My Little Armalite (8 page)

There are many things hidden in the earth. Roman coins pour out on to the boots of men digging for gas mains. Cattle plod about upon the gold-stuffed ship graves of Saxon kings. Priceless chalices, buried in fear, their sole keepers hacked to death without talking, wait for millennia a mere foot too deep for the yearly plough. Things get forgotten. Whole valleys full of kings. The Warsaw Pact. The gun had lain quiet for twenty years: it could stay there for one more bloody week.

Yes, once the VIP was safely done and delivered, I would call the cops and they could hold me for as long as they liked! Of course, it would be pretty stressful for Sarah and the kids to find the house full of armed police and myself under arrest, but everything would soon be cleared up. Hmm. And actually, Sarah could hardly expect me to pay back all those nights and days of childcare if I was in a police cell, could she?

True, it might feel bizarre, this week, to look out at my garden and know there was an Armalite lying there. And obviously, I'd never be able to tell Sarah that I'd deliberately waited a week before calling the authorities.
For the rest of our lives I would have a little, tiny, harmless secret from my darling wife.

Well, so what? I was man enough for that. It was a marriage, for God's sake, not a confessional. I mean, it would not be the first time I'd kept a meaningless little secret from Sarah.

Had I told her that the first-choice candidate for my new job had in fact dropped out because he had taken a serious look at house prices and decided to keep his family in their leafy, well-schooled suburb of Leeds? It had seemed unnecessary. Had I told her that among my many reasons for wanting to leave Sheffield had been the fear that a certain little affair with a postgraduate student (not strictly speaking one of my
own
students, of course!) was getting a wee bit out of hand? Why would I tell her that? I mean, for God's sake, I'm a
humanities lecturer.
What does anyone expect?

What we do not know …

That was OK then.

I walked out of the front door for the first time since Sarah and the kids had left. The small, quiet house leaped away from behind me and gave way to the big loud London night. Our Victorian ceilings, high perhaps by modern standards but still low by human standards, were replaced instantly by the vast and timeless sky. I looked up at the stars and breathed deeply: my troubles fled from me at the speed of light.

I headed for the pub.

My pubbing days lay deep in the last, lost century. Of course, as you age, pubs naturally turn from exciting places where you never know what is going to happen into boring places where the same old thing happens into gruesome places where nothing is ever going to happen again. But in my case this natural process of disillusion had been underlined by geography.

When entering upon my chosen career, you see, I reckoned without the plain statistical fact that most university lecturers in England end up working for most of their lives in (and hence dragging their wives around) cities in the North or the Midlands.

I did not like cities in the North and the Midlands. They made me feel foreign. The drinking folk in these places (from whom, as
the people
, I expected great things) read newspapers I despised, passionately followed entire sports of which I knew nothing whatever (rugby league, for God's sake) and, while being authentically pro-Trades Union and anti-Tory, happily voiced opinions on immigration, asylum and punishment, corporal or capital, which left me blinking into my beer with the effort to avoid fatal eye contact. So, what with my responsible career, beloved wife and young children, I had not spent much time in the saloons of Sheffield, Leeds and Birmingham over the past decades. I had not been into a pub of an evening since we moved.

But tonight I was going out in the night to a London pub for the first time since 1989, and so I strode up to the Red Lion with a certain long-forgotten excitement.
I may even have been softly whistling a jig or reel. I cannot swear against it.

Then I found myself in an over-heated miniature Sky-TV multiplex that happened to serve unbelievably expensive lager and amazingly cheap spirits. I stopped dead and gazed around me through my misting specs.

Apart from the Big Screen there were four high-mounted television sets of large domestic size, making sure that no corner of the pub could possibly escape the Big Match. The Big Screen itself, with its ceaseless, insane bombardment of pub-quiz information zipping below the pictures and scrolling to the right of them, was half-masked by the heads of standing male drinkers, of whom a statistically improbable proportion were shaven-headed, their ringed ears standing out in alarming silhouette against the bright plasma.

