My Little Armalite (33 page)

How simple and lager-filled things were all going to be. How dreamless. And soon I would be just archaeology:

Ah yes, observe. A fine example
, Homo londonensis
from the
Early Chinese Plastic Crap Age.
An individual of no great rank, almost certainly, since he was unearthed in what was then to the south of the river, which (as we saw in last week's lecture) seems to have represented a clear and distinct watershed, possibly tribal in nature. A troubled culture, it is certain. The records are scanty because the socio-environmental disaster which overwhelmed their society was, once the unseen tipping-point had been reached, so sudden and so overwhelming. It appears, however, that they had access to virtually limitless
amounts of plastic-electronic artefacts, many of which have no discernible function and must therefore be regarded as totemic objects. They seem to have worshipped a now entirely mysterious pantheon of demigods called
TV celebs
, whilst living in superstitious dread of an undescribed but evidently hostile entity known as
the mortgage rate
…

I stumbled at last out of the cab and into our street without even thinking seriously about the Armalite lying there in the Mercedes before our door.

So what? Let it stay there!

What difference did it make now? The VIP, and with it my career, was about to be cancelled in any case. The police could do nothing more to me. I might as well just leave the gun in the car, call them, as soon as I felt well enough to face them, and tell them absolutely everything.

Problem solved.

In fact, it would save me even having to confess to that bastard Bill Adams. Yes, indeed: now that would be an easier email to send altogether. The message leaped clear to my mind as I fumbled for the keys to the front door.

Dear Bill,

I'm afraid that having spent the last five days (!) under police interrogation for no other reason than that in New Labour's police state anyone who, perfectly innocently, as is of course the case with me, happens to find an assault rifle in their back garden, university lecturer or not, is immediately suspected of being a terrorist, I am in no position to deliver my paper on Heiner Panke at the conference. Please accept my bitterest regrets. If any senior committee members feel, as I hope they
do, so outraged at this new evidence of the disastrous consequences for Britain that flow from our poodle-like support for Bush's so-called War on Terror that they wish to contact the media, and thus maybe even get me an interview in
The Paper
after all …

Yes, well, something like that.

I slid shivering through the door of our house and was greeted by the grey emptiness of a cold house at sunset in winter.

I am aweary, aweary
.

The sight of my little Edwardian writing desk under our stairs and of my beloved Victorian captain's chair waiting before it felt like a sentence of death. They would never make it to north London now. No more of that. They were wholly inappropriate to our coming new life in SEgodknowswhat. Flog them off in the free ads or on eBay. IKEA for us from here on in.

Unable to bear the sheer silence of the house, I lowered my head very carefully under the staircase, sat at the laptop and logged on. At least in cyberspace there would be some evidence of my existence (
I have
email, therefore I am
), even if it was only more demands from the Quality Delivery Unit.

There were indeed many new messages from them. Oh well. I was going to have another fifteen years or so of this, so better stop carping and get on with it. More whining students. For God's sake, yet another petition from that idiot against the ban on Israeli academics. What chance does he think he's got of getting
that
through the union AGM? Another automatic non-answer from
The Paper
, bunch of snooty bloody …

What?

Wait!

Oh my God. It was not automatic and it was not a
no
.

Dear Dr Goode,

Thanks for yours. If Panke's DEF going to be there himself (can you reconfirm this pls if poss from his own office, no offence!) the Asst Acting European Editor will send me along re: piece on New European Left/Anti-Globalisation. That wd be fun. I haven't been back to Oxon since I left last year! I see you were there too. What coll when? Maybe you left before I came up. Anyway it wd be fun, wouldn't it? Cd you email asap BRIEF notes on Heiner Panke/aims of the DEBB/recent electoral stats/yr CV? Sadly no cab funds here for me yet (boo!) so cd u meet me @ Oxon station?

kr
Alex
(Alexandra Hesmondhalgh)

I leapt to my feet with a cry of despair that was cut short as my head rammed into the underside of the stairs. The stunning crunch threw me to me knees and set off a new tsunami in my head and bowels, to match the one raging in my soul. After all these years those bastards on
The Paper
had finally recognised me, just when it was too late to do me any good!

