It hadn’t been the first time she’d attracted the attention of security in Sainsbury’s, although on the previous occasion she’d been in the company of her dear chum, the actor Robert Goodman, so she hadn’t really blamed them. Bob, blessed with what a desperate estate agent would call “distinctive features”, had during his various career played the Hamburglar, and the corpse-humping rapist solider in Luc Besson’s Joan of Arc, while in a number of advertisements for car alarms, alongside his appearances upon The Bill, Eastenders, and in Batman and A Fish Called Wanda, he had made the role of Second Scar-faced Thug his own. Given Bob’s murderous demeanour, she wasn’t surprised that they’d been followed round the store. If Alma didn’t know Bob personally, and if he wasn’t currently researching stuff on her behalf pertaining to tomorrow’s exhibition, then she’d have him taken out by snipers; would have more than likely done so long ago. This latest incident, however, had no such extenuating circumstances: she’d been stopped and questioned because she looked poor. In fucking Sainsbury’s, which Alma hadn’t realised was now such an elite concern. By contrast, here in poncey Marks & Spencer’s, the one guard who’d ever spoken to her had just smiled and said he was a fan. Class prejudice, apparently, is not seen as a major issue, possibly because its victims are traditionally inarticulate. Alma herself, of course, never shuts up, particularly when it comes to people of her background being demonised. She can drone on about the subject endlessly, most usually in the two or three media interviews she does each week, or some more permanent form. No, she won’t be needing an apology.
Back in Abington Street, burdened by two carrier bags now, she carries on towards the coffee shop down at the bottom, Caffè Nero. Why name a café after someone like Nero, Alma wonders? You might just as well call it Caffè Caligula or Caffè Heliogabalus. Or Caffè Mussolini for that matter. The caffeine of Europe.
The café stands roughly on the former site of the town hall, the intermediary model serving as a stepping stone between the first Gilhalda on the Mayorhold and the splendid current Guildhall round the corner in St. Giles Street. It was here on this spot almost ten years before that Alma had crossed paths with then-Prime-Minister-in-waiting Tony Blair, on a pre-landslide walkabout with suited Reservoir Dogs minders and the rictus grin and painted eyeballs of a ventriloquist’s dummy who’s determined not to go gack in the gox. The party had been sauntering down Abington Street just as Alma had been walking up, sunbathing in the awed attention they clearly imagined they were getting from the utterly oblivious passers-by. You could tell that inside their minds they were parading down the recently pedestrianised precinct, all in flattering slow-motion with the faint breeze ruffling their jet-moulded hair attractively.
Scanning the passing faces for a sign of something other than indifference, Blair’s eyes had eventually met Alma’s grey and yellow hazard lights. Of course, she hadn’t known at that point he was going to drag the country into an interminable and disastrous war, buddying up to the Americans with a view to his own retirement prospects, but she’d been aware of him for years and knew that he would almost certainly be doing something vile. She’d watched him and his party tacitly support repressive Tory legislation like Clause 28 or the Criminal Justice Bill. She’d watched him ‘modernise’ the Labour party by excising the last vestiges of the core values that her parents and grandparents had believed in; watched him sell the poor, the disinherited and even the trade unions who’d brought his party into being down the same endlessly rolling opportunist river. On the afternoon of her encounter with him, then, despite the fact he hadn’t been elected yet, she’d thought to get in her retaliation early. She hadn’t looked daggers at him, she’d looked Daisy-cutters, with a glare of such intensity that she would only normally employ it if she were attempting to blow up the moon. There had been fields once that had given Alma cause to look at them like that, where now there would be nothing growing for the next few hundred years. She’d held the contact long enough to make sure it had registered, waiting until Blair’s grin had frozen to a rictus and his startled eyes had undergone their first-to-see-the-creature moment before she had curled her lip and looked dismissively away, continuing with her ascent of Abington Street.
Entering the café now to grab a cup of hot black tea and slice of Tiramisu, she talks with the Polish girls behind the counter before relocating to a punch-drunk leather armchair by the window, still considering her brief encounter with the man who is at present hanging on to leadership with the desperate tenacity of a hand-chosen lobster clinging to the ornamental castle in the restaurant tank. This is the man who by his own account has felt the hand of history upon his shoulder with such dreary frequency across the years and yet has never realised that it’s fastening a label saying “stab me” to his back with Sellotape.
Levering up a forkful of her custard/coffee cake towards the tag team of bright red Mexican wrestlers that are her lips she thinks about the pair of local men, both former Labour Party members, who are currently confined by a restraining order which prevents them leaving England and forbids them talking to each other. One of them, a civil servant by the name of David Keogh who lives just off the Mounts, was a communications officer seconded to the Foreign Office during 2005. While thus employed, Keogh had received the transcript of a conversation between Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush in which the gangster and his moll had discussed the advisability of bombing non-combatant Arab television station Al-Jazeera. Understanding that this was a war-crime in the making, Keogh had panicked and passed on the information to his fellow Northamptonian and Labour Party chum, former political researcher Leo O’Connor, then employed as an assistant to Northampton South Labour MP and erstwhile Inter-City Firm football enthusiast Tony Clarke. Alma has always had a soft spot with regard to Clarke, who seems to her an honourable, decent man. To be fair, she supposes that unless he’d wanted to be in the frame himself as part of a conspiracy the MP would have had no choice but to do what he did upon discovery of the memo, which was putting in the call to Special Branch.
This has led to a minor quandary at the Foreign Office, detailed in the pages of a recent Private Eye. Apparently, while one department of that august body had been claiming that the Bush/Blair Al-Jazeera conversation never happened and was the malign invention of Keogh and O’Connor, a completely separate department had announced in its response to an enquiry on the case that although they possessed a transcript of the conversation, they could not release it. Alma wonders how they’ll charge the pair for breach of the Official Secrets Act without reminding everyone what the official secret under scrutiny had been. Her guess is that they’ll leave it a few months until some new catastrophe or scandal has eclipsed the matter and the overall amnesia of the general public has had time to kick in. Then they’ll rush the case through court with a D-Notice on the media, preventing press and television from giving details of the original offence in any coverage. That’s what she’d do if she were some pink-faced Magister Ludi in the depths of Whitehall.
Blotting mascarpone from the scarlet crime-scene of her lips, she feels indignant that this Kafka re-run should be happening to people from her town, one of them living on the Mounts just past the northeast corner of the Boroughs, her beloved neighbourhood. Mansoul, it is the very seat of war.