1985 (19 page)

Bev couldn't help smiling as he strained his neck, still looking upward at the flying wheel, remembering that ownership was incompatible with the philosophy of labour, and that the TUC rented this building from the Arabs. Where would Tucland be without the Arabs? The oil, at a price ever more exorbitant, flowed in from Islam and kept Tucland's industries going. And Islam was not only the hot desert but also the cold ocean, for North Sea oil had been mortgaged to the Arabs for a government loan when the International Monetary Fund had closed its cashboxes to Britain for the last time, and the loan had been called in and the mortgage foreclosed, and the crescent moon banners waved from the chilly derricks. The Arabs were in Britain to stay. They owned Al-Dorchester, Al-Klaridges, Al-Browns, various Al-Hiltons and Al-Idayinns, with soft drinks in the bars and no bacon for breakfast. They owned things that people did not even know they owned, including distilleries and breweries. And, in Great Smith Street, soon would stand the symbol of their strength – the Masjid-ul-Haram or Great Mosque of London. To remind Britain that Islam was not just a faith for the rich, plenty of hard-working Pakistanis and East African Muslims flowed in without hindrance, for the adjustment of the immigration laws (which had had too-stringent quota clauses) in favour of the Islamic peoples was a necessary political consequence of Arab financial patronage. Yet the workers who had forgotten their Christianity were supposed to sing, ‘Scorn we a heaven hereafter'. They ought, thought Bev in a flash of insight, to be more fearful than they were of a people that believed in a heaven hereafter.

Like good Muslims, the British millers who produced what Britain called flour – a fine white dust with carcinogens but little nutritive content – struck at sunset, not at dawn. At dawn on Christmas Eve there was no bread, for the bakers locked the doors on their flour-stocks and also went on strike. The confectionery workers went on strike too. Housewives, who were not yet unionized, grew angry when they found no loaves or cakes around and rioted in the High Streets. The Wages Board responded
at three in the afternoon by promising favourable consideration of the millers' demands for triple-time pay for night-work, and the strikes were ended half an hour before the Christmas holidays were due to start for regular day workers, so that all could toast the festive season in the boss's time. There was still no bread for Christmas.

Bev, shoulders straight, chest out, legs like water, reported for duty as usual at eight in the morning at Penn's Chocolate Works. There was a picket waiting for him. There were policemen, chewing their straps. The police, though reluctantly, grabbed a man who threw a small stone at Bev, even though he missed.

‘Whose side are you bloody rozzers on?' went the shout.

‘You know the law as well as what I do,' said the sergeant unhappily. A van from Thames Television drew up. Bev waited. His act would have no validity unless available for the world to witness. This was the new way. It's Really Real when it's Seen on the Screen. Jeff Fairclough got out, hands deep in smart burberry, red hair waving in the breeze. A man with a hand-held camera and a recordist with a Stellavox followed. Fairclough and Bev nodded to each other. He had telephoned Fairclough the previous evening. Fairclough had once been a colleague, a teacher of English until the advent of the new WE syllabus. (‘Usage is the only law.
You was
is the form used by eighty-five per cent of the British population.
You was
is therefore correct. The pedantic may reflect that this was the regular form used by pedants like Jonathan Swift in the eighteenth century.') Bev and the team marched through the open gateway. The strikers put on a great act of snarling and cursing for the camera. The sound recordist didn't record. They could get the bloodying and buggering from stock. Bev led the way to the executive wing. Young Mr Penn, very nervous, came forth to meet them. The Stellavox man put his headphones on, switched on, gave a thumbs up to Fairclough, who said: ‘Action.'

‘Good morning, Mr Penn. I'm reporting for work as usual.'

‘You can't, you know it, we're closed. There's a strike on.'

‘
I'm
not striking, Mr Penn. I claim my rights as a free man. I'm here to work.'

‘You can't. You damn well know you can't. Be reasonable.'

‘Are you denying me my basic right as a worker?'

‘Don't be so bloody stupid. You know bloody well what the position is.'

‘Are you a Quaker, Mr Penn – a member of the Society of Friends?'

‘I don't see what the hell that's got to do with anything. Now bugger off.'

‘You're dismissing me, Mr Penn? On what grounds? Redundancy? Inefficiency? Insubordination?'

