My Little Armalite (2 page)

I'll have come back from my war and I'll never speak of it.

We'll have not truth, but love.

And I'll remain for ever the boldly liberal man whose story I've set down over the last few long, lonesome evenings but who now, as I sit here under our stairs at three a.m., trembling somewhat, it is true, at what I am to do tomorrow, as well I might, but firm in my intentions, my little Armalite and I all ready at last (
at last!
) for manly action, seems so very far away from me that I find I can scarcely recall his name …

I, John Goode, was a normal, liberal man who, apart from stoning policemen during the Miners' Strike (as I frequently admitted at dinner parties), had honestly never even fantasised (as far as I could remember) about seeing anyone getting physically hurt (apart from Maggie and George W. Bush, obviously).

I'm sure I would have stayed that nice man my whole life long, but one November evening, while I was out planting some young plum trees in our small London garden, I found a machine gun buried under our little patch of lawn.

Actually it's an
assault rifle
.

But how was I to know the difference (if any)? What did I know about machine guns? Nothing. I wasn't American, so I'd never met otherwise-sane folk whose domestic equipment included machine guns. I wasn't European, west, east, north, south or middle, so I'd never been made to spend time in a barracks, learning about machine guns. And I wasn't from the Rest of the World (pretty well all of it, except for the bits that still have Elizabeth on their coins), so I hadn't been used from birth to seeing snappily dressed paramilitary policemen swanking around the place, slinging machine guns.

No, I was English, and though my militarily useful years (now gone) had coincided almost entirely with an era (now past) when her central foreign policy was readiness for a war (now unthinkable) in which national annihilation was the probable outcome, England had
never remotely expected me to go soldiering. So like most normal Englishmen, I had never felt the slightest need to concern myself with developments in personal weaponry.

It's true that some three months before, while sitting in a taxi from Paddington to WC1, feeling important (because I hadn't been in a black cab for years, let alone when someone else was paying) and excited (because I knew I had a real chance of getting this job, which meant London was beckoning me home at last) and scared (because I might yet blow the interview, thus probably dooming myself and my beloved family to northern cities for ever), I had seen quite a few guns.

Amazed and affronted, I had seen English bobbies swanning toughly about with small machine guns and stylish earpieces as they patrolled the concrete-block ramparts of the American Embassy. The mere fact of cradling guns seemed to make them swagger heavily from overfed hips, in a deeply un-English fashion. Next thing, they would be wearing reflective bloody shades. Oh, some of them already were.

I laughed with outrage at this charade and asked my cab driver (until then we'd been happily chatting about the weather, as required by local custom) what the hell good were machine guns against suicide bombers, eh?

What, for God's sake (I demanded roundly), did the famously incompetent, historically corrupt and structurally racist Metropolitan Police intend precisely to do if somebody suddenly tugged sweatily at a suspicious belt amid those innocent visa-queues of people? Just open up, with no doubt inaccurate little machine guns, from every angle? In the middle of London? Ridiculous. Even if it really was a terrorist for once and not just some poor bloody Brazilian plumber with skin a shade too dark for his own good, adjusting his trousers at the
wrong time and place! They would probably kill more people that way than would ever be hurt by a small bomb going off in an open space. You didn't have to know a thing about guns (and thank God we don't have to, here!) to see that the whole, well, yes,
charade
was complete nonsense. Just the government trying to make us feel under permanent threat, obviously. And how did we get into this mess in the first place, with terrorists in London? By kowtowing to the bloody Yanks and their insane neo-imperialist war of choice!

My arguments were so clearly sound that the cab driver contented himself with chewing his gum and looking in his rear-view mirror.

No, I knew nothing about guns and had no desire to know more. Naturally, I had been taken, as a boy, and had, just two weeks ago, taken our own children, now that we were living in London (
at last, at last! Daddy has delivered!
), to see the chocolate soldiers in Whitehall, horse and foot. But when I noticed that my sons were more interested in the flak-jacketed police standing nearby with their stupid bloody real little machine guns again, I hurried us on, with a stout huff of public annoyance, assuring little Mariana, for all around to hear, that we would come here again to see the funny soldiers and their nice horses, for longer, properly, once London
got back to normal
!