I had landed myself in every liberal and cultured Englishman's worst nightmare: I was alone and surrounded at night by illiberal and uncultured Englishmen of perfect head-butting age and size, in noisily festive and patriotic mood, wearing replica football shirts.

—Mind your back, mate, said a voice, as three pints of lager sailed choppily past my left ear and a large beer gut squelched across my back. I turned, trying to smile in a bluff way, making sure I did not look down my vulnerable nose from on high. I never actually got as far as the manful quip, because the England teamsheet went up on the Big Screen. Everyone cheered and looked round. An Englishman amidst Englishmen, I could hardly do otherwise.

Each of the England players now got a few manic seconds of dedicated screen time, a flick-cut montage of their palatial homes, all-blonde girlfriends and bizarre celebratory routines that their semi-human
ancestors would no doubt have understood perfectly well. In order not to seem completely ignorant of the dramatis personae if forced to chat about them later, I hoovered up the information flashing madly over the screen, selecting useful information for storage in the temporary files of my mind.

I was good at this sort of thing, having spent twenty-five years speedreading weighty tomes that would quite possibly never make it out again from the deep, ghostly stacks of university libraries. I now filled my brain RAM swiftly with faces, names, dates, teams, transfer values, salaries …

Salaries.

Bloody hell!

I had, of course, heard about footballers' absurd salaries. But it was the sort of unbearable fact that I was normally able to blank out. Tonight there was no escaping the truth. These brutish young men earned in six months of kicking a ball about more than I would earn in my entire career. Or, not to beat about the bush, my life.

Yes, I knew pretty well exactly how much I would make in the remainder of my time. Enough to pay off our brand-new twenty-year mortgage by the time I retired, that was how much. By the time I finished working I would own outright a small terraced house in SE11, hoobloodyray, and be unable to afford to go on nice holidays or to help my sons or my little daughter to buy houses.

It could not be right. It was simply
not possible
that thick little head-butting bastards who had never even heard of Schumann could throw their money about on multiple Ferraris, hideous so-called mansions in Cheshire and ludicrous houses on artificial islands in Bahrain while I myself would quite probably never be able even to own a house with four proper bedrooms, enough space to walk past the pram in the hall and a nearby school that vaguely approached the national average.

It was plainly and simply
wrong.

Their stupid kids, named after American bloody states, for God's sake, would swan about buoyed up by unearned income, whilst my children, my hard-working, lovely, clever children, were drowning in impossible
mortgage repayments, with me powerless to save them.

My eyes glazed over, screening out reality. Of course, they would say, —
The market decides, tough
. Twenty years before, I might have had a counter-argument. I might well have argued, twenty years before, that the government should intervene to limit such ludicrous incomes, reapportion such blatantly unfair wages, block tax-evasive trusts or redistribute a little of such clearly undeserved wealth by inescapable taxation on luxury goods. Twenty years ago, I might well have pointed out the fact that in the GDR there was no unemployment. I would almost certainly have pointed, as everyone else did twenty years ago, to the striking progress of literacy in Cuba.

I had not suggested these particular alternatives for some years. Even Cuba was looking rather dodgy these days. But alternatives there still had to be, surely? To prevent thick young footballers from earning in a month what normal, decent people earned in ten years. Or people buying football clubs with the billions they had made trading shares acquired cunningly from economically illiterate, indigent pensioners in Siberia. Or a thousand number-crunching arseholes in the City getting million-quid bonuses and thereby inflating alleged national wages and property prices so much so that the rest of us poor sods had to suffer another hike in interest rates rather than tax those few bastards a teeny little bit more?

How had it happened?

Why?

Who asked for a winner-takes-all world?

What makes us think there is nothing that can be done about it?

Q: Which major Western nation state one hundred and twenty years ago forced, repeat
forced
, all the big
landowners in approximately one-third of its sovereign territory to sell all but a few hundred acres of their land to their small tenant farmers at a government-set fair price, and even gave those small farmers one-hundred-year, negligible-interest, state-backed mortgages to buy the land with?

