My Revolutions

~ ~ ~

Outside in the garden, workmen from the marquee company are bolting together an aluminum frame on the lawn. They shout to each other and make jokes, theatrically throwing bolts and brackets across the blossom-strewn patch of grass under the tree. It’s an old tree, taller than the house, and in autumn the fruit smashes when it falls to the ground. We should, I suppose, have had it cut down. The men seem happy. Maybe it’s because they work in an atmosphere of constant preparty excitement. Perhaps celebration gets inside them. The secret of the good life: putting up tents.

Other people are out there too. Caterers, a delivery driver; all preparing for the big do. Miranda has gone out for something or other, ribbon or flowers or place cards. For once, she said, she wanted me to be the center of attention. She knew I wouldn’t approve, but everyone deserved the chance to wish me a happy fiftieth. Everyone, I thought. Everyone? They’re her friends really, but I knew how kindly it was meant. And I found myself looking forward to my party. For a long time, more than half my life if you want to look at it that way, I’ve avoided large gatherings. It’s become instinctive, part of my personality. However, during the last few years I’ve started to lower my guard, a little. Which “karma-wise” (as Miranda would say, meaninglessly) seems to have been a mistake.

I look away from the window. The study has been transmuted by Miles’s visit. It’s as if, by coming here, he’s put the room in brackets. The oak desk silted with spreadsheets and reports, the shelves of books. Even the chipped gray filing cabinet has taken on a provisional, insubstantial look. The party preparations going on outside, which are, I have no doubt, at the very center of

Miranda’s consciousness, feel to me as if they’re taking place on TV, a scene from one of those early-evening dramas where well-heeled suburbanites experience a little formulaic frisson in their lives; romance or a murder-mystery.

The workmen are laying out a white awning beside the metal frame. I sit very still, not wanting to disturb the atmosphere of the room, the pattern of the life I’ve led in it. Miranda will be back soon. What will I say to her? What can I say?

Voices in the hall. Not Miranda or Sam, not yet. I open the study door and meet two young guys, all gum and hair gel, carrying musical equipment. They ask where it should go and I hear myself give them directions, modulating through a series of cheery cadences. Mein Host the birthday boy, his mask still more or less intact under pressure.

I have to be clear. It’s already over. All this — the house, my family, this ridiculous party — no longer exists. But accepting that doesn’t mean I know what to do next, and even if I choose to do nothing, events will carry on unfolding, and very soon now, days or even hours, my life here will be over. In the sitting room there’s a photo of Miranda, which I took on a cold weekend walk at the Norfolk coast. She’s standing with her back to the camera, looking out to sea. The light is coming straight at the lens, and she’s little more than a silhouette: big boots, narrow shoulders wrapped in an ethnic something-or-other, hair streaming in the wind. Somehow that’s the image that comes to me: frail, romantic Miranda, rather than the arranger of breakfast meetings, the recipient of local chamber- of-commerce awards, the Miranda of the last few years. Soon a wave is going to break over her: police, maybe the media. How will she cope? I wish I could feel optimistic, but Miranda isn’t a person who deals well with the world’s unpredictability. She’s always fought hard against randomness, with all the weapons in the stationer’s: a little arsenal of agendas and diaries and wall-planners dotted with colored stars. Poor Miranda, no amount of Post-its will ward off what’s about to happen to you. You’re utterly unprepared.

The stairs creak as I climb up to the bedroom. I have to duck my head to go through the door. I’ve never found the low ceilings and narrow corridors of country cottages quaint, at least not straightforwardly. They’re scaled to the small stature of poorly nourished people; an architecture of hardship and deprivation. Of course I’ve never said this to Miranda. Irregular walls and creaking floorboards please her. I think she’d like to forget she was born into an industrial society. I can’t, at least not in the same way. That kind of mystification has never seemed right to me. It’s so incoherent, for one thing. A country life, but with plumbing and telecoms and antibiotics. A rich person’s fantasy.

But this is our house, or rather Miranda’s house, the house she allowed me to share and always wanted me to love as she did. I realize I’m standing with my fists clenched, glaring at the William Morris wallpaper, the patchwork cushions on the armchair. Above our bed, hanging from the oak beam, is a dream catcher. I tug at it, breaking the string. I’ve wanted to do that for so long. Such an absurd, out-of-place thing. Our house is filled with these objects— tribal, spiritual, hand-crafted little knick-knacks that are supposed to edge us nearer to Miranda’s wish-fulfillment future of agrarian harmony. There are corn dollies and old glass bottles and prints of medicinal herbs with quotations from Culpeper printed underneath in calligraphic lettering. “Only from lucre of money they cheat you, and tell you it is a kind of tear, or some such like thing, that drops from Poppies when they weep.” That’s outside the bathroom. Culpeper is natural, and natural is the flag Miranda waves at the world, the banner standing for righteousness and truth.

Why am I doing this, breaking her things? None of it’s her fault. She’s worked hard to make the life she wanted. She’s tried to be a good person. And she has loved me. I know what will be the most terrible thing — the look on her face, the gradual opening of the abyss. Everything she has known or believed about me, her lover, her partner for sixteen years, the man who has been a stepfather to her daughter, is untrue. Or if not untrue — for I’ve tried not to tell unnecessary lies — then partial, incomplete.

Listen to me. Partial, incomplete. I’m even lying to myself. It could hardly be worse; she doesn’t even know my real name.

My bowels are loose. I lock myself into the bathroom, among the lavender bunches and embroidered hand towels and the rows of Bountessence products in their little recyclable bottles. Bountessence is the highest expression of Miranda’s romance with nature. Bountessence is Miranda, though in public it’s the two of us, because I still cling to some undefined administrative role and occasionally squire the boss to events and dinners in the West Sussex area. I’m a sort of Denis to her Margaret. Michael Frame and Miranda Martin of Bountessence Natural Beautycare.

It’s peculiar. Those words make no sense to me. I can’t connect myself with them, or with the couple they represent. They’re just sounds. Ever since I became Michael Frame, all those years ago, I’ve existed in a kind of mental crouch. When I was a child I used to have night terrors, not quite dreams, more semiconscious imaginings that took on narrative form, like scenes from films. In one recurrent situation I was wedged under the floorboards, holding my breath and waiting for the German soldiers to stop searching the attic where I was hiding. I could hear the clatter of their boots, a guttural voice barking orders. I used to lie rigid under the covers, the blood pounding in my head, my entire consciousness occupied by the effort of not making a noise. I think when I went underground those night terrors colonized my waking life. Remaining undetected has consumed all my energy, has hollowed out my sense of self. Nothing that has taken place in the meantime has ever quite felt real.

Except that tomorrow Mike Frame will be fifty, five weeks after me. This life, this Michael Frame life, has been it. This is what I have had.

I flush the toilet and wash my hands at the basin, trying not to look in the mirror. What will happen to Miranda? Will she have to move away? She’s put so much into this house. If she’s very lucky they might leave her alone. Maybe it won’t make any difference to the world at large, what I did. Maybe it will end with the

two of us. And maybe she’ll find a way to feel we did have a connection. Although there were things she didn’t know, there were also things she did, which were important and real. I could say that to her. I could say, Maybe one day you’ll come to understand and find consolation. But would I believe it? Not really. And would she? I don’t know. Because I don’t know if it’s true about understanding and consolation. And I’m not certain we had anything at all.

Miranda will be back soon. She has allowed Sam to drive her to the shops in her nineteenth-birthday present, a second-hand Fiesta. An act of faith on Miranda’s part: she’s a nervous passenger and Sam only passed her test a few weeks ago.

Sam’s room is just as she left it at the start of term; the neat row of shoes in front of the cupboard, the pile of outgrown soft toys on the bed. An orderly and rather conventional room. Only the backpack and the Discman dumped on the bed signal that, despite the argument we had last week, she’s come down from university for Mike’s officially-becoming-ancient party. I can’t imagine what this will do to her, the media circus, the betrayal of trust. There’s a chance she might just shrug it off. She’s a practical girl, and startlingly worldly for a nineteen-year-old, at least as I would have judged a nineteen-year-old of my generation. Certainly Sam isn’t your idealistic type of law student, interested in righting injustice or fighting for the little man. She says she wants to “do corporate” because that’s where the money is. And, I think, because she knows it scandalizes her mother and me. Little Sam and her embarrassing hippie parents; by now “Soma” will be off her passport too. She hasn’t allowed us to call her that for years.

Fuck. I can’t do it. I can’t face you, Sam. There’s no way.

Working quickly, I open closets and pull out a sports bag, start stuffing in socks, underwear, a couple of shirts. I need to move fast, before they get back from the shops. My passport is in the study, in a box file. At least, that’s where I think it is. I check and find it isn’t and for the first time since Miles left I lose control. When you panic you forget to breathe and your heart rate rises. I know this; I tell it to myself; but things start to speed up and soon

I’m sweeping papers onto the floor, pulling out drawers and sobbing with rage and frustration. Outside there’s the sound of a car and I freeze, but it isn’t them, just one of the marquee riggers. At last I spot the passport on a bookshelf. Frame. Michael David. British citizen. 10 April/Avril 48. “British citizen” is the only part that is true.

Five minutes later I’m in Miranda’s big silver BMW, approaching the junction with the bypass. I head out of town and along the coast toward Newhaven, obsessively checking the rearview mirror to see if I’m being followed. A blue Sierra preoccupies me, then disappears at a set of traffic lights. I’m so busy staring at it that I narrowly avoid rear-ending the car in front as it slows for a turn.

What am I worried about? By now Sam and Miranda will have gotten back home. Before long they’ll realize I’ve gone. So what’s left to salvage? At the port I pull into the ferry terminal and park between cars packed with luggage and fighting children, all waiting to be transported across the Channel for the holidays. I only really admit to myself where I’m heading as I line up for a ticket.

Last year I made this journey with Miranda. She was exhausted. Over time the business, which once involved filling little bottles on the kitchen table, has grown, slowly but steadily, into a substantial operation. It now consumes all of her energies. Bountessence sells beauty products — face cream and shampoo and conditioner and massage oil and so on — through a network of telemarketing agents, mostly women, some working at home and others in an office above a tanning salon in the town center. When I met her, Miranda was making the stuff herself, boiling witchy cauldrons on the stove at her flat. Now “her ladies,” as she insists on calling them, sell factory-made “natural botanicals” on commission to customers whose names appear on a list she rents from a marketing agency in London. A surprising number of people don’t seem to mind being phoned by strangers to talk about moisturizer, and lately Miranda has begun to glimpse a grand and lucrative future.

I insisted on the holiday. I wanted to slow things down. She’d just secured funding for further expansion and was looking at space

in an industrial park. There was talk of online sales and meetings with a brand consultant, whatever one of those is. When she came home from signing the contract with her new investors (a pair of ambitious local lawyers) I expected her to be elated. Instead she sat and sipped pennyroyal tea in the garden, fidgety and withdrawn.

Unlike me, Miranda has a knack for living in the world. Almost effortlessly she seems to find herself on the crest of whatever preoccupation is currently sweeping the lunch table or the Sunday supplements. I’ve come to think of it as a gift. It isn’t something she works at; Miranda certainly isn’t a modish person, at least not consciously. In the last few years everyone around us has become very excited by money and, sure enough, her talent has led her to it, like an ant following a pheromone trail. There used to be a contradiction between money and Miranda, a short circuit. Like me, she belongs to a generation whose selfishness was tempered by a more-than-passing interest in renunciation. We had the notion that in some variously defined way, simplicity was glamorous, hip. So although she’s now a thrusting entrepreneur of the type celebrated in the glossy magazines she buys with increasing frequency, Miranda remains conflicted about consumerism. I diagnosed her silent tea drinking as a symptom of guilt, the unease of a woman who’d once spoken about alternative lifestyles with the emphasis on “alternative” rather than “lifestyles.”

Or maybe she was just tired. Either way, I could tell she wasn’t sure that expansion was what she wanted — and I had my own private reasons to worry. I was being stretched thin by Miranda’s ambitions. It was increasingly hard for me to keep a channel open to something important, something I don’t really have a name for any longer. An ideal, maybe, though I’m not comfortable with the word. A vision of the future? Perhaps just to a person, someone I never was but once hoped to become.

It was clear we both needed space to breathe, so I rented a holiday apartment in the Languedoc and in my best stern-but-loving tone ordered my common-law wife (a charmless and apparently legally

null phrase that winds Miranda up whenever I use it) to take ten days off. She complained bitterly. Didn’t I understand it was a crucial moment for the company? I was insane if I thought she could just pack up and leave, we weren’t kids anymore, and so on and so forth. I held firm, tried various arguments, told her she had to think about her life holistically — meaning, in Miranda-code, that her work was getting in the way of her relationship with me. That got her attention, to an extent.

In the end I think she was only persuaded because of the car. To my horror, the woman who had for the first five years of our cohabitation driven a Deux Chevaux with an Atomkraft Nein Danke sticker on the back bumper had arrived home one evening in a brand-new silver BMW, which she called a “Beamer” in an affected Cockney accent and justified to me by saying the car gave her “credibility” and made “a statement” to her suppliers. I’ve always been grateful to Miranda for pulling me out of a hole and, heaven knows I’ve reason to be wary about setting myself up in judgment on anyone, but the car crossed a line. A strong stomach and a streak of low cunning were required to sell the holiday to her as a chance to take the thing on a road trip. Depressingly my ploy worked. Her eyes sparkling with advertising imagery of alloy on scenic country roads, she agreed.

So we drove through France and for a few days, as I’d hoped, Bountessence receded from our lives. We were just ourselves again, two people who had the capability to make each other happy. We avoided the highways and made our way south on Routes Nation-ales, Miranda overtaking trucks on long straight roads lined with cypress trees, me humming along to a tape of Charles Trenet chansons, wishing I understood more of the words to the one about being happy and in love on Nationale 7. We stopped overnight at a hotel in a forgettable small town where we ate Coquilles Saint-Jacques and slept in a room papered with an alarming pink rose pattern, which had migrated like a fungus to cover not just the walls but the ceiling and the panels of the wardrobe and the bathroom door. We had sex in the soft, lumpy bed, giggling like children

as the iron frame creaked and the headboard banged against the wall. Our neighbor retaliated by turning on the TV and we fell asleep to the muffled sound of gunfire. In the morning we woke up and dragged our cases out of the rose room and back into the car, silent and hung over. I put on the Charles Trenet and Miranda switched it off again. Eventually we arrived.

The place I’d booked was described as an ancient stone house on the outskirts of a tranquil village near Béziers. It turned out to be a cramped little maisonette, with the rough white textured plaster, dubious wiring, and mismatched crockery of holiday apartments all over Europe. Miranda went out to buy flowers, and I opened the shutters and was hit by clean white southern light. We decided to be happy.

Our idyll lasted four days — days of waking up to the noise of the village street under our balcony, of chopping tomatoes, speaking bad French in shops, driving to the river, sopping honey onto fresh bread and drinking little bottles of beer that accumulated in a green gang by the side of the loudly humming fridge. We visited markets, Miranda pointing winsomely at produce she packed into a wicker basket as I picked through a phrasebook, vainly searching for the names of fish and vegetables. I followed her around contentedly, enjoying the way her thin cotton dress silhouetted her legs.

Miranda liked to take a siesta. She wanted, she said, to live to a Mediterranean rhythm, at least for a couple of weeks. I’d brought a fat book with me, a thriller I couldn’t get into, and as she snoozed in the heat of the afternoon, I lay beside her on the bed with it balanced on my chest, my eyes skating off the print as I cycled through a familiar sequence of thoughts. How circumscribed my life was, how regulated. How — I hesitated to use the word trapped, even to myself, but then again I was with Miranda Martin, who’d been one of those little girls who get to the age of ten with every detail of their wedding day prearranged in their heads, who retained the ability to make a plan and then slot the world into it, like a peg into a board. That was certainly how it had been with us. She had a vacancy; I was interviewed; I got the job. As usual when my

mind worked in this fashion, I resolved nothing, just ran through my list of complaints like a man turning the wheel on some rusty piece of agricultural machinery.

On the fourth afternoon I finally fell asleep beside her, and woke up refreshed, comforted. I suggested we spend the afternoon at a village I’d been reading about in the Green Guide. Sainte-Anne-de-la-Garrigue was an hour’s drive away. It was a place with a bloody history, the site of a siege during the Albigensian crusade, after which its Cathar defenders had been burned at the stake. The Michelin people gave it two stars.

We packed hats and bottled water and turned the air-conditioning up high to dispel the awful heat in the car. Though it was late afternoon when we crossed it, the sun was still beating down like a drummer on the narrow stone bridge over the river. We drove on through a paper-flat world of white limestone, yellow-green scrub, and cloudless blue sky as the road picked its way up the side of a gorge, passing through a pinewood to emerge into gorse and thistle and a series of hairpin bends whose vertiginous drops were punctuated on the worst corners by white-painted rocks and battered metal barriers.

