A Messiah of the Last Days

by C. J. Driver

  He was smiling at me, but somehow smiling in such a way that his eyes seemed focused on a point about two yards through me. Perhaps it was because of the audience. “You’re wrong, Tom, if you think that’s what I believe. What I know is people won’t behave any better than they allow themselves to behave; if they believe what they call ‘human nature’ makes them behave in a certain way, they’ll have a society that fits their view of themselves; and then they’ll find the society makes them behave as they think they are. If you could start from the other end, from a society that assumed people would behave well, there would be both a good society and good people, and people would behave as well as their society.”

  “No laws, no gaols, no policemen, no barristers, no judges! Oh, John, how can you call me a sentimentalist? You’d live in total chaos. I’ll bet that on the first day your well-behaved people will make laws and rules to keep other people well-behaved too.”

  “No, if you remove the causes of strife, you won’t have strife.”

  “Some of the causes of strife are people; you’d end up having to get rid of all badly behaved people—executing them, putting them in gaol; and so to institutions not very different from those we have already.”

  Talk, talk, and more talk, and now the audience joined in. It was not something we would ever solve by talking: sadly enough, events are the only solution. John wanted to believe Williams was a thoroughly nasty man, a villain of repression and authority; I wanted to believe he was a nice man, caught up in a situation where his desires and his duties conflicted. That was all there was to it, or so it seemed at the time.

  *

  Eight o’clock. The multitude of private debates which have taken over from the mass situation are beginning to die out; these are kids, and they are going to have a party, and it’s going to be a smashing party, with enough of everything for everyone. Only the passionate souls are bothering to continue their discussions and debates: John is one of them—he is still surrounded by a crowd of people, and they are talking—or rather John is talking to them. They stir and eddy around him; and of course he’s too small to be seen in the middle of that mob. Kelso is somewhere on the edge of the crowd, trying valiantly to create his own whirlpool; but it is simply a small eddy on the edge of John’s vortex.

  *

  Eight-thirty. I knew I should have left. I have been cornered by the mad Bowland; he is just large enough to seem slightly menacing as he stands in front of me and hectors me in his shrill off-centre dialect. He has had his hair cropped very short since I last saw him; it adds to the menace. There is a parodying lunacy in our talk.

  “I saw you gabbing to Buckleson. You’re that lawyer-man, aren’t you? You a liberal, I guess.”

  I know this scene well enough to know that ‘liberal’ is a swear-word; ‘moderate’ is another—moderately truthful, moderately honest, moderately scrupulous. “I’m a barrister,” I answer, “but I’m here because I’m a friend of Buckleson and Tella Raymond.”

  “Capitalist like that white South African, revisionist like that mother-fucking Buckleson; I got your scene, man, and it stinks.”

  Idiotically I answer, “Oh really.”

  “Oh really,” he taunts me with my own legal voice. “What the fuck are you doing here? How much have you offered Buckleson?”

  Presumably he means how much money I have offered him, so I answer “Nothing.”

  “What are you doing here, then? This isn’t your scene, man.”

  “No, it isn’t. I was just about to go home.”

  “This is too revolutionary for you? We’re liberated, man: none of your middle-class hang-ups here.”

  He shifts his standards very quickly; now it is not Bowland in opposition to the revisionists, but Tom Grace in opposition to the revolutionaries. I understand now why John treated him so gently: what else could you do?

  “I’m not a revolutionary, I’m a socialist,” I answer.

  “That’s a gas, man;” is it the naïveté of my answer, or its own contradiction that so amuses him? He is smiling now, leaning forward confidentially and cheerfully. “They hate me, you know,” he says.

  “Who?” The question is surprised out of me.

  “All of them: because I know, you see.”

  “I’m sure they don’t hate you.”

  “They do, you know; they pretend not to, but they hate me.”

  “Why should they?”

