Nik: Now I Know Read online

  Vic comes to and says with bluster: Sorry, dear boy, not much help to you, I’m afraid.

  It’s okay, I say. And it’s time I went. Things at home . . .

  Of course, yes, Vic says. I’ll see you out.

  At the door he slips a goff club from its bag and putts a pebble from the step. Old Chum lumbers after it like a geriatric caddy and disappears among the overgrown garden bushes.

  Pity you don’t play, Vic says. Easier to talk on the fairway. Fresh air. Exercise. Should try it. Strongly recommended. Give you a lesson, if you like.

  He is a different man from the one I’ve just been talking to. More lively but less likeable. The real Vic is hiding behind a shield of hearty gamesmanship.

  Thanks. Sometime, I say, and retreat towards the gate.

  You’ve only to ask, he calls, waving his club in farewell.

  I wave a non-committal hand and escape through the gate, thankful that a high wall makes it unnecessary for me to look back.

  †

  Nik—Sorry to have been so little use last evening. After you left, a thought occurred that might be helpful. I suggest you see some friends of mine. They are a kind of monk. Don’t let this put you off. They’re quite sane. They’re called The Community of the Holy Innocents. CHI for short. (We do have monks and nuns in the Church of England, though most people don’t seem to know!) I think they might be able to answer some of your questions better than I.

  If you can stay a day or two you might even discover some of the answers for yourself. Seek and ye shall find, as the saying is.

  Whether you do or not, I think you’d have an interesting time. The brothers will put you up free of charge. (Though you may be expected to help with a few small chores.) And without any religious obligation of course. I mean you don’t have to promise to let them convert you in order to qualify for free bed and board!

  Do try. You won’t regret it. I spend a spell there every year and always return refreshed. Write to Brother Kit CHI, at the address overleaf. Say I suggested the idea.

  God bless.

  Philip Ruscombe

  †

  Lacking clues, Tom visited the scene-of-crime.

  No one was there when he arrived. The cross lay in between a battered mobile crane and a pyramid of old tyres. He poked about, finding nothing except a confusion of footprints drying in the mud. Whatever else there might have been would, he supposed, have been carted off for lab treatment.

  An old man, hands in pockets, came wandering up.

  ‘After something?’ he said, unwelcoming.

  Tom flipped his identity wallet.

  The old man was small and stocky with high, hunched shoulders. He wore a grubby cap and a torn old pullover that might once have been green and was covered with flecks of wood shavings and a powdering of sawdust. His trousers were baggy, tired grey, probably part of an old suit. His face was clean shaven, though spiky bristles grew in the creases of rugged lines. A prominent nose—almost a beak, Tom thought—and pale sharp eyes. He looked about sixty but could have been older. A hawk-like man.

  ‘Thought your lot had finished here,’ the old man said.

  ‘You know what all this is about then?’ Tom said.

  ‘Roughly.’

  ‘Work here?’

  ‘Now and then.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Now and then. Supposed to be retired. Bloody fool idea. Retirement is for the dead. I keep a workshop. Do a few odd jobs. Nothing regular.’

  ‘Here early this morning?’

  ‘How early?’

  ‘Six o’clock?’

  ‘Too early for me, that is. These days any road. One benefit of being retired, you see. Can please yourself.’ The old man laughed.

  ‘But you know what happened?’

  ‘There’s plenty of gossip.’

  ‘And what does the gossip say?’

  ‘That some kid was strung up on a cross during the night but disappeared after he was found this morning. Something like that.’

  ‘Does the gossip say who did it?’

  ‘Hooligans, likely.’

  ‘And who the kid was?’

  ‘No. Nothing about him.’

  Tom nodded. He felt he was being stonewalled.

  ‘And what do you think, sir?’ he said with too careful politeness.

  The old man sniffed and grinned. ‘Nothing much.’

  ‘You don’t seem very bothered.’

  ‘Why should I be bothered?’ the old man said, looking away. ‘Anything can happen these days, and mostly does, if you wait long enough.’

