My Little Armalite

by James Hawes

  —Right. Tuck-tuck.

  —So, this time you load the magazine all yourself, yes? Good, that is better. Always tap on the table. If you wearing helmet you can tap on this too, like that, make sure the bullets all right inside. No jams. You try. Yes. That is good! So. Now you put clip in. You are on safety, no problems, you see? And now cock. And now you stand like so. I show you. Sorry, leg like this, like I show you. Good. This arm a little lower. I tell you. You watch I do, you copy me. You take all weight of gun only in right hand, to see. I always think this is best. Good. You see? Balance like this. The left hand now, just to steady her. Good. This is low ready position. You can walk like this all day, you see? You can look around, you do what I do, Toni. You can look around, maybe you see something, easy to bring her up, yes, like this. Oh, nothing. Back down. Very good, Toni! But now, aha! You damn sure you see something, some bad guys there, there, and there maybe. So now you go high ready. Still you can look around and easy cover your ass, but now when you see the bad guys, is very simple just swing up this little bit, then tuck-tuck.

  —I see, yes. Yes, ha.

  —So, now we try with live. You are cocked, is good, so now switch to fire. Do what I do. Low ready. Ah, over there, I think bad guys. High ready. Yes, I see bad guys, that target there, three o’clock, Toni.

  BANG-BANG.

  —You get him, Toni! Just tuck-tuck, you see. Exactly! Very good. And again we do it. Low ready. We walk, we watch. Oh, look out, Toni, bad guys five o’clock. No no, five o’clock is over here, Toni.

  —Oh, sorry …

  53: Outside the Liberal Box

  Cold? Not any more.

  We stood and we knelt and we lay prone. We shifted from target to target mid-clip, at his calmly shouted command. We let the magazines drop where they fell and slapped in new ones with scarcely a break, taking care to stagger our changeovers and thus be able to cover each other from our virtual foes as we did so. I began to see what George meant about my tweed. It made no noise at all. From somewhere beyond the big sandbanks, the Russian Army fetishists were firing off incredible, teeth-juddering blasts from a World War II heavy machine gun. I could hear my heart thudding fast inside my earphones.

  Swiftly our notional enemies fell before our fire. I don’t know who George was shooting at in his head (I imagined that it was nineties Serbian mortar groups), but my own targets were very well-defined, my own mission clear.

  Margaret Thatcher I got with ten out of ten shots, five bursts of tuck-tuck right into her chest, the bitch. I turned round to grin at George so quickly that my ear-protectors fell off, then forgot about them in my excitement and nearly deafened myself when I moved swiftly on to waste Blair, for whom I decided a few in the face would be more fitting, as the reward of treachery. George rolled over a wall and landed cat-like on the ground beside me.

  —This is good, Toni, your enemies fall. You slot them good.

  —Slot?

  —Is what British special forces say. Always they slot people. Is not good English?

  —Slot? Oh yes, it’s a perfectly good word. I just never heard it in this context. I’m not sure what it must be derived from. Presumably from some notion of fate, of us all having a slot allotted to us? Or perhaps from slot as in a slot in the earth, a grave?

  —Toni, you are clever man. You know much, I see this. But still you must learn. When you kneel to shoot, no bone on bone. Your elbow here, not there on your knee bone.

  —No bone on bone, gotcha, George.

  —Yes, you learn good with me, Toni. Now, this time I cover you, you go first, yes?

  —Rightyho!

  How refreshing to be the beginner pupil for once. A very fertile experience for any university teacher, when you thought about it, to learn absolutely from scratch a subject which they had never expected to encounter. Enlightening. Especially with regard to teaching students from underprivileged and unconventional entrance streams. Absolutely. Should be part of every colleague’s Best Practice. Must mention this place to those pathetic cretins in the Staff Development and Quality Delivery Unit, ha ha!

  And how enlivening, how useful for the cultural historian indeed, to feel that one is acquiring an age-old though of course essentially undesirable human skill. Guns, after all, are merely the latest development in missile weapons (as opposed to shock weapons), no fundamentally different in philosophical principle or tactical use to a Stone Age bow and arrow (as opposed to a club). Get them at distance, enemy or prey. And fascinating to discover this whole new vocabulary. Mentally stimulating, rather. A long time since I had seriously learned something entirely new. Bit rut-stuck, had I become? Good for the synapses, this? Undoubtedly.

