Fractions (57 page)

I shook my head. ‘I'm sorry, I don't see your point.' I thought I did, but I hardly dared believe it.

Cochrane raised an eyebrow to Reid, who nodded slightly.

‘I've glanced over some of the literature that you've sent to Dave over the years,' Cochrane said. ‘Among all the dross it contains rather stimulating ideas about a possible role for insurance companies in supplying security to their clients. Now, as a political ideal –' An airy flick of the hand. ‘However, as a market strategy for dealing with, ah, a certain absconding of the state from what have hitherto been its responsibilities, it has definite attractions. To say nothing of…'

And he said nothing of it. His eyes had lost the blinking tic, and gazed steadily back at me.

‘Another little interruption in the smooth course of British history?' I asked.

He nodded soberly. ‘Speculative, of course. But we may some day have to consider our position in relation to what the erudite Mr Ascherson delights in calling
the Hanoverian regime.
Think of it as…'

‘Insurance,' Reid said gleefully.

I looked from one to the other and lit a cigarette, moving my hands very carefully to keep them steady.

Until that moment I'd thought myself immune to the glamour of power, in exactly the way that a eunuch might be to the glamour of women. I'd never stood up for an anthem or straightened for a flag, never fumblingly inserted anything in a ballot-box. The attitude that made my parents' sect reclaim the taunting nickname of ‘impossibilists' had, I fancied, been inherited in my own anti-political stance. Oh, I'd wanted to have
influence
, to change the way people thought, just as my parents did; but – again like them – I'd never seriously expected the opportunity to actually get my hands on power's inviting flesh.

In short, I'd been a complete wanker, until that moment when I learned what I'd been missing. And you know, what I felt then
was
almost sexual; it's something in the wiring of the male primate brain.

The big thrill wasn't that they were offering me power – they were offering me a bit more influence, that was all. No, what made the hairs on my neck prickle was that they thought I might – any decade now –
have
power; that I might represent something that it was a smart move to get on the right side of well in advance; that somewhere down the line might be my Finland Station.

‘Just one question,' I said. ‘There are plenty of better-known and better-connected people with views similar to mine, so why me?'

Reid looked as if he were about to say something, but Cochrane cut him off.

‘It's because you don't have connections with any part of the present establishment, and we wouldn't wish you to cultivate any. Your views on the land question and the banking system are dismissed as thoroughly unsound by every free-market think-tank I've consulted. Your political connections are such that your MI5 and Special Branch files are, I understand, commendably thick. Your Internet articles on the recent Oklahoma outrage, on Chechnya, on Bosnia, have added the FBI and the CIA and FIS to your attentive readership. So, you see –'

‘I see, all right,' I said. ‘You want to buy someone who looks like he's not been bought.'

‘Christ, man –!' Reid began, but again Cochrane interrupted.

‘Excuse me, chaps,' he said, dusting grains of chilli from his fingers. ‘I've never had a radical conscience to wrestle with, and quite frankly I'd be a liability to my own case in the kind of discussion I can foresee developing.' He smiled wryly, almost regretfully, at us. ‘So if you don't mind, I'll leave you to it.'

He stood up, held out his hand, and I rose to shake it, mischievously returning his peculiar grip. ‘Good evening, Jon, and I hope I see you again.'

‘Well, likewise, Ian.'

He nodded to Dave, and departed.

 

Dave remained silent until Cochrane was out of the door. Then he put his elbows on the table and his fingers to his cheeks, the heels of his hands almost meeting in front of his mouth.

‘What the bloody hell are you playing at?' he demanded.

‘Nothing,' I said. ‘I meant it. You didn't expect me to jump at the chance of being the radical front-man for some bunch of suits worried about what happens when their present cosy arrangement goes down the tubes?'

‘What a fucking idiot,' Dave said, not unkindly. ‘You're the last person I'd have expected…ah, the hell with it. Let's hit the pubs.'

In the conveniently close Malt Shovel, he let me get him a pint of Caffrey's and told me of his plan for the rest of the evening.