  ‘Could I have your name, sir?’ Tom said, taking out his notebook.

  ‘Is it that bad!’ The old man chuckled.

  ‘Might need to talk to you again, that’s all.’

  The old man, shrugging, said, ‘Arthur Green.’

  Tom said, ‘You don’t own this dump?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Who does?’

  ‘Wouldn’t know. Fred Callowell runs it.’

  ‘Is he around?’

  The old man nodded towards a hut where the access road ended. ‘That’s his office. But he’s often out, buying and selling.’

  ‘Was he here earlier, would you know?’

  ‘Better ask him.’

  Tom looked round at the wilderness of scrap metal and pyramids of corpsed motor cars.

  ‘You’ll be here all day?’

  ‘Can’t think there’s anything more I can tell you.’

  ‘All the same, you never know.’

  Tom walked away, past the closed hut, along the access road to his unmarked car parked out of sight by the railway bridge.

  Arthur Green watched him go, then hurried to his workshop, two buildings along from Fred Callowell’s hut.

  †

  The day after Nik visited the vicar of St James’s, he read a notice in the local rag, headlined:

  CHRISTIAN CND

  PEACE RALLY

  Demonstrators were invited to form up in Field Road, near the maternity hospital (how the new mums would love that), at three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, before marching through town (how the shopkeepers would love that) to Stratford Park (how the bowls players would love that) for the inevitable speeches from local and (minor) national notables.

  A good chance for Christian-watching. Besides, he approved of the cause if not the method. Crowds and slogans never succeeded in convincing him of anything except that they were likely to be wrong.

  Nik stationed himself in the park well before time on high ground in front of a large lean-comfortable tree, from where he would have a good view of the proceedings. When he arrived few other people were there. Six or seven young men and women wearing armbands printed with M (for Marshal) were busy being important around a scaffold platform draped with Christian and CND posters. An older man in a baggy suit was giving them orders from the platform, calling everyone ‘Brother’ or ‘Sister’ in a way that, Nik thought, gave Christianity a bad name and mixed it up with loony trade unionists. A knot of policemen and one policewoman stood to one side, trying to look dispassionate, and muttering jokes to each other, which, from their side-glances, Nik could tell were about Baggy-suit.

  Five minutes before the demonstration arrived, a blaring out-of-tune brass band heralding its coming, the already grey and overcast sky started pouring rain as if to douse a fire. This settled, after its first enthusiasm, into a steady, drizzling fret. Under his tree, and dressed in his usual, though dishevelled, ex-army combat jacket, Nik was bearably protected. The police, ever prepared for the worst, donned waterproofs snatched from their van. The marshals, exercising Christian fortitude, made no concessions but laughed a lot and moved about even more busily.

  Baggy-suit tested the microphone, tapping and blowing on it, saying, ‘One, two, three . . .’ and then intoning, ‘He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.’

  ‘Matthew five, forty-five,’ shouted one of the
marshals from the ground and the others cheered.

  He at the microphone said, ‘Hallelujah, brother. The Lord reigneth; let the people tremble.’

  His aeolytes groaned, mocking his pun.

  ‘Psalm ninety-nine,’ yelled back he of the memory.

  ‘Brother,’ Baggy-suit called, waving at Nik, ‘can you hear me up there?’

  Cupping his hands to his mouth, Nik shouted, ‘Mark four, nine,’ this happening to be one of the few quotations that had stuck in his memory from all his recent reading.

  ‘What did he say?’ he at the microphone asked aside of a marshal.

  Marshal of the memory shouted, ‘He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.’

  Baggy-suit coughed. ‘Thank you, brother,’ he said and climbed down.

  JULIE: All that rain! And me holding up that silly poster someone had pushed into my hands while we were forming up. Rain was running off the handle straight down my arm. My hair was soaked and streaked in rat tails all over my face so that I could hardly see, and water was streaming down my neck. I remember you telling me afterwards that I was beaming great smiles and you thought I must be alight with the vision of God or something. But really it was only the rain trickling between my boobs and making me nearly giggle. Nothing holy.