  “Because I see what they’re up to.” He’s talking straight now, and the paranoiac madness is even more clear. “They’re liars, the whole lot of them; like John Buckleson. He tells lies the whole time.”

  “I haven’t heard them.”

  “Oh, he’s very clever; you can’t deny that. Very clever. Do you think he means what he says?”

  “I suppose so—but he says a lot.”

  “Revisionism—anti-proletarian revisionism. He’s liberal really, like you. Haven’t you noticed?”

  “Well …,” I begin, but Bowland won’t let me. “This just isn’t your scene, man. You got to be real tough to stand up to these lies. Have you ever been to Latin America?” The irrelevance is menacing.

  “No,” I answer truthfully enough. “Have you?”

  “You should go there; they know how to deal with your kind—against a wall and … pow, pow …” Like a small boy he mimes my murder.

  “I’d say that was a good reason for staying away …”

  “Don’t give me that shit, man.” He is very angry now, leaning forward, breathing upleasantly in my face.

  “I didn’t mean …”

  “Just don’t give me that shit, man.”

  “Have you been to Latin America yourself?”

  “Lived there,” his eyes shift away from mine. “In Argentina. When I was a kid. That’s a really bad scene. Yankee imperialism, you know.” He nods sagely, still not looking at me. But for some reason this subject has quietened him, so I pursue it. “Tell me about Latin America.” But this is a mistake—he turns back to me, eyes fixed on mine, and the menace returns. “You bastard,” he says. “You mother-fucking bastard; you know about it, don’t you? You’re taunting me with it, pretending not to know; but you know, all the same. You’re with them, like them”—he gestures broadly across the floor with its scattering and heaving dance.

  “Well …,” I begin again.

  “I know you; you’re plotting against me—I saw you talking to the police and then to Buckleson; I know what you are doing—you are getting them to accept your revisionist line, so you can prevent us doing what we have to do.”

  I shake my head; it seems safer to do than to answer. I look round me to see if there are any of the Free People in sight whom I can signal to rescue me—but John seems to have disappeared, and the occasional person in a white tunic is either a stranger or too far away for me to attract. Perhaps I should submit to my fate, and allow the latter-day Mariner to menace me with his unfocused eyes.

  “Look, what’s your name, shall I give you proof? What they want to do to me? Then you’ll understand why people like you must be chopped.” I nod but it makes no difference; he has me and he is going to get his reward, however unwilling I may be to accept his terms. So on he goes—from night in the forests to sun in the desert which he now inhabits. They are going to kill him because he sees the flaws in their use of the dialectic; they are going to betray him to the police because he is the one true revolutionary; he is going to kill them before they kill him because he is not uptight like them about the proletarian revolution; he is going to kill me because I was the representative of capitalist institutions; it is all a beautiful scene, man, you know, ludicrous and terrifying. Anything but a gas, man.

  *

  It was Tella who rescued me; somehow she got rid of Bowland, who wandered off into the dancers, muttering.

  “Did he say anything to you about the Argentine?” she asked as he went.

  “He asked me if I’d been there.”

  “He always asks that, even to people he kno
ws. It’s horrible really; his parents were killed out there when he was kid—his father was not much good anyway, I gather; an alcoholic or something, and so he had been got out of England. They got shot by mistake—Jiminy was with them—it was a miracle he didn’t get killed too; he’s still got a scar on his shoulder he shows people sometimes.”

  “Shot by mistake?” I asked.

  “Oh, they were in a car outside a bank, and there was a robbery—I think it was sort of political too and the police opened fire, and the car was in the cross-fire. It must have been horrible. Jiminy came back to England then, and went to boarding schools; he had some strange aunt he lived with, but she was wrong upstairs, and had to be put away. Jiminy got chucked out of schools all over the place, and then arrived at the commune one day.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Through John; he’s sort of Jiminy’s guardian.”

  “Why does Bowland always attack John then?”

  “I don’t know; perhaps because he knows John looks after him. I think he really likes John a lot.”

