by James Hawes
—Hello, mate, you still there?
—Sorry, sorry, line went for a second. Yes, of course, my name is, it’s …
My mind had locked off. What name would I use? Shit, come on, just any good old English name would do. Anything believable, anything I’d be able to remember easily for the rest of today, that was all. Nothing got through the mesh, except one. It was a ridiculous name, but it was English, or at any rate Anglo-Saxon. I would have no trouble remembering it, and it was the only one I could hear in my head right now. So I gave it, helplessly, trying not to giggle as I did so.
—Gotcha. Flight number? … Lovely. I’ll be there myself with the old sign round my neck. See you in Prague at one then, Mr Bush!
—Oh, call me Tony, I replied.
48: Tons of Flab Wobbling About in a Big Net
Americans, hard-working pioneers, are happy to pay the going rate for what they want so long as they get it. Englishmen, the dispossessed heirs of Empire, cannot give up on the thought that they deserve a little upgrade in life for free.
Many of the people crammed on to the wretched flight to Prague, notably the few linen-clad folk who obviously considered themselves a cut above, tried various entertaining ruses to try to get the vacant front-row seats without paying. The stewardesses, who I guessed were on some form of bonus scheme for selling these seats, blanked them all smilingly. No one was prepared to cough up the actual money.
Normally, I would have quite agreed with these stoutly English sentiments, but today I was so tired that I simply bit the bullet and handed over twenty-five quid (though I counted the notes out with the huffing bad grace demanded by my national heritage). I thus managed to get a seat where I could almost stretch my legs out straight, allowing me to lean my head on the fibreboard cladding and close my burning eyes at last.
Perhaps it is because I never flew anywhere until my twenties, but I can never sleep on planes, even with my pillow, until we have passed the point at which the newsmen would say on take-off or shortly after take-off. And when a flight is as full as this one was, I find it impossible to rid myself of the horrible awareness that as we leave the earth every rivet in the airframe and engines is straining at the absolute limit of tolerances decided upon by the accountants who work out exactly how long this plane has to last, flying backwards and forwards to Prague three times a day every day (and to Glasgow once a day in between) like some winged bus, in order to turn a penny for the owners.
At such times, the thought of human body fat is my one consolation. You see, there must be a small, unintentional, built-in safety margin on European flights. After all, the accountants and engineers at Boeing and Airbus presumably have to do all their load-to-propulsion-to-lift calculations based on the bodyweight of the average American flyer, which must be significantly higher (say a stone per person, at least) than that of the average Old Worlder. If this is indeed the case, as it must be, unless American versions of all planes actually have fewer but larger seats put in, which seems unlikely, a European flight, even one packed to the gunwales, is in fact taking off with several tons of human blubber less than the designers have been forced to allow for.
I always imagine these tons of flab wobbling about in a big net, tied to the back of the plane, being gratefully released just as the wheels heave to escape the ground …
Fat or not, the accountants had got it right, as usual: fully laden with human cattle, we nevertheless made it to the happy cruising level at which the engine-whine drops and there is now really nothing very much to go wrong. I considered for a moment the absurd miracle of flight. I tried to rediscover a fitting sense of wonder at this dream of millennia. At least someone on this plane had the spiritual resources to still feel it!
Soon I was yawning.
Pillowless, my face slid and slipped on the plasticated wall of the plane; my neck lolled, my head fell this way and that, snapping me out again and again of deeply unpleasant dreams. In one of them, I had left little Mariana in a shed that had caught fire and was desperately trying to call help on my phone, but could only hear distant angelic singing on the line. In another, I found myself in court facing a benchful of tearful thirty-somethings, the little kids whose doorstep I had robbed of their breakfast milk in 1983, thus (it transpired) providing the final catalyst for their widowed dad to throw himself into the river that day and condemn them all to lives of abuse in unregulated children’s homes. A dozen times I blearily reset my head and dropped away once more into such unnerving scenarios, but I was finally awoken beyond hope by the tinny ravings of the PA as the cabin crew desperately hawked sandwiches, perfumes, drink. I checked my watch and found to my disbelief that we were only half an hour into the flight.
