My Little Armalite (5 page)

By the time the boys are both done, rezipped and once again holding up their touchingly miniature NOT IN MY NAME banner (on which we spent most of yesterday afternoon), we are hopelessly separated from the happy gang of like-minded old college pals with whom we were planning to spend the rest of the day marching and picnicking and finding child-friendly north-London pubs that serve real ales, and suchlike jollity. We try to call mobiles, try to make ourselves heard over the din, try to make back-up plans. Then we look around, our spirits in sudden free fall. We have been engulfed by wild-eyed SWP members, pale faces alight with the unholy glow of certainty. There is no escape. With Sarah heavily pregnant, we can hardly try to barge speedily forward through our fellow marchers. Nor do we feel like risking a confrontation with the brooding line of armoured policemen. Christ, in my days on the Miners' Strike they still just had ordinary helmets and coats and looked like humans! Hmm. Perhaps if we
hadn't
thrown bricks at them back then? Yes, well. There they are, anyway, looking as if they might quite like to make a fight of it, and here we are surrounded by loony Trots and the stream of protestors surges on about us, all shoulders and elbows, eventually forcing us to shuffle on regardless. We stall and slow as much as possible to let the screaming SWP overtake us. Perhaps we can find the Quakers? If we march with the Quakers for a bit, singing and smiling inanely, the police might see that we are essentially harmless and let us leave the march. But it is not the Quakers who now envelope us. It is, instead, the toughly silent, semi-masked Northern acolytes of some aged and
bearded Muslim cleric. This ancient scholar-cum-tribal-chieftain smiles with Olympian, or at any rate Araratian, condescension at me and even absent-mindedly ruffles the hair of our sons (they smile nervously, sure of parental approval later), but he does not seem to even register Sarah's existence.

And it is just then that I notice the policeman, not twelve feet away, openly taking pictures with a very large camera. Pictures of us. Of me. With these people.

It was a legal march, for God's sake, what were we doing wrong? Nothing. Nothing at all. Merely exercising our democratic right to object peaceably, although perhaps in somewhat ill-chosen company, to a war for which we were paying in many different ways but about which we had not been consulted and with which we did not agree. Nothing wrong at all. And yet. What if those same marchers about me had, more recently, been CCTVed outside some mosque vowing publicly to ritually disembowel anyone insulting God and warning that the
real
Holocaust (as opposed, presumably, to the one that they claimed never happened) was yet to come?

What if, when I called the police about the Armalite, the police checked everything,
everything
that they could possibly have against my name? Which of course they would. It was an Armalite, for Christ's sake, and this was these days! The most plodding common sense might quite reasonably suggest a connection between my having an Armalite buried in my garden and my having recently been photographed marching in the proximity of associates of supporters of glorifiers of terrorism.

Would they hold me for a fortnight? Or a month? Or however long it was they could hold you without charge these days? That man who had worked on
computers for the 7/7 bombers and had gone to the police was
questioned for two weeks
, it had said on the telly. And he had been a definite Good Guy! Questioned for two weeks! What would happen to my Very Important Paper if they even questioned me for a few days? And hence, my career? And hence, our children's futures? And hence …

Dang Dong!

—Open up then, Doc!

—Rrrrrrrr!

—Yes, sorry, of course, just washing my hands!

Christ, I just needed to think.

I needed peace, that was all, just for a moment, just so I could work this one out sensibly.

OK, right, just say hello, be civil and get rid of the idiot. Then decide, calmly and rationally, what exactly to say when I called the police as obviously I was going to … For example, I would certainly have to make sure I didn't say
Armalite
when I phoned them! I mean, I didn't want them asking how come I, an ordinary Englishman, had recognised this particular brand of machine gun, did I? Christ, no. I didn't even want to think about it myself …

I raced back to the garden, bootless, kicked the lid of the suitcase shut, ran back through the house to the front door, took a deep breath, stuffed a cigarette into the corner of my fixed smile, set myself in as bluff a shoulders-back blue-collar manner as I could strike without blatant absurdity and cried, —Aha, hi there! more loudly than I'd meant to, and flung open my house.