CLUE: In 1989, an elderly farmer I knew laughingly showed me the receipt for his family's last-ever payment of 2/6.

Q: 2/6?

A: Indeed. Half a crown. The country was Britain. The elected British Government in then-British Ireland did it. Because they had to. Because people were so furious about blatant unfairness that they had started making British Ireland ungovernable. Did they want Revolution? No. Communism? God forbid, they were decent Catholics. They just wanted the chance to buy, repeat
buy
, the little bit of land they worked. They just wanted fairness. And they demanded it with boycotts, then riots, then guns. So they got it.

Things
do
change. Things
can
change. Things
must
change. It is
not
enough to say that things are the way they are, full stop. That is simply the idiotic voice that says,
—Whatever is, is right
, the crass metaphysics of pure contingency. No, no:
the way things are means things
cannot stay the way things are.
Discuss.

But change which way?

How done?

By whom?

Decides who?

—There you are, Prof John. Where the hell you been? I been fighting every cunt off this seat for you. You missed the warm-up, mate. Only just in time. Two pints behind already.

—I, um, sorry, Phil. My mum called.

—Oh, well then. Mums is mums. Boys, this is Prof John, our new neighbour. I also calls him Einstein. On account of his brain. Doctor of fucking German. Bit posh for us, eh? But he likes a scrap too. Going to come out on patrol. Tell you anything about Hitler and the Nazis, he will. Try him.

—Hi, er, boys. Lager, Phil?

—Yeah. Get two in for yourself, you're behind.

—Sure. Good idea, Phil.

Now I had been seen talking to tough men I was better able to engage in the Darwinian struggle for bar space, and was soon inserting myself crabwise into a fine space directly before the beer pumps. Suddenly it occurred to me.

What if I finished the VIP, emailed it to a colleague and then called the police on the evening just before the Oxford conference. Imagine:
Plenary national peer-group paper given in absentia at Oxford as
Newsnight
East Germany expert questioned by police over machine gun in garden
. Enough to make
The Paper
, surely? Maybe even the TV news. God, if I just got the chance, just one chance, to make that one vital, memorable sound bite on the box!
Someone
has to get the next BBC series, after all.
Someone
has to be catapulted out of all this crap and into …

—Yes please, I can get you?

I looked up and found myself staring into a pair of cool blue female eyes.

I blinked, and in a flash, with the edge-of-vision skills common to my profession, I had also taken in a fine pair of breasts without in the slightest appearing to look at them. The Polish barmaid Phil had spoken of, presumably. Pretty? Yes. But there was something else about her that made me stare.

—Hi, what I can get you? she asked impatiently. I held up a finger as a sign for her to be quiet. Suddenly I was back on home territory and filled with magisterial confidence.

—What? she mouthed, scowling lightly. But she was so taken aback that she obeyed.

—Say that again please?

—What I can get you?

—No, yes, hold on. Wait. Don't tell me. Yes
.
I've got it.
Cottbus
, said I firmly.

The barmaid blanched. She came immediately close.

—Don't-speak-German-to-me.

—But you're from Saxony.

—I am from Poland.

—You sound Saxon.

—Look, if you were German would you tell the English people in a shithole like this that you were German?

—Perhaps not.

—So here I am Polish, yes? How many nice cold lagers, sir?

—Um, what? Oh, yes, sorry. Three, please.

Well, an East German girl, here! That was a bit of luck.
I, that is, we, Sarah and I, could invite her round. For dinner. She could come into the university perhaps. It might be interesting for my students to hear it from her mouth rather than mine. Nice mouth too. She would be able to tell them about the aspects of life in the GDR that had been worth saving but had all been swept away by untrammelled capitalism. Sexual liberty, for example, sanctioned by Marxist theory and backed up by abortion virtually on demand or generous state childcare provision. Women's rights, yes indeed. She was youngish and yes, pretty. It would be quite fun, knowing her secret. A bit like in the old days of those bold, semi-legal poetry clubs in Dresden and Leipzig. Sharing. Comradely.