Authors: Clare Carson
‘I’m going to buy a pair of monkey boots. There’s a shop that sells them cheaply in the arcade near the station. By the way,’ she said over her shoulder as she pushed open the door, ‘Was Roger ever in the SAS?’
‘No,’ said Liz crossly. ‘He wasn’t in the SAS.’
‘Didn’t think so.’ Roger, the stupid sodding plonker.
‘SBS,’ said Liz as Sam marched away. ‘He was in the Special Boat Service. He loves the sea.’
She descended the steps from Brixton Station, turned left, the sweet scent of mangoes wafting enticingly from the market stalls of Electric Avenue and crossed over Coldharbour Lane. I will show you fear, she chanted to herself. I will show you fear in a handful of dust. Jim was right; she had been a bit half-arsed about her political opinions, a bit lazy. She’d been on the ban-the-bomb marches, shouted the slogans, but never bothered to find out where the uranium came from, never looked beyond her own horizons, never cared to find out how the ore made its way out of the earth, its alchemic transformation from natural element to lethal dust, its journey from Zaire to the States and on to Japan. Hiroshima: the beginning of the end of the age of science. How typical that Jim had seen the hidden connections, the darker histories, knew the clandestine pathways from here to there and everywhere, left his footprints trailing for her to follow.
She headed down Railton Road to the wrong side of town and instinctively buttoned her coat, stuck her hands in her pockets, fingers searching for her talisman, the raven’s feather. She was walking towards the front line now: drugs, knife-crime, no-go area. No trees here. Boarded-up buildings and burned-out cars. It was too early, though, for the barrage of dope dealers who marked the road and hissed hashish as you advanced and cursed your back as you passed. The only signs of life on the street at this time of the morning were a couple of empty Red Stripe cans rolling along the road in the breeze and a tortoiseshell cat sniffing the remains of an abandoned Chinese takeaway left festering in the gutter.
Milton House was just beyond the drug dealers’ stretch, visible through an archway across a dingy, sunless courtyard. She stalled as she surveyed the grimy Dickensian red-brick verandas. A robin hopped cheekily near her feet, cocked its head, winked and flew away at the sound of a door closing nearby. She took a deep breath, stepped into the gloomy stairwell. Her eye caught a movement in the dark space underneath the lowest flight of steps. She peered into the murk, saw a pile of abandoned rags rearrange itself into a man slumped on the floor underneath the heap of his grubby clothing. He grunted.
‘Herroh,’ he slurred.
Tramp. Sloshed.
‘Hello,’ she replied as she climbed the steps.
First floor. Second floor. Out on to the open veranda, the winking radio tower of Crystal Palace visible on the far horizon. She steeled herself. Stepped past a door painted badly in red and black and a window hung with grubby bedsheet curtains. A squat? Number 24 was the second door along. Through the adjacent window, she spotted Anne’s dirty blonde hair dangling over a table. Anne looked up nervously, large eyes blinking warily from her puny, pale face. Sam smiled through the glass, reassuringly she hoped. No backing out now.
The front door opened. Close up, there was something slightly old-fashioned about Anne’s appearance, a grown-up little match girl, skinny, sparrow-like fragility and pinched lines that suggested she was older than she had looked from a distance – mid-thirties at least, but still a familiar figure in her grungy baggy jumper and faded black jeans.
Anne surveyed her questioningly, waiting for her to speak first. Sam hesitated, unsure how much Anne knew, unclear how to begin.
‘I think you know my dad—’ she started and stopped. Why hadn’t she rehearsed her first line? Why hadn’t she worked out her story?
Anne interrupted. ‘You’re Chris’s daughter, aren’t you?’
She was momentarily bewildered. Chris? She twigged. Of course, Chris must have been his false identity. Chris was his cover. Sam tried not to smirk. Chris seemed like a singularly inappropriate name for Jim, it was so… so unmacho. She couldn’t bring herself to repeat it.
‘How did you know?’ she asked.
Anne shrugged. ‘He told me he’d got a daughter from his marriage. He’s spoken about you quite a bit. You just fit the description. You and your mate were with him in Orkney, right?’
Sam nodded.
‘It’s Sam, isn’t it?’
Sam smiled, too surprised at hearing her own name to speak.
Anne returned the smile, conspiratorially. ‘Chris told me that you had been arrested for obstruction outside Greenham.’
Sam nodded again. Jim had mocked her when the letter from the magistrates’ court had turned up. She couldn’t quite decide now whether she should be furious or amused that Jim had used her identity, her history, as part of his subterfuge. Window-dressing. Anne beckoned her inside. And as she stepped over the threshold, it dawned on her that Jim had provided her with a backstory, a readymade cover. She could play herself.
Anne’s front room was a more unkempt version of her brother’s study in Orkney: a wonky bookcase haphazardly constructed from crates, clothes strewn across a collapsing armchair, an overflowing wastepaper bin, piles of paper everywhere. A poster of a man waving the flag of Anarchy was pinned on one wall. On another, a black paint board was covered in a tangle of chalked messages; calls to overturn the state running into reminders to buy oranges and onions. She couldn’t quite see Jim here in this chaotic room with Anne and her messiness, her political naïveté. Although he would have approved of the efforts at recycling, Sam decided, and the obvious total lack of expenditure on what he considered to be unnecessary luxuries, like something to sit on that was actually comfortable. In fact she suspected she could see Jim’s fingerprints on the cack-handed construction of the skip-retrieved crate shelving; it looked like something he might have helped to build. She rubbed her eye. She didn’t want to think about it. Anyway, it couldn’t be Jim’s fingerprints because Jim had never been here. It was Chris. She began to feel queasy, overwhelmed by the confusion of ghosts and shadows, engulfed by the stories that mirrored the truth, turned them inside out and reflected them back at her in disconcertingly familiar forms. The room was spinning.
‘Is this a squat?’ Sam asked, forcing herself to focus on the basics. Facts.
‘No, it’s a housing co-op. We were given a short-term licence by Lambeth Council because they didn’t have enough money to do them up.’ Anne spoke in the nondescript monotone of middle-class London.
A housing co-op. Not quite so haphazard and disorganized as it all looked then.
‘How did you find out where I live anyway?’ Anne asked.
Sam hesitated, feeling dumb, caught on the back foot, not expecting to be the one answering questions.
‘Did you find my address in my brother’s house in Orkney?’
Sam’s cheeks burned.
‘It was you who broke in, wasn’t it? A neighbour said he’d passed two teenagers in a noisy maroon Cortina on the road that afternoon.’
Sam’s brain scrambled for a rebuff but couldn’t find one quickly enough.
‘Chris said he didn’t think you would do something like that,’ said Anne. ‘But I suspected he was probably covering for you.’
Sam glanced down at the floor, feeling like a naughty schoolgirl.
‘I’m right, aren’t I?’
She grimaced, decided there was no point denying it, nodded silently.
‘To be honest, I was quite relieved to think it was only a couple of teenagers ferreting through my belongings. At least you didn’t filch anything. But what were you after? What do you want anyway?’ Anne asked. With hostility? Not exactly. Sam sensed Anne was more interested in finding out about her – or, at least, not her but Chris’s daughter – than condemning her for breaking into Mark’s house.
Sam inhaled deeply. ‘I came to tell you something. I thought you ought to know. I wanted to tell you that he’s dead.’
No reaction.
‘I don’t understand,’ Anne said. Flat tone.
‘My dad had a car crash on the way back from the station last weekend. Vauxhall Bridge. He missed a traffic light and hit a brick wall. The pathologist said he was over the limit.’
The shockwave rippled outwards from