‘I want to show you some of my favourite pubs,' he explained. ‘Only one way to do that – a pub-crawl by public transport. Here, the Café Royal, a quick snifter in the station bar, on to Haymarket, next train to Dalmeny, along the front at South Queensferry then the last bus over the bridge to Dunfermline.'

Dunfermline. I'd addressed many packages to his place there, but had vaguely thought it was a suburb of Edinburgh. Wrong: over the Forth, apparently. My mental picture changed to Highland mountain ranges.

‘You sure we have time?'

He set down an empty glass. ‘See how far we go.'

We almost ran down Cockburn Street, across the Waverley Bridge again then up around the back of a Waterstone's and a Burger King to a large pub that seemed to have only a side entrance. High ceiling, tiled walls, murals, leather seats, marble, polished brass and hardwood.

‘A veritable people's palace,' I observed as we sat down. ‘It's like something from one of your degenerated workers' states.'

Reid grinned. ‘The beer would be cheaper.'

‘Yeah,' I said. ‘See what they did to Budweiser?'

‘Shocking,' Reid said. ‘There ought to be a law.'

I nodded at the murals. ‘Heroes of the Industrial Revolution…is that Watt? Stevenson?…they should have one of Adam Smith seeing the invisible hand.'

‘Capitalist realism,' Reid said.

‘Something you've got into, apparently.'

‘Yes, I'm glad to say.' Reid leaned back, stretching out in his seat. ‘It's the only game in town.'

‘Yeah, well, you should know.'

‘Damn' right I do!' he said forcefully. ‘I haven't changed my ideas, long-term – but I know a defeat when I see one. Getting over the end of the Second World will take generations, and it won't be our generations. The last time I hung out with the left was during the Gulf War. The kids don't know shit, and the older guys –' he grinned suddenly like the Dave I knew better ‘– that is, the ones older than us, they look like men who've been told they have cancer.'

‘And can't stop smoking, eh?'

‘Ha! OK, Jon, we still have a bit of business to settle.'

‘Fire away.'

‘The brutal honest truth is you're not likely to get a better offer. Face it, man. You're forty, you're nobody, and you're getting nowhere. The chances are you'll end up hawking space junk around SF conventions and forgotten ideas around fringe organisations for the rest of your life.'

I shrugged. ‘There are worse ways to live.'

Dave leaned towards me, almost jabbing his cigarette in my face with his emphasis. ‘And there are better, dammit!'

‘I know, I know. But I'll get there my own way. The whole free-market thing still has a long way to run, and even space is becoming fashionable again. People are going to see that new movie, what is it? –
Apollo 13
, and think, “Hey, we did that way back then! Why can't we do it now?” The West will get back into space fast enough when they have the Chinese on their ass. Or
somebody
'll give us a Sputnik-style shock. And look, even Cochrane seems to think I'm onto something.'

‘Aach!' Dave's inarticulate sound conveyed a weight of Highland scepticism. ‘That was ninety-nine percent bullshit and flattery. Maybe one percent keeping a weather-eye on the contingencies.'

‘Sure, but I'd rather have that one percent than sell out.'

‘Stop bloody thinking about this as selling out! Christ, I'd take money from Nirex or Rio Tinto Zinc if they gave me a free hand with it. This
is
getting there your own way. This is all legit. On the square and on the level –'

He realised what he was saying and laughed. ‘OK, old Ian is in the Craft but that's got nothing to do with it!'

‘Yeah, well, I'm kind of holding out for the Illuminati…So that's the deal, is it? They put up the money and I do what I like with it?'

‘No hassles so long as you get results.'

‘Measured how?'

‘Oh, rebuttals, airtime, exposés of where the
environmentalists
get their bloody money from. Parents making a fuss about Green propaganda in schools.' He shifted into a semblance of an English working-class accent, or at least a permanently aggrieved tone. “In my day we didn't call it destroying rainforest, we called it clearing the jungle, and I think there should be a bit of
balance
, know what I mean?”'

It was beginning to sound quite attractive. That and the thought of no more basic economics lectures. Get on my own demand curve instead of…

‘The rainforests belong to their inhabitants,' I said. ‘Scrap environmental legislation, yes, but only if polluters have to pay for the damage, strict liability. That's my agenda. Think they'd buy that?'

