My Revolutions

~ ~ ~

Great prospects! See the world!

What will YOU be doing in Northern Ireland? They tell you it’s for your country. They’re lying. You’ll be breaking down working-class doors, trampling on people like yourself and your family. They want you to kill and die for their profits. We’re fighting back against their power.

Rise up! Remember August 14!

We made it back to London as dawn broke, still wired on the amphetamines we’d taken to get through the night. The Rover

stank of petrol. Its upholstery was smeared and grubby. We drove it on to some wasteground near Hackney Wick and burned it out. Anna insisted we should steal another car immediately, but we couldn’t get into any of the vehicles parked on nearby streets and ended up trudging several miles home through freezing fog.

For several days we looked through the newspapers, expecting to see our actions reported. There was nothing. We read that BBCi had just started broadcasting in color; an actor from Coronation Street had gotten married. No real news, just distraction. A couple of days later we stole another car and drove to Chelmsford to check our work. There it was: a blackened building like a missing tooth in a jaw of shuttered shopfronts.

New Year came and went. A new decade. Thirteen was so cold that milk froze in bottles on the windowsill and a film of ice coated the inside of the bathroom window. A dozen of us slept close together on the mattresses, a rat-king in a midden of sleeping bags. None of us was working. We had problems with dole claims, fines, probation, unpaid debts. I wanted a life free of money, but it seemed to be plucking at me, its tendrils curling round my ankles as I shivered in my sleep. I developed a rash, which left clusters of tiny lesions round my mouth and between my thighs. It was several weeks before we realized that we were all suffering from it, scratching at our armpits, our pubic hair, infecting and reinfecting one another. We burned the bedding and got more.

We went out looking for work, pooling whatever money we could get. I labored on building sites. Leo and I stole tools and used them to open up empty houses, leaving a trail of flapping doors around the East End. We joked about setting up a squatters’ estate agency. In the face of hostility from the other women, Anna got a job in Soho, first as a cocktail waitress, then as a stripper. I think the work was important to her, part of her project. Once, or at least once that I know about, she accepted money for sex from a man she met at the club. She told me she did it to see what it was like to become a commodity. Self-denial would be the wrong term for what she was doing. It wasn’t some kind of religious

bargain: Anna certainly didn’t believe in a reward in the hereafter. She was mounting yet another assault on her own sense of privilege and entitlement, on what she considered the “excessive value” she’d been brought up to place on her life.

Sometimes I went to pick her up from the club, hanging around on the pavement outside because the doorman wouldn’t let me in. She’d come and find me and we’d go to drink frothy coffee at an Italian place on Old Compton Street. I’d surreptitiously examine her for signs of change, beyond the unfamiliar traces of makeup round her eyes and mouth. We’d talk a little, laugh about inconsequential things. It felt good, a moment of relief from the struggle. I knew she enjoyed it too, so I was shocked when she denounced our meetings in Criticism-Self-Criticism, accusing me of deviation, of clinging to the luxury of bourgeois leisure.

Someone brought a plastic bag of mushrooms back from Wales. We tripped and argued and shivered under the covers and scraped the huge pan of vegetable stew, endless vegetable stew made with whatever we could buy or scavenge, tasteless however much curry powder we added to the mix. We wrote position papers and smashed monogamy and once in a while we burned something down. Then Sean was released from prison and our hibernation came to an end.

* * *

As I watched Miles eat fish pie, it occurred to me that we were sitting more or less across the road from the coffee bar where I used to meet Anna. When I went to use the bathroom I looked out of the window. The café had gone, turned into a Thai restaurant. The club was gradually filling up, the sofas now tenanted by well-dressed after-work drinkers. In the bathroom I splashed water on my face and tried to work out where Miles was leading. I expected him to make a proposition, a demand of some kind, but when I got back to the table he’d called for the bill.

“I think that’s enough for now,” he told me. “I have things to do. I’ll drop you at your hotel.”

“So that’s it? You’ve finally got it into your head that Pat Ellis wasn’t involved?”

“Whatever, Chris. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. There’s somewhere I need to be, but I’ll come in the cab with you. I’ll pick you up at eight tomorrow morning.”

We drove to a dingy townhouse in Fitzrovia, with a card in the window saying No Vacancies.

Miles left me in the care of an elderly landlady with a floral housecoat and no small talk. Both she and her nameless establishment seemed like survivals from an earlier era, before newfangled notions of comfort or hospitality took hold in the British hotel trade. The lobby smelled of cigarettes and carpet cleaner. The leaflets in the rack by the reception desk advertised shows and exhibitions that had long since closed. There was no sign of any other staff or guests. The woman gave me a key on a heavy brass chain and walked me arthritically upstairs to a room decorated with hunting prints and the kind of geometric-patterned wallpaper last current thirty years previously.

“What time’s breakfast?” I asked.

“I understand you’ll be taking it out. Mr. Carter’s company specified when they made the booking.”

“Mr. Carter?”

“The gentleman you were just with.”

“His name’s Bridgeman.”

“I wouldn’t know about that. Will you be going out at all?” “Yes,” I said.

“Front door’s locked after ten.”

Grudgingly she accepted that the night porter would let me in if I was late, then quit the room, shutting the door smartly behind her. Contemplating the hospital corners on the bedsheets, the small cake of soap and the paper-wrapped toothbrush mug on the basin, I was filled with foreboding. All British state institutions, whatever their purpose, share an atmosphere. When I was growing up they used to share a smell too, an alkaline reek that united school and hospital and prison and dole office, and always triggered in me a kind of cellular-level panic, a fight-or-flight reflex. The smell has gone, abolished along with so many of the visible signs of power (in dark moments I think it’s all my generation achieved, killing that smell), but even without it the atmosphere remains and that room had it: old and cold and abstractedly cruel.

I grabbed my coat and half-ran down the stairs, ignoring the landlady’s barked inquiry about the key. The evening had turned cold and the few people on the street were hurrying along, hunched into coats and scarves. I headed for the tube station. At that moment my plan, in so far as I had one, was to get on a train, any train. I had a cash card. I could withdraw some money, go somewhere, start again. How far would I get on two hundred quid? Little by little, I slowed my pace. I knew I was panicking, not thinking clearly. On impulse I turned a corner. Up ahead I saw the lights of Oxford Street. Basics, Chris, I told myself. Remember the basics. Miles will have you followed.

The wind whipped at my face. I lingered outside a cinema on the Tottenham Court Road, using the glass window to watch the

street behind me. Then I made my way into Soho, loitering in alleyways, ducking in and out of video stores and bookshops, trying to spot my tail. In a basement, as I pretended to browse bondage magazines alongside a row of suburban commuters, I finally picked him out, a young guy in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt who looked out of place among the briefcases and thinning hair. I led him toward Regent Street and lost him in a department store, shouldering my way back out through the late-night shoppers and jumping on a bus outside. It was only then, as I sat on the top deck, breathless, eye-level with the advertising hoardings of Piccadilly, that I realized how I’d been addressing myself. Turn left, Chris. Don’t look behind you, Chris. For years I’d trained myself to be Mike Frame. I’d settled down in him, ceased even to think of who I’d been before, but Miles had uprooted me with a few short conversations. In itself that didn’t matter, except that if Mike Frame went, Miranda and Sam would go with him.

Oh, Sam.

Once upon a time I’d been prepared. When I worked at Olla’s new age shop I’d kept a metal cash box hidden in the storeroom, containing money and an American passport I’d bought on the street in Bangkok. Then Miranda and her fatherless baby had come into my life. Mike Frame had applied for a bank account, a national insurance number. The identity held up. After a couple of years he renewed his British passport to go on a camping holiday in Spain, where he baffled his partner with his nervousness at the airport and his interest in relics of the Civil War. Chris Carver had tried to escape the state, but Mike Frame eagerly embraced it. Each database record, each countersigned form confirmed his reality, put flesh on his bones. Little by little, the running money got spent. The American passport expired. Michael Frame started to seem like an end, a final destination. Looking back, I think I closed my escape routes deliberately. I didn’t have it in me to run again; which is, I suppose, another way of saying I’d gotten old.

I stepped off the bus near Victoria station. In a brightly lit Indian restaurant tricked out with laminate flooring and contract furniture,

totally unlike the flock-wallpapered haven I’d hoped for, I ate chickpeas and drank several pints of lager. I paid the bill and stood swaying slightly on the pavement, knowing that I was going to have to face whatever Miles had in store for me. I went into an off-licence and bought a half-bottle of vodka, then hailed a cab and went back to the hotel, where I lay on the bed and drank shots out of the tooth-mug, embalmed in the swirling patterns and petrol fumes of 1970.

* * *

Sean raced out of prison like a greyhound chasing a hare. Before we’d even got him back to Thirteen he was making war plans. The Tupamaros had shown the way in Uruguay. Urban guerrilla: a small band, operating in the city, using the terrain to our advantage like peasant revolutionaries used the mountains. Street corners and tower blocks our Sierra Maestra. And cars. Cars featured heavily in Sean’s plans for our future.

We were the vanguard party in embryo. We would lead the way. We’d be exemplary and we’d be self-sustaining. So there would be fast cars, stolen and stored in lock-ups or sold to get money. There would be money and with the money we’d buy arms. There would, above all, be no more waiting, no more frustrating attempts to persuade others of the urgency for change.

It felt like spring twice over. Without Sean, Anna’s intense cold had spread through all of us, sealing us into a sort of mute despair. Now the ice had gone from the windows at Thirteen. At the back of my mind there was a twinge of resentment at the way Sean could push things forward so easily. He and Anna spent long hours on the mattresses, plotting and whispering to each other. In Criticism-Self-Criticism I chipped away at their exclusivity. We were still opposed to monogamy, weren’t we? Anna accused me of being manipulative. I had a misogynistic desire to dominate. I was trying to force her back into my bed. I told her she was being arrogant. My only concerns were political.

We got the explosives out of the phone book. Sean had formulated a baroque plan to stake out construction sites and mines, then follow trucks to find out where they went. Without directly contradicting him, Anna visited the local library and came back with a list of ten demolition contractors, all within fifty miles of

London. The theft went smoothly enough. There was a company out in Grays, along the Thames estuary, which had a yard by the river, at the end of a desolate lane strewn with car tires. The only guard was an old man who sat and read model-railway magazines in a hut by the gate, his head framed in a little yellow square of electric light. We parked on a patch of wasteground and watched the oily black water, waiting for a cloud to obscure the moon.

I remember the sound of my breathing, ragged and heavy and somehow detached from my body as I carried a wooden box across the yard toward the hole we’d cut in the fence. Light rain falling on my face, the endlessness of the space between the warehouse and the gap in the wire. The open steppe.

Back at Thirteen we sat around the kitchen table, staring at our haul. It looked like bars of some kind of confectionery, each yellow block wrapped individually in waxed paper. We had a hundred and fifty charges of nitroglycerine gel, a spool of safety fuse and fifty PETN detonators. I don’t think any one of us knew what to say. There was no exultation, no sudden release of tension. We just sat there. I don’t know about the others, but I didn’t sleep that night. The mere presence of the stuff, hidden in a metal box under the floorboards, imposed a density, a pressure on the atmosphere that made it impossible.

Since none of us knew anything about explosives, our plan was to do some tests, drop a stick down a hole somewhere and see how big a bang it made. We told ourselves we’d proceed slowly. We’d take care.

Richard Nixon put an end to that. On May Day we woke up to his announcement that he was sending U.S. combat troops into Cambodia. It was a massive escalation of the conflict. “This is not an invasion,” said the President, describing the movement of several thousand troops across the border. America couldn’t be a pitiful helpless giant while the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy were threatening free nations everywhere. Here was the man who’d told voters he had a “secret plan to end the war,” shuffling his notes

and gesturing vaguely at a map on an easel as he told us why more killing was the right thing for everyone.

We had to respond. He’d given us no choice.

In principle the device was straightforward. An electric current initiated the detonator. The detonator initiated the gel. A kitchen timer from Woolworths would close the circuit. The timer was shoddy and imprecise, but as long as you didn’t set it too short, it would do the job. I was the one who knew about electricity, so I was the one who sat down at our long wooden table and spread out tape and tools and wire and batteries and made a bomb. I told the others to go out for the afternoon. As I worked, all I could think about was what would happen if I made a mistake. I could already feel the explosion welling up inside me, as if merely thinking about it tapped a disintegration already latent in my body. Only a month previously, a group of New York radicals had blown themselves up in a Greenwich Village townhouse. Rich kids, said the newspapers. Stupid nihilistic rich kids who got themselves killed. Nothing was mentioned in the articles about their politics.

Stripping the plastic coating from the wire to expose the core, twisting the ends. My hands shaking. It was, essentially, no more complex than wiring a plug, but it seemed to take forever.

Late that night we put the bomb in a blue leather handbag (a jumble-sale purchase of Helen’s) and left it against the front door of an American bank near the Mansion House. It was a weekend and the City of London was deserted. A stage set, waiting for the play to begin.

A BOMB TO HALT THE MONEY MACHINE

Nixon invades Cambodia. More blood on his hands. Bankers and arms companies pull the levers.

THEY profit. WE die.

U.S. trade supports mass murder. U.K. government wants a piece of the action.

* * *

It’s time to RESIST.

Numbers for Nixon:

U.S. military spending 1968, 9.4 % of GDP. U.S. soldiers killed last year, 9,414 killed, 55,390 wounded.

Vietnamese and Cambodian dead are not counted, hundreds of thousands so far, maybe millions.

We are acting in solidarity with all oppressed people across the world. Our attack is violent because violence is the only language THEY understand.

RISE UP!

MAY DAY 1970

We posted copies of our communiqué to mainstream newspapers and the underground press. From telephone booths we phoned the BBC and ITV, claiming responsibility. Then we waited. Three days later there had been no response. No news reports. No commentary. No acknowledgment at all. It was as if the bomb hadn’t detonated. But we’d heard the sound, a muffled crump. We’d seen emergency vehicles racing toward the scene. The day afterward the bank was closed. Wooden boards covered the building’s ground-floor façade.

Does something exist if it’s unobserved? Does something happen if it is not reported?

* * *

Renounce anger, forsake pride. Sorrow cannot touch the man who is not in thrall to anything, who owns nothing. This car, with its silt of water bottles and maps and fast-food packaging in the footwell. This body.

It smells, this body that is not my body. These unwashed clothes, these furred teeth. This face coated with grime and sweat.

South of Paris the country has changed. The air is warm and pine trees line the road. I catch a glimpse of a river, a flash of blue water scattered with white boulders. On impulse I take the next turning and make my way down toward it. Leaving the car in a clearing carpeted with pine needles and scraps of blue plastic, I pick my way to the water, where the light is harsh and bright. I take off my shirt and shoes. The stones are painfully hot, a bed of coals for me to walk across. No one seems to be around, so I strip naked and wade into the deepest part of the river, where it’s slimy underfoot and the shock of the cold, up to my knees, thighs, chest, persuades me that I’m still more or less alive. I stay in until I’m shivering, then clamber onto a large flat boulder and lie down. The sun quickly begins to dry off my skin.

I’m exhausted.

An orange bloom of light on my closed eyelids. Orange wallpaper in a hotel room, nauseating op-art swirls rotating as I drink and fret and wait for Miles. Heat like the fierce heat of the dry season at Wat Tham Nok, when the ground hardens and the grass underfoot is parched and brittle. The lizard that squats for hours on the wall of my cell. It’s there when I go out to do my chores, still in the same spot when I get back. I sprinkle water on the ground in front of the farang block to lay the dust, sweep the flagstones, line up the battered metal buckets for the morning

purge, then walk over to the monastery office to help Phra Anan with the accounts and the registration letters. Translating the letters, learning scraps of French and Dutch and German: I pray for you to help my son with his addiction. I feel you are his last chance. . Every day the lizard is waiting for me, judging me with its little liquid eyes. How have I done? Have I trodden lightly? The tinselly promise of religion: follow the instructions, find the exit. Orange, fading to guilty red, flaring up to an unbearable dazzling white as I open my eyes, then fading again as I drowse, watching seven-year-old Sam playing with a bucket and spade, pottering around and chattering to some invisible friend. Her arms and legs are less chubby than last year, her game more organized. My daughter, not by blood but because I notice such changes. My daughter because I love. Miranda, some way down the beach, looking for fossils, stooping to examine a find. Anna, walking away up the hill. Tall, rangy Anna, smoking a cigarette. What will I say to you? I’m driving south because I have something to ask you, but do I know what it is? I think I want to ask why you carried on, even when you must have known the revolution wasn’t getting any closer, when it must have been obvious you weren’t changing anything, just piling up horror. Did you still have a choice, by then? Grainy photographs of the burning embassy building. Uniformed police gesturing, looking up at the balcony. How did you survive? Who was the dead woman if it wasn’t you? And who helped you, Anna? What deals did you have to make to be allowed to live in peace in your little village, to walk up the hill carrying a string bag of melons, smoking a cigarette? When you cut up the fruit at your table, what do you feel? When you look back at your life, does it make sense? That’s what I want to know. That’s the answer I need from you.

For a year after that bombing, we fought a strange, silent war. Our first targets were corporate, because we believed corporations were pulling the strings of government. After the bank bomb, we attacked a chemical company, a subsidiary of a group that sold defoliants and white phosphorous to the American army. VICTORY

TO THE NLF AND ALL THIRD WORLD REVOLUTIONARIES. We bombed the head office of a construction firm with a contract to build new prisons. We bombed a bank that financed the regime in South Africa. WE ARE EVERYWHERE, we wrote. WE ARE IN YOUR OFFICES YOUR FACTORIES WE ARE THE MAN AND WOMAN NEXT TO YOU ON THE TUBE THE BUS THE TRAIN. Anna and I composed them together, lying on the floor or sitting at a rickety Formica table in one of the flats we rented after we closed down Thirteen.

Their school is a concentration camp. Their factory is a concentration camp. Their prison is a concentration camp. Their hospital is a concentration camp.

Concentration Camp Britain.

We are the Jews.

Can you smell smoke?

We’d argue about the tone, veering between a terse, tabloid style we hoped would speak to the masses and the technicalities of an argument we wanted to make to other revolutionaries. As we wrote them, our statements felt reasoned and sober. If they sounded harsh or hysterical, we felt it was only because we were speaking truth to power and the truth was bleak. We drafted them in a notebook, then made copies with a child’s printing set, sealing them and giving them to militant friends to circulate to the media.

Lessons: how to police each other, how to persecute the weak. State machine, making the citizens it needs. Bells telling you when to sit, when to stand. Can you handle it? Always productive, always on time. Ring ring! Mummy, Daddy,

Janet, and John. Open up, pop it in. The State installs the cop in your head.

SMASH THE STATE! OFF THE PIG!

The silence was eerie, absolute. Nothing in the papers, nothing on the TV. We tried to seed rumors, put out feelers to the underground press, who were running lurid stories about the Brigate Rossi in Italy, the German RAF, the PLO, the Weathermen. Nothing came of it, nothing reflected back to us at all. It was obvious the mainstream media had been instructed not to run the story, but why was no one else asking questions? How many accidental fires and midnight gas explosions would people accept? Richest one thousand have more than poorest two billion. A billion live and die on a dollar a day. It was as if we were shouting into a vacuum. I began to wonder what else took place in this silence, how much dark matter there really was in the universe.

Our lives changed very rapidly that year. We moved out of Thirteen, splitting up to stay in rented flats, two in London, the other in Manchester. I cut my hair and started to dress conservatively, something I found oddly wrenching. I hadn’t realized how attached I was to my Bohemian self-image, how empty it would feel to be a man in slacks and a drip-dry shirt. Passing other young people on the street, I’d feel angry and envious. In Criticism-SelfCriticism I was diagnosed as a closet élitist, still trying to set myself apart from the proletariat. Since we’d stopped organizing or participating in mass actions, I knew the others were just as isolated as I was. We saw no one, spoke to no one who wasn’t part of an increasingly narrow and rarified network. What, I wondered, was the difference between a vanguard and an élite?

Discipline, certainty: the way they seem to bleed into one another, to blur at their borders. Because I am disciplined I am certain. Because I am certain, I am disciplined.

Sean pinned a magazine picture to the kitchen wall, a NASA image of the earth seen from space. It was the only decoration in

the tiny Kentish Town flat and it wormed its way into our heads. A green and blue disc surrounded by infinite blackness. The shortest of shorthands. We were on the world’s side, the side of life.

