'Japanese? Inventor of a violin method?'
'That's very good. But you're a couple letters way off. Violence is more like it. Method, yes, a method.'
Tod said earnestly: 'The trouble he said is separating culture from morality. Because culture's developed by societies and that makes it preach social values. I mean, he means, books don't preach villainy. They preach being good.'
'Books shouldn't strictly preach anything,' said munching Bev. 'Knowledge and beauty - they're outside ethics. Who is this Mizusako?'
'He's in jail somewhere in the States,' said Tuss, smoking very aromatically. 'He went the rounds of the campuses preaching disin disint shit disinterest shit shit shit'
'Disinterestedness?'
'Hell of a mouthful. But yes, that's it. Free learning, free action. He talked of a UU.'
'You You?'
'An underground university. Paid for by robbery, which has to mean violence. Teaching useless things. Latin, Greek, history. We got lousy education, right?'
'Right.'
'Lousy because it's Labour. Lousy because it levels. No clever boys wanted. There's certain things it won't allow, because it says they're no good to the workers. Now it follows that the things they won't allow must be the only things worth knowing. You get that?'
'There's a sort of logic in it.'
'We go to school, we lot, till we're sixteen. That's the law. Okay, we go and we don't listen to the crap they call sociology and Worker's English. We sit at the back and read Latin.'
'Who teaches you Latin?'
'There are these antistate teachers about. You a teacher?'
'History. Very useless.'
'Okay, there are these thrown out of schools for not wanting to teach the crap they're supposed to, right? They wander, like you're wandering. We give then the odd wad like we're doing to you. Then they give us a bit of education in return. Real education, not State school crap.'
'You want something now?'
'One thing,' said Tod. 'How did we get into this mess?'
Bev took a deep breath and then coughed on macaroon crumbs. 'The workers say it isn't a mess. Do your parents say it's a mess?'
'They say nothing,' said Tuss. 'They consume. But it's got to be a mess, because it's so fucking dull.'
'I accept that.' Bev couldn't help grinning at the downrightness of Tuss's statement. 'Let me try to explain the mess very quickly and simply. Since the beginning of history there've been the haves and have nots. In politics two main parties developed - one for ensuring that the haves continued to have and, indeed, to have more; the other for turning the have nots into haves. No rich, no poor, just enough for everybody. Levelling, egalitarianism, the just society. Socialism. We have a Socialist State now. We've had one pretty continuously since 1945. Who were the have nots? The workers, the proletariat. They were ground down by the haves, or capitalists. The workers organized themselves into bodies too big for the capitalists to exploit. Unions. Right, the capitalists tried to use non-union labour. The time came when this put them outside the law. The unions had and have the upper hand. The formerly exploited are doing fine. What's wrong with that?'
'There's got to be something wrong,' said Tuss, 'if life is so fucking dull.'
'Here's where things went wrong,' said Bev. 'There used to be an Independent Labour Party in England, the old I L P. Then there came a new Labour Party, which destroyed the old. The new Labour Party started off as the political executive of the Trades Union Congress. Part of the union subscription went to the support of the party -very reasonable. Now the aim of Socialism is to socialize. To abolish, as far as possible, private ownership. Instead of railways and mines and steel making huge profits that all go into the pockets of wealthy shareholders, the profits go to the State, which can thus give more money to the workers and put some by for development and improvement. The only trouble is that nationalized industries never make money. Why not? Because there's no urge to make profits.'
'We know all about that,' said Tuss somewhat irritably. 'Bureaucrats and nobody getting fired and sitting pretty.'
'Now I come to the Great Contradiction,' said Bev. 'With a Socialist State you don't strictly need unions any more. Why not? Because the workers are officially in power, and who do they have to defend themselves against? East European Socialism has no unions, and that's logical. But British syndicalism, once started, has to go on existing. It needs its opposite still. Of course, there are still a few private bosses around, but the State is the main employer. You still have the old dichotomy of employer and employee. The workers have to regard their own political executive not as an aspect of themselves but as an entity they have to oppose. They oppose, and the opposition has to give in, because it's not a true opposition. Hence all wage demands are met and inflation flourishes.'
Both boys looked gloomily dissatisfied. 'That explains nothing,' said Tod. 'It doesn't explain the crap we get at school. It doesn't explain us and you sitting here.'