Reid shrugged. ‘You could try.'

‘OK,' I said, my mind suddenly made up. ‘Show me the details, and if it's all as straight as you say, I'll go for it.'

‘You will?'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, thank fuck for that. I thought it'd take all night to batter some sense into you.'

At the station we had a few minutes to spare, even with a gulp of whisky in the Wayfarer's Bar, so I phoned home.

‘Hi darlin'.'

‘Hello, love. Where are you?'

‘Waverley Station. Reid's got me on a pub-crawl by train.'

‘Well, you take care. Looking forward to tomorrow night.'

‘Me too!' Electric smooch. Some chit-chat about the Worldcon, and Eleanor's school exams, then she asked:

‘Did you sell much?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘I've sold a lot.'

 

I picked up my bag from the left luggage (the remaining stock from my stall was at that moment heading down the motorway in a van belonging to a friendly SF bookshop in London). We got on the train for one stop, downed a couple of pints at the Caledonian Ale House in Haymarket and caught the next train onwards.

Dalmeny was a pair of deserted platforms with a startling end-on view of the Forth Bridge, its lights sending ghostly pillars into the darkening sky. The Road Bridge straddled the backlit cirrus of the sunset. Dave led me along a narrow, bramble-whipping path between fields and the railway embankment, over a rise and a wooden bridge and down a long flight of wooden steps to the shore of the Firth. A sharp left at the bottom took us to the Hawes Inn, a pub whose charms were only slightly diminished by several games machines and many inapt quotations from Robert Louis Stevenson on the walls.

We found a seat by a window, in a corner with the games machines. Space battles roared beside us.

‘This is where Rome stopped,' Reid remarked in a tone of oddly personal satisfaction as he gazed out over the Firth.

‘Can't be,' I said. ‘Weren't the Highlands Catholic –'

‘The Roman
Empire
,' Reid explained. ‘This was the farthest north they got: the
limes.
Massacred the natives at Cramond, apparently. Beyond the Firth they did nothing but lose legions all over the map, that's about it.'

‘Heh!' I raised my pint of Arrol's. ‘Here's to the end of empires.'

‘Cheers,' Reid nodded. ‘Still, it's impressive in a way. All the land from here to the far side of the Med under one government.'

‘Hmm…somebody warn the Euro-sceptics: it's been done and it
lasted for a thousand years
!' – this in a comic-German screech that distracted one push-button space warrior enough to glance at me and lose a few ships to the invading evil empire on the screen. I think I was a little drunk by this point.

Our progress continued through The Two Bridges, The Anchor, and The Ferry Tap. Outside the Queensferry Arms Reid hesitated, then said, ‘Skip this one. Got a better idea.' He led me a few steps along the narrow High Street to a Chinese take-away where he promised me the best delicacy on the menu.

‘Two portions of curried chips, please.'

‘Curried chips?' I asked incredulously.

‘Just what you need after a few pints.'

The girl behind the counter served us these with what I dimly thought a patronising smile. Eating the steaming, sticky, greasy messes with little plastic forks, we made our way past a police-station and what Reid described as a Jacobite church, and on up to the last pub, pausing only to dispose of our litter thoughtfully behind a front gate.

We lurched in to The Moorings with breath like dragons'. The girl behind the bar actually averted her face as she pulled our pints. I followed Reid away from the bar into a rear area where wide windows presented a fine view of the Bridge.

The pub was new, fake-old; nautical gear and framed drawings of battleships on the walls. In the course of our travels Reid's opening shot about the Roman Empire had turned into a long and involved argument about empires generally, with Reid firmly in their favour. He loathed the usual default option for disillusioned socialists, nationalism.

‘See these,' he said, opening his third pack of cigarettes and pointing at the naval engravings. ‘See them. They, they saved us, right? From the German fascist barbarians. And from good old Uncle Joe, if truth be told.'

‘That,' I said, trying to steady him in my ‘scope, ‘is a bit of an over-simplified few. View. I'm surprised at you.'