A Messiah of the Last Days

by C. J. Driver

  And then nothing. An American poet of popularity and no intelligence got up to read an interminable poem about life in modern cities; it was called as far as I remember Buddha’s Arsehole, and it too went nowhere, though less excitingly then John had done.

  And then nothing. John knew it as well as anyone. When eventually he had worked his way back through the crowd, and had talked to his Free People, he came near enough for me to grab his arm and say, “Well spoken, John; really magnificent.”

  “Crap, Mr. Lawyer,” he said, “and you know it. Words for the people. And you can’t eat words, and you don’t shoot words from guns.”

  “Still, it was a good speech.” I was not being insincere; words matter. I know the over-simple Marxism we are fed with these days says men die only for matter, not for ideas; but words can send men and women out into the streets to die.

  “Did you hear them shout ‘Yes’?” It was hardly a question. “It’s a marvellous feeling when you have a crowd like that, when you know you can do anything with them. But we’re not really ready yet …”

  “Ready for what?” I asked.

  “To make ‘Yes’ mean something more than a happy noise.”

  “You might make some of them live a bit better.” I was quoting him again, but he laughed and said, “Oh, Tom, you’re hopeless, I thought people like you died out before 1914 even.”

  There was no point in reminding him. “What are you going to do now?” I asked.

  “Work; and I’m not going to tell you anything more—or the rest of them,” he gestured behind him to the crowd. He began to push his way away from me through the crowd.

  *

  “Remember the law, Tom,” he shouted over his shoulder, “remember the law.”

  *

  Some time later, when the interminable poet had emerged from Buddha’s Arsehole and had been replaced by another pop group, which was too loud for me, even in that massive building, I found myself in retreat again at the back of the audience. Inspector Williams was there too, on his own and busy scribbling in his note-book, and he did not see me. I was about to go over to talk to him when I saw John and Tella go past him; John was obviously still in his euphoria and I saw him stop and say something to Williams. I retreated into the bloom below one of the frames for the TV lights, and John went on, with Tella trailing a yard or two behind him. I don’t know what held me there in the gloom, watching a policeman writing down his notes; but while I watched, I saw Caister emerging from the audience and quickly following John and Tella. He walked right past Williams going fast; and Williams looked up and saw him, and looked away quickly. Caister had seen Williams, I am sure of that, but he showed no sign of recognition, and the Free People knew Williams and almost never passed him without making some kind of jibe. Without meaning to, my mind noted the oddness of Caister not noticing and Williams looking so quickly away.

  And then my mind put the two faces together, Caister and Williams, and noted them and, suddenly, as a footnote to the notation, I remembered where I had seen Caister before. I shut my eyes and pulled the faces from my memory again, put them together, and was sure I remembered rightly. Yes, it had to be that, it fitted, it was right.

  I had been called to New Scotland Yard for a conference about an ‘armed robbery’ case; there was a problem about what actually had been stolen, and since the problem involved a large safe as well as the explosives which the villains had planned to use, we had gone to the Yard to inspect. I had come out of the conference a little before the others and had almost walked into Williams, whom I knew by then. I hadn’t taken much notice of the young man with him; he looked like a policeman off-duty, though his hair was too long for a policeman, and I had assumed he was simply some young police constable attached to Williams and the Special Branch. That had been … oh, let me see … about ten or twelve months before I first set eyes on Buckleson; I hadn’t even heard of the Free People then. All the same, though the hair might be a little longer now, there was no mistaking those wide-set eyes and sharp planes of the face. Caister was the informer, I had no doubt of that; he might even be a policeman—that athletic body was not typical of the Free People—who had been ordered to infiltrate a body of potential trouble-makers. Was that why Williams seemed to take the Free People so much more seriously than I had ever been able to, whatever I felt for Buckleson himself?