I spent the next feature-length stretch of time staring greyly at clouds, trying not to let the sour resentment at my wasted twenty-five quid bloat into complete disproportion. Twenty-five quid, for nothing! Think what that could buy in, well, in Prague.
But this was no time for petty whinges. It was OK. Everything was perfectly planned: Prague airport, go to shoot Armalite without showing passport/credit card, train station, two hours odd of wonderful sleep (with my pillow!) on the train, get to Dresden, cab to posh hotel, clean up, get in touch with Panke (just for the record), have a quick drink to relax, early night in a big bed (thank you, God!), then tomorrow meet Panke if he was about, if not a bit of reading in the university library, then back to London and so home, confidently de-cock the gun, shave my beard off, dump the gun and my laptop into the Thames way downriver (somewhere without CCTV), then get back to normal, start growing my beard again and polish off the VIP.
A remarkable feat of line management, under the circumstances.
Shit, I should have gone into business or PR in nineteen eighty-bloody-four. Why did no one tell me the age of the academic was ending? I would be how rich by now? What insanity of nurturing had made me think I was too good to go into trade? Stupid bloody leftie parents …
49: Waste the Pig
Just as the accountants had predicted, the plane landed safely at Prague, and we disgorged even as gangs of no doubt underpaid and undertrained local youths scurried to pump the flying bus full of super-flammable liquids yet again.
In the arrivals hall a small figure stood waiting with a badly handwritten sign, made from a hastily torn cardboard box, for TONY BUSH. I saw him before he saw me and just had time to dive behind a tall fellow passenger in order to cram on the brand-new stupid yoof cap I had bought for this purpose at Gatwick. Even with my beard soon to go, I wanted to make absolutely sure of nonentity, and I had read somewhere that Caucasians (unlike most other people) always remember hair colour first and best when asked to recall a person. With this vital identification now hidden, I turned back and walked up to my meeter/greeter.
—Ah, hello.
I suppose he had expected something better. A City cum-military bearing, perhaps. Not a shambling fool wearing dozed-in middle-aged M&S clothes under an Oxfam tweed jacket, topped off with a sort of ski-cap thing designed for an idiot teenager.
—Oh. He-llo! Tony Bush? he asked, all too clearly hoping that he might yet be wrong.
—Yes. Gerry Beaks?
—Yeah. Well. Great. Good flight, Tony?
—Yes, thanks.
—Welcome to Prague then. No luggage, Tony?
—Just my pillow.
—Travelling light, eh? Why not? Right you are. This way. Your carriage awaits.
We went out on to an airport concourse that could have been anywhere in the world. We crossed into a car park where the brands of the vehicles narrowed it down to anywhere in Europe.
—This your first time in Prague, Tony?
—First for a long time, Gerry.
—Real kicking city now. Tell you what, you got a hotel? I can fix you up with a great room for forty quid. Four star, nice big beds, near all the action.
—I’m going to Berlin tonight. You said you’d get me to the station, remember?
—And I will. The
17.45. But if you change your mind …
—Thanks, but I’ve got to go to Dresden. I mean, Berlin.
—And I’ll get you there. Here we are then, Tony.
We stopped beside a deeply unprepossessing Toyota saloon that must have been older even than my Merc. There was a mildly awkward pause.
—So, right, that’ll be just four hundred euros, Tony. Cash, as we agreed, yeah?
—This is going to be a proper personal tutorial, right, Gerry? I want to actually learn how to, you know, make it safe, and things.
—Nah, nah, absolutely. Got you our best tutor. Trained with our lads and the US Marines. One, two, three, four hundred. Lovely, ta. Perfect. Sign there, it’s just a disclaimer, in case you shoot your own foot off. Not that it’s ever happened to us, but tell you what, some of the less shall we say exclusive outfits, well, bunch of blokes from Hull pissed on a stag night, you can imagine. Great, ta, Tony. Now, normally speaking we can’t do full auto here, but I have got you, being as you are obviously a rather different kind of customer, on to a range that has military-grade clearance. Which means that for a modest extra fee we could in fact do full auto, because let’s face it, Tony, full auto is what we all really want, isn’t it?
