1985 (20 page)

In the evening, while they were eating their cold turkey and ham and fried-up spuds and cauli, accompanied by champagne cider, and watching
Holiday Inn
, once more with Saint Bing (whom Bessie took to be a kind of obligatory Christmas presence), the electricity went off. The film rushed at the speed of light to an horizon where it became a pinpoint and then vanished, the electric fire glowed duller and duller and then became irritable noises of contraction. They had no candles, they were really in the dark. Bessie howled and wailed in real anguish.

‘
Now
do you understand?' growled her father. ‘
Now
do you see what I'm fighting against?' She howled that she thought she saw, but the poor motherless child was incapable of generalization. Medicine must progress, man.

On 27 December Bev went back to work and at once the all-out whistle blew. Obedient to the contract with the union, the management formally dismissed Bev. Bev went to the Labour Exchange, where he insisted on seeing the Director, not the mere chewing girl underlings with dark after-Christmas rings under their eyes. He informed the Director of his position, and the Director brusquely told him that he could not be registered at the Exchange since he was unwilling to abide by the fundamental condition of employment in any of the scheduled trades, which meant all imaginable trades except that of poet. Formally unemployed and unemployable, Bev went to see about the drawing of
unemployment benefit under the provisions of the National Insurance Act. He was told that he was not entitled to anything since he had wantonly rejected employment inasmuch as he refused to accept the conditions of employment as laid down in the Trade Union Enactment (Compulsory Membership) Act of 1979. Bev said:

‘I have paid money into the fund. Every week since I began work at the age of twenty –'

‘Why did you start so late?' asked the shrewish fat blue-rinsed woman behind the bars, irritably tapping her pencil on the little counter.

‘I went to university. I took a degree.'

‘Compulsory payment into the National Insurance fund does not automatically entitle you to receive benefits. Certain conditions have to be fulfilled, and you are unwilling to fulfil them.'

‘Then what do I do? Do I starve?'

‘You fulfil the conditions.'

Bev went to a pub for a half-pint of bitter and a cold sausage with free mustard. He telephoned his Member of Parliament, or rather his secretary, and arranged for an appointment in the late afternoon. Parliament was not sitting: the Christmas recess was on. Mr Prothero would see Mr Jones at his five o'clock ‘surgery'.

J. R. Prothero
MP
was a smart sleek man in early middle age, dressed in tweeds as for a country week-end, smelling of an aftershave lotion that was aggressively urban. He smoked a pipe which he had difficulty in keeping alight; the ashtray before him was a communal grave of dead matches. He listened to Bev's story and said:

‘What do you expect me to do about it? Change the law?'

‘Laws
are
changed. It's a slow job, I know. The House of Commons, I was taught, is where unjust laws are opposed and just laws propounded.'

‘You must have been taught that a very long time ago.' He had his pipe alight now and sucked two or three times. Then it went out. ‘Damn and blast.'

‘Why don't you give it up?' said Bev.

‘Give what up?' said Mr Prothero with sudden sharp and defensive suspicion.

‘Smoking. It's not worth it, with tobacco at £3.50 an ounce, and you obviously don't enjoy it.'

Mr Prothero relaxed. ‘I thought you meant – you know.'

‘Well,' said Bev, ‘You must have asked yourself often enough what
use Parliament is. I'll confess I've come to you with no hope. Like a fool, I suppose, living in the past when Members looked after their constituencies. But I have to suck a bitter pleasure out of the hopelessness of it all. I have to go through the motions of believing that democratic freedom still exists. It's like trying to believe in one's wife's fidelity when you see her lying on the hearthrug with the milkman. Till death us do part. Government for the people. Silly, isn't it? Nostalgia.'

Bev saw that Mr Prothero's inefficiency with pipe-lighting was, in a way, volitional. He kept striking, and, unlike so many of his constituents, he struck to no avail. But the fruitless process gave him an opportunity to put off answering awkward questions or, as now, being even minimally helpful. Still, he said at last, putting down a still cold pipe: ‘You can't fight history.'

‘Ah, interesting. And who makes history?'