  “It doesn’t sound like that.”

  “But he does, I think.”

  *

  So I went home, even though the Free People were expecting me to stay. I had had enough freedom for one day.

  PART III

  9

  In one way the Freedom Congress was a kind of ending for the Free People. There was of course a great deal about them in the press in the few days after the Congress, and the television companies let their current affairs programmes have a final tilt at Buckleson and Kelso. The Times reported Lebraski and the Guardian Jonah Jones, who had spoken on the Sunday when I was safely at home in Wealdridge; both mentioned that Buckleson and Kelso had also spoken. The Telegraph carried a warning from the citizens of Camden Town that they were sick of the carryings-on in their neighbourhood. The Standard’s political correspondent wrote sympathetically of the millenarian yearnings of the young of England. The Express said that the Free People stank, metaphorically and actually, and called Grass Roots Inc. a communist front—it was a lot of things, but how an organisation as many-sided as Grass Roots could have a front at all no one was to know. Even the Socialist Weekly reported on the Congress and commented that the working people of England—with whom they had a divinely ordained relationship—were not interested in such adventurism as the Congress had demonstrated.

  But enough was enough: the Free People had had their temporary fame, and the Great British People wanted something different now. Within a fortnight, it might almost have been that the Free People had not existed. The ‘alternative’ press did not waver in its loyalty, naturally; so the Free People could still read about the Free People, and Youth Action about Youth Action, and Grass Roots Inc. didn’t approve of newspapers anyway. No more TV companies tried to get Buckleson to debate with a Cabinet minister and an archbishop. No profiles of Buckleson adorned the centre pages of the intellectual weeklies. No pugnacious television commentator tried to get Buckleson to contradict himself.

  It’s so easy to say it didn’t really matter that the Free People became just another melted-down lump of newsprint. John said it didn’t matter, indeed that he was relieved to live in silence again. But it did matter; because the Great British People has an imagination, and its imagination had been moved, even if only by the sensational nonsense of half-naked girls in the commune. Perhaps you can’t eat words; perhaps they are useless as ammunition. But words matter; John Buckleson’s voice mattered. Visionary rhetoric may break no bones. The means of production stay in the hands of the filthy capitalists. You call a rape a ‘criminal assault’ and no one except the raped cares so much. You drop a bomb on a mountain village and call it an ‘error of judgement’ and everyone thinks it is except the people in the mountains. You tie a man’s hands behind his back and blow his head off with a bullet and call it ‘retributive justice’; and it isn’t as bad as murder.

  We needed John Buckleson’s voice, and we were denied it. We needed the Free People living in their warehouse, and we were prevented from knowing it. It didn’t stop John talking, it didn’t throw the Free People out into the streets; and so on officially, no one was hurt and everyone said that the Great British Newspapers and the Great British Television Companies were free. And because they said so you believed it in the end, even if you knew damn well you shouldn’t. Because you can’t live one way and think another. Not without dying somewhere. You can send your spirit away to another country, but it too dies.

  *

  The Free People went on; if anything, there were more of them now, and they had to rent the next-door warehouse too. Caister made the arrangements, Tella paid the deposit, and I looked up the laws of tenancy. They demonstrated regularly; nearly a thousand of them turned out to stop the GLC bull-dozing a dozen houses in Camberwell for a road-widening scheme, and O’Brien got himself arrested by an over-zealous constable. But the police decided it wasn’t worth charging him; perhaps if they had arrested John it might have been different, but the police were waiting for something bigger, though we didn’t know at the time.

  The G.L.C. slapped a court order on the Free People preventing them from preventing the public works in Camberwell; John and the others thought and talked about contesting the order, and Bowland shouted loudly that they should disregard it and go into the streets to die, but the G.L.C. had arranged decent housing for the dispossessed families after the first demonstration, and I managed to persuade John that a battle over court orders wasn’t worth fighting. Neither the press nor the TV mentioned the demonstration or the consequences.