—No thanks, I don’t want full auto.
—You don’t? Oh. OK. Front or back, Tony?
—Back, please. I need to sleep. Got my pillow, you see. Had a bad night, last night. With the baby.
—Your baby drink you under the table did he?
—Sorry?
—Ha ha, come on, no offence, Tony.
—OK, OK, my family’s away, I got a bit drunk.
He turned round from the driver‘s seat and looked me full in the eye with a pimping smile.
—And why not, eh? When the cat’s away, eh? Look, I’m here for you, Tony. You’ve paid me good money and I’m going to make sure you get what you want. Tell you what, think of me as your very own architect of pleasure here in Prague. No need for a man to go lonely in Prague, Tony. Just don’t touch the toms on the streets, they’re all Ukrainians and White Russians. Rob you blind. The girls in the clubs are mostly Czech, or at least Slovak, much classier. I can get you a VIP pass to any of the best clubs for a tenner, first two drinks on the house.
—Gerry, I don’t want anything like that. I’m just here for the shooting.
—Each to his own, Tony. So, what exactly did you want in your special tutorial? Not trying to pry, that’s not my job, my job is to deliver what you want, Tony, I just need to know, so I can deliver, right?
—Well, like I said, I have, I just want to …
—Look, Tony, I better tell you straight right now. We don’t do pigs here. Nor cows. Nor deer. Not even chickens.
—Sorry? What?
—Now, there was nothing on the site about animals, was there? You may have assumed, but assumptions is rash, Tony. I know, I know, you’ve heard about them doing cows and pigs in Tallinn and Riga. But this ain’t Tallinn or Riga, Tony. This is Prague. We’re part of Western Europe these days. More or less. Whereas Tallinn and Riga, well, that’s practically bloody Russia, isn’t it? So they do things Russian-like. I just want you to know straight away. Sorry, but it’s no-can-do on wasting the pig.
—Fine, fine.
—Now, having said that, Tony, tell you what, there is just a chance that if I make the right call we could get you a goat on the quiet, but it is going to cost, I got to tell you that.
I felt a sudden air pocket in my soul rather like the time when I was twenty-one and a gay friend of mine first told me about fisting and rimming. Disbelief, then vertigo. I would never have guessed such things existed. But now I did. And now I could quite clearly see the tethered, unknowing creature, the bestial faces of the drunken Englishmen. I didn’t want to know such things existed. I didn’t want to know about gay fisting and Ukrainian hookers and people machine-gunning animals for fun. Jesus Christ, why do we have to know so bloody much these days? Why had I ever had to find the sodding gun?
—I don’t want to shoot animals, thanks, Gerry.
—Oh. Well, that’s easy enough then. So, like, what is your interest, Tony, if you don’t mind me asking? Just so that I can deliver the correct experience for you?
—Research, Gerry.
—Research? Ri-ght.
—Well, I really must get some sleep, so if you don’t mind …
I closed my eyes tight and took thankful refuge in my cold, deep pillow.
50: Into the Forest
I did not sleep, of course. I could no longer imagine how I had ever gone to sleep, or ever would again. I merely lay with my head on the fridgy linen and watched a gloomy world go blankly by as we skirted the fabled city.
The outskirts of Prague had the desolate, building-site atmosphere you find at the edges of any Mediterranean city, except here everything was mud rather than desert. The oases in this desolation were formed by vast, new, low industrial units emblazoned with the logos of well-known Western brands. Once beyond this, the satellite towns slumped into pure Stalinist grey, though with a surprisingly large number of old houses, churches, castles.
At one point we were wallowing along a straight road between vast, hedgeless fields when we suddenly stopped so sharply that I braced myself and turned my head to look our fate in the face.