I was, in short, uninterested in guns. I recall, for example, one Sunday some few weeks ago, shortly after our arrival here, when I was out with one of my new colleagues, shopping for the lunchtime joint, and we popped in somewhere for a quick sneaky schoolboyish one on the way back, to chat about matters sporting and cultural, the way liberal Englishmen do. Guns did, in fact, enter the conversation, but only as follows:

—Hey, here's one. Before the Civil War, the American
one, I mean, not ours, what was the most popular sport in America?

—God knows. Shooting bison? Shooting Native Americans?

—Ha ha! No. Cricket!

—Cricket? In America? You sure, John?

—Well, it said so in
The Paper
.

— Oh. Oh, well then.

—But will you find that in any Hollywood costume drama? Not bloody likely.

—Yes, the Yanks don't give a damn about truth, do they? It's all myths with them. I mean, take those pistols, that kind Hollywood is obsessed with. What
are
they called? You know, John, those big black pistols that obviously make Tarantino's knickers catch fire?

—Magnums?

—No, that's that ice cream they market as if it were a blow job.

— Oh yes. Talk about the sexualisation of advertising! All those airbrushed models with fuck-me eyes and red lips, dribbling chocolate. Outrageous!

(Momentary contemplative silence, with beer.)

—
Absolutely, John. Anyway, the thing is, I just don't believe that if you get shot with one of those pistols you
fly backwards
. It can't be possible.

—God knows.

—Well, it can't be. You know, Newton's first law, or whichever it is.

—Second, I think. But yes, it's all balls. Why we allow the Yanks to inflict their gun culture on us is beyond me. And the rest of their so-called culture! For God's sake, we had the Men of the West speech in
Lord of the
Rings
, then
Troy
, then
300
, and now
Beowulf
. Aryan bloody myths, all of them, all stuff Hitler would have loved! What's Hollywood going to give us next, eh?
Russell Crowe as Siegfried, wiping out dark-skinned baddies from east of the Danube? The implications for our children's world scare me, they really do. Same again?

—Mmm, please, John.

—Two more, please. I mean, look at the French. They have masses of state support for their
own
culture, and it's
real
culture. We must all be mad, staying in this half-American dump when we could be living in bloody great farmhouses in France with no mortgages! Brownings?

That was how much I knew about guns.

And no doubt I would never have learned anything more about them if I hadn't found myself, at forty-five, not having been single since before the Berlin Wall came down, alone for a whole week, out all by myself in the cold and the wet and the big, dark south-London night.

I was not supposed to be doing anything at all with plum trees, let alone at night. I was supposed to be working away, safe and warm, at my laptop, in my cleverly arranged little study area under the stairs.

Sarah, my beloved wife, had taken our ten-year-old twins, Will and Jack, and Mariana, our unplanned little late-come darling, away that very evening, for a whole week, after surprisingly little negotiation, so that I could finish and then give my Very Important Paper (as it had become known in the family) to the upcoming national peer-group conference. She had not done all this just so I could mess about, quite unnecessarily, with small fruit trees in the dark and the rain!

—Bye, darlings!
I had called, reminding myself too late that I really must stop myself doing that ridiculous English thing of addressing my children as though they come from several decades ago and several notches up the social ladder.
—So sorry I can't come too, but well, you know, I've got to get the Very Important Paper done, to make things better for us all. Daddy's Work again, eh? Still, it's already got us to London, hasn't it? What's that, Jack? Well, no, that's true, we didn't actually
ask
you if you wanted to move to London, but sometimes there are things that adults just, anyway, look, hey you loved the Science Museum the other day, right? Sorry, darling, sorry, I was just trying to be, you know, anyway, hey, boys: a week off school! In Spain! Lu-cky! Now, you be good for Mum, right? And for Granny and Grandad. And don't poke those guns in people's faces, please. No, Mariana is a person as well. What? No, you
can't be ‘a people' Jack, it's ‘a person'. Sorry? Well, yes, OK, that's true, Will, very good, yes, ‘a people' is grammatically possible, you're right. No, Jack, Will's not being geeky, and that's not a word we use in this family, he's just right, in
certain cases,
yes, you can say ‘a people', though I'm not sure generalisations like that are usually very wise and … yes, yes, of course, sorry, darling, I was just, look, Jack, Will, just shut up for a minute, stop answering back and do what you're told or Mum'll take those bloody stupid guns away from you and chuck them in the bin! What? Well, sorry, darling, but I thought you
wanted
me to, sorry, yes, of course, I was just, oh, Mariana, don't cry, Daddy'll see you soon, he'll be … Well
I
didn't know she'd dropped her toy, did I? Right. Yes. Bye, darling, drive safely. This will be worth it. I promise!

I waved a last goodbye, turned back to the house, went in, shut the front door, knelt beside the little antique table under the stairs, unfolded the small leaf of the table, swung the miniature gateleg out beneath it, patted the early nineteenth-century mahogany with satisfaction, stood up carefully so as to avoid banging my head on the underneath of the staircase, pulled my laptop forward, opened it, turned it on, went the few steps into the living room to draw over my rather nice Edwardian captain's chair and sat down to work.

For several minutes, I stared at the Very Important Paper.

My week had seemed barely enough to finish it, in all honesty. Hardly adequate at all really, when you thought about it. Negligible, to be brutally frank, when compared to the vast swathes of outside-office work time available to so many of my rivals in this vital forty-something leg of the career marathon. Men married to women who did not expect help with the kids. Men unlikely ever to be encumbered with kids.
Men who could afford nannies. It was, well, yes, actually, there was no way round it, to be quite honest it was almost
unfair
, when you thought about it, to expect me to keep up with these so-called colleagues just by having one little week of pure work.

But now, those same seven, no eight nights suddenly felt like rather a long time.

—Ridiculous, I laughed aloud at myself. Of course a family home seems a little funny when there is no family there. To it, then, and no more nonsense.

The organisers had given the Very Important Paper one of the plenary sessions, no less. I had hardly believed it when I got the call.
Plenary!
The very word set off, as it always did, a cocktail of fear and ambition that started my guts bubbling softly. My field is pretty specialised, you see. It would only take a dozen of my rivals to drop dead for me to be a made man. And all of them would be sitting there, watching and listening: every hirer, firer and decider of lives. If I brought it off! The strong applause, the looks of approval from the frontmost rows, as mysterious but vital as in some meeting chaired by Stalin. In the coffee break one of the real Big Beasts awards you a whole minute of his full attention (your peers instinctively back off a scarcely measurable fraction, the bastards, making a tiny but unmistakable clearing for this drama of gracious condescension). Suddenly you're right in the mix, on everybody's longlist:
him
, you know, still young really, recently moved to London, you know, the one who gave
that
plenary paper at the conference? Oh yes, of course,
him
…

There was something missing from the VIP, though, and I knew it. What was it? Come on, this was a technical problem, no more. Exposition, presentation, communication. I scrolled up and down through the
document. Now and then I felt I almost saw what needed fixing, a shadow between my lines, but it kept flitting away again, like a fish in dark water. I cleaned my new, frameless designer spectacles for a while (they had been expressly purchased for the giving of the VIP). Then I decided that before settling down properly, I might as well do a bit of admin and check my emails. I'd have to do it sometime this week, after all, so why not get it out of the way right now?

I logged on with the usual distant glisten of hope that today
the
email might be waiting for me. You know,
the
email, the one that somehow makes the offer out of the blue or opens the door at last after all your knocking.