1985 (23 page)

‘That bulge in your pocket. May I see it, please?'

‘What bulge? Where? Private property, mine. I regard this as an intolerable infraction of.'

‘You were observed taking a bottle of gin from that shelf. Do you propose paying for it?'

‘I propose putting it back.' Bev took out the bottle and tried to make his way to where he'd nicked it from. There were a lot of people looking at him. One old woman tut-tuttutted. ‘Having counted my money I discover that I haven't enough after all. It's terribly expensive.' The girl barred the way. The supermarket manager appeared, grim as a surgeon in a white coat. ‘Putting it back,' Bev said, ‘if you'll kindly allow me.' But they wouldn't allow him. The manager said:

‘All right. Caught red-handed. Get the police, Miss Porlock.'

‘Yes, Mr Allsop.' She went, a pretty-legged girl.

‘Look,' said Bev, ‘you're making a fool of yourself. I've stolen nothing. It would be theft if I got it past the pay-desk, right? But I haven't. You'll
have a hell of a job proving anything.' And he tried again to put the bottle back where he'd scrounged it from. The manager pushed him. The manager called:

‘Alwyn. Geoffrey.' Two other men in white coats came from their work of shelf-packing. It was as though Bev were going to be forced into submission to a dangerous surgical operation. He panicked and tried to leave, gin bottle in hand. Then he turned back on a reflex of honesty and tried to give it to Alwyn, who looked sympathetic, a sly nicker himself probably. Alwyn, as if to disclaim complicity, thrust it by. ‘Grab him, Geoffrey,' said Mr Allsop. Alwyn, who was now shown to be really Geoffrey, laid hands on Bev. Bev was not going to have that. He fought off the hands with the bottle's firm base. Miss Porlock arrived with two policemen, young men with gangster moustaches. They came for Bev and breathed hot sweet tea on him. They grabbed. Bev was not going to have that. He raised his bottle once more. The bottle was seized by one of the constables and given to Miss Porlock. Bev fought. The customers watched. This was as good as the stricken telly, almost. Bev tried to shove through the customers in line at the paydesk, some of whom shoved him back. The police got to him again. Bev scratched. His nails had not been trimmed since Christmas. He achieved a bloody hairline on a left cheek. ‘Ah no,' said the constable, ‘not that, chum.' They got him with a knee in the groin. They frogmarched him off.

The sergeant at the station two streets away supped tea and nibbled a cream horn while he wrote down Bev's various misdemeanours in a large slow hand: attempted robbery, resisting arrest, assaulting a policeman, being in possession of a weapon (they had found the flick-knife), having no fixed abode. ‘Gertie,' said the sergeant to a policewoman, ‘get this geezer's testiculars from CR.' CR was Central Registry, where Bev's entire curriculum vitae lay waiting in a computer for instantaneous disgorgement. ‘Jones, B.'

‘Number?' said the policewoman.

‘What's your number, cock?'

‘Union number? Birth registration number?'

‘All your numbers, chummy.'

‘To hell with numbers,' said Bev. ‘I'm a human being, not a bloody number.'

‘Be reasonable,' said the sergeant, ‘the whole place is swarming with Joneses. Very difficult to find, even with a B. Come on, lad, co-operate.'

‘Why should I help a bloody machine?' said Bev. One of the two constables thumped him.

‘Right,' said the sergeant, writing. ‘Uncooperative. Let's have your fingerprints.' They forced him to press inky whorls on a card, and the card was taken off to be photo-telexed to CR. ‘You forgot anything?' said the sergeant to one of the constables. ‘Sure you got the story right? You forgot to say he pulled the shiv on you.'

‘It's a lie,' said Bev.

‘You have to co-operate,' said the sergeant kindly. ‘Cooperation is what life is all about, my son. Take him away in the usual manner, lads.'

Bev was, in what he took to be the usual manner, thumped towards the cells. He thumped back. The sergeant, sighing as though at the irredeemable folly of man as represented by Bev, made a new entry. The charge sheet had grown to quite a sizeable document. ‘Right,' said the constable whom Bev had scratched in the supermarket, ‘you wait here, cocker, till court in the morning.' He shoved Bev in a small heaven of warmth and cleanliness, with two made-up bunks and a chamber pot. There was even a basin of water and a rough towel and a hunk of green soap. As for the iron bars, it was the rest of the crazy and evil world that was shut in, not he. He stripped off and washed all over. He was given a plate of blind hash and a mug of sweet tea by a surly man in an apron. He lay on the upper bunk and meditated. The early winter dark came and dim fluorescent lighting simpered from the ceiling. He slept.

