Game of Stones

by David Maughan Brown

  Cameron paused to finish what was left in his glass, he was aware that his heart-rate had risen at the reminder of men sitting in white cars. Brian had already drained his glass and was getting ready to buy the next round.

  ‘If the man in the car was there to keep the house under surveillance,’ Cameron added as Brian stood up, ‘that just goes to show how advanced the so-called first world is compared to the developing world: the Special Branch in South Africa had to make do with white Corollas. It might well have been the whiteness of the Volvo that gave me the creepy feeling that they might be watching my house. Whoever “they” might be.’

  While Brian bought the drinks, Cameron looked around at the other tables, spotting a few regulars he knew by sight but not by name. He had scrambled a couple of eggs for himself before he came out, but the sight, and particularly the smells, of the pies and the chips were making him feel hungry. Brian ate fish but no other meat, so he wouldn’t be tempted by pies.

  ‘Being made to pay for beer that doesn’t contain any alcohol is like being made to pay for the placebo in a randomized controlled trial,’ Brian observed as he sat down. ‘It goes severely against the grain, literally as well as figuratively. It feels like a total rip-off – value for money it certainly isn’t.’

  ‘What does an English teacher know about randomized controlled trials?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘As it happens, I’m involved in a trial of a new statin right now,’ Brian said. ‘I’m prepared to bet that they are giving me the placebo. Talking about going against the grain, isn’t it just possible that you were unduly aggressive to that policeman on Sunday? I don’t know exactly what you said to him, but you told me that you had “had a go” at him, and I’ve known you long enough to know what your “having a go” at someone tends to mean. You still seem to spend your life with your mainspring fully wound. If you let anything wind you up any further something is going to give.’

  ‘Why would you worry about my being aggressive towards them? You know as well as I do what happened at Hillsborough,’ Cameron said.

  ‘Yes, but not all the policemen at Hillsborough that afternoon behaved in the same way,’ Brian replied. ‘Some of the younger ones tried to open the gates to let the fans spill out onto the pitch, but they were prevented from doing so by more senior officers who were totally fixated on the idea that the cause of any agitation in any football ground had to be hooliganism. Of course what had happened at Heysel when Liverpool fans got out of control a few years before wouldn’t have helped. But some of the policemen at Hillsborough that afternoon tried very hard to resuscitate victims and were apparently badly traumatised.’

  ‘Even if they were,’ Cameron said, ‘that didn’t stop them from going along with the doctoring of their supposedly independent statements, and none of them would appear to have tried to contest the lies about the fans published by The Sun. Anyway, what makes you think that some of them were traumatised?’

  ‘I’ve come across a couple of ex-policemen who left the force after Hillsborough,’ Brian said. ‘They were both too young to retire. Both were extremely cagey, and wouldn’t talk specifics, but it was clear that they hadn’t been at all happy with what went down. You might be surprised to hear it, but some people over here do join the police out of idealistic motives.’

  Brian paused to take another swig of his beer. Cameron realised that the silence extended beyond their own table: the customers at two of the tables closest to them had stopped talking again and had been listening to what Brian was saying. He wasn’t sure whether Brian had woken up to the fact that other people were listening, or whether he would give a damn if he had, but before Cameron could think of a way of alerting him Brian went on.

  ‘It would have been more than their jobs were worth either to refuse to allow their reports to be doctored or to contradict the lies that their senior officers were concocting and passing on to The Sun. But a few of them did insist on writing their statements in their pocket books, as proper procedure demanded, rather than doing what they were instructed and writing them on loose sheets of paper which could be sanitised afterwards to eliminate any criticism of the police or exoneration of the fans. Your Constable Hudson might well have been one of the few. That might well be why he is still a constable all these years later.’

  Time to change the subject.

  ‘Nobody seems to have picked up on the police violence against the strikers at Orgreave in the same way that Phil Scraton has picked up on Hillsborough,’ Cameron said. ‘But their pre-emptive violence that day was so unabashed that it must have been approved at the highest levels. It won’t have been coincidental that that was also in South Yorkshire. The way the police set about distorting the truth by doctoring their statements was the obvious precedent for Hillsborough. Even the BBC deliberately distorted the story by editing their account so that it looked as if the police charge was in response to the miners throwing stones at them rather than the other way round. But you can bet your life there won’t ever be an inquiry into Orgreave that will peel the lies off, layer by layer, until it arrives at the truth in the way the Taylor report exposed the police lies about what happened at Hillsborough.’

  ‘I expect you are right,’ Brian said, ‘but enough politics – let’s talk about something really important like football instead.’

  As soon as he had moved to Sheffield, Brian had undergone conversion to a steadfast faith in Sheffield Wednesday that was impervious to mere results. Cameron had once asked why Sheffield Wednesday, rather than Sheffield United, and Brian had said it was simple: he had been born on a Wednesday and ‘Wednesday’s child is full of woe.’ That made Sheffield Wednesday the obvious team for Brian to support on at least two counts, and obliged Cameron to sing the praises of Sheffield United whenever their conversations turned to football. Cameron had always, in fact, supported Manchester United – notwithstanding Jules’s scepticism about what kind of ‘support’ anyone could give to a football team from six thousand miles away.

