The Star Fraction

6

The Summer Soldier

I looked up from the Observer on the breakfast table. Outside, through the french window, our small walled backyard hummed with bees and bloomed with weeds. Ten o’clock sun slanted steeply in. Annette was sitting feet up along the bench opposite, leaning against the wall, enjoying her first cigarette and second coffee of the day. Eleanor, the main reason why we were up at this hour on a Sunday morning (and the result of a Sunday morning seven years earlier when getting out of bed was the last thing on our minds) knelt over felt-tip pens and a colouring-book.

‘What are we doing today?’ I asked.

‘Peace-fighting,’ Annette said firmly.

‘Not me,’ I said, in chorus with Eleanor’s groaned ‘Oh no, mummy.’ I’d forgotten about the CND demonstration, although it had been pencilled, then biro’d, on the kitchen calendar for weeks.

‘Please yourselves, anarchists,’ Annette said, stubbing out her cigarette. Something in her tone and gesture told me she was annoyed – having succeeded in getting us to demos before, she knew our objection was based more on sloth than principle. In this year of Chernobyl and Tripoli, we were letting the side down.

‘How about if we meet you there?’ I suggested hastily. ‘Eleanor and I could nip over to Camden market, then we’ll go and see Granny and Grandpa at Marble Arch and watch out for you, and we can all go to McDonald’s afterwards.’

As I spoke Eleanor transparently calculated whether trailing around second-hand bookstalls was worth it for the sake of seeing her grandparents and tanking up on cheeseburger and milkshake. From the way her eyes brightened it looked like the bottom line was in the black. I turned to Annette, who gave me a relenting smile.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘At least you’ll be there.’ She stood up, in a graceful slither of nightdress and negligée. ‘And come on, you,’ she added, stooping to pat the sticking-up rump of Eleanor, now back at her colouring. ‘Get yo’ little ass into some kinda decent gear.’

‘Do we have-to?’

There were times – like this, and bedtimes – when I regretted ever answering the question: ‘Daddy, what’s libertarianism?’ with anything but a lie.

‘No, we don’t have to,’ I said. ‘But we’re going to, because I bloody say so.’

‘I’ll tell mummy you said that.’

‘Said what?’

‘Bloody.’

‘Go ahead, clipe.’

‘Whassa clipe?’

‘A much worse word. A terrible word.’

By this time we were in the street, walking briskly along to Holloway Road. Even on a Sunday the trucks were lined up, honking nose to stinking tail. I blamed the environmentalists, who’d delayed the widening of the Archway road for years and inflicted planning blight on the entire neighbourhood. At least it lowered the price of a ground-floor flat. I relieved my feelings by starting to sing ‘Ten Green Protestors’ and got Eleanor skipping and singing along. By the time we’d reached ‘…there’d be no Green protestors and a road through the wall!’ we were on the Camden bus.

Top deck, branches brushing past. Smokers had to sit at the back. I blamed the environmentalists.

Chalk Farm Road and Camden Market cheered me up, as they always did whether or not I found anything I wanted. Stalls and canals and the invincible hand of the flea market, its black plastic bags and canopies the banners of an anarchist army that would still be there when the rest had done their worst, if anything were there at all.

We left with a leatherbound Lord Macaulay for me, an antique rayon bodice for Annette, a coral paperweight for my parents and a climbing wooden monkey for Eleanor. So I was in a good mood when we emerged past the lines of cops at Marble Arch and found my mother and father near Speakers’ Corner. As I’d expected, they were leafletting and pamphletting and generally irritating the first contingents to trail in after traipsing – with an entirely unjustified sense of having achieved something – from another park to this one.

Eleanor raced up to be grabbed by her grandparents. I encircled them both in a quick air-hug and let them get back to work. Tall, stooping, grey-haired, and tough as a pair of old boots, they’d seen it all before: the Peace Pledge Union, CND, the Committee of 100, Vietnam Solidarity, CND again…Today they were doing a respectable trade in a pamphlet. In between keeping half an eye on the demo and chatting to whichever of them wasn’t in full flow, I flipped through Is a Third World War Inevitable?: its cover as lurid as any peace-movement propaganda, its contents a frosty dismissal of two centuries of peace campaigns – all of which had failed to prevent (where they hadn’t actively endorsed) increasingly destructive wars.

