Christopher Brookmyre - Parlabane 04 (17 page)

'They can't all be gems,' he apologised with a shrug, which got more chuckles than the gag. 95

'We could do with one here,' Rory grizzled, almost but not sufficiently under his breath. 'Get rid of that shower we've got at the moment,' he added, louder.

'Hear, hear,' said Max, in the moment that heralded the evening's imminent, hurtling descent into becoming the dinner party from hell. 'Only way to shift them, I reckon. It's not as if there's a viable opposition, more's the pity.'

'What?' asked Kathy. 'You reckon we could get a more right-wing government than is already in power?'

'We can but dream,' Rory said.

'It would never happen,' ventured Liz. 'A coup I mean. We don't really do extremism in this country, not in large enough numbers anyway. Salman Rushdie wrote in
The Satanic Verses
that it was because of the weather.'

'The weather?' asked Joanna, laughing.

'Yes. Miserable summers, mild winters. No droughts, no hurricanes, no extremes. It's never that cold and, crucially, it's never that hot, so we don't lose our heads and we don't like things to go too far in one direction.'

'Sweet moderation and all that,' agreed Toby.

'I don't know,' Kathy said. 'We went pretty far in one direction during the Eighties. There wasn't much sweet moderation in evidence when Thatcher was in power. If you weren't "one of us" you could fuck off, as far as she was concerned.'

'Well, somebody had to draw a line and force people to choose which side of it they wanted to stand,' Max argued. 'There were too many subversive types trying to undermine this country back then, and Margaret Thatcher had the steel to expose them for what they were and make a stand against them.'

'The "enemy within",' agreed Rory.

'By what measure did disagreeing with Thatcher become equated with undermining the country?' Emily joined in. 'It's called opposition. It's called democracy.'

'Oh, come on,' Rory said. 'The left was full of nutters in those days. I was a student back then, and I remember the types. They were spoiling for a fight all the time, didn't matter the issue. The issue was just that week's excuse. Same agitators, same nutters. One week it was the miners, the next it was Apartheid, then gay rights, then the week after that it would be, I don't know, save the fucking whale.'

'Exactly, Rory,' Max resumed, buoyed by this show of solidarity. 'There's a difference between democratic protest and concerted, organised troublemaking.'

'Yeah,' said Emily. 'Democratic protest is a protest you agree with. Organised troublemaking is one you don't. I've got a two-inch scar on my skull courtesy of a police baton during an anti-Apartheid demonstration. Do you 96

think I got it because I was troublemaking, or do you think I was exercising my democratic right to protest?'

'I'm not saying there weren't important issues at stake,' Rory said, sounding a little cowed and conciliatory in the face of Emily's onslaught. 'I can understand folk getting hot under the collar about certain issues, but not bloody everything. There was an orthodoxy about you lot: here's a list of the things we support and the things we oppose. This month's boycotts and demonstrations are as follows. One minute you were wanting sexually explicit material banned - even page three - and the next you were campaigning
against
a law that would ban sexually explicit material in schools.'

'Only
homo
sexual material,' Kathy corrected. 'Clause 28 was minority bashing for the sake of it, the playground hard man beating up the unpopular kid because it made him look good in front of his mates. Damn right I protested about it. I'd say the question is why didn't you?'

Kathy's eyes were bulging, Emily merely sighing. The latter looked like she had less appetite for the fight, but more through fatigue than a lack of conviction. She'd heard both sides of the arguments too many times before, he guessed, as had Parlabane, and both knew the likelihood of anyone's minds being changed about much, even twenty years later.

'Actually, I think you'll find there was a bit more to it than that,' Max weighed in, his tone imprudently patronising. 'If you knew what those loonyleft councillors were doing in London with public money. . . Makes me mad to this day just thinking about it. Bah bah green sheep, remember that? Changing the words because it might offend ethnic minorities. Early days of political correctness running mad.'