WE ARE EVERYWHERE. We needed funds. Our best source of money was cars, luxury models we stole from quiet streets in Mayfair and Belgravia. The market is not nature. The ruling classes are not invulnerable. They have no immutable right to power. First comes refusal, then resistance. Fumble with the lock, break open the plastic housing round the ignition and yank out the cable. Touch the wires together, then listen for the starter motor. We sold the cars to a connection of Leo’s, a feral-looking ex-con called Fenwick who ran a garage out of a railway arch in Bethnal Green. It wasn’t an arrangement I felt happy about. Fenwick had little reason to be loyal to us, still less the pair of black mechanics he had working for him. I never knew their names and they never asked questions, but they were always checking us out. They knew there was something odd about us. Our accents, our manner. We didn’t fit. I hoped Fenwick was spreading a little of his profit around.

Pigs, know that we can get to you behind your high walls, your mock-Tudor mansions, your barracks, your police stations, your plush offices. There is nowhere to hide. Sean and Leo went to meet a Spanish contact in Earls Court, someone connected with the anti-Franco resistance. They took elaborate precautions, getting on and off buses and trains, watching, doubling back. They came back with two handguns, snub black Czech pistols that they proudly unwrapped on the kitchen table. The guns looked brand new.

“What are we going to do with these?” I asked.

“Expropriations,” said Sean, pointing one at the wall and squeezing the trigger. “And self-defense, of course.”

“It’s a serious business,” said Leo, pointing the other at Sean. He swung round, so the muzzle was pointing at me. “Have a go?”

We had a rule. We’d all agreed. We would attack property but never people. That was supposed to be an absolute prohibition, a

line we would never cross. What good, I wanted to know, was a gun against a building? Sean told me to relax. It was all spectacle. We had no reason to use them.

As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one with misgivings. A few days later Sean went over to the other London flat. He arrived back a couple of hours later, swearing and slamming the door. I’d never seen him so angry. “I’ll kill them,” he said. “I’ll fucking kill them.” He picked up a coffee mug and smashed it against a wall. “Fucking cowards. Can you believe it?”

It was a while before I could get any sense out of him. Helen and Matthias had disappeared. They’d packed their things and left. They hadn’t communicated with anyone. Jay, who’d been staying with them, thought they’d seemed unhappy, but hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. The news provoked a flurry of paranoia. We wondered if they’d informed on us, if perhaps we were about to be raided by the police. In the next few hours, we moved the guns and explosives out of their hiding place under the floorboards and left London.

Through Claire, we’d found ourselves a hideaway, a tumbledown farmhouse in North Wales that we could use in emergencies. Driving there, behind the wheel of a stolen Ford Cortina, I tried to work out what had happened. The last Criticism-Self-Criticism had been particularly hard on Helen. She’d admitted she was missing the work she used to do, the women’s group, the housing activism. Though Matthias had covered for her, it was obvious she was losing faith. Anna told her bluntly that her problem was psychological. If she agreed in theory that we had to resist the power of the state, it must be the reality she found disturbing. Leo joined in. He’d said he’d always thought of her as a typical intellectual, happiest with ideas, so nice and neat and antiseptic. Why couldn’t she admit that real people disgusted her, that she wished she was back in the library? When Matthias tried to defend her, he too was accused of harboring reactionary tendencies. The whole tenor of their relationship was suspect. Monogamy was tied up with all sorts of other capitalist formations. If they couldn’t bring

themselves to reject that particular residue of the old world, who knew what other sentiments they might be harboring? After a couple more hours, Helen was in tears. Matthias tried angrily to leave, but we prevented him, blocking the door. It was one of our new rules that no one could leave a Criticism-Self-Criticism session until the group agreed it was finished. Nothing could be broken off. Every interaction, every interrogation, had to run until the bitter end.

So instead of complying with the will of the collective, Matthias and Helen had run away. The rest of us — eight or nine people, as I remember — met up in Wales, more or less convinced none of us had been followed. Outside, rain lashed at the windows as we tried to light a fire in the damp hearth. In the corner of the room a carryall contained the guns and explosives. Everyone was nervous and depressed, except Anna, who chain-smoked cigarettes and stared into the fire and talked, half to herself, half to the room. She approached the situation methodically. This wasn’t a problem. It was an opportunity, a chance for us to confirm our commitment to the armed struggle. Matthias and Helen had shown us they were objectively reactionary. Of course it was hard for us to accept. We’d loved them, treated them as our brother and sister, but they were pigs, end of story. They were pigs and now they’d gone. Things like this were to be expected. As revolutionaries, worse misfortunes would happen to us than losing a weak comrade like Helen. Once we became a serious threat to the state, we shouldn’t expect it to show us any mercy. It was important to know this, to know how strong we had to be. She proposed an answer. We should conduct a Criticism-Self-Criticism session to discover if anyone else was thinking of leaving or, worse, was working for the enemy. We had to nip our paranoia in the bud. Sean caught on quickly. We had to trust one another. It was, he agreed, the only way. That night he and Anna seemed to be marching in lock-step. They were thinking with one mind, finishing each other’s sentences.

Sean produced a sheet of blotter acid. By then the only drug we used with any regularity was speed and none of the rest of us liked

the idea of tripping in our anxious, mistrustful state. Sean argued that this was exactly why it was necessary. If we were going to break down barriers, everything had to be in play, everything out in the open. So we sat round the fire and swallowed our hits, washing them down with gulps of ice-cold water, drawn from the pump outside the kitchen door. Then, to my horror, Sean loaded a round into one of the pistols and put it on the rug in front of the fire, smiling beatifically.

“Now you’re just being stupid,” I told him.

“Why do you say that, Chris? Afraid you might use it? Afraid it might get used on you?”

“Of course I’m afraid.”

“He’s right,” said Anna. “Enough macho bullshit. It’s not going to help anything.”

But no one made a move to take the thing away, so it sat there on the rug and we stared at it until Anna told Leo she didn’t think he really believed in building the revolution and Leo defended himself and made a counteraccusation and gradually we were all drawn in, pointing, shouting, putting one another to the question, everyone an inquisitor, a Dzherzhinsky, a Beria strutting about in our psychedelic Lubyanka basement. I don’t remember much about what happened, except that it was frightening and sometimes physical and all night the gun sat there in the middle of the floor, radiating malevolent potential. We ruthlessly hunted down every molecule of Fascism and Imperialism in one another until at last it was daylight and we were all exhausted, shaking as we came down, finally convinced there were no traitors, that we were all committed and prepared to carry on. Claire made strong sweet tea and it tasted like life itself. I remember looking out of the window, feeling scoured, purified, my hands trembling as I held the mug.

That afternoon we went out walking across the hills, following a ridgeline high above the scribble of stone walls and sheepfolds around the farmhouse. I was beside Anna, the others straggling out ahead of us, making for a cairn of stones marking a nearby peak. We’d said very little, each lost in thought. On impulse I asked

her the question that kept echoing back to me. Miles’s question in the cells at Bow Street.

“What do you think it will look like?”

“What?”

“After the revolution. What kind of place will this be?”

“That’s not for us to know.”

“What do you mean, not for us to know? That just sounds like mysticism.”

“Not mysticism, historical process. It doesn’t matter what we think, because the future will be determined by the will of the masses, not a few individuals.”

“Sure, but you must think about it. What do you imagine, when you imagine it?”

“I don’t, Chris.”

“Why not?”

“Because I won’t see it, and thinking about it would make me sad.”

A couple of months later, we got a letter from Helen, postmarked Frankfurt, West Germany. It said she and Matthias had moved there to live in a Sponti commune. She was involved with a Kinderladen and Matthias was working for a magazine. They wanted us to know that in their opinion we’d started to reproduce all the worst forms of hegemonic domination in our conditioning. We should reconnect with the working class or risk succumbing to our latent group Fascism. Helen also wrote that she was pregnant. She hoped her child would be brought up in an atmosphere free of nihilism, safe from our perverse fascination with horror.

Pigs, I thought. Traitors.

* * *

The more the worker expends himself in work, the more powerful becomes the world of objects, which he creates in the face of himself, and the poorer he himself becomes in his inner life, the less he belongs to himself. Anna and I stand in an elevator on our way up the tallest building in Britain. It’s five hundred and eighty feet high. The elevator is traveling at a thousand feet a minute. I know a great deal about this building, the Post Office Tower. I know about the TV and telephone traffic it routes through powerful microwave transmitters. I know about the radar aerial at the top, designed for short-range weather forecasting. I know something about the layout of the upper floors, where this elevator is taking us. If I stare straight forward, my view of the steel elevator doors is barred at the periphery by the unfamiliar black plastic frames of a pair of glasses. I can see my reflection in the polished metal, not clearly, but as a kind of fuzzy impressionistic blur. The dyed reddish-brown hair, the gray smudge of my suit. Beside me Anna shifts from foot to foot, uncomfortable in her high heels. Her face is obscured by her wig, a curtain of long blond hair cut into a severe, unfashionable bob.

We have a dinner reservation at the Top-of-the-Tower revolving restaurant. Name of Beresford. I’ve eaten there once before. I’ve been to the viewing gallery and the cocktail bar. I’ve seen the arc of tables on the revolve next to the plate-glass windows, the three-tiered buffet displays in the center, stacked with dramatically lit piles of fruit and crudités. I know the location of the bathrooms and the emergency stairs. I know that this is the restaurant’s busiest night of the week.

The elevator stops at the thirty-fourth floor and we step out

onto an expanse of lurid blue and red carpet, woven with the restaurant’s logo. The whole place is blue and red. Red vinyl banquettes. Blue curtains. Blue tablecloths with red borders. We’re shown to our table by a man with a phoney French accent who introduces himself as Gustav. The menu is also phoney and French, snobbishly printed without translation. Screw you if you don’t know the difference between consommé au paillettes and créme d la reine. All the luxuries can be had at the top of the tower. Oysters and caviar. Sole in a champagne and lobster sauce.

The waiter hands me the wine list and does fussy things with the napkins. Anna looks out of the window. She’s wearing heavy makeup. Lots of blue eye shadow and burgundy lips, a face to match the décor.

We sit in silence, revolving slowly over Fitzrovia. The sun has gone down and the buildings are constellations of lighted windows, a vertical column of lights marking Centre Point, a black void the open space of Regent’s Park. Remembering how we’re supposed to be behaving, I take out my camera and click the shutter pointlessly into the darkness outside. Then, impulsively, I take a picture of Anna.

“Don’t do that,” she snaps. The waiter comes back, pours the wine for me to taste, takes our order. We do our best to appear animated, the young married couple from the suburbs, up in London for a special night out. We’re good at it. I almost believe in us. What, I wonder, if we were what we appear to be? What if we could just sit here and hold hands, toasting each other and looking out over London?

“I’m going to do it now,” she says. Without waiting for me to reply, she slides her bag from its position under the table, picks it up and heads in the direction of the toilet. I try not to stare. I don’t want anyone to follow my eyeline. I sit, looking fixedly out of the window. One full revolution takes twenty-two minutes. I have completed an arc of perhaps a hundred and twenty degrees when Anna returns, still carrying the bag.

“It’s locked,” she says. At that moment the waiter returns,

carrying two bowls of clear soup. We fall silent as he pours more wine into our glasses.

I wait until he’s out of earshot again. “It shouldn’t be.”

“Well, it is.”

“Did you try the observation deck?”

“We don’t know anything about who’s down there.”

“It’ll be empty.”

“We don’t know that for certain.”

“I tell you, there’s no one there, not at this time. I’ll go, if you won’t.”

This is bad. We’re not doing it properly. The Beresfords shouldn’t be arguing with each other over their romantic dinner. Near the toilets, behind a thick blue curtain, there’s a fire door opening onto a narrow set of concrete stairs that leads to the observation deck and from there to floor thirty-two, where there’s a storeroom right beside the emergency exit. On thirty-two there’s also a lot of switching equipment: a bomb placed there could shut down phone service for the whole of London. But they’ve locked the door. They’ve locked the door, which was supposed to be open.

Our information came from a friend of a friend, a girl who used to have a secretarial job at the GPO. At night, she said, the only person on the upper floors was a watchman. Jay and Leo checked it out. One evening Jay wandered around the building for almost half an hour without being challenged. He was the one who found the storeroom.

But the door’s locked.

What a farce. The door’s locked and there are gun battles on the streets of Belfast and children are dying in Biafra and in their infinite wisdom the British people have elected themselves a Conservative government. The right wing press is whispering to its readers about the enemy within, but despite our best efforts we’re still just a rumor, part of the toxic atmosphere of this old, cold, gray little country. Not for long. This action will make us real. Undeniable and real. But the door’s locked.

Here I am, surrounded by bovine executives and their

frozen-haired mistresses, proud members of the ruling class squatting in a hermetically sealed revolving bubble, chowing down on duck à l’orange: bland and selfish, totally unconcerned with all the horror inflicted in their name. I’ve made hating them into such a habit that I don’t really see them anymore, don’t regard any one of these rich white people as more or less attractive or clever or cultured or better-dressed than the others. They’re an abstraction, a quantity of power that has to be moved from one side of the balance sheet to the other. As individuals, they have no substance for me at all.

But we are agreed. We respect human life. That’s the difference between us and them. We’ve taken care not to hurt anyone with our bombs. But we need to make a point. It’s time to put an end to the silence. In Britain, established power likes things discreet. Confrontation is always a sign of failure. When the system’s working, the energies of those who resist it are always diffused, our anger spiraling down into some soft and foggy place where there’s no obvious enemy, just a row of civil service desks and a faint, receding peal of trumpets.

I can’t taste my soup. Mechanically I spoon it into my mouth. The door. The fucking door.

“Give me the bag,” I say to Anna.

“You can’t carry a woman’s bag through the restaurant. People will notice. It’ll be too obvious.”

“Just give me the fucking bag.”

I have to do something. I can’t sit and eat. My stomach has cramped up.

“I’ll do it,” she says, and gets up again, toting the heavy bag over her shoulder. I’m left in my seat, slowly revolving. I try to control my breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth.

“Is everything all right, sir?” asks the waiter, and I stare at him as if he’s speaking a foreign language.

I don’t want death. I try to remember that. I’m twenty-two and I want life. Life for myself, life for the world, all the people of this fragile blue and green disc. This is my hope, as I sit at the table,

scraping breadcrumbs into patterns with the side of my knife: that the revolution can happen through an accretion of small actions, like moth holes on a suit left too long in a closet. Because what’s the alternative? 1917. Executions and prison camps and civil war and tens of thousands dead.

Cleansing, Anna calls it. I hate that word.

I wish she’d come back. Panic is bubbling up inside me, a primal scream, all the psychic pain knotted into my muscles. Just as sitting still is about to become intolerable, she slides back into her seat. She hasn’t got the bag with her. At the same time the waiter arrives with our main course. In answer to my unspoken question she just nods.

I stare down at my plate. A fussy little pile of mashed potato. Green beans. A pork chop.

At three A.M we phoned in a warning. At four-thirty our bomb blew up part of the thirty-first floor of the Post Office Tower, sending chunks of concrete and shards of glass showering over the roofs of Cleveland Street. By morning we were the lead item on BBC News. London landmark a target. No one was hurt, though the night watchman phlegmatically reported being “lifted two or three inches” out of his armchair. A government minister gave a statement calling it an act of insanity.

SHUT DOWN THE SPECTACLE!

Last night Post Office Tower bombed.

Because it is the lobotomy machine

the pacifier

Microwaves sent out across Britain

Television transmission

the dead hand of technology

their means of control

their communications

their message

* * *

fairy stories to distract you

REALITY: Imperialism, Colonialism, Dictatorship

REALITY: troops on British streets

REALITY: an international state of war

REALITY: the mental patient spasms with

electricity

REALITY: dead-eyed mothers on Merseyside streets

REALITY: not a GAME SHOW

We demand complete withdrawal of American troops from Indochina, British troops off British streets.

WE ARE EVERYWHERE

SHUT DOWN THE SPECTACLE

DESTROY THE RULE OF CAPITAL ARMED RESISTANCE NOW!

Even though the news report didn’t quote our communiqué I was still ecstatic, hugging the others, even punching the air, the idiotic gesture of a football player celebrating a goal. For a day or two I felt slightly manic and walked the streets in an attempt to calm myself. I covered miles of pavement, feeling the world had subtly changed. Faintly but unmistakably our idea had been absorbed into the air. Every passerby had been touched by it. There we were, a headline behind the grille of the newsstand outside the tube. There we were, propagating through the radio spectrum. Eventually my euphoria dissipated and I found myself on London Bridge, pushing feebly against a pinstriped tide of evening commuters, feeling naked, surveilled. I went home and slept, the covers pulled over my head.

I was in a Camden café with Sean when an unfamiliar face appeared on the television above the counter. The man was a chief

superintendent in the Met, an unremarkable-looking official in his fifties or sixties, with thick-framed glasses and graying combed-over hair. It was hard to catch what he was saying over the noise of the diners. He stood outside Scotland Yard and spoke to an interviewer in an unhurried, languorous voice, “educated” vowels pasted over a Black Country accent. . Entirely in hand. . the object of attention. . who sees anything suspicious is urged to come forward. . I examined him, this bomb squad detective, soothing a troubled situation with the balm of euphemism. Businesslike and professionally unemotional, a man who’d never understand that his own impersonality was at the root of our so-called crime, that we’d placed our bombs to destroy the rule of men who’d evacuated themselves of their humanity, functional men like him. The enemy.

The police acted quickly. Within the next day or two, we started hearing about busts. In Notting Hill detectives turned over every underground household in the area. During the next few weeks, it seemed as if every squat and commune in London got raided. Bizarre tales filtered back: a feminist bookshop in Stoke Newington whose entire stock was confiscated, an International Marxist Group organizer taken for questioning because he had fencing equipment in his room. We’d got what we wanted. Reality. War on the state. War, or at least talk. We were being talked about all over Britain.

the saturation of our minds with the poison of subversion has become so constant that we are no longer even aware you say we can support the aim while disagreeing on methods but they should think about the damage they’re causing to legitimate organizations trying to do real creative grassroots work opinions that once would have been thought frankly treasonous are openly as a tactic it’s useless actively promoted by at least thirty known Communist organizations and many thousands of unassociated

do these bombings ever connect anyone from different struggles? No. Pretty much the opposite. Have they moved any of the struggles (Ireland etc.) on to a higher level of awareness or activity? One is continually

confronted by (occasionally well-meaning but always blinkered and immature) there is cowboys and indians glamour and then there is getting real often members of the privileged middle classes, who seem to believe that by the endless repetition of slogans don’t seem to know the difference between some kind of improvement an analysis and that’s better than nothing they should consider the effects/ ineffectiveness of what slightest criticism of their reasoning, let alone the suggestion that they might be fellow travelers with totalitarianism, is met by denunciations of the most hysterical end up busted or worse in the general crackdown only the most closed of closed minds could have perpetrated the latest outrage in London. The bombing of an important economic target and familiar landmark should be roundly condemned by all who have z wonder if the people doing these acts of so-called armed struggle ever opened up wide discussions with other militants? further proof, if proof were needed, that a climate exists in this country that might best be described as a terrorist has Britain’s best interests at heart a bomb, said Lenin penetration by subversives of the trade unions and shop floors has led to widespread industrial strife and demoralization we lost leaflets, copying equipment, stencils. And they took our membership list, diaries, personal papers, etc. the unprincipled exploitation of largely imaginary grievances by wreckers and state-subsidized layabouts threatens to undermine the values and ideals that we cherish as a nation exactly what they say they’re against but they’re provoking not soon to find ourselves minions of Moscow, we must meet the threat of the bombers with the utmost firmness and moral clarity

The only thing the commentators and letter-writers seemed to agree on was that we were wrong. We were mindless and evil. We were probably mad. I was shaken by the reaction — not by the condemnation, which I’d expected, but by the fact that most people seemed not to understand why we’d done it. I thought our action was so pure in motive and clear in intent that no one could fail to

understand it. I thought we were a spark. My expectations seem extraordinary to me now.

I tried to hide my disappointment from the others, but it came out as a bitter rant against our supposed fellow revolutionaries. Their reaction smelled, I said, like fear. Secretly they didn’t want anything to change. They were just having a good time playing Che and pushing policemen at demos. There was more, which I didn’t say, about my own fear — that we were the fools who’d believed, poor political Tommies, who’d charged over the top with nobody following.

We had supporters: no group like ours could exist in total isolation. Though we’d severed many of our connections with the overground Left, we had contacts, people who believed in the armed struggle and were prepared to help us with logistics, but we had no one to speak out in public. Our own words were still missing.