  But this was not information I planned to make any use of. What could I do with it, after all? Go to John Buckleson to say, “I know the informer’s name, old chap”? And what would he do? A ceremonial execution? A service of ex-communication? An exorcism? No, I would hang on to my little snippet of information, not letting John or the others know what I knew, not letting Williams know either. But why was Williams himself so ready to attend all the performances of the Free People if he already had a source of ready information from the inside? To keep Buckleson aware he was under surveillance? To tone down the vigour of the polemic? To keep an eye on his own informer? It was altogether intriguing, and it suited my spectator’s heart to have a secret I would communicate to no one.

  I left the gloom below the scaffolding of the TV lights and walked over to Williams. He was still writing in his notebook; he looked up when I said, “Hullo, Inspector,” but he did not seem surprised to see me. Presumably he had seen me in the crowd before—and perhaps had even noted my presence down in his little book.

  “Hullo, Mr. Grace. Listening to your young man?”

  “Yes. I’m not taking notes, though.”

  He smiled. “That’s what’s called my duty, Mr. Grace—and perhaps if I ever have to read my notes out in court, you’ll dispute every word, from ‘bullets’ to ‘God’.”

  “I think ‘Yes’ is what I’ll remember.”

  He nodded, then looked at his watch as if he was making up his mind about something. “It’s four o’clock,” he said. “I’ve been off duty officially since one. Would you care to join me for a cup of tea? There’s a café just down the road that’s quite respectable.”

  “Tea would be better than coke,” I answered gesturing to Tella’s hamburger stalls.

  Together we walked out of the Roundhouse and a little way down the road to a small café. Williams stopped for a moment outside the Roundhouse to have a word with one of the uniformed policemen on duty there, and I stayed deliberately out of earshot until he had finished. When we were walking again, I said, “I thought you were off duty, Inspector.”

  “I am now, Mr. Grace,” he said. “Thoroughly off duty, and if you will not mind, I’d like to be off the record for a while too. Do you mind?”

  “Of course not, Inspector—or shall I call you something off duty?”

  “Bill Williams,” he said. “Off duty, off the record.”

  Neither of us said anything more until we were at a table in the little café. When we had sat for a moment or two, Williams leaned back and said, “One of the things I like about you lawyers is that you know the difference between on the record and off it; like good journalists, though you can’t trust all of them any more.”

  “Lawyers need the distinction as much as policemen.”

  He nodded; he wasn’t looking at me but was fiddling absent-mindedly with the teaspoon on his saucer. “Do you know something, Mr. Grace? When everyone said that ‘Yes’ to young Buckleson, I said it too. I don’t think anyone noticed, because I didn’t exactly shout, but I said it.” He looked up suddenly. “Did you too?”

  I nodded, although I hadn’t said ‘Yes’ at all. But I knew what Williams meant, and I had felt what everyone had felt, even when my mind was saying something else.

  “Good,” Williams said. “Then you’ll understand what I mean. It’s an extraordinary thing, isn’t it? I suppose like being in church: everyone stands up, you stand up too. Everyone says ‘Amen’, you say ‘Amen’ too. And I’ll go back to the Yard now, and I’ll take out these notes,” he patted the pocket where his duty book was, “and I’ll copy them out neat; and I’ll write down pretty well every wor
d he said. And someone else, one of my mates, will come into the office and say, ‘Hullo, Bill, what’s that?’ And I’ll say, ‘Oh, it’s some political crap I was listening to.’ I’ll put that ‘Yes’ away, as if I’d never heard it, never said it. Extraordinary, isn’t it?”

  “I expect most people there will do the same,” I said carefully.

  “Perhaps.” He looked directly at me again. “Do you believe in that City, Mr. Grace?”

  “It depends what you mean by ‘believe’.”

  “Always the lawyer, Mr. Grace.”

  “No, not as lawyer: I’m off duty too, Inspector.”

  “Bill,” he said automatically.

  “Sorry. I said ‘Yes’ too, under my breath. You can’t not say yes. Perhaps it’s the crowd. People do strange things in crowds.”