And there it was, the line he'd known would be along soon enough: 'Political correctness gone mad.' Parlabane had referred to it recently in a column as

'the distress call of the thwarted bigot'. Any time he heard it, he felt he ought to rejoice, because somewhere, something must be being done right. In that respect it was the opposite of 'a victory for common sense', which invariably hailed some act or decision that satisfied the base and brutal instincts human civilisation had spent the past ten thousand years evolving away from. It should have been his cue to join the fray. In these days of anodyne debate and somnolent apathy, Parlabane had been longing for a return to such impassioned, even entrenched political anger. However, this exchange only had the heat and the bitterness, being merely a remnant of an old, stale but evidently still festering divide. It was like the night he and Sarah, vainly defying the approach of their forties and despairing of modern nightclub music, attended an Eighties Alternative retro night. After the initial hit of nostalgia at a few forgotten classics and emotion-memory carnal stirrings in response to the contemporary goth-wear, it all seemed very tawdry and sad, devoid of 97

the dynamism that had made the music, the clothes and the culture exciting at the time. It was devoid of that dynamism because it couldn't move forward, couldn't develop, couldn't evolve. It was no more than a snapshot, a compilation album. You couldn't go back, and, what was worse, it taught you nothing to try.

This was old news, an eternal echo of a dead debate: still reverberating, but unable to progress. He no more felt like joining in than he'd felt like moshing around to
She Sells Sanctuary
.

Still, he did owe the combatants a point of clarification.

'Bah bah green sheep never happened. The
Sun
made it up. They admitted it later. In fact, they and their counterparts made up most of the loony-left GLC stories. It was a concerted propaganda campaign, in cahoots with Tory Central Office, to rubbish the GLC so that they could abolish it.'

'Says you,' Max insisted.

'Says the journalists who wrote it. They were all pretty up-front about it once the GLC was gone and the job was done.'

'You can't expect me to believe that. If they weren't true, why weren't these stories challenged? Why weren't they sued?' Max demanded.

'Pointless. It was a smear campaign. A
Sun
or
Mail
reader's mind isn't going to be changed by a rebuttal in some other paper they don't read.'

'That's if they could find a paper to print their side of the story,' Kathy added. 'The Tories had the press sewn up in those days. There were so few mainstream outlets for dissent it was like living in a fascist state.'

'I was waiting for that one,' Rory muttered disdainfully. 'The Lefty's Lament. Anyone who disagrees with them is always a fascist. The country was like a fascist state in the Eighties because you were in the minority. Is it only democracy when you get your own way?'

'It was like a fascist state because--'

'To be fair, Kathy,' interrupted a voice, 'that kind of intemperate language doesn't help anyone.' Parlabane looked down the table to confirm that it had come from the previously silent - and still very softly spoken - Toby. 'If I recall, it was your own Denis Healey who spoke out against those calling Margaret Thatcher a fascist because it devalued the term and meant they wouldn't recognise the real thing if it came along. I lost count of how many times I got called a fascist just because I was a Tory. It didn't make me examine my conscience and re-evaluate my politics - and it didn't give me much respect for your lot either.'

'Mmm,' approved Grieg, nodding, his first contribution since 'Could you pass the white wine?' about an hour back. 'I voted for Thatcher, first time I could vote: '87. Didn't mean I was some kind of extremist. I didn't pay much 98

attention to politics, to be honest. I voted Labour in '97. It's all about choice, isn't it?'

Sadly, thus spoke the voice of the constituency that really decided British elections: the uninformed and barely interested wavering numpty.

'Quite,' agreed Campbell, who had looked a little shell-shocked throughout the preceding exchanges. 'I've always voted Conservative because I'm basically a business-minded person and they've always, to me, been the businessminded party. But I've never been any kind of extremist, and yes, like the others, I'd resent the implication.'

Liz was nodding too. 'It could even be argued that being so intolerant of your political opponents is fascistic in itself.'

'Well, bloody hell, isn't that just typical,' Emily exclaimed. 'You don't see a Tory for ages, then half a dozen come along all at once. Okay, you want to talk about political intolerance? Margaret Thatcher turned conference debate into Stalinist rallies and witch-hunted the so-called Wets - and that was just how she dealt with dissent on
her
side. She seemed offended by the very idea of anyone disagreeing with her, and she cracked down hard to try and stop it. Her regime had MI5 spying on law-abiding British citizens because they were

"potential subversives". If you were a member of CND, they were tapping your phone. Does that sound free and democratic to you?'