As we passed over the col I caught sight of Sainte-Anne, a spiral of red-roofed stone houses knotted tightly round a jutting white rock. When we got closer I saw that on top of the rock was a stark broken rectangle, the stump of a tower, which the guidebook informed me was “of uncertain age.” We parked outside a church in a little square, completely without shade. The village appeared deserted; the heat had driven everyone inside. The only place that seemed to be open was a café, the generically named Bar des Sports. We sat down at a table under an umbrella and drank little round-bellied bottles of Orangina, trying to work up the energy for sightseeing.

“It’s pretty,” said Miranda, a note of approval in her voice.

“You sound like a teacher giving out marks.”

She frowned. I’d meant it as a joke. Sainte-Anne-de-la-Garrigue was undeniably pretty. There was a little mairie and a war memorial,

and behind the church a narrow cobbled street that wound upward in the direction of the tower.

“That was where they executed the heretics after the siege,” I told her. “Over there. Right in front of the church door.”

“Mike?”

“Yes?”

“Put the guidebook away.”

“But that’s the whole point of this place.”

“What is?”

“What happened here.”

“Why should I care what happened here? Nothing has happened to me here. It’s just a pretty little village on a very hot day.” “But—”

“Mike, I want to feel peaceful, not think about people being burned at the stake.”

So we sat in silence. Miranda took a picture of me and I smiled distractedly. There was something occulted about Sainte-Anne, something I wanted to decipher. The mid-afternoon quiet had a physical quality, an apparent potential for form and weight.

“Do you want to climb up to the tower?” I asked.

“Not yet. Give it ten minutes. Let’s have another drink.”

We ordered mineral water, and I sat and listened to the tiny fizz in my glass as it mingled with other tiny sounds: insects, a transistor radio muttering in the back room of the bar. I watched an old man cross in front of the church, leaning heavily on a walking stick. He was dressed in some kind of long robe; I wondered if he was the curé. Then something peculiar happened. I could put it down to the heat, I suppose. Perhaps I fell asleep for a few seconds, enough time for the old man to round the corner and a second person to appear in the same spot. However it happened, I suddenly realized the person I’d taken for an old man was actually a woman. There was no robe, no stick, nothing even to suggest them. The transition was seamless: one minute one figure, the next another. This woman was tall, wearing pedal pushers and a sleeveless cotton top that revealed a pair of wiry, muscular shoulders. Shadowing her

face was a big straw hat. She carried a string bag filled with fruit: oranges, peaches, a green-skinned melon. Though she was a long distance away, I sensed something familiar about her. Maybe it was her walk, an unhurried but somehow purposeful amble, one brown arm swinging the bag, the other raised occasionally toward her hidden face. Smoking a cigarette. Who used to walk that way? Who used to walk along smoking, swinging a bag?

The woman didn’t look like a villager. A tourist? I thought not; at least, not a day-tripper. She looked too purposeful. From such a distance it was impossible to say how old she was. She turned the corner into the street that led up to the tower.

“Come on,” I said to Miranda. “Drink up. Time for some exercise.”

She looked at me sulkily. “Right now?”

“Why not? I’m bored. I want to move.” I tried to put something jaunty into my tone, to disguise the sudden need I had to get up, to walk after the woman and see her face.

“But I haven’t finished my drink.”

I grinned a big fake grin. “All right, see you up there.”

“Christ, Mike, can’t you wait two minutes?”

“Of course. Take your time.”

I was gripped by a powerful anxiety. What would I miss if I lost sight of the woman in the straw hat? I tried to wait patiently for Miranda, then gave up. Opening my wallet, I tucked a banknote under the ashtray, scraped my chair back from the table and stood. Miranda sipped her drink with deliberate slowness. I turned around and started walking. I was halfway across the square before she caught up with me.

“You obviously didn’t want your change,” she said sarcastically. I didn’t reply.

The street that led up to the tower was steep and narrow. As we reached the church I could just see the woman up ahead, turning a corner. I walked fast, not looking behind to see if Miranda was keeping up, passing rows of identical little doorways and shuttered windows with terra-cotta flowerpots on the sills. I reached the

corner just in time to see the woman stop and fit a key into one of the doors. As she went inside, she half turned toward me. I suppressed an impulse to break into a run. She was still too far away to be sure, but I thought — it was ridiculous what I thought. Increasing my pace I approached the point where she had disappeared. Sweat was pouring off my forehead. My shirt was plastered to my back. When I judged I was outside the right door I stopped, feeling dizzy and slightly sick. The house looked newer than some of the others, but patches of its cement facing had peeled away, giving it a forlorn, down-at-heels aspect. My dizziness worsened. I couldn’t be certain, could I? I leaned forward, propping my hands on my knees.

Miranda bustled up, flushed and annoyed. “What on earth’s got into you? Are you all right?”

“I don’t feel well.”

“Sit down. Sit on the step. Why did you charge off like that?” I flopped down on the doorstep and lowered my head between my legs.

“You shouldn’t do these things,” Miranda admonished gently. “You’re no spring chicken. And in this heat—”

“Yes, all right. Don’t go on.”

“Well, excuse me.”

It couldn’t have been her. That’s all I could think. It couldn’t have been. But there was something about the way she held herself. Familiar and yet unfamiliar. I thought of my own body, letting me down after a short climb uphill. How had twenty-five years changed the way I walked, the way I swung my arms? Weakly, I allowed Miranda to help me back down to the car, where she made me drink gulps of warm plastic-bottled water. Then she drove me home.

After that, nothing was easy. In the evening, Miranda pottered about in the kitchen and I lay in the darkened bedroom, frozen into a kind of rigid panic. The next morning I felt physically better, but I couldn’t reconnect mentally with the way I’d been before we drove to Sainte-Anne. Could it really have been Anna? We went to the market and I found myself nervously scanning the crowd.

Two days went by. I was sullen, unable to settle or to enjoy anything. I’d lose myself in thought and realize Miranda had asked me a question. Several times I caught her staring at me, her jaw tight, her eyes narrowed. Our holiday was almost over and the atmosphere between us was so poisonous that, regardless of what else happened, I began to wonder whether we’d still be together when we got home. When we finally had a proper argument, I felt weirdly relieved. One minute we were preparing a tense salad in the kitchen, getting in each other’s way. The next we were standing in opposite corners of the tiny room, shouting. The content was irrelevant — I can’t even remember now what sparked it off; underneath she was telling me I was impossible and selfish and cold, and I was telling her she was controlling and stupid and shallow. I grabbed the car keys from the table and stamped downstairs. I had the excuse I needed.

The weather was cooler than before. A light wind blew dust over the road, hazing the air and moving flecks of cirrus cloud across the sky. I took the hairpins on the way up to SainteAnne-de-la-Garrigue at speed, pulling the wheel hard and sending little showers of white gravel spitting onto the crash barriers. Roaring into the village I brought the car to a halt in front of the church. Outside the Bar des Sports a group of old men were playing cards. As I got out, they stopped their game to glare at the foreigner whose loud car had disrupted the afternoon’s peace.

As I walked up the steep hill toward the tower, all I knew was that I needed to see the woman’s face; after that I hoped the rest would become clear. I’d arrived soon after lunch, earlier than before. If she had a routine, and if I waited long enough, maybe I’d see her. I was wearing dark glasses and a floppy cricket hat with a wide brim, the kind of hat that identifies its wearer as English, beyond any shadow of cultural doubt. It was supposed to be a disguise. The glasses obscured my eyes and the hat hid what was left of my hair, which when Anna had last seen me had been long and wavy.

I realized I’d begun to take seriously the possibility that it was

her. I wasn’t sure whether the chill I felt was fear or excitement.

Outside the cement-faced house, a pair of old women sat on high-backed chairs. Despite the heat they wore headscarves and pinafores and thick black stockings. A lean tabby cat rubbed round their feet, mewing. As I approached they put down their sewing and inspected me balefully. I said a gruff “Bonjour” and walked past, trying as I did to peer through the open door into the house. The thinner of the two, whose jaw worked in a constant nervous motion, squeezed her neighbor’s wrist and said something. The neighbor made a dismissive gesture. A little farther up the hill, I stopped. I was confused. Maybe I had the wrong house. With two pairs of eyes boring suspiciously into my back, I didn’t want to loiter around to check. The street showed no other sign of life, just a long row of closed doors and shuttered windows.

I walked back to the old women and said a second bonjour into the silence. “La femme — la femme qui habite ici?” I asked, gesturing at the house.

“Une femme?” asked the thin one, her chin quivering accusingly. I made “tall” signs with my hand. “Ici.” I pointed to the house. “L’Anglaise.”

The thin one spoke rapidly to her friend. They both shook their heads.

“La Suédoise?” suggested the friend.

“Suédoise?” I asked eagerly. “Elle est suédoise?”

They nodded warily, pursing their lips at my insistence. The thin one pointed to the next-door house.

“Elle habite là?” I asked. They adopted the closed expressions of respectable women who know there is a limit to the amount of information one should give a foreigner in the street. Realizing they weren’t going to reply, I thanked them and walked on.

So I’d been imagining things. The woman was Swedish, some teacher or accountant or civil servant with a holiday home in the village, and somehow from out of the depths of my stress I’d conjured Anna Addison. Relieved but inexplicably disappointed, I headed on up the hill. The street gave out into a narrow path,

bordered by a mat of dry undergrowth that made me think about snakes. Feeling like a tourist again, I stood for a few minutes, catching my breath and looking down over the roofs of Sainte-Anne. Beyond them the valley dropped away toward the glittering snail-trail of the river. I toiled on up to the tower, which was completely featureless, four blank masonry walls with no sign of an arrow slit, let alone a door. It was hard to see what it might have been used for. Around its base was a path, which I followed, trailing a hand against the warm stone. As I completed my circuit I thought I heard a man’s voice, but when I turned around to look, no one was there. It was time to go home.

I was completely unprepared to meet her. As I made my way down she appeared in front of me on the path, very suddenly, as if she’d risen out of the ground. She was wearing a sleeveless blue dress and the same straw sun hat as before. It was crammed down low on her head, the way Anna always wore hats. When we lived at Lansdowne Road I used to tease her by asking if she was expecting a high wind. “Pardon,” she said, and stepped around me, striding on up the hill. Her voice was pitched higher than I remembered. My legs felt weak. I could hear the crunch of her footsteps; all I’d have to do was call her name.

And what then?

God, her face. Anna’s face. The high cheekbones, the full mouth; a mouth now nested in lines but the same mouth. There was always something primitive about Anna’s face. In certain moods she could fix it into a carved wooden mask, a thing to be worshipped, feared. Did I even see her eyes? Anna’s eyes were green. When things were good between us, I couldn’t bear to meet them for too long in case I gave myself away, blurted out all the promises I was trying so guiltily to extract from her. But she hadn’t looked up. And I hadn’t been recognized — her pace didn’t falter as she passed by.

Anna Addison. Who’d been killed in the conference room of the German embassy in Copenhagen in 1975.

* * *

Nothing is permanent. Everything is subject to change.

I walked back down the hill past the two old women, who gave me the evil eye as I went by. Under my feet the cobbles felt distant, almost spongy, like a street in a dream. Then I began to run, and once again it was 1968 and I was pressed against the trunk of a tree outside the American embassy in Grosvenor Square.

Annica is the Buddhist term. The cosmic state of flux.

I was trying to link arms with the guy next to me, whose long hair was matted with blood. The tree provided some shelter because the mounted police couldn’t ride under the branches. As long as I was there, I was relatively safe. All around me there was an incredible rushing noise, which I knew was composed of shouting and screaming and firecrackers and stamping hoofs, but sounded to me like a great wind, like history.

I was twenty years old. I thought about history a lot.

Up close, coming toward you, police horses are bigger than you could imagine. Facing the metal-shod hoofs, the jangling harnesses, wild eyes, and flaring nostrils, you know how it must have felt to be a serf in a medieval battle. The wall of flour-spattered blue tunics in front of the embassy parted and the horses charged into us, kicking up clods of turf, their riders standing up in the stirrups to add force to their baton blows. There was no pretense in that charge. It was about unleashing as much violence as possible. People were thrashing about on the ground. I saw a girl trapped beneath a horse, desperately trying to cover her head with her hands. The horse reared up, almost unseating its rider, a red-faced sergeant with a toothbrush moustache. People were shouting at him, one or two of the braver ones edging forward to try to pull the girl out. Red-face thought they were attacking him and twisted

around in his saddle, flailing left and right with his stick. Finally the horse shied away and the girl was left unconscious on the ground, a tiny broken thing in a suede jacket with a young man on his knees beside it, trying to gather it up.

Protesters were running in all directions. Pressed against the tree trunk I was only a few feet away from the police line, which had re-formed on the far side of the ironwork fence that marked the western boundary of the square. From time to time they’d reach over it and grab someone; we’d cling on from behind, clutching at ankles or belts in little comic tugs-of-war. To do this we’d have to emerge from the shelter of the tree. I was hanging on to some guy’s leg, looking over my shoulder to check that I wasn’t about to be trampled or coshed, when I spotted her running forward, a thin girl in blue jeans and a torn army jacket, her long brown hair tied back from her face with a scarf. There was something both reckless and self-possessed about her, about her loping run, the clean overarm action she used to throw the stone; as I watched it arc through the sky, I felt both aroused and ashamed, aroused by the casual beauty of her act and ashamed of myself, for so far that afternoon all I’d done was push and shove and jog around confusedly, trying not to get arrested. She had the clarity I lacked. It had become a fight, so she was fighting back. The stone fell somewhere behind the line of black vans drawn up in front of the embassy steps. When I looked around again, she’d disappeared.

Later, when I met Anna, I told her I’d seen her before, at Grosvenor Square. I told her the way she carried herself had “profoundly affected me”; that was the phrase I used. It sounded pompous even as it came out of my mouth and I wished I’d found a better one. We were at the house in Lansdowne Road. I can remember sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace, leaning against the ratty old couch. She held her hand in front of her mouth as she laughed. I laughed too, just from the pleasure of being next to her. I’m no longer sure why I thought she was lying when she told me it wasn’t her: she had no reason to lie. She said she’d been on the march,

but a girlfriend had felt faint and she’d taken her home. She’d never made it to the embassy. The strange thing is that, although I dropped the subject, I was so certain I’d seen her that it became part of my personal mythology, an unexamined truth that in later years took on a dubious aura of prefiguration, confirming to me that though they’d felt disordered at the time, even terrifyingly random, the events of my life with Anna were in some sense necessary, that the future had been pulling me toward itself, reeling me in.

* * *

I don’t remember much about how I got back from SainteAnne-de-la-Garrigue. At the apartment, Miranda greeted me with a curt nod and a silence that persisted through the remaining days of our holiday, cloaking our final packing and washing-up, the return of the keys, the long drive to the coast. She didn’t ask where I’d been and I didn’t tell her; we traveled, as it were, in two separate capsules, as lonely a journey as I’ve ever taken.

As soon as we got home she threw herself into Bountessence, driving up to London and returning with loan documents, ad-agency artwork, sheaves of financial projections, bags and boxes from department stores containing elements of a new “business” wardrobe of tailored suits and high-heeled shoes. She walked around the house talking ostentatiously into her phone and whenever I asked how things were going she’d reply with a torrent of jargon, as if to underscore how far beyond my sphere of competence she’d moved. I was being warned: I might just find myself surplus to requirements.

Sam’s departure for university gave us a short respite. She’d spent the early part of the summer waitressing at one of the pizza joints in the town center, then bought herself a cheap flight to — of all places — South Africa, a country I was still unused to thinking of as a tourist destination. She returned soon after we did, happy and sunburned, to fill the house with loud music and stories about her adventures, which seemed mainly to have involved her and her schoolfriend Ally climbing up or jumping off or into things with the clean-cut boys whose pictures now took pride of place in the collage of snapshots above her desk. I tried not to speculate about whether she’d lost her virginity to one of these variously grinning white teenagers, the one in the striped

rugby shirt, the one with the shark’s-tooth necklace and the sunglasses pushed up like a headband into his streaky blond hair. None of my business if she had, of course. As Sam occasionally reminded me, usually just before slamming her bedroom door, I wasn’t her real dad. She was the product of Miranda’s monthlong fling with a musician, a drummer in an Australian band who’d gone home at the end of their tour not knowing about her pregnancy. I’d been around since Sam was two years old, and though I loved her very much I was annoyed to find myself so clumsily possessive. I felt ambushed, tripped up by fatherhood, a ridiculous and slightly creepy cartoon of a stepdad.

With Miranda so busy — increasingly her trips to London seemed to involve overnight stays — I was the one who oversaw Sam’s preparations for university, helped her decide which of her clothes to take, which textbooks she absolutely had to buy before she got there. We made piles and lists, and when Miranda was around, the three of us colluded in putting a happy face on things. Miranda and I drove Sam to Bristol, carried her bags into the hall of residence and sat through an interminable restaurant lunch watching her sigh and fidget, visibly wishing we’d vanish and let her get on with her new life. Afterward we watched her run away from us up a flight of concrete stairs; sitting in the car, Miranda leaned her head on the wheel and burst into tears.

“Now what?” she asked. I knew what she meant. It wasn’t just that her little girl had grown up. It was us. We were going to have to face each other.