He woke to hearty noise. Two different constables and a new sergeant were thrusting into the cell with some difficulty a soiled and drunken man. They apparently knew him well. ‘Come on, Harry,' said the sergeant, ‘be a good lad. Your bunk's nice and ready. Get your bloody head down.' The man's head was not in fact bloody, but it was bald and scarred and contained areas of crinkly skin as though it had at some time been burned. The man sang:

‘They shoved him down and they shoved it up

        Till his cup was well-nigh overflowing,

 And this went on till the crack of dawn

        And all the time their cocks were crowing.'

He interspersed his blurred and tuneless lines with, ‘Fuck you, matey,' and, ‘If it isn't old Bert, Bert's my pal Bert is,' and, ‘Just one more and make
it a boilermaker,' and, ‘I've supped some stuff tonight, I have that.' He was thrown on to the bottom bunk. Bev sighed, foreseeing a sleepless night. The sergeant, a thin man with the look of a Methodist minister, said:

‘We know all about you, you non-union bastard. I've read your little dossier and filthy reading it is. You've got old Ashthorn on in the morning and I hope to Christ he pulverizes you.' He then locked the cell-door, saying to the drunk: ‘That's right, Harry, keep that swede well and truly crashed.' Harry snored. Bev tried to go back to sleep. The snores turned into the pleasant sound of a sawmill in a country place: the sun was hot, even for August, and he and Ellen sat on the bank of the stream, their feet laved by the kindcold flinty element. Little Bessie, four years old, chased a red admiral. How beautiful Ellen was: clear skin, wide green eyes and snub nose, laughing wide mouth; her body spare but shapely in its pippin-russet brief summer dress. A covey of partridges drummed. The sawmill had stopped. Bev was shaken very roughly awake. Harry was on his feet, shaking.

‘You got a drop for an old pal?' he said. ‘I've a thirst that rasps. I can bloody hear it rasping like a real rasp.'

‘There's water over there,' said Bev, trying to turn over.

‘Water? Water for me? Handled thousands of millions of gallons of the bloody stuff in my time, but never not one drop down the gorge except by accident. All right, if you won't help, you won't, so bugger you, matey.'

Bev, wide awake now, said: ‘What's that about water?'

‘Never touch it, me, except by way of the job.'

‘And what would the job be?' asked Bev, getting down from his bunk. ‘Would it be by chance the job of a fireman?'

‘Hit it first time, matey. Station B15. Here, I'm fucking parched.' He went to the cell-door and yelled through the bars: ‘I'm dying of bloody thirst. Beer'll do. I know you've got a dozen Charringtons there, I saw them, you bastards.' There was no response. All was dark. Bev, now standing, his arms loose, said:

‘Murderer. You murdered my wife, you bloody murderer.'

‘Eh?' Harry turned in tottering surprise. ‘Don't know your wife, matey. Never murdered a woman in my life. Killed one or two with kindness, but that's different. What you on about, then? Christ, I suppose I shall have to.' And he went to the water jug, raised it, glugged it down. ‘Terrible stuff,' he panted.

‘You struck,' said Bev. ‘You let the Brentford Hospital burn down. My
wife was a patient there. I saw her. I saw her just before she died.' He came for Harry with thumbs ready to gouge. Harry was drunk, also potbellied, but he had no difficulty in knocking Bev's hands off.

‘You're barmy,' he said. ‘We don't start fires, we put 'em out. You get that, you see it?'

‘You didn't put this one out. You murdering bastard.' He struck out but missed Harry's face. It was the sort of face that might look better upside down. ‘You went on strike and let people die in agony.'

‘Look,' said Harry, ‘blame the bastards that set fire to it, right? It was the murdering Micks, the IRA. One of my mates heard them on about it in a boozer in Shepherd's Bush. He lunged and got done for his pains. We don't like fires, matey. The fewer fires there are, better we're pleased. So don't start on about that business, get it?'

‘You went on strike,' said Bev, ‘that's all I know. She was just burnt bone and scorched skin. My wife. That's what you did with your bloody strike.'

‘Listen,' said Harry, now rather sober, ‘you got to jump when they say, right? You hear the bells going down and you shin down the pole and don't ask questions. Same when they blow the whistle. You're going on strike, they say. Right, so that's what you do. If you don't, you're out of it, right? I've got five kids. I've got a missis that'll play screaming buggery when I get home tomorrow morning. I've got a job, and it's the thing I can do. I got to do it. I need the money, and what with prices shooting I need more all the time. So you put the fear of Jesus into everybody by going on strike, and then you get what you want. What's wrong with that? Besides, it's not me and my mates that says right we'll strike. It's what they tell us to do and we have to do it.'