'The intelligence services have to spread a wide net to catch big fish,' Campbell stated. 'It's a necessary evil that they'll end up spying on people who are innocent, but you're just as likely to be monitored if they think you're an extremist of the right. It's the only way to catch the dangerous ones before they do serious damage. Basically if you're doing nothing wrong, what's the harm?'

'You mean aside from gross invasion of privacy and violation of your civil rights?' Emily retorted. 'Anyway, I'm not talking about extremists plotting to blow up parliament. MI5 were infiltrating trades unions, political groups: legal, democratic organisations. That's how they broke the miners' strike: they had agents close to Scargill, passing on information to the state. What was Arthur planning to blow up, do you think, Max?'

'It's no wonder Thatcher was such an admirer of Pinochet,' Kathy added.

'Every time she was at Wembley Stadium for the FA Cup Final, she must have been eyeing the place up with a wistful sigh and thinking: "If only".'

'Sounds like we're back to calling people fascists,' said Liz. 'I take it you're being facetious.'

'I'm entirely serious,' Kathy insisted. 'She knew what Pinochet was doing, and it didn't stop her inviting him round for fireside chats. I've very little doubt that woman would have had subversives eliminated if she thought she could get away with it. In fact, she did, in Gibraltar. The SAS shot dead three 99

IRA members, unarmed and in broad daylight. The order came from the top, and her own sources don't dispute that. Thatcher wanted to give the IRA "a bloody nose", their words, after Brighton.'

'And quite bloody right,' said Max. 'They were there to massacre British soldiers and citizens in a bomb attack, not abducted from their beds by snatch squads. They weren't political opponents, they were terrorists.'

'They were murderous scum,' Kathy stated vehemently. 'But according to the laws of the country those SAS operatives were supposedly protecting, even murderous scum have a right to be tried in a court before sentence is passed, and that sentence is no longer allowed to be death.'

'Sure. They should have been apprehended, at the risk of killing or injuring British soldiers in the process, put on trial and then, on the off-chance they actually
were
convicted, they would call themselves political prisoners and be out by now as part of the so-called Peace Process. In fact, they would probably have cabinet posts in the Northern Irish Assembly. Is that what you'd prefer?

Gibraltar wasn't an act of fascism, it was self-defence against fascism, for what else could you call blowing people up because you can't get your way in a democracy?'

'Live by the sword, die by the sword,' Grieg added, in another essential contribution. 'They got what they were planning to dish out. I've no sympathy for terrorists.'

'Neither have I,' replied Kathy, 'but the point is we're supposed to be better than them.'

'Fight fire with fire, I say,' Grieg observed, going all out for that cliches-towords-spoken record ratio.

'I don't imagine Red Adair's with you on that one,' Parlabane mused, unable to resist in the face of such unthinking vapidity.

'It's just a metaphor,' he replied testily.

'Or an analogy, even,' Parlabane corrected.

'Yeah, well, the point is, the world wouldn't miss a few more dead terrorists.'

'And would we kill them after they'd carried out an attack or pre-emptively?'

'Preferably before. Either way, it's no great loss.'

'How long before?' Parlabane asked. 'When they're poised to strike? When they're on reconnaissance? When they're hatching their plot? When they join a proscribed organisation?'

'No, we should wait until they've killed as many people as possible, as usual, before we do anything that might have hand-wringers like Philip Young bleating about civil rights,' said, inevitably, Max. Philip Young was the spokesman for Taking Liberty, not an organisation Parlabane imagined Max having a direct-debit subscription to. 'You know, I really do wonder how many people would still be alive today if we
had
been fighting fire with fire.'

100

'Absolutely,' Grieg agreed. Campbell nodded also. Max was looking around for further assent. Liz wore an impatient frown, as those overemotional female creatures were wont to whenever men started talking about killing each other. Rory, who had grown quiet during the latter stages of the argument, didn't meet Max's eyes. Instead he looked across at Toby, rather furtively and not for the first time. Parlabane couldn't see Toby's face to read what, if any, response he had for either man.