Retching yet again, I now knew that the sheer injustice of the world was finally proven.

I sat on the bottom stair, my head sunk deep between my shoulders. If only I had never found the bloody gun! What had I done to deserve this?

I wanted to call Sarah, very badly.

I tried to rehearse how I would inform her of our new and somewhat more modestly conceived future. But as I began to construct my well-argued explanation to her, something happened.

I lost the power of mental speech.

The words would not come out, they would not even begin to form. I was trying to talk to her but I could not begin to see her face: my mind's eye simply failed to conjure her up. As soon as I even began to think about what I might say, the person I was addressing stopped existing.

Myself I could quite easily see, standing by the gasfired barbecue on our little tarmac drive, stubby bottle in hand, swapping opinions about the relative merits of Chelsea and Manchester United, Ford and Toyota,
The X Factor
and
Big Brother.
No longer haunted by lonely dreams but happily sharing the bright, blatant wish-world of millions. After the odd night in the local pub (opened in 1990), my male neighbours and I would watch Hubby Huck. So much for me. I would adapt, not die. As for Will and Jack, I could, without too much trouble, almost joyously reimagine our boys as regular teenage lumps untortured by bullying or insecurity, headed seamlessly for banks or IT companies, and why the hell not? They would soon be out-earning me, and
I would be glad. Even my beautiful Mariana I found little difficulty seeing as an unthinking little princess of suburbia, utterly fitted for the modern world. I would happily greet her accountant husband-to-be.

But not Sarah.

When I tried to imagine Sarah in the little low-ceilinged lounge of our identikit home, or in our small and eazi-2-kleen kitchen, or going up the narrow, slow-rising stairs towards the flat-faced modern door of our uPVC-silenced little bedroom in the arse-end of nowhere, or talking about what happened last night on
BB
with our neighbours, there was just nothing there. Sarah plus
that
life was simply an equation that could never work out, the square root of minus one, matter and anti-matter occupying the same place.

I knew right then that whatever I said, however much I argued that it was all for the benefit of our children, Sarah would never agree to live like this, not because she
didn't want to
, but because she
couldn't
, because if she did, she would, in that instant, cease to be herself.

The woman I loved and had always loved and will always love could never, ever be that.

And so, you see, it was my love for her that pulled me through.

I had weakened, yes.

Lost in the mapless new world, I had been about to abandon everything I believed in.

I had been ready for re-education.

I was prepared for malls, muzak and Sky. To love even
Big Brother
and
The X Factor
.

But she, my angel, was my salvation.

The physical impossibility of Sarah and
BB
/
TXF
co-existing in the same space made her my eternal and indestructible truth, my mighty fortress, the rock on
which my cowardice shipwrecked and my selfhood clung.

She gave me back all the hopes of the seventies.

Only the best is good enough for the workers.

She flung open the tall sash windows of my dreams again, taking me back to a lost age when uPVC and market discipline had not even been invented, let alone conquered the world.

Stop now? Give up? Accept the bosses' offer and get back to work?

Not I.

UPVC?

Oh, I don't think so.

Not for Sarah. She had always been my sash-window girl.

Sashes and Schumann, by fuck, she would have.

Yes, sashes and Schumann and all that go with them.

I was the clever boy from the rough comp, and fuck me if I wasn't going to make the deal stick.

It's down by the Bogside that I long to be.

I wasted not a moment more.

I carried my doomed laptop almost tenderly out to the garden shed. There I placed it on the oil-stained sheets of
The Paper
, which lay there still. I opened my father‘s toolbox, bent low, inhaled deeply from its manly depths, then levered the computer bodily apart with a large screwdriver and, wielding a two-pound lump hammer (MADE IN ENGLAND), speedily reduced its Far Eastern innards to small fragments of plastic and metal. It felt bizarrely like something I should have done many years before, and left me laughing with the ancient delight of sheer liberation.