A Scottish ASTMS banner bellied through the gateway, and as it sailed closer I saw Annette a few rows behind it. She was walking with a man whom I recognised, with a pleasant surprise, as Reid. We’d seen him a quite a few times over the past decade, kept in touch: he’d crashed out on our floor often enough when he was in London for work or politics.

I stood there under the trees while my mother talked to Eleanor and my father argued with a stray Spartacist, and watched their approach. They were deep in conversation, faces serious, eyes oblivious to the surrounding march. When they were about twenty metres away Reid, perhaps distracted by the raised voices nearby, looked aside and saw me. He touched Annette’s elbow and she saw me too, and immediately they broke ranks and hurried over.

Reid’s hair was shorter and neater than it had been the last time I’d seen him, at a Critique conference the previous year. His shirt, black jeans and Reeboks were new. His denim jacket was faded, frayed, breastplated with badges against Reagan and Thatcher, Cruise and Pershing; for the Sandinistas and Solidarnosc, and (as if that unlikely combination wasn’t enough) a red-and-gold enamel badge celebrating the 1980 Moscow Olympics. A carrier-bag flapped lightly from one hand.

‘Hi Dave. Good to see you, man.’

‘Yeah, likewise.’ He slapped my shoulder. ‘Hello, Eleanor. You’ve grown a lot.’ Eleanor gave him a smile that showed all the gaps in her milk-teeth. Her gaze kept returning to the bright rows of badges.

My father’s dispute had ended in a stand-off. The Spartacist, a scrawny lad in a knit cap and lumber-jacket, saw Reid and turned like a locking-on radar.

‘Comrade –’ he began, stepping forward and moving a bundle of papers into combat position.

‘Oh, piss off,’ Reid said, barely glancing at him. He faced my father. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Wilde. I’m David Reid. Annette and Jon have often told me about you.’

‘Martin,’ my father said. ‘And this is my wife Amy. Pleased to meet you, David.’ He grinned. ‘Jonathan tells me you’re quite bright, for a Trot.’

Reid looked at me with raised eyebrows. I shrugged and spread my hands. ‘I take no responsibility for what his warped mind makes of anything I say.’

‘Can we go to McDonalds now?’

My father smiled at Eleanor and checked his watch. ‘There’ll be a couple of comrades along shortly,’ he said. ‘What about you, David?’

Reid jiggled his carrier-bag on one finger. ‘I’ve sold most of my papers. Yeah, I’ll be OK to skive off for half an hour or so.’

‘It’ll be all boring speeches now,’ Annette said. She smiled and waved airily. ‘Fine by me.’

‘She never brings anything to demos,’ I explained.

‘Only my beautiful self.’

‘That’s enough,’ Reid and I said at the same time, and we all laughed.

We hung about for a few more minutes until my parents’ comrades – who, to my surprise, had green hair and studded nostrils – turned up. Then we ducked under the main road and through the golden arches, to find the place packed. A lot of badges and plastic bags, a lot of post-attack black.

‘Goddamn anti-Americans,’ Martin muttered as we queued. ‘Under-fed, under-employed and underfoot!’

He trotted out some variant of this at every occasion of suspected anti-Yank sentiment, and now I barely grunted at it, but Reid grinned broadly. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘They come down here, they take our seats…’

Ten minutes later we were crowded around something that wasn’t so much a table as a painstakingly exact plastic replica of one. Eleanor sat between her grandparents and kept them entertained. Annette sat on one bolt-down seat and Reid and I half-leaned, half-sat over another.

‘Annette says you’re still lecturing,’ Reid said.

‘Yeah.’ I blew on a hot fry. ‘Part-time, short-term contracts. Further education’s run like a typing pool these days.’

‘You should approve.’ Dave was eating quickly, glancing away every, now and then.

‘I would if there was some sense to it all…Just as well Annette’s got a steady job.’

‘Solid breadwinner,’ Annette said, around a mouthful.

‘Safe from everything except the animal rights nutters?’

‘That’s about it. How’re you doing yourself?’

‘Working for North British Mutual,’ Reid said. ‘Big insurance company in Edinburgh. I’m supposed to be a software engineer. It’s just like being a programmer except you do it properly.’ He leaned closer in a parody of confidentiality, and winked at my father. ‘Money for old rope.’

‘Still with the Migs, I take it?’

Reid gave a twisted smile. ‘Everybody’s in the Labour Party these days, but you know how it is. Got into working in the union. Been on the branch committee for the past year.’

