My Little Armalite (10 page)

God, if only I had stuck to my guns.

Hitler and the Nazis! Every five minutes there's something on the box about Hitler. The swastika sells books that would normally be stuck for ever in the
library stacks. If only I had acted straight away when the Wall came down! I was still young enough, back then, to reinvent myself. Too late now …

A shithole run by the Red Army?

Could she be right? Had I simply wasted my life? No, no, that wasn't possible. There had to be some way round this one, some way I could …

Of course! Father Eamon! He would set me right!

—Oi, come on, Prof John. What you doing? Get over here with those beers.

—Yes, sorry, Phil. I was just …

—Why-are-we-waiting?

I forced my feet to yield to my shrinking willpower and made it to the table, where a grateful crowd of orc-like hands clutched for the glasses before the tray even hit the table. I raised my own pint weakly in reply to the jolly mockery about my tardiness, then sank back as quickly and deeply into my seat as I could. The noise of the television and the cries of the massed drinkers now seemed to issue from some faraway planet. The pictures on the Big Screen looked like an ancient newsreel.

—Yeeeees! Goal! Fucking gorgeous!

—Ye-es! cried I weakly. The noise of the cheering pub passed over me like a big green wave. It surged into my ears and through my mind. Feverishly, I gulped icy lager. I needed to talk to Father Eamon and I needed to talk to him now.

—Inger-land! Inger-land!

—Tra-fal-gar! Wa-ter-loo!

—Ha ha ha!

—Collaborating cunts!

—Ha ha ha!

I had to leave. I made myself suddenly look round, as if in bleary response to a vibrating alert. I patted my
pockets, as if searching for my phone, and looked at the dead screen as if at a text. I was pretty sure I had done it all convincingly.

—Oh shit, I groaned loudly, and got quickly to my feet.

—What's up, Prof John?

—Text from my mum. I've got to go and call her.

—Got to look after your mum, Prof John!

—Yeah. Sorry, er, boys. Excuse me, ta …

I shoved my way apologetically from the table. I aimed for the door. I turned for no reason and saw that the barmaid was watching me while she poured drinks for another man. I walked swiftly out from the pub and into the rain, trying not to let myself run until I was clear, already reaching for my phone, as if there, in my pocket, some wonderful salvation was waiting.

The pub doors swung shut, sealing off the warm, beery heaven behind them, and I ran up the bleak street through the cold rain, scrolling through my address book.

Christ. London? This?

I mean, who decided to arrange this country so that you had, absolutely
had
, to call the bloody property market right once every ten years? So that the
only
thing that actually mattered these days, the sole factor that decided your life and your children's chances, for anyone on a remotely normal income, was whether or not you bought a house in London ten years ago (—
I know, John! It's terrible! I really don't know
what
we'd do
if we were looking now. It really
isn't
right!
'). Ha bloody ha. So nice of you to sympathise.

And what can I do about it now? Nothing. Economise, like Mum and Dad said? Well, yes, that would be really useful, if a colour telly still cost 5 per cent of a middle-class home and Majorca was only for the jet set and Edward the bloody Confessor was on the throne. If it could help get us a semi with sash windows in some place near a park where we could dare let the boys go out on their bikes alone on an early summer's evening, of course I'd tighten my belt for a few years. Tighten it? I'd pull it in until it crushed my liver against my backbone! But what can I do that is ever going to even scratch the top layer of paint off a one hundred and seventy-five bloody grand mortgage? Nothing! All I can do is pay up and pay up and pay
up, every month, for ever and ever and ever and, and … and, oh God, Dad, why oh why didn't you just take out the biggest bloody mortgage you could get in the seventies and grab the biggest place you could lay your hands on before that cow Maggie went and encouraged every …

I found Father Eamon's number.

And what if, what if the most dreadful of all
what
ifs
came true? What if (please God, no!) I'd paid through the nose at the top of the market for somewhere that was actually only just at the very high-tide mark of quasi-gentrification? If the social waters of London receded those vital few hundred yards for another ten years?

I rang.

Antarctica was once joined with South America and Australia.

