Country of the Blind (36 page)

Are you out of your fucking mind?"

"He thinks you're very sharp, very perceptive," Sarah had told her, in that surprisingly (and right then comfortingly) English accent. "He was singing your praises after your TV performance. I know you must be feeling like the little girl that's lost in the department store right now, being led around by the hand, but believe me, if Jack didn't think you had something he could use, he wouldn't have brought you here. He'd have dumped you with some babysitter

- Jenny, probably - and picked you up again when the coast was clear."

"Who's Jenny?"

"Oh, I'm sure you'll probably find out. But believe me, Nicole, when he comes back you'd better be wide awake."

Nicole felt momentarily distanced from herself as Parlabane spelled out 204

what he had done and what he had discovered, suddenly catching a glimpse of where she was, what she was doing, what she was part of. Part of - not on the fringes, not spectating, not along for the ride. In on it. Working to crack a conspiracy of unknowable proportions, staying frosty to evade the assassins, discussing options and scenarios, her opinions sought and considered. Despite the fear, the fatigue and the disorientation, it was an image of herself she wished she could frame. If only they could see me now. If only who? Her father? No. With the best will in the world, he'd still only be able to see his little girl in danger, and the thought of his concerned face brought the little girl within that bit closer to the surface, training the fear upon where she was most sensitive to it. She blocked his image from her mind.

Rob.

Yes. If fucking
Rob
could see her now. Rob who saw her as a different little girl, a little girl with cute little tits who he liked to screw, and a little girl whose triviality got on his nerves after he came. Rob of the standard-issue scrawny goatee and ever-present pack of "Marley Lights" sticking out of his shirt pocket, that triangle on the lid like the attention-seeking pride badge of a love that can't help but speak its name: narcisexuality. Rob of a thousand lefty causes, each one more earnest than the last, providing moral reasons to disapprove of just about every nation, state, organisation and individual on Earth. Rob the sensitive feminist, who used his disgusted-deconstruction-ofaggressive-male-sexuality routine to get women into bed. And Rob, whose habit of saying "come to Papa" as he rolled on a condom and she took her knickers off, might keep psychoanalysts busy for a very long time. Parlabane wasn't really expecting Michael Swan to appear on national television and admit that he had murdered Roland Voss. Mind you, he hadn't been expecting a dead man to appear on television a few nights before and tell him that there was a massive cover-up going on, either. But while each revelation came in a form that was understood by Parlabane alone, the difference was that Swan didn't know he was telling him.

"So can't you find out who was up at Craigurquhart, who these MI5 guys were?" Nicole asked, with a restless impatience Parlabane would only tolerate in someone whose life was under threat.

"Not today I can't," he stated, leaning back in his chair, Sarah sitting on the arm of it, absently stroking his hand. The six o'clock TV news was burbling quietly in the background, the volume down since the latest Voss manhunt item ended, but the VCR still whirring, Parlabane now obsessively recording every broadcast on the matter. "I've learned in this line of work that you have to be careful who you're asking questions about, and who knows you're 205

asking. And on this case, I think we only have to look to the late Messrs Lafferty, Campbell and now Hannah to appreciate that discretion is definitely the better part of valour."

"So what are you going to do?"

"Right now? Lock all the doors and windows and sit tight until
The Saltire
comes out. By which time I expect to be sound asleep. Tomorrow, things will look a lot different. I know it doesn't help these poor sods on the run, but there's nothing we can do until that paper hits the streets, and we certainly can't do them any good if we're dead.
The Saltire
's running the booby-trap story plus pictures, which should buy you a little insurance. It's also running the floorplan and my contention that the Voss Four couldn't have done it."

"This is running under the false byline, right?" Sarah said, concern on her face.

"Yeah, the usual," Parlabane confirmed. "John Lapsley. Anyway, once all this stuff's public, we can stand back and watch where everybody jumps.
Then
we can start asking who else was on that grassy knoll and other such awkward questions. Because then
everyone
is going to be demanding to know what really went on up there."