‘You bloody murderer,' said Bev, feebly, doubtfully.

‘I know how you feel. The fire should have been put out, right. We thought the army was doing it. Christ, that's what an army's for. Then those bastards strike, what we didn't expect. We don't want their bleeding sympathy. Scared shitless of the job is what I'd say, so they get out of it by talking of the cause of our civilian brothers. In the army you're supposed to jump to it and get fucking shot if you don't. My dad always said that, he was in the Desert Rats as they were called, and by Christ he was right. Look, I've slept it off, I want out.' He began to rattle the bars loudly, yelling: ‘Bert, Phil, Sergeant MacAllister.' Bev sat on the one rickety Windsor chair and sobbed without tears.

Old Ashthorn presided, as foretold, in Number 3 Court. He was a fierce wattled martinet in his seventies, bald but with clumps of hair like wool-balls above his ears. Next to him sat an assistant magistrate, a plain flat-chested woman with a drab hat on. The clerk of the court was loud and insolent. Bev was addressed as plain Jones. The constable with the bloody hairline on his cheek, which, Bev could have sworn, had been cunningly emphasized with lipstick, read out the charges in the gorblimied form that the desk sergeant had dressed them up in. They sounded pretty bad. Miss Porlock from the supermarket confirmed everything except what was supposed to have happened at the station. The clerk of the court handed up the flick-knife to old Ashthorn who, with frightening expertise, kept shooting in and out the blade, on which dried blood stains had been imposed, presumably by the police. He dared Bev to say something in answer to the charges.

‘I admit the attempted theft,' said Bev. ‘But I have no job. The Workers' State denies me unemployment benefit. I have to live. I have to steal.'

‘You have to steal
gin
,' said old Ashthorn, flashing the bottle (Exhibit A) in the artificial light. ‘Not bread, but gin. And a very good gin, too.' He made a cage of his long skeletal fingers and beetled very sternly. His colleague read everything on the label of the bottle. She nodded, as in awe, at the long claim to excellence. ‘You tried to evade lawful arrest,' said old Ashthorn. ‘You carried a bloody weapon.'

‘
Not
bloody. That knife has never been used.'

‘Speak when you are spoken to, Jones,' cried the clerk of the court.

‘That's precisely what I did,' said Bev. ‘He spoke a lie, and I corrected it. Is there something wrong with that?' The assistant magistrate whispered something at great length to old Ashthorn, who kept nodding and nodding.

‘You have broken the law,' said old Ashthorn. ‘Society must be protected from people of your type.' Bev came as rapidly to the boil as a pan full of alcohol. He said:

‘My type? What do you mean,
my type
? I'm a scholar forbidden to transmit my scholarship. I'm a widower whose wife was burnt to death
while the firemen of London sat on their arses and picked their teeth.'

‘You will apologize to Mrs Featherstone for using that word,' bellowed the clerk of the court.

‘I apologize, Mrs Featherstone,' said Bev to the assistant magistrate, ‘for using that word. Words are terrible things, aren't they? Far more deadly than fires allowed to burn on while firemen sit on their fundaments. I am not a
type
, your worship or honour or whatever you like to be called. I'm a human being deprived of work because I stand by a principle. I object to being a unionized sheep.'

‘You understand what you are saying?' said old Ashthorn.

‘Perfectly well. Justice has been corrupted by syndicalism. Not only justice in the wider sense but justice as meted and administered in the courts. Send a union man to jail and you have a strike on your hands.'

‘This is insolence,' said the clerk of the court loudly and insolently.

‘Shall we say,' said old Ashthorn, ‘that it is merely untrue? Shall we also,' he said to Bev directly, ‘be reasonable? The law is founded on reason. It would be unreasonable to fine you, since you have no means of paying a fine. This is your first offence –' He checked with Bev's cybernetic
curriculum vitae
. ‘It seems to me evident enough from your behaviour that you have not previously been in a court of law. I am not empowered to send you to prison. Even if I were empowered, a spell of imprisonment would in no wise alter your situation. You are, you say, forced to steal. Justice
in the wider sense
demands that your circumstances of life be so modified that the urge to commit crime is quelled and eliminated. You are to be placed on probation. Mr Hawkes,' said old Ashthorn, ‘would you be good enough to explain the probationary process to the er er to the.'