So it became real, our fight. Or did it? We were already floating free, as removed from the experience of the average worker as the diners in the restaurant at the top of the tower. After that, the insidious message of the spectacle — that nothing takes place, even for the participants, unless it’s electronically witnessed and played back — took us over. We thought we were striking a blow against it, the hypnotic dream show of fuckable bodies and consumer goods. Instead we fell into the screen. Our world became television.

* * *

Orange wallpaper. Nauseating swirls. Gummed eyes, sticky mouth and the sound of insistent knocking on the door. I pulled a sheet round me and went to answer it. Outside I found the landlady. “Mr. Carter is downstairs,” she told me, a look of pure hostility on her face. “You’re late.” Obviously I’d caused her some trouble.

Miles was waiting outside, slouched in the back of a large black Mercedes. The driver, a middle-aged Nigerian, greeted me politely. He was playing some kind of handheld computer game, which he put away in the glove compartment as I got in. Miles looked run down. He had bags under his eyes, patches of shaving rash on his chin.

“Have a nice time last night?” he asked peevishly.

“You look unwell.”

“So do you. Put this on.”

He handed me a tie, an old-fashioned item with some sort of crest repeated on a green background.

“What is it? Grenadier Guards? Old Wykehamists?”

“Just put it on. You look like you slept in that jacket.”

I knotted the tie round my neck.

“Fuck’s sake, you’re even scruffier now. Take it o,”

We inched through the morning rush hour, the driver lurching forward into each gap, then braking sharply. I opened the window, hoping the fresh air would make me feel less sick. Near Regent’s Park, Miles directed the driver to pull up outside a terrace of elegant Regency houses. A man was waiting for us, pacing up and down on the corner, his hands jammed into the trouser pockets of a gray suit. He was in his late twenties or early thirties, with floppy blond hair and a scattering of freckles on his face, looks that would have been charmingly boyish were it not for the crude jaw and the unfriendly gray eyes he passed over me as he opened the front

passenger door. He had what is euphemistically termed an athletic build, a square head rooted in a thick neck, shoulders that strained against the fabric of his jacket as he settled himself in his seat.

“Good morning, Mr. Carter,” he said, in a public-school accent. He didn’t introduce himself to me. Miles shot a significant look in my direction. Through my hangover I smiled back. I felt I’d achieved something. We’d come to the edge of civility, the point beyond which force would be used. I’d pushed him thus far, at least.

We made our way up Euston Road, slowing to a crawl outside the grimy façade of St. Pancras station.

“Where are we going, Miles?”

“Don’t worry. Just a business breakfast. If you relax, we’ll be out of there in half an hour and I won’t be bothering you again for a while.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

We turned into a side street near King’s Cross and parked outside an office building, some kind of recent warehouse conversion, all sandblasted bricks and plate glass, fashionably facing the canal. The driver opened the glove compartment and retrieved his computer game, placidly resuming the arrangement of little falling bricks into a wall. The big man disappeared inside the building and came out again with a set of laminated visitor passes.

“Now,” said Miles, “this is an informal, walk-around event. Just let me guide you. I’ll be right beside you. You don’t have to do anything at all. You don’t even have to speak.”

We walked past the front desk into a large function room, which had been laid out as some kind of exhibition space. A girl handed us each a folder, pointing us toward a table laid with coffee urns and pitchers of juice and platters of large, rubbery-looking croissants. We wandered around, past photographic displays and architectural models presented on felt-covered tables. Little prison wings. Little model figures banged up in little cells, playing Ping-Pong with one another in little rec rooms.

“Architects,” said Miles, gesturing at the people around us, who

were balancing cups and saucers and peering surreptitiously at one another’s name tags as they made conversation. “Architects and detention-center contractors. And Home Office people, of course.”

Pat Ellis was at the center of a knot of acolytes, who were listening to her with rapt attention, first nodding in agreement, then laughing doggedly at a joke. Without preamble, Miles gripped my arm and steered me toward her, pushing his way into the circle.

“How nice to see you, Minister,” he said, cutting through the laughter.

Pat Ellis looked momentarily nonplussed, then nodded curtly and continued her anecdote. She was talking about a visit she’d made to some facility in Holland, what she’d said to the director, what he’d said to her. The young man at her side, obviously some kind of aide, frowned at us.

Miles plowed on. “You remember Chris Carver, don’t you?”

The minister broke off again and smiled at us, a neat and practiced smile, which gave the impression of warmth without masking her irritation. “No, I’m sorry. You’ll have to remind me.”

“Chris Carver,” repeated Miles. “Think back.”

I looked at Pat. She used to have long chestnut hair, which she often wore in a scarf. It was gray now, bunched up in a tight, unflattering perm. She was dressed in business uniform, like all the people around her, a dark suit, a string of pearls doubled over the mottled skin of her neck. I’d seen her the previous day, of course, and before that on television, but I was unnerved to find myself so close to her. I couldn’t find a trace of the nervous, hardworking young woman I’d once known — crushingly sincere, easily moved to tears. The features were the same, the long nose and the large widely spaced eyes, but the thin-lipped mouth (which I’d kissed once, in the middle of a drunken party) had a twist of placid vanity, the curdled self-assurance of the professional politician. She looked at me blankly, complacently, not recognizing me. Then she made the connection. I could see it happen, the loss of traction, the sudden skid on the ice.

“No, I’m sorry, Mr. — uh. .”

“Carver,” repeated Miles.

For a moment she was completely speechless. She looked at the floor, then at her assistant. Everyone was waiting for her to say something. Reluctantly she turned her eyes back to me and her expression was momentarily unguarded, almost warm. I realized, bizarrely, that somewhere inside she was pleased to see me. Then a flash went off. Miles’s young thug had taken a picture. Instantly, the barriers slammed down. She looked about, coldly furious, trying to spot the photographer. I opened and closed my mouth. I wanted to say something, to disrupt the trap Miles was setting.

“Sorry, Pat,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”

“Yes,” interrupted Miles. “My apologies, Minister. I thought you knew each other.”

He grabbed my elbow and steered me away, leaving Pat Ellis behind us, hissing into her assistant’s ear. Miles’s thug was on the other side of me, his hand on the small of my back, propeling me discreetly but firmly toward the exit. Angrily, I shook them both off, a violent gesture that made people turn and watch. “Excuse me, are you with the press?” asked one of the PR women, when we reached the door. “This is a private event. There’s no photog- raphy.” Miles made an inconclusive hand gesture at her as we brushed past.

We got into the car. The driver put away his game and pulled out onto the street. “Well,” said Miles, keying a text message into his cell phone, “a bit crude, but we’ll just have to see if she takes the hint, won’t we?”

While I tried to understand what had just taken place, Miles relaxed into his seat, received an answer to his text, read it, and slipped the phone into a jacket pocket.

“What hint?” I asked quietly.

“Put it this way. There are some people it’s just not appropriate for the next Home Secretary to know. That is, if she wants to be the next Home Secretary.”

“I keep telling you, she had nothing to do with anything. I didn’t see her or Gavin after 1969.”

“Well, you say that, Chris. And, of course, you could well be telling the truth. But if you were a journalist, the possibility would certainly be worth following up, wouldn’t it?”

“You can’t give this to the press.”

“Why not? I’d say it was in the public interest.”

“Why not? Please, Miles, you keep saying you’re my friend. Think about my — my wife. Our daughter. Our daughter knows nothing about any bombings. Think what this would do to her.”

“Yes, I do understand. You’re Michael Frame, suburban family man, and you were rather hoping it would stay that way. But you must have known, Chris. Sooner or later it was going to come out.”

“But why? You’re not the police. This isn’t about bringing me to justice or anything straightforward like that. Whatever job you’re doing, I know you don’t give a shit about justice. What did Pat Ellis do to you, Miles? She must have done something.”

“To me? Nothing at all. It’s just politics, Chris. Real, grown-up politics, not the kind that starts by carving out a Utopia and then hammering at the world, trying to make it fit. If she’s going to get the top job, she’ll have to make sure all the stakeholders are satisfied. Simple as that. No mystery. No conspiracy theory. If everyone’s happy, then this all goes away. There’ll be no need to bring you any deeper into it and you can fuck off back to Sussex. But if Mrs. Ellis doesn’t play ball, she’ll find the media beginning to focus on certain issues of character.”

I stared out of the window, and Marylebone Road was just a jumble of planes and reflections. Miles sighed, adopted an avuncular expression, and squeezed my shoulder, one — two — three, an autistic mime of sincerity. “I am your friend, Chris. Really. And as your friend, I think you should tell your family. They deserve to be let into this as gently as possible.”

I wanted to kill him, to smash his face to a bloody pulp. “And

what am I going to let them into, exactly? That Daddy’s a terrorist and he’s going to prison?”

He shrugged blandly. “Not necessarily. Everyone knows this all happened a long time ago. Yes, you did certain things, but — well, the context has changed. People are quite pragmatic, these days. I won’t pretend that there won’t be pressure for an — um, judicial dimension, but there are ways you could make the climate as favorable as possible. If you had something to give, for example.”

“Give?”

“Oh, God, Chris, don’t be obtuse. If you could find something a little more concrete to say about Pat Ellis, you could help yourself considerably.” He looked sharply at me. “Unless you have something else?”

“Such as?”

“It might help for you to tell me what happened. In your own words. Who did what. A lot of that period is still rather murky.”

I said nothing, though Anna’s name was hanging in the air.

Miles put me on a train at Victoria. I slumped in a window seat and was pulled out of London, moldering suburban stations scrolling past as I ate a clammy sandwich and thought about powerlessness. Not about abolishing power, let alone seizing it. Having it trample over you, take the substance of your life and grind it between its teeth. Miles demanded a burnt offering: Pat Ellis or Anna or me. Because he was powerful he would have one. Heart and entrails, sizzling on the fire. I scrunched up the sandwich packaging, stuffed it into the bin behind my seat. Seeing Pat Ellis had taken me back into our own private gray area. Of course there was one: in every situation involving two or more people, there’s always a gray area, a few halftone specks at the border of the black and the white. 1969 wasn’t the last time I’d seen her. It was late in the summer of 1971.

I don’t know what kind of figure I must have presented. When she answered the door of her basement flat, in one of the hilly streets around Tufnell Park, she looked shocked. I’d turned up

unannounced. Someone had been watching the place for a few days and we knew Gavin would be at his chambers. We’d judged her the more sympathetic of the two, the one more likely to help.

She invited me in, not without a trace of reluctance, and we drank mint tea, sitting on her sofa in front of a rug littered with wooden blocks and rattles and stuffed toys. She introduced me to her son, Robin, who was almost a year old. I played with him for a while, making faces and letting him grip my fingers. Pat asked what I’d been up to and I asked her if she still considered herself a revolutionary. I can’t remember what formulation she used in her reply, but she was noncommittal. I got the impression I was making her nervous, because she kept finding excuses to get up and walk around, fetching things from the kitchen, fussing with Robin. She asked again what I’d been doing and I told her (as planned) that I was living in Leeds and was in contact with certain comrades who were facing criminal charges arising out of their clandestine work. The baby began to cry and she picked him up, walking up and down, rubbing his back. She asked what kind of charges.

“Armed robbery,” I told her.

Expropriation was logistically correct, since we needed a better way of financing ourselves than car theft. It was politically correct because it was an act of dispossession. It was tactically correct because it was proletarian, the method of people who owned nothing, who had no stake in the system. But our first attempt had gone badly wrong. For once, I hadn’t been directly involved. It was Sean’s project. Anna was out of the country meeting some of her Paris contacts and he’d put it together with Leo, whose idea of planning was as vague as his own. Accompanied by Ferdy and Quinn, two of Leo’s old friends from the Firm, they’d gone into a bank in Reading and held it up. Sean had fired a shot into the ceiling, cowboy-style. According to Leo, he’d even insisted on wearing a Stetson over his stocking mask. They’d gotten away with a fair amount of money, but somehow Ferdy was left behind, tackled by a passerby as they ran to the car. Though Sean had threatened to

shoot him, the man wouldn’t let go and Sean hadn’t been prepared to pull the trigger.

I told a version of this story to Pat. Though there was no chance of acquittal, Ferdy wanted to plead not guilty. We needed lawyers who could run a political trial, who could use the court to propagate our message; in that way we thought we could salvage something from a disastrous situation. Pat heard me out, jiggling up and down on the rug as she tried to soothe her baby. She told me she didn’t want any part of it. She didn’t believe there was anything to be gained from that kind of politics. She used the same words I’d heard from so many of our supposed allies. Adventurist, counterproductive. I argued with her for a while and eventually she agreed to write down some names, people she knew who might take the case. I gave her a phone number, told her she should ring if she changed her mind. I knew she wouldn’t. Why did she help at all? Out of friendship? To get rid of me? I suppose one could find some ambiguity in it, space enough for Miles to live and thrive. I next saw her when she popped up on TV some time in the early nineties and I discovered that she’d become an MP. The idea of a political trial soon faded away and Ferdy, who refused to name his accomplices, was sentenced to eight years in prison, without the question of his political motivation even being raised.

When I got off the train at Chichester I went straight to God’s and drank myself into a stupor, sitting in front of the gas fire with a bottle of supermarket Scotch. He must have come downstairs and found me, because when I woke up the next morning, feeling shaky and bleak, I found a blanket thrown over me and a glass of water and a foil strip of painkillers waiting on the desk. God wasn’t given to making conversation, least of all in the morning. As I tried to gather myself to leave, he shuffled around the shop and pretended to look for something in the theology section, working up courage to speak.

“I don’t like to pry, Mike,” he said gruffly, after several minutes of inner struggle, “but is everything all right at home?”

“Don’t worry, God. I’ll be — ne.”

He looked immensely relieved that I wasn’t going to force any intimacies on him. I was touched. I knew what it had cost him even to broach the subject. A great respecter of the private pain of others, Godfrey.

* * *

I must have fallen asleep, because when I open my eyes the sun is low and my skin feels hot and tight around my face. I sit up, watched suspiciously by a family of picnickers who’ve set themselves up elaborately on the riverbank, a small brightly colored complex of windbreaks and umbrellas and barbecue equipment. My head is swimming. I’m very dehydrated. I dress and pick my way back across the rocks and up the path to the car, where I change my shirt and gulp down half a bottle of warm water. Then I sit on a bench, listening to the buzzing of the flies round the overflowing litter-bins. The air is fragrant, heavy as lead.

I drive through the evening, passing Bordeaux just as the light fails. The radio chatters and spits out pop songs and the road climbs through foothills into the darkness. Little by little, my skin exhales heat and the bends sharpen into hairpins, dented metal barriers gleaming suddenly in the headlights. I’m close now. Only another hour to Sainte-Anne. I don’t feel ready. I want to swing the car round, to defer the moment when I’ll find myself face to face with Anna.

After the Post Office Tower, the conflict escalated. We began to hear rumors of other actions, ones we hadn’t carried out. Someone blew up a railway line in Ayrshire, near the Cairnryan ferry to Northern Ireland. They phoned in a warning to British Rail, told them not to allow their trains to be used as troop transports. There were attacks on electrical installations, airline offices, and embassies. Some of our friends were arrested, notably Alex Hill from the Sylvan Close occupation, who apparently had a copy of one of our communiqués in his flat. Many more had their homes raided and their possessions smashed or taken away for examination. I remember Sean remarking sarcastically that if having your record

collection trashed was sufficient to radicalize someone, a revolutionary situation would exist in Britain within weeks.

We responded with two further actions. Leo and Claire planted a bomb in a gambling club patronized by senior American officers, which demolished the entire rear elevation of the building, a mansion house in St. James’s. Because of Agent Orange leaching into the earth of Cambodia, because of white phosphorus burning through the skin of small children. Britain is not a safe haven for the strategists of extermination. Nowhere in the world will they be protected from the guerrilla, acting in support of the people of Indochina. We phoned in a warning and the place was cleared, though we heard the next day that two people had been hurt by flying glass. They were our first casualties, but I don’t remember any particular discussion about them. I think we blamed it on the police. A second bomb, placed outside an air force base, failed to detonate. It was suggested in the underground press that the attacks were the work of neo-Fascists, trying to discredit the Left. We read a dozen theoretical demonstrations of the objectively counterrevolutionary nature of our actions, a dozen more of the historical inevitability of our failure, but it seemed to us that history was on our side. Every week there were more strikes. Dockers, car workers. Ninety Soviet diplomats had been expelled from Britain, accused of spying. An anti-Communist panic was sweeping the country, which seemed to be completely polarized between those who were more terrified of Moscow and those who were more terrified by the binary madness of the Cold War. It was a question of gut feeling: you chose one kind of fear or the other. Not being afraid wasn’t an option.

A message to all those comrades who feel that revolutionary action is not appropriate in the U.K. because this is a place where the forces of reaction are strong. If you believe, as we do, that Imperialism is a paper tiger, then nowhere can be excluded as the site of struggle. You say we are

squandering revolutionary energy, that adventurism is a characteristic deviation in times of weakness. We say agitation and propaganda are insufficient. If that’s the sum of your ambitions, you should be ashamed.

Sometimes it felt as if we were spending more time arguing about money than about strategy. Like our failure to discuss the injuries at the gambling club, this should have been a warning to me, a sign that things were beginning to degenerate, but we were desperate for funding and prepared to do more or less anything to get it. A friend of Jay’s worked for a record company. Through him we were introduced to an underground character called Nice Mike, who wanted to score fifty thousand hits of acid off some Liverpool gangsters who had a lab down in Devon, at a farmhouse out on Exmoor. Nice Mike didn’t trust the people he was involved with and wanted to take along some protection. Jay suggested us.

It was risky. We knew nothing about Nice Mike’s contacts. We didn’t know a great deal about Nice Mike himself. I disliked him on sight, an overweight south Londoner with shoulder-length hair and loud Carnaby Street clothes, who set up our first meeting in a trendy bar and seemed incapable of answering direct questions. He laid out his proposition in an exaggeratedly soothing tone, as if lulling children to sleep. We told him nothing about our political activities; he seemed satisfied with the story that we were ordinary criminals, connected with some unspecified east-London gang. He was prepared to pay cash up front plus more when he’d sold the drugs. Despite our misgivings, we agreed.

He wanted to drive down to Devon, which was fine, but on the appointed day he turned up in an absurdly conspicuous car, a bright blue Bentley, loaded with gadgets that he insisted on demonstrating to us, like a salesman. The heated leather seats, the eight-track built into the dashboard. On the road he played acid rock and clicked his many elaborate silver rings on the steering wheel, bragging about the famous groups he dealt to when they were passing through London. It was all birds and

backstage and Jimmy this and Mick that, clicking his damn rings on the wheel in time to the beat.

It soon became apparent that Mike was very nervous. As he drove he smoked joints, stubbing them out in the ashtray, weaving alarmingly in and out of the traffic, occasionally freaking himself out about phantom objects in his peripheral vision and pulling the wheel round to avoid them. Luckily the car handled like a boat or I swear he would have spun it. He wasn’t helped by his glasses, big octagonal things with a heavy blue tint that must have increased the weirdness several-fold. When we passed Stonehenge he insisted on stopping, as if we were on some kind of excursion. The three of us — Sean, Jay, and I — trailed after him while he wandered round the stones, waving his arms and intoning a lot of faux-Druidic nonsense, invoking the pagan gods to bless our endeavor and promising to “make a sacrifice upon our return.”

When we got back into the car, which was parked on the grass shoulder by the roadside, Mike scrabbled around in the glove compartment and pulled out a plastic bag of pills. “Want anything? We need to maintain our edge, yeah?” I told him I thought what we needed was to keep our shit together and he got very defensive. Who was I to say who did or didn’t have their shit together? Who the fuck was I? He kept repeating it, his tone increasingly self-righteous. “I mean, who the fuck are you? How do I even know you have your shit together?”

We ate a tense fry-up at a Little Chef somewhere in Somerset, wreathed in cigarette smoke and mutual distrust. In the middle of the crowded diner, Mike decided to start talking about guns. We’d brought guns, right? We were packing, because we needed to be packing, because he hadn’t paid for fucking amateurs, OK? He’d thought we were going to look heavier. We didn’t look heavy enough. He was speaking very loudly. The subject of guns seemed to tug his accent partway across the Atlantic. People were staring. Young families, truck drivers.

The only way to shut him up was to walk out, so that was what we did, leaving our plates of food half finished on the table. When

we got back to the car, I took his keys and Sean shoved him into the back seat of the Bentley, still protesting about his eggs and his second cup of tea. Jay kept watch, leaning on the car, as Sean and I got in beside him and shut the door.