  Tuck-tuck.

  And indeed as our guns jerked and banged, I found myself thinking with a whole new clarity, as if my mind itself had been switched firmly on to ‘safe’ for far too many years.

  I mean, when you thought about it (tuck-tuck), my allegedly English fear of guns was perfectly stupid. I (tuck-tuck), as a sophisticated intellectual and cultural analyst, really should know better than to merely accept such alleged normality at face value! Why, in fact, had Englishmen (tuck-tuck) for many centuries rarely been encouraged, let alone obliged, to train with guns? Simple: because having (tuck-tuck) led the way in deposing and/or decapitating their rightful kings by force of arms, they had then given up killing each other and had taken to attacking foreigners with a bloody great navy (tuck-tuck, tuck-tuck), to which over time they so devoted themselves that from Trafalgar onwards no one could threaten them, whilst they could intervene at will in the politico-military settlements of others. For the next century the Royal Navy was to the world what the USAF became after World War II: a force which, if it could not actually occupy and control territories, could damn well bugger them up (tuck-tuck). Having been overtaken by technology and America during the Second World War, this navy found itself briefly eclipsed by the RAF before being gratefully re-equipped with the biggest gun (tuck-tuck) ever devised by man, one that could level cities Bible-style and which only a few other countries on earth were allowed to possess.

  No wonder Englishmen don’t need to know about guns.

  Tuck-tuck. Tuck-tuck. Tuck-tuck.

  And think: Bleak House, you could pop into a shooting gallery just off Leicester Square and blaze away any time you fancied. Five dozen rifle and a dozen pistol. Dr Watson casually packing his revolver in his stout Edwardian luggage without Conan (tuck-tuck) Doyle making any great fuss about the telling. Elementary. Always go armed east of Aldgate! You could hardly call Dr Watson un-English!

  Tuck-tuck. Tuck-tuck.

  Now that felt right. Yes, unless I was much mistaken, that would turn out to be bloody good grouping. So much for Ronald bloody Reagan. Press with finger, let it drop, in with the new clip, chonk! Already cocked, you see! Yes, I have to say, George is quite right about the AR-15, it really is rather …

  Over there, George? Right. Mine. Tuck-tuck. John Major. Well, perhaps he didn’t really deserve that. Collateral damage. Sorry, John.

  Morover, consider: what, when you thought outside the liberal box for just a moment, could be more convenient for capitalism than an entire country full of people who have been nurtured to fear and loathe the very instruments without which they can, if and when the need comes, be cowed easily into submission by a few battalions of the armed lackeys of big business and the corporate state, eh? Oh yes! Whereas compare and contrast the capacity of the small wee Bogside to resist, simply because armed with a few dozen Armalites. Precisely! Ever since the Normans built castles no Saxon peasants could ever hope to storm, there has been an arms race between the ruling class and the rest of us. And look who’s won it. Well, quite. I mean, imagine for a minute how differently the Miners’ Strike might have panned out if we’d had a few of these babies!

  Ah, yes, and there he is, whatshisname, you know, that American or was it Canadian bastard Thatcher hired to come in to break the miners, the first of the new breed of million-quid-bonus fat
bloody union-busting cats, got him in the sights easy as pie: tuck-tuck, goodnight! Slotted the bastard, ha ha!

  54: A Black, Bloody Insurrection

  I had fired off many, many rounds without noticing, through the sights, any smoke from my own shots. When watching George, I had now and then caught a very slight and incredibly brief whiff of shadow in front of his gun when he fired. But now we reached some mysterious tipping-point of light.

  The wet, brown-green afternoon slid over quite suddenly into a real November country nightfall and everything changed. The next time I looked over at George to receive his waved instructions (he was as totally serious as an eight-year-old boy at play), the darkness had fallen and I was amazed to see six-inch licks of flame dancing sideways out from the chamber of his gun with every ejected shell, and his muzzle spurting great comic-book blooms of red and orange fire. The blasts showed every bone in his face and lit off reflections inside my specs.