'All right,' said Bev. 'The worker's struggle in the nineteenth century was not solely economic - it was cultural too. Why should the bourgeoisie have the monopoly of taste and beauty? People like Ruskin and William Morris wanted the workers to be enlightened. With the Marxist stress on the basic reality of culture and of history too being economic, well - well, pretty wallpaper and free reading-rooms didn't seem so important. Discriminate consumption disappeared as a doctrine. The thing to do was to consume - but what? Whatever gave or gives the easiest gratification. Diluted taste. The manufacturers are always ready with some watered-down parody of a genuine individual creation. To buy should be to gratify. You buy a book you can't understand, and you get angry. You ought to understand it, you've paid for it, haven't you? Things have to be made simple, easy sources of gratification, and that means levelling-down. Every worker with money is entitled to the best that money can buy, so the best has to be redefined as what gives gratification with the least effort. Everybody has the same cultural and educational entitlement, so levelling begins. Why should somebody be cleverer than somebody else? That's inequality. There are no nineteenth-century progressives around, telling the workers about the beauties of Homer's verse. As you know, some of the old workers actually learned Greek. And Hebrew. It was called self-improvement. But that means some selves improve and others don't. Monstrous inequality. Hence your lousy school curriculum. Hence the dullness. Napoleon may have been a monster, but at least he wasn't dull. What can great men like Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ do for the worker?'
'We're not in jobs,' said Tuss bitterly, 'and we never will be. We're not sheep, we don't follow the ram's bell. We face a life of crime and violence. Culture and anarchy. I wish to Christ I could get them to fit. Read Virgil and then rip some guy up. I don't like - what's the word?'
'Inconsistency,' said Tod.
'You can't avoid it,' said Bev, though uneasily, 'if you're human. You're committed to crime if you're against the Workers' State. My MP told me that.'
'Crime of two kinds,' worried Tuss. 'Robbing Robin Hood style, like you saw tonight. The acte gratuit.'
'Who told you about the acte gratuit?'
'A guy called Hartwell.' said Tuss. 'He talked to us some place, I forget where. A great man for the gin. He told us about Camus - a French Algerian guy, a footballer, you may have heard of him. This guy kills a guy and then he knows he's a human being. He's done a thing there's no reason for doing and he sees that that's what makes him free. Only human beings can do the acte gratuit. Everything else, and that means the great fucking big universe and all the stars, it all has to follow like laws. But men have to show they're free by doing things like killing and chopping.'
'What we do isn't gratuit,' Tod said. 'It can't be. If we're antistate we have to be properly antistate. That means kicking against the law because it's a State thing. Like Latin and Greek are antistate things. So violence and Shakespeare and Plato go together. They have to. And literature teaches revenge. When I read Don Quixote I went round slashing every gu
y that wasn't thin and tall and a bit dreamy. I left the little fat ones alone too.'
'What's that big Greek word you said yesterday?' said Tuss to Tod.
'Symbiosis?'
'That's it. Without us how would the Christniques get on?'
Bev's head reeled. All these things happening. 'Explain,' he said.
'These kids,' said Tuss, 'that started the UC or Underground Christ. In that bit of the District Line that's been closed up. They have what they call a love supper, with real shagging, boy and girl, boy and boy, but the feast bit is only mkate and the odd drop of vino. Sometimes we nick it for them. They say the bread and wine is really Jesus. Then they go out looking for trouble.'
'Christian violence?' said Bev, now ready to believe anything.
'No no. They go out wanting to be cracked. Then they practise the Christnique of loving your enemies. That's where we come in. We get sort of friendly, that's the trouble, don't slash hard enough. Let them get their own vino,' he said with sudden viciousness.
'The only things of importance,' Bev said, still with uneasiness, 'are subversive. Art is subversive. Philosophy too. The State killed Socrates.'
'Yeah, I know,' frowned Tuss. '"Crito, we owe a cock to Aesculapius."'
'O Kriton,' translated Bev back, 'to Asklipio opheilmen alektruona.'
'Again, again,' urged Tuss, grabbing Bev's worn greatcoat lapel. 'Christ, those are the real words, that's really the poor guy talking.' Bev, who still owned a stylo, wrote it down in Roman transliteration on Tuss's cigarette pack. Tuss devoured the words, then he said: 'I get a shiver when I read the words in English. Right down the backbone. Now it'll be a shiver all over. I had to bash up those Greeks that ran the stinking restaurant in Camberwell. Because of that. Then I found the guy that ran it was called Socrates. Mockery, I said, and I put the boot in proper.'