  “But I’m not against the crowd, Mr. Grace. I’m with it, even with a crowd of kids like that. They call me a ‘pig’ and a ‘fascist’; I realise that, and it worries me sometimes. But I know I’m a democrat. I’ve voted Labour all my life; I reckon those people know more than the managing directors and the judges and maybe even most of the M.P.s what’s good for me and mine, in the long run. And yet when I get back to the Yard I’ll sneer at them.” He looked at me for a reaction, but I wasn’t going to give him one. Since I said nothing, he went on. “I don’t know, maybe your young man, that Buckleson, maybe he’s right; maybe in the end I’m a prisoner of Time. Maybe… what’s it he said? … maybe I’ve grabbed its tail and it pulls me along so fast I don’t see where I’m going.”

  “You can’t make Time dance for you just by saying ‘Dance’ to him.”

  “No,” he laughed, and suddenly was his usual serious and cadaverous self again. “Tell me, Mr. Grace, you know Buckleson socially as well as professionally, don’t you?”

  “I suppose you could put it that way.”

  “Can you give him a tip? Not from me, please, but just a tip? Without mentioning me?”

  “Perhaps. If I can.”

  “It’s not him we’re worried about most; but there’s some in that Free People lot who we are very worried about. Do you know what urban guerrillas are, Mr. Grace?”

  I did know, and said so.

  “There are new names for most things now. They’re not interested in Buckleson’s City, Mr. Grace; they’re not interested in any City, of God or of Men. They’re interested in bullets and burning and bombs; not Buckleson’s big one, but big enough. I don’t know if Buckleson is with them, but if he is, he’s going to come unstuck; I mean that, Mr. Grace. That boy …” he shook his head. “I’ve got a kid of my own, Mr. Grace; the eldest, he’s a boy, fifteen now; he thinks the sun shines out of Buckleson. He’s seen him on the box and in the Sundays, and he sneaked off to Hyde Park once to hear him speak. He’s got the same clothes, made me buy them for him for his birthday. Hair the same too; and sometimes when he thinks no one is looking, he practises making speeches too in the same way.

  “It doesn’t worry me; he’s a good kid, and he works hard at school. His teachers says he’s bright enough for university, though I expect he’ll end up like me. And I’ll say one thing, the kid reads now, everything he can lay his hands on: newspapers, paperbacks, magazines. I don’t always like what he reads, but my God he is learning things I couldn’t have learned when I was fifteen. But if Buckleson does what his friends want, and starts to hurry his City on too fast, with home-made bombs and plastics and rifles with telescopic sights, I’ll be Inspector Williams again like a shot, and I’ll put Buckleson inside for a long, long time, whatever my John thinks.”

  “I’ll tell Buckleson to be careful, but …”

  “But he doesn’t take advice, any more than my John does. No, Mr. Grace, I understand that. I just want to be able to remember I said ‘Yes’ like the rest of them. Will you try to warn Buckleson off that guerrilla lark?”

  “I’ll try,” I answered.

  “The trouble with these kids is they don’t know what it’s about really. A rifle is a sort of symbol to them, not a nasty thing that bruises your shoulder and takes three quarters of a chap’s head off from a mile away. Have you ever shot someone, Mr. Grace?”

  I shook my head.

  “Too young for National Service? I did mine, in Cyprus. I know what it’s like to have a kid shooting at you from a rooftop with his dad’s shotgun; and to knock him off his perch with one shot from your Service issue. And to find a kid of sixteen with both his hands blown off and his eyes gone from a home-made bomb he didn’t chuck quick enough. I don’t want any of that again, Mr. Grace; and if these kids knew they wouldn’t talk so easy about urban guerrillas.”

  He looked at his watch. “I’ve talked too much,” he said. “I must get along now. You’ll remember what I said, Mr. Grace?”

  “Of course.” Though whether or how I would pass it on was a different matter which I did not intend to discuss with Williams. We got up from our table and shook hands.

  “On duty again,” said Williams as we shook hands. Then he smiled and patted the pocket where his notebook was. “I didn’t say ‘Yes’, did I, Mr. Grace?”