In old cartoons, the Hanna Barbera shorts I used to watch as a child, Wile E. Coyote would frequently run off a cliff. When this happened, he’d stop moving forward, his legs windmilling in the air, but it was only when he looked down that gravity started to work and he fell. Until then he was magically suspended, held aloft by his conviction that there was still ground beneath his feet. This was how I dealt with seeing Anna again. By pretending I hadn’t. I repressed the memory thoroughly and completely, and when it struggled to the surface I pushed it back down, telling myself that

with my relationship to Miranda crumbling, the last thing I should have on my mind was the reappearance of someone from my political days. But it wasn’t just someone. It was Anna. Dead Anna. In those first weeks, the point I kept making to myself, neurotically, repetitively, was that, though I’d seen her, she hadn’t seen me: if I could just forget what had happened, the meeting would be an event without consequences, a mirage.

It meant she’d survived Copenhagen, of course, which seemed impossible. The news reports had been unequivocal. They’d published photos, disgusting prurient photos of her corpse, the arms spread wide, a bloodstained suit jacket hiding her charred face and torso. Somehow a living Anna made less sense than a dead one. In her beliefs, her political choices, she belonged to a past almost geological in its remoteness from the present. Even back then, death had always been on her horizon; that was what I’d understood, eventually. You can’t hate the world’s imperfection so fiercely, so absolutely, without getting drawn toward death. Beyond a certain point it becomes the only possibility.

So, instead of thinking about Anna, I tried to mend things with Miranda, ignoring her pointed questions about how I was passing the days while she was out at work. I kept the house clean and the fridge full; I tiptoed around her as she worked on her business plan, and when Bountessence moved into its new premises I attended the opening drinks party and held a glass of cava and tried to pretend, as I applauded the speeches, that I didn’t feel as if I were spinning out of control.

For a while it worked. Our conversations became less strained. We found things we could do together without getting on each other’s nerves, watching whole seasons of American drama on DVD as we ate ice cream on the couch, the very model of the modern consuming couple. We started sleeping with each other again. The sex was good, better than it had been for years, but I cringed from the scratch of her newly manicured nails on my back, which felt to me like a cat clawing at a door, begging to be let in.

Then came the evening when Miranda invited her backers and their wives for dinner. The two lawyers exuded the bland machismo of small-town worthies everywhere. They talked about skiing and their wine cellars and how there was money to be made from the Internet. I’d cooked, which they evidently found amusing; as I served the food there were barbed comments about housework and aprons. The women seemed to find me exotic and slightly unsavory. Where had I learned to make Oriental food? Thai, I corrected. I told them I’d lived in Thailand for a while, during the seventies.

“Mike was in a monastery,” interjected Miranda, trying to make me sound interesting. I wished she hadn’t: from the fake smiles around the table, I could tell I was now seen as a crackpot, some sort of religious cultist. “I was never a monk,” I clarified. “I just worked there.” I tried to make it sound like a tourist destination, as innocuous as a spa or a yoga retreat. There was nothing I wanted less than to discuss Wat Tham Nok with those people. Miranda herself had only the vaguest idea about the place. It had always been a sore point that I’d never wanted to go back to Asia with her. She liked the idea of being shown the “real Thailand,” by which she meant kite festivals and sticky rice and girls making wai, rather than back-room shooting galleries in Patpong. And there we were again, up against yet another barrier to truth, another thing I’d elided in the authorized version of my life story: the way I’d actually lost my lost years.

When the cheek kissing and coat finding and insincere expressions of concern about driving over the limit were finally dispensed with, we closed the front door and wandered around in silence, clearing the table and stacking plates and glasses by the sink.

“I’ll do this, Mike,” offered Miranda.

“It’s fine.”

“Really—”

“Really, it’s fine. Pass me a cloth.”

She flicked down the bin lid and sighed. “I’m sorry I put you through that. It’s just—”

“Business. I know. You don’t have to apologize. I understand.” “I do appreciate it, Mike. You were great.”

“Don’t overdo it. I just cooked a meal.”

“Putting up with them, I mean. I had to have them over. It was beginning to feel awkward.”

“Why didn’t you invite them before?”

“Well, I knew you—”

“I what?”

“Not you. Them. I knew how they’d be with you, the patronizing way they’d treat you.”

“So you were protecting me.”

She kissed me. “I’m not saying you need protecting. They’re major investors. I need them to like — to respect me. You were a saint to put up with them.”

“Ah, I see, it’s about status. So, what do you reckon? Are they driving home talking about what a great couple we are, or about why a successful entrepreneur like you is married to some fucking socks-and-sandals religious freak?”

“Mike, don’t be like this. Caroline and Judith really loved your food.”

“You think so?”

“Look, I know they aren’t very — cultured. I could have died when they said Oriental like that. Like it was a pizza.avor.”

“Miranda, as long as it’s about Bountessence, fine. I understand. You do what you have to do to make money. See whoever you need to see. Be however you like with them. Just keep them away from me. I don’t want to know them and I don’t want to have to pretend to like them.”

“They’re not so bad, Mike.”

“They’re smug, Philistine, reactionary, self-satisfied morons.” “I don’t think that’s fair. They’re conservative. Old-fashioned.” “Old-fashioned? They’re fucking Neanderthals. You could almost

see those two golf-club Fascists asking themselves if I was queer.” “I wish you wouldn’t swear.”

“Oh, really?”

“I can see why you’re irritated, but you have to understand. In their circle they don’t meet a lot of men who — who don’t work.”

“Now it comes out. Work! Of course. It’s been on your mind for months. Well, the way I heard it, I work with you. We work together, isn’t that right? A partnership?”

“Of course it is, Mike. But things are changing. You have to see that.”

“I think I’m beginning to.”

“Bountessence has to be — it has to be put on a more professional footing. And you’ve got to admit you don’t have the business background.”

“I don’t want the fucking business background.”

“Exactly. And, besides, I’m not sure it would be appropriate for either of us. Going forward, I mean.”

“Going forward?” I made sarcastic little quote marks with my fingers, which she ignored, doggedly carrying on with her speech.

“To work together, I mean. Things are strained enough as they are. I’m not sure I could — what I’m saying is I think you need something. Something of your own. A project.”

“So what do you reckon I should do, darling? Take up crocheting?”

“God, you’re impossible! I just meant — well, there’s nothing to stop you from getting a part-time job, is there?”

I walked out of the room before I said anything I’d really regret. And once I’d calmed down, two or three days later, I realized she was right. Anything was better than festering away in the house, obsessing about Anna Addison. Miranda didn’t want me around Bountessence and I didn’t want to be there either. There was, as she put it, nothing to stop me. So I followed the path of educated misfits through the ages and got a job in a bookshop.

Pelham Antiquarian Books is a refuge of slackness in the economically efficient high-street hell of our little market town. Specializing in nothing in particular it has, over the years, turned

into a dusty cavern of yellowing paperbacks, a place where books go to die. It’s run (slowly, into the ground) by Godfrey Kerr, an elderly alcoholic who doesn’t seem to give a toss whether he makes any money or not, as long as no one disturbs him before eleven or asks if he has anything by Jeffrey Archer.

I’d known God slightly for years, reached the stage where he’d grunt at me and perhaps raise his coffee cup when I came through the door. I’d always liked going into Pelham’s, with its moth-eaten rugs and rickety shelves, its odor of cat piss and intellectual decay. As the old town-center tradesmen have gone out of business, butchers and ironmongers and family-run tea rooms edged out by branches of Starbucks and Pizza Hut, it’s one of the last places you can pass the time without feeling you’re in some sort of wipe-clean playpen for the consuming classes. When I spotted God’s discreet card in the window, advertising for an assistant, I knew it would be the perfect bolt-hole.

Soon I was the one drinking coffee behind the counter and playing with Stearns, the elderly ginger cat. I went in even when I wasn’t needed, when God wasn’t too busy drinking himself to death in his “parlor” to come downstairs and open the shop. I spent a lot of time rummaging in the cardboard boxes stacked chest-high in the basement, pulling out buried treasures to read in the broken-down armchair in the back room. I hadn’t the faintest idea why God thought he needed an assistant. There wasn’t any work to do. The atmosphere of genteel derangement reminded me of one of the places I’d worked when I first came back from Asia, the shop where I’d met Miranda. Avalon sold various kinds of new-age junk, crystal healing kits and dream diaries and cheap silver jewelry. It was run by a witchy woman called Olla, a refugee from Kristiana, whose life was plagued by omens and portents; several times a month she received supernatural word that it was temporarily dangerous for her to sell scented candles and tarot packs to the people of the town and disappeared, leaving me in charge. Miranda was a regular customer, buying books on herbalism, packets of potpourri, greetings cards. I was suspicious, unused to being back

and still half in hiding as I gingerly built up the paper trail around Michael Frame. I’d moved to Chichester almost at random, because of a picture postcard I came across at the monastery, which had made me feel homesick. So English, that segmented blue-and-green selection of views. Cathedral Close. The High Street. It turned out to be a stuffy little town, good to bury myself in. It was only when I started chatting to Miranda that I realized how lonely I was.

Olla and Avalon disappeared years ago, so long that when I first tried, I found it hard even to remember Olla’s name.

After twenty years without a cigarette I’d started smoking again. Stress, I suppose, though in part it was an infantile reaction to Miranda’s new order, which now encompassed a personal trainer called Lee, who took her running in the park and hung around our kitchen talking about her body-mass index. No cigarettes in the shop was one of God’s few rules, so every time I wanted one I had to go for a walk. I was smoking under the Market Cross, remembering the phone calls from Olla where she’d whisper instructions into the receiver, telling me to light a sprig of St. John’s Wort and not answer the door to any red-haired men, when I realized the well-dressed tourist who’d been walking up and down photographing the cathedral had turned in my direction and was doing a sort of theatrical double-take. I was wrapped up warmly against the November weather, in a thick coat with a hat pulled down low over my head. There was nothing to distinguish me from a hundred other middle-aged shoppers, which made it all the more disturbing that this man was now starting to walk toward me, smiling a familiar quizzical half-smile.

“Chris,” he said, in the tone of a man in the throes of pleasure. “Chris Carver.”

I felt sick. Ever since France, I’d been waiting for this. I didn’t know what shape it would take, didn’t know who it would be, but I knew there would be someone. I should have guessed. It was always Miles who signaled the changes.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”

“I don’t believe so.”

“My name’s Michael. You’ve made a mistake.”

“Come off it, Chris. I know we’ve all changed, but not that much.”

He’d grown into himself, somehow. His hair, which had been fine and blond, was shaved close to his narrow skull. His glasses, which I remember as thick, black-framed things like old-fashioned TV sets, had slimmed down into tiny steel-rimmed rectangles. He was wearing an expensive-looking overcoat over a suit in a brash Rupert Bear check. As he examined me he shot his cuffs, showing off the cufflinks, two little enamel portraits of Elvis Presley. Evidently Miles Bridgeman was still the dedicated follower of fashion. It seemed unlikely that this man, with his aura of well-heeled cocaine abuse and lunches at West End clubs, just happened to be wandering around in Chichester at two on a Wednesday afternoon. Whatever lay behind this encounter, it wasn’t chance.

“Please, Miles,” I said, as gently as I could. “At least call me Mike. That’s my name now. Mike.”

All things are transitory. All things must pass. Attachments, whether to material possessions, to people, to places or a name, are futile. Despite your clinging, these things will fade away.

I first met Miles in the cells after Grosvenor Square, the same day I saw the girl I still believe was Anna. I’d begun that morning, listening to speeches in Trafalgar Square, as a fairly typical second-year student at the London School of Economics, which is to say I’d spent the previous eighteen months in an overheated coffee-bar argument about the best way to destroy the class system, combat state oppression and end the War. For us there was only one war. Even though we weren’t fighting there (one promise our so-called socialist government hadn’t broken), Vietnam defined us. It was Vietnam that drew us together and made us a movement. I was sometimes a little vague about who I included in the word “us,” but that Sunday it seemed clear. There were tens of thousands there, the famous and the unknown, gathered together in the name of peace and internationalism. We were the People. It was our day.

The speakers harangued us in relays from a platform in front of the National Gallery, approaching the mike against a backdrop of fluttering North Vietnamese flags. Someone let off a smoke bomb and an orange haze drifted across the fountains, licking at the feet of the lions guarding the base of Nelson’s Column. The smoke was a reminder of why we were there, of the horror being played out in jungles and rice paddies on the other side of the world. The speakers linked this to other things: Aden, devaluation. They told us Britain was on its knees. They told us the system was tottering.

My name then was Chris Carver. I’d grown up in Ruislip, in the commuter belt of west London. I’d done well at grammar school, so well that even my father, a man whose emotions got lost at the bottom of the North Atlantic on some wartime winter convoy, had evinced a little pride in my LSE place. In stale sixties Britain, university meant upward mobility. My family were proud members of what is still termed, with the disgusting precision of English snobbery, the lower middle class. When he heard the news over the breakfast table, Dad, who owned a shop selling electrical goods, had cracked a smile behind his copy of the Express, not because he cared about knowledge or particularly respected those who possessed the education he lacked. Quite the contrary: he always made his feelings very clear about eggheads, spewers of hot air. It wasn’t even about money, not really. He smiled because his son was on the rise, edging a little closer to the high-walled place occupied by the governors, the top people. And, of course, because my ability to pass exams reflected well on him. “Blood,” he’d said, gesturing at me complacently with a marmalade-smeared slice of toast, “will out.”

Standing in the crowd that morning with my fist in the air, there was one thing I was certain of: I’d had enough of my father’s world, enough of the idea that life was a scramble to the top over the heads of those poorer, slower, or weaker than yourself. I hadn’t spoken to either of my parents since the previous Christmas, when I’d announced over the lunch table that I was a Communist. My

mother, numbed by pills and her own lack of expectation, had been incredulous. To her it was simply nonsensical, as if I’d just told her I was a Negro or a circus clown. Communism was for Glasgow dockers and bearded Jews. People like us didn’t just turn that way. But my father understood. He knew I was telling him to get fucked.

For my dad, disrespect was always a threat, not just to himself but to the wider world, the nation, whatever it was he thought he’d fought a war for. Where would I be if he hadn’t known how to obey an order in i94o? That was his trump card. His war, my warlessness. I think he’d have found it easier if I’d told him I was homosexual; then at least he could have submitted me to the appropriate authorities — the psychiatrist or the vicar. Something could have been done.

Even now I hate remembering the gloomy little Oedipal scene that played out in our front room, the four of us, Mum and Dad, me and my older brother Brian, wearing paper crowns from cheap Christmas crackers, the kind that left slight stains of color on your forehead when you took them off. I talked into the silence, trying everything I could think of to get a response, a sign of life. I told my parents the ruling class were scum, fattened by nine hundred years of greed and oppression. A cough. The clink of cutlery on the second-best china. Warmongering bastards, burning the skin off little children. Dad segmenting a boiled potato. “Christopher,” he said eventually, “if this is typical of what they’re teaching you—” I knew the second part and repeated it along with him—“then I don’t know why I’m paying my taxes.” My mother asked if I wanted more gravy. I pushed my chair back and left the house.

So Trafalgar Square was part of a new life, a project of self-invention. I’d come on the march with my friends, who were all members of something called the Vietnam Action Group, one of a dozen different councils and committees that existed at my university, all dedicated with varying degrees of clarity to the proposition that ending America’s war in Vietnam was our special duty. My own anger about the war rendered everything else

disgusting. Every small pleasure was bleached out by the knowledge that elsewhere such horror existed.

My friends loved to argue. They loved to talk, and though I had a shelf of Marcuse and Marx and knew the jargon as well as they did, their talk had begun to seem ineffectual, masturbatory. In meetings and teach-ins I was the first to stand up and call for action. I was hopeful — this was how young I was — that I might just be the one, that it might be given to me, Chris Carver, to smash up the old world and build something new.

Beside us in the crowd that morning, a boy with a scrap of bedsheet tied around his head knelt down and doused an American flag in lighter fluid. He hunched over, shielding it with his parka as he tried to light a match. I knelt down beside him and flicked open my Zippo. The flag caught and we smiled at each other. He raised it up on its pole, shook it a few times. Around us, several people cheered. Comrade Bob, a pol. sci. postgrad and orthodox CP member who’d only reluctantly deviated from his position that the march was recklessly adventurist, tugged urgently on my sleeve. There was movement nearby, angry voices. A little knot of blue helmets was clearing a path toward us. I wanted to stay and confront them, but my friends were already moving away. Reluctantly I went along, craning my neck to get a glimpse of the boy with the headband. Some kind of scuffle was breaking out; the charred flag wobbled wildly on its stick. People booed and hissed.

As we pushed through the crowd, the others chattered excitedly, patting me on the back and puffing up their chests like real revolutionaries. Alan in his new Carnaby Street floral shirt, Bob trying to relight his pipe. An American news reporter thrust a microphone at Ginger Ken, asking him sarcastically why we were there. Ken fingered his glasses and talked at a whirring camera about the Tet offensive and Imperialism and the need to stand together in solidarity with the people of the third world. The reporter, a small wiry man with a prominent nose and a flat-topped scrub of sandy hair, suggested that “all this,” meaning the march, was “just a substitute

for sorting out your problems closer to home.” Ken, blindsided, couldn’t think of anything to say and the newsman pressed home his advantage: “Isn’t it easier to criticize America than to do something about injustice here?”