Sean was direct. “Now, look here, you decadent little fucker. If this goes bad I’m going to cut your balls off and make you eat them, you understand?”

Nice Mike’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Don’t you dare rip me off. If you rip me off you’ll regret it. I’ve got friends, man. You touch any of my money and I’m telling you right here and now that you’ll regret it.”

We quizzed him again about the people we were going to meet, what he knew of their background, who else he’d told about the deal. He was evasive, panicky. Then we locked him in the car while we went for a quick walk round the forecourt.

“You know what?” said Sean. “We should just dump the cunt. Take the money, take the car and have done with it. We don’t need to go to Devon.”

“It’ll come back to us,” argued Jay. “He’s not kidding about having friends.”

Like Sean, I’d had enough of Nice Mike. “Fuck his friends,” I said. It was two to one, so we went back to the Bentley and told him how it was going to be. When he argued, Sean stuck a gun in his mouth, to prove he was “packing.” We took Mike’s briefcase of cash and his bag of pills and drove away in his ridiculous car, leaving him kneeling by the side of the road, his eyes tightly shut and his hands clasped in front of him, as if in prayer. If he had friends, they never found us.

Was that before or after Anna went to Paris? I’m honestly not sure. Maybe it’s the stress we were living under or maybe it’s just too long ago, but that year exists for me only as a series of fragments, shards of memory I can’t fit together and don’t quite trust. I know my mind is capable of playing tricks, not just in sequencing but in deeper, more subtle ways. For example, I remember daffodils in the graveyard where I walked with Anna, looking for dead babies.

It was a little Norman church with a lychgate and moss-covered gravestones leaning at drunken angles. The light of my memory is golden-hour light, warm and diffuse. Sunshine-yellow daffodils are scattered in the long grass. Sunshine-yellow and paper-white. But that would place it in early spring, and it was certainly later than that, months later.

I remember, very clearly it seems to me, what she looked like and how she was dressed. Her hair was cropped short, her arms and legs bare. There was a softness about her body that I associate with periods when she was happy, when she allowed herself to be less rigorous and austere. We were laughing, strolling through the churchyard like conventionalized lovers, bathed in the yellow light that’s now eternally the light of i97i, not just for me but for everyone who saw a film or looked at a magazine that year. Dazzle and softness and lens flare.

We held hands. I can’t have concocted that. She talked about her childhood. For most children, the world is defined by the sensory; by likes and dislikes, favorite smells and tastes. Anna’s narrative was mostly about ideas. Witness, duty. It’s the only time I remember hearing her speak about her family. She was an only child, precocious and diligent, the repository of all her Quaker parents’ wishes for the future. She didn’t say much about her mother, but spoke of her father with respect and what sounded like regret. He’d been, she said, like an exam board, asking her general knowledge questions at the dinner table, testing her on her memory for various prayers and catechisms. She recited for me, in an ironic sing-song voice: We utterly deny all outward wars and strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end or under any pretense whatever; this is our testimony to the whole world.

“He knows someone has to fight,” she told me. “That’s what makes him unforgivable. He’s just too finicky to do it himself.”

Later, I saw a picture of her father, a gaunt man in an old-fashioned woollen waistcoat, staring defiantly at the camera as he defended his dead terrorist daughter to a magazine journalist. He’d taken her on demonstrations, taught her that it was sometimes

necessary to exercise dissent if one wanted to have a conscience void of offense toward God and toward men. The journalist described him as a religious zealot.

Anna remembered playing at the back of meeting halls during lectures, whispering to her doll. She looked so lonely, as she told me that; I reached for her instinctively. I was hurt when she started to speak to me in the jargon of Criticism-Self-Criticism, reproaching me for allowing myself to get distracted. “What about pleasure?” I asked, trying to sound sarcastic. She told me flatly that our pleasure wasn’t relevant to the struggle. It was only through the struggle that we could materialize ourselves in a meaningful way. If I wanted to fuck, she said, we could fuck; but politically she was sick of fucking.

I was so angry that I couldn’t speak. Was that what she thought? That I only wanted to fuck? She walked a few feet away, looking down at the line of headstones.

“Here’s one,” she said.

And there it was, in gold letters on a little white marble slab.

MICHAEL DAVID FRAME

4.10.48–1.12.50

“RESTING WHERE NO SHADOWS FALL”

“That could do for you.” She got out a notebook and started taking down the details.

In the car on the way back to London she told me, almost casually, that she’d been approached, through one of her Paris friends, by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PFLP had offered us funds and training. She was going to Paris to meet one of their representatives.

I was stunned. Why hadn’t I been told? This was the most important news imaginable and she hadn’t even discussed it with the rest of us before agreeing to a meeting. There were a thousand political questions. There were security issues. I started to argue with her but she brought me up short by telling me that the others

had already agreed. She and Sean had discussed it in some detail, she said. Sean thought it was the right move. Leo and Jay were in agreement too.

“The revolutionary is a doomed man,” wrote Nechayev. “He has no interests of his own, no affairs, no feelings, no belongings, not even a name.” The monks at Wat Tham Nok would recognize that, I think. If to be a revolutionary is to be nameless, without attachments, then a revolutionary is simply a person who has understood the first three of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. He sees suffering, sees that its cause lies in greed and craving; he also sees that it could potentially come to an end. But what’s the right way to end suffering? The revolution, giving yourself up to history? Or Nibbana, giving yourself up to transcendence? Phra Anan, whose English was good enough to discuss such things with me, had no time for history. “Too much history in Indochina,” he’d say, shaking his stubbly head. “Less history needed, not more.”

After so long living as Mike Frame, it’s sometimes hard to find my way back to Chris Carver, to remember why he made the choices he did. There seems such an obvious split between how I wanted things to be and how they actually were, not just in the world but in our group, our little cell. We were supposed to be a band of equals, committed to abolishing every trace of power in our relationships with one another. But once Anna and Sean started taking decisions on their own, that was self-evidently no longer true. I was twenty-three by then. Not so young. Old enough to know that taking your desires for reality wasn’t a straightforward answer to anything.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see that Anna and Sean had always been in front, daring one another to go further out onto the ledge. In a way it seems extraordinary that they took so long to fuse together, to start acting in concert. When they did, they ran the rest of us off our feet. The PFLP contact was the first incontrovertible sign that I was no longer in control of my life. I should have seen I was heading into the darkness. I should have gotten off the bus.

At the time I got bogged down in detail. I knew very little about the Middle East and, unlike a lot of my friends, I had an instinctive sympathy with the Israelis. After the concentration camps, who could deny them a home? On the other hand, the cruelties inflicted on the Palestinians were undeniable. Anna poured scorn on my confusion. The PFLP were Marxist-Leninists. They were fighting Imperialism. That should be enough. It wasn’t necessary to get into the intricacies of their political position, or to agree with everything they did. It would be a pragmatic alliance. Their contact in Paris would pay us three thousand U.S. dollars a month, which would solve our money worries at a stroke. Our people could go out to Lebanon and receive proper weapons and explosives training. We’d become an effective fighting force. What was there to discuss?

So Anna disappeared to Paris and stayed away for weeks. Sean organized his disastrous bank raid. I sent off for a birth certificate in the name of Michael Frame and used it to apply for a passport. We were all doing the same thing, developing aliases, preparing to go underground.

* * *

Finally I turn off the main road and start to pick my way up the pass toward Sainte-Anne-de-la-Garrigue. It’s after midnight and the petrol gauge has dipped into the red. I drive very slowly; my tired eyes are producing phantoms, shadows that race across the road and flicker in the rearview mirror.

I crest the col and see that the tower is illuminated, its blocky form like a lighthouse guiding me in. I bump my way over the cobbles into the main square, where I park in front of the church, on the spot where the righteous Christian knights burned the heretics on their pyre. Miranda: Why should I care what happened here?. . It’s just a pretty little village square on a very hot day. Well, it’s cold now, the air whipping round me in icy gusts as I get out of the car and stretch, trying to work the cramp of two days’ driving out of my body. Though there’s a light in the Bar des Sports, the door is locked and no one answers when I knock. I had some idea of getting a drink, perhaps a sandwich. Now that I’m here I don’t know what to do. I fish a sweater out of my bag and walk around, feeling the blood gradually returning to my legs. I peer up at the looming frontage of the church, with its massive bolted wooden doors; I run my hands over the cold lip of the drinking fountain, a carved stone bowl with a copper spout, dribbling away in front of the mairie. Finally I force myself to head up the steep street that leads to the tower. The houses are mute, shuttered; there’s not a radio, not a chink of light to indicate occupation. I can’t remember which of the line of identical doors is Anna’s and something in me recoils from the idea of knocking. When I see her, it ought to be in daylight, so there can be no mistake, no misrecognition. As I hesitate, a cat emerges from the shadows. I watch it stalk down the hill, the only sign of life in a

scene as desolate and hermetic as a de Chirico piazza. Inevitably, I end up climbing toward the tower, wreathed in a jaundiced yellow glow at the summit of the hill.

After my trip to London I didn’t hear from Miles for a long time. It seemed that Pat Ellis had decided to comply with the demands of her “stakeholders,” whoever they were.

At home things had reached a new low. I’d given up hiding my drinking and sometimes brought home bottles of wine to nurse in the study or in front of the TV. Miranda didn’t comment; she’d more or less stopped speaking to me. We moved around the house in a strange silent dance, trying as far as possible to stay in separate rooms. At God’s, I leafed through old pamphlets and thought with increasing regularity about heroin. I’d noticed a drop-in center near the leisure park, a nondescript building where the county Drug and Alcohol Services ran a methadone clinic. Two or three shell-suited men were always leaning against the wall outside, slouching in the unmistakable lizard posture of dealers. It would take half an hour at most to score and make it back to God’s. I could sit and smoke and think without having to care about what I was thinking. If the dealers at the drop-in center couldn’t help me, Portsmouth, a few miles away, was teeming with junkies. You saw heroin faces everywhere, shuffling about behind shopping centers, sitting disconsolately on garden walls. No problem scoring in Portsmouth. It was Oblivion-on-Sea.

I kept answering the phone to someone named Carl, who needed to talk to Miranda about business. She’d always take the calls upstairs in the bedroom. As I put down the receiver I’d hear her greet him, an unfamiliar warmth in her voice, a breathiness. Was he her lover? It wouldn’t have surprised me. There were so many secrets between us that one more wouldn’t really have made a difference. I felt happy for her: she deserved someone who could share her ambitions, her hopes for the future. She certainly deserved better than me. Yet this new mystery, this sense of possibilities away from our shared life, suddenly made her seem desirable again. It was like some bad behaviorist joke: me

in the dunce’s cap, salivating on cue. I found myself watching

her as she dressed to go to the office, her trim bottom wiggling

into a pencil skirt, the nape of her neck as she twisted sideways

to brush her hair.

One evening I was in the living room, half watching Pat Ellis

on the news. I had a bottle in front of me on the coffee table, a

Portuguese red that I was trying to make last. Miranda came in

and sat down beside me on the sofa.

“Want one?” I asked, trying to sound playful.

She shrugged. “Why not?”

“Really?”

She nodded. I muted the TV and went to fetch her a glass. She

took a couple of sips and set it down on the coffee table. She looked

very tired. A sudden deep silence fell between us, a mutual ease I

didn’t want to break.

“How was London?”

“Fine. Busy.”

“I can’t remember who you were meeting.”

“No reason for you to remember. Someone was showing me

retail units.”

“Retail?”

“I haven’t decided yet, but I think we’ll open a little boutique.

Somewhere to showcase the new range.”

“That’s a big step.”

“Not so big. Not since the investors came on board.”

“Where would it be?”

“I was thinking King’s Road, but Carl says Notting Hill would

be better.”

“So was it Carl who was showing you the shop?”

“Carl Palmer. I’ve told you about him.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“He’s in property. He’s been very helpful.”

“He rings here a lot, your Carl Palmer.”

She looked defiant. “Does he?”

I held up my hands. “Forget it. Sorry.”

Anger and hopelessness played over her face. She took a deliberate gulp of her wine. “We’ve got a lot to sort out, Mike. But let’s not get into accusations. Not when we’re actually having a nice time.”

“You’re right.”

“Look, why don’t we go out for once? I feel like I’m suffocating.”

We drove to a Greek restaurant where we treated each other with such care and formality that we eventually made ourselves laugh. Carl Palmer was with us at the table, floating beside Anna Addison, balancing her, giving our conversation the brittle lightness that comes when two people are colluding with each other, working hard on the deferral of pain.

The next morning we woke up wrapped round each other in bed. Miranda smiled at me warily. We had a truce. It was soon afterward that she first mentioned the idea of a birthday party.

October from the study window: Miranda brutally stabbing at the garden with a trowel. February brought her a reward of daffodils, great clumps of them lining the beds, paper-white and sunshine-yellow. I spent hours at my desk, the desk I didn’t use for anything anymore, watching them quiver in the rain. In the evenings I followed Pat Ellis on the news. There she was, nine months into the new era, standing beside her leader wearing a scarlet jacket and an optimistic smile, like some kind of political redcoat. There she was, surrounded by hand-picked representatives of the topic of the day, addressing the concerns of Junior Police Officers or Minority Community Representatives or Victims of Antisocial Behavior. Whatever her gang was up to, she was right in the middle of it, retailing euphoria, glad-handing rock stars.

When the telly started spewing pictures of fox hunters pushing policemen in Parliament Square, I laughed so hard I almost fell off the couch. Oh, I was living in a topsy-turvy world all right, a mirror world of flash and spin and graphic design. Politics was just lifestyle. Even the scandals seemed to be about home improvement. Miles’s

taunt came back to me: yes, this was the opposite of carving out a Utopia, the opposite of whatever I’d been fumbling for all those years ago. Thoroughly pragmatic, blandly ruthless, always up for a cocktail party. The bloody prime minister was five years younger than me, whichever birthday I counted from.

Then the Home Secretary got himself in a pickle over immigration and the pundits started mentioning Pat Ellis as the coming woman. One day I was half listening to the radio at God’s, watching that rare thing, an actual customer, scanning the poetry section, when I realized Pat was talking in my ear. It had long been her belief, it transpired, that the end of the Cold War necessitated a change of focus in Britain’s intelligence services. She buried it in jargon, smoothing the edges with euphemism and talking with great seriousness about people trafficking and animal rights activists and other contemporary threats to state security, but the underlying message was a budget cut, a reduction of influence for the spooks.

People think Fascism doesn’t exist anymore. It’s just a cartoon perversion, a repertoire of sketch show mannerisms: uniform fetishism, short hair, lining your pencils up in a row on your desk. But the Fascists didn’t go away after the Second World War. I don’t just mean skinheads, though even they’ve burrowed underground, talking about multiculturalism, dressing like breakfast-television presenters. There’s always been a part of the British establishment that identifies its own interests with the interests of the state. They’re unsentimental about human life. They have creatures like Miles to do their bidding.

Whoever Miles represented, whichever clique or tendency or faction, I knew that to them, someone like Pat Ellis was just a blow-in, a temporary occupant of a chair. They wouldn’t hesitate to remove her if they thought she was a threat. The only question was whether they took her speech seriously.

Back in i97i, the defenders of British liberty didn’t bother to camouflage themselves. As union unrest grew and middle-class leftists talked about revolution around Hampstead supper tables,

there were rumors of an imminent military coup. In Northern Ireland, young men and boys were being rounded up and placed in camps. Detainees spent hours or days hooded and shackled in stress positions while loudspeakers played white noise into their cells. There were stories of mock execution, prisoners forced to run gauntlets of baton-wielding soldiers.

In a peculiar way, I felt relieved by the news from Ireland. Internment confirmed what I’d always felt was true: inside the democratic velvet glove there was an iron fist. To the imperial dreamers who still ran our country, this was just another colonial police action, rounding up a few natives to keep the rest in line. To us it looked like the beginning of the slide toward the gas chamber.

Sean’s anger knew no bounds. He wanted to act as soon as he heard the news and it was all I could do to stop him from walking out of the door, looking for someone to shoot. He talked about kidnapping, about bombs under cars. He’d always been volatile, but since the debacle of the bank raid, his anger had grown uncontrollable, bitter. He kept talking about how he’d failed to “save” Ferdy, how he should have fired. With Anna away there was no one to counterbalance his self-disgust. He barely listened to the rest of us, even Claire, who could sometimes talk him down. Strangely, for someone who seemed to have trouble concentrating and whose consumption of amphetamines meant that he sometimes went several nights without sleep, he’d taken to reading. He attacked books; after he’d been at one it would look as if it had been through a storm, brutally battered, whole pages underlined in thick pen strokes. To everyone’s annoyance he’d scrawled a quote from Mao on the wall of the room where he was sleeping. We are advocates of the abolition of war. We do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun, it is necessary to take up the gun. It was Sean’s old favorite line; I didn’t like to think of it running round his head when he was wired, late at night.

The problem was that there was very little we could do. We’d almost used up the explosives we’d stolen from the demolition contractor. The rest of our arsenal consisted of three pistols and

an old Sten gun, which was so rusty I doubted it could be fired.

Thankfully, the plan we came up with was simple, if risky, and the only casualty had been dead for three hundred years. Late at night, with Sean behind him, Leo drove a motorbike into Parliament Square. While he pretended to break down, Sean ran into the darkness and planted a bomb on a short fuse beneath the statue of Oliver Cromwell that stood outside the Palace of Westminster. As they accelerated away down the Embankment, the explosion blew the old butcher into little pieces there is no point trying to explain right and wrong to cowards and crooks and part-timers we are sick of justifying ourselves to you our so-called masters or to you liberal dilettante scum who wring your hands and say oh no not this way not now not yet not ever if it was up to you not while british troops are setting up concentration camps in ireland three hundred years after cromwells army raped and pillaged across Two days later the inspector from the bomb squad came on the TV to announce he’d made arrests in connection with the so-called “14 August” group. We saw blurry photographs of people we’d never heard of, who were described as dangerous seditionaries. The policeman was confident their “dangerous antics” had now been brought to an end we are talking to those of you who get it already who are sick of the endless talk which never brings anything into reality we are talking to those of you who know we are all in prison and want to break out go and explain to the people it is time to put an end to the pig state they have looked their whole lives into the lying eyes of judges and social workers and managers and teachers and foremen and doctors and local councillors and still the only ones they fear are the police WE ARE EVERYWHERE we are the man standing next to you on the station platform the woman cleaning your kitchen floor. I tried to speak to Anna. I had

to leave a coded message with a contact in Paris, who called back several days later asking me to wait beside a telephone at a certain time. Since I was staying in a flat with no phone, I’d persuaded a friend to let me use hers. This friend, a girl I knew from Notting Hill, had no idea I was involved in anything illegal. When Anna’s call came through she was in her living room, drinking and playing records with some friends. I sat on her bedroom floor in a tangle of tights and paperbacks and ashtrays and listened to the party on the other side of the door and the crackle on the line and an operator’s voice speaking in a language I thought must be Arabic and then came Anna’s voice, cosmically distant, saying, “Hello.” Our conversation was stilted and telegraphic. I didn’t want to risk discussing Sean. I asked how she was and she said she was fine. There was a long pause, then she asked if Grandma was all right, our code for an emergency. I didn’t dare say that my main reason for calling was to hear her voice. I pretended to have a logistical question, a query about a vehicle we’d left in the long-term parking lot at Heathrow airport. I didn’t ask where she was. I knew it wasn’t France.

Three weeks later. An indeterminate landscape, neither land nor sea; the light a uniform gray dazzle. I drove a brand new VW camper van over endless mudflats, the only sign of my passing a pair of tire tracks, abstract lines in the rearview mirror. It was impossible to tell where the sky began.

I was still on the German side of the border. Up the coast a mile or two was Denmark. The Holstein marshes appeared primeval, almost empty of human life. Up ahead the mudflats folded themselves into low dunes crested with gray-green sea grass. Huge flocks of migratory birds wheeled overhead.

There it was, the place I was looking for — a boathouse with a red roof. I drew up, parked beside it on a patch of broken concrete, listened into the wind. A series of muffled stuttering reports. Silence, then the same sound again. Short bursts of automatic-weapon fire, coming from some distance away. I got out and walked round the boathouse, rattling the big double doors, trying to see in through the smeared glass of the windows. Muffled as it was,

the sound put me on edge. An animal reaction. Fight or flight. As I looked round, someone grabbed me from behind, pinning my arms to my sides. I struggled and found myself face to face with Sean, who seemed to find my violent thrashing very funny. When I shook him off, he raised his hands in pretend surrender.

“Hold on there, cowboy. I saw you drive up. I came to find you.”

