The Good Terrorist (25 page)

Alice listened modestly to all this, her lids kept down.

She was thinking: And
who
is he? For
whom
would I be working? She had a good idea—but did it matter? The main point was, did she or did she not think that the whole ghastly superstructure should be brought down and got rid of, root and branch, once and for all? A clean sweep, that was what was needed. And Alice saw a landscape that had been flattened, was bare and bleak, with perhaps a little wan ash blowing over it. Yes. Get rid of the rotten superstructure to make way for better. For the new. Did it matter all that much who did the cleansing, the pulling down? Russia, Cuba, China, Uncle Tom Cobbley and all, they were welcome as far as she was concerned.

But she said, after a while, in a pause that was there for her to fill, “I can’t, Andrew.” And suddenly, arising from her depths, “A bourgeois life? You want me to live a middle-class life?” And she sat there laughing at him—sneering, in fact—all alive with the energy of scorn, of contempt.

He sat facing her, no longer tired now, or stale with sleep, watching her closely. He smiled gently.

“Comrade Alice, there is nothing wrong with a comfortable life—it depends on what the aim is. You wouldn’t be living like that because of comfort, because of security”—he seemed to be making an effort to despise these words as much as she did—“but because of your aim. Our aim.”

They stared at each other. Across a gulf. Not of ideology, but of temperament, of experience. She knew, from how he had said, “there is nothing wrong with a comfortable life,” that he felt none of the revulsion she did. On the contrary, he would like such a life. She knew this about him; how? She did not know how she knew what she did about people. She just did. This man would blow up
a city without five seconds’ compunction—and she did not criticise him for that—but he would insist on good whisky, eat in good restaurants, like to travel first-class. He was working-class by origin, she thought; it had come hard to him. That was why. It was not for her to criticise him.

She said, definitely, “It’s no good, Comrade Andrew. I couldn’t do it. I don’t mean the waiting—for orders—no matter how long it was.”

“I believe you,” he said, nodding.

“I wouldn’t mind how dangerous. But I couldn’t live like that. I would go mad.”

He nodded, sat silent a little. Then, sounding for the first time humorous, even whimsical, “But, Comrade Alice, I have been getting daily, sometimes hourly, reports of your transformation of that
pigsty
there.” The dislike he put into that word was every bit as strong as her parents’ could ever have been. Leaning forward, he took her hand, smiling humorously, and turned it so that it lay, the back upwards, in his strong square hand. Alice’s hand shrank a little, but she made it lie steady. She did not like being touched, not ever! Yet it was not so bad, his touch. The firmness of it—that made it possible. Along her knuckles, a crust of white paint.

He gently replaced her hand on her knee and said, “You’ll have the place like a palace in no time.”

“But you don’t understand. We aren’t going to live in that house as
they
do. We aren’t going to
consume
, and
spend
, and go soft and lie awake worrying about our pensions. We’re not like
them
. They’re
disgusting.”
Her voice was almost choked with loathing. Her face twisted with hatred.

There was a long silence, during which he decided to leave this unpromising subject. (But, thought Alice, he would not be abandoning it for long!) He offered her some coffee. There was an electric kettle, and mugs and sugar and milk on a tray on the floor. He quickly, efficiently, made coffee.

Then he began to talk about all the people in Number 43. His assessment of them, Alice noted, was the same as hers. That pleased and flattered her, confirmed her in her belief in herself. He spoke
nicely about Jim, about Philip; but did not linger on questions. Bert he seemed to dismiss. Pat he wanted to know more about, where she had worked, her training. Alice said that she did not know, had not asked. “But, Comrade Alice,” he reproved her in the gentlest way, “it is important. Very important.”

“Why is it? I haven’t had a job since I left university. I’ve done all right.”

This caused a check or hitch in the flow of their talk; he was suppressing a need to expostulate. There’s a lot bourgeois about him, she was thinking, but only mildly critical because of her now established respect for him.

