1985 (17 page)

‘– is taking a serious view of the matter. It is believed that the fire was started by irresponsible elements who have not yet been identified, though Scotland Yard is already at work on the following up of what are described as significant clues. It is felt that deliberate advantage was taken of the firemen's strike, now in its third week, and of the sympathetic strike that broke out yesterday at army barracks in the London area. In the absence of professional anti-pyro services, said Mr Halifax, Minister of Public Safety, citizens must be on the look out for further acts of
wanton incendiarism and, at the same time, should acquaint themselves with the fire precaution information made available by their communication services.' Bev, sobbing, ‘
Oh my God
,' was out of that room and fumbling with the multilocks while the announcer was saying, ‘Soccer – tonight's fixtures,' and Bessie, as ever slow on the uptake, was wailing before switching back to her cartoon. An old Popeye was just coming on. She was content. And then she remembered her hunger. But Bev was out of the apartment before her complaints grew loud.

He stumbled sobbing downstairs. The Irwin boy, still unconscious, lay waiting for an ambulance. Mr Withers was probably back at lunch. Bev ran to Chiswick High Street. He saw no taxis. He saw a bus, Brentfordbound, snarled up in the traffic. He boarded it and then remembered he had no money for his fare. To hell; the shock of the sight of the burning sky, his own distress, were not these payment enough? They proved to be as the bus crawled on. The black conductor said: ‘You look pretty sick, man. Okay, you pay nother time.'

And then he was there, trying to push through the police, for the police were not at present on strike, and shouting, ‘My wife, my wife, it's my wife, blast you.' The sky was puce, damson, gamboge, primrose, daffodil, smoke, flinders of destruction going up like thin black angels, and the heat was a huge shouldering bully. A few windows were square eyes empty of all but flame, sad, at length sadly collapsing. There were a couple of collapsing doctors in singed surgical coats. Beds and stretchers were being loaded on to floats borrowed from the nearby brewery. ‘My wife,' cried Bev. ‘Mrs Jones, Ellen, Ward 4c' The doctors shook their heads as if shaking were physically painful. ‘You,' cried Bev to an old woman, grey hair burned off, slackly naked under a blanket, ‘you know me, you know my wife.'

‘Don't let them get away with it,' breathed a known voice.

‘Oh, my God, Ellie, Ellie.' Bev knelt to the stretcher that awaited loading. His wife and not his wife. There are parts of the body reluctant to be combusted, but they are mostly bone. He was on his knees beside her and then, desperately sobbing, lying across her, seeking to embrace, picking up a handful of scorched skin and, under it, cooked meat. She could not feel anything now. But that had been her voice. The last thing she said had not been love, I love, look after Bessie, God what a waste, we'll meet. It had been: ‘Don't let them –' ‘My dear poor beloved,' he sobbed.

‘That one,' said a weary voice high above him. ‘for DD. Better out of it. A lot of them would.' Disposal of the dead, evacuation of the living. The brewery floats were chalked DD and EL. Bev was pulled kindly to his feet. ‘Can't do anything, mate,' said a kind rough voice. ‘It's a crying shame, that's all. It's the world we're living in.'

He went back home. He walked back, seeing in a shop window Bev Jones, his hair singed by a small flame, prophetic, a message, his jaw down, mouth shapeless, eyes fierce. In the hallway of Hogarth Highrise the inert body still lay, awaiting an ambulance that would probably not now come. Bev mounted the stairs.

It was not easy to make it clear to Bessie what precisely had happened, that she was now without a mother, that her mother had been cooked to death by irresponsible elements. That those whose office it was to put out fires had struck some weeks back for more money. That the army had – intimidated or else through genuine ideological conviction of the right to withhold labour – mutinied. But mutiny was an old-fashioned word, its quaint inept syllables (mute, tiny; mew, tinny) to be associated only with old films about the British Navy. It belonged with words like honour and duty. That men and women could withhold their labour on a point of principle was universally accepted as a right, and the right had at last (after certain pointless wrangles about honour and duty) crossed from the shop-floor to the barrack-square. For the moment, he thought, he would say nothing to Bessie. He had quite enough to think about, as well as to suffer, without having to suffer the fatigue of probing for a thinking area in Bessie's brain. Bessie was watching some ancient film about the Americans fighting the Japanese. She had been eating cereals from a box into which she had poured milk, regardless of leakage, and sprinkled sugar. So much was evident from the floor around her. That was because, in his urgency, he had forgotten to relock the kitchen, in which Bessie could not be trusted. He went quietly to the kitchen now and set about preparing a cooked meal for Bessie. Everybody had a right to a cooked meal at lunch-time. It was long past lunch-time, but the right would stand no nonsense from the feeble arguments of the clock. As for himself, he would not be going back to work today. Tomorrow would be different. Tomorrow would be very different.