“Get off. Get the fuck away from me.”

“Calm down, amigo. Bad journey?”

“It was OK.”

“We’re over in the dunes, shooting targets.”

I’d followed Anna’s instructions. A Middle Eastern man in a café on Edgware Road. An envelope of money. I’d bought the van, taken it to be modified. Now there were secret compartments behind the door panels and between the front and rear axles, ready to transport the equipment back to the U.K. We’d all made our way to the marshes in ones and twos, disguised as tourists exploring the national park. As money was no longer a problem I’d bought myself new camping equipment, an expensive tent and sleeping bag. I told Sean I’d follow on and pitched it some distance away from the boathouse. I wanted to wake up in the morning and see the horizon. I wanted to watch the flight of the birds.

For that week we knew each other only by single names. The instructors were Khaled and Johnny. There were the Germans, Jochen, Conny, Frank, and Julia. Paul, I think, was French. Some had been in southern Lebanon, training in a PFLP camp. For others, like me, this was the first contact with what Khaled called “the organization.” I watched Anna skillfully stripping and rebuilding a 7.65 mm Skorpion machine pistol. She demonstrated how to reduce the rate of fire, how the stock folded so it could be carried under a jacket or a coat. Khaled stood beside her, nodding approvingly, his eyes fading from view behind his Polaroid sunglasses whenever the sun emerged from behind a cloud.

A gun, an animal weight in my hands, warm and snakily alive. Anna repeating Arabic words from a phrasebook. Johnny picking

his way over the dunes, the sand filling his city shoes. No one disturbed us. No one came. In the evenings, after the light had failed and we’d eaten a tasteless meal of canned soup and bread, discussions were held in the dank boathouse. Ideas were debated in a patchwork of languages. Plans were formed. People spoke of a strategy for victory. They spoke about the end of Imperialism. They could have been talking about anything. Road resurfacing, waste disposal. Out in the marshes, I thought. We’re out in the marshes at the edge of the sea, miles from the nearest other human beings, talking about who we’re going to kill to demonstrate our organic connection to the masses. I’d light my way back to my tent with a little pocket flashlight, a bright speck in the enormous darkness.

Johnny and Khaled never let us forget where the money came from, whose agenda took priority. Whatever we’d been doing before, whichever acronymic jumble of letters represented our particular hopes, we were now part of something much larger than ourselves, an international network with nodes in Frankfurt, Milan, Beirut, Bilbao. They talked about targets in London, people and places that had no connection with anything I cared about. They talked obsessively about Zionism. The weapons were new, some of them still in their packing grease. They were all of Eastern-bloc manufacture: Makarovs and Tokarevs, the Czech Skorpion machine pistols. This should have told us all we needed to know. We weren’t autonomous anymore. Far from it. Yet none of the others, these people I knew as Sean and Leo and Anna and Jay and Claire but who now had other names, seemed to want to be reminded of the way we’d talked to one another only a few months previously, how we’d intended to escape the binary madness of East and West, how we respected human life. Armed love, we’d said. In order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun. I fired off rounds into a paper target, and with each bullet I believed a little less. Quietly, privately, I began to wonder how I could get away.

Oh, Sam. It was arrogance, I suppose. We thought we’d stepped

outside. We thought it had been given to us to kick-start the new world. Can you understand that? Does wanting to be a corporate lawyer count as a dream? For the first time in many years I celebrated my birthday, Chris Carver’s birthday, a few weeks before that of Michael Frame. I sat in the study with an expensive bottle of Burgundy and looked back at my fifty years and felt so fucking disappointed, Sam. I knew I needed to speak to you, to prepare you, however imperfectly, for what was about to happen. That was just last week, when I drove to Bristol to see you. You were shocked to find me on your doorstep. You opened the door a crack, your hair a mess, a sheet wrapped round your middle. It was past twelve. I could hear someone coughing in the background. You left the boy in your bed and made me coffee in the shared kitchen, shuffling past your neighbors as they boiled pasta and opened cans to make a sauce.

“What are you doing here, Dad?” As if I were a visitor from outer space, bug-eyed and slightly disgusting, come to earth to rupture your reality. I told you I needed to talk and you said you had a lecture. Couldn’t I have rung first? I offered to occupy myself for an hour or two, meet you afterward. I wandered round Clifton and, when you’d gotten yourself together, took you to lunch at a fancy French restaurant where I encouraged you to overorder and flourished the wine list and generally faked my way through the part of the jovial father who’d come down to uni to give his daughter a surprise. I tried to get you to eat. You just pushed your food around on your plate. You looked thin and I said so, and immediately you flew off the handle, telling me to mind my own business. That sort of remark was typical of me. It was typical of men. I asked what you meant and you raised your voice and demanded to know why it was that, unless you were totally stuffing yourself, men were always, like, were you some kind of anorexic. You used the word fucking. Miranda never liked you to swear. What, you asked, was I doing in Bristol anyway?

I told you there was something you needed to know about, and you immediately asked whether your mum and I were splitting up.

Such a direct question, it threw me. “Of course not,” I said automatically. “No, of course not.” You sat there, your face suspicious and expectant by turns. I was lost for words. I’d already gone wrong. You were so volatile, so unexpectedly bitter. In a bid to mark time, I heard myself say, yet again, that there was something I needed to discuss. I tried to push myself on by telling you there were things you and your mum didn’t know about me.

You reacted with hair-trigger hostility. “I knew it. You’re sleeping around on Mum. You bastard.”

As much as I protested, you wouldn’t listen. You were so absolute, so unwilling to be contradicted. You called me various names echoing things Miranda must have complained to you about. Why didn’t I do something with my life? Why did I just mooch off other people?

You were impossible, Sam. You wouldn’t let me get a word in. You’d sensed something and you knew you were at least half right, which gave you the confidence, the self-righteousness, to shut me down completely. Angry and hurt, I called for the bill. We didn’t part as friends.

Miranda must have forced you to come home for the party. You didn’t have much to say to me when you arrived that evening, just dropped your stuff and went out to the pub. Surely you must have told your mum I’d been to see you. She didn’t bring it up. I decided she must be holding it in reserve. That was what I was thinking about when Miles arrived. Was it yesterday? The day before. I was in the study, watching the men from the marquee company fooling about on the lawn. I swiveled round on my chair and there he was, standing in the doorway.

“Hello, Chris. Sorry to call so unexpectedly. Door was open.”

My instinct, as ever, was to get him out of the house, so we walked into town and sat in a café, some hideous chain operation with prosthetic-pink iced buns lying like hospital patients under the glass of the counter and a bedraggled Eastern European girl making coffee that tasted of dishwashing liquid. “Will that be everything for you today?” she said mechanically, as we lined up

to pay. “Would you like to add an extra shot or a flavor for only fifty p?”

We sat in the window. Miles performed his usual fussy sitting-down routine, fiddling with his trouser legs and smoothing his jacket under his bottom. For a while he rambled on about his chiropractor. Miracle worker, reasonable rates. Another carry-over from the old days. Miles always had an air of slight distraction, a vagueness that made it hard to tell where his attention was directed.

“I’m sorry, Chris,” he said eventually, with the compassionate expression of a doctor about to tell the patient his cancer had metastasized.

“What exactly are you sorry about?”

“In life, I always say, you start off somewhere and you end up somewhere, but the trouble is you don’t begin with a clean slate. I think that’s what we were after. A clean slate. Not much to ask, you would have thought. Take me, for instance. I realize everyone thought I had it very easy. Well, I didn’t. My life wasn’t simple at all.”

“Is that so?”

“You sound skeptical.”

“You seemed to be able to do what you wanted. You drifted around, made your films. You always had money.”

“Money wasn’t really the issue.” He leaned back in his chair and stretched. I heard the joints in his arms and back make an unpleasant gristly sound. “I was doing my best to look free. It was the fashion, wasn’t it? You had to look free. And sincere! You had to be so crushingly sincere all the time! God help you if you weren’t. Everyone jumped down your throat.”

“What do you want, Miles? I need to get back.”

He ignored me, fixated on his train of thought. “I’ve given it a lot of input over the years and now I understand why everyone was so bloody boring. I think deep down we all knew we were doomed to be terribly disappointed, but we hated anyone bringing it up. If you brought it up, it messed with everyone’s vibe.”

“Who’s this ‘we’ you keep talking about? I hardly knew you.”

“Do you remember the time we met in Wales?”

“Yes.”

“You were in too deep, by then. I could tell you were.”

That was true enough. I’d started to get eczema on my eyelids and on the backs of my hands. Whole days went by when I couldn’t get out of bed. At other times I was possessed by an intense, restless energy. From the flat in Camden Town, I started to take long walks by the canal, picking my way along the towpath toward the rubble of the docklands, or into the West End, where I’d wander around staring at the bustling world as if it were behind glass, an expensive window display arranged for someone else’s benefit, not mine.

After I got back from the training camp, I couldn’t see what the future held. I felt like I’d cut myself off from everything meaningful. Other groups were continuing the political work we’d once done; they were still connected to the struggle, to something wider than themselves. Once I’d been surrounded by people. Where had they all gone?

One afternoon, as I was bustling purposelessly toward Camden Lock, someone called out to me. I didn’t respond at first, but finally, after my name was shouted a second and a third time, I turned round and saw a girl I knew from Free Pictures. Alison had curly dark hair and a broad, gentle smile; I hadn’t seen her since the last chaotic party at Lansdowne Road, during which, for an hour or two, I’d hoped we might go home together. She greeted me with a hug and asked what I’d been doing. I gave some noncommittal answer. She seemed almost absurdly excited and carefree, as if she were the inhabitant of a parallel world where young people were allowed to drift around on September afternoons without worrying about raids and explosives and surveillance and the secret state. She was living nearby. And me? “Round about,” I said. “Staying with friends.” Why hadn’t she seen me? I shrugged. She gave me an appraising look. Then, as if struck by a sudden inspiration, she asked if I wanted to go to Wales with her and her friends. Right then, that afternoon. There was a free festival. There was space in the van.

I said yes instinctively, without thinking.

As I was driven out of London in someone’s beaten-up Bedford, I started to think of all the reasons I shouldn’t be going. The breach of security; the breach of discipline. But no one else had been in the flat where I was staying so there’d been no one to question me.

There were six of us. Though the others were all my age, they seemed incredibly young. The boys showed off, telling jokes and trying to impress each other. The girls giggled and rolled their eyes at Alison, who let them know I was her property, nestling herself beside me in the back and chattering away about things that seemed utterly foreign: the names of bands, the hassles of her part-time job.

By the time we reached the Welsh borders, a light rain had set in and the atmosphere in the van became more subdued. At last, after many hours’ driving, we found ourselves crawling through tiny lanes in a remote spot on the Caernarfonshire coast, looking for the festival site. We found it by following a London taxi painted with Day-Glo orange and yellow swirls, which led us to a muddy patch of farmland by a river, set in a beautiful bowl of forested hills. The festival wasn’t a huge event. The organizers had erected a small stage and a few hundred people had set up camp on the soggy land around it, a scattering of tents and trucks and tepees that looked like some sort of tribal encampment.

Ragged people moved through the forest foraging for firewood. Some had built shelters among the trees out of tarpaulins and artfully interwoven branches. As we pitched tents there was a moment of awkwardness until Alison made it clear I’d be staying with her. We went over to hear some music, stretching out on a rug listening to a group featuring a flautist who traded licks with a sitar, while their singer rhymed getting straight with meditate.

Lying down beside Alison, I let the sound wash over me. A jazz-rock band came on, all complicated riffage and polyrhythms. A gnomelike old guy, naked except for a loincloth, performed a shuffling shamanic hop at the front of the stage. Alison and I talked,

or rather she talked and I listened, happy to hear her opinions about books and fashion and films. A kitchen was dispensing free food and as we lined up with our bowls I had to fight the urge to cry on her shoulder, to let all my troubles spill out. As night fell, people lit bonfires and someone passed round a tube of tiny red stars. As Alison came up on her trip she wanted to have sex but I couldn’t and felt bad about it, which made her feel bad too. We stopped trusting each other and she retreated to her friends and eventually I left the circle of firelight and wandered around in the dark. Someone was playing a repetitive figure on an electric guitar, a jagged rasp that seemed vaguely threatening, like the shadows that loomed up around me as I stumbled through the damp woods, shadows that always resolved into the silhouettes of other festival-goers, lost souls too high and disoriented to get back to their friends. I fell asleep by someone else’s fire and woke up very early in the morning to the sound of conversation.

For a long time I didn’t move. I couldn’t feel my arms and legs. In my confusion I wondered if I’d died. The light was very bright. A young girl with a disturbingly doll-like face was reaching down toward me, touching my face. Her blue eyes and white clothing triggered some Sunday-school routine in my brain: it was only when I noticed the muddy hem of her dress that I was finally convinced she was real.

“You’re very cold,” she said, in a broad Yorkshire accent. I sat up stiffly, rubbing my eyes. She was right. My back had frozen into a painful block. She offered me a joint, which I waved away. Then, to my amazement, I noticed Miles Bridgeman sitting next to her, wrapped in a shaggy Afghan coat. His hair had grown and he had a full beard, plaited into twin strands held together by little glass beads.

“Chris?”

“Miles?”

“I couldn’t decide if it was you. Someone had to move you in case you burned yourself. Man, what are you doing here?”

“I don’t know. I came with some people.”

“You must be cold. Give him a blanket, Milly.”

Milly looked about thirteen, but there was something about the way she carried herself that made me think she must be a good deal older. She draped a patchwork quilt over my shoulders, looking at me incuriously with her ceramic blue eyes. Someone was building up the fire and within a few minutes I was huddled next to it, poking my feet as far forward as I could get without melting the soles of my boots.

“You fought them, you know.”

“What?”

Miles grinned. “The people who tried to move you. You’d passed out completely, but you woke up and tried to fight them.”

“Shit.”

“You didn’t hurt anyone.”

I watched Milly make tea and my mind raced as I tried to work out how much trouble I was in. I didn’t think Alison had any connection with Miles. I saw no way he could have engineered this encounter unless Alison had been placed in the street, waiting for me to go by. But I hadn’t seen him since he was kicked out of Sylvan Close. I knew I needed to be careful.

“It’s been a long time,” he said. I nodded, looking over his shoulder to see if I could spot Alison in the crowd. People were milling about, looking for breakfast, making their way down to the river to wash.

“You were calling out, too, you know. When they were trying to move you.”

I must have looked worried, because he held up his hands and smiled. “Impossible to tell what you were saying. Just noises.”

We sat for a while, poking the fire with sticks. I was beginning to warm up, to master my shivering.

“What have you been doing?”

“Not much. You know.”

“You’re still in Hackney?”

“I’m staying with friends.”

“I’ve got a houseboat down in Chelsea. Just off Cheyne Walk.

You should come and take a look at her one day. She’s called the

Martha. You can still see a place on the side where she got hit by

a German shell at Dunkirk.”

“Very patriotic.”

“Goodness. Dirty words, coming from you.”

Milly made beans on toast, which I ate gratefully, the reviving

warmth of the food doing what the fire hadn’t quite managed.

“Very bad about Northern Ireland,” said Miles, as I scraped the

plate with the side of my fork.

“Let’s not discuss politics. Not today.”

“That’s unlike you.”

“What?”

“Not to want to talk politics.”

“I feel like shit, Miles.”

“Of course. Sorry. How’s Anna?”

“She’s — ne.”

“So you’re still in touch?”

I was too tired to lie. “Sure.”

“And Sean? I haven’t seen him around.”

“Why would you? You’re not exactly his favorite person.”

“I suppose you’re right. Good to know you’re all still together,

though.”

There was a massive hinterland to his words, a realm of

insinuation. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a pen and

a little notebook. What kind of person carried a pen at a festival?

He scribbled something down, tore out the sheet and handed it

to me.

“Take this, while I remember.”

“What is it?”

“My address. The boat. I’ve put my phone number on it.”

“Thanks.”

“You really should come by. I always feel I ought to keep up with

friends a little more than I do. People have missed you, Chris.”

“Oh, yeah? Like who?”

“Me, for one. But there are others. I’ll be honest, people say things. What with all the raids and everything — well, when heavy people like you and Sean and Anna drop out of sight — you know. There’s talk.” He left it hanging in the air. “Chris, whatever you’re into, you should be careful.”

I stood up and brushed myself down. I was covered with dried mud and bits of grass. “I should find my friend Alison.”

“Really? Perhaps I’ll see you later.”

“Maybe. Do you know her?”

“Alison?”

“Her surname’s Jenner, I think. Dark hair. Used to work at BIT.”

“No, doesn’t ring a bell.”

“I thought she might be a friend of yours.”

Miles stood up and put his hands on my shoulders. It was an oddly intimate gesture for such an unphysical, self-contained man. “If I don’t see you, call me when you get back to London. I mean it. If you ever need someone to talk to about anything. Anything at all.”

I waved to Milly, thanking her for the beans in a strained, over-cheerful voice. Then I went around the camp, trying not to get spotted by Alison as I hunted urgently for someone who was driving back to London. In the end I got a lift with a couple who said they could take me as far as Reading. I got into the backseat of their old Hillman Avenger and was halfway to Bristol before I realized I’d left my sleeping bag in Alison’s tent.

Miles remembered the festival as a bucolic moment, a highlight of our shared youth. It was evidence, he told me, that we’d once been friends. He hoped that even if I felt angry now, I appreciated that he’d acted in as decent a way as possible.

“Unfortunately,” he said, in a tone of infinite resignation, “Mrs. Ellis is being pigheaded. It was put to her that now might be an appropriate moment to step down from frontline politics and do something more suitable.”

“What does suitable mean?”

“Voluntary sector. Academia. The places they keep the more intractable old lefties.”

“And she refused.”

“Sadly.”

“Because your insinuations aren’t true.”

“Yes, they are.”

“Who says?”

“You do.”

I watched the shoppers trudging past the café window.

“You’re an evil bastard.”

Miles sighed. “Chris, I’m not doing this to be vindictive. In fact, you shouldn’t go away with the impression that I give a damn one way or the other, because quite frankly I don’t. I don’t care what you did thirty years ago, or what Pat Ellis did. Believe me, I’d rather be doing anything with my day but this. I realize how it’s going to disrupt your life, but it’s unavoidable. You’ll be in the spotlight for a while, which is also unavoidable. The thing to remember is that it’ll only be for a short time, the exposure. They get bored. It stops. And you won’t be on your own while it’s happening. We’ll help you through. You’ve had a good run, but it’s over. You have to understand that.”

“I’m not doing anything for you.”

“Chris, I’m sorry. But it’ll be a lot better if we do it my way. The other way you wouldn’t like. It’s time to come out of hiding. It’s time to tell your story.”

I asked him if he wanted another coffee. He shook his head. “So,” I asked wearily, “what are you proposing?”

“You’ll give an interview to a journalist, a man called Gibbs. He’s someone I’ve worked with before. Very reliable. An arsehole, of course, all those guys are, but he’s not unpleasantly rabid. In it, you’ll describe your remorse for your actions, your secret double life and so forth. Your “explosive revelation”—as their headline writer will no doubt dub it — is the fact that a serving government minister was present during the manufacture of the Post Office

Tower bomb. You’ll throw yourself on the mercy of the British justice system. You’ll be given the opportunity to remind readers how young you were. In return, I’ll try to minimize the legal consequences. It’s not something I’ll be able to control entirely, but I promise I’ll give it my best. Have you told your wife yet?”

“No.”

“I think it’s time you did.”

“Don’t fucking tell me what it is or isn’t time to do. It’s my life. My life, Miles. We’ve been together sixteen years. What do I have other than her and Sam? Fuck all, that’s what. They’re my life and the person who has that life is Mike Frame.”

He slammed his palm down on the table, making the coffee cups rattle. He looked exasperated. “God, you make it fucking difficult, don’t you? Think! Use your head! You don’t have a choice about whether this is coming out. One way or the other it’s going to happen. Your only choice is how it comes out. I’m asking you to think of your family. Make it easy for them, if you can’t for yourself.”

We’d been raising our voices. The girl behind the counter was glancing around nervously, as if wondering whether she’d have to intervene.

“I’m going now.” I got up and walked out, cutting across the street and weaving through the Saturday shopping crowds. I didn’t look behind but I knew Miles was following me. I could hear the sharp reports of his shoes on the flagstones. Metal heel protectors. What did we call them when I was a kid? Blakeys. He was wearing blakeys.

“Chris, stop.”

“Mike. I’m Mike, all right? Michael Frame.”

