. In central London, where there must be more cameras and cops per inch than anywhere else in the country. There was no question of dumping the gun here now. Flight and concealment were now paramount.

  I U-turned as soon as possible and cruised carefully southwards back across the bridge. Figures flitted and loomed out of the bright-lit darkness, scanning me with reddened, dullard eyes to see if I was indeed an unlicensed minicab. I ignored them, other than to avoid crushing them.

  It was OK. I already had another plan.

  I would drive, very carefully indeed, to the M25. I would simply beetle slowly along in the leftmost lane amidst the massed traffic of a dark winter’s morning rush hour. I would make quite sure that there was no one close enough behind to read my number plate and no cameras about. It did not matter how long this took or
where I saw my chance. If I had to go right around the blasted thing twice, who cared? When the time came, when I saw my chance, I would just let the gun slip from my window, on to the hard shoulder and away for ever. Even if anyone saw the bin-bagged lump falling, no one in their right mind would stop on the dark, wet M25 just to see what crap some git had chucked out of their car. I would be free. Surely? So long as I was not actually on film throwing out the gun, I would be all right, wouldn’t I? The gun would in all probability not be found for days, maybe even weeks. By the time it was stumbled upon by some trucker taking a leak, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of cars would be on film passing by in the vicinity. The police would not, could not check every plate, could they? Anyway, how would they know which batch of film to choose? Surely, even today, there was no way they would be able to …

  —Christ! I slammed on the brakes, my wheels juddered as the ABS kicked in and my body shot forward against the seat belts. A ghostly young woman with a thin-lipped face and staring eyes, dressed in little more than underwear, stood square in front of my bumper, drumming on my bonnet, having leapt bodily out to stop me.

  —Ta-xi-i! she screeched. —Yee-haah! Claire, get in!

  —Peckham! screamed a voice beside my head. I jumped and turned. At my window battered another girl. She had employed blonde hair dye, shades and lipstick to construct, on some instinct, a Freudian mask of such primal effectiveness that all I could register was: blonde, shades and lipstick.

  I could not move. My windscreen was almost filled by the half-naked, bloodless girl, who was now actually clambering over the bonnet in front of me. To my right, the insanely exaggerated assembly of eyes, hair and lips banged on the window three inches from my head. In the corner of my vision (I did not dare to look down) I could clearly see the black-wrapped gun, which had decelerated its way almost completely out from under the seat and had, on the way, torn partially through the plastic. The end of the buttstock was now sticking clean out.