A great dense cloud of big black crows had got up from the ploughed earth and was crossing the road low, right in front of us. I had never seen so many in one place: we simply had to wait until they had passed on. What had drawn them all to this field? I couldn’t get a picture out of my mind: a cow tethered to a stake in a field while a grinning, bestial gang of English scum prepare to shoot it to pieces for a stag-party laugh.
I’d never been interested in darkness. Darkness was for the hopeless. I just wanted a house with tall bays and sash windows, in a normal place full of normal people. Christ, it had to be possible. But how? When you thought about it, my future, and hence my children’s best interests, would be best served by an almighty bloody great economic (and especially housing) crash, and the sooner the better, if only I could use my intelligence and cultural-historical expertise to call it right for once and sell up first!
Yes, as I watched the muddy Czech fields go by, I could see the headlines clearly:
Readers of The Paper rejoice
as economy collapses
They may be nice, liberal people, they may care about the Third World and lose sleep over seals, but our readers (as opposed to our editors, who are all loaded and living in N1 or NW3, of course, the bastards, but still have to pretend, now and then, that they share the hopes and fears of teachers and nurses in Leeds) are jumping for joy as bad news follows worse on the economic front.
With house prices down by over 50 per cent in the last year, sea levels rising palpably, oil at $120 a barrel following the Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear plants, tankers full of African refugees hammering at the gates of Europe, Romanians taking every job in Germany, China in hyperinflationary chaos, India at war with Pakistan, the High Street deserted and City redundancies turning into a flood that is quite literally visible in the newly locked-out, traumatised, tear-stained figures shambling each new afternoon into Liverpool Street Station, it no longer seems quite so stupid, so pathetic, so spineless and laughable, so utterly lacking in ambition, nous or any sense of the way of the brave new free-market world, to have chosen two decades ago to take a steady but poorly paid career with a modest but government-backed pension in a field where, even today, very few people are ever really and truly sacked. Yes, suddenly it’s the teachers and lecturers and civil servants who are strolling happily into north-London estate agents’ offices (the ones that are still open!), where they would not have dared to even slow down in passing just twelve months ago for fear of being laughed at by some spotty little esturine-English-gabbling, Hugo Boss-shirted, degreeless little shit who now goes in daily terror of his Porsche being repossessed, ha ha ha ha ha!
—Nearly there, Tony, wakey-wake
y!
—What?
I awoke just in time to feel the car swing off the metalled road and lurch into a forest. My heart sank. I’d vaguely imagined that the shooting range would be something like an old airbase, but I now realised that it was going to be a forest. Why does it always have to be a forest? Forests are where big bad wolves and murderous rapists lurk. Where people who hate people live. Where people go when they want to shoot guns and skin things. I would cut them all down, the forests: I would make parks with knee-high hedges of box and avenues of roses and light. I did not want to go into a forest.
But go in we did. The wheels spun in mud, bit again, took us deeper into green darkness. On the trees I began to notice small red-and-white metal signs saying STELNICE. All of them had rusting bullet holes in them. Then we arrived at a compound of low wooden buildings. I got out, and straight away plunged my foot lace-deep into a sucking puddle of oily mud. All around me was the sound of guns.
I’d never heard guns before. Why would I? I’m English. It was nothing like the noise on films. Not deep roars. High, thin cracks that whipped into your abdomen, followed by long, rolling, hissing echoes.
I did not like the place at all. I did not like the noise which made me jump and the mud which had me sliding. I did not like the cold that bit and the damp that clung. I did not like the dank wooden lavatory block that you could nose at fifty yards. I did not like the shaven-headed man who was sitting on the steps of the main shack, earphones pushed on to the back of his head like grotesquely menacing Mickey Mouse ears, drinking a bottle of beer and looking steadily at me with watery-blue abuser‘s eyes. I pulled my inadequate tweed tighter and tugged my ludicrous hat down over the tops of my ears. I must have been mad to come out here.