I interrupted, trying to explain that it was all connected, that the differences between the Viet Cong and poor blacks in Mississippi and factory workers in Bradford were artificial, but the reporter had his footage of Ken failing to answer and signaled for the cameraman to cut. I was outraged: I felt we’d been duped. Evidently I wasn’t the only one to feel angry. As Flat-top turned away, rivulets of spit ran down the back of his jacket.

When the march moved off, we found ourselves near the front, behind a phalanx of German SDSers who were wearing helmets and jogging along in formation, much to the amusement of the ragbag of freaks around them. My friends were snickering too, but I was impressed by the Germans’ organization, their seriousness. Most people were treating the march like a bit of fun, a day out: a guy in a cloak and a cardboard wizard’s hat capered around, casting spells on LBJ; some street-theater types were carrying a coffin. But there was an edge to the atmosphere. A group of Scots, marching under red-and-black anarchist banners, cat called and shouted insults at the police lining the route. Fucking pigs! Fucking Fascists! One or two people were wearing helmets, or had covered their faces with scarves. We made our way down Oxford Street, watched by Mr. and Mrs. Average: center parting, matching bag and hat. You could tell one or two of them thought it was VE Day or something, so we called out to them to join us. Yes, you, sir, you at the back! We’re having a revolution. Why, right now, of course. Come and join in!

As the march approached the American embassy it came to a halt. Word filtered back that the police were blocking the entrance to Grosvenor Square. Comrade Bob announced that in his opinion things were about to turn ugly and he, for one, was not about to get arrested to further the political careers of the gang of opportunist Trots who’d called this tomfoolery. I told him he could do

what he liked. Of all the VAG people, only Alan came along with me as I pushed my way forward. “I wish I had a mouth-guard,” he said. I looked blankly at him. “You know,” he explained, rolling his shoulders like a rugby forward, “scrum down.” I had the disconcerting sense that Alan, with his horsy face and public-school good cheer, was just pitching in. Whatever was up, he’d want to be part of it. It could be going over the top on the Western Front or pushing corpses into a pit, just as long as there was a team element.

Soon we became part of the crush, staggering from side to side, pressed forward by the crowd and back by the police. A double line of helmets was just visible over the heads of the people in front of us. Behind the cops, press photographers were holding their cameras up high, trying to get shots of us looking threatening. Around me some people were laughing; others were angry or beginning to panic. A thin girl in a plastic raincoat was twisting around, beating her hands against the back of the man in front of her. “I can’t breathe,” she sobbed. “I can’t bloody breathe.” Another girl told her not to worry, showed her how to make some room with her arms. I was heartened by that. We were helping each other. We were the People and this was our day.

Something came sailing over my head, exploding in a puff of white. A flour bomb. Then another one. I heard whistles and the sound of screaming, and felt a sudden violent lurch backward. For the first time, I saw truncheons raised over the line of helmets, coming down once, twice. A chant cascaded forward from the mass of the crowd. “Hands Off Vietnam! Hands Off Vietnam!” and quickly we were all shouting, enjoying the power of the words, punching the air and throwing peace signs at the enemy. Horsemen had appeared behind the foot soldiers, shying from side to side. Under the roar of the chant you could hear the percussive sound of hoofs on the paving stones.

There was a convulsion and I lost sight of Alan. Then I was right at the front, facing the first line of police constables, who were straining to keep their arms linked. Behind them, one or two of their superiors were getting nervous, jabbing with their truncheons,

screaming at us to move back. Their jabs became blows, but there was nowhere for us to go. Order was beginning to break down. Suddenly a boy was ejected from the friendly cocoon of the crowd, somehow squeezing through the forest of legs and arms to emerge behind the police line. He couldn’t have been older than seventeen, with tousled hair and a big cardigan that looked like his mum had knitted it. I watched him turn left and right, realizing he was completely on his own. He tried halfheartedly to run, but he didn’t stand a chance; a second’s grace and then they were onto him, four of them pulling him down and carrying him bodily away. To my left someone else broke through, a guy in a crash helmet who didn’t even make it to his feet before he was buried under a pile of uniforms, all trying to get a — st or a boot in. Someone tore his helmet o, Underneath he had a beard and a mop of curly black hair. He writhed around, yelling and kicking. A constable grabbed a — stful of hair and a sergeant, not bothering to hide it from the cameras, punched him hard in the face. He went limp and they dragged him o,

Frightened, I pushed myself back, only to — nd myself shoved forward again, barreling into a policeman who tripped, breaking his hold on the man next to him. Flailing around, I tried to stay on my feet. All about me police and protesters were grabbing at one other for balance, like couples performing a violent jig. A great surge from the belly of the crowd had broken the police line, forcing the front few rows into the open space of the square. I just about kept my footing, wheeling around in panic to see if I was about to get attacked. Around me, others were doing the same thing. For a moment, disoriented, we hung back; then we were running into the square, in ones and twos and then all together, the whole ragtag London mob, students and street hippies and East End mods and striking builders and Piccadilly junkies spilling like an over.owing council bin into the big green open space, superciliously surveyed by the elegant townhouses of Mayfair.

The embassy was — and is — an imposing modernist bunker, with a short.ight of steps leading up to the main entrance. A line of

Black Marias had been drawn up outside. I sprinted toward it as fast as I could. Coppers were running here and there, some trying vainly to push people back, others engaging in weird comical chases with individuals unlucky enough to have caught their eye. I zigzagged, looking out for horses. My heart was pounding. Were we about to storm the building? Earlier there had been talk of armed guards, snipers on the roof, but I was sure we wouldn’t stop. If somebody got killed, it would be their fault, not ours. This was it, our Winter Palace. This was 1917. I swerved away from a couple of policemen, but they weren’t interested in me. One had lost his hat. The other was covered with flour. They were desperate to get back to their mates, who were hastily hopping over the ornamental iron fence in front of the embassy.

Faced with this second police line, our charge ran out of steam. People were still pouring into the square, but we’d stopped short at the fence, milling around, shouting and waving banners. The atmosphere had changed. We’d seen what would happen if we got caught, so there was both a new apprehensiveness and a new anger bubbling in the crowd. A constant rain of missiles was flying over my head. Not just flour, but marbles, bottles, clods of earth, broken banners, bits of fence. Someone had let off a smoke bomb. I could see a policeman lying on the ground, unconscious. I picked up a placard so I had something to defend myself with.

Then they charged us with the horses and the scene turned medieval. As I watched the battle from my spot under the tree, I realized this was as far as we were going to get. We were a temporary crowd, a mass of disparate people. When threatened, there was nothing to hold us together; we had neither the guts nor the organization. And perhaps not the imagination either. How many of us would know what to do if we got inside the embassy building? How many would freeze, then run back down the stairs into the world we knew?

From beneath the tree, I watched the police make little sorties, hauling people back with them. Everything seemed to be happening at a distance, on a screen. Suddenly I found myself thrown forward

on to the churned-up grass, my palms squishing into cold wet mud. Snapping back into close-up, I rolled my shoulders and windmilled my arms, trying to shake the grip that had tightened on my jacket, only to find a second pair of hands lifting me up by the waistband of my jeans so my feet lost contact with the ground. Someone took hold of my legs. Someone else grabbed a handful of my hair. Lolloping along as fast as they could, the policemen frogmarched me toward the fence and threw me over. Before I could pick myself up my arms were twisted behind my back and someone punched me hard in the stomach. At that point I started to lash out, from fear as much as anything. A new group of hands lifted me up, landing a few more workmanlike blows as I tried to get away. There was little real malice in it; I think by this time they were too tired to be properly nasty. My face was mashed against some copper’s blue serge tunic; I could hear his labored breathing as he helped cart me along, smell his reek of sweat and cigarette smoke. “Get out of it, you little cunt,” he muttered. I was thrown face first into the back of a van, where I sprawled on the ridged metal floor, winded and gasping for breath. I found myself wondering if the stone-throwing girl had seen my arrest, had seen me fighting back, like her.

The van was packed with prisoners, five men and a woman, each handcuffed to an escort. A middle-aged man in work overalls nodded warily at me. The others, younger, looked at the floor or held their heads in their hands. On the way to the station, the policemen made small talk. Their eyes gradually settled on the woman prisoner, whose blouse had lost its buttons and was sagging open, revealing a section of white breast cupped in a lacy beige bra. After a while she gave up trying to cover herself and stared dejectedly at her feet, pretending not to hear the dirty jokes being made at her expense.

Finally the van stopped and we stepped out into the pandemonium of Bow Street police station. The corridors were full of arguing, scuffling people; police and prisoners, lawyers, newspaper reporters. We joined the crowd, jostling and pushing, the uncontrolled energy

of the demo still surging on through the solid old building. As I lined up outside the charge-room I spotted someone from the LSE, a friend who’d been involved in the occupations. He raised his fist in a salute. I called out and waved. It felt good to see a familiar face, a reminder that I was there for a reason, part of something larger than myself.

I waited for almost an hour, as the prisoners in front were taken down to the cells and what seemed like hundreds of new arrivals piled in behind. In the charge-room an angry sergeant stood on a chair and shouted over the din, as another man took down details in a ledger. “I didn’t do anything,” I told him when it was my turn. “I was exercising my right to peaceful protest.”

“Put a sock in it,” he said.

A few minutes later I was shown into a cell. The first hour of my captivity was spent uncomfortably, as I tried to delay the moment when I’d have to use the stinking, lidless toilet in front of five strangers. We sat, three to a bench, staring at one another in silence. Finally I couldn’t wait any longer and shuffled over to the porcelain bowl, where I produced a shameful stench.

Gradually, I began to slide into a state of trancelike despair. In my back pocket I found a penny piece, which I used to scratch “Victory to the NLF” in the plaster of the wall behind my head. The slogan took its place in a palimpsest of names, dates, and obscene drawings. I felt hungry, but the stink from the toilet was so strong that when a constable brought in dinner, I couldn’t eat. I’d been staring at a discolored patch on the ceiling for what seemed like days when I heard the sound of raised voices in the corridor and the rattle of keys. A man was pushed into the cell. As soon as the door slammed behind him, he pressed himself against it, shouting through the spyhole in a noticeably well-bred voice, “Let me out of here, you fucking pigs! Let me out! One day we’re going to raze this fucking place to the ground, you Gestapo fuckers, you fucking Nazi cunts!” He kept this going for several minutes, pausing occasionally to cough and spit on the floor. From the corridor a bored voice told him to shut up.

After a while the man stopped shouting and slumped down on the bench beside me, forcing the others to shuffle up to make room. I leaned back and scrutinized him. He was dressed unremarkably in jeans and a brown corduroy jacket, but his expensive Chelsea boots caught my eye. I knew what they’d cost because I’d seen them the previous week in a shop on Newburgh Street. I’d wanted a pair but didn’t have the money. How clean they were! My own shoes were scuffed and spattered with mud. The boots annoyed me. He annoyed me. “You seem to have come out of it OK,” I observed sarcastically.

He stared at me, running his hands through his wavy blond hair. He had an equine face, drilled below the forehead by small eyes walled off from the outside world behind thick black glasses. Below the glasses hung a long nose and a pair of lips, full and fleshy and rather pink, which drew the gaze involuntarily to the inside of his mouth. It was as if he was only now registering my presence in the cell.

“What do you mean by that?” he asked, folding his arms. “You’re looking very fresh. They obviously didn’t knock you about too badly.”

“I’m not feeling well, so I couldn’t put up much of a fight. And, anyway, I was trying to save my equipment, not that it did much good. The bastards took it all anyway.”

“Equipment?”

“Camera equipment.”

“Are you a journalist?”

He cocked his head to one side and examined me. “They certainly gave you a going-over,” he said, showing his teeth in a sort of half-smile. To my surprise, he reached forward and touched my bruised cheek with his fingers. I recoiled. He sat back. Again came that same half-smile. There was something illicit about it; an under-the-counter expression, suggestive of brown paper wrappers, specialized tastes.

“Blast my throat,” he said, rubbing his neck with one hand and sticking the other out for me to shake. Reluctantly, I took it.

“Miles Bridgeman.”

“Chris.”

“Chris what?”

As soon as I told him my surname I felt like checking to see if my wallet was still there. As I was to discover, Miles always jumped on things. He was never content until he’d pinned them down, all the specifics, the whys and wherefores. I used to forgive him for it; in an odd way, his clumsy avidity felt like the most straightforward thing about him, the part closest to honesty.

Years later, under the Market Cross, it was still there. The same question, the same poorly concealed intensity.

“Mike what?”

“Frame. Michael Frame. As I’m sure you know already.”

Miles sat down beside me, tugging fussily at his trouser legs and smoothing his coat under his bottom. His movements were stiff. He seemed to be having trouble turning to his left side. “Bad back,” he said, answering my unspoken question. “I have to use this bloody awful chair at the office. Designer must have worked for the fucking Stasi.” The afternoon shoppers wandered past, averting their eyes from the Big Issue seller on the corner. I thought uneasily about all the people who might walk by and see us. Miles told me about his chiropractor. Miracle worker, reasonable rates. So how had it turned out for me? I must have looked puzzled. “Life,” he explained, gesturing at Chichester. “All this. I have to say — it’s not what I’d have guessed.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“You know, it’s amazing to see you. I always wondered what had happened to you. I assumed you’d gone abroad — and then — well, I don’t know what I’d assumed, but I never thought I’d see you again. Certainly not — well, not in such ordinary circumstances. But here you are. You haven’t changed, by the way.”

“Bollocks, Miles. All bollocks, from start to finish.”

“No, I mean it. You look just the same. You’re looking fit.”

“I take vitamin supplements.”

For all his pampered sheen, Miles didn’t look so well himself. The skin on his face had a coarse, slightly flushed look. Around

his nose there was a little web of broken capillaries. He shook his head, as if in wonderment. “There’s so much to say. I barely know where to begin. How many years is it? I last saw you in — when did we last see each other?”

He knew perfectly well. The houseboat in Chelsea. The conversation in which I’d told him all the specifics, the whys and wherefores.

I felt like one of those Japanese soldiers they used to find holding out on remote Pacific islands, still fighting the Second World War decades after it had ended. At last, here was Miles Bridgeman, come to receive my surrender. I felt an overwhelming need to confide, to place myself in his hands. Perhaps his appearance meant my problems were over and no one cared anymore. But that seemed too optimistic. I’d seen Anna and now Miles; there had to be a connection. Whatever Miles wanted, my well-being was unlikely to be a factor in his calculations. Once upon a time, I’d have immediately checked any thought of my own needs with the stern reminder that there was something greater than the personal — but that was when I thought I knew what it was. I had enough presence of mind, though, not to make it easy for him just because I felt sentimental. Just because he’d called me by my real name.

“Why are you here, Miles?”

“Pure chance. It seems almost spooky.”

Unless he was prepared to be honest, I wasn’t going to put up with any facile chumminess. And I knew he could keep it up, his flow of nostalgic bullshit. Miles could always talk.

I remembered, in the cells at Bow Street, how he’d crossed his legs and begun to speak lucidly and with surprising passion about his work as a revolutionary filmmaker, how he took advertising reels and old information films and cut them together with his own footage of the alienated lives of cleaners and shop workers and the purposeful lives of political activists and young people moving out of the cities to create a new existence in the countryside. He wanted to illustrate the existential poverty of the System. He wanted to propagandize for internationalism, for a free and progressive style of life. He’d

been to America, and to Sweden. Things were very free in Sweden. “Cinema is a weapon,” he said, “for changing consciousness.”

I was uncomfortable with the topic of consciousness, which was a problem, since in those days it came up a lot. It lay in that gray area between the personal and the political where I found a lot of things got jumbled up with one another. I’d smoked a little dope, but that was as far as I’d got with drugs. I’d never meditated. And as for political consciousness, I tended to rely on a small storehouse of slogans. All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude. That was one of mine. Before Miles arrived in the cell, I’d been trying to steel myself by thinking politically. I’d told myself my anxiety over getting arrested was just a symptom of class privilege: other young men, born in Biafra or Vietnam, didn’t have the luxury of worrying about their safety, let alone their career prospects or whatever I thought I might be risking. I felt threatened by Miles, by his six-guinea shoes and his interesting-sounding life. The other prisoners were listening in and I didn’t want to be exposed as a scared suburban kid. So I went on the attack. “Oh, yeah?” I sneered. “So how come the police took your camera? Not much of a weapon, at the end of the day.”

“What, precisely, would be a suitable weapon?”

“Well, what would you rather have in your hand next time they come to arrest you? A camera or a gun? It’s going to take more than montage to start the revolution.”

“Interesting. Are you perhaps a member of a group?” He put an odd sarcastic emphasis on the word.

“I’m cochair of the VAG — the Vietnam Action Group. It’s a student organization.”