“It’s over, Chris. All that’s over. I told you Pat Ellis has decided to fight. Apparently she’s contacted the police about you. She’s made it official, so that if she’s challenged she can say she took immediate action. They’re circulating your old pictures.”

* * *

Shoot the messenger. That was it, partly. But there was also a deeper question, one of trust. I didn’t blame them for their paranoia. I’d have been just as suspicious. I was cadre. I was supposed to be disciplined. Without warning I’d disappeared for a weekend, gone completely off the map. Then I’d come back with a story about Wales and Miles Bridgeman, who everyone already suspected was an informer. It was never going to look right.

There was a meeting. Hostile faces, searching looks. I was left in a room on my own and when they came back, they told me — or, rather, Anna told me, using her coldest and most impersonal tone— that Leo and Jay would take the train with me to Manchester, where we had a flat we’d kept empty for emergencies. We should phone in every day. We should wait for instructions.

Whether or not I’d been believed, my news precipitated a group transformation, a sudden shedding of skin. For some time we’d been laying paper trails around our new identities, breathing life into birth certificates and library cards and utility bills and fake letters of reference. We’d all practiced changing our appearance. It was time to break with the past, to go completely underground.

From that day on my name was Michael Frame. I practiced it. If Michael Frame was walking down the street and someone called out, he should turn round instantly, without hesitating. Michael Frame had short hair and a neatly trimmed moustache. He had no connection with politics of any kind. I rehearsed the names of his mother and father, his date of birth.

On the journey north, Leo and Jay behaved more like guards than comrades. I couldn’t buy a newspaper at a kiosk or walk through the train to the buffet car without one of them accompanying me.

We didn’t talk much. They both had trouble meeting my eye. I knew Leo was armed and that made me afraid.

The Manchester flat was on the sixteenth floor of a system-built block in Rusholme. It was almost bare of furniture, just a couple of mattresses and a little black-and-white telly balanced on an orange crate by the heater. We stayed there for almost two weeks, playing cards, smoking endless cigarettes. The weather was filthy. Wind drove dirty sleet against the windows. Once in a while the sun appeared, a bilious pale yellow ball like the yolk of a battery farm egg. If it hung around for more than an hour or two in the morning, it turned the treacherous film of ice on the pavement into a nasty gray slush.

A strike was on, so there were power cuts. When night fell, its reign was absolute. In the stairwell of Arkwright House, bobbing flashlight beams; dishes of melted candlewax on the kitchen counter. Sixteen floors up and the elevators didn’t work. Sixteen floors with crappy plastic shopping bags, which sagged and tore, sending cans and bottles crashing down the hard steps. When the wind was strong, rushing through the gaps between Arkwright and Stephenson and Cobden, the three towers groaned in pain.

One evening as I climbed the stairs with Jay, my pocket flashlight lit up an old man clinging to the handrail. He was like a ghost from the industrial past: flat cap, scarf knotted round his neck, his jacket unbuttoned to reveal a woollen undershirt tucked into a pair of greasy trousers. He was in a bad way, breathing heavily, the sweat pouring down his unshaven cheeks. When I asked if he was all right he mutely shook his head. “It’s Mary,” he said, expelling the words with great effort, through a curtain of phlegm.

George was probably in his sixties but work had aged him brutally, scooping out his face and clogging his lungs with cotton dust. In August his wife had slipped and fallen; now she was too frail to leave the flat. For the last couple of days she hadn’t stopped shivering, so he’d put on his shoes and gone downstairs to fetch a doctor. It had taken him the best part of an hour to make it as far as the seventh floor. We sat with him for a while, and when we

realized his asthma wasn’t getting any better, Jay went back down to the pay phones in the hall to call an ambulance. Half an hour, they said. They’d had a lot of calls. I told George they were on their way and went to check on his wife.

“Don’t frighten her,” he pleaded. “Sing out before you go in, else she’ll think you’re a burglar.”

Up on the fourteenth floor, I knocked on the door and called through the letterbox. George couldn’t remember if he’d locked up so he’d given me his key. Still calling out, I went inside. The flat smelled of bacon fat and was as cold as a tomb. The flashlight picked up patches of damp, a shelf of dusty china birds, an armchair with a stack of Reader’s Digest magazines balanced on a footstool beside it. I found Mary bundled up in bed, her eyes shut and her mouth hanging open, a little gray-faced figure with a tuft of thin hair plastered across her scalp. The bedroom stank of stale urine. I wondered if she was already dead.

“Mary, I’m a neighbor. George sent me to see how you were.”

She moaned. I couldn’t tell if she was aware of me, but at least she was alive. My foot hit an overflowing chamber pot, sitting out on the rug by the bed; I tried to master an overpowering sense of disgust. How had they been left like this? Who was supposed to be looking after them? Eventually the ambulance men came; Jay and I made ourselves scarce. We stood on the landing, just out of sight, listening to them cursing and swearing as they carried Mary down the stairs. I expect it was the smell, rather than the weight. She must have been as light as a bird.

The next day I took George a bag of necessities: candles, toilet paper, cans of food. He was too proud to admit it, but there were obviously days when he and Mary ate nothing at all, when their pension money had run out or they hadn’t been able to make it to the shops. I sat in the armchair and he shuffled around, making a slow motion cup of tea. I listened to his labored breathing, the squeak of his cane on the kitchen linoleum. It made me feel ordinary, human. I remember it as the one decent moment of my time in Manchester.

When I went back upstairs after taking George his food, Leo

thrust a newspaper into my hand. Across the front page was

splashed the story that a bomb had blown up part of the employ-

ment secretary’s constituency home. A communiqué had been

received from the bombers, which hadn’t been reproduced.

“Was that us?” I asked. Leo nodded.

“Anyone hurt?”

“No, not that it says.”

“Why wasn’t I told?”

He shrugged. “Because you’re a security risk,” he said flatly.

At last, to my face. I tried to make a joke of it. “What are you

going to do, Leo, put me on trial? A people’s court? March me into

the woods and shoot me in the back of the head?”

I wanted him to laugh. He didn’t laugh. He told me to use his

other name. Paul. I was to call him Paul Collins.

“Since when,” I asked, “are we bombing people’s houses? Did

we know nobody was in there?”

“A risk assessment was made.”

“A risk assessment was made. You know what’s going to happen,

don’t you, Leo? Someone’s going to get killed.”

Again he shrugged, the same petulant, noncommittal shrug.

“Collateral damage,” he said. “It’s inevitable in war.”

“You sound like General Westmoreland.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Callous, Leo. You sound callous.”

“Human being or pig. You make your choice.”

“So there’s nothing in between?”

“No.”

“And the pigs have to die?”

He didn’t reply, just stared at me angrily.

I gave him a slow round of applause. “Well, good for you, mate.

That’s the kind of commitment I like.”

He chose to ignore my sarcasm. “Sean’s coming later. You can

have it out with him.”

Soon enough came the death-rattle buzz of the doorbell. Sean

wore a new gray suit and a hungry look. He was carrying, of all things, a leather attaché case, the kind with a combination lock and fancy metal clasps. He loped into the flat and filled the living room with misdirected energy. “Hello, Mike,” he said.

I laughed involuntarily. I couldn’t get used to the name. “Christ, Sean, there’s no one but us here.”

“Dennis Kilfoyle,” he said sharply. “Dennis.” The case dangled awkwardly from his arm. It was the oddest thing for him to carry. Its effect was to render the rest of the disguise theatrical; the suit, the club tie, the badly shaved chin.

He walked past me into the bedroom, picking his way over the mess. As we had no table, we’d taken to eating our meals standing at the kitchen counter or sprawled on the living-room carpet, which was now pocked with stains and cigarette burns. I asked Sean if he wanted to go out and eat.

“No time,” he said. “I’m here to drive you all to a meeting.”

I took this in. “When?”

“Tonight. Now. You should get some things together.”

I found a sports bag and started stuffing dirty clothes into it. Sean lit a cigarette, turned over one of the books lying on the floor. The sky was a black square in the curtainless window.

“So, how have things been?” I asked.

“We’re making progress.”

I waited for more. The silence spooled out like thread.

“You ready?” he asked eventually. I nodded. He was all business, ostentatiously checking his watch. Sean Ward, wearing a watch. We walked through the piss stink of the lobby and into the nighttime drizzle. Outside Arkwright House was parked a brand new Mercedes. He motioned me to get in.

“You’re going up in the world,” I noted.

“It’s a company car.”

All four of us broke into nervous laughter.

Sean drove out of the city, heading into the Peak District. It was drizzling and he was driving fast, too fast, as it turned out, for the traffic police. Flashing blue lights appeared in the rear window.

Under his breath, Sean swore, shifting around in his seat and loos-

ening his jacket.

“Here,” he said. “Take this.” He handed me a gun.

“What the fuck, Sean?”

“Dennis. It’s fucking Dennis. If he asks me to get out of the car,

you do him. Understand?”

I turned round. In the back, the other two were also readying

weapons. Leo seemed to have one of the machine pistols.

“I’m going to pull over, OK? Everyone set?”

Oh, fuck, I thought. Fuck. Fuck. It seemed as if we sat there for

eternity, hazard lights flashing, waiting for the tap on the

window.

“Hello, sir? Could I see your driver’s license and the car’s log

book, please?”

He was young, a clean pink face peering into the car, shiny with

rainwater. He shined a flashlight over our faces.

“Sorry, Officer, I don’t have them on me.”

“Your car, is it, sir?”

Stupidity. I tried to transmit it to the policeman by means of

telepathy. Just be stupid, if you’re not already. Be lazy.

Sean grinned. “Like the car?”

“Very nice. Three hundred, is it?”

“That’s right. Six point three liter.”

“Could you just tell me the registration number?”

Sean hesitated. Don’t make me shoot him, I thought. Please

don’t make me fucking shoot him. It was as if I could already feel

it, see it, the bloom of bone and blood, the bullet collapsing the

planes of the young policeman’s face. The silence was too long.

Sean was taking too long. Fuck. Fuck.

Then he reeled it off. “PWF 97K.”

The policeman hesitated. Leave it alone, I willed him. Go home

out of the rain.

“Thank you, sir,” he said, after a silence of infinite weight and

duration. “I’ll let you go now, but you’ll have to produce your docu-

ments at a police station within the next five days.” He wrote

something in his notebook. “And if you could just watch your speed, visibility’s not so good tonight. We don’t want any accidents.”

We pulled away and drove for a long time without speaking.

“Is this stolen?” asked Jay.

Sean nodded, fiddling with the radio. “It’s all right. I changed the plates.”

I exhaled. “And you memorized the new number.”

“What do you think I am? Some kind of cowboy? I’ll have the gun back now, if you don’t mind.”

We traveled through open countryside, listening to a stream of crackly pop songs that faded into static as we got up into the hills. The rain grew heavier, fat drops splashing on the windscreen. The headlights illuminated stone walls at the shoulder, rabbits scooting across the road. Finally Sean turned the Mercedes up a track that ran through a dense pine forest, coming to a halt in front of a rusty metal gate. I waited in the car as he ran to open it, holding his jacket over his head as an ineffectual shield against the water. We parked in front of an ugly gray stone building built, as far as I could see in the murk, around a little courtyard. The windows were covered with sheets of corrugated iron. Half the frontage was colonized by an enormous black ivy. It was a tumbledown place, the trees crowding in as if they were trying to reclaim it for the forest.

Soaked, Sean got back in, his hair plastered to his face. “Where are we?” I asked.

“Somewhere to keep you on the straight and narrow.”

He bared his teeth mirthlessly, pointing at a weathered wooden board nailed above the gate.

TOIL HARD FEAR GOD BE HONEST

Sometimes I dream about that old workhouse. Its interior was as stark as the granite façade. Most of the fittings had been ripped

out, leaving empty bathrooms whose skin of black and white tile was broken by the silhouettes of missing sinks and toilets, a foul-smelling workshop with painted-out windows and a raised proctor’s dais at one end. Our people had obviously been staying there for several days, sleeping on mats in a dusty dormitory that had a pile of iron bedsteads in one corner. They’d even rigged up a makeshift kitchen, with a low table of scavenged planks and a couple of rings running off bottled gas for cooking. Light came from oil lamps. A row of plastic buckets stood by a rainwater butt in the courtyard.

The smells of hash and vegetable stew mingled against a humid background of rotting wood. We ate, squatting on the floor by a heater. I asked Sean what was happening. When was the meeting? “Tomorrow,” he said. So why had it been so important to drive two hours through the rain to get here? He shrugged and carried on spooning stew into his mouth. “We wanted everyone in place,” he said. I caught an officious note in his voice, one of Anna’s inflections. Someone handed me a glass of water. People moved through the room, materializing like wraiths out of the shadows. Leo’s friend Quinn, a couple of others I didn’t know. No one introduced me.

“Is Anna all right?” I asked. “Nothing’s happened to Anna?”

“Why do you say that?” asked Sean, sharply. After that no one made conversation. We just sat there in the half-darkness and waited.

“Is something about to happen?” I asked.

“Do you think it is?”

I turned round. It was Anna, dressed in jeans and a torn sweater. Even by the light of the oil lamp I could see how gaunt she was. Giacometti body, polished-bone head. She looked elevated, somehow achieved, as if she’d burned some final layer of indecision away from herself.

“Hello, Anna. I was worried about you.”

“No real names, please. Call me Christine, if you must call me anything.”

It wasn’t just physical, what Anna had erased. She sounded

uncannily detached, as if communicating from a great distance.

“If that’s how you want it.”

“It’s not a question of how I want it.”

“No, of course not. I’m sorry.”

I was beginning to feel uncomfortable; the atmosphere in the

room was a physical weight pressing down on my shoulders.

“Are you expecting someone, Michael? You keep looking over

my shoulder.”

“I can’t see who’s here.”

“Who’s going to come through the door?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m sure you do. Tell me, what have you been up to?”

“You know what I’ve been up to. Hanging about in

Manchester.”

“Hanging about in Manchester. What else?”

“I don’t understand. Is this the meeting? Are we having the

meeting now? Do you want to discuss targets?”

“I asked a simple question.”

I realized I was at the center of a circle. People sat in the shadows,

smoking, watching. “Are you interrogating me?”

My words dropped thickly off my tongue. Anna’s face was a

yellow blur. Around it the.ickering light had taken on an involuted

quality; the whole room was pointing toward her face.

“Why do you say that?”

“I’m asking you a question.”

“Who have you been talking to?”

“Is this an interrogation?”

“Tell me who.”

“Nobody.”

“That’s good, Michael.”

Is that what she said? Brie.y, her face looked gentle again. Oh,

Anna, I could have loved you. I could have tried to be perfect. I

listened to myself talking. What had I been talking about? Nothing.

Talking about nothing. Then I realized what was happening and

a tendril of fear crept up into my chest. “Did you spike me?”

I said the words and knew it was true. The dryness in my throat. The change in the quality of the shadows. My skin was tingling. My peripheral vision was just a puzzle, a palimpsest of sight. Suddenly I was very afraid. Please don’t let me be coming up, not here in this terrible place. But I was. I was coming up. What was it? The glass of water, brought without me asking. So this was what it felt like to be a traitor, to be Kavanagh in the woods. Anna was still talking, asking a stream of questions. God, how much had they given me? Just out of eyeshot, it was getting busier. Teeming shadows, a cacophony of vision. The questions became sharper. It wasn’t just Anna. They were all joining in. Are you sure? Sure of what? Is there anything you need to tell us? I don’t think so. Think so or know so? We even had a name for it, a name from Criticism-Self-Criticism. They were bombing me. They were going to turn me inside out and pick over my head for the bad bits, like monkeys smashing a coconut to get at the flesh. How much had they given me? And why do it there, in that place? I said again, to them, to myself, that I had nothing to be scared of, nothing to hide. How much had they given me? Nothing to hide. I was a good person with nothing to hide. Who do you work for? Good, Chris. Do you work for Miles? Good, Mike. Who is Miles? Nothing to hide. And as I tried my best to fight my fear and answer their questions, reality slid away until there was no me, just a voice pleading with other voices. How many voices? Tell us how many other voices? They seemed to come from all sides asking what are your real beliefs an impossible question answer a human being for other human beings that’s no kind of answer a man only one way to free yourself michael you have to let it go this pretense say what you want it’s in your head in my head say it down with the pig system this miles who is he down with the pig system twelve thousand a day what is what twelve thousand people die every day twelve thousand every day do you care or do you hate perhaps you’re just a pig who wants a car holiday color tv no, that’s not it, not it at all come on pig sick pig let it all go pig sick pig pig pig.

Eventually they must have given me some kind of sedative, because the next thing I remember is waking in the late afternoon of the following day to find myself curled up in a sleeping bag, my mouth dry and my head thick and pounding. The world still wasn’t back to normal. It had an ugly slant to it, a sickening lean. Anna was kneeling down in front of me. She looked haggard and exhausted. I saw she had a cold sore on her bottom lip.

“Do you want some tea?”

I propped myself up on one elbow. I felt weak and slightly nauseous. The tea, which had a lot of sugar in it, tasted good. I noticed Anna’s hands as she passed it to me. The chewed nails, the line of black scabs on her knuckles.

“Well done, Mike. I was so worried about you.”

I couldn’t really speak, so I just nodded. She left me alone and I lay there, trying to piece together what had happened. Another hour or so passed. I could hear the sound of people moving around downstairs, birds singing outside the boarded-up window. I think I fell asleep again.

Later that night, as I lay awake in the dormitory, listening to people breathe and cough in the darkness, Anna came to crouch beside me. She smelled of the workhouse, of rotting wood and long-ago fear. She brought her face close to mine. “It’s good to have you back,” she whispered, kissing me.

What was this? A reward? Another interrogation? I traced with my fingers the winged ridges of her shoulder blades, her ribcage, and as I touched her I felt a rising tide of horror. “What would you have done?” I asked.

“What, baby?”

“If you’d found out I was a traitor.”

She tugged her T-shirt over her head. “I’d have killed you,” she said, lifting her leg to straddle my hips.

* * *

Slipping on loose gravel, I pick my way up the path to the tower, which glows inscrutably above me like something from a science fiction film. There’s a cold wind up here on the hill, shuddering through the bushes, catching at my arms and legs. I sit down against the tower’s blank stone wall and arrange myself into a comfortable position, straightening my back and resting my hands in my lap. There’s nothing I can do now but wait until morning. Gradually I start to become aware of my breathing. How long since I last meditated? For years, while I was living at the monastery, I practiced every day. I stopped as soon as I got back to Britain. The two things were connected, deciding to stop and going home. I was angry with the monks; that was part of it. I was sick of the pretense that I’d managed to renounce the world. Wat Tham Nok was a bustling place, a worldly place, for all the incense and chanting and saffron robes. I think the last straw was the ceremony the abbot performed to bless a certain Mr. Boonmee’s fleet of taxis. Boonmee was a gangster, as far as I could see, an oleaginous man who owned a brothel and a service station and various other businesses in the nearby town. I remember the gifts piling up, the vapid grin on Boonmee’s face as he accepted congratulations on his public act of piety.

After a while, the spotlights switch off, cutting out with a click and a soft buzzing exhalation, like a sigh. I’m left in darkness, breathing in, breathing out. Gradually I’m able to make out the horizon, the point where the purple-blue sky is cut off by the denser black of the hills.

I shut my eyes.

There was to be another action. That was what they told me, after my interrogation. A job we were to do for Khaled. They laid

out the details. Whether it was come-down or disorientation or simple shock, I was able to listen and show no emotion at what was being proposed; my horror existed in a small, locked-away place, far from the surface. Everyone was very friendly to me. Sean and Leo in particular went out of their way to be nice. As proof of my recuperation, I was given an important task. I would meet the PFLP contact in London and pick up our next tranche of funding.

I drove there overnight with Sean, half listening to his stream of fractured amphetamine jokes. He dropped me in the West End as dawn broke, where I hung around for a couple of hours, waiting for things to open and wishing I didn’t feel so sick. Then I went to meet the man we knew as Yusef. In a Lebanese café that smelled of rose-water and cigarettes we drank cups of bitter coffee and I watched him adjust his tie and run his fingers over the lapels of his fashionable suit, caressing himself, stealing glances at his reflection in the plate glass of the window. He handed me a package containing five thousand pounds. He didn’t seem to notice how my hands were shaking, the dusting of spilled sugar on the table.