The animals who happened to be standing in what is now Antarctica were all doomed on the very day in some rainy season all those aeons ago when the straits finally grew too wide to swim. No evolutionary leap could save them now. They continued to change and struggle for forty million years or more, but they might as well all have lain down and died that very day. Nothing of them remains.

And what about us? What about people socio-genetically engineered to succeed under Crafty Harold and Darling Teddy? Is there no place laid aside as a reserve for us? No quiet, backwoods peninsula where students are respectful, big houses are cheap and essays are done by hand? Where hard-working state-school boys are taking over the Georgian rectories while the ginsodden posh sell up as they melt away in the face of history's inevitable march and punitive taxation? Where soccer players end up running pubs, if they're
lucky? Where accountants are glad to be socially noticed by grammar-school teachers and where the rough people live jolly lives of full employment and weak beer, in lifelong work at sixteen, married off in a rented council house by twenty and safely waked shortly after sixty-five, all as planned for by Nye Bevan's experts?

God rot the blasted woman! If only the bloody useless IRA
had
got her!

—Come on, Eamon, answer the bloody phone!

No one could say that I had actually
promised
Sarah anything when courting her.

We never talked like that, obviously. Absurd, no way. We were young, it was love. I was a part-time tutor at the University of London; she was one of my students. God, I fancied her. I never dared even to try to kiss her, because what could a broke, four-eyed postgrad offer a beautiful girl like her? But the term before her finals, I landed my first real lecturing job. Being no longer her teacher, I was free to kiss her if I dared. And being now a proper lecturer, I dared. Soon afterwards I visited the house in Exeter to tell her parents I wanted to marry her. And when I looked back now, I was pretty sure that around that time I had hinted, or suggested, or at least acted and talked in such way that she could clearly infer, in a perfectly modern way, yes, true, but still, that by agreeing to marry me she would be choosing a life that, in the perfectly normal, natural, unspoken way of things, was going to involve a place like her parents' place, at the absolute very least, before very long at all, almost certainly in some nice (though vaguely defined) part of north London. Not a life that would drag her from one northern city to another, culminating triumphantly in this flat-fronted little terraced
house in SE11 with not even enough space for an upright bloody piano …

—Well, John Goode, by God!

—Eamon! Thank Christ! I need to talk postmodernism and I need to talk it now!

Eamon Sheehan was a gay historian I knew from the Irish pub in Kentish Town in the eighties. He had been a young man in Ireland at the time of the Pope's hysteria-inducing visit, days when a military coup was rumoured, holy statues were regularly seen to move and the ambitious all fled to London or America. Young Eamon, who hailed, said he, from a boghole somewhere beyond nowhere, mistook the gaseous cramps of the dying old cloth for the twitchings of renewed life and hitched himself, as did several hundred other likely young Gaelic lads in unlikely jumpers that heady year, to what turned out to be the fast-disappearing coat-tails of the Church: he found a vocation.

Another life washed up at one of history's tidemarks.

A lesson, no doubt, for all of us who tremble at the sight of massed young Muslim males chanting the name of their God: this, too, will pass as soon as they all get steady jobs in the financial-services sector. Unless they don't.

Eamon saw the darkness following certain unsavoury revelations concerning the priests of his own childhood. This was in the summer of 1989, just before my own job prospects were mortally threatened by the collapse of communism. He swiftly reinvented himself as a post-modern historian of Irish Catholic imagery, wrote a book full of photographs called
Kitsch Kerry Christ
, which you can find on practically every gay couple's shelves, and got a job teaching art history in Dublin; I speedily married Sarah and went off to Manchester and post-Germanunification
studies. Having such differing lifestyles, we had met only rarely since, but the bond of those frightening months, our time spent cowering under fire in the trenches of utter career ruin with thirty bearing down upon us and our CVs blown to tatters, kept us in desultory e-contact: we had seen the Horror together.

—Are you busy, Eamon?

—Are you drunk, Johnnyboy?

—God no. Well, maybe a very little tipsy. So, hey, Eamon, have you got a minute or two?

—Hold on, let me just fire off a sexy reason for my handsome avatar leaving the virtual bar. Shall I claim that a gang of my postgrads just knocked on my door, wanting pre-club liveners in Stephen's Green? Why not? In cyberspace, no one can hear you lie. We live in the last brief golden age of the written word, an Eden where ugly fuckers with good keyspeed and ready wit can still arouse that vital first erotic spark. Universal webcams will spell the final victory of Body over Spirit and the death knell of European dentistry. Till then, I lie as fast and brightly as I can. There. Virtual persona off for cocktails. Now, what gives in the sad bad world of so-called reality?

—Eamon, I need your help.

—Then you must be in a fine old pickle, begob.

—I'm writing a big paper for the peer-group conference, a plenary paper, actually.

—You? A plenary paper? Well fuck me sideways. Not on that shite KGB-funded poet you pushed for years, I assume?

—Yes, actually, but that's the trouble: I've sort of, I don't know why, I've just started to, well,
think
about things. I mean, what if I've wasted my life, Eamon? What if the place I dedicated my life to studying was only ever a shithole run by the Red Army?

—Sounds like a reasonable description.

—So what if all my work just doesn't
mean
a bloody thing?

—Oho! Got you in one.

—You have?

—I see, my man, that you are suffering from an acute attack of losing trust in meaninglessness. You, hopeless fool, have backslid into wanting it all to
mean
something.

—My God, Eamon, you're right!

—Johnnyboy, I can see that we need to look at this again from first base. Allow me to demonstrate it by a concrete example, you hopeless Brit. I shall read to you from my blurb accompanying an exhibition hereabouts. This will, I think, make the importance of postmodern theory clear. Let's see … blah blah blah … oh yes, this is where I start to hit the sweet spot:

O'Leary's almost undetectable interventions in her (re)found objects, her Mother's/Madonna's fetishes of unquestioned adoration, undercut the whole project of ‘Western' forays into so-called subjectivism and primitivism. Here the primitive is the known and the subjective gaze the conviction of Truth itself. With this subterranean dynamic, O'Leary structurally insists that the viewer question her engagement as viewer with the act of viewership, constructing an implicitly infinite (and hence perhaps by definition heavenly) range of meta-/physical subjects.

—Bloody hell, Eamon.

—Talk about heavy slice, eh? Now, tell me what that means, Johnnyboy?

—What? Well, um, I suppose it sort of means that …

—It means that if the right member of the curatocracy comes along to the gallery and I lay it on them with a trowel and they go away feeling that this could be a handy subject on which to base some of their own priceless spouting, a cokehead neurotic by the name of O'Leary makes a mint for strewing white rooms at random with her dead mother's yellowed collection of sixties parish newspapers from the ol' County Clare. And I, as her discoverer, the man who made her fit for theorising about, get on to the panel of the Dublin Modern Art Biennial next year, hence able to make young people's careers at will by the imprimatur of my bullshit, hence getting laid wherever I go despite being almost fifty and having European teeth, as happy as a cardinal in a home for orphaned boys, is what it fucking well means.

—Right. So, you mean, I should just think about how …

—Weaken not, Johnnyboy! Last millennium we had things called Right and Wrong. Guidebooks for life. You yours, I mine. The Pope and Charlie Marx. Until we were forced to realise that the Virgin Mary only works for illiterate farmers, that Lenin was a disaster for the twentieth century and that the Labour Theory of Value is right up there on the sanity chart next to the Holy Trinity.

—I suppose so.

—So if
we
were wrong, does that mean the
others
were right? The boring, hard-working, election-voting, shop-keeping, job-holding, tax-paying, child-rearing, mortgage-servicing, acceptable-level-of-violence-maintaining middle-of-the-road fuckers?
Right all along?
Them?
Admit
that
?

—But, Eamon, if we admitted that, we'd be saying, well, we'd be saying that …

—Indeed. We would be saying that spoiled priests and defrocked Marxists should by rights be grateful to get work stacking shelves. Are we going to say that? Like fuckery we are! Instead, we shall say (wait for it!) that if
our
right was not right after all, there is, in fact,
obviously no such thing as Right and Wrong
!