He grilled some sausages, reconstituted dried potatoes into a puree, made tea.

‘Bessie, dear,' he said, taking her plate in to her. Poor motherless child, watching the Yanks knocking hell out of the Japs. He sat in the worn aubergine-coloured armchair, hands folded, watching her eat. She shovelled it all in near-sightlessly. She belched in finality, scratching her bared pubes. Poor motherless
innocent
child. When
THE END
came in brassy triumph, he gently switched off the set. She made an animal noise of resentment and put out her hand, but he caught the hand tenderly and said: ‘I have to tell you things.'

‘But it's Spiro and Spero now.'

‘Spiro and Spero, whoever they are, must wait. What I have to tell you is that your mother is dead. She was burnt to death in a fire at the hospital. Do you understand me, Bessie? Your dear mother, my dear wife. We won't see her ever again.' Then he wept, sniffing, ‘
I'b sorry I cad't help id
,' as he looked for his handkerchief. But the kumina gang had taken that too. His swimming eyes saw Bessie looking at him, mouth open, trying to take it in. She was looking into the future, trying to visualize a life without a mother. She said:

‘Who'll cook Christmas dinner for us then?' It was a beginning: she was contemplating a future from which certain familiar amenities had been removed. ‘You don't cook as good as mum,' she said. Then she began to snivel. She was taking in more now. ‘Poor mum. Poor me.'

‘I'll learn, we'll learn together. It's you and me together now, Bess girl.' And he turned eyes of grim pity to her, a child of thirteen who looked twenty and a blowsy twenty at that, over-ripe for the bearing of moronic workers for T U K, or The United Kingdom, or Tucland as Bill, the Symbolic Worker, called it. Bev gauged her capacity to learn anything other than the numbers on the knobs of the television dial, a victim of bad medicine, bad air, bad food, farcical education, a despicable popular culture. A brain that had reached seven and then stood still. Last year there had been compulsory fitting of a ring contraceptive too deep in for her fingers to fiddle with. Well, it was right, he thought, right.
Don't let them get away with it
. If he was going to challenge the system, Bessie was not likely to be much good as a helpmeet.

Having taken in a certain future emptiness, enough to be going on with, Bessie now partially filled it by switching on the tailend of Spiro and Spero. Bev sighed and shook his head. Spiro and Spero were a pair of cartoon dolphins who spoke English on the Chinese model: You Say He Not Come I Know He Come I Know He Come Soon.

He knew that shock was going to strike soon, so he made a cushion. In the kitchen cupboard was a half-bottle of emergency Australian brandy (Beware of Foreign Imitations). He took it down, sat at the kitchen table, and began to sip from it. The tap dripped dully, like life. The calendar facing him showed bronzed naked girls in the snow, their mouths in a rictus of winter joy exhibiting back-fillings.
DECEMBER
1984. Ellen had ringed 10 December as the day she was to enter hospital, 20 December as the day she would probably leave it. It had been a matter of Toye's disease, tedious tests anyway to see if Dr Zazibu's diagnosis had been correct, and, if the showings were positive, the excision of the spleen. An altogether safe operation, Mr Manning the surgeon had said, his eyes belying the words. Thank your stars, young man, for the National Health Service. But Bev had looked up Toye's disease in the Public Library. Not at all altogether safe.

He held back his tears and swigged the brandy. A burnt sugar taste was the prefix to the big burning word in the belly, and the word began a vague romantic or sentimental poem of pure feeling: there's a plan, a meaning, an all-provident Providence. He let the tears come and began to enjoy them. Not at all altogether safe. And then he knew, that there was going to be no shock. Nothing unforeseen had really happened. Toye's disease. ‘. . . Removal of the spleen may effect a temporary remission of symptoms but the prognosis is, in 85 per cent of cases, negative.' He had expected Ellen to die, though not so brutally. As for her last words, as for the thing he had to do – well, a matter of principle had now been given sharp teeth. ‘My wife's last words, brothers, don't I have to follow my wife's dying request?' But the principle itself had had sharpish enough teeth five years ago, though soon blunted . . .

