Revenger

8

Between the south London districts of Battersea Park and Vauxhall nine sets of elevated train tracks run side-by-side, like a coronary artery of wood and steel twenty-five feet above the streets. Many of the buildings on either side of the tracks are council blocks, erected after the Second World War to replace the Victorian terraces that had been flattened in the Blitz.

Donny Bakunin lived in a fourth-floor council flat in one of these blocks, though his name was not on any of the rental papers, nor the utility bills that lay unpaid on the mat beneath the front door. Bakunin was fifty-two years old. He had short, grey hair that ringed a bald spot that seemed to get wider by the day. He would never have admitted to being vain enough to have noticed, any more than he would have given any reason for the choice of his plain, metal-framed spectacles other than their extreme cheapness. His face was so lacking in flesh, the skin so tightly wrapped around his nose and cheeks and his surprisingly strong, forceful jaw that the contours of his skull were clearly visible beneath the skin. His body, too, was severely underweight.

Bakunin was no more interested in the pleasure of good food than he was in elegant clothes, comfortable furniture or agreeable surroundings. In his mind all were trivial fripperies. So were intimate relationships of anything more than the most fleeting, functional kind. All he cared about was his own personal faith of anarchic revolution. Much like the Americans who had invaded Iraq without the slightest idea of what they would do once they had conquered it, so Bakunin had spent his entire adult life plotting the downfall of capitalism and no time whatever in planning its replacement. It was destruction that interested him, not the creation of a better world.

Now, after more than thirty years of frustrating, even futile, activism he could finally see his end in sight. It was no longer a matter of insanely optimistic ideology to say that the West was falling apart. It was a simple statement of fact. And that, too, explained why he was not eating. He did not have time. There were so many better, more profoundly nourishing things to do.

A phone rang on the cheap MDF desk at which he was sitting, one of half a dozen prepaid mobiles lined up in front of him.

There were no introductions, and there was no social chit-chat. Just a voice that said, ‘You got everything sorted for tonight, yeah? Eight-fifteen, Netherton Street, SW4. Now remember: what we want is maximum damage. They can loot the shops, rip the shit out of the curry house and the Chinky takeaway, take all the money and gold from the cash converters, all that good stuff. But we’re not looking for bodies all over the place. GBH yes, murders, no. Capeesh?’

‘Yes,’ said Bakunin with an oddly clipped, middle-class accent.

‘And remember, tell your people that pub’s off-limits. No one goes near it.’

‘Already done it. How much time have we got before the police arrive?’

‘Plenty. They’ll all be at that rally down the O2 trying to keep order.’

‘How about media coverage?’

‘Same thing: all at the O2 as well. Just make your own video. Stick it on YouTube. Have someone tweeting live as you go in. That’ll get us all the attention we need.’

‘Right, yeah, we need to break the hegemony of state-controlled media and corporate mind-control. This is a much more authentic way of communicating to the masses.’

‘For fuck’s sake, Bakunin. Save us the political lecture. Just go and fuck some stuff up.’

Well, he was always happy to do that. In that respect, nothing had changed since the boyhood days when he’d still been called Donald Blantyre, and grown up in Tunbridge Wells, acquiring an impressive set of O- and A-Levels at Tunbridge Wells Grammar School for Boys, and a First in English literature at King’s College, Cambridge.

It was at that august, yet self-consciously radical seat of learning that the eighteen-year-old Blantyre first found an ideological voice with which to express the vast, poisonous well of indiscriminate fury that had lived within his apparently perfectly placid exterior for as long as he could remember. To his Tory-voting parents’ horrified surprise he’d returned from his first term at university in December 1978 with his hair dyed jet black and sprayed into short, scruffy spikes. He had, he informed them with a defiant snarl that begged for an argument, changed his name to Bakunin and joined the Socialist Workers’ Party, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and an anarcho-punk band called The Spartacist League. The Blantyres told one another that this was just a passing phase. They were wrong.

After leaving Cambridge Bakunin went into teaching, but unlike most members of his profession his ambition was not to give his pupils the best and most enriching education; quite the reverse, in fact. He wanted to ensure that they learned as little as possible. His aim — one shared by a small, but influential hard core of extremists — was to create an embittered underclass, whose members would be lacking in skills, motivation or self-discipline. They would be shut out of the labour market and bitterly aware that they had no hope and no future. This would fill them with hatred for anyone better off than themselves, and make them ripe for recruitment as the foot soldiers of the revolution.

In the past few years he had abandoned his teaching career for a life of full-time political agitation, and as the fabric of law and order had begun first to fray, then fall to shreds, Donny Bakunin had become a sort of twenty-first-century Fagin. His gangs of urchins were not chirpy Artful Dodgers and innocent Oliver Twists. They were precisely the kind of young men he had always intended to recruit: functionally illiterate and innumerate, unqualified for any well-paid job but greedy for the gaudiest designer brands, and only too happy to seize by force that which they could never hope to earn by hard work. They came from every one of the myriad ethnic groups of South London, their perennial hostilities temporarily set aside in favour of a joint assault on society. And when the calls went out from Bakunin’s flat to others just like it on a dozen nearby estates, the gangs began to gather and an army of the night was formed.