  My God, I must look like that as well!

  Pretty damn cool, in other words.

  Hard and bloody scary.

  If my colleagues could only see me now.

  If only my boys could see me now.

  God, what if I just kept the gun for a couple of years? Ha! Oh yes, in a couple of years Jack and Will could be as teenaged as they wanted, but there would not be much danger of them thinking me an old pointless git on the evening I cajoled them out to my shed on some blithe pretext (—Have we got to, Dad? Why? What’s the point? Bor-ing!) and there, in the soft lamplight, showed them how to strip and load a real live AR-15 Armalite assault rifle!

  Ridiculous, of course.

  Back to reality.

  Reload.

  Cthunk!

  Now, who was there left to slot?

  Capitalism itself, why not?

  There it is: capitalism personified, a slick-haired shit of about forty sat in his bloody spit-new Porsche braying hands-free into his Bluetoothed BlackBerry, a man of zero spiritual or intellectual distinction who is about to pocket another million quid, on which he will in one way or another make certain he pays virtually no tax, for his part in crunching the numbers or clauses of some bloody private-equity hedge-fund, asset-stripping deal made by people no one has ever heard of who will now be allowed to sack hundreds of hard-working people before selling niftily on.

  Tuck-tuck! The Porsche, that piece of sheer rub-their-noses-in-it consumption, veers, its windscreen suddenly a web of cracks, the smug grin on the driver‘s face now a mask of idiotic surprise as he looks down at the stain rapidly totalling his Armani suit.

  Watch, I say, watch: for ye know not when the tuck-tuck cometh!

  And who is this next up? Ah yes, a north-London estate agent. Of course. Who better? Revenge is black pudding, as the Germans somewhat curiously put it.

  Hello again, Mr Young Estate Agent. Yes, that’s right. I said up to four hundred thousand pounds. I said nothing special. Yes, I said anywhere at all in north London with three human-sized bedrooms. I said all I want is a normal house in a normal area where my eleven-year-old boys can ride their bikes in the park alone now and then. Yes, I said I’d expect the schools to be reasonably OK. No, I don’t mind if a bit of work needs doing. Go a bit higher, you say? Quite a bit higher? How much is quite a bit? Oh, I see. Another hundred and fifty? And that, you say, might just about shade us, wasn’t that what you said? Into the what did you call it? The ballpark? What a lovely word. American, right? Sorry, let me explain. I, who have never been unemployed and who got on the property ladder as soon as I could, what with having studied religiously for my current profession throughout my twenties, have just offered to nail myself to the ground until the year I retire just to get a normal little house for my family. And you say I’ll have to go quite a bit higher. I see. Now, how precisely shall I do that, Mr Slick? What’s that? Oh, your own in-house mortgage advisor can probably help me work it up to five or six times our joint income? If we’re economical with the truth, ha ha? So, hold on, correct me if I’m wrong, what you actually mean is: if I lie about what I earn, your colleague will be able to pocket the fat commission on a mortgage deal that will enable you to pocket the fat commission on a sale that will end up with me signing for a mortgage I cannot possibly afford and which, therefore, unless property prices continue to rise at over 10 per cent per year for ever, will inevitably leave me bankrupt and homeless? Well, that’s very kind of you both. What nice men you are. But I’ll tell you what, how about you tell this bullshit to my little friend, fuck face? Not such a figure of comedy now? You know what the linguistic root of the word mortgage is, O deeply qualified professional young man? You want to find out? Yes, try to scrabble away to safety behind your desk, but you will not escape vengeance.

  Tuck-tuck.

  Blood over the flat-screen workstations, the carousels packed with flats at half a million quid tumble as dying fingers grasp at them. The earth, a very slightly cleaner place. He shoots, he scores!

  Talking of which, hark! Who is this nineteen-year-old with no GCSEs, a reading age of twelve and several Bentleys?

  Why, who but Sean Scally, one-time plaguer of teachers, long-time bully of his fellow children and now world-renowned screamer-at of referees, a ruinous example of sudden and undeserved wealth to thick teenagers everywhere. Nothing personal, Scallo, but no society can function with examples like you held up every day. Why the hell shouldn’t you pay 80 per cent tax? You and Liam bloody Gallagher. Meet Mr Tuck-Tuck, Scallo.