“I see.” He appeared to think for a moment, then asked in a low voice whether I’d known about the plan to storm the embassy.

I shrugged and told him there had been talk. I told him the rumor about snipers, that if anyone had tried to get through the door they’d have been shot.

“We could have done it, you know,” he said. “In my opinion, we could have taken the place.”

“You think?”

“Well, you didn’t back down, did you?”

“No, I suppose not. But most people did. There didn’t seem to be the energy to do it. The will.”

“I thought a lot of people wanted to go for it. I’m sure you and your friends, for example, in the Vietnam — what was it?” “Action Group. No, not them. They’re not particularly serious.” “But you are.”

“Of course. It looks like there’s a chance for change and I think we ought to take it.”

“Ah, yes. Change.”

Everyone in the cell was listening to me now. I felt I had the upper hand. “No one else is going to do it, if we don’t. No one else is going to build the revolution. I think we owe it to the future.”

“But what kind of future will it be?” he asked, leaning across again and gripping my arm. “What exactly? That’s the question.” “Free,” I said, suddenly uneasy.

“Yes, I know. But what would it look like?”

“What do you mean?”

“Picture it in your head. What’s different? How does it work? How do they do things? What do you see?”

I saw myself walking down the street smiling. I saw a sunny day. Everything I saw looked like an advertisement.

“People,” I lied. “People together.”

Miles looked deflated. “I think I’ve got TB,” he said, rubbing his chest. “It’s hard to tell.”

I was angry with myself. Was that really all I could imagine? Not even to have a picture of freedom. How abject. How bleak. “So what do you think is in the future?” I asked. “What do you see?”

Miles considered the question for a moment. “Action. It’s where everyone’s at now. Either shit or get off the pot.”

“And what about us?”

He laughed and made a vague expansive gesture with his arms.

I saw he was extremely thin: underneath his jacket his shirt hung off his body in folds.

“Oh, I think they’ll let us out one day.”

“Don’t patronize me. That’s not what I meant.”

He stared at me with what appeared to be pity, then stood up and went to the door, banging it with his fist. “I want to see my lawyer!” he shouted. “Do you hear, pig? Get me my fucking lawyer.” Then he turned and said something that at the time seemed snide and hectoring, but which later I realized I agreed with.

“It’s not about how you feel, you know. How you feel isn’t the point.”

The door was opened by the sallow custody sergeant. “You,” he said to Miles. “Come with me.” Miles brushed his jacket with his hands. “Catch you at the revolution, I expect.”

Under the Market Cross, Miles bathed me in a warm stream of nostalgia. So much water under the bridge! Old comrades, painful memories, oughtn’t we to head for the pub? I knew I had to get away from him. I couldn’t think straight. “I don’t drink,” I told him, standing up. “Nice to see you, Miles, but I’ve got to go.”

He looked aghast. “You’re kidding. Twenty-five years, you can’t just walk off. We were friends. I’ve pieced together a lot about what went on since that day you came to the boat, but you and I never talked, not really. What happened to you? Where have you been?” I realized he’d read me all too accurately. He knew part of me wanted to tell my story. His voice became mellifluous. “You really should stay and talk.”

“About what?”

Anna, I expected him to say. I needed to hear her name from someone else’s lips. Anna. Instead he made an offer. “Why don’t you come and see me in London?”

“Why?”

“Come on, Chris. Don’t be such a spoilsport.”

“Mike,” I said, walking away, “my name’s Mike.” I turned down a side street that led in the opposite direction from the bookshop.

Halfway along it I ducked into a narrow lane and waited in a doorway. When I was certain he hadn’t followed me, I doubled back toward Pelham’s. The streets and the shoppers felt remote, as if they were on the other side of a pane of glass.

At the bookshop, I turned the sign on the door to “closed” and wondered, for the first time, about running. I’d done it before. I imagined packing a case, heading to an airport. There was money in our joint bank account. How long would it last me in Asia, in South America? The idea of leaving Sam and Miranda was unthinkable. I sat frozen in God’s worn leather wing-backed chair, trying to work out the angles. What did Miles want? What did it have to do with Anna? I knew that if I was to save myself, I’d need to face certain things I’d always avoided; I’d need to go over it all again. There was an unsorted box in the basement I’d looked into just once, then ignored. I went down to fetch it. Underneath a layer of old sociology textbooks and blue-spined Pelican paperbacks was a cache of pamphlets and yellowing newspapers that I tipped out onto one of the frayed Persian rugs. There were copies of International Times and Frendz and Black Dwarf, flyers for meetings and demonstrations. In a slew of handbills and pamphlets, I found what I’d been looking for: traces of myself. There were several copies of Red Vanguard, a socialist paper that had, for a few issues, been printed in a workshop below the room where I slept. They’d run one of our communiqués, an early one, written before we got tangled up in self-justification. I remember lying with Anna on the mattresses at Thirteen, drafting it in a notebook:

CONFRONTATION! CONFRONTATION! CONFRONTATION!

CONFRONTATION dramatizes our condition, which is struggle.

CONFRONTATION gives a lead to the apathetic. CONFRONTATION is a revolutionary role model for disaffected youth.

CONFRONTATION is a bridge from protest to resist — ance.

CONFRONTATION helps combat so-called mental

illness and disorders of the will.

CONFRONTATION gives you insight.

CONFRONTATION is your path to revolutionary self- transformation.

Action is movement, movement is change and process. Accelerate the process: CHOOSE YOUR TARGETS! ACT NOW! CONFRONTATION! CONFRONTATION! CONFRONTATION!

We worked together, scrawling phrases, calling them out to one another, little fragments of polemic we delivered like orators, taking pleasure in the force of the words, their potential to make change. Often these documents were just a record of arguments, each line bitterly fought over, picked to pieces and reconstructed. This one had come easily, I remember, like making up a song.

On the evening of the riot at Grosvenor Square, I was moved to a cell of my own. Wrapped in a thin, scratchy blanket, I spent the night dozing fitfully. In the morning I was given a fried-egg roll and a cup of tea, then transferred to Bow Street magistrates’ court. My trial, such as it was, lasted under five minutes. A dog-faced policeman described how he’d bravely tackled me as I was running toward the embassy to throw a missile. I was, he said, looking savage and shouting words it would embarrass him to repeat before the court. When he attempted to effect an arrest, I had punched him in the face. I shouted out that he was a liar. The judge, a lantern-jawed man with a drinker’s swollen nose, sentenced me to six weeks’ imprisonment. I was taken directly to HMP Pentonville.

* * *

Cold spray spatters against my face as I lean over the side rail of the ferry. The water, far below, is gray and choppy. Beside me a pair of girls, Sam’s age or a little younger, are telling each other how sick they feel, taking drags on a shared cigarette. By now Miranda and Sam will know there’s something wrong. Miranda will be phoning the bookshop, trying to get God to pick up. Walking carefully so as not to slip on the wet metal of the deck, I go inside, where it smells like all cross-Channel ferries, that queasy cocktail of lager and snack foods and exhaust fumes and cleaning products that doesn’t quite mask the acid stink of vomit seeping from the toilets.

On impulse I feed some change into one of the arcade games in the corridor. Lights flash and writing races across the screen, too fast to read. The rules are incomprehensible. Colored blobs race around. Little dots and spinning things, which look to me like pieces of fruit, blip in and out of existence, seemingly at random. I press buttons, push and pull the joystick. It’s impossible to tell what I’m controlling, which of the little creatures is me. YOU DIE! says the machine. YOU DIE! TRY AGAIN!

The last time I played a computer game was at Christmas, when Sam’s not-boyfriend Kenny came over with a PlayStation. I’ve always liked Kenny. He’s awkward and slightly nerdy, which is why he’ll never ascend to the position in Sam’s affections he so transparently craves. Sam likes sporty boys — uncomplicated squash or tennis players who can drive her to the pub and talk to her about jobs or holidays. Kenny has a mop of dyed hair and a collection of T-shirts bearing the names of Japanese garage bands. Occasionally Sam allows him to escort her to the cinema, but whenever I ask if they’re “together,” she rolls her eyes and adopts a long-suffering expression.

When am I going to see you again, Sam? And what will you think of me when I do? You’ve always lived in a bounded, knowable world: a triumph for Miranda, I suppose, keeping you safe all these years. I find it very hard to think of you as nineteen; that’s almost the age I was when I went to prison. You seem so young, young enough for me to wish I wasn’t the one smashing up your happy home. I can’t ask you not to hate me, or not to be frightened. I think the best I can hope for is that one day I’ll be able to sit down with you and explain. You’re too old to be saying to me, as you did recently, that you weren’t “interested in politics.” You want to be a lawyer. Well, a lawyer needs to know something about politics, even a corporate lawyer who just wants to climb the ladder, to buy the things her friends buy and go to the places they go. You’re lucky that politics feels optional, something it’s safe to ignore. Most people in the world have it forced on them. To be fair, I suppose you’re just a child of your time. Thatcher’s gone, the Berlin wall’s down, and unless you’re in Bosnia, the most pressing issue of the nineties appears to be interior design. It’s supposed to be the triumph of capitalism— the end of history and the glorious beginning of the age of shopping. But politics is still here, Sam, even in 1998. It may be in abeyance, at least in your world. But it’s lurking round the edges. It’ll be back. You ought to give Kenny a chance, by the way. He’s a decent kid.

I realize I’m forming words with my mouth, muttering to Sam under my breath as I feed the last of my change into the machine. A voice comes over the ship’s public address system, saying we’re entering port. We’ve arrived in France. As I line up on the narrow stairs down to the car deck, I still can’t stop myself. Explanations, justifications, like a crazy old man. Logic says there has to be a beginning, a first moment of refusal. I’m not sure. There’s the usual Oedipal tangle: Mummy-Daddy-me. There was my brother and Kavanagh the junk man, the Russians and nuclear war. There was my need to be better, more decent, to deserve. None of these. All of them.

My earliest memories are of red bricks and high green hedges, of being walked past endless garden walls down roads that always brought us to the shop or the white pebbledash and well-oiled gate of our house, number-three-avon-close. Depending on how you looked at it, we were either on the way into or out of London, part of its great westward sprawl. In the mornings a line of men walked past the end of our street on their way to the station. In the evenings they walked back again. On Saturday mornings the men came into our shop, Parker’s Electrical, to buy fuses and lightbulbs, staying to turn over the price tags on transistor radios and what Dad always called “labor-saving devices”: vacuum cleaners and kettles, gadgets for the wives. I remember feeling slightly cheated that Dad didn’t go into London to work. I wanted to have more to do with “town,” where things mattered, where the goods we sold were made.

I often asked why we didn’t change the name of the shop. Our name was Carver. Why wasn’t it Carver’s Electrical? Dad told me it would only cause confusion. Litter, teddy-boys, sons who asked stupid questions: confusion could take many forms and my father was enemy to them all. It was, I think, the reason he moved Mum out of Kennington when he came home from the war. Ruislip was, above all, an orderly place.

Where we lived was distinctive for only one reason: the airfield. During the war, as I learned at school, gallant Polish airmen had flown out of RAF Northolt to fight the Germans. Down by Western Avenue there was a memorial to them, with lists of battles and difficult names, all zs and ws. A little farther away was the American airbase, USAF South Ruislip. When you went past on the 158 bus, the conductor sometimes called out, “Next stop Texas!” as a joke. Every day military transport planes flew directly over our house, the rumble of their engines cutting through the sound of the Light Programme as we ate our tea in the kitchen. Like the other Avon Close children, I sometimes went out to watch them land, taking turns at peering through a hole in the hedge that masked the airfield from the road.

As I watched the planes I would think about war. War was the midnight raids and lost patrols I read about in Adventure and Wizard. It was Banzai! and Hande hoch! and being wounded but still crawling forward to lob your grenade into the machine gun nest. It made boys like me into men like my teachers and the shopkeepers of North End Parade, who’d all seen and done wartime things yet mysteriously chose to mark physics homework or sell pork chops to my mother. All the fathers carried war around with them every day, buttoned up tight inside their shirts. War was secret knowledge. But war had changed since the fathers went to fight. Now it was about the planes that made the cutlery rattle on our Formica kitchen table, planes that flew so high they couldn’t be seen or heard from the ground.

I had good ears; Mum always told me so. Perhaps I’d be the first to hear it: a drone, a faint humming in the empty sky, out of which would tumble the Bomb. I tried to picture everything, which I hoped might be done by listing all the things there were until they ran out. I always failed, which made it even scarier. Each time you thought of anything, anything at all, you discovered it, too, was part of everything, which was what would blow up if they dropped the Bomb. I tried out survival techniques in my imagination. Ducking, crawling under the kitchen table, running down into the cellar we didn’t have. Even the tube trains went above ground at Ruislip. Where would we go?

My dad was frustratingly inscrutable on the topic of how we’d survive the Bomb. Whenever I asked (which was often) he told me not to worry and went back to the paper. I interpreted this as courage, but wasn’t reassured. There was something closed about my dad, and it made me think he knew more than he was saying. What little I learned about his own war was extracted from my mum. He’d served on corvettes, escorting convoys across the North Atlantic. His ship was called HMS Primrose, which sounded disappointing to me, unmartial. He didn’t like to be seen without his shirt, even at home, because of the smear of livid red scar tissue that covered his left side, from hip to chest. There was a fire at sea,

was all Mum would say. I could never get her to tell me any more. I imagined my dad’s skin melting from the effects of the Bomb. Its searing fireball is as hot as the sun’s interior. . Radiation is particularly dangerous because it cannot be felt or smelled, tasted, heard, or seen. .

As I got older, I roamed around on my bike, discovering a world with no obvious center, an unfocused sprawl of i93os houses that gave way in surprising places to open fields where cows grazed or football goals stood waiting for Saturday league matches. The boundaries of this world were main roads. You’d come up hard against them, screaming with traffic, intimidating, uncrossable. The planes took off and landed. Sometimes I got up at night and opened kitchen cabinets to see if my mum was stockpiling enough canned food.

Parker’s Electrical stood at the end of a parade on a long straight road, next to a butcher, a florist, a funeral director and a junk shop, whose window was almost obscured by clutter. The junk shop was run by an Irishman called Kavanagh, who, for reasons I never discovered but probably amounted to nothing more than the standard English stew of race and class prejudice, was roundly hated by the other shopkeepers. Kavanagh was scruffy. His horse left droppings on the pavement. He was rumored to deal in stolen goods or pornographic pictures. When Dad came home from meetings of the North End Parade Traders Association, Mum would ask if they’d “come to any conclusions” about him. There was something sinister in her tone.

My brother, Brian, heard what was said about Kavanagh. Brian was two years older than me and I did what he said. One night, under his direction, I sneaked out of the house to the lock-ups round the back of the parade. Kavanagh’s was at the end and its wooden door was half rotten, a sad contrast to ours, which was royal blue and had the words “No Parking in Constant Use” neatly painted across it in white letters. Brian put his hands on his hips and used one of Dad’s words. “Disgraceful,” he said. He made me hold the flashlight while he wrenched out one of the rotten planks

and poured something from a bottle through the hole. I had to light the matches. It took two or three goes. As we ran away, a faint orange glow was coming from inside.

I lay awake listening for the fire engines, but they never came. The next day we went to see what we’d achieved. I was nervous. If there was a detective, he might be waiting for us to return to the scene of the crime. The door was charred, but otherwise the lock-up was intact. There was no sign of a detective, or of the devastation I was expecting. Brian was disappointed. I pretended I was too.

A couple of months later, just after my thirteenth birthday, Kavanagh’s closed down. The man and his junk disappeared, leaving an empty shopfront, its glass whitened by smeared arcs of windowcleaner’s soap. I had visions, influenced by Saturday matinées, of my father and the other shopkeepers taking Kavanagh “for a ride.” An unshaven man in a greasy gray jacket, falling to his knees out in the woods.

Kavanagh’s departure did nothing to appease my father’s anger. He was always up in arms about something or other — rude customers, articles in the paper. It was a trait my brother had inherited. Brian became a very angry man, a shouter in saloon-bars, a puncher of walls. There were evenings when we’d sit round the kitchen table, eating the food Mum had cooked, and she would try to listen to The Archers while Dad held forth about Malaya or the West Indians or de Gaulle, banging the table with the heel of his hand while Brian and I competed to express our vocal agreement.

Then there was Mum, who had her good days and the other kind. One weekend I stood in the garden with a spool of copper wire in my hand. My father, cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth, was up a stepladder by the back fence. I remember him silhouetted against the sun, a smoky black outline, the wire gleaming as he looped it over the trellis. Mum ran out of the house, wiping her hands on her apron and shouting at us in a high, strained voice: “What are you doing? For the love of God, what are you doing?”