I wasn’t sure before. It was only when I stepped out onto the pavement that I knew what I was going to do. My Michael Frame passport was in my pocket. I had a bag full of money. I hailed a cab and twenty minutes later was standing on Cheyne Walk, looking at the little village of houseboats moored in front of the elegant townhouses. Low tide had exposed an oily swathe of black Thames mud, a cluster of peeling hulls and a wooden gangway butting up against a flight of weed-slathered concrete steps. The Roaring Girl, the Linnet, the Annicka, the Lisboa Princess. Some were shabby, others spick and span. Here and there were jolly touches: stripy life preservers, rows of pot plants. One or two boats were flying the Union Jack. A Bohemian slovenliness hung over the place, a mannered slouch.

The Martha was an old tug with a freshly painted nameplate and a little porch built in front of the wheelhouse. I spotted a patched section on the side, which I supposed was the shell-hole. The deck was cluttered with folding chairs and a bicycle was chained to the

gangplank rail. I walked up and knocked on the cabin door. There was no reply. I knocked harder.

Miles had obviously been asleep. In his ratty check dressing gown and scuffed leather slippers, he looked very young, almost like a schoolboy. “Chris, what are you doing here?”

“I need to talk.”

He frowned. “You’d better come in.”

He made coffee in the galley and I sat on a stool, wondering how to start. Miles kept his place very tidy. There were no piles of books, no dirty laundry on the floor. Everything was perfectly presented, from the row of gleaming copper pans hanging over the stove to the Super 8 camera standing decoratively on a tripod by the bed.

“I need to tell you something, but before I do, you have to understand that I don’t want to know what you’ll do with the information. I don’t want to know anything, Miles, about what you do or who you are. Do you understand?”

“I think so.”

“After this, you won’t see me again. That’s part of the deal. I tell you and then I disappear.”

“All right. I’m listening.”

“I’m telling you because it’s gone too far. I can’t justify it, not what’s being proposed. Not politically — not morally, whatever that means. I want you to know that I’m not here because I’ve stopped believing in the need for a revolutionary politics. I haven’t. I’ll always work toward the revolution. I just need to stop this from happening.”

“I understand.”

And then I told him. The names of the members of our group. The addresses of our safe houses. I gave him what details I had of the next action. I told him where to find our cache of arms. At first he looked confused. It took him a while to realize what I was talking about. When he did, he looked ashen. After a while he began to take notes on a legal pad. When I’d finished, he breathed deeply and shook his head.

“And Anna Addison? You haven’t mentioned her.”

“She’s not involved.”

He looked as if he were about to contradict me, then stopped himself. Lighting a cigarette, he flicked through his notes. “Where will you go?” he asked.

“It doesn’t matter.” It didn’t. Not then. Not for a long time. Outside, the traffic was beginning to build up along the Embankment as commuters made their way to work.

Thirty years later, running down East Street, we were making a spectacle of ourselves. Two middle-aged men, pink-faced and out of breath. I slowed down and Miles slumped gratefully against a wall. Passersby turned round to watch him, this dandyish man sitting on the concrete. He looked as if he were about to pass out.

“Last chance, Chris,” he choked. “If you walk away from me again, I’ll make a phone call and the tabloids will be on your doorstep by the end of the day. How do you think it’ll go for you with them on your back?”

I shrugged.

“I’ll tell you how. The police will be forced to act. There’ll be an investigation. And — this is what you need to know — if there’s an investigation they’ll find something against you. Do you understand, Chris? If they search they will find. And it’ll be serious, we’ll make sure of that. You’re fifty years old. What age do you think you’ll be when you get out of prison?”

All the years. All the years, because of conversations with Miles Bridgeman. It crossed my mind that I could kill him. I could take him into the park, wring his scrawny neck like a chicken’s. And then what? Then I’d be running. Did I really have the energy to run?

“And if I cooperate, what happens to Miranda?”

He laughed, standing up and brushing the seat of his trousers. “She’ll probably get a book deal.”

I pictured Miranda getting over the shock and finding herself the center of attention. Miranda doing the rounds of the talk shows, lunching with journalists from women’s magazines. Miranda blossoming, finding someone with better hair and teeth to sit beside her on the interviewer’s sofa.

“You’ll need a lawyer.”

“Oh, of course, a lawyer.”

He was irritated by my sarcasm. “Let’s get out of the street, shall we? We could at least try to talk like grown-ups.”

We went into the nearest place, a chain pub with blond wood furniture and a loud jukebox. One window was boarded up, presumably a souvenir of the previous night’s chucking-out time. Miles bought beers and I asked him what I hadn’t wanted to ask all those years previously, on his houseboat.

“Who are you, Miles?”

He pursed his lips in annoyance. “Oh, God, Chris, don’t get metaphysical. I couldn’t bear it.”

When he spoke again, his voice was weary. “OK. You want my story? Once upon a time I wasn’t so far away from you, politically. Not as serious, no, but I did want things to change. Unfortunately I didn’t have a choice about how I acted. They had me. They had me from before I first met you.”

“What? Recruited over sherry in your tutor’s study? ‘Young fellow, how would you like to serve your country?’ ”

“Christ, you probably think that’s really how it happens. That’s the funny thing about you, Chris. After all this — all this madness you’ve been through — you’re still peculiarly naïve. Amazing, really. No, I got busted. It was in 1966. I knew a man who ran a gallery, a little place in St. James’s that sold objets d’art. Oriental stuff, mostly. Pictures and vases, chinoiserie. He offered me a job. I’d been at school with his brother.”

I snorted derisively.

“Well, it turned out the pots and rugs were just a front for other business. I needed money. I wanted to make films. Do you have any idea how much stock costs? Processing? And it was only hash. Nothing that was going to do anybody any harm.”

“And you got caught.”

“My employer liked to boast at parties. They arrested me at Dover, picking up twenty pounds of Nepalese black. We were shipping it inside brass ornaments. I was terrified. I thought I was

going to get ten years. And then some chap in a rumpled suit and a Balliol tie turned up and told me that if I helped him I might be able to sort out my problems. Work off my debt.”

“So you became an informer.”

“That’s more or less it. They were desperate for people who could fit in. Everyone could always tell a policeman. Hair, shoes— they stuck out a mile. The bastards kept on at me. They always had something else for me to do, someone else for me to get to know. At first it was drugs, but pretty soon it was political stuff. Who was at what meeting. Who knew who.”

“Did they put you in that cell with me?”

He nodded. “God, that was an awful job. All day on that march I felt like shit. Because I was against the war, you see. I really was. But each time I tried to drop out they threatened me. And what I was giving them seemed so innocuous. For Christ’s sake, it was innocuous. There were all those pseudo Trotskys yabbering away, but most of them didn’t have a clue. All that revolutionary fervor— it was a sort of wishful thinking. Oh, I don’t deny there were things that needed doing — I mean, Britain was a joyless hole of a place before our generation got hold of it — but no one could see farther than the end of their noses. We thought it was all about us. Even Vietnam was about us. And there we were, in the middle of the Cold War.”

“At least some of us tried to do something. At least we stood up to them.”

“Can’t you even admit it now? Anything that destabilized the British state was to the advantage of the USSR.”

He drained the rest of his pint.

“And since then?” I asked. “Did they let you off the hook?”

“Eventually. But, oddly enough, by that time it had turned into a career. There was something called the Information Research Department. A Foreign Office setup. They gave me a job in a press agency. They used it to place things in the newspapers.”

“Disinformation.”

“Propaganda, certainly. Things that made the other side look bad.”

“So much for wanting the world to change.”

“Oh, and you made the right choices, did you? ‘Trying to do something.’ You were irrelevant, don’t you get that? History doesn’t care about what you did. Who’s even heard of you? Ideology’s dead now. Everyone pretty much agrees on how to run things. And you know what, Chris? I don’t mind. Let’s all get on with gardening and watching the soaps and having kids and going shopping. You’ve done it. You’ve been able to lead a dull life because there’s no real conflict anymore. In a couple of years it’ll be a new millennium and, with luck, nothing will bloody happen anywhere, nothing at all. That’s what a good society looks like, Chris. Not perfect. Not filled with radiant angelic figures loving each other. Just mildly bored people, getting by.”

“How the hell do you face yourself in the morning?”

“Don’t patronize me. I don’t see you’ve any call to occupy the moral high ground.”

“No, I mean it. What’s it like, trying to live like you do?”

“It’s very simple. It’s what most people do. You don’t need to agree with me. You don’t need to approve of me. But it’s not people like me who are the problem. All right, let’s say I don’t believe in anything. Well, one great advantage of that is not wanting to blow anyone up.”

We sat there in front of our empty glasses.

“So,” he said, “now that we’re actually talking, what about you? What happened to you after you walked off the boat that afternoon?”

What happened to me? I did what you did in those days. I got on a bus. I had a passport and five thousand pounds, a huge sum of money, enough to keep me alive for several years if I lived cheaply. As far as I was concerned, my life in Britain was over. I didn’t have any clear intention; I just wanted to move, as quickly as possible.

So I got on a bus at Victoria station and headed for the Continent. It was the beginning of a period of drifting through Europe that ended about three months later, in a street in Istanbul. I remember that time as a flip-book of cheap hotel rooms, a two-guilder dormitory in Amsterdam, a flophouse in Naples where you could hear cockroaches scuttling about on the tiled floor after they turned out the lights. At first, out of habit, I gravitated toward places with a counterculture. I sat around on my bedroll in main squares, listening to long-haired kids playing guitars and hustling one another for dope. I went to gigs and lost myself in the amplified darkness, the anonymous strobing of the lights.

I don’t remember much about what I thought or how I felt. I was treading water, turning round and round, existing rather than living. I had the idea that I’d try to find somewhere very beautiful and very simple and settle there, far away from all kinds of violence and destruction. To say I was disillusioned with politics would be too simple. I still hated the system, hated the cops in their gray or green or blue or brown uniforms, pushing people around, moving them on from the Damrak or St. Pauli or the Strøget. But I didn’t trust myself anymore. I was suspicious of my instincts, my capacity for violence.

Khaled had ordered us to kill someone. His name was Gertler, a Jewish businessman who owned a supermarket chain. Gertler’s crime was Zionism. He donated large sums to right wing political groups. The British government had given him a knighthood. Every morning he took his nine-year-old daughter to school, waiting on the pavement outside his house for the driver to bring his Bentley round from the mews where it was garaged. The plan was to ambush him and shoot him dead.

I was confused about many things, but I knew what I thought about that. Perhaps Khaled and Yusef were justified in fighting the enemies of their people. Perhaps, having no army, they had no alternative but horrific, spectacular violence. But I couldn’t see how it was justified for me, who’d never even been to Palestine, to kill a man out of some abstract sense of revolutionary solidarity or

third world internationalism. No matter how crisply logical the theory, no matter how tightly one blocked one’s ears to the historical hiss of Zyklon B, on a simple human level Khaled’s plan still meant killing a man in front of his child and that had nothing to do with what I believed in. I wanted an end to poverty, to carpet bombing, to the numbness and corruption of the death-driven society I’d been born into. Instead it seemed death had corrupted me too.

Sooner or later, in every city I visited, I’d see someone I thought I knew. I would hide or walk the other way, but before long I’d start turning the incident over in my mind and decide they must have recognized me. I’d feel as if I were being followed. Eventually I’d pick up my things and run to the railway station, in the grip of a sweating, heart-racing paranoia.

All that came to a head in Istanbul. The city was seething with bad vibes. There had recently been a military coup and soldiers were patrolling the streets, grim men in fatigues who checked papers and lounged around contemptuously at intersections, watched by the sullen populace. People were always tugging at my sleeve in the bazaars, trying to sell me drugs or steer me into their shops. I was spending most of my days looking for someone to give me a ride farther east, knocking on doors at my hostel, hanging around outside a café called the Pudding Shop, which had a traveler’s noticeboard and a crudely painted mandala on the wall. One afternoon I picked up an eight-week-old copy of The Times, which had somehow survived, preserved with various other archaeological relics of the foreign media, on a stall just off the Grand Bazaar.

TWO DEAD, OTHERS SOUGHT AFTER LONDON TERRORIST RAIDS

The shopkeeper watched me curiously as I tore off the plastic wrapping and read. The article was frustratingly terse. Following a tip-off, police had raided premises in north and east London, looking for weapons and explosives. They’d arrested three men

and two women and retrieved a number of small arms. On the same afternoon, armed police had been involved in a gun battle on a residential street in Shepherd’s Bush, after a vehicle had failed to stop when requested. The occupants of the vehicle opened fire on the police, killing one, a Sergeant Terence Denham, aged thirty-two. One of the terrorists was also killed. Another, who was seriously wounded, surrendered. The dead gunman was named as Sean Michael Ward, of West Kensington. Police were seeking a twenty-six-year-old woman, Anna Louise Addison, who had fled the scene, hijacking a car that was later found abandoned in Camden Town. A watch on coastal ports and airports had so far failed to produce any results. Members of the public were warned not to approach her as she was believed to be armed.

Sean was dead. At first I flatly refused to accept it. I spent the next few days scouring every bookstall and hotel lobby in the city for English-language papers and magazines. Though I was half mad with guilt, I didn’t dare ask other travelers directly, fearful of drawing attention to myself. I clung to the irrational hope that the Times article was wrong or would turn out to be some kind of police ploy. Eventually I found an old American news weekly, which confirmed the worst. It had happened a few days after I’d left. Leo had been shot in the stomach. The police were holding Jay, Claire, Quinn and several others, at least two of whom I didn’t know. Nowhere was my name mentioned. And Sean Ward was dead. They’d printed a picture of the street, cordoned off with tape. A BMW was slewed across the pavement, its windows shattered, its doors hanging open, visibly punctured by nine-millimeter rounds. Beside the car lay a form covered with a white sheet. Sean was dead because I’d betrayed him. I’d killed him as surely as if I’d pulled the trigger myself. My feeble attempt to keep Anna out of it now just seemed ridiculous. I ought to have found another way — written a letter to the papers, warned Gertler. Anything but tell Miles. My emotions led me in all sorts of directions. I considered going to Lebanon, giving myself up to the PFLP. I thought of going home and surrendering to the authorities. I assessed various methods of killing myself. My only

comfort, if such a word is appropriate, was that Anna had escaped. For the policeman, who was apparently a member of the Special Patrol Group and trained to use firearms, I had no feelings. A pig, to me, was just a pig.

I was sitting in the Pudding Shop, trying to work up the courage to go back and throw myself off the roof of my hotel, when a Dutch couple offered me a lift in their bus. They were heading for Erzerum, then Tehran. As it turned out, Peter and Justine were junkies. They showed me a way to sidestep the horror, an instant method of coming to terms with my confusion and guilt. We trundled up the rutted road into the mountains and gradually I made myself a stranger to the world. The wheels turned round and I disappeared.

Somewhere in Iran, I left my Dutch friends, who wanted to push on to India. I arrived, perhaps in a taxi or riding on the back of someone’s truck, in a village whose name I never knew. It was an ancient and apparently timeless place, on which the world could surely never intrude. The fields were tilled with wooden plows. Old men in woollen caps sat in the doorways of crumbling houses. I made my wishes known by signs, finding a room with a packed-earth floor and a neighbor who brought me food and enough opium to prevent me from giving a damn about who’d lived and who’d died because of me. I spent my days with Abbas and Hamid, the layabouts who fed the fire for the village hammam, watching them lower themselves into a pit of bitumen, coming out black from the waist down. Together we sat and smoked and watched the snow on the mountain. The air was clean and pure, the sky a dome of blue tile.

All I’d wanted was certainty, a solid place to stand, but the more I’d tried to produce it, the more ambiguity had grown up in my life, choking it like pond weed. Gertler the capitalist had lived. Sean Ward the terrorist had died. Accumulation, dissipation. I still wanted to kill myself, but I lacked the will. My self-disgust was total. Sucking the acrid smoke into my lungs, I was Darius the King of Kings, an ant crawling on the cracked wall. The Shah, about whom I’d once had an opinion, presided over my purgatory,

nailed above the wooden boards of the table in the form of a hand-tinted print. Everything was connected to everything else and none of it was very important. Nothing was true. Nothing was good.

One day men came from the city in a dusty car. I hid in a sheepfold on the hill above the village. “America,” Abbas said, stabbing a finger at me. They’d been looking for the American. I moved on.

Yellow earth, a concrete ribbon of road. Men squatted at the shoulder to urinate. The next dusty village and the next. At the caravanserai, I sat in a crowd of truck drivers and watched a movie. The girl danced in an overdriven screech of violins. People were shouting at the screen. The smoke tasted like death inside me. A man with a harelip tried to sell me a watch. I grew thinner and more ragged and my hair and beard became a single tangled knot. I met a black American wearing a ruffled shirt and carrying a matching set of alligator luggage. I met a German boy who seemed to own nothing but a blanket. Pashtun tribesmen fired AK-47s into the air. Flies crawled across lambs’ hearts. The German boy couldn’t remember his own name. Death lay in the leaves at the bottom of my teacup, in the thud of the butcher’s cleaver.

I cultivated absence. I dared myself to doubt further. What did it mean if nothing was real? What did it mean if there was nothing between people except a brutal, cynical commerce? Money from the money changer, the red-striped pole that marked the border. White people begged from me. Just for the hell of it, I begged from them. I learned to feed myself and buy drugs in at least four languages, forgetting each one as I passed the guards into the next pointlessly demarcated zone. Village women in sky blue burqas, some Swedish girl with hepatitis. Her friend was on a smuggling charge in Delhi. Could I help her out? I walked up a thousand steps to a shrine. I attended a dog fight. Truck headlights jogged up and down in the dust. In Kabul someone stole most of my money as I lay unconscious on a pavement outside a mosque. I converted the rest into gemstones, which I sewed into the hem of my shirt. Someone stole the gemstones.

I had no further thought of sustaining myself. I was happy not to feel at home. It would be misleading to say those years were blank. Many things happened to me. I lived on beaches, in the ruins of an ancient city crawling with snakes and scorpions. Up in the hills, I shared a bungalow with a Frenchman who called himself Ram Das. We did nothing but inject. We rarely went outside. He kept telling me that we were in Paradise. I was ill, feverish on pallets and mattresses. I squatted in a shit-encrusted hole while a man killed chickens outside, his feet just visible, caked with blood and feathers. I passed out in the waiting room of a doctor’s clinic; it was comforting to lay my head on the cool tiled floor. Once I was paid to fly something across a border. It was in the lining of a suitcase. I carried the suitcase. I stood at the Customs table. I gave it to the man by the baggage claim. The second time I just took the case and traveled on. I was rich again, for a time.

With a sort of impersonal curiosity I noticed the horror I inspired in people. Perhaps, I began to think, I wasn’t inspiring their horror at all. Perhaps I was their horror. I forgot what had happened before. The world was an illusion. Death teemed in the cities and over the empty land. The more I struggled, the more death I produced. Suffering rippled out of me as I thrashed about in the water.

At last I got what I wanted. There is a period of two years, between 1974 and 1976, of which I remember nothing at all.

One day I returned to Bangkok. I knew I’d been there before because the route to the red light district was familiar. I arrived on foot. I’d been with a woman up in the north, but she’d died or left me. There was a weeping abscess on my arm and I was missing a tooth. For two or three nights I slept on the street in Patpong, curled up in an alleyway behind a go-go bar. “Kee nok,” the touts hissed at me, aiming punches and kicks to keep me away from their customers. Birdshit farang. The war in Vietnam was over, but the city was still full of Americans, uniformed soldiers and sailors, ex-GIs who couldn’t face going home. I told them hard-luck stories as they tumbled out of the bars with their girls. I’d make them laugh by imitating fractured Thai English. Pussy smoke cigarette,

pussy open bottle. There was a dealer who sat on a chair outside one of the prostitutes’ short-time hotels, an old man festooned with protective amulets. If you bought his gear he’d let you shoot it upstairs, in a low-lit room with a record player. That room was my Shangri-La, my El Dorado. I offered to sell him my passport.

I didn’t recognize the farang shaking my hand in front of Yom’s noodle stall. He kept saying his name, but I couldn’t understand him. “You see show?” I asked, trying to flip into my comic Thai-tout routine. “You want see love show?” He bought me food and watched me fix up in his hotel room. I think he must have paid for the heroin too. I nodded off for a while and woke up and looked at him looking tearfully back at me and it really was Saul Kleeman, prosperous and tanned, wearing a loud batik shirt, trying to talk to me about Anna.

“Chris,” he said, for the tenth or twentieth time.

“No, man,” I told him. “All that’s in the past.”

“Anna,” he said. “Anna’s dead.” He told me what had happened and let me sleep in his room and took me to the doctor and gave me fresh clothes and some time later, a day or two days, he took me downstairs and put me in a taxi. I stared blankly out of the window at paddy fields, my forehead pressed against the glass.