‘Movements. Trends. Elans. Processes. Not who, what. What's happened in Britain has not happened through bloody and wasteful revolution. We've gone our democratic way and not, in the process of changing, seen any violent signs of change. And then one morning we wake up and say: The Rule of the Proletariat is Here. What has still not happened in countries where nasty revolutions took place has happened here without trouble. I don't know what Karl Marx would say if he came back, but –'

‘Marx would say that the desired thing hasn't happened, that the means of production are not in the hands of the workers, that capitalism has not been destroyed.'

‘It's being destroyed,' said Mr Prothero. ‘Fast. There's hardly a firm in the country that hasn't passed into the hands of the State. The State's the great employer.'

‘Exactly. And against the employer is set the employee. The State's the dirty horrible boss and the unions fight it as though it wore a top hat. And they always win, that's the trouble. The government's a mere machine for printing paper money. Look at the state of inflation. And is one single voice in parliament raised against the imminent ruin of the country? It's time some of you risked your jobs and spoke out for liberty and decency and, yes, plain old-fashioned common sense.'

Mr Prothero picked up his old enemy and tried once more to set fire to it. The graveyard of dead matches was rising into a tumulus. He gave
up bitterly and said: ‘There's the Whips. We just vote in the bills or abstain from voting. Our constituencies aren't regional any more, whatever they're called. Our constituents are a cross-section of the whole syndicalist system. It's no good anyone complaining. That's the historical process nobody can oppose. It's not like in the days of Fox and Burke and Wilkes. There's just two collectives.'

‘It might as well be one. The notion of opposition is a farce. Socialists and Conservatives – nothing but names with a nostalgic historical meaning. What difference is there now between your ideologies? Whoever's running the government, the workers can reduce it to impotence. Do what we say or we strike. And,' his voice grew deep and harsh, ‘there's a day or two of token resistance in the name of holding back inflation or keeping our exports competitive. Then more money printed with nothing to back it. Token resistance to show the government's really governing. Except that it's not token resistance to those who die of hypothermia or, Jesus Christ help us, hyperthermia.'

‘I'm sorry about what happened,' said Mr Prothero pitilessly. ‘You must be feeling very bitter. The firemen go back to work tomorrow, if that's any consolation.'

‘Unfortunately, I don't have another wife for them not to burn to death. All right, forget it, I have to forget it. I come to you now to ask – to demand, I suppose – that you do something about me. A man jobless and likely to be for ever, unentitled to State benefit, because he's followed the dictates of his individual conscience and refused to yield to the collective will.'

‘You know damned well I can't do anything,' said Mr Prothero, clutching his pipe peevishly. ‘You're fighting history. I've got more sense than to try to fight it. Strictly speaking I'm forbidden even to open my mouth in a
token
way on your behalf. Because you're outside the law. Union membership is a basic condition of franchise. You're not represented any more.'

‘I join the little old ladies and the lunatics and the criminals?'

‘There's a Senior Citizens' Union, as you damned well know. Lunatic – criminal – yes, I suppose those terms apply. You're on your own, brother.' It was not clear whether
brother
was used out of Socialist force of habit, or with the contemptuous irony it sometimes carried in old American movies. It certainly conveyed clearly to Bev his condition of brotherlessness. Bev said:

‘I expected all this, of course. In a way I'm courting my own ruin. Call me a witness, which, in Greek, is
martyr
. But I had to go through the motions – pretend that an engine is still working when it's only a disregarded item in a museum. I hope my situation gives you bad dreams, Mr Prothero. Screw you. And get rid of that bloody stupid pipe.' Then he went out.

He went back to his flat where Bessie, still on holiday, was eating the remains of the cold turkey with her fingers and gawping at Red, Rod and Rid on the television. He sat down wearily and wondered whether there was anything he could sell to put off the coming day of eviction. There was nothing except Ellen's clothes and a couple of old Suitcases. The furniture belonged to the landlord, a faceless collective with computers that would brook no appeal to such human weaknesses as compassion. The eviction notice would come in a week or so, and then the RPs or Rent Police or bullyboys would arrive to enforce the eviction. He did not even own the television set: it was rented from Visionem Ltd. The end of the month, which was also the end of the year, was coming up. Repossession Day. He said:

‘Bessie, I think the time has come. Get your things together.'