  People in the Free People still got themselves into individual trouble and needed me for the law or Henderson for psychiatry. Edna got her sixteen-year-old self pregnant and ran back to her parents, who tried to get Streeter on a paternity suit; he asked me and I told him how you could contest a paternity suit. Thank God he didn’t want to and the next we heard of him was a postcard to the Free People from Morocco; I only hoped he would keep away from fifteen-year-old Arab girls, where paternity suits are settled with sharp knives. Bowland tried out some imported acid he had bought from an American seaman and Henderson had to commit him to hospital for a fortnight to recover from the effects. A couple of ex-public schoolboys beat up a local shopkeeper who had refused them entrance to his shop and were sent down for three months, even though I got the Indian restaurateur from down the road to testify in court that the shopkeeper had been baiting the Free People for months.

  Tella went home for a holiday to Johannesburg and came back suntanned and miserable; she told Henderson who told me she had been taken to visit one of her father’s mine-compounds. But she didn’t sell her shares as far as I know, because she still wrote cheques and called the money communal whenever the Free People needed it.

  I watched Caister as carefully as I could, and I think he watched me in return. He was always at John’s elbow, ready to take over some practical problem: he arranged the groups which went off to Covent Garden every day to buy cheap vegetables; he saw to it that the kitchens were cleaned up after the G.L.C. sent a Health Inspector round the warehouses: he found beds in hospitals for girls to have their babies in; he arranged a concession for the Free People at the Indian curry-shop in Read Street; he fixed a permanent bodyguard for the restaurateur after his place had been wrecked by a gang of motor-cyclists, presumably in revenge for the testimony he had given; when the Free People wanted to go off to Europe or the Far East, he told them how to get passports and, when they came back, how to get social security. And all the time he watched. He was indispensable; he had made himself that, and you couldn’t leave him out of anything. Not that anyone except me would have wanted to and then I, who knew so much, knew nothing really.

  I tried to talk to John about Caister once, but I don’t think John took in what I was saying; I didn’t want to tell him I knew Caister was the informer, but I wanted him to be careful what he told anyone. He knew there was an informer; I think he suspe
cted it was poor mad Bowland with his desire to suffer and cause suffering. Perhaps he wanted it to be Bowland.

  “Where does Caister come from?” I asked John.

  “Andy? Oh, I don’t know. He doesn’t talk about things much.”

  “I don’t like him.”

  “Don’t you? I think he’s bloody marvellous—all action and no talk. I don’t know what we’d do without him.”

  “He worries me.”

  “Why?”

  But I couldn’t and wouldn’t say; all I replied was, “Oh, I don’t know; bad chemistry I suppose.” And so I left it. Inaction is my watchword.

  *

  There was a strange mood in the Free People; looking back now, I can recognise what it was, but then I thought the elation so many of them seemed to feel was created by the very fact they were managing to survive at all. They had lost public attention, but they went on in their warehouses, and they eat cheap, and they lived without appliances, and they did not advertise, and they did not make money even if they had to use it to live at all.

  Youth Action broke up over some issue of intricate policy; Kelso had been converted by some Algerian theorist, and he took a quarter of the Youth Actioneers with him. Others went back to the Socialist League, and some joined Grass Roots Inc. and others went for a few weeks into the New Socialist Alliance; the old Socialist Alliance too had broken up, and some had gone back to the Socialist League, some had set up the Advanced Trotskyite Party of Great Britain, and some had retired to bourgeois life. Winter came and the numbers of the Free People dwindled a little; the warehouse was cold and the girls with small babies went home to their forgiving parents, and the permanently married couples moved to rural communes and struggled to live off the land without the expertise needed to tend pigs and grow potatoes. But they survived. There was Caister to sort out the practical details, there was Tella with her guilty cheque-book, and there was John to give them words which would take them through cold nights and drizzling mornings and when the kitchen fires went out and the white uniforms went grey in the rain.