A silence fell among them, the absence of their voices letting the sounds from the TV fill the gap, their re-awareness of it in the corner once more drawing their eyes. Michael Swan was standing at a lectern in a low-ceilinged room, temporary lightstands visible on one side of the small stage, which was partitioned off by pale blue hoardings. Michael was talking but it was not his words that provided the soundtrack; whatever his speech had said, it was being summarised for the viewer by Roger Oakham, the Conservative Central Office press officer who had long been masquerading as the BBC's political correspondent.

"Bring back John Cole," Sarah muttered.

"Hondootedly," agreed Parlabane.

Then Michael's voice did break in, the snippet that had been selected for direct consumption.

"We will not let Europe impose its so-called standards on Britain, when by

'standards' it means dragging us down to its level," he said, all bad suit and rehearsed histrionics. "We will not let filth flood into this Christian country, filth that will corrupt young minds, filth that will degrade women. . . and filth that will cause sexual violence figures to soaaar."

Very onomatopoeic, Parlabane thought.

"For let anyone who doubts the power of this filth listen to these words: 'We are your sons, and we are your husbands, and we grew up in normal families. I had a wonderful Christian home. But pornography can reach out and snatch a child from any house today.' These are not the words of a moralist, or a cam206

paigner. These were the words of Ted Bundy, the American serial murderer, who confessed that pornography drove him to kill and to kill and to kill and to kill. And this same pornography is what Brussels wants to bring into
our
homes
.
British
homes."

"Jesus, not this shite again," moaned Parlabane. If the Voss story was this week's orchestra, Swan and his crusade had been the kazoo player in the background, more irritation than distraction, and Parlabane had been a wee bit too busy to pay attention to it. It had started on Monday with a few radio soundbites, fairly off-the-cuff, but now Swan had obviously progressed to the full-on press conference, doubtless including glossy info-packs for the assembled hacks, and probably a homepage on the fucking Internet: http://www.tory.wanker.co.uk.

"Quoting Ted Bundy," Parlabane said, shaking his head. "He'd sound more credible quoting
Al
Bundy. 'Hey, Peg,'" he mimicked, "'vote Conservative.'"

The Bundy shite was familiar to Parlabane from his LA days, when he had heard it trooped out regularly by Republican equivalents of Swan to support a worryingly fundamentalist "family" agenda. Christian Reactionaries Against Pornography. Bundy was a serial sex killer sentenced to death in the US, who was approached by the pro-censorship Meese Commission and told that if he linked porn to his crimes, they might be able to get the sentence commuted to life. So despite never having blamed it before, and despite the police finding none on him, Bundy suddenly decided Porn made me do it. (Cf: God made me do it; see also: A big boy done it and ran away.)

What Bundy didn't tell the Meese Commision was that from the age of three he was raised by his grandfather, an exceptionally violent man who regularly beat up his family and tortured animals. Neither did he mention that his own mother was a wee bit concerned at occasionally finding this normal wee boy stabbing his own bed with butcher's knives. But hey, that kind of shit didn't work so well in a soundbite.

"So what's this about?" asked Sarah, whose routine of alternate working/sleeping often meant major news developments passed her by.

"It's the FILM Accord," said Parlabane. "All caps, but it's not an acronym. It's an EC body; they'd need a different name or acronym for each member-state's language, so instead they come up with something everyone understands and then cap it up so that it sounds important. They used to have MEDIA 92 and MEDIA 95, before the funding plug got pulled."

"So what's FILM?"

"Glorified policy and consultative committee. They sat down with the movie and TV industries to see what they could do to make Europe less of a maze in terms of rights, ownership, copyright, legislation etcetera. They came up with the FILM Accord. Everyone's ratified it except us, surprise, surprise."

207

"And what does it actually do?" asked Nicole, who like most other people in the UK had only heard about it since the start of the week, and then only in relation to Michael Swan and "filth".