Jasper—but he simply would not talk about Jasper. Because, she thought, of her link with him. She didn’t have to ask, though: Comrade Andrew did not have much time for Jasper. Well, he’d see!

Roberta and Faye. He asked many questions about them, but what interested him was their lesbianism. Not out of prurience, or anything Alice could dislike: there was a total noncomprehension there. He simply had no idea of it. No experience, ever, Alice guessed. He wanted to know what the women’s commune was like that Roberta and Faye frequented. What the connection was between lesbians and the revolutionary formulations of the political women. Alice offered pamphlets and books, which she would procure for him. He nodded, but pressed on: how did women like Faye and Roberta see the relations between men and women after the revolution? Alice suppressed an impulse to say: Liquidate all men. She was remembering long and hot arguments with Molly and Helen in Liverpool, during which she, Alice, had said that their attitude amounted to a contempt for men so total that in effect they suppressed all serious thought about them.

What Alice said was, “There are many different formulations in the Women’s Movement. I would say that Faye and Roberta represent an extreme.”

Then there were Mary and Reggie; and, as she expected, Comrade Andrew refused to dismiss them as she wanted to. Precisely what she disliked most about them was what interested him: she knew that he wondered whether they could be persuaded to become
sleeping partners in the revolution, a phrase that she used and he approved with a dry smile and a nod.

Alice didn’t know. She doubted it. They were naturally conservers. (Not that she had anything against Greenpeace. On the contrary.) They were, in short, bourgeois. In her view, Andrew should discuss it with them. She could not answer for them.

This, she knew, cut across the underlying premise of the conversation: that she was willingly acting as his aide in assessing possible recruits. For something or other. Not stated. Understood.

Did they plan—number 43—to take in more members of their squat or commune?

“Why not? There’s plenty of room.”

“I agree, the more the better.”

And so the talk went on, reaching back, for some rather tense minutes, to her childhood. Alice’s mother did not really interest Comrade Andrew, but Cedric Mellings, that was a different matter. How big was his business? How many employees? What were they like?

Alice’s brother: Alice decided not to say Humphrey worked in a top airline firm. “Oh, don’t waste your time on him,” she said.

More cups of coffee, and some rather satisfying talk about the state of Britain. Rotten as a bad apple, and ready for the bulldozers of history.

When Alice said she had to go, she was expecting Jasper, and stood up, Andrew did, too, and seemed to hesitate. Then he said quickly, for the first time sounding awkward, “You have been with Jasper a long time, haven’t you?”

“Fifteen years.” Knowing what was coming, recognising it from many such moments in the past, she turned to go. He was beside her, and she felt his arm lightly about her shoulders.

“Comrade Alice,” he said. “It’s not easy to understand … why you choose such a … relationship.”

The usual ration of affront, resentment, even anger was in her. But this was Comrade Andrew, and she had decided that what came from him was, had to be, different. She said, “You don’t understand. No, you don’t understand Jasper.”

His arm still lay there, so gently that she could not find it a
pressure. He said, gently, “But, Alice, surely you could …” Do
better
was what he wanted to say.

She turned to face him, with a bright, steady smile.

“It’s all right,” she said, like a schoolgirl. “I love him, you see.”

Incredulity made his smile ironic, patient.

“Well, Comrade Alice …” He allowed it to trail away, in humour. “Come in any time,” he said.

“Why don’t you come in and see our palace?”

“Thanks, I will.”

And so she went home, her mind a dazzle of questions.

She had been going up to admire her newly painted room, but something took her to Jim’s door. She knocked, heard nothing, went in. Jim lay on the top of his sleeping bag, facing her, his eyes open.

“Are you all right, Jim?”

No reply. He looked so dreadful.… She went to him, knelt, put her hand on his. It was dry, very hot.

“Jim! What’s wrong?”

“Ah, hell, what’s the point?” came out of him in a choking sob, and he put his arm over his face.

Under the loose sleeve was a red wound that went from elbow to wrist. Wide. Nasty. It seemed filled with red jelly.

