Newsdeath

by Ray Connolly

  Alongside Neil Maxwell sat someone whom Eyna had identified as Michael Hickmore; he was tall and stooped and his hair was dirty and shoulder length. The most physically dominant of the six men was the one identified as Shelley, a huge apelike character with long arms and legs and a large hooked nose. The two girls intrigued Huckle, and he wondered whether they had exclusive relationships with any of the men. One of them, a mousy, dark girl with a pinched face, was introduced to him as Jenny. She had a bored look about her. The other was smaller and wider and seemed jollier. Her name was Kate. It was Kate who was the first to speak after Eyna had completed the introductions.

  ‘Are you still frightened?’ she asked. Huckle was surprised to discover that she had an American accent.

  He wanted to shake his head and pretend that nothing they could do would frighten him. But he didn’t: ‘Yes,’ he said, honestly. The days of darkness had taken the manhood out of him.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Eyna. It was an order rather than a polite suggestion, and he promptly pulled a chair out from under the large kitchen table and sat down amidst the company. He knew there were all kinds of questions which he ought to have been asking, but for the moment could think of nothing to say. For their part the group sat eyeing him coldly as though waiting for someone else to open the conversation.

  He looked around the kitchen. It was a place of low ceilings and a large inglenook fireplace. The place, although littered with empty wine and milk bottles, packets of cigarettes, biscuits and all kinds of supermarket foods, didn’t look like a squat. The refrigerator and cooker were too new and expensive for that. He decided that the farmhouse had been rented for the duration of the group’s stay. Newspapers were everywhere; although he could see one of them which bore a headline concerning PUMA, he was unable to read what it said. In one corner of the room Martin Jenkins sat in an armchair holding a sub-machine-gun which was pointed in the direction of Huckle. Jenkins, a slight man with large glasses, looked the very antithesis of an urban guerilla, but his steady observation of Huckle’s movements left him in no doubt that should he attempt to escape he would be shot to pieces before he could get as far as the door.

  At last, having given Huckle enough time to pull himself together, Eyna began to talk again. ‘We brought you down because certain events mean that we are going to have to bring forward our plans,’ she said, turning towards him. ‘And you’re going to help us.’

  ‘Supposing I don’t.’

  She looked at him again. ‘And supposing I remind you about your children.’

  Huckle realized that everyone was watching him. He didn’t answer her. There was nothing more to be said about that. He had no alternative but to go along with them. He wondered whether he would ever get out of this alive. He thought it unlikely.

  ‘What’s happened to change your plans?’ he asked after a moment.

  ‘Someone talked. The Press have it all wrong as usual, but it’s only a matter of time before the police have all of our names.’

  ‘Including yours?’ Huckle looked her straight in the eye. For a moment he thought he saw a look of doubt cross her face. Danny, too, looked up from playing with his gun to see what Eyna’s expression might tell him.

  ‘If they know who the other members of PUMA are, they’ll know who I am,’ said Eyna, rather too snappily, thought Huckle.

  ‘You told me you’d tell me about PUMA,’ said Huckle at last. He had evidently touched a nerve.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ Martin Jenkins had moved from the back of the room and joined him.

  ‘I want to know everything.’

  Jenkins sat down beside him: his machine-gun now pointing towards the ceiling. ‘The manifesto said it all, really. The Press and television are enemies of the people because they present life as a comic strip by which to full the people into a false sense of well-being. Life is turned into a glamorous Technicolor dream through television, where the bourgeois values of respectability and knowing one’s place in the social order are emphasized. Thus the system is self-renewing. The media in all societies is controlled by a very small group of people. In Communist countries by the Government; in the West by the Government in collaboration with capitalist forces. Revolutions come, but then the revolutionaries fall in love with the spectacle which has become themselves. The chief enemy of revolution is the media because it distorts the causes of revolution. That was why we decided that, if revolution were ever to be possible, it must start with an attack upon the means of communication. To do this it became necessary to get control of the media, if only for a short time. Only by control of the media can events be successfully precipitated, can history be changed.’