The Neighbourhood Watch was shaven-headed, ear-studded, and dressed in a leather blouson jacket over tight jeans rolled up to show the whole length of his Dr Martens boots. Around his rumpy neck hung triple ropes of gleamingly cheap but indubitable gold, so heavy that their major design influence seemed to be Bronze Age throat armour. He was carrying a mighty-looking, battle-scarred cricket bat over his right shoulder and was accompanied by a large black dog mutated by generations of carefully selective inbreeding until its barrel chest and stumpy legs had become little more than a chassis to carry a square, pig-eyed head, the salivating jaws hard-wired into a fiendish perma-grin.

So although he was a solitary man a whole head shorter than I and no younger, I was deeply unconfident about getting rid of him quickly. Many unpleasant playground experiences had taught me that whatever interesting anthropological theories sociolinguists may deduce from our use of terms like
highness
and
superiority
and
elevated status
and so on, in brute reality being noticeably taller than other males, when those males are white trash from violent and stupid backgrounds, simply means that nature has arranged things perfectly for them to leap suddenly up and head-butt you smack across the cheekbone and nose, often breaking your NHS specs.

I had always sworn that this would never happen to our lovely boys. I would do anything to stop that. I mean, anything short of giving up my career, obviously.

This was a case in point. You see, I recognised man and dog immediately. They lived diagonally across the road. The man was the father of three repulsive boys between the ages of about eight and eleven, fattened up (I assumed) by pizza and cable TV yet somehow still thumpingly sporty, who went to the same primary school as Will and Jack. I had noticed them, father, boys and dog, on the first day I walked our sweet sons schoolwards. The Neighbourhood Watch had been chatting away to a boiler-suited Afro-Caribbean fellow resident, and had casually swatted his eldest boy around the head for interrupting him. The blow had resounded up the street, but the meaty lad had scarcely winced: his two younger siblings had laughed delightedly at this little bit of slapstick and had continued hooting even as their elder brother kicked them both hard up their arses in displaced revenge. Then the muscular family had proceeded on towards the school with every appearance of high humour, pausing only for the dog to crap hugely in the middle of the pavement. I had secretly feared the worst for little William and Jack. What chance did our lovely boys have amongst young thugs raised to think of a full-blooded smack on the head as the first reaction to any daily provocation? I was pretty sure no actual violence had happened to them in school yet, though they had been quieter since the move and had hinted at being mocked for their posh non-London accents.

No, they would not suffer! Not if I could help it in any way. I mean, OK, obviously, I wasn't going to drag them to live in a seventies brick box with plastic windows on a suburban, Tory-voting estate in some place halfway to Brighton at the end of some overland line no one has ever even heard of, just because there is actually a quite decent local school there. I mean,
you can't just give up
completely
, can you? But apart from that, I would do anything,
anything
, to stop them being bullied.

So I was certainly not going to risk alienating this no doubt opinion-forming alpha bloody neighbour (and thus his tough sons) by seeming anything other than perfectly normal for SE11.

—Ah, hello, I said, forcing my hand not to flutter up and needlessly press my glasses back higher on to my nose.

—Nice to meet ya, Doc. Phil George. A steak-like hand was held out. As I shook it, I did my best to make my own grip loose yet wiry.

—Hi, Phil! Hi. I'm John. John Goode. So, hey, you're the Neighbourhood Watch round here, eh? Thanks for keeping an eye on things. I must join. Once I get settled.

—You like a bit of a scrap, Doc John, ha ha? He mimed a thoroughly convincing burst of ringcraft, his fists pulling up barely short of my face at each move.

—Oh, hey, you know. So, do you have, um, scraps, in the Neighbourhood Watch?

—Not of our choosing, Doc, know what I mean. But, see, I got some old mates down the cop shop, haven't I, and like they said on the QT, who's to say a decent law-abiding council-tax-paying Englishman, out all on his own, hasn't just come back from knocking a cricket ball about the park, for the family dog to fetch? See? Here's the ball, right here. My kids' cricket ball. Catch, Doc John! Butter-fingers! Got Uncle Joe's fresh teethmarks in it, see? And his fresh gob on it, as you can no doubt feel, ha ha ha! All kosher, just in case some clever fucking lawyer tries to catch me out. We all do it, see, Doc John. Always go out on our tod, always with a dog and a ball and a bat, always make sure we
get seen up the park every time we go out on patrol. The Neighbourhood Watch thinks ahead! The words
prepared
and
be
spring to mind! You got a dog, Doc John?