Bev shivered inwardly when the image of the ravished and torn Irwin boy came back to him. He'd suffered and died because he wasn't a character in literature? Or perhaps he wanted it, an extreme Christinique? Who knew anything of the dark heart of man? 'Aren't you afraid of getting caught?' he asked. 'Of being put away?'
'No.' Tuss shook his head many times slowly. 'Not scared. It's the final test, to see if you can live like alone inside your skull. That's one reason for stocking it up, to see if it can feed off itself. That's real freedom, being alone in a cell and there's all your brain to travel in, like a country. But nobody gets caught. The nguruwes keep out of our way.'
'I don't know the word. Police?'
'Pig in Swahili. The chanzirim - that's Arabic, that's worse - they don't want blood on their uniforms. O Kriton,' he began to read, 'to Ask -'
'"Pay the debt, therefore. Do not neglect it,"' said Bev. 'That's how it goes on.'
'Give it me in Greek. Give it me real. I want the past in front of me like it was all really there.'
'I can't remember the rest,' said Bev, 'sorry. You're right about the past. We owe no debt to the present or the future. Keep the past alive, pay the debt. Somebody has to do it.'
6 Free Britons
It was the following night that Bev, frozen, came to a disused factory off Hammersmith Broadway. In the factory yard, railed and gated off from the street, ragged men sat round a fire. A reek of charred meat flooded Bev's mouth with saliva. The gate was open.
'No room, no room' said a scholarly-looking man in a stained and ancient British warm, tartan trews and muddy Wellingtons. But his eye was kindly. Bev, without invitation, sat on an old oil drum.
'Antistate?' he said. 'All?'
They looked at him warily. 'Your vocation?' said the scholarly-looking man. Bev told him. The man nodded. 'My name is Reynolds,' he said. 'I am fifty-nine. Had I been willing to keep my mouth shut for a month or so longer I would have retired in the normal way and received my State pension. Comprehensive School, Willingden. Senior teacher of literature, sir.'
'Look, prof, we've heard all this,' whined a bulge-eyed man with a perfectly round head shorn and shaven, as if against ringworm.
'You cannot hear it too often, Wilfred. Besides, I'm addressing Mr Jones here. The set books laid down for the advanced level of the State Leaving Certificate examination were as follows. Poetry: the lyrics of a boy called Jed Foote, member of a singing group called The Come Quicks that sang them; a volume of songs by somebody, American I think, called Rod something. Drama: a play called The Mousetrap by the late Dame Agatha Christie - still apparently running in the West End forty years after its premiere. Fiction: a novel called The Carpetbaggers - or to be exact A Shorter The Carpetbaggers by Harold Robbins, and some nonsense about the errors of social climbing by Sir John Braine. I ask you. Literature. I resigned.' He looked round the circle as for applause.
'Most courageous,' said Bev. 'Might I have a little of that meat there? I'm starving.'
'Let him nick his own,' snarled a black man.
'Charity, charity,' said Reynolds. 'He will do his share of nicking tomorrow, if he joins our band. Here, sir, this is chuck steak and hard to masticate but nourishing. I think a roasted onion rests somewhere among the bluebleak embers.' He picked for it with an iron rod and rolled it out towards Bev. It was oozing juice through its black overcoat. Bev ate gratefully. Wilfred grudgingly, at Reynolds's ocular urging, lent Bev a bottle of rotgut, a coughing fit in every globule. They talked and ate. A thin man with a cap named Timmy read, to general groans, from a worn pocket copy of the New Testament.
'Every bleeding night we have this,' said Wilfred.
'It's to drill it into you,' said Timmy. 'The bargaining principle is forbidden the workers by the Lord hisself. "Didst thou not agree for a penny?" That's clear enough and it's the word of God, so stick it up your jaxy and keep it there.'
'If there's to be reading aloud,' said Reynolds, 'hear the word of Alexander Pope.'
'We don't want no RC stuff,' whined Wilfred.
'You see?' said Reynolds. 'You join the ignorant. Banned in the Ealing Public Library because the Library Committee chairman said some nonsense about the Secular State and if you want Popes go to Rome. But you will listen, my friend.' He read out with evident pleasure:
'Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS, is restor'd;
Light dies before thy uncreating word;
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall And universal Darkness buries All.'