  ‘And what about the killings?’

  ‘The girl was an accident. The pornographer was going to talk. You panicked him. Danny was only just in time. He had no alternative. Some deaths are sacrifices for the movement. The cops were just pigs … and the van driver was murdered by the refusal of the capitalist Press to heed our warnings.’

  Huckle didn’t know anything about policemen or a van driver being killed, but he didn’t pursue that line of enquiry because Jenkins had continued talking.

  ‘We didn’t intend that there should be so many killings, but they’ve been forced upon us from outside. They started the violence. When we wrote the manifesto we made it clear that, although some people would inevitably be sacrificed to the revolution, we were opposed to violence. The girl who was killed by the first bomb was really killed by the system. We phoned a warning in good time about that car bomb, but the pigs want people to die. We didn’t sacrifice the girl. The pigs did. They could have stopped that bomb. But they didn’t want to. It suited their purposes.’

  Huckle’s experience on the night of the blast told him a different story. And who was supposed to have started the violence? But again he didn’t pursue the matter. To have argued with them would have been worse than useless. They believed what they wanted to believe.

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re trying to achieve,’ he said at last.

  ‘Total world revolution against the capitalist systems of the West and the state capitalist systems of the East,’ came back an answer as glib and facile as any he could have imagined.

  ‘Just the eight or nine of you …’ he almost felt like laughing at them. They seemed so absurdly pompous.

  ‘Don’t make fun of us, mate.’ Suddenly Huckle was aware of a blond boy with a huge barrel chest. He remembered that his name was Dave, but he was surprised to hear his working-class south London accent in contrast to the measured, educated tones of Martin Jenkins.

  Immediately Huckle was on the defensive. ‘I wasn’t …’

  ‘We don’t expect to change the system by ourselves.’ Kate Springfield had come in now. ‘All over the world there are people who are thinking the way we’re thinking. We’re just one small cog in a much larger world-wide revolution that is already taking place. Maybe we’ll all be killed, but the movement will go on. Because you can’t kill the idea. And the more people who know about the idea … then the more certain is our victory and the more quickly it will come.’ She spoke with a zealous lyricism in her voice and in lines that might have been lifted straight from the script of Spartacus.

  Again Huckle wondered how the murder of schoolgirls and van drivers could help them win public support, but he didn’t press the issue.

  ‘What about me?’ he said, after a few moments, noticing that all eyes were on him again. ‘Why did you bring me here?’

  This time Neil Maxwell, the black man, answered. His accent was a mixture of sing-song West Indian and Cockney. ‘You’re a reporter. And it seemed to us that you were getting too close. You and your friend Collins. At first we thought about killing you, but then we decided that you were less valuable to the movement if you were dead than if you joined us. We weren’t all in favour of keeping you alive, but Eyna persuaded us.’

  Huckle looked towards where Eyna was sitting in silence on a low settle on the other side
of the room. He tried another question. ‘That piece of film that was put into The Third Man; was that an inside job?’

  The stooped figure of Michael Hickmore moved towards him. ‘That was my job … it was so easy. I planned doing it for two years when I worked there, pushing out all that biased crap every night. You’ve no idea how easy it is to divert the media to your own ends if you really want to. I could have burned down the whole of fucking Television Centre without anyone knowing.’

  ‘You worked in the telecine operations room?’

  ‘I was a trainee floor manager. But I know every inch of that building. And I hate it …’ There was something violent about the way that Hickmore was speaking. Yet his voice was quiet.

  ‘And what about the bombs … who makes those?’

  Danny coughed, and fiddled with the safety catch on his machine-gun. He didn’t even have to look up.

  At last Huckle turned towards Eyna. ‘I still don’t understand why you wanted to know so much about me?’

  ‘Or why I let you fuck me …?’

  He looked around the room. A couple of the men were smiling to each other. ‘That too,’ he assented.