  As they finished their respective pints and got up to go, Cameron was surprised to feel his forearm being lightly gripped by a man who had been sitting with his back to them at the next table. He turned round to face the man – mid-sixties, deeply lined face, very curly greying hair, definitely not somebody he had ever been introduced to – and was even more surprised to be handed the torn-off bottom margin of a bar-food menu on which a note had been written. The man waved him on his way without saying anything.

  Sensing that the man hadn’t wanted attention to be drawn to what he had done, Cameron put on his coat and waited until he was out of the door and under the light in the vestibule before looking at the note. The writing was spidery and difficult to read, but it was decipherable. It gave a Sheffield phone number and said: ‘Arrested at Orgreave. Trial failed. Phone if you want to write about it.’

  The man must be nursing a long-standing grievance and had clearly been listening to their conversation. Cameron reflected that he might well want to write about Orgreave at some stage, but it couldn’t be much more than a footnote in a book focussing on what had happened since, rather than up to, 9/11. It would have to wait, but the phone number could be useful, so he folded it and put it in the top pocket of his jacket.

  ‘What was that about?’ Brian asked once they were outside on the pavement. ‘Do you know that man?’

  ‘Never seen him before,’ Cameron replied. ‘The note just said he had been at Orgreave and gave his phone number. I don’t have time to research that now – but it could be useful down the line. Are you going to the Palestine protest on Saturday?’

  ‘Probably not – I think I’ll have to visit my mother,’ Brian replied. ‘Are you?’

  ‘I’m supposed to be one of the speakers,’ Cameron said.

  ‘Well don’t let anything wind you up too tight,’ Brian said, ‘Ciao.’

  ‘Cheers,’ Cameron responded as he turned to walk the few hundre
d yards back to his house. A chilly wind had sprung up and he realised he should have worn his overcoat – but there wasn’t far to walk.

  The white Volvo was still there, and someone was still sitting behind the wheel. Cameron could feel his pulse starting to race and the familiar prickling of sweat under his arms. He should just walk past, see if he could see the man’s face – though he would almost certainly turn his face away again – take the car’s number, and walk on home. He should – but he felt the familiar surge of anger and knew he wouldn’t.

  He picked up speed over the hundred yards or so to the car and rapped on the driver’s window, again with a very strong sense of déjà vu. The driver’s flat cap was pulled well down over his eyes but Cameron could see the bottom half of an emaciated-looking face with very prominent cheek bones and a carefully cultivated moustache planted above paper thin, tightly compressed lips. Both hands waving across one another, fingers pointing upwards, palms facing outwards, conveyed the clearest possible message that their owner wanted nothing to do with anyone knocking on his window.

  Having established that there was no handgun to be seen on the passenger’s seat – just a tightly folded copy of The Sun – Cameron ignored the hands and carried on rapping. The right hand stopped waving and moved momentarily towards the ignition key, presumably to start the car, but decided against that and pressed the window button instead, opening the window three or four inches.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Cameron asked. ‘You’ve been here all bloody evening. Are you watching my house?’

  ‘Sari. No understand,’ the man said, with a look of blank incomprehension.

  For a brief moment Cameron didn’t understand either, wondering what on earth saris had to do with it.

  ‘I asked what you think you are doing here,’ he said, catching himself speaking more loudly and more slowly. Why was it that one’s invariable tendency was to associate a lack of facility in English with incipient deafness?

  ‘Are you watching my house?’ Cameron repeated.

  ‘Sari. No understand,’ the man said again.

  This wasn’t getting anywhere fast. If the man didn’t understand English what was he doing with a copy of The Sun? A copy that looked, from the way it had been folded, as if it must have been read. If the incomprehension was an act, he was pretty good at it. Cameron was sweating freely in spite of the chilly wind and could feel himself getting angrier.

  ‘You’ve read that disgusting newspaper, haven’t you?’ he asked. ‘How could you read it if you “no understand”? You are just pretending not to understand, aren’t you? What are you doing here?’

  ‘Sari. No understand,’ the man repeated again.

  ‘Fuck you, and fuck your taste in newspapers,’ Cameron said, boiling over. ‘Just remember not to try to wipe your arse with it or you will end up with more filth on you than you started.’

  As he turned away he heard the car window sliding shut behind him. That had been less than elegant on his part. Things would turn out much better if the man didn’t happen to be a reporter from The Sun. But why would a reporter from The Sun be sitting watching his house? There were two things he was certain of as he walked away. One was that the man, whoever he was, was watching his house. The other was that he could speak English perfectly well.

  Neil would not be giving him a gold star any time soon. He had got much too angry, much too quickly. But he was not being paranoid, he was sure it was his house that was being watched. Perhaps a silver star might be in order. When Neil was planting his strategies for anger-management he always ended with the mantra: ‘But if you find yourself getting uncontrollably angry, just make sure that the violence is verbal, not physical.’