I never knew exactly what Saul was doing in Bangkok, or how to get in touch with him afterward. He saved my life, and I’ve always been grateful to him, even if I sometimes wish he’d minded his own business. He looked well, I remember. I’d like to think things went all right for him. I retained very little of what he told me about Anna. What I know now I’ve gleaned in fragments, over the years. Some of it I only found out from sifting through God’s unsorted stock of books.

Anna successfully fled Britain, with help from the PFLP. She disappeared from view for a time, living in the Middle East or North Africa, possibly in Libya, and next surfaced in 1974 as part of a team of terrorists who hijacked an airliner en route from Frankfurt to Tel Aviv, in an attempt to force the West German authorities to free prisoners of the RAF and Rote Zelle. They were

partially successful. The prisoners weren’t released but they were allowed to land in Algiers and fly out again on another plane, with a substantial sum of money. Gun Girl, the trashy biography illustrated with her ex-husband’s photos — the Chelsea fashion shots and a couple of salacious nudes — dates from this time, when she was an object of almost hysterical media interest in Britain.

Class warfare is life process, wrote Anna and her comrades, who came from Japan and Germany and the refugee camps of Lebanon. For us, production and destruction are identical. Three months after the Algiers hijack, eight of them entered the West German embassy in Copenhagen, an imposing neoclassical building on the waterfront. They killed a security guard and a junior diplomat and took twenty hostages in an upper room. Once the Danish police had surrounded the building, they issued a series of demands, including the release of prisoners in Israeli and West German jails and the provision of an aircraft to fly them to the destination of their choice. After the first twelve-hour deadline expired, they took the economic attaché on to the balcony and shot him in the head. It is possible that Anna herself was the executioner. There is a photograph said to be of her, taken earlier that day, leaning out of a second-floor window, raising a fist.

The siege lasted almost eighty hours. Bonn and Tel Aviv refused to negotiate. On the third night, Danish special forces moved in and retook the building. During the assault, all the terrorists, seven hostages and three soldiers were killed. Anna’s body, or the body that was identified as hers, was found in the conference room, badly burned: a booby-trap rigged by the terrorists had been detonated during the assault. The oddest aspect of the siege was the terrorists’ reported use of a technique that in earlier communiqués they termed the ARC effect. Surviving hostages testified that they’d been herded into the conference room, where projectors and audio equipment were set up. For more than twenty-four hours they were subjected to some kind of audiovisual display, incorporating taped speeches and images of American atrocities in Vietnam. The purpose, it seems, was experimental — to induce ARC, an

acceleration of revolutionary consciousness, to alter their politics with son et lumière.

The Anna of the embassy siege is someone I never knew, who’d traveled to a psychological place I could never follow. My Anna was a woman who consciously suppressed her own desires in the name of a greater good. Always, in some part of myself, I’d refused to connect the two, so it felt like a revelation, a coup, when I realized in France that it was possible she hadn’t been in Copenhagen after all. When we were lovers, I would always pester her about the future. I wanted to know what she imagined, what sort of society she hoped to create. I think, covertly, I wanted her to describe how things would be for us, for me and her. I never understood why she always rebuffed my questions, until the day she angrily insisted I stop asking them. “Can’t you see,” she told me, “that the future’s not for us?” I didn’t follow. “Look at how we live,” she said. “We’re damaged people. There would be no place for us in the world we’re trying to build.”

When I arrived at Wat Tham Nok I was in a state of agitated withdrawal. For the last hour of the journey, I’d been hassling the driver to let me out, but he only waved a hand and tapped his fingers against his pursed lips, indicating that he spoke no English. When I saw the golden spire of the stupa I realized my destination was a temple but nothing prepared me for what was to come, the prison conditions of the addicts’ compound, the formation exercises in front of a huge portrait of the king. The abbot of Wat Tham Nok had been curing alcoholics and drug addicts for years using his own patented herbal emetic, a vile potion containing more than a hundred ingredients. Saul had paid for me to take the cure, giving instructions that I couldn’t be trusted to look after myself and should be restrained if I tried to leave. This was how I came to spend my first twenty-four hours at Wat Tham Nok chained to a pillar.

I was barely aware of where I was. I thought Saul was present in the room, and screamed at him that he was a bastard pig traitor. I thought he’d sold me into slavery. They’d dressed me in a set of

faded pink cotton pajamas. A novice monk had been left to monitor my progress. He must have been about twelve years old. He sat in the corner of the hall, silently watching me, flanked by a pair of plastic buckets.

When I’d calmed down, I was told where I was and asked whether I’d like help easing the withdrawal pains. That help turned out not to be methadone, as I’d hoped, but the name of the Buddha, written on a small piece of paper, which I was told to memorize and swallow, like a coded message. Over my head, the abbot intoned a cheery blessing. “Repeat the sacred name when you feel craving,” he told me, through an interpreter. For a week I was rousted up at dawn from my pallet in the addicts’ barracks and taken through the ritual of purging, vomiting into a trough while monks chanted and clanged hand cymbals. There were more than twenty of us, Thai and foreigners; we muttered and swore our way through the sleepless nights in a dozen languages.

Round and round. The days and nights, turning circles. The brown jets of vomit. Clear running water, splashed over my face. I lived off fruit and bowls of rice broth and after a week it grew easier, the spasms in my gut more manageable and the world somehow crisper and more stable around me. I did small tasks about the compound, sweeping and mopping, folding laundry into piles. I repeated the name of the Buddha, usually abusively. One of the monks gave lectures in English. I listened to him describe the Four Noble Truths, the eightfold path that leads to the cessation of suffering. Forsake anger, give up pride. Sorrow cannot touch the man who is not in thrall to anything, who owns nothing.

But how to do that? Without heroin there was nothing to distract me from my self-disgust. I spoke about it in veiled terms to Phra Anan and he told me to take refuge in the Buddha. Officially I was “cured”; it was time for me to leave. The trouble was that I didn’t have anywhere to go. I couldn’t see any way forward and though I still wasn’t sure if I deserved to live, let alone live free of sorrow, I knew I wanted nothing more to do with death, my own or anyone else’s. I asked if I could stay. Phra Anan spoke to the abbot, who

agreed, on condition I worked hard and adopted the same rules as the novice monks. I was given a little hut in the monastery grounds and for the next four years Wat Tham Nok became my home. I shaved my head and wore the robes of a novice. I ate my last meal at midday. During that time I didn’t sing or dance, take intoxicants, or have sex. I didn’t wear a watch. I wrote letters to people seeking treatment for their addictions. I counseled the foreigners, always careful to ensure that they only knew me as Monk Saul or Monk Andrew, names I alternated with each new intake. I followed the real monks round on their morning alms and sometimes I handled money, which they were forbidden to do. I’d often walk behind them, carrying donations, the overflow from the metal bowls that the townspeople filled with rice and curry, with other monkish necessities, soap and candles, toothpaste, socks.

Wat Tham Nok and the little nearby town became the limits of my world, a body whose third eye was the fissure in the rock on the hillside where thousands of swallows nested, the “bird cave” that gave the monastery its name. It was pleasant to sit in the assembly hall, with its giant reclining Buddha, too vast to contemplate at once, and attempt mindfulness in front of a segmented hand or toe or single passive eye, which seemed to look out on the world with infinite resignation. When my thoughts wandered, the statue’s great eyes sometimes looked as dull as those of an opium smoker. I’d try to observe my thought, see that it was fleeting, and relinquish it. I tried, in all things, to relinquish control. Then I tried to stop trying. The greatest transcendence is not the greatest transcendence. Therefore it is called the greatest transcendence.

Though I was lonely I found my work comforting, and as I followed the simple, menial routine through months and years, I gradually began to feel less connected to what I’d thought and done before. The monks taught that to escape suffering one must reject the impulse to act on the world. The desire for change, they insisted, is just another form of craving. I felt I’d no right to act at all, so it seemed all the easier to turn inward and imagine that in renouncing my politics I’d given up nothing important, just a source

of pain. As the world of the armed struggle faded, it came to seem like a dream. The liberation I’d fought for was surely impossible, illusory. For now, whispered Chris Carver. For ever, murmured the voice I heard in the tiny sounds of Wat Tham Nok, the beating of swallows’ wings, the flick-flick of a monk’s plastic sandals on a path. The Dhammapada begins, Mind is the forerunner of all processes: it is chief and they are mind-made. If one talks or acts with an impure mind then suffering follows as the wheel follows the ox’s tread. So I tried to purify my mind, to accept that the only possible sphere of liberation was the self. I thought I had a chance to achieve peace. I might as well have been doing push-ups.

Two things happened. There was the blessing for Mr. Boonmee’s taxis, the last in a long line of last straws, and there was the postcard an ex-addict sent to the monastery office. She was a Canadian who’d found herself on holiday in southern England and decided to send us greetings from the cathedral town of Chichester. I picked it up out of the wire tray on my desk and in the face of its acid blues and greens, its little curlicued banners titling a selection of bland views, the room I sat in, with its stone floor and piles of dusty papers, seemed forlorn and somehow ridiculous, part of a childish game I was playing with myself. I was sick of the birds rustling in the trees, sick of the very air, which lately had been heavy with threats and corruption. It was one thing to renounce the world and contemplate the liberation of the self. It was another to sustain this while watching the monks greet military officers and local politicians arriving for the ceremonials on the king’s birthday.

It took me a long time to put a name to my disillusionment. I wanted to go home. After so long living in an institution, the prospect of formlessness was frightening, but Wat Tham Nok had come to seem as oppressive to me as any Jesuit seminary, the monks no different from the guardians of established religion anywhere else in the world. When I went to the abbot to tell him I intended to leave, he made me a present of a protective charm and expressed the wish that I would soon find a wife and start a family. Then he

returned to his papers, exuding an air of benevolent, unshakeable unconcern. Phra Anan was the same. I left Wat Tham Nok feeling I’d made no more impression on the place than a pebble thrown into a pool of water.

I landed at Heathrow airport in the summer of 1981, armed with the Canadian addict’s postcard, a new passport, which had been issued without fuss by the British embassy in Bangkok, a tent and enough sterling to buy me a train ticket to the south coast. I expected to be arrested and I think, had it happened, I’d have accepted it with equanimity. But the immigration official barely glanced in my direction as he waved me through.

In Chichester I sat under the Market Cross and watched middle England go about its business, supremely oblivious to the wider world. It was the place depicted on the postcard, no more and no less. It gave me pleasure and a kind of relief. For the first couple of months I lived on a campsite, picking and boxing fruit to accumulate the deposit to rent a flat. By the following year I was living in a bedsit near the railway station, working for crazy Olla, trying to keep my head down and tread lightly, to live a humble life. I accepted the faintly ridiculous role in which I found myself, the inoffensive little guy in the woollen waistcoat, the ex-hippie selling scented candles and doing his best to hide from the sharp-suited eighties.

Then one day Miranda stopped browsing the rack of greeting cards and asked whether I’d like to take her for a drink.

Olla’s shop was an odd vantage point from which to watch the new decade assemble itself. After my long absence the difference in mood was stark. If I watched the news or read a paper, both of which I tried to avoid, I found myself dragged back into questions I thought I’d buried. Miranda used to berate me for my lack of politics. She was always getting involved in causes: Amnesty, Free Tibet. She bought mugs and sweatshirts. Her concerns had the character of enthusiasms, fleeting, scattergun. Once in a while she’d wonder aloud about going on a march. As her cosmetics business grew, she benefited from all the things she vaguely disapproved

of, deregulation and low taxation and the other strategies of the disciplinarian economics that had bafflingly become known as the “free” market, and because she’d never really understood the reasons for her disapproval, she gradually stopped vocalizing it and then, eventually, it was as if she’d never held such views at all and was free to compete, to run and jump and jostle with all the rest. And meanwhile, in secret, it gradually came to seem important to me to make something unified from the broken threads of my life, not to lose touch altogether with Chris Carver and his dreams of revolution. Did anything connect me with who I’d once been? And if not, what had I lost, owning only half of a life?

“When did you find me?” I asked Miles, as we sat in the pub, whose midafternoon pall was only accentuated by the piped music, a speeded-up woman singing about getting higher to the accompaniment of some kind of synthetic drumbeat.

“Her Majesty’s government would love to say you were never lost, but you were. I heard they picked up Michael Frame a couple of years ago. A passport check, most probably.”

“Why didn’t they arrest me right away?”

“Oh, they were probably saving you for a rainy day.”

“And here you are.”

“Here I am. Pitter-patter.”

He walked me back to the house and told me to make my arrangements because someone would be picking me up in the morning to take me to London. After he left, I sat in the study, watching the workmen larking about on the lawn and thinking how thin life was, how easily the whole charade of Mike Frame and Miranda Martin could be torn down, like an old net curtain.

Here, under the tower, I’m frozen to the bone, but the line of hilltops is clear along the horizon, the sky’s blacks opening up into purples and inky blues, bruise colors. The smashed-up sky persuades me to get up and walk around, forcing blood into my legs, into my feet, which feel like two clubs inside my beaten-up tennis shoes.

Likewise blood filters slowly into the sky, until finally the sun spills over the ridge like metal over the lip of a crucible and a faint heat starts to warm my face.

I make my way down the hill to the Bar des Sports and when it opens, I buy a cup of coffee and an apple brandy, which I sip, eyed suspiciously by the woman behind the zinc, who thinks, rightly I suppose, that I am up to no good and should be kept under observation. When the alcohol has risen through my body and broken my solid chill into constituent bergs and floes, I pay my bill and walk back up the sloping street to Anna’s house. The line of doors winds upward, some shabby, others neat and bright, and there are early signs of life, open shutters, a man on a Mobylette, its engine rising in pitch as it labors over the cobbles.

It occurs to me that maybe she will kill me.

Here is the door. It’s painted a dull ochre yellow. I recognize the house beside it, with its row of geraniums in terra-cotta pots, the one belonging to the old women who told me Anna was Swedish.

I knock.

I hear her come to answer it. The door opens. She is wearing a cotton kimono, printed with a design of woodblock bamboo. Her hair has fallen over her face; as she looks up at me, she sweeps it back with one hand and stares, fixing me with clear gray-blue eyes, which, like her mouth, are nested in a tracery of delicate lines.

“Anna.”

“Excusez-moi?”

“Anna, it’s me. Chris.”

“Who?”

“Chris Carver. I’m alone. No one followed me here, Anna.” She looks blank. “I don’t think I know you.”

In both French and English, she speaks with an accent. Scandinavian, it sounds like. I look at her and say my name again. And a third time.

“Chris Carver. You remember me, Anna Addison. I know you remember me.”

“I’m not Anna. I never heard of any Anna. Do you know what

time it is? It’s very early in the morning.”

I look at her face and suddenly I’m not sure. It seems softer,

ill-defined, not much like Anna’s tribal mask. But it’s been such a

long time. Anything could have happened. She could have had

plastic surgery.

“Anna Addison,” I say, with more insistence. “Don’t pretend.”

“I don’t know this person.”

“Please, don’t pretend.”

“I tell you I don’t know her.”

I realize I’m scaring her. I hear myself raising my voice and her

telling me she’ll call the police and all the time I look at her, staring

hard into her eyes as if daring her to blink, and finally I’m forced

to admit that I’m completely adrift, without reference or marker.

“I’m sorry to have bothered you,” I say.

She slams the door in my face and I realize Anna is dead. She

has been dead all along, a charred corpse in a Copenhagen confer-

ence room, mute and fanatical, fixed in the past like amber.

I walk slowly down the hill and phone Miles from the Bar des

Sports.

“Where are you?”

“I’m in France.”

“What are you doing there?”

“I just saw Anna Addison. How about that?”

“Don’t be stupid. Anna’s dead.”

“Is she? Yes, I suppose she is.”

“Chris, where are you? I’m worried about you.”

“Is Anna dead, Miles?”

“Of course she’s dead. She’s been dead forever. Are you all

right?”

“I thought I saw her.”

“Chris.”

“What do I tell Miranda? I want her kept out of it.”

“Chris, you should come home.”

“Talk to me about Miranda.”

“You don’t have to tell her anything, not if you don’t want to. We can come and get you. Stash you away somewhere. How about it? A nice country hotel.”

“Run away. Fuck off and hide. Good plan.”

“Look, how about this? Twenty grand and a head start. More cash than that, if I can swing it. Forget what I said about a trial. I was angry. You come back, you do the interview, you hang around long enough to give the press a taste — until the job’s done, absolute minimum, no more. We’ll help you. Give you somewhere to hide out. Someone to handle your calls. Then it’s over and you disappear. By the time the police, or whoever else you’re afraid of, arrive, you can be long gone. I’ll help you, Chris. Come in and I’ll help you.”

“Don’t lie, Miles. I’m too old to start again.”

“No, you’re not. Like I said, more if I can swing it. Probably more like thirty grand.”

“And you could get me a passport?”

“Yes. That too. A clean slate, if that’s what you want. All your sins forgiven.”

“Have you got kids, Miles?”

“Yes, a son and a daughter. Twelve and fourteen.”

“You still with the mother?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You know how it is.”

“No I don’t. That’s the funny thing. I don’t know how it is. Never have.”

Miles gives me a number and an address in London. He wants me to ditch the car and.y. If I tell him exactly where I am, he’ll sort it out. Just go to Toulouse. Dump the car. There will be a ticket waiting for me at the BA desk. He’ll meet the flight. He can’t help enough. His voice is soothing and richly compassionate.

I get into the car and head toward the autoroute. Behind me, the tower rises up like an amputated limb.

Because legality is just the name for everything that’s not

dangerous for the ruling order, because the poor starve while the rich play, because the flickering system of signs is enticing us to give up our precious interiority and join the dance and because just round the corner an insect world is waiting, so saying we must love one another or die isn’t enough, not by a long way, because there’ll come a time when any amount of love will be too late. But it’s something, love, not nothing, and that’s why I pull over and find a phone booth in a rest area and punch a number into the phone. Miranda picks up on the third ring.

“It’s me.”

“Oh, God. Mike? Where are you?”

“Chris,” I tell her. “My name’s Chris.”

Historical Note

Certain things are always erased or distorted in a novel and this is no exception. It seems worth saying that it is not a representation of the politics or personalities of the Angry Brigade, who carried out a series of bomb attacks on targets including the Police National Computer and the Employment Secretary’s house in the early seventies.

The British revolutionary underground has attracted less attention than its counterparts in the United States, Italy, and Germany. Many people, even in the U.K., have forgotten the Angry Brigade, whose notoriety peaked at the time of the “Stoke Newington Eight” trial in 1972, at the end of which four defendants received long prison sentences. There are several reasons for the AB’s disappearance from history. In part it is simply a question of intensity. The armed struggle that engulfed Italy and Germany had no counterpart in the U.K., where the actions of young revolutionaries were eclipsed in scale and brutality by the civil war in Northern Ireland. The Provisional IRA’s murderous mainland bombing campaign in 1974 left forty-six people dead and drained away countercultural support for terrorist tactics at a time when elsewhere in Europe a certain glamour was still attached to the idea of political violence.

According to veterans, the AB was never a formally constituted organization with a central command and a cell structure. Rather it was a name (like “Marion Delgado,” a tag adopted by some members of the Weather Underground, or “Luther Blissett,” more recently popular in Italian leftist circles) that could be used to “sign” actions committed by a variety of groups and individuals who broadly described themselves as “libertarian socialists.” In the early seventies London was a haven for Greek, Portuguese, and Spanish

exiles working to overthrow the Fascist dictatorships in their home countries. Numerous attacks against embassies, airline offices, and other targets took place. Many incidents were not reported in the British press, who at the time maintained a cozy relationship with the rest of what used to be called “the Establishment.” The AB received both inspiration and (it is usually assumed) material support from these networks, and many of its actions were cloaked in the same media silence.

Readers who want information about the Angry Brigade are directed to the papers of the Stoke Newington Eight Defence Group and writings by Gordon Carr, Jean Weir. John Barker, and Stuart Christie. I am grateful to the librarians at the London School of Economics for use of their archive. Thanks to Andy Davies for information about police procedure. Quotations from the Dhammapadda are adapted from translations by Joan Mascaró and Ninian Smart. Mistakes in the translation or interpretation of the Pali Canon are my own. I have drawn on Ron Bailey’s account of actions by London Squatters and Chris Faiers’s account of the occupation of 144 Piccadilly by the London Street Commune, among many other sources. Contemporary respect is due to Dr. J. J. King and all former denizens of The Mitre and The Bart Wells.

The Post Office tower was bombed on October 31, 1971. No claim of responsibility was made.