“It’s for my radio, Mum,” I told her. “We’re testing my radio.” The wire hung slack over the bare branch of the elder tree, running back down into the spool, into my hands. Crystal sets needed long aerials. We were going to set it up so I could listen in my bedroom; it had to go all the way back to the house and through the upstairs window. My mother snatched the spool from me. Strands of hair fell across her face, which was red. So were her hands, from the washing-up. She was red and white, her breath making a little cloud in the cold as she screamed at me. Another smoking head. “You’ll electrocute someone! Burn the whole house down! We’d be trapped! Don’t think you’ll get away with this!” This last sentence was spat at my father, who climbed down the stepladder, telling her to shut up and go inside. Grabbing her by the arm, he pushed her back into the house. It was no use telling her my crystal set didn’t use electricity, just the energy of the radio waves. When Mum was in one of her moods, she didn’t listen. She broke things in the kitchen. She went to bed and cried. Twice that year (the year I was nine) she phoned the police and told them stories about Dad. The first time, when they got to our house, they wanted him to go with them. He had to explain for ages before they went away.

Nothing was ever said in our house about my mum’s “moods.” As far as I know, she’d never seen a psychiatrist or talked to anyone else about why she found the world such a hostile place. She didn’t really have friends, at least not the kind who did more than say good morning when they saw her at the front gate. The local GP kept her supplied with pills, a row of little bottles that took up a whole shelf in the medicine cabinet. On a good day she’d go about her business with slow deliberation, like someone moving under water. On a bad one I’d sometimes find her stalled completely, staring straight ahead, a wooden spoon or a tea towel in hand and an expression of bafflement on her face. Speak to her and she’d come to life again, shuffling round the kitchen as if nothing had happened.

On a typical Sunday, Mum would be lying in bed, listening for the rats and cockroaches she suspected were scuttling about in the attic over her head. Dad would sit downstairs with the newspaper and I’d be in my bedroom, attempting to summon the outside world. The first time I fitted the pink molded earpiece of the crystal set into my ear, I heard a tiny crackle, then, very faintly, a voice singing a few words in a foreign language, accompanied by a violin. Like all first things these sounds were powerful. I felt they were being born out of the noise just for me, as if I was creating them through some special skill, coaxing them out of formlessness.

As a hobby, crystal sets occupied me for a year or so. Then, as a birthday present, my parents bought me a Japanese transistor radio. It was like hearing the world think. There were stations on pirate ships out at sea, stations playing advertising jingles and pop music and sports matches. Stern voices read out news items or religious texts, spoke terse messages in accents from the other side of the Iron Curtain. On short wave there were mysterious phenomena, urgent bursts of Morse code, mechanical voices reciting meaningless lists of numbers. I heard whispering, women crying, once a pilot or lost sailor calling, “Come in, please, come in.” There was something angelic in the surf-sound of white noise between stations, the whoop and whine of travel across the bands of the spectrum.

The radio was a way to escape from downstairs, from my deep-sea diving mother, wading in lead boots toward the sink. Aged fourteen, I tuned in to the missile crisis. I call upon Chairman Khrushchev to halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace and to stable relations between our two nations. I call upon him further to abandon this course of world domination, and to join in an historic effort to end the perilous arms race and to transform the history of man. This was it. The Bomb was coming. Making the most of what I thought were my last few hours on earth, I stayed up all night, listening to short-wave artifacts, the noise between stations. Afterward, noise would be all that was left.

After thirty-eight days the crisis ended, and I was still there, lying in bed with my radio. The following year the leaders signed a treaty saying they wouldn’t test nuclear weapons in space or the earth’s atmosphere or the sea; people acted as if this was some kind of victory. But what about the missiles? I wanted to scream. They’re still there, pointing at my house. So when I ran into the couple outside the tube station, with their painter’s table and their colored leaflets weighted down with seaside pebbles, it felt as if I’d found the only other sane humans on the planet. They were old, in their mid-twenties. Colin had a scraggly blond beard and a CND badge pinned to the lapel of his pea coat. Maggie wore a long peasant skirt at which I stared intently, because each time I glanced up at her face, I started to blush. She looked like Leslie Caron, an actress whose picture had recently joined a growing collage on the wall above my bed. Beat-band singers, models, artists: people from the Sunday Times color section, from the new world growing a few miles away in town.

Maggie chatted to an old lady, trying to get her to sign a petition, while I hovered around, reading a leaflet about the government’s advice to householders on protection against nuclear attack. We were to survive using whitewash, brown paper, and dustbin lids. Colin introduced himself, made a joke about what he’d really do if the air raid warning sounded. I liked him. He didn’t speak to me as if I was a child. Nor did Maggie. When I said I wished I could do something, they told me I wasn’t alone. Millions felt the same. If I really wanted to make a difference, I should come over to their house the next day. There would be a meeting. “It’ll be very informal,” said Maggie, “but you’ll get a feel for what’s going on.”

I left with a copy of their newspaper and an armful of leaflets, which I promised to put through doors in Avon Close. That night I read about Distant Early Warning Stations: tropospheric scanners, enormous parabolic dishes looking out over the Yorkshire moors. Two minutes was all they’d give us. Two minutes to do what? Make love to Maggie. As I fell asleep I worked it all

out, in the weird, narcissistic fashion of teenage boys. We’d be on a hill. I had an American accent. Where Colin was in all this I can’t remember.

I also can’t remember much about that first meeting. It must have been taken up with routine administration. Collecting dues. Arranging a speaker. I probably spent most of it staring at Maggie, at the way her mouth moved when she spoke, the shape of her breasts under her sweater. The other members of Ruislip and Northwood CND were a spooky bunch. Elderly Quakers, a vegetarian ex-fighter-pilot. It didn’t matter to me. Thursday evenings now belonged to Maggie and the Bomb, in that order.

Soon I was knocking on doors to tell people about first strikes and secret NATO exercises, fallout and megatonnage, all the thrilling science-fiction pornography of nuclear war. I handed out pamphlets with titles like Six Reasons Why Britain Must Give Up the Bomb and H-bomb War: What Would It Be Like? For the first time I had arguments with adults in which I wasn’t always told to be quiet and respect my elders. Women shut the door in my face and men told me I was a little fool, but sometimes they argued back, shaking their heads as I described the deformities of Hiroshima children, the underground bunkers to which key government personnel would be removed when the sirens sounded. People invited me inside, old people who wanted company, a man who put his hand on my knee and told me I was a likely looking fellow.

The following Easter, a month or two before my sixteenth birthday, I marched to Trafalgar Square, part of a crowd (much smaller, I heard, than previous years, but to me still vast) who felt what I did; who had the imagination to look beyond their never-had-it-so-good daily lives to the threat that lay just over the horizon. We waved placards saying No Polaris. We sang “We Shall Overcome” and “Down By the Riverside.” Mothers wheeled their children in push-chairs. Bands played trad jazz, because trad was authentic. Authenticity meant roots and honesty, but according to Colin it also meant the reality of your death. If you knew — really held it in your mind — that one day you’d die, then the value of

life would be clear, and you’d live fully, deeply. Most people found the thought of death unbearable and fled into the everyday, so most people were only half alive. Colin felt this was why the majority of them seemed to be learning to live with the nuclear threat. That seemed logical to me. If your Being was already infected with Nothingness, annihilation probably didn’t seem so bad.

Authenticity was just one of the things I learned about from Maggie and Colin. They lived in a way I’d never even imagined. Their house, which from the outside looked just like ours, was open to all, and in contrast to the frozen routine of Avon Close, had a joyous and unpredictable rhythm. Even if Colin was working he was happy to open the door and let you make tea in the kitchen, with its jar of spaghetti on the counter and poster of a Picasso dove pinned above the stove. Colin was writing plays. I don’t know how far he ever got, but he’d sit and bang away at an old Remington typewriter on the dining table, making occasional contributions to whatever was happening around him, which might include four or five friends singing and playing guitar, or having a loud debate about Algeria. Maggie would “clear him away” when she wanted to serve dinner, which she did for however many happened to be there, pushing his papers to one side and clattering cutlery onto the typewriter keys to indicate that it was time to lay the table.

Maggie was the magnet that drew people to the house. Though Colin’s writing was the official center of things, it was her determination and her adventurousness, not the way he’d sometimes talk excitedly of “having a breakthrough” or sit around dejectedly when not having one, that gave the place its charged, purposeful atmosphere. She seemed inexhaustible, working as a teacher to support Colin’s literary ambitions and coming home every day to an establishment that at times seemed part boarding house and part fallout shelter. There would often be someone sleeping on the sofa, and one or two others on mats on the floor. Usually they were other activists, men with rucksacks and pipes, pairs of tanned young women just returned from camps and congresses in exotic-sounding places.

Maggie’s frank bossiness, her sudden inspirations, her willingness to put her shoulder to the wheel whenever there was something to be done infused the CND group with a sense of direction it would otherwise entirely have lacked. She listened patiently to my half-formed opinions, and took me canvassing with her on the Saturdays when Colin was “trying to get something done” and needed peace and quiet. We’d get a lift from Squadron Leader Myers, who had a car, and set up the table in our regular spot outside the station. We’d eat a packed lunch, and if I was lucky she would chat about herself. She told me she dreamed about “doing something really useful” with her teaching. Volunteering, going abroad. I began to understand, dimly, that she wasn’t happy; the thought both shocked and thrilled me.

At first I tried to keep Colin and Maggie a secret from my family. One Sunday Brian, always looking to stir up trouble, told Dad I was “hanging around with some beatniks” and there was a terrible row. My father threatened all the customary things. I stormed upstairs, leaving him shouting in the living room while my mum mumbled and wrung her hands. Slamming my bedroom door, I found Brian standing on my desk, holding the old suitcase in which I kept all my CND stuff, the cuttings and souvenirs and supplies of leaflets for canvassing. He’d dragged it from its hiding place under my bed and emptied the contents out of the window. Pieces of paper were turning end over end all down Avon Close, caught in hedges, silting up the gutters in little piles.

My professed nonviolence didn’t hold me up for a second. By that time I was as tall as Brian, though more lightly built, and he had an older brother’s complacency. My attack took him by surprise, and I soon had him wedged in the corner by the bedside table, his lip bleeding, covering his face to ward off my flailing fists. My dad pulled me away, pinning my arms to my sides until I stopped struggling.

The incident was judged to be my fault. Mum took to her bed and Dad forbade me to see Colin and Maggie again. My CND membership card, which I’d retrieved from the garden, was torn

up in front of my eyes. Shaken and furtive, Brian avoided any obvious triumphalism. I caught him smiling slyly to himself when he thought no one could see. That day was the end of something in our family. I couldn’t give it a name, but after that it had gone.

* * *

Leaving Dieppe, I’m exhorted by signs to remember to drive on the right-hand side of the road. I crawl along in a train of British cars, past industrial estates and big-box hypermarkets advertising cheap deals on alcohol. Gradually the country opens up into farmland, interspersed with gloomy towns overseen by brick church towers and war memorials.

I support Kenny’s cause with Sam for the simplest of reasons— he reminds me of myself. He’s a painfully serious boy, just as I was in my teens. One afternoon, about six months ago, he was mooching about the house after my stepdaughter, vainly trying to interest her in a vinyl record he was carrying. “Listen to the lyrics,” I overheard him say. “And the guitar on track three.” She was sending a text message on her phone. It was like watching a depressive footman hovering behind the queen.

Later that day, I tried to talk to Sam, to tell her that if she didn’t like him, she ought to put him out of his misery. “You’re being cruel,” I said.

“He’s here of his own free will,” she replied primly. “Anyway, what do you know about relationships? You’ve only ever been with Mum.”

She said it with such certainty. Suddenly I could see very clearly the unbroken borders of her world, the world of a child. She’d always treated me as a kind of country bumpkin when it came to feminine topics; amused, I’d accepted it as part of my fatherly identity. But her lack of imagination now struck me as odd, limited.

“Why do you think that?”

It was stupid of me. She looked up sharply. “You’ve never talked about anyone else. And you were a monk before, so I just

thought. .” She trailed o, I was in too deep, and retreated to wash up. She followed me into the kitchen. “You and Mum.”

“Yes?”

“You’re all right, aren’t you?”

I hugged her. “Of course we are.”

So I never solved the problem of Kenny, and he’s still hanging around, yearning for Sam just as hopelessly as I yearned for Maggie. After my fight with Brian and the ban on seeing her, I stayed away for three days, then went round to see her on my way home from school. As usual Colin was typing, Maggie sitting opposite him marking books. In melodramatic terms, I described what had happened, hoping they’d be able to help. Maggie gave my shoulder a squeeze and told me it was good to stand up for what I believed in, but I shouldn’t have lashed out at my brother. Dr. King had withstood much greater provocation. Colin frowned and asked whether my dad knew their address. They fed me bean soup and sent me home, Maggie’s good-bye kiss burning on my cheek.

After a few months things were much as they’d been before. I’d avoid confrontations, lying about after-school activities, even inventing a fictitious youth club at which I played ping-pong once a week. If I ate at Maggie and Colin’s I’d force myself to swallow another dinner at home. Dad knew I was still seeing the beatniks, but had more pressing things to worry about. Brian had abruptly left school and started work in the sales department of an engineering company. He was spending most of his salary in the pub and came home drunk several nights a week, tripping over the furniture and leaving marks on the wall as he staggered upstairs. His confrontations with Dad were much worse than my own, and he had no patience with my mother, jeering at her as a mad cow, a mental case. In response, Mum grew ever more anxious. Soon after my seventeenth birthday she was committed.

I’m ashamed to say I only went to visit her once in the three months she was in St. Bernard’s. It was a large Victorian institution, a cluster of imposing Gothic buildings surrounded by a high perimeter wall. Inside, orderlies pushed trolleys and escorted patients

down long, echoing corridors. She was on a ward named after some royal personage, which smelled of urine and boiled cabbage. The beds were like little iron islands on the scuffed linoleum.

Brian had refused to come, saying he had better things to do with his weekend than go to a nuthouse. A nurse took Dad and me past a row of women sitting in vinyl-covered armchairs or lying in their beds. Mum had been given a course of ECT. She seemed not to know who we were. Trussed up in an unfamiliar flannel dressing gown she smiled uncertainly as my father tried to summon some gentleness into his voice. “How are you bearing up, Angela?”

She pointed out of the window. “You can see the birds,” she said.

Dad nodded encouragingly, then looked at his feet, unsure how to go on. There was a terrible silence. My eyes kept straying back to Mum’s hair, which was messy, tangled up in knots at the back of her head. This was what I found most upsetting. She was particular about her hair. She’d spend hours at her dressing table, pinning it up, freezing it into gâteaulike shapes with cans of lacquer.

Under Maggie and Colin’s influence I was reading books and working hard for my A levels. With my new confidence I’d acquired a new group of friends, boys my own age, with whom I listened to folk and modern jazz records, smoking cigarettes out of bedroom windows and talking about our various plans of escape from Ruislip. I’d applied to the London School of Economics: if I got in, I’d be able to go and live in hall.

As my exams came up, things at home got worse. Dad brought Mum home in a new hat with matching handbag, talking loudly and laughing a shiny, high-pitched laugh. Her brightness had something brittle about it, as if she were only performing her newly learned happiness, acting it out for our benefit. She had new pills too, which kept her awake. I’d hear noises in the kitchen at unearthly hours, three or four in the morning, and go down to find her rummaging in the cutlery drawer or polishing glasses.

Hello, dear, would you like some breakfast? For all her energy, she didn’t seem able to cook anymore, something about the complexity of it, the timing. There were small disasters, charred joints of meat, eggs at the bottom of pans brimful of cold water. Soon we were subsisting on a scavenger’s diet of canned food and fish and chips. Brian and Dad diverted themselves from their panic with breakages and shouting.

I spent as much time as possible out of the house, working in the public library or wandering around the West End, a habit I’d gradually developed since I first started taking the train into town for CND events. In drafty church halls I attended screenings of Bicycle Thieves and The World of Apu, accompanied by Czech cartoons in which people built walls and then all the flowers in the garden died. Soon I progressed to less elevated pursuits. Soho fascinated me, with its secret alleys and women sitting at upstairs windows, smoking and looking down at the street. There were coffee bars with rows of scooters parked outside. The amplified clatter of beat bands punched its way out of cellars. I didn’t dare go into these places. Sometimes I bought a frothy coffee in one of the quieter caffs and sat in a corner watching girls, hoping to be noticed.

I’d begun to despair of CND. There was something antique about it, something hopelessly polite. The year the Mods and Rockers fought on Margate beach, CND youth groups were up on the pier, offering donkey rides and a “non-violent Punch and Judy show.” “Don’t shout slogans as you march,” advised one of our leaflets. “This sounds ugly. Join in the singing, which sounds good and helps marchers along the road.” The warlords were trying to kill us but we had to be cheerful and take our litter home: good little citizens, asking nicely not to be irradiated. On the day I went on my first Easter march, the Committee of ioo held a sit-down demo at USAF Ruislip, just up the road from my house. I only heard about it afterward. Hundreds of people were arrested. While I was strolling around the West End singing “If I Had A Hammer,” people had been blocking the airbase gates.

