Normally I’d devote days like this to what I called political work. (I’d almost persuaded Annette it was some kind of elaborate game-plan whereby I’d work my way up, from writing long pieces for obscure organisations and tiny pieces for famous organisations, to being the sort of global mover-and-shaker that a grateful humanity would some day commemorate with statues on the moons of Saturn.)
Today I had more serious plans. I found an old address for Reid in my Filofax, and a current one (with the old one crossed out) in one of Annette’s diaries. I worked my way through every free-market, libertarian, anti-environmentalist or just sheer downright reactionary organisation I’d ever had any contact with, and phoned or sent Reid’s details to their mailinglists. After about an hour that was done, and I wasn’t satisfied, so I set out to cover a few more angles.
I leaned on the doorbell of the Freethinker offices in Holloway Road. Behind me the traffic rumbled past. As ever I felt saddened by the dusty window-display of sun-paled, damp-darkened books and pamphlets. After a minute the Society’s secretary let me in. A slight-built, middle-aged man with a deeply lined face, eyes large behind thick glasses. Kind and unselfish and poor as an atheist church-mouse. I told him what I wanted, and he let me get on with it, busying himself with his breakfast while I picked my way through files, sifted stacks of magazines, got ink on my fingers from trays of painfully created label-sized addressing-stencils.
It didn’t take long to compile a list of journals and organisations, mostly American, that could be guaranteed to stimulate a bit of free thought. By way of thanks on the way out I bought for full price a seriously shop-soiled copy of a selection from Thomas Paine’s works. I browsed it while I used my Travelpass on an ideological whistlestop tour of London, from the Freedom Bookshop in Angel Alley and the Market Bookshop in Covent Garden to Novosti Press Agency in Kensington, getting back via Bookmarks in Finsbury Park just in time to meet Eleanor coming out of school.
These are the times that try men’s souls…The summer soldier, and the sunshine patriot, may shrink from the service of his country…
Reid miserable? He hadn’t seemed so, except for that moment when he’d talked about union meetings. Looking back, I thought I’d seen in his eyes a desperate recollection of a waste of evenings, and a premonition of more to come. If he could try to fuck my wife and fuck with my life, the least I could do was to fuck up his mind. Reid was spooked by his ideas; he had wheels in the head. He identified with his beliefs in a way I never did with mine. He didn’t enjoy exposing them to challenge, but when some bit of grit was dropped in their fine machinery he went to endless trouble to remove it, to clean and polish the wheels and replace any broken teeth. He’d once kept me up, if not exactly awake, half the night as he teased out the intricacies of a surreal debate the Fourth International had in the early ’eighties: over whether Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea was or was not a variant of…capitalism.
‘Stubborn, and literal, and so goddamn serious’ – Annette had his number in more ways than one. And so did I. There was no way Reid could ignore any political literature that came through his letterbox. He’d worry away at refuting the most manifest absurdity, check up on every recalcitrant factoid and bold-faced lie. By the time he’d struggled with all those conflicting views, Reid’s soul would be sorely tried.
Other streets, other summers…We met Reid at marches against the poll tax and apartheid. In the black June of ’89 we sat down in a Soho street with thousands of Chinese and hundreds of Trotskyists, and sang ‘The Internationale’, and he nodded, giving me an almost worried look, when I told him I would march with the Taiwanese students.
‘Ah so,’ he murmured. ‘The Kuomintang. Catch you later.’
Neither I nor Annette said anything more about what he’d said to her, and he always seemed to turn up with a new girlfriend for every demo. All of them, Bernadette and Mairi and Anne and Claire, seemed to me like distant relatives of Annette, dark Irish girls with bright eyes and ironic voices.
He never commented on the steady trickle of anti-socialist or dissident socialist or maddeningly wrong-headed socialist material I kept sending him. In the end I think it was redundant: the way things went in the Communist world, the subscription to Moscow News would have covered the lot.
But it had an effect, and it wasn’t the one I sought.
7
Critical Life
‘Basically,’ says Ax, as he and Dee wander back along the canal-bank towards Circle Square, ‘I don’t know if I believe it. I mean, most people just dismiss it, like, well, flying saucers and Old New Martian ruins and Elvis and shit. But I’ve heard stories.’
His pause indicates that whatever stories he’s heard, Dee’s going to hear too. She nods.
‘Go on.’
‘Well, some of us…not Tamara, not the activist types, OK, have always thought, or wished, that Wilde would come back. Or come through. And over the years, people have seen him. Or said they have. Out in the desert. Sometimes walking, sometimes driving a ’track. Usually he’s with a girl, and he looks like he did when he was an old man.’
He’s been going on about the iniquities of society for a few minutes now. He’s talked about things that have happened to him, and about how they’d be all right with Reid but not with Wilde. Wilde wouldn’t have stood for it. This Jonathan Wilde seems to be a mythical figure, somebody who knew Reid and lost out to him and who might, equally mythically, some day come back and avenge the oppressed. Dee has listened politely, filing it all away for more detailed study later. She’s handling it as she used to handle social occasions. But what he’s just said brings her up short.
‘What do you mean, an old man?’ she asks.
‘Somebody who hasn’t re-juved before stabilising,’ Ax replies flippantly. ‘Quite a sight.’
Dee shudders, thinking of how people used to fall apart like badly maintained biotech, how they’d eventually just stop. Horrible. She’s sat through classical movies with Reid, and they give a very different picture of Earth than historical romances do. Nobody lives happily ever after.
‘I saw an old man recently,’ she says. ‘In the last couple of weeks. An old man with a girl, in a truck. Called up Reid’s front office, said it was a wrong number.’ She glances sidelong at Ax. ‘Not many old men here. Could that have been Wilde?’
Ax looks at her with sharp scepticism. ‘What was this guy like?’
‘Hmmm,’ says Dee. She moves her lower lip over her upper teeth, then wipes her thumb across the teeth and observes the streak of lipstick.
‘Something bothering you?’ Ax asks, amused.
Dee stops in mid-stride. ‘Yes.’ The memory belongs to Secretary, but it resonates with several of her other selves as welclass="underline" all the new ones she’s loaded up have this odd imperative, linked to the memory and tagged to their root directories.
‘Just a minute,’ she says.
There’s a bollard a few metres away. She walks over to it and sits down, flipping the back of her black lace skirt carefully out of the way, so that she sits on the bollard, not on the skirt. The iron is cold through fine leather, thin silk and bare skin. Ax, watching, gives an appreciative moan, but Dee has already boot-strapped into the dry clarity of Sys.