  ‘Well, it made you easy to handle, didn’t it?’ she said at last. ‘You’d be surprised how much political conversion can take place between a pair of sheets … and anyway …’ she paused, and looked around the room to make sure that what she was about to say would be heard by everyone, ‘you’re a man, and I’m a woman. It would have seemed such a wasted opportunity, wouldn’t it? And you were so grateful to me. Another two weeks in there and you’d have been virtually ready to kill the Queen for me.’

  A spasm of self-disgust surged through Huckle: he wanted to insist that what she was saying was not true. But it was true, and it was indisputable. He had never tried to escape; the sex had all been part of the adventure for him. And he knew that she had controlled him with the minimum of effort. He had been frightened by the dark, and comforted by her body, and that had seemed enough. She was enigmatic, and yet she infatuated him in ways he could not explain to himself.

  Every member of the room was enjoying his discomfort at Eyna’s retorts, and his shame turned to anger as he saw their amusement. ‘I suppose a man could fuck the devil and enjoy it,’ he said at last, more in self-abuse than overt anger towards her.

  ‘Maybe you did,’ she retorted.

  ‘Maybe I did,’ he repeated. Everything she said was right, and he was ashamed. She had used his carnality and his craving for affection as a weapon against him. He had been dependent upon her, but willingly so. She had dominated him and he had been pleased to allow that domination, not ashamed at being her prisoner but grateful to be rewarded with the comforts she offered. Now he understood her reasons for encouraging him to talk about himself. It had strengthened his dependence upon her, and lulled him into a sense of security. She had never wanted to know about him. She had wanted to control him. And she had succeeded. Because still, despite the hate and disgust he felt towards himself, another part of him coveted her attentions. He knew that she could still control him with her looks and smiles and those eyes.

  He changed the subject. ‘I still don’t understand how you knew so much about me when you picked me up.’

  Eyna looked at him for a long moment before she answered him. When she spoke Huckle felt again as though she were addressing the whole group. ‘You mustn’t imagine for one second that the people you see here are the only people who believe in an alternative way of living. It’s true we are PUMA, but PUMA has allies and friends, people who pass on information, people who, while trapped in their straight lives, act as back-up groups for us. Believe me there is nothing that we can’t find out about. PUMA is everyone who speaks the truth and who wants the truth to be known.’

  This was just too much for Huckle. ‘Bollocks,’ he said suddenly, overcome with his own disgust at the claptrap that was being handed out to him.

  Behind him he thought he heard the movement of a chair, and then as a scarlet flame seemed to leap across his mind somewhere behind his eyes, he heard the London voice of Dave howling with rage, and he dropped from his chair and out of consciousness.

  ‘That was a really dumb thing to do.’ Huckle opened his eyes and found himself looking at the chubby, freckly face of Kate Springfield. ‘Really dumb.’

  ‘Who d’you mean, him or me?’ Huckle felt that dipping in and out of consciousness was becoming an occupational hazard.

  ‘You shouldn’t upset Dave. He’s very touchy. He doesn’t like profanity.’

  Huckle looked around him. He was back on his bed, but now the light was on and it no longer seemed like the erotic prison it had been. Only Kate was with him, and she had an automatic in her belt. ‘He isn’t touchy. He’s psychotic,’ said Huckle.

  Kate smiled. ‘Maybe that, too.’

  Huckle gestured towards the gun. ‘Is that thing for me?’ Kate nodded and smiled. ‘If you’re difficult I’ll have to shoot you.’

  ‘Have you ever used it before?’

  ‘I’ve never killed anyone yet. But I’ve been practising. Don’t make me learn on you.’ ‘I’ll try not to.’

  They were quiet for a moment while Huckle considered his position. He was alone again in this room with a woman, but Kate was as unlike Eyna as two young women can be. Where Eyna had remained aloof and mysterious and had captured his imagination, Kate was wide and smiling and chummy. And probably gossipy, he thought.

  ‘Where’s everybody else?’ he asked, testing the water.