  NIK’S NOTEBOOK: Carrying a poster

  Made me laugh. Saw her straight off, even before she was near enough to see her face or even tell that she was a girl. A kind of energy or something. Don’t know. Also, most of the others were playing at being demonstrators, looking around with a kind of pretend humility, but at the same time saying: Look at me, I’m protesting. As if protesting made them better than the people who weren’t.

  Note for history essay: If you’re protesting something – a belief or an opinion or an injustice, or anything – does your protest only ‘work’ if there are a lot of other non-protesting people to see you? Suppose it depends a bit on this, or who’s to know? But it oughtn’t to. And if protesting only depends on the publicity value, and isn’t worth anything in itself, is it worth anything at all?

  But this girl wasn’t being anything but herself. You could tell she meant it. Felt it. Her thoughts were her own. I mean were part of her.

  Seems to me most people don’t/can’t think. They only think other people’s thoughts. People who enjoy being in crowds are mostly like that. They like speeches and demos because they are told what to think. And because they are with a lot of other people the same as themselves, which makes them think they’re thinking for themselves and doing something about what they think. But they aren’t. It’s all a trick, a con. What they’re really doing is giving themselves up to somebody else who is just using them.

  Selah.

  This girl. Couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was so her. But she was taking part in this demo. How could she? She wasn’t just a goggle to look at. There was more to her than that. Why was she there at all?

  She was dressed in a floppy blue sweater that was too big and jeans you could see, even from the odd glimpse of them I got, had been worn by a male (or else she was hermaphrodite). As the sweater got wetter and wetter it hung heavier and heavier on her, and clung to her, showing her top half was indisputably female. She kept brushing the hair out of her face, and looking round with this slightly silly grin, as if she was observing what was happening as much as she was taking part. And what she saw was amusing her.

  Even before the trouble started I was thinking maybe I’d try and talk to her afterwards.

  STOCKSHOT: Who is there?

  I.

  Who is I?

  Thou.

  And that is the awakening—

  the Thou and the I.

  The trouble Nik mentions started five minutes into the first speech. A couple of hundred demonstrators were crammed together in front of the platform. On the platform nine or ten people were trying to look godly and peaceful. Two press photographers were darting about like sheepdogs herding a flock. The police, about twenty by now, were scattered around the edge of the crowd like blue fence posts, listening and watching with professional poker faces. Nik, under his tree uphill from them all, had a view of the whole scene and, by panning right, of the road from the park entrance.

  He was paying little heed to the speech, being too busy watching the girl. She stood in the middle of the crowd, her back to him. But even this hedged back view fascinated him. He willed her to move just for the pleasure of seeing it. Most of all, he willed her to turn and see him, and be as eager for him as he was for her. He wondered about tracking through the crush till, standing beside her, he could see her close up and be ready to speak.

  And would have done had he not been distracted by the sudden appearance along the road from the entrance of an open truck driving fast and festooned with Union flags and flapping posters bearing such messages as:

  NF

  KEEP BRITAIN SAFE

  BRITAIN FOR THE BRITISH

  and biggest of all:

  NF v COMMIE NUKE DEMOS

  Paraded on the back was a rampant squad of jeering, stamping men, late teens and early twenties, geared in bower boots and black leathers, bullet heads shaven close, fist-pumping arms tattooed and harnessed in studded bands. The rain gave them an armoured glaze and spumed in their wake.

  What happened next happened very fast, of course, and took everyone by surprise, as it was meant to, which also added to the confusion, causing people to behave irrationally, against their convictions and even against their natures.

  Some of the nearest police and demonstrators, hearing the truck’s approach, turned to look. One policeman walked towards it, his arms spread wide, flagging it down. The truck skidded to a halt in front of him at the edge of the crowd. As it stopped five or six of its squad jumped down from the side nearest the crowd and advanced, jeering, towards the approaching policeman.