My father looked suddenly alert. He’d been on his branch committee for decades.

‘God, that must be thrilling,’ I said.

For a moment Reid’s face took on a look of utter weariness.

‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘Better than Labour Party ward meetings anyway.’

‘I’ll tell you what your trouble is,’ my father said quietly. ‘You’re still doing it for the party, not for the union.’

Reid shook his head. ‘I’m for the union!’

Martin narrowed his eyes, held his gaze for a second, then returned to teasing Eleanor.

‘What’s your political activity these days?’ Reid asked, breaking an awkward silence. ‘Deep entry in the Tory Party?’

‘Very funny,’ I said. I had once spoken at a fringe meeting, but I wasn’t about to tell him that. ‘I do odd bits of work and write articles for what I consider good causes. Everything from Amnesty International to the Space Settlers’ Society, with the Libertarian Alliance somewhere in between.’ I shrugged. ‘I know – it sounds a bit…all over the place.’

‘Space and freedom, huh?’ Reid said lightly.

Across the street the demonstration was still going past. A banner with a picture of a rising rocket – a Polaris missile – caught my eye, and I think that was the moment when it all came together, when I had the vision. I saw a future where other people – infinitely different from these, infinitely like them – carried banners with other and greater rockets, chanted unfamiliar slogans I couldn’t quite make out.

‘That’s it!’ I said. ‘That’s what we need to get away from the nuclear terrorists. A space movement! Escape from the planet of the apes!’

‘That’ll be the day,’ Reid said. He examined a hunk of sesame-sprinkled roll, stuffed it in his mouth and chewed it. ‘OK folks, I gotta go.’ He smiled around the table, saw Eleanor’s covetous look at his badges and took one off and gave it to her. Jobs Not Bombs. ‘My phone-number’s still the same. See you soon, I hope.’ I caught a flicker of a look between him and Annette. His eyes, as he turned to me, were calm and friendly as ever. ‘Next time we’ll have a proper drink, right?’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘“Not those rich imperialist tit-bits.”’

‘Yeah,’ he grinned. ‘Well, back to the Judean People’s Front.’

‘What!?? Don’t you mean the People’s Front of Judea?’

Reid smote his forehead. ‘Of course. See ya mate.’

He edged through the crush and vanished into the crowd.

We finished up our fast-food in a defiantly leisurely way. The queue, as apparently unending as the demonstration, shuffled forward. My father spotted a young woman carrying a bundle of papers whose headline – no, it wasn’t even that, it was the actual masthead – read ‘Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!’ and asked her in a tone of polite curiosity: ‘Why don’t you fight capitalism, for a change?’

But after the young woman had said only a few sentences, he stopped her with a smile and an uplifted finger. He looked at his watch, and brought the finger down to tap it triumphantly.

‘One minute, twenty-five seconds,’ he said to the puzzled cadre. ‘Congratulations. That’s the shortest time yet for a member of – let me see –’ he made a pretence of counting on his fingers ‘– a split, from a split, from a split, from the Fourth International to call me a sectarian!’

He stood back as we all rose to sweep our detritus onto trays.

‘Wasse on about?’ the young woman said indignantly, seeing a look of surreptitious sympathy from Amy. ‘Wassis Fourf Inte’national?’

‘Don’t you worry, dear,’ Amy said, squeezing past. ‘He’s a terrible man.’

But she slipped the girl a leaflet all the same.

Amy believed there was hope for everybody yet.

Except, possibly, Martin.

In the play-park off Holloway Road, Eleanor paced along painted lion-footprints and suddenly scooted off to the swings. We’d taken her here to run about after all the Tube and bus rides she’d sat through.

Annette flopped on a bench. ‘I’m knackered,’ she said. ‘Long walk.’ She leaned back, eyes half-shut against the sunlight but still watching Eleanor.

I sat down beside her, leaning forward, elbows on knees.

‘Long talk, too?’

‘Oh yes. Dave.’ She sighed and shifted, half-facing me, an arm draped along the back of the bench. ‘I came across him selling his Socialist Action faction rag at the assembly area, and I’d lost the Islington lot so I ended up marching along with all those Scottish trade unionists. Dave and I talked the whole way.’

I smiled. ‘Like old times.’

Annette ran her upper teeth over her lower lip, looked in her bag and reached for a cigarette.