His uncle George and aunt Rosa had emigrated to Australia in the 1960s. They'd been happy enough in Adelaide, that rather strait-laced city, going to church, eating oysters; George efficient at his linotype job. Nearly twenty years of it, dinkum Aussies both, never a tear for the England they'd left behind. And then Rosa had become ill in 1978, the very worst illness, a paralysis that meant her being encased in an iron lung as part of the permanent furniture of the sitting-room of the Gloria Soame (so, as his uncle said in a letter, it was called in Stryne or Australian) on Parkside Avenue.

Then, without warning, the electricity workers struck.
Strike
– the
right, terrible word. There was no time to rush her and her iron lung to the hospital with its emergency supply. For want of the animating current she died. Was murdered, George had screamed. And then – Ah, it had been in all the newspapers. He had accused Jack Rees, the strike leader, of murder. The union itself took no blame. The strike had been wildcat, unofficial. Yes, screamed his uncle, but who invented the weapon? My curses on the whole union system, to the deepest hell with syndicalism. And, while I'm about it, let me say that no man has a right to withdraw his labour, not in any circumstances, for only by his willingness to work is a man defined as a man. It was in this evident madness that Uncle George shot dead Alfred Wigg, the General Secretary of the Electrical Workers' Syndicate of the Commonwealth of Australia, while Wigg was getting out of his official car outside his private residence. Jack Rees went free. Uncle George was living out his confused and sometimes violent days in a pleasant green place called the Patrick White Retreat.

And there was another thing – a thing that never got into the British or TUK or Tucland papers, a matter of journalistic discretion of bullying or bribery or the quiet invocation of some regulation about public order. On a January day in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA (which some said, perhaps jocularly, stood for Unhappy Syndicalized America), with the temperature at 35 degrees Fahrenheit below freezing, the entire city's power supplies were threatened with indefinite intermission unless, by presidential fiat, certain extravagant wage claims were immediately granted the members of the Federal Electrical Workers' Union. Fifteen thousand deaths from hypothermia, very hard to hush up, followed defiance of the threat. And then, as had to happen, the workers got what they wanted. Then other workers tried the same hellish technique in other areas of essential amenity – gas, water, fuel oil, food delivery. The National Guard, which still attached a meaning to the term mutiny, had been called out. Struggles with picket lines, shots fired, finally shame and the restoration of order and decency when Big Jim Sheldon's own son was brutally killed. Bev had known all about it. Bev's cousin Bert had long been settled in Duluth, Minnesota. He had written letters. When letters did not get through it was not because of censorship, only because of postal strikes. There had been no postal strikes at that time; the letters had got, or gotten, through.

And so those dying words –
Don't let them get away with it
– were
really the echo of an old song. Bev sighed over the near-empty bottle of Australian brandy as he foresaw himself at last translating a long-rumbling disaffection into action. He did not want to be a martyr for a freedom that, anyway, few believed in any more or even understood. But he felt himself, as it were, buying a ticket for a train whose destination he could not know, the sole passenger. All he knew was that the journey was necessary.

Devlin peered at the computer print-out. ‘Bev?' he said. ‘That's really your first name? Not an abbreviation for Beverley or something?'

‘It could stand for three things,' said Bev. ‘Beveridge, Bevin or Bevan. Those were big names when I was born. In Socialism, I mean. My father was a great Socialist.'

‘Beveridge was a Liberal,' Devlin said. ‘But, of course, Social Insurance was essentially a radical idea.'

‘A radical idea borrowed from Bismarck's Germany,' said Bev. Devlin frowned at him and said:

‘You sound like an educated man.' The term itself sounded old-fashioned, but Devlin was a man in his sixties, and his vocabulary had not always kept pace with the development of WE, or Workers English. ‘You don't sound like –' He looked down at the print-out. ‘– Like a Confectionery Operative. And, ah, yes, of course, it's all here. You actually taught European history. At Jack Smith Comprehensive. It doesn't say here why you gave it up.'