The cow was right after all: freedom is freedom is freedom!

I gathered the resulting shards carefully up within
the newspaper and plunged the lot into the grease-filled suitcase. I lugged the suitcase across the garden, through the house and out into the street. I opened the boot of my car and heaved the suitcase in.

—What you up to, Prof John? Oh, nasty bump that. Awkward boots, these Mercs. Made you jump, eh?

—Yes, actually.

—Here, Prof John, you look like shit warmed up. I can smell the beer and puke off you from here. Well, leave a man alone, what do you expect, eh? Nothing good, that's for sure! What you got in there then? You chopped up some tart and taking her to the river to dump her? Ha ha!

I looked my neighbour in the eye properly. I realised that I had never done so before. For the first time I was not trying to please him, so for the first time I held his gaze. With ancient certainty, I saw his eyes, and with them his judgement of me, change for ever even as I stared back. Still I held the look. I wondered if I should show him the Armalite under the passenger seat. How he would look at me then! But I controlled myself.

—Sorry, Prof John, you OK?

—Just thinking, Phil. You said you can get new plates for a car, right?

—Oho! You on nine points, Prof John? Fucking cameras, eh?

—No. But I have got a little job.

—A little job, Prof John?

—Tell you what, just let me dump this old suitcase, then fancy a pint later on, Phil?

Darling, it's three a.m. and I'm sitting here in my rather large and lovely cedar-clad shed (how cleverly I got it to just scrape in beneath the height-limit of the planning regulations!) in the really almost substantial garden of our modest enough but very pleasant and these days ludicrously desirable Edwardian semi. But I'm not working on the script for the new show, I'm afraid. Instead, I'm standing on the small mezzanine platform above my writing table, looking out of my special little chapel-like window high in the eaves, making this supplementary recording exactly a year after what you've just heard.

I mean, it does seem rather as though I've got away with it, but you
never can tell
. Particularly as it now seems that I must, sadly, employ my little Armalite again. I have taken all the precautions a clever man can take, and my cover story will again be tailored to the prevailing mood of the country, but only God knows how it will pan out. So if you do, at some point, indeed still find yourself needing to sell my story, your potential buyers might want to know how it felt to have clawed my way back to the normality that was all I ever wanted for us.

So how
does
it feel, to be here now?

To have read
Pooh
to Mariana, to have helped Jack and Will do their interesting homework for their frankly rather posh (though theoretically comprehensive) school, then to have smoked my evening cigarette in the garden whilst secretly watching you playing
Schumann to yourself until the first guests arrive from all corners of north London to help celebrate my new commission from the BBC?

How the hell do you think it feels?

It feels bloody good, is how it feels.

Just right, in fact, is how it feels.

This
is what Tiggers like best!

And all because my little Armalite gained me, in less than one minute of full-auto action, the sort of name-and-face recognition that one usually only gets by slaying a Beatle, throwing twenty billion dollars at the New Hampshire primary or grilling a bit of fish on the box.

The TV footage was actually very good. As you'll no doubt remember, if only because it was reused yet again in that prime-time advert I did recently for insurance to
protect your loved ones
in case of unforseen events …

We press PLAY.

I, John Goode himself, walk to the podium of the Oxford Conference with Panke beside me: I small, plump and shy; he large, loud and leader-like. The camera swings to take in the applauding lecturers, their faces fixed in the idiotic chimp-like smiles that tell you they are looking at a higher-status hominid.

Panke, little knowing what is in my notes, makes a joke in German that gets the hall guffawing, and the subtitles tell the world:
My little doctor feels a little tired.
Indulge him. I never saw him drink so much beer, even when
we sung together while the wall was still standing!
He claps me so hard on the back that I stagger and drop my notes. As I kneel to pick up the papers, Panke sighs and speaks again. The captions inform us that he is saying:
I had better help. He might get my life backwards!
We might end up back in the bad old days. But in fact, you
know why the Chinese are so happy? They still have their
wall!
At this, the lecturers roar with delight.