  This, however, was a blind. From his vantage, Nik observed six or seven more squaddies jump down from the other side, split into two groups, and sprint round the crowd, one group heading one way and one the other.

  Before anybody had quite grasped what was going on, the leading squaddy had reached the platform, leapt onto it, snatched the microphone from the speaker, and was shouting into it himself:

  ‘This demonstration is another communist-inspired attempt to undermine the will of the British people to protect itself against foreign aggressors and against those who have no right to live here . . .’ Et cetera, ad lib.

  Julie at first thought this was part of the demo, some kind of stunt arranged by the organizers to help liven up the meeting and make their point in a dramatically ironic way. So she laughed and booed and mocked, thinking she was joining in the fun. Others around her must have thought so too because they reacted with similar amusement. But very soon, several events happening at the same time forced everyone to realize this was no stunt but was brutally real.

  Before the invader had said much more than is quoted above some of the platform party surrounded him, shouting objections, and trying to wrest the microphone from his grasp. This brought two more squaddies leaping up in support of their man. Their intervention turned the disagreement into a scuffle and finally into a brawl with fists as well as words being thrown. (Thus in minutes providing a graphic demo of how wars begin: provocation; angry objection; resort to physical violence; and so to battle.)

  Just as soon as his leader was interfered with, a squaddy stationed at the side of the platform for this very purpose grabbed the wires trailing from the mike and cut them with clippers.

  Meantime (mean time indeed) the gang of squaddies who had jumped down on the side of the truck facing the crowd were approached by three or four of the nearest police, coming to the aid of their mate who had flagged the truck down. The squaddies let the police reach them then dodged away in all directions, bulldozing through the crowd and snatching at banners, which they flailed above their heads, thus turning posters for peace into weapons of war (and demonstrating the neutrality of matter). As
they bludgeoned swathes through the protesters, people scattered, shouting, stumbling, falling, ducking away, the squaddies yelling and whooping, and raising Cain by way of yet another demonstration that all men are not brothers.

  During this riving diversion the oldest (he was forty if he was a day), biggest, most fiercely and expensively leathered squaddy of all, who had so far sat watching from the truck’s cab, climbed onto the back, and from there, using a bull-horn, continued the speech begun by his platform henchman.

  A couple of police, hearing this, detached themselves from the keystone kops pursuit now in progress against the crowd busters, and turned their attention instead to the silencing of the truculent orator. Only to find, as they ran towards it, that the truck moved off just fast enough to prevent them reaching it, circling skilfully, zigging, zagging, curling along the edge of the disintegrating crowd, thereby leaving the bill behind, sloshing about in the mud churned up by its wheels, and causing further mayhem among the protesters now fleeing outwards from the mêlée.

  NIK’S NOTEBOOK: Planned. All of it worked out before-hand and executed like a military op.

  She was trapped. And stood her ground, still holding up that gormless banner. Others near her scattered. But not her.

  One of the black leather boys came right at her, shoulder charging. She went flying, arms spread-eagled, legs kicking. Her banner rocketed out of her hands. He caught it in mid air, swung it, and batted her across the buttocks like she was a shuttlecock, sending her pancaking flat-faced, into the mud.

  That did it. Observer turned activist. Pacifist turned belligerent.

  I’ve never felt anything like it. Me, I’m a watcher, not a doer. The world is splitting at the seams with doers. People who think they know best, who want to be in charge, want to be the ones who make the running for the rest of us. Mighty Mice dressed up as Supermen.

  One of the reasons I like history is that it tells about the doers. And it seems to me the bigger the doer becomes the more he/she turns into a murderous, power-hungry, hypocritical, self-righteous, arrogant prig. While ordinary non-big-doers like me and Grandad and all the tellywatchers of the world, who want only to live our lives unmolested, are supposed to be thankful, and admire these Big-Doer creeps, who always pretend they’re doing what they’re doing for the sake of the rest of us, when they’re really only doing it for themselves. And they pay ad-people (who are no better) to make ads and TV programmes presenting them as heroes.