"Well, lots of itty-bitty boring things to do with 'satellite foot-prints' and

'domestic production quotas', and some bigger things, like a new, EC-wide co-production treaty, which does away with the old treaties' pain-in-the-arse obligations to employ a certain amount of cast and crew from each participating country, which resulted in what you call Euro-puddings - dreadful movies full of B-list actors from three different countries with tortuous plot devices to explain away the clash of accents."

"Cut to the chase, Jack," said Sarah.

"Okay. The FILM Accord would also standardise film and video censorship across the EC. That's the big one, controversy-wise. At the moment, the distributors have to submit
every
movie to
every
country's censors, then have to re-edit to that censor's standards to get a certificate, because what gets the equivalent of an 18 in France might still need further trimming for the UK or Belgium or wherever. So it wastes a lot of time and costs an unnecessary fortune; apart from re-cut costs, censors themselves charge by the second. And obviously in some countries - some extremely sad and repressed countries not a million miles away from where we sit - there are things you can't show at all. So particularly at the 18-certificate end of the spectrum, you can end up with oodles of different cuts of a film floating around. And to do all that reediting and resubmitting, obviously you're spending time and cash that might better be used to make more films and therefore more jobs for actors and technicians.

"The FILM Accord would mean that what's allowed in one country is allowed in all. So the distributor just submits the one cut of a film across the EC, and each country can say 'we give that an 18', or 'we give that a 15', but they can't say 'we're banning this' or 'we won't classify it unless you remove such-and-such'. Each nation retains the right to
classify
a film as they see fit, but what they can't do is cut bits out. So in this country, the name British Board of Film Classification would no longer be an Orwellian euphemism. It would cease to censor."

"But the bottom line is that hard-core porn would be legal in the UK?" said Nicole.

"The legalisation of images explicitly depicting sex between consenting adults would be a by-product of the legislation, yes," he said with a wryly false importance. "And that's something Mr Swan appears to have 'just noticed', even though his government - indeed his department - was represented on the FILM committee that drafted the proposals."

"What are you getting at?" asked Nicole, aware of Parlabane's arch look. 208

"I mean I wouldn't be surprised if it was his fucking idea in the first place. Or if not, that he was aware of this ramification early enough to have done something about it before now."

"And why would he do that, why would he wait?"

"Because this is the Tories' last roll of the dice. This is where he raises the banner one last time and hopes the troops stop fighting amongst themselves long enough to rally round before the election. All this Euro-rebel and Euro-sceptic nonsense. . . The reason it did so much damage wasn't just because it caused rifts in the party, but because it confused and thus bored the arse off the voters. Your Tory-voting
Sun
-reader doesn't have a bloody scoob about whether he's in favour of monetary union or a single European currency; probably thinks the ECU's that blue and yellow thing Rod Hull used to cart around. The only issue the Tories were able to get them remotely interested in was whether Lizzie's head would still appear on the notes and coins. So it doesn't do any good to pose around objecting to Brussels if the average voter doesn't understand what you're objecting to."

"Well," said Nicole, "it strikes me that what most of them were really objecting to was the idea of Johnny Foreigner telling Blighty how to steer its own ship. 'Bloody cheek, don't they know we used to run this planet' and so on."

"Yeah, but they couldn't actually come out and say that. But
now
, now Michael's giving the punters something they can really get their teeth into. Jesus, forget cows. That was obviously desperation, any excuse, no matter how embarrassingly ridiculous - I mean
cows
for Christ's sake - to unite us glorious Brits against a common foe. Mooo! And it was an own-goal of Terry Butcher proportions, because even the fucking tabloid-readers knew the whole farce was Britain's fault. But this? This is manna from heaven. Dirty foreigners trying to force filth into decent, British, Christian homes. This way he's calling in the xenophobic vote, the moral-majority vote and the religious vote. Thus giving the disillusioned Tories out in the shires a common enemy to struggle against, a real cause to fight for."

Sarah was shaking her head. "Sneaky bastard."

"He's also giving himself the role of champion," continued Parlabane, "plus a stoater of an aunt sally to be seen battering."