  ‘Eyna took Danny and a couple of the others on a recce … Dave and Shelley are downstairs tidying up the loose ends, Neil’s checking the cars … we all have our jobs to do.’

  Huckle felt the lump on the side of his head where Dave had hit him. It was large and oval, but so far as he could tell from touch it hadn’t bled. He said: ‘I don’t really understand what a girl like you is doing with people like Dave. Maybe I’m just dim, but nothing I’ve heard or seen about PUMA makes any kind of sense. And you seem a pretty sensible girl.’ She just looked at him. ‘I mean, how long have you been involved?’

  ‘From the beginning.’

  ‘Which is how long?’

  She smiled at him. ‘You don’t have to interrogate me. I’ll tell you. We’ve no secrets from you now.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, the original PUMA was founded about seven months ago by Shelley and Neil … Neil’s the black guy, right? Shelley had been in the army in Belfast and he became so sickened by what he had to do and by the lies the army was putting out that he eventually just dropped out of sight while he was on leave in Scotland. The Military Police were after him around there so he moved down to London and settled in a squat in Harrow Road. That was where he met Neil. I don’t think until that moment he’d ever had a revolutionary thought in his life.’

  Remembering the lumbering Neanderthal size of Shelley Huckle wondered to himself whether he had ever had any thoughts in his life.

  ‘Neil was already into all kinds of protest. I think he always saw himself as a revolutionary of some kind. That’s how he described himself when I was first introduced to him … “a revolutionary”. It sounded weird at the time, but now we all think of ourselves that way. He’d been involved in black politics and black newspapers since he was about seventeen and had been hanging around the Black House and looking on Michael X as some kind of God. When he found that he wasn’t I think he sort of freaked out for a while.

  ‘And then while he and Shelley were hanging out together around Harrow Road, Mike and I moved in for a while. It was a good time, you know. We were all different, but we all got along so well. I’d only just got to know Mike as a matter of fact. He’d been working in television and had left because he couldn’t stand any more of the shit they were putting out there, and I’d taken a year out from college to live in London. We met at a People’s Media seminar. He was giving a lecture about the role of the media in changing the structure of society and no one was even
listening to him. It was pitiful. He believed then, I mean we both believed then, that revolution by education could be a peaceful process. We were very naive.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Oh … last spring some time … early summer … you know, when it was so hot.’

  ‘As recent as that?’

  ‘Yes …’

  Kate looked at him with an expression that was as guileless as any he could imagine; it was almost as though she were unaware of the crimes she and her friends had committed. Huckle was still finding it difficult to comprehend that such chance meetings could possibly have led two seemingly normal people into a conspiracy of killing and a spree of terror.

  ‘What about the others? When did they join you?’ he asked.

  ‘They were friends. At this stage we didn’t know what we were going to do; we just felt we had to do something. Martin had known Michael when they were at the North London Polytechnic together. Martin had become involved in action movements in Birmingham … mainly housing … but he became frustrated. It wasn’t leading anywhere. We all felt this great tension and frustration. We just wanted to do something. Jenny is Martin’s girl. She was being used by some pornographer pig … he was using her body, and selling it on film and glossy papers so that other pigs could get off on her degradation. Martin went out of his mind when he found out. It seemed just so exploitative. I mean she’d had a really bad time. I think she was married. Her old man must have been some kind of louse … because she’s really such a beautiful person … when you know her, she’s just the kindest of people. A really beautiful person.’

  Huckle thought about the girl he’d met downstairs, the mousy girl who looked miserable. Beautiful was not a word he would have used to describe her. She clearly had a wonderful soul. Then he thought about the barrel-chested Dave, the man responsible for the lump on his head. As though reading his mind Kate provided the details again.

  ‘Dave was a friend of Shelley’s when they were both in Belfast,’ she said. ‘He left the army after some trouble over guns. They could never pin it on him, but they wanted him out of Ireland. He and Shelley are still very close.’