'CHAOS,' said Bev. 'Consortium for the Hastening of the Annihilation of Organized Society. Pope didn't have to fight society. He gloried in exalting it. The elitist society, of course. Meanwhile the loaf-stealers hanged and the beggars scratched their sores.'
'Do you mind?' said the religious man. 'I'm eating.'
Reynolds said: 'And yet what springs out of universal justice? The universal darkness Pope never knew. Pope knew what the great enemy of life was and is.'
'Dullness,' said Bev.
'Ah,' said Reynolds with pleasure. 'No dullness now. Welcome, Szigeti, welcome, Tertis.' Two men with fiddle cases joined the group. One of them produced a kilo of pork sausages from his overcoat pocket. 'Prick them first,' said Reynolds. 'I can't abide burst bangers.'
The newcomers ate and then opened their cases. A violin and a viola. They played a charming duo by Mozart and then a Bach two-part invention. Their standards were high; they were very mature men; they were professionals without union cards. Tertis said;
'You could see how it was going to go back in 1977. Covent Garden, I was first viola. They stopped the damned opera after the second act. Said it was going on too long. They wouldn't accept overtime, all goes in tax anyway they said. I protested.'
'That was nothing,' said the violinist. 'They blew the whistle three bars after the start of the last movement of the Ninth. The singers needn't have come. And the whistle wasn't pitched in the right key, either. Royal Festival Hall, September '79. Jesus help us.'
Don't let them get away with it. Bev's wife's voice crackled out of the fire. 'What do we do?' Bev asked.
'We wait,' said Reynolds. 'We wait for one of hi
story's little surprises. I propose turning in, gentlemen.' To Bev he said: This factory closed down when it couldn't meet the '79 wage demands. The government didn't find it worth while to take it over. It was a mattress factory. We found plenty of mouldering mattresses in the warehouse. If you sleep here, you will feel very much like the filling of a sandwich. Trevor,' he said sharply to the black, 'you said something about knocking off some blankets.'
'Not easy, man.'
'You must really take our situation more seriously, Trevor.' To Bev: 'Have you any particular speciality, sir?'
'In thieving?'
'We don't like that word. We prefer euphemisms like nicking, knocking off, finding, scrounging. Were you ever in the army?'
'I was born,' said Bev, 'at the beginning of the Long Peace.'
'I see. The army gave me, brief as my service was, a wholesome attitude to property. Well, we'll see. Come, let me find you a place to sleep.' He produced a candle-end and lighted it at the fire.
The empty hull of the factory was cavernous and rusty. It rang hollow and forlorn. Reynolds lighted a smoking oil lamp with his end of candle. He showed Bev how to sleep - on a mattress with two other mattresses laid over him laterally. Bev felt warm but dirty. 'Does one wash?' he asked. 'Surely, successful nicking depends on a decent appearance?'
'For retail winning, yes. For wholesale, filth does no harm. When a meat truck is unloading, you present a dirty shoulder and receive a side of beef, then you take it into the store or shop in question and leave the back way. Sometimes there are problems. We can give it to you the easy way tomorrow, if you wish. A beard does no harm. A cat lick in cold water. But decent dress is essential for the knocking off of supermarket goods. We have what we call the C and A. Wilfred's little pleasantry - the Coat and At. Kept clean and ready in plastic. No shortage of plastic, plastic everywhere, free and indestructible, like God. Ah, on cue, as they say. Father Parsons, Dr Jones.'
'Mister, mister,' protested both at the same time. Parsons, who had just walked in, evidently drunk, inclined courteously, a skeletal man well muffled, nearly seven feet high. 'A very nearly altogether satisfactory evening,' he said. 'Some of the violent youth of Camden Town stood me whisky in exchange for a swathe of church history. They were sincerely interested. Very pro-Latin. Very much against the Lord's Supper as mere commemoration. Then the landlord of the pub said no religion in here and no politics neither. One of the youths said what else is there worth discussing, up your pipe mate or some such locution. Trouble, fighting, a timid brace of policemen. It spoilt the evening rather.' He yawned with loud relish: 'Yarawwwgh.' He fell on his mattress fully clothed and slept. One by one, two by two, the cheerless cavern filled with sleepers. Snores, chokes, groans, odd muttered or screamed words. No life, thought Bev before he too dropped off, no life for anyone.
1985 Page 16