“Jim, what happened?”

“I got in a fight.” The words came out of a sobbing smother of frustration and rage. “No, leave it, it’ll heal, it’ll be all right, it is clean.”

He seemed to be fighting with himself as he lay there, banging his fist to his head, clenching up his legs, then shooting them out straight.

“But the police didn’t get you.”

“No. But they will know I was there by now. There’s someone who’ll make sure of that! What’s the use? There’s no way you can get
out
of trouble, you can’t get
out
, what’s the use of trying.”

“Did you try for a job?”

“Yes, what’s the use?” And he turned over and lay on his back, arms loose by his side.

She had known it. There was a certain struggling fury that went with being jobless, and persevering, and being turned down, that was different from simply being jobless.

“What were you trying for?”

“A printing firm in Southwark. But I don’t know all this new technology—I learned the old printing. I did a year’s course, I thought it would get me somewhere.”

“Printing! You didn’t say. But there must be hundreds of little firms all over the country who still use it for special jobs.”

“Then I must have applied to half of them in the last four years.”

“My father has a printing firm. A small one. They do all kinds of things. Pamphlets and brochures and catalogues.”

“He won’t be using the old way for long.”

“I’ll write to him. Why not? He’s supposed to be a fucking socialist.”

“What’s the use, I’m black.”

“Wait, I’m thinking.”

He was still tense and hot and miserable, but, she thought, better. Like a nun, or his sister, she sat holding his hand, smiling gently down at him.

“Yes,” she said at last. “I’ll write to my father. I’ll do that. Make him practise what he preaches. He’s had blacks before, anyway.”

She could see he was, in spite of himself, beginning to hope again.

“I’ll write it now,” she said.

In the backpack in which she seemed to keep half her life she burrowed and came up with a biro and writing pad.

“What’s your name, Jim?”

“Mackenzie.”

“I have a cousin who married a Mackenzie.”

“My grandfather was Mackenzie. Trinidad.”

“Then perhaps we are related.”

A small gust of laughter blew through him, and left him smiling. He sighed, relaxed, turned towards her, put his hand under his cheek. He would be asleep soon.

She wrote:

She neatly folded the letter, put it in a nice blue envelope (choosing the blue in preference to cream, for some reason), and addressed it.

Jim’s lids were drowsing.

“Why don’t you take this round tomorrow. Your cut won’t show.”

She pulled back the sleeve gently. He did not resist her. It was a really bad cut, which would leave a thick scar. It needed stitching. Never mind.

“I like you, Alice,” he stated. “You are a really sincere person, you know what I mean?” He did not add “unlike the others.”

She could have wept, knowing that what he said was true, feeling confirmed and supported. She stayed near him till he slept, went out into the dark hall, switched on the light with pride and with the knowledge of what that little act meant, what it had cost, would cost: she pressed a tiny switch on the wall, and electrons obediently flowed through cables, because the woman in Electricity had so ordered it.

Money. Where from?

Standing there, surveying the hall, so pleasant now (though she knew that really she ought to get carpet foam and do over the carpet, which after all had been folded up in the dust of the skip), she saw that Philip had mended the little cupboard under the stairs that the policeman had kicked in.

At this moment, a knock, and with a premonition she went to open the door, a look of authority already on her face.

It was the policewoman she had seen in the police station. At the gate stood her partner, a young man Alice had not seen before.

“Good evening,” said Alice, “can I help you?”

She stood with the door open behind her, so that the order of the hall could be properly seen; she saw the policewoman taking it in. The young policeman was, as Alice was not surprised to see, trying to locate with his eyes the place in the garden where these crazies had buried …

“Does a James Mackenzie live here?”

“Yes, he does,” said Alice at once.

“Can I speak to him?”

“You could, but he’s not here.”

“When will he be back?”

“He might not be back tonight. He’s gone to visit friends in Highgate.”

“He wasn’t here this weekend, then?”

“He was here last night.”

“He was here all last night?”