‘I'm not dismissing you. I'm giving you the day off.'

‘You deny one of the basic tenets of the Quaker chocolate manufacturers – an employee's right to work, his total immunity from any exterior coercion that persuades him not to?'

‘You know the position as well as I do. You're in a closed shop. You can do nothing about it and neither can I. Can't you at least go through the motions, man?'

‘I'll go through the motions with pleasure. Open up and let me get to my machine.'

‘But the power's off. Oh, go away.' Mr Penn was in deep distress.

‘You think this is just?' said Bev. ‘You think you're being just in the way your ancestral co-religionists were just?'

‘It's not the point, I tell you. This is the modern age.'

‘You and I, Mr Penn, have entered into contractual relations. As employer and employee. Do you propose breaking that contract?'

‘Right,' said Mr Penn grimly. ‘Come with me.' And he led the way (the cameraman ahead, walking backwards) to the works. Soon Bev stood by his cold machine among other cold machines, being interviewed by Jeff Fairclough.

‘So this, Mr Jones, is your way of denouncing the principle of strike action. Don't you consider you're being rather old fashioned?'

‘Is justice old fashioned? Is compassion? Is duty? If the modern way approves the burning to death of innocent people with firemen standing by and claiming their workers' rights, then I'm glad to be old fashioned.'

‘You realize, Mr Jones, that you're inviting your dismissal from your job? That, moreover, no other job can possibly be available to you? That the closed shop is a fact of life and applies to every single gainful activity?'

‘The individual worker has the right to decide whether or not to withhold his labour. My curse on syndicalism.'

‘You've just condemned yourself to permanent unemployment.'

‘So be it.'

The camera stopped whirring. The recordist switched off and packed up. ‘Was I all right?' asked Bev.

‘You was fine,' grinned Fairclough. ‘But God help you.'

They left. The picket, held back by unhappy police, jeered and threatened. Bev was given a lift by Thames Television to his bank, where he drew out £150, noting that he now had a credit balance of £11.50. He went to do the Christmas shopping. Poor motherless Bessie must not be deprived of her right to seasonal stuffing. She knew what Christmas was about. Her class teacher, Mrs Abdul-bakar, had told them the whole story. Nabi Isa, last of the great prophets before Mohammed (may his name be blessed), whom it was in order for the Peoples of the Scripture to call Jesus, had been born to tell the world of the goodness and justice of Allah Most High. Therefore you had to stuff and make yourself sick.

Bev was in the kitchen drinking Christmas Eve whisky when he heard Bessie call: ‘Dad, dad, there's this man that looks like you.' He went in and saw himself on the news, but he did not hear himself. The appropriate teleworkers' union would have been at work there, threatening strike action if heresy were allowed to be spoken to the world. He saw himself with Mr Penn and at his cold machine for about ten seconds as a brief pendant to the regional news, and he heard the flippant newsreader say something about here's one man that we can wish a merry Christmas to but not a happy New Year, and then, to the tune of Chopin's Funeral March on wa-wa trumpets, they cut to a chalk-scrawled hanged man on a wall. And that's the end of the local news. Bessie said: ‘He's like you, dad.' Bev said:

‘He has to be, girl. He
is
me.' Bessie looked at her father with an awe she had never before shown: my dad on the telly.

‘Why was you on the telly then?'

Bev sighed and wondered whether to tell her all. No, let it wait. Let her have her Christmas stuffing, poor kid. So they sat together that evening chewing dates and cracking walnuts, her eyes glued to the screen, his restless, sometimes closing unhappily, and they saw
White Christmas
with Saint Bing and Rosemary Clooney, and when
Arab Hour
came on they switched over to a new musical version of Charles Dickens's
A Christmas Carol
, in which Ebenezer Scrooge was not reformed into a model paternalistic employer but, scared by his ghostly visitants, saw what the bloody power of the workers was going to be
bloody well like, mate, and celebrated Boxing Day by being cowed by the new Clerical Workers' Union under its leader, Bob Cratchit. Then Bev served them both, on the floor in front of the telly, with the electric fire glowing away, a nice big cold Christmas Eve meal of ham and mixed pickles followed by sherry trifle he'd made with old dry sponge cakes and eggless custard, and they drank Australian sherry (Beware of Foreign Imitations) and big mugs of sweet tea. There was a late late movie called
The Bells of St Mary's
, with Saint Bing again as a straw-hatted RC priest and Ingrid Bergman as a nun, but it was so cut about as not to make much sense, and then Bessie went to her squalid bed (Bev had neglected the laundry) and woke her father up at four in the morning screaming about a man with claws and three heads. She had wetted the bed in her fright, and Bev in some unease let her come into his, his and poor dead Ellen's. The poor girl was naked, having soaked her already soiled night-dress, and this made Bev very uneasy. When she had got the nightmare out of her head (there were other details than the three-headed man, such as horrid white snakes and hands clutching out of dirty pools of water) she grew calm and said:

‘You was on the telly, dad.'

Then she approached him in a frank amorousness that he had to fight off. Poor kid, she was going to be a hell of a problem. He decided to cool her down by telling her what the situation was. It wouldn't spoil her Christmas: she'd have forgotten it all by tomorrow morning. He said:

‘Listen carefully, Bessie my love.'

‘Yes darling, I'm listening. Put your hand there.'

‘No, I will not. Listen, bad times are coming. I'm going to be out of a job. There's going to be no money coming in at all, not even from the National Insurance. They'll probably throw us out of this flat because I won't be able to pay the rent. The bad times are coming because it's my stupidity that's making me jobless – that's what they'll tell you –'

‘Who'll tell me? Put your hand there.'

‘Your teachers and the other kids whose parents will have told them all about it. But you have to understand why I'm doing it, Bessie. No man has to be crucified. Jesus didn't have to be. But there are some things that a man can't submit to, and I can't submit to what the unions mean. Do you understand?'

‘What's croosy whatever it was? Why won't you put your hand there?'

‘Because you're my daughter, and there are certain things not permitted between father and daughter. I want you to understand what I'm telling you, Bessie. Your poor dying mother said:
Don't let them get away with it.
And, although it must seem mad to you, that's why I'm setting myself up against the whole power of the unions. I can't beat them, but I can at least be a martyr to the cause of freedom, and some day, perhaps not till I'm long dead, people will remember my name and perhaps make a kind of banner out of it and fight the injustice that the unions stand for. Do you understand me, Bessie?'

‘No. And I think you're mean. Why won't you put your –'

‘Well, perhaps you'll understand this, Bessie. You'll have to go into what they call a Girl's Home.'

‘A what?'

‘A place where the State will look after you, all girls together, until you're old enough to get a job.'

She thought about that for at least a minute, then she said: ‘Will there be the telly?'

‘Of course there will. No home complete without one, not even a State Girl's Home. You'll get your telly all right.'

‘Perhaps they'll have one of these new wide ones.'

‘I shouldn't be surprised.'

‘They can show the big wide pictures on them, like that one we saw that time with the monsters.'

‘You mean
Sky Rape
?'

‘Was that what it was called? You and me and mum saw it.' A tone that might have been called victorious came into her voice. ‘And now it's me that's here and not mum. Put your hand there. You've
got
to.' Bev turned over wretchedly and pretended to go to sleep. Bessie beat at his back with her fists for a time and then seemed to settle to masturbation. The sooner she got in that Girls' Home the better. The sooner – The first
waktu
of the day started from the Chiswick mosque. No God but Allah.

Next day Bev cooked the stuffed turkey and the cauliflower (it had cost £3.10) and the potatoes and heated up the canned Christmas pudding, while Bessie divided her attention between the telly and her presents – a transistor doll with long provocative legs and an insolent leer, an earplug stereo radio twin set, the Telennial for 1985. After dinner, which Bessie conceded was as good as what mum could do, they
listened to the King's Speech on the telly. King Charles III, a rather podgy bat-eared man in his late thirties, a near-contemporary of Bev's, spoke of this happy and sacred time and God bless you all and, at the end, he grinningly wiggled a finger offscreen and Her Majesty the Queen (not to be confused with Elizabeth II, the retired Queen, now Queen Mum) came on, a pretty dark woman with many pearls, also grinning. The King put an arm round the Queen and both waved at the viewers as though they, the viewers, were going off in a train. Then there was
God Save the King
.