Colin and Maggie disapproved of breaking the law. They said we had to show we were a responsible, rational part of society. If we were perceived as wreckers or undesirables, how could we hope to have an effect? We’d begun spending time at a folk club, held above a pub in Shepherd’s Bush. Maggie and I would watch as Colin, who’d been taking guitar lessons, went up to take his turn with the other amateurs before the professional singers did their sets. Sitting next to Maggie in the smoky darkness, I absorbed her high-mindedness and her optimism. I thought things were going to change; I was young enough to think the very strength of my desire for change would be enough.

Then came the 1964 election. The prime minister we derided as Homeosaurus (“Too much armor, too little brain, now he’s extinct”) was booted out and a Labour government came in. At meeting after meeting, speakers had assured me that once Labour were in power, they’d disarm. I believed them: the Labour Party stood for international brotherhood and peace. I was too young to vote, but I thought a Labour victory meant I was living in a country that made sense, a rational country where people knew that one day they’d die and until that day wanted to live, as fully as they could. Instead, the new prime minister, Mr. Wilson, made speeches about economic progress, the white heat of technology. We would be keeping our nuclear weapons and getting more. After all my efforts, all the lost Saturday afternoons and the boring meetings, “we” had won and still nothing was going to change.

I lost faith in CND and Maggie with it, as if somehow Wilson was her fault. With the discovery of her feet of clay, my idol became incapable of absorbing any more adoration. I had no vocabulary for what I was feeling, and such a hopelessly low self-image that had she ever shown any signs of reciprocating, I wouldn’t have dared touch her, but all the same I knew my chaste knight-errancy— one part Tennyson to two parts song lyrics — was no longer sustaining me.

One day I was in the West End, listlessly handing out CND leaflets outside a theater in Drury Lane, when a pair of Danish

students stopped to ask directions. Freja and Sofie were both pretty, one dark and one fair, over to see the galleries and tick off sites of historical interest in their guidebook. I soon realized they didn’t want to hear about the amount of strontium-90 in the bones of children under one year of age and began to brag about how well I knew Soho. This was only partly true. I’d never actually been through the doors of the fashionable places I was boasting about. Luckily the girls had as little money as I did, so I was saved the humiliation of being turned away from the Scene or the Flamingo. They said they wanted to hear some music, so I stuffed my leaflets back into my satchel and took them to Beak Street, where there was a basement club little bigger than my living room at Avon Close, a cheap dark cellar where the management wasn’t particular about the age of their clientele. I’d been there once or twice to lean against the back wall and smoke an affected cigarette. It was a place where I judged I wouldn’t be out of my depth.

Though it was early, the basement was packed with people watching a band playing covers of American rhythm-and-blues songs. At first we stood by a pillar, sipping our drinks to make them last. Then I danced, first with Sofie, then Freja, pressed close together by the jostling crowd. The place was unbelievably hot. Within minutes sweat was running down our faces and soaking our clothes. Droplets of moisture dripped from the ceiling, barely a foot above our heads. I danced with my eyes closed, dizzy and ecstatic. Freja draped her arms round my neck and I squeezed her against me, feeling her thighs moving under her damp cotton dress, the ridge of the bra-line bisecting her back. Then, as the band sang uh uh yeah yeah do you like it like that we were kissing, her fingers scraping away strings of wet blond hair from her mouth as we crushed our faces together and my hands traveled over the curve of her buttocks, the slippery nape of her neck. The hour of the last tube was edging closer and with it would have to come some kind of decision, but there was no contest, not really, because Freja was smiling and grazing my cheek with her knuckles and conferring with Sofie, giggling and whispering as I stood apart and nodded my head to

the music, lighting a cigarette, tapping my foot yeah baby oh baby oh in time and just to make sure taking off my watch and slipping it into my pocket.

By the time we left it was very late. We sat in a coffee bar and ate toasted sandwiches, smiling conspiratorially at one another. Sofie drew fingertip patterns in spilled tea on the Formica tabletop while Freja and I played footsie until there was no money left for drinks and all three of us started to yawn. Finally I confessed I had no way to get home, and they both laughed, as if I was being sly. Freja told me they’d try to sneak me into their hotel, and led me by the hand into Fitzrovia, to a townhouse in one of the bigger squares with an illuminated sign above the door saying the Richmond or the Windsor or something House. We hung around outside, prevaricating. Freja and I kissed and ran our hands over each other, almost clawing each other in desperation. Sofie hopped up and down a discreet distance away, hugging herself against the cold.

As they rang the bell for the porter, I hid out of sight. After a minute or two someone came to the door and they disappeared inside. I waited for a long time, crouching behind a pillar box across the street. I began to feel lonely, suspecting that all the earlier discussion at the club had been about how to get rid of me. The stars were faint in a sky that was now turning from black to a washed-out purple-gray. On the other side of the square a car started up and pulled away, its engine sounding loud and hollow in the silence.

I must have been dozing when Freja came back down to let me in, because the first thing I heard was her voice hissing my name. She was standing in the doorway, waving frantically. I ran over and she pulled me up several flights of thickly carpeted stairs to a little room with two single beds and a huge mirrored wardrobe, a looming Formica block that dominated the far wall like a prehistoric monument. The lights were off and the curtains half drawn, letting through a dribble of predawn light that fell across Sofie, just a mound under the covers, pretending to be asleep.

Without looking at me Freja started to undress, stepping out of her skirt and carefully folding it over the back of a chair. Too shy to watch, I turned away and found myself confronted with her double image in the wardrobe doors: the curve of her back, her birdlike shoulders. She unhooked her bra, struggled into a long cotton nightie, and dived into bed. “Hurry up,” she whispered. “Get undressed and get in.”

Gray hands unbuttoned a gray shirt. I was self-conscious: though I couldn’t see her eyes in the half-light, I knew she was watching me. I got down to my underwear and crawled beneath the blankets and we tried to stifle our laughter as we wrapped ourselves around each other. She smelled of sweat and cigarette smoke. I kissed her salty face and her tongue darted out from her hot dry mouth. My body was a single nerve, thrumming with each small urgent movement, each shift in position. Her mouth at my ear. Her exploring hand.

Several times in my life I’ve gone through long periods without sex or any other kind of physical contact. The hunger it produces is deep and low; it’s possible to lose track of it, to forget or fail to perceive how it’s emptied everything out of you and made the world papery and thin. Touch starved, you brush against existence like a stick against dry leaves. You become insubstantial yourself, a hungry ghost.

I found the hard points of her nipples with my mouth, sliding a hand into the extraordinary slipperiness between her legs. Her nightdress rucked up round her waist, then, as I pushed it higher, became a solid wad round her neck. I felt her lift up her arms and snake out of it, a sudden rush of cold air sweeping in as her movement dislodged the blankets. Then her miraculous hand was on my cock, slithering me into her as the covers fell away completely. The cold somehow added to my excitement as I arched myself back and forth. “Don’t squirt your stuff inside me,” she warned, and I pulled out and came copiously onto the sheets. My moan produced a kind of answering sigh in her, a long exhalation that might have been melancholic or relieved or regretful or satisfied,

all or none, I had no idea. I saw Sofie was awake, watching us. Her mouth was slack, her eyes glittering.

We rearranged the blankets and lay silently on the narrow bed. I reached for Freja again but time had somehow passed and her breathing was even and the light coming through the chink in the grubby curtains was hard and strong, strong enough for me to see that Sofie was still watching. “You’ve got to go,” she said. “People will wake up soon, and they can’t find you here.”

My head was swimming with lack of sleep. The daylight made everything complicated; guilt lurked in the corners of the room. I foraged for my clothes on the floor and, with a quick glance at the two girls, one asleep, the other staring, I tiptoed downstairs. From behind the frosted-glass door in Reception came the sound of someone moving around. I fumbled with the front-door latch, and all at once I was standing outside in early-morning London, a place of sunlight and milk floats and street sweepers, tucking my shirt in and realizing that I was miles from home and hadn’t even got enough money for a bus fare.

There was a huge row, of course, but I didn’t much care. I retreated to my bedroom to trace and retrace every minute of my night, the quickly fading loops and whorls of happiness.

There were times like that later on, with Anna. In the squat, in various shared beds and shared houses. Watching and being watched. We had abolished privacy: we hoped guilt would go with it. Watching could become anything. Mechanical or transcendent. It could leave you open-mouthed, touching yourself. It could make you curl up defensively, resenting the selfish animal sounds, the smell of other people on the pillow into which you were pressing your face.

Brian moved out. Mum went back to the hospital, after she had scratched a lot of skin off her arms. While she was away, I moved around the house in a strange cramped dance with Dad, trying never to be in the same room. I could feel he wanted to talk to me, which made me all the more intent on avoiding him. Above all, I didn’t want him to try to make friends, not now that I was finally about to get away.

When my exam results came out, the first people I went to tell were Maggie and Colin. I wanted Maggie to share my happiness: I had my place at the LSE, my ticket out.

When Colin opened the door I waved my results paper at him. “Hi, Colin. Guess where I’m going.”

He just stood there on the doorstep, staring blankly at me. “What do you want?” he asked curtly. He didn’t invite me in.

“I just came over to tell you I got in.” I was hurt by his abruptness. He hadn’t said anything, hadn’t reacted at all to my wonderful news. “And,” I added, trying to be polite, “to — to see how you are.”

“Well, I’m bloody awful, if you’re interested.”

“Where’s Maggie?”

“Where’s Maggie? How the hell should I know?”

I was floored by this response. He had a strange, twisted expression on his face. I couldn’t think of anything to say and it must have shown.

He snorted and let out a humorless staccato laugh. “Sorry to disappoint you, Christopher, but she’s not here. She’s gone and she’s not bloody coming back, or at least that’s what she said in her letter. So now you can turn round and piss off home. I never liked you sniffing round her anyway. All that wide-eyed admiration rubbish.”

“But — I never—”

“Oh, you never, all right. Not for want of trying, you dirty little sod.”

“I didn’t, I swear. . What happened, Colin? Where did she go?”

He mimicked my voice. “Where did she go? She left me, you ass. She buggered off to Ghana or Bongo-Bongo Land or somewhere to go and save the little black babies. So no more CND, no more free food, no more singalongs, no nothing, comprende? It’s over. Now fuck off and leave me alone.”

And he slammed the door in my face.

I’ve often wondered what happened to Maggie. I can never

picture her. Perhaps she’s still in a classroom in Africa, the headmistress, the director of the orphanage. Perhaps she’s dead. And then there’s Freja and Sofie and all the others my daughter can’t imagine, all the threats to the charmed circle of her-and-Mummyand-me. Which of them am I driving toward now? Is it really just Anna?

* * *

By the time I reach the Paris périphérique I’ve fallen into a trance of headlights and signage. Round I drive. Porte d’Orléans, Port d’Ivry. Blossoming red lights, brake sharply, traffic suddenly filtering in from a hidden slip-road, brake again. The road’s like a go-cart track, one damn thing after another, running in and out of orange-lit tunnels, through billboard-lined trenches and elevations. Was that my exit? My eyes are tired of squinting into the darkness for — what am I looking for? Porte d’Orléans. Didn’t I pass that already? I have no idea of the time: Miranda never set the dashboard clock. Thirty thousand pounds’ worth of high-status German engineering, but she doesn’t set the clock. Round and round. Though I’m dog-tired, I can’t face the complexity involved in turning off and looking for somewhere to sleep. So I carry on, round and round, Porte des Lilas, Porte de Montreuil, right shoulder inward, circumambulating the large stupa at Wat Tham Nok, following the line of chanting monks, the tea light in its little clay bowl warming my hands. Circling in the Aegean, the taste of salt on my lips, blank and free. Round and round. Porte de Charenton. Trudging round the yard at morning exercise. My revolutions: a hundred of us walking, two abreast, inner ring clockwise, outer ring counter-clockwise. Back in the days when Pentonville was the gateway to transportation, the builders constructed an endless double path of flagstones, two snakes eating their own tails, set into the black tar. The regime was designed to isolate prisoners from all human contact. Face masks, enforced silence. Round and round, a folk dance or a fairground ride. Very important, they thought, never to give the scum a sense of achievement.

I never found out why I came to be sent to HMP Pentonville. It was the recidivists’ prison. Remand prisoners went to Brixton,

first-timers like me to the Scrubs. It had a bad reputation, which a police constable gleefully told me all about as he led me out to the “meat wagon,” a Black Maria with metal-grilled windows. “The lags’ll have you for breakfast, you hippie cunt,” he told me cheerfully, as he locked me in.

As we got down from the van a gang of prison officers descended on us, screaming like squaddies performing a bayonet charge. We were doubled into a low hall, searched, and assembled into a ragged line. The screws marched up and down, shouting at us to stand up straight, poking us in the ribs and asking rhetorically if we knew where we were. They locked us into small wooden cubicles, where we stood in semidarkness while one of them read out the rules. The purpose of prison was to encourage and assist us to lead a good and useful life. We were to address all prison officers as “sir.” We would be required to perform useful work for not more than ten hours a day. Failure to obey an officer would be punished with removal of privileges. The list went on. When we could receive visits. When we could receive letters. More rules were written on a card pasted to the wall in front of me in the coffinlike cubicle. I peered at them as I waited. I was not to fight or set fires. I was not to possess a greater quantity of any article than I was authorized to possess.

I was pulled out of the cubicle by a pair of POs, and taken to the desks at the end of the room. Behind each desk sat a trusty with a red armband, writing in a ledger. I was ordered to stand on a scale and my weight was written down, along with my age and occupation. “Religion?”

“None,” I answered.

“C of E, then,” said the prisoner-clerk.

“No, none,” I insisted. “I don’t believe in God.”

“That comes under C of E.”

I was frogmarched into a second room to stand before a PO who occupied a stool behind a high desk, like a Dickensian clerk. He ordered me to undress and as I took off my clothes, they were itemized and dropped into a cardboard box. I had to bend over and

spread my buttocks, then show the soles of my feet. Afterward I was given a dressing gown and taken to the showers, where the two POs escorting me shoved me into a stall and gave me an unhurried beating. Thought I was Fidel Castro? Long-haired wanker, I looked like a girl. They bet I took it like a girl. After a while it didn’t hurt so much. Water spattered over me as I pressed my cheek against the cold white tiles of the wall.

Round and round. Porte d’Orléans. Porte d’Orléans? Turning circles in the sea. Walking round the stupa, mindfully placing one foot in front of the other, counting my breaths. Round and round, circling the Old Building steps, under a banner that read, archly, BEWARE THE PEDAGOGIC GERONTOCRACY. Exactly the kind of thing nonstudents sneered at as studenty. It had taken only a few weeks at the LSE for that clever-clever tone to wear thin. Still, I knelt under that same banner to have my picture taken for the newspaper, along with all the other sitters-in, clever young people trying to look serious and committed and political, which would have been easier if they’d stopped grinning like chimps.

We were in occupation. Smile! Speak into the mike. “It’s not even about Adams per se, it’s what he represents. In Rhodesia he did nothing. He didn’t oppose the UDI, didn’t speak out when they started to arrest his students. The administration paints a picture of him as oh-so-brave, keeping his mixed college open while the Fascist, racist regime was consolidating power. But what’s that? Just collusion, as far as we’re concerned. Now he’s foisted on us as LSE director and we’re supposed to accept it without question.” It was freezing at night. None of us was prepared for a sit-in. No sleeping bags, no food. They locked the doors open, hoping that would be enough to get rid of us. A lot of people did slope off home.

There are moments from those eight days of occupation that stand out, images that over time have become unmoored from their context, floating free in my memory. Rolling a joint and passing it round with three friends as we sat by an open upstairs window, listening to a police inspector barking orders through a megaphone. Two students from my year busking folk songs and

rattling a tin. I had sex with a girl called Tricia in the toilets of the administration building. She wasn’t anything to do with the university, just one of the people who’d appeared out of the woodwork, attracted by the spark of possibility flitting temporarily around our stuffy college. There were mysterious middle-aged men with flasks of tea and sheaves of self-printed leaflets, feral-looking hippies, delinquent teens, raggedy thirties Marxists looking to warm their hands at the revolutionary fire.

You could make something out, dimly, through the blizzard of opinion that seemed to surround even the simplest question of right and wrong: change, the sense that everything was in play, all verities suspended. We were getting telegrams from the CGT union in Barcelona, from Bertrand Russell. We were a sign of something, the canaries in the capitalist coal mine, the Vanguard. We issued self-important statements: “WE HAVE CHALLENGED AND CONTINUE TO CHALLENGE THE WAY IN WHICH LSE SERVES THE NEEDS OF THE RULING CLASS IN PROVIDING THE RIGHT MANPOWER, STRONGER IDEOLOGY AND RESEARCH THAT MAKES EXPLOITATION AND OPPRESSION OF THE WORKING CLASSES MORE EFFICIENT.” Early one morning we broke into the administration building, barging past the night porter when he opened the door. We milled around in the corridor outside the director’s office, built barricades of chairs and desks and metal shelving, scribbled on the backs of notices, trying to formulate a statement for the press. I slept for a few hours, curled up with Tricia on the floor by a radiator. After a while I felt her get up. “Got to go toilet,” she said. “Go toilet,” like a child. She never came back. A week or two after the occupation I started to itch and went to visit the doctor, who gave a short speech about living in an era of moral confusion and used Latin to tell me I had crabs. Pacing up and down in my room, slathered in white cream from knee to chest, I read a letter from the university authorities saying that as a result of my participation in the sit-in I would be fined, but no further action would be taken.