  Tuck-tuck.

  He drops his ridiculous cocktail and crashes face-first into his Cheshire swimming pool.

  And now?

  Ah yes, you, you Bluewater-cruising godforsaken arseholes, because of you the planet is going to die and my kids are going to have a shit life. I believed in betterment, but all you care about is how quickly you can get your hands on the brands. Jesus fucking Christ, was it for this that the Tolpuddle Martyrs did, well, you know, whatever it was they did? And you have the same vote as me! Insanity! Well this is where the craziness stops, right here:

  Tuck-tuck.

  As for you all, you hoodied and hoodless suckers-up of so-called ‘benefits’, you ruiners of the social democratic settlement, you serial abusers of a wonderful system designed to save decent workers from hunger between jobs, you two million who thought you were too good to do the jobs that six hundred thousand hard-working Poles have found in England! Hanging round robbing and dealing and spawning the so-called street culture that is going to make my poor boys’ schooldays a Calvary. What’s that? Oh, really? Only just over a quarter of all government spending, and hence of my tax, goes on what they call Social Protection? How modest. Only just over a quarter? Well well. That’s OK then, what am I being so small-minded about, comfortable homeowning citizen that I am? I’ll tell you bloody what! I am not a human, my unprivileged little mate, never mind a comfy one, I am a mere machine for paying bills, and I just about make my quota every month on month, year on financial year, and if I’m lucky I’ll make it to retirement without falling behind, so that I can start being really poor.

  Very nice.

  Very bloody nice.

  So hear me, the lot of you, up and down, in your Porsches and your estate agencies and your TV studios and your malls and your dole queues and … you know what this country needs?

  A real bourgeois armed uprising at last!

  A black, bloody insurrection of the hard-working, over-taxed and unbenefited. A dictatorship of the normal suckers, merciless with revolutionary discipline against all who utilise tax shelters or vandalise bus shelters. Down with all the dealers, in drugs or securities. Let fairness prevail on pain of summary execution. Welcome to the Day of Judgment, roll up and get your low-number party cards, all ye who never lied to social security or sat down with a tax barrister, and let our battle-cry be: righteousness!

  Tuck-tuck! Tuck-fucking-tuck. Tuck-tuck-fucking-tuck.

  Oh fuck this fucking tuck-tuck for a game of soldiers, I want full auto and I want it now, I want
to really cut loose and …

  —Hey, Tony!

  —Aah! Oh, Gerry, um, hi, sorry, what?

  55: A Deep and Very Middle-European Ditch

  —Tell you what, Tony, we better wind up if you want to catch that train to Berlin! Here, you look like you’re loving it!

  —What? Oh, yes, of course. Um, very, interesting. Christ, really, is it that late?

  —Time flies in the zone, eh, Tony?

  —God yes. Right. Right. So, well, er, George …

  —Toni, I hope you think this was good day.

  —Oh, yes, very. Very, George. I just wish …

  —I told you George was good! Just time to down a quick beer if you fancy, sandwich too, all included just as per, why not, eh? Everyone likes a beer afterwards, Tony. Funny, but true.

  —A beer? God, yes, actually. I could murder one. Um, Gerry, hey, I really enjoyed today and, well, I was wondering, actually, you see, I’m pretty flexible time-wise the next few days and, um, well, I mean, I could come here again, very soon, maybe tomorrow, or the next day. But only if George is available.

  —Toni, I am there for you when you want.

  —Great! Well then, Gerry, look, how about I book up right now? Here, look, I’ve got the money. Four hundred, right?

  Gerry immediately stepped, or rather bounced, close to me and took me round the shoulder.

  —Tell you what, put your money away, Tony. We can talk prices in the car. Now, let’s be going. I’ll sort it for you. That’s me, eh? There’s my car. Let’s get on our way, shall we? Don’t want to miss your train. We can get that beer at the station. Cheers, George, thanks for …

  —Gerry, you wait.

  —What’s that, George?

  —Toni, you tell me how much you pay him for today?

  —Tell you what, we’ll sort this out later, George.

  —Toni. I am your friend, you tell me.