‘Yeah, well…’ She lit up and inhaled hard, sighed smokily. ‘You could say that. Shit, this is difficult.’

‘What’s difficult?’

‘I should’ve told you this before, but there never seemed to be a good reason, or a good time. The fact is, for quite a while now David’s been, well, kind of gallantly flirting with me, you know?’

‘Of course.’ I smiled sourly, feeling tense and cold. ‘That’s understandable. And I suppose you would coquettishly flirt right back?’

‘How nice of you to put it like that.’ She leaned forward, eyes bright, and laid a hand on my knee. ‘But Dave’s stubborn, and literal, and he’s so goddamn serious…’

‘And he got the wrong idea,’ I said, my voice heavy and flat. Eleanor came off the swing and ran up a grassy mound, like a long barrow, and began climbing a wood-and-metal artificial tree.

‘Yes.’ Annette sounded relieved. ‘Maybe that’s why –’ She stopped for a moment and sucked air around the cigarette, as if it were a joint. ‘Today,’ she continued in a firmer tone, ‘God, my ears were burning. He told me that letting our…relationship, or whatever it was, break up was the worst mistake he’s ever made, that he’s never got over me and…’ Her voice trailed off and she stared into space. ‘He’s always loved me and he wants me to come back,’ she concluded in a rush.

I stared at her. ‘You mean to tell me –’

‘Daa-ad!’ Eleanor wailed from the top of the climbing-tree. She wind-milled her arms as she swayed, her feet on the top grips. I jumped, I warped space – it seemed only a moment later that I was reaching up to catch her and lower her to the ground.

‘Stay on the swings,’ I said. ‘Please!’

I sat down again beside Annette, shaking my head. My heart was thumping for several reasons.

‘He really just blatantly told you that?’

‘Yes,’ Annette agreed.

‘Jesus!’ I exploded. ‘What the fuck does he think he’s up to?’ I thought of our casual, friendly banter and felt sick.

‘I’ve told you,’ Annette said, ‘what the fuck he thinks he’s up to.’

‘And what did you say?’

Annette lit another cigarette, her hands shaky, the flame invisible in the light. ‘I said he was crazy, he was pushing it too far and that I was perfectly happy and I love you and Eleanor and there’s no way I’d leave you for him. I told him to forget it, basically.’ She smiled at me wanly. ‘What did you expect?’

‘Well, that, obviously.’ I squinted into the sun at her, smiling with relief. I was angry, not at her – at him. But some of it must have leaked into my voice as I said, ‘But did you say to him that you don’t love him?’

‘No,’ Annette said. ‘I couldn’t. It’s not that I still love him!’ She laughed. ‘I don’t, not…like that, but I still care about him. As you do too, yes? And I don’t know if you know this, but I got the feeling he’s really unhappy, and confused and frustrated, and it woulda been like a kick in the teeth.’

A kick in the teeth, I thought – that could be arranged. But I breathed out, and relaxed and forced a smile, and said, ‘Yeah, OK, I’m glad you said what you did. To him and to me.’ I smiled at her more genuinely, and leaned forward to put my arms around her and as I did so realised that I had a cigarette in my hand and that after five years off the damn’ things I was smoking again.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘fuck me.’

‘Yes.’

Which was all very well and wonderful, but afterwards, lying staring at the ceiling, I thought about all she had said, and – more worryingly – all that she hadn’t.

Looking back, I could see that Annette had understated the length of time in which Reid had been ‘gallantly flirting’ with her. He’d done it from the first evening he’d met us after we’d started going together. I’d thought it a joke on me, a compliment to Annette, in as much as I’d thought of it at all. Shortly afterwards, Reid had – to everyone’s surprise – had a brief and tempestuous affair with Myra. Now that I’d thought showed a flash of male-primate teeth, a gesture at me. But strangely, he’d seemed more cutup about its predictable breakup than he had ever been about the ending of his relationship with Annette. Perhaps, like me, he’d unwittingly fallen for Myra, and she hadn’t for him.

Sexual competition had been intertwined with our friendship from the start, and whether we were close or distant, so it apparently remained.

I rolled out of bed and padded through the flat to the kitchen. I sat in a pool of light and smoked another cigarette. Outside, in the black window, my reflection looked ironically back. The government health warning (always an occasion for ironic reflection) told me things I didn’t need to know, and didn’t warn of the real killer: the slight, the subtle, the incremental and irreversible hardening of the heart.