‘What for? It's Dish and Dash in a minute.'

‘Very well. After Dish and Dash, whatever they are. You and I must go you know where.'

‘Where?' Her eyes had not left the screen.

Bev went to the kitchen and drank the last of the Christmas whisky. Anything to sell here? He opened a drawer: all landlord's cutlery. Wait, what was this? It was a flick-knife, rather a good one, sharp and solid, the blade quick to respond to the flickswitch. It had been put there to keep it away from Bessie. Where had he obtained it? Ah, yes – the two six-year-old boys once on this very street, threatening a five-year-old girl. Why? For no purpose except sheer disinterested terrorization. He had hit the boys and grabbed the knife. If his MP had, more or less officially, assigned him to the criminal classes, he might as well be criminally armed. He put the knife in his trouser-pocket. Then he went to drag Bessie away from whatever it was that followed Dish and Dash. She did not wail, it was only the news. ‘Let's be quick,' she said. ‘There's
Sex Boy
on soon.' Home was anywhere, so long as there was a telly.

The new year came in with bitter weather. Bessie was snug in a Girl's Home in Islington, whence she travelled daily to school in what her father, having already seen some of her co-inmates, ironically called a virginibus. Then she travelled back to tea and the telly. Bev himself slept where he could – in Salvation Army hostels, in railway termini and, on one occasion, in Westminster Abbey. His bit of money soon ran out – £7.50 in notes and deckers. The decker was the old florin that the Victorians had introduced with a view, later wisely abandoned, to decimalizing the coinage – ten of them to a sovereign. The decimalization of the 1960s, to force Britain into line with the rest of the European Community, had brought one hundred new pence (called, with proper contempt,
p
), but these, with the advance of inflation, had soon lost their meaning. Ten deckers to a pound, and no finer division. Soon, Bev foresaw, the Tucland quid would be like the Italian lira, only theoretically fissile. For a decker he could buy a small box of matches, if he wished to, though he did not see the use. Tobacco, the lonely and idle man's comfort, was beyond him. A bun or sandwich was at least £1.00. The Salvation Army gave him, on condition that he first prayed over it, a bowl of skilly. He grew pretty wretched, dirty and bearded. He had expected to be able to spend much of the day in the reading-rooms of public libraries, but there were not many public libraries around these days, and such as existed still were full of old snoring men.

‘The workers don't need libraries,' said a kumina boy. ‘They need clubs.'

‘I'd club the bastards,' growled another. A small gang of them had stopped Bev with an evident view to bashing and robbing. Bev felt no fear and the boys must have sensed it. He leaned against a torn wall-poster of Bill the Symbolic Worker (some graffitist had added the inevitable cross-bar to the
T
in
TUCLAND
), right hand in pocket clutching flick-knife. He smiled and said:

‘'
Sunt lachrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt
.'

They'd surrounded him on that, examining, sniffing, reathing on him.

‘You know Greek too, man?'

‘
Me phunai ton hapanta nika logon.
Sophocles,' said Bev. ‘From the
Oedipus Colonus
.'

‘Meaning?'

‘It is best not to be born.'

From some of the boys came a deep exhalation, as from some satisfying inhalation. The kumina leader, black with an Aryan profile, pulled out a pack of Savuke Finns and said: ‘You want a cank?'

‘Thanks, but I had to give it up.'

‘You out of a job? Union mashaki? You antistate?'

‘Yes yes yes.'

There were seven of these kumina boys, not all of them black. The leader said: ‘Ah.' For across the street, Great Smith Street in Westminster, where the foundations of the new Mosque lay white in frost, an unwise man was walking alone purposively, a man with a place to go to. ‘Ali and Tod,' said the leader. The two named walked over and tripped the man expertly, booted him in the left side, then frisked him as he lay. They came back with thirty-five pound notes. ‘Right,' said the leader. ‘You come, Tod. The rest at Soapy's around eleven, okay?'