  As he unlocked his front door – mortice, Yale and a deadbolt these days – Cameron knew he was going to have to work at making sure his growing sense of déjà vu didn’t overwhelm him. He could start by celebrating the fact that the man in the car hadn’t had a gun on the seat beside him. Nowadays, Neil notwithstanding, it was not the man in the car who had the automatic. If he ever needed it, the Sig Sauer would be there – somewhere between his mattresses.

  Chapter 4

  The next few days were unremittingly cold and wet. The last few belated daffodils were hunched against the wind, looking profoundly miserable, and most of the spring blossom was lying like sodden confetti, browning on lawns and pavements. There wouldn’t be much fruit to pick on the allotment when the time came. It was as if the weather gods had come across a few stray November days that had somehow been overlooked last time around and decided to slot them in now: April showers these certainly weren’t.

  Cycling to and from the university was an ordeal. At the best of times the seven hills of Sheffield – the city’s one claim to parity with Rome – posed a challenge to cyclists whose commute to work involved no aspiration whatever towards the Tour de France. Cameron hated the process of clambering out of dripping wet rain-gear when he got to the university, and having to ease his way back into it, still water-logged, to get home. Riding uphill against the wind in the pouring rain was about as unpleasant as any mode of transport could possibly be, but there wasn’t any parking for him at the university. Waiting for busses in the rain wasn’t a whole lot more pleasant, and once he had braved the hills and rain he could, at least, feel a glow of Outward Bound virtue when he finally made it back to his front door.

  Sleeplessness didn’t help when it came to finding the energy to ride bicycles up mountains. The phone had woken him again the night after his get-together with Brian. He hadn’t had the dream again, but that was only because he hadn’t managed to get to sleep again. These nights, he didn’t lie awake listening for the tramp of boots that would mean they had come to detain and torture him, which had been the compelling fear of his past life. He didn’t know enough about what was going on even to know whether it was people in boots he needed to be afraid of. All he knew was that, once again, his phone kept ringing in the early hours of the morning, and a man in a white car was watching his house. Finding himself under surveillance again was cause enough for sleeplessness.

  Cameron hadn’t seen Mutoni again. He suspected that they – whoever ‘they’ were this time – were watching his house in the hope of catching her visiting him again. That must mean that there were at least two of them, as Mutoni’s digs would be much the more obvious place to wait. How did they know she had been at his house? He was sure nobody had followed them from the allotment. Cameron hoped she wasn’t sleeping in her shed – there was no way any allotment shed, even one a lot less decrepit than his own, would be rainproof in this weather.

  When Cameron looked out of his bedroom window on the Saturday morning of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign march, he saw that the rain had relented somewhat, but hadn’t given up altogether. It was still drizzling enough to make a mess of the posters and to make the march unpleasant. Standing around listening to speeches afterwards would be even more so. He would make sure his speech was even shorter than usual – it wasn’t as if his audience would be numbered in the thousands.

  Cameron had started attending PSC meetings soon after arriving in Sheffield and it wasn’t long before he had found himself drawn onto the local committee. Although there were some differences, there were enough parallels between apartheid South Africa and the government of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to make solidarity with Palestine a no-brainer. Cameron had supported the various boycotts of South Africa when he was there, including the academic boycott. It seemed entirely logical now to support the Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions campaign launched by the Palestinian NGOs. If an academic boycott of apartheid South Africa had been morally right, which few now seemed to doubt, what made an academic boycott of Israel any different?

  In addition to letters to various newspapers, Cameron had published three articles about Israel and Palestine. The first, about South Africa’s various collaborations with I
srael during the apartheid years, most notably over the development of nuclear weapons, had been relatively uncontroversial. The history spoke for itself. The other two articles had been anything but uncontroversial. The first had drawn a parallel between the apartheid government’s deliberate fomenting of the internecine civil war between the African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party in Natal in the 1980s, and the government of Israel’s much more recent role in the conflict between Hamas and Fatah. The second had argued that the government of Israel often appeared deliberately to over-react to Palestinian provocation in order to elicit extremes of criticism that could then be dismissed as anti-Semitism. That opened the door for all other criticism of the government of Israel’s behavior to be condemned as anti-Semitic by association. Cameron had ended the article with a prediction that the time would come, and wouldn’t be too long in arriving, when a consensus would be reached that anyone who criticized the government of Israel was a closet holocaust-denier.

  During the apartheid years, Cameron had come in for a barrage of flak in response to articles and letters to editors that were critical of the South African government, but the flak had never been as virulent or as obviously coordinated as the vehement reaction to these two articles. He had been accused not just of being anti-Semitic but, as he had predicted, of being a proponent and advocate of the holocaust. His Head of Department, his Dean and the Vice Chancellor had all received vitriolic letters demanding that he be fired – all signed by different people, usually with illegible signatures, but using remarkably similar wording. Abusive letters had arrived for him at both the university and at home. The university address would have been easy enough to get hold of but, given that he had only recently moved to a different rented house, whoever was coordinating the fan mail clearly had sources of very up-to-date intelligence. His new telephone number was ex-directory, which made the continuing 3am calls the more worrying.