  “You’re far too sensible to say anything of the kind, Inspector.”

  *

  By the time I got back to the Freedom Congress, I had resolved that I had no intention of passing Williams’s warning—or was it a threat?—on to Buckleson. It was a bit of information I would store up for my delectation, as I had resolved to do with the information about Caister. No doubt the leaders of the Free People talked about being urban guerrillas; they probably talked about the moral necessity of pacifism too. Certainly O’Brien did. I could not believe any of them, even John Buckleson, or especially John Buckleson, would do anything much about their talk. Their crusade was one of words, not deeds; the words mattered to me, at least as they were spoken by Buckleson himself, because they stood for a life of the soul which was not tormented by divisions and separations. But I believed then the nearest they would go to acting their words out was in street theatre, congresses of theoretical freedom, a hired warehouse in derelict London, and the support of social security. You might want to say at the end of a speech by John Buckleson, And then … and then … and then nothing, but at least speech was there, and for him at least an attempt to create a language which was alive. Out of a living language might come a creed men could live by again; but Williams’s horrors of the boy shot from a rooftop and the boy without hands and blind were no more than horrors. They did not impinge on my feelings for Buckleson.

  *

  Five o’clock. A fashionable psychoanalyst preaching—and preaching is the only word for what he was doing. Indeed, at one stage he called himself a ‘doctor of the human condition’, and then demonstrated it was society which was the illness he had been sent to cure. He did not seem to notice or mind that there was any contradiction in what he said, or any contradiction in the notion of a psychoanalyst aiming to cure society.

  I didn’t pay much attention to him; I was getting bored. I had heard John, I had discovered to my own satisfaction the name of the informer in the Free People, I had been asked by a policeman to carry a warning to John Buckleson—it seemed a fair record for the day. Yet I didn’t leave; I suppose the strangely encapsulating atmosphere of the Freedom Congress made me want to stay in case anything significant happened. A kind of womb perhaps, with its own rules and its own pattern of behaviour, marvellously secure, complete in itself. Even boredom seemed safe.

  *

  Seven-thirty. I was talking to John, surrounded by various Free People and unaffiliated young. He had seen me with Williams, or had had my leaving with Williams reported to him. Caister was there in the background; he may have been worried too. I suppose informers are inevitably insecure; for all he knew, Williams may have decided for ends of his own to reveal to me that Caister was an informer. Suppose I was about to tell John. Indeed, it strikes me suddenly it may have been Caister who told John of my departure with Williams.

  “I saw you talking t
o that bastard Williams,” said John fiercely. He was talking not only to me but for the benefit of his followers.

  “Oh, he’s not so bad.”

  “What do you mean? He’s a policeman, isn’t he?”

  “But quite a humane and pleasant one.”

  “The trouble with you, Tom, is you like people too much.”

  “I wouldn’t have called that a criticism.”

  “It isn’t a compliment.”

  “I gather that.”

  “Does it upset you?”

  “Not really; I don’t understand why there should be anything wrong in liking people.”

  “I didn’t say ‘liking people’; I said, ‘liking people too much’.”

  “Semantics.”

  “It’s not, you know. You see, you look at these people and you think you see something essentially human in them, and so essentially likeable—the biggest shit in the world, the man who poisons his mistress, the judge who sends a villain to gaol to ‘protect society’—but what you don’t see is they are social beings before they are individuals.” He looked round at his audience. “Everyone should understand that.”

  “I can’t see people like that; I’m no Marxist.” I wasn’t much enjoying being used as an Aunt Sally in John’s debate.

  “No, that’s obvious; but what you are is a sentimentalist and, like all sentimentalists, you’ll end in despair.”

  “My God, coming from you after that speech of yours, that’s a laugh. You’re the one who’s always on about how good things could be; you’re the one, thinking men will behave decently if you put them in decent situations. I don’t believe that; I know bloody well they will behave badly even in the best situations. You’re the sentimentalist, not me.”