I was working at the college three days a week, and Monday wasn’t one of them. Annette left for work, I cleared up the breakfast stuff and walked Eleanor to the school gates. I picked up the papers, almost bought ten Silk Cut, returned to the flat and whizzed through the housework like a student on speed. Then I sat down with a coffee and a Filofax and a savage bout of nicotine withdrawal.

Normally I’d devote days like this to what I called political work. (I’d almost persuaded Annette it was some kind of elaborate game-plan whereby I’d work my way up, from writing long pieces for obscure organisations and tiny pieces for famous organisations, to being the sort of global mover-and-shaker that a grateful humanity would some day commemorate with statues on the moons of Saturn.)

Today I had more serious plans. I found an old address for Reid in my Filofax, and a current one (with the old one crossed out) in one of Annette’s diaries. I worked my way through every free-market, libertarian, anti-environmentalist or just sheer downright reactionary organisation I’d ever had any contact with, and phoned or sent Reid’s details to their mailinglists. After about an hour that was done, and I wasn’t satisfied, so I set out to cover a few more angles.

I leaned on the doorbell of the Freethinker offices in Holloway Road. Behind me the traffic rumbled past. As ever I felt saddened by the dusty window-display of sun-paled, damp-darkened books and pamphlets. After a minute the Society’s secretary let me in. A slight-built, middle-aged man with a deeply lined face, eyes large behind thick glasses. Kind and unselfish and poor as an atheist church-mouse. I told him what I wanted, and he let me get on with it, busying himself with his breakfast while I picked my way through files, sifted stacks of magazines, got ink on my fingers from trays of painfully created label-sized addressing-stencils.

It didn’t take long to compile a list of journals and organisations, mostly American, that could be guaranteed to stimulate a bit of free thought. By way of thanks on the way out I bought for full price a seriously shop-soiled copy of a selection from Thomas Paine’s works. I browsed it while I used my Travelpass on an ideological whistlestop tour of London, from the Freedom Bookshop in Angel Alley and the Market Bookshop in Covent Garden to Novosti Press Agency in Kensington, getting back via Bookmarks in Finsbury Park just in time to meet Eleanor coming out of school.

These are the times that try men’s souls…The summer soldier, and the sunshine patriot, may shrink from the service of his country…

Reid miserable? He hadn’t seemed so, except for that moment when he’d talked about union meetings. Looking back, I thought I’d seen in his eyes a desperate recollection of a waste of evenings, and a premonition of more to come. If he could try to fuck my wife and fuck with my life, the least I could do was to fuck up his mind. Reid was spooked by his ideas; he had wheels in the head. He identified with his beliefs in a way I never did with mine. He didn’t enjoy exposing them to challenge, but when some bit of grit was dropped in their fine machinery he went to endless trouble to remove it, to clean and polish the wheels and replace any broken teeth. He’d once kept me up, if not exactly awake, half the night as he teased out the intricacies of a surreal debate the Fourth International had in the early ’eighties: over whether Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea was or was not a variant of…capitalism.

‘Stubborn, and literal, and so goddamn serious’ – Annette had his number in more ways than one. And so did I. There was no way Reid could ignore any political literature that came through his letterbox. He’d worry away at refuting the most manifest absurdity, check up on every recalcitrant factoid and bold-faced lie. By the time he’d struggled with all those conflicting views, Reid’s soul would be sorely tried.

Other streets, other summers…We met Reid at marches against the poll tax and apartheid. In the black June of ’89 we sat down in a Soho street with thousands of Chinese and hundreds of Trotskyists, and sang ‘The Internationale’, and he nodded, giving me an almost worried look, when I told him I would march with the Taiwanese students.

‘Ah so,’ he murmured. ‘The Kuomintang. Catch you later.’

Neither I nor Annette said anything more about what he’d said to her, and he always seemed to turn up with a new girlfriend for every demo. All of them, Bernadette and Mairi and Anne and Claire, seemed to me like distant relatives of Annette, dark Irish girls with bright eyes and ironic voices.

He never commented on the steady trickle of anti-socialist or dissident socialist or maddeningly wrong-headed socialist material I kept sending him. In the end I think it was redundant: the way things went in the Communist world, the subscription to Moscow News would have covered the lot.

But it had an effect, and it wasn’t the one I sought.