Round and round. Did I agree with the written record of my personal effects? The deputy governor’s Home Counties voice was

crisp with authority regularly exercised and obeyed. Club tie, thick plastic-rimmed glasses, pompous donkey-face made longer by its mutton-chop sideburns. Beside him, shuffling papers and glowering at me, sat the stern, crop-haired chaplain in the role of the Church Militant. The welfare officer was asleep, from the look of him, hunched over his notes like a great black beetle. He didn’t move at all during the interview, presenting me with his balding crown, a featureless pink oval that I gradually came to think of as his face.

Yes, I said. I agreed with the written record of my personal effects.

The chaplain said he believed I was Church of England, and looked forward to seeing me in chapel. I’d derive much sustenance from attending services. The deputy governor wanted me to take the opportunity to ask myself some hard questions. I was an educated fellow. He hoped I’d come to see that my posture of rebellion was essentially immature. We were living in changing times, which made it all the more regrettable that certain irresponsible social elements were leading some of our best and brightest to squander their advantages, advantages most of the young lads in this place would give their eye teeth for. Watching one hand seamlessly over to the other, I started, for the first time since my trial, to recover myself. God-man and state-man, working in concert, indistinguishable in their pose of bland benevolence. When I moved I could feel the bruises from the previous day’s beating. Fuck you, I thought. Fuck you and your polite, civilized tone. Fuck your unearned air of authority, your smug talk about advantages, as if the world is some kind of game you’re refereeing.

Round and round. Miles’s question. What would freedom look like? That first university summer, instead of going home, I’d crashed on the sofa of a friend’s house in Muswell Hill. I found a temporary job at a small factory in Archway, which made control panels for industrial equipment. I had to sit at a bench, screwing glass dial-facings and Bakelite knobs to anodized aluminum plates.

It was easy enough work, and well paid. After a month I had enough money to travel, and set off for Europe. It was my first time abroad. I sat on the ferry’s rear deck, watching the coast of England recede behind me. In Ostend I showed my brand new passport to a smiling immigration official, who waved me through into Belgium with such warmth that I felt I’d been given the keys to the kingdom. Soon I was on a sleeper train heading south. I lay awake for hours in my upper berth, listening to the whistles and slamming doors of nighttime stations, the labored breathing of the middle-aged Dutch businessman in the bunk below.

I spent a month and a half sleeping in youth hostels or on station platforms, making fleeting alliances with other travelers to share a ride or a meal or an evening in a bar. I went to sleep in one country and was woken up by the border police of the next, fumbling blearily for my documents as another unfamiliar landscape took shape through the window. I wanted to travel far and fast and rarely stayed anywhere for longer than a night, passing through Berlin, Vienna, and Rome without really seeing them. When I arrived in a new place there was always a moment of choice, of having to find something to do with myself. I had very little money. I saw a lot of parks. I was most content listening to wheels on a track, the sound that confirmed I was going farther on, farther out. Finally I found myself swimming off a beach on a rocky Greek island, turning circles in the water, my world reduced to a dazzle of white light. If someone were to ask me when and where I was happiest, I’d describe that afternoon swim.

Circle the yard then back up to the threes, walkways above and below, a palimpsest of girders and wire netting. My cell had a single grilled window high up on the wall, made of little four-inch panes of muddy glass. Sit, stare, eat slops from a pressed metal tray. Nine-thirty sharp, lights out. Bad dreams on a narrow bed, cut through by the reveille bell. The best moment of the day was the first step onto the landing, where there was light and space, a distance on which to fix your eyes. At morning employment we sat, elbow to elbow, in a low-roofed atelier, dismantling old electrical equipment.

Radios, televisions. It was like being in the back of Parker’s, with my dad. Once we were given a pile of Second World War gas masks and spent a couple of days unscrewing the filters, cutting the glass eye panels away from the rubber. I never found out what happened to the parts we salvaged. I suspect they were just thrown away.

Lunch in the cell. Three slops in the molded metal tray and a cup of stewed tea. Afterward, locked in. For an hour or two after a meal, the sharp tang of boiled cabbage hung over the wing. Once every few days a trusty pushed a library cart along the landings. Usually it had nothing on it but religious tracts or textbooks, but for a while I lived with a tattered old copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel, its green cloth binding shiny with years of use. I’d never liked fiction, never seen the point in something that wasn’t real; Baroness Orczy’s class-ridden Paris did nothing to change that. Her heroes were blameless gentry and the common people were “human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seemed naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate.” Disgusted, I started to imagine another book, the mirror-image of the one I was reading, peopled by greedy, vicious aristocrats and starving sans-culottes dreaming of a better world.

Harris, the man who sat beside me in the dismantling shop, liked to gossip. Who owed money or cigarettes. Who’d got a new radio or a rug in their cell. After the first few days I stopped listening, but the details of Harris’s life had got in by osmosis, the wife who was definitely waiting but hadn’t visited for the last three months, the mate who was going to give him a job when he got out. He kept offering me things — cigarettes, girlie mags, once a pair of shoes he said he didn’t want. I always refused, though I was tempted by the shoes. My prison-issue boots were molded to the shape of their previous owner’s feet, the heels worn down in a way that forced me to walk with a strange pigeon-toed roll.

After a couple of weeks I was transferred to cleaning duty, scrubbing floors, mopping spilled tea and soup off staircases and landings. After the dismantling shop it felt liberating, even luxurious. Pushing a mop my mind could leave my body. I barely heard the screws

shouting at me when I dawdled. Round and round. I rocked back and forth on my worn heels and dreamed of the island, of turning in the water, the horizon stretching away from me in an infinity of blue.

One night, in a room above a noisy taverna, I’d counted my money and realized I had barely enough to get back to England. I would have to leave the next day, or the day after. Three nights later I ate a dinner of dolmades and grilled fish and drank a bottle of red wine and three glasses of ouzo and decided to stay for good. What did I have in England? I’d get one of the crumbling little houses by the harbor and do it up. I’d learn to fish. I tried to talk to the taverna owner about it as he played dominoes with his friends at a back table. I was drunker than I thought. Angry with me for interrupting his game and unable to understand what I was saying, he waved me away. I insisted, grabbing his shoulder and babbling about fish and houses and a local girl I’d spotted outside the church. Eventually a couple of the players pushed me outside. Like a fool, I tried to fight them. Bruised and hung over, I left the island the next morning.

On the overnight train trip from Bari to Milan I was joined in my compartment by a man in a well-cut suit, who said he was from Rimini and worked in local government. We talked for a while, mostly about football. His English was stilted, but he knew the names of all the current Spurs squad, reciting them one by one, as if telling a rosary. He rummaged in his bag and pulled out a bottle of a nasty-looking orange drink. I sipped some, just to be polite. “Please, take more,” he said, smiling. “Please.” The next thing I knew, it was daylight, I was alone, and the train was pulling into a siding. The carriage was stiflingly hot. I stumbled out into the corridor and came face to face with a cleaner, who gesticulated and shouted at me in Italian. The train was completely empty. Sick and disoriented, I had to walk down the tracks back to the station. Only when I tried to buy a ticket for my next journey did I realize my camera had gone, along with the small amount of cash I had left in my money belt.

I ended up begging from a middle-aged English couple who were sitting at the station café. The wife believed my story. The husband patently thought I was a liar, but handed over enough money for a ticket to Calais, along with their address, “In case,” as he told me drily, “you intend to do the decent thing.” At Calais I had to beg again and this time wasn’t so lucky. I hung around in the ferry terminal for hours, approaching every likely-looking person. Are you English? Sorry to bother you. Eventually I was arrested. At the gendarmerie they checked my documents, searched me, and let me go again. By that time I hadn’t eaten for two days.

I was saved by a middle-aged homosexual who bought me a beer and a sandwich in the terminal café. Wretchedly I told him my story, and to my surprise he bought me a ferry ticket. On the crossing he fussed over me, treating me to more drinks and food. He had a racing green MG parked at Dover and I gratefully accepted a lift to London. Eventually we drew up outside a mews house in Chelsea and he said, enunciating pointedly, that he thought we should have a little cocktail together. I let him unload my pack from the boot, then staggered away down the street, while he tugged at my sleeve and swore at me in a sort of stage whisper so as not to wake the neighbors. I walked all the way to Muswell Hill and, after emptying my friend Alan’s fridge, lay down on his sofa and slept twenty straight hours, waking up with a start in the middle of the night in the deluded belief that I was still on a train.

Round and round. The rhythm of wheels on a track. With about twenty hours of solitude a day, I had plenty of time to think in prison. If Pentonville was a factory, what would it make? If it was a machine, what was it designed to do? I spent hours running through my memories. I thought about when I’d been happy and unhappy, the times when I’d been closest to feeling there was a future. The more I thought, the clearer the moral landscape appeared. There seemed to be two worlds. One was basic and sensual, a human-scale place of small tasks and pleasures, building things and eating good food, lying in the sun, making love. In this world, human relations were very simple. The desire to dominate,

to own and to control, just didn’t arise. The other world, the world of Law and War and Institutions, was a strange and abstract place. In this mirror-world I was a violent person and had to be punished because violence was a monopoly of the state. I’d somehow authorized the British government to distribute violence on my behalf, which it did through various branches of officialdom — the army, the police, the Pentonville screws. The problem was that I couldn’t remember giving my consent. What paper had I signed? Where had I said I wished to regulate my habits and govern my sexual behavior and strive for advancement in various abstract games whose terms had been set before I was born? The state claimed it was an expression of the democratic will of the people. But what if it wasn’t? What if it was just a parasite, a vampire sustaining itself on our collective life, on my life in particular?

* * *

I was released in the last week of April 1968. No one was there to meet me. I was relieved not to see Dad or Brian, whose single visit had been as bad as anything else that had happened to me in prison, but I’d hoped some of my Vietnam Action Group friends would be at the gate. So much, I thought, for solidarity. But I’d had a short letter from Alan in Muswell Hill, saying he was storing my stuff and I should go over there when I got out, so that was where I headed.

I bought a paper from a newsstand and read it as I waited for the bus. I found it hard to concentrate on the news. It felt too good to be wearing my own clothes, my own shoes, standing on the Caledonian Road looking at rows of houses blackened with grime from the railway yards. Beautiful pigeons, beautiful old man in his vest, smoking a cigarette and watching the beautiful street from an upstairs window.

Back at the Muswell Hill house Alan shook my hand and asked how I was. I didn’t know what to say, so I told him I was OK. We drank tea, standing in the overgrown garden, where one of his housemates was storing a partially dismantled scooter. I expected Alan to be curious about prison, but he didn’t ask any questions at all. He seemed fidgety and distracted. “They’ve suspended you,” he told me. If I wanted to continue at university I’d have to begin my second year again in the autumn. I asked him what was being done. Were any of the activist groups at the LSE going to support me? He looked uncomfortable and wouldn’t meet my eye. “The thing is, you were convicted of a crime. That doesn’t make it very easy, politically.”

I took in this unwelcome information as he told me his news, which consisted of gossip about various LSE factions, who’d slept

with whose girlfriend, who’d taken what line on the Powellite dockers’ march. As he chattered, I realized he hadn’t the slightest conception of what had happened to me. As soon as I’d disappeared into the police van, he’d more or less forgotten my existence. The last straw was his announcement that he’d “something rather delicate to discuss.” His housemates had told him they’d rather I didn’t stay there. They were worried about police attention, didn’t want to jeopardize their degrees. He was sorry. Naturally he’d argued, but it was a democratic household. He’d been outvoted.

I couldn’t believe my ears. My so-called comrades were washing their hands of me, self-proclaimed revolutionaries so timid that at the first sign of trouble they were running away. Without raising my voice I told Alan he was a coward, a middle-class fraud. He’d been with me on that demo: it could have been him who’d gotten arrested. I’d just spent a month in jail, I had about ten bob in my pocket and he wasn’t even going to let me kip on his couch? He mumbled something about there being hash in the house. But did I need money? My lip curled. Money, of course. The bourgeois solution. I extended my hand. He couldn’t get his wallet out fast enough.

I took the bus into town and went to a steak house just off Leicester Square, where I ordered all the most expensive things on the menu and drank a bottle of red wine. The waiters looked at me uneasily until I actually waved a banknote at them. From a phone booth outside I rang a girl I knew called Vicky, who lived in her parents’ basement in Holland Park. Yes, she said, I could stay with her.

I took a taxi, giving the driver a tip to get rid of the last of Alan’s cash. Vicky seemed excited to see me. Her place was impressive, a self-contained garden flat on a winding side-street of elegant Victorian houses. I found out later that her father was on the board of a mining company with interests in southern Africa. She was riddled with guilt about where her money came from and did all she could to antagonize her family while still living under their roof. I was part of that strategy.

We talked and smoked a joint and she asked all the questions about prison I’d expected from Alan. I told her a little of what had happened, in a series of rambling and elliptical answers, which she broke short by taking me to bed. Later I lay awake and listened to her breathing. We didn’t know each other well and I’d gone round there for the most cynical reasons: I knew she liked me; I knew she had her own place. Still, it felt good to lie beside her in the darkness, even if I couldn’t sleep.

I stayed at Vicky’s for a week or so, smoking her dope and playing her LPs. She had a job volunteering with a playgroup on Portobello Road and left me alone during the day. I spent my time lying on her floor looking at the patterns the light made as it filtered through the branches of the monkey-puzzle tree in the garden. If Vicky minded my lethargy, she didn’t show it. I think she could see how low I was feeling. I only left the flat to go walking in Holland Park, long, aimless afternoon meanderings through the formal gardens, during which I looked at my feet and kept as far away from other people as possible. Elsewhere, Parisians were building barricades. I wandered around and listened to music and ignored the washing-up. On the weekend Vicky told me she was driving to the country and asked if I wanted to come. I said no. Alone in her flat, I spent a day and night completely motionless in a chair, not thinking about anything in particular, just cradling myself inside a sort of glacial depression. I felt as if I was mummified, living inside some kind of membrane that formed a final and definitive barrier to human contact. The bright light outside was a mockery: energy radiating across the whole world, none of it for me.

* * *

I knew Miles wouldn’t leave me alone. Two days after I’d seen him

at the Market Cross, I answered the phone in the kitchen. I’d been

filling the dishwasher, while Miranda sat at the table flicking

through a gardening catalogue. “Hello, Chris,” said the voice at

the other end. Reflexively, I hung up.

“Who was that?” asked Miranda.

“Wrong number.”

The phone rang again. I stood there, paralyzed.

“Aren’t you going to answer it?”

I picked up. I had no choice.

“Listen to me, Chris,” said the voice. I assumed it was Miles. It

didn’t sound like him.

“I think you have the wrong number.”

“Don’t be stupid about this.”

“I told you, you have the wrong number. Don’t call here

again.”

I slammed the phone down, trying to master the tide of adren-

alin rising through my body.

“Who were you talking to?”

“Just some guy. He thinks this is his friend’s place. He sounds

strange.”

“You were very aggressive with him.”

I shrugged noncommittally. Again, the phone rang. Miranda got

up to answer it. “Don’t,” I told her sharply. She put up her hands

in mock surrender. The phone carried on ringing. After a while it

clicked through to the answering machine.

“This is a message for Chris,” said the voice. “Listen, mate, don’t

piss about. You need to phone me. For your own good, you should

phone me.” He left a cell number.

“You’d think people would actually listen to the message,” said Miranda, vaguely. “It says quite clearly ‘Miranda and Michael Frame.’ ”

My throat was dry. I poured a glass of water from the filter pitcher. “Yes,” I said. “You’d think they would.”

After Miranda went to bed, I slipped out and drove over to the shop. God wasn’t there, so I was able to sit for a while in comforting darkness, huddling into my jacket and rubbing my hands as I waited for the gas heater to cut through the cold. I was thinking seriously about leaving. How far would I get if I made a run? If I went straight to the airport, would I be able to board a plane?

I switched on the ancient Anglepoise on the desk and sifted listlessly through a pile of Left Book Club volumes. The dreams of the thirties and forties; Spain and the hunger marches. They were fragile objects, those books, their yellowing pages flaky and brittle, about ten years away from dust. Soon, as I knew I would, I found myself taking another look through the unsorted sixties and seventies box. I opened copies of Socialist Worker to read about Grunwick and Blair Peach, events I’d missed because I was in Thailand. Why had God even bought all that stuff? As far as I knew, he was an old-fashioned Tory. Englishman’s home is his castle, the whole bit. I was about to put the box away when I found a copy of the International Times, which fell open to a collage of a jazz-age figure in a sweater and plus-fours operating a hand-cranked camera. The man’s head had been replaced by a fist. Out of the camera lens spilled a cornucopia of bodies and flowers and abstract forms. Rifles and feathers and halftone dots. Biafran children, Chairman Mao. I knew that image. It had been on a flyer someone had handed me on Portobello Road, the day I finally roused myself and walked out of Vicky’s basement:

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