—Um, no, actually.

—Well, you could always take Uncle Joe for a walk, eh? Who's to say a decent law-abiding English doctor can't help his neighbour out by taking his mutt for a stroll, eh? Have to get him used to you first, of course. Ain't that right, Uncle Joe? That's right.

—Rrrrr!

—Uncle Joe, eh?

—Yeah. In memory of my old man. First time I saw him down the dogs' home, killing a Dobermann, I knew that was the name for him. My old man always used to say it was Uncle Joe tore the guts out of the German army, see.

—As Churchill wrote, I added, significantly.

—Did he? Well there you go. Good dog now, mostly. Took a while to knock it into him, of course, but then it does, doesn't it? So there we are: I just happen to be out with the bat and the ball and the family pet, and if I see some little cunts up to no good, well, obviously, it wasn't me that kicked it off, was it? I'd back me and this old bat and Uncle Joe against any three little Albanian cunts, knives and all. What you reckon, eh, Doc John?

The massive cricket bat was swung in a jocular way so that it stopped a fraction of an inch from the side of my head.

—Right!

—Take that Merc of yours, Doc John. It is yours, the silver Merc? Thought so. Spotted it, new car on the block. The Neighbourhood Watch notices these things. The words
posh
and
bit for round here
sprang to mind.
Now, how long d'you reckon that Merc badge on your bonnet would last round here without the Neighbourhood Watch, eh? Not fucking long, is how long. Still, if you got it, flaunt it, eh? Ha ha!

I needed to get this ape away from my house, but I could not have him thinking me (and thus, our boys) posh and different, so I quickly replied.

—Flaunt it? I only paid five grand for it, er, Phil. In the free ads.

—Five grand in the free ads? Mmm. Sounds all right. What's she got on the clock?

—Ninety-five K, I replied, with practised ease. —Full history too.

—Here, you done well there, Doc John.

The basking sun of normality lit me from within. What higher praise can a blue-collar Englishman give to his new neighbour than to say that he got a good deal on his motor? I would make sure I got him to tell Sarah this, because she had still not quite accepted that when I had gone out two months before, empowered to buy a normal one-owner family car just out of warranty from a reputable dealer but had returned with a seven-year-old Mercedes with ninety-five K on the clock and three names before mine on the logbook from some bloke in the free ads, I had been acting rationally. Proud and happy, I chatted briefly to Phil about build quality, reliability and depreciation curves.

—Whatever you say, Doc John. Or should I say, Einstein! And of course, Mercs is Mercs.

—They are, I nodded sagely.

—Makes you feel like you made it, Mercs.

—Well, I suppose, sort of, in a way …

—Yeah, and with that star on the bonnet you can play Focke-Wulf pilots in the Blackwall Tunnel, eh?
Achtung! For you, Tommy, in your Mondeo, ze war is over, budabudabuda, boom!
Ha ha ha! And the Neighbourhood Watch intends to keep that star right there, Doc John, on your bonnet, not round the neck of some little Albanian cunt, eh? And if you ever find yourself with nine points on your licence, like anyone can these days, just let Phil know, say no more, soon fix you up with a nice pair of new plates for the fucking cameras and no harm done to anyone, eh? We generally ask for a couple of quid a week contribution from our neighbours, Doc John. Just to defray expenses and show willing. Twenty a month do you? Less than having your windows cleaned every Friday, innit? Which I also arrange, round here. Sign you up for both while we're at it? Why not? What's a tenner a week to a medical man, eh?

—Right, I said, searching my pockets.

After all
, I hastily lectured myself
, I mean, yes, admittedly it does sound bizarre to us, at first, the notion of private security. Bloody American, it sounds. Because we are so used to the big State. But consider: to Marx and Engels, at any rate the early Engels, the very notion of the State serving the People would have been laughable. To them, the State meant Otto von Bismarck. And remember: whose side were the police on during the Miners' Strike, eh? Well, exactly! When you think about it, really, without being blinded by preconceptions, who would you rather have walking your streets, looking out for you? The paid hirelings of the State, always clamouring for new powers and more of your taxes, laughing at ‘civilians' when the microphones are off? Or your own neighbours, actual real working-class people, who you know by name and who just ask, pretty reasonably it has to be said, for a little voluntary contribution to …