My Little Armalite (15 page)

If you are constructing your own AR-15 from new castings, some of the small holes can have debris in them from the forging process. A small drill bit, turned by hand, will clean these nicely
. You don't say?

Laughably easy. But hold on.

No!

Yes.

Bill bloody Gates!

Even if the gun nuts at AR-15.com, or the people watching the gun nuts at AR-15.com, had not put cookies into my system, as they surely had, there was still the entire panoply of unseen demons that work away in the bottomless deeps of Windows: hard-disk traces, swap files, Internet trails, registry entries. There was no escape. Somewhere on my computer there would now be God knew how many ghostly references to AR-15s and Armalites.

Think about it and tremble.

If anything
did
go wrong, if I
was
caught dumping the gun and the police took a look (as they certainly would) at my laptop? Now they would find, as well as unguarded liberal chit-chat, the digital shadows left by my downloading technical drawings of assault rifles.

Shit.

There was no escape.

Now I would have to dump or destroy the bloody laptop as well as the gun. More bloody expense. More lies to Sarah. And who knows how to truly annihilate a hard disk? I would have to make sure it never got found by anyone, just in case. Into the Thames with it too, then. Surely, it would never be dredged up, and surely even if it ever were, a few weeks of total submersion in filthy polluted water would wreck the bloody thing?

I had no choice, sod it.

Impatiently, I waited while all my recent work was blipped across to the university and backed up on my memory stick. Oh come on, you heap of Japanese crap. For God's sake, this is supposed to be
broadband
! Einstein was right, time is relative and PC down-time is the longest kind of time in the universe.

But at last the interminable three and a half minutes had finished. Huffing with annoyance, I snatched up the printed-out AR-15 plans and rose swiftly from my chair.

—Aaaah! Shitting fucking stupid little …

Having recovered from the brain-shaking impact on the underside of the stairs, I got to my feet again and stalked angrily to my shed.

I was in no hurry to build the gun.

I had several hours until I was sober enough to drive, and my plan was in any case the sort best carried out during the coldest, darkest hours of the night, when the living give up and the dying die, and good, normal people are all asleep. So I took it slowly and methodically.

With my perfectly legal plans printed and spread out before me on the floor of my shed and a pint of double-strength coffee inside me, I had, rather to my own surprise, no great difficulty in reconstructing the Armalite using my father's Imperial-gauge toolbox.

The greatest problem was that I had firmly decided, just in case, to take great care that no possible trace of my bodily contact should remain on the gun.

After all, you never know who, public or privatised, might have access to your innocent bio-data in New Labour's quasi-police state! So I kept Sarah's kitchen gloves on throughout the entire process, though it made things very fiddly. But however long it took, nothing deterred me. No bruises and pinches set me back. This was striking, because I had often given up completely on a piece of IKEA furniture for much less. I was delighted to find myself working away at the sort of problems which would normally have stopped me dead.

—Here I am, Dad, look at me!

Yes, well, now, what next?
Install hammer in receiver

with feet pointing rearward away from hammer
. Feet? Whose? Mine? Oh, I see. Yes, that seems right.
Use 5/32” punch to retain hammer in place as you insert hammer retaining pin
.
Fine, OK, got that.
When installing the bolt catch, first drive the roll pin about halfway into the rear hump from the rear of the receiver.
Rear hump? Rear hump? So, does that mean … Aha! Yes, yes, perfectly clear.
Install spring on to hammer, ends of spring to rear and shoulder on back of hammer
. Eh? Oh, I see. Yikes! Ouch!

I whipped my fingers out just in time to avoid them being seriously caught and checked that the rubber gloves had not been perforated.

As I worked away, I pondered this new ability to accept pain and endure fiddliness. I had often wished to feel like this. My father, who was by trade an electrical engineer, was so inured to volts and amps that he could hold a wired-up spark plug with his bare hands whilst the engine was running and happily show off the leaping blue sparks. I once saw him send an incautious friend flying across a garage by smilingly inviting him to do likewise. Perhaps it was just a question of becoming accustomed to anything? For example, if I had been systematically head-butted every day for some weeks, back in the early seventies, rather than repeatedly being surprised by spontaneous and unexpected nuttings every now and then over a period of dismal years, would I have become head-butt-proof? Perhaps Dad should have beaten me when I did wrong or acted spinelessly, not simply sighed and gone back to his shed?

Insert spring and detent into receiver. Compress detent in recess using 3/32” punch and rotate tool
. Shit, this is a bit tricky …

My God, imagine it! Walking into a rough pub with absolute confidence that if any little drunk decided to have a go at me, I could simply take his first shot smack on the nose or cheekbone, then say, in good Devon:

—Right, mate, now we know you can dish it out, so let's see if you can take it …

Yes, perhaps after the Very Important Paper was done, I would sort out this irrational fear of physical violence once and for all.
Push out tool with pivot pin and rotate until detent is in groove of pivot pin
. Gotcha! Hey, why not? I could find a local gym where they taught boxing. Phil was bound to know of one. I could pay someone to hit me in the face, very gently at first, of course, until I simply grew to accept pain and became unafraid of it, and then of punching back.

How different my life would be. I could teach my new skill to Jack and William so that I need never worry about them being bullied again. Perhaps I should start tomorrow? It wouldn't take me long, surely? It wasn't as if I was that unfit. I could still swim a length underwater. By the time I came to give the Very Important Paper, I could've learned enough so that if any pebblelensed, stoop-shouldered, bearded little shit dared to bring up Panke's membership of the KGB again, I could just step down from the lectern, walk through the rows of chairs with a bare-toothed smile on my face and deck the four-eyed little pen-pushing bastard with a single right hook to his flabby, chinless …

I pushed my spectacles back up on to my nose, and yawned. The drink had ebbed away, leaving a sour tidemark somewhere behind my eyes. My skin felt like thin old newspaper and I realised that I had, bit by bit, become thoroughly chilled out, here in the shed. I was grey. Perhaps I should just call it a night right now and crawl to bed and …

I finished the bit of gunsmithing I was doing and looked blearily down.

I blinked.

There, on the shed floor before me, quite unexpectedly, was a gun. A whole and entire assault rifle.

Kneeling, I looked down at the finished gun and felt life prickle back quickly into my cheeks. I stood quickly up and shifted my weight this way and that, to look at the gun from every possible angle, as if I might thereby suddenly understand it. I leaned and peered. No secrets were revealed. I knelt again, stretched out a hand, and speedily withdrew it, as if the gun were some sleeping but highly aggressive animal.

Ridiculous. It was not alive. It was just a passive thing. It would do exactly what I wanted it to do, no more, no less. As the AR-15.com site had said a hundred times, guns don't kill people, people kill people. This object would,
could
, no more attack someone without me explicitly ordering it to, by a complicated and conscious process of loading, readying, pointing and shooting, than, for example, my laptop would or could send a lascivious email to one of my female students unless I myself typed one in and clicked it away with full intent.

Exactly. If I walked away right now and left the gun, it would just lie here for ever until the dust of centuries covered it. It had no will and no desire. It was neither good nor evil. And after all, when you thought about it, to know something of the feel of a gun was, for many males, indeed quite probably for a majority of males now living on earth, simply par for the course. Just another part of life.

I lifted it cautiously, only to get the heft of it.

There, you see? Was that so hard? Just a power tool, really. And one I had myself just put together. Nothing
scary or mythical whatever, once you got your hands on it and your brain round it. Lite indeed. My father's old metal-shelled electric drill had been heavier than this, surely? And smaller than I would have thought. Just a normal lump of metal from the world of men who bowl tyres, flip manholes, hump crates. A thing cleanly made in a perfectly proud and legal factory somewhere, like anything else you care to name.

Now, why not try it? Just fit on the
buttstock
(ha, I knew it was
something
to do with butts and stocks). Simple. And see how my hands, which I normally assumed were just much too small for manliness, curled perfectly well around what I would until that evening have called
the handle thingy
but which I now knew was properly known as the
pistol grip
. We live and learn. No trouble at all for my index finger to slide into the trigger guard and on to the trigger itself.

Meanwhile, the left hand presumably goes here, under that fat waffly bit around the barrel, in fact aka, to we in the know, the
handguard assembly.
Like so. Yes, no doubt at all about that. Lift the barrel to horizontal, nothing to it really. Now, if I recall, you pull back that slide thing to
cock
it (really, does it all have to be
quite
so Freudian, tee hee?). It's perfectly safe, I know the thing is empty because I just
built it myself
, ha ha! Now, draw the buttstock into my shoulder. See how well it fits! And now close one eye, lower my head, squint along the sights and …

Clack!

Quite fun, actually.

I lowered it slightly and turned it in my hands. It shone darkly. There really was something about it. Like a fine camera, an expensive watch, a Mercedes engine. Chunky, sort of, yet light and exact. Purely functional and, perhaps for that very reason in a way, yes, in a
very real way, beautiful. You had to laugh, really, at the ridiculous English fear of this inert and guiltless piece of precision machine tooling. Really, we are just
so
tight-arsed. Or indeed,
assed
, ha ha!

Yes well, but that was enough laughing.

Now it was time to go and get rid of it.

With playful reluctance, I lowered the gun. I taped the magazines to the sides of the handguard. I snapped two links from a roll of stout bin bags and soon had the entire thing swaddled in black plastic. Jauntily, I slung it under my arm like an umbrella. How easy it all was. How ridiculously scared I had earlier been. A gun, so what? Into the river it was going. Yes: so easy to throw, now.

I stepped outside the shed and tested it, spear-like. Absolutely. If I wanted to, I would from here be able to guarantee clearing the garden wall without the slightest difficulty. I could do it, right now, were it not for my responsible fears as to who might discover it. Much, much better than trying to control a whirling bolas of metal weights flying about loose inside a bin bag.

You see? The practical application of pure reason. Excellent.

Away with it, then, and tomorrow back to normal. Back to work!

In fact, it had been an interesting evening, one way or another. Quite refreshing, really. Not often something unexpected happens, these days. God, how I was going to work tomorrow!

I yawned, left the shed and marched across our stupid little garden, my secret gun casually held in my arms. Little did anyone know, ha ha.

Through the house, grab the laptop and so briskly out, for the second time that evening, into the darkly luminous bowl of the London night.

I set happily off for Tower Bridge.

Geography, hydrography and psychology agreed on my destination: Tower Bridge was easy for me to reach and the water must be pretty deep that far down the river. I had visited it with the boys only two weeks before and I recalled the low railings beside the narrow pavements. An easy throw. And anyway, we all like the big moments of our lives to have good backdrops: it makes us feel as if nature gave a damn. Suicides choose beauty spots. Once the gun and laptop were safely drowned, I could stop and walk around in the quiet of the night, have a cigarette as I sat on the old cannons, where I had sat as a boy, and watch the wintry dawn.

I would make it memorable. From tonight, whenever I got bored or annoyed with life, I would recall this moment of picturesque liberation and be content.

That was the plan.

But as I drove northwards I found myself vainly trying to work out what the hell was going on in London tonight.

In my mind's eye, I had clearly seen myself cruising towards the big river along streets as deserted as in some sixties TV programme about an alien invasion. So why were there so many people about? It was an ordinary weekday night, for God's sake, and four-thirty a.m. Could Londoners really so deeply hate the Congestion Charge? What else could possibly send so many of them setting off for work so early in the late-November darkness?
Had flexitime gone totally mad under the merciless assault of the global free market, forcing all these poor sods out of bed so early? Had I missed a general-election night or a moonshot?

At length, of course, I had to admit that the roads and pavements were alive not with determined or exploited workers fighting their way to their jobs, but with drugged-up, drunken little arseholes who were still out partying. Our vile neighbours, who evidently considered it perfectly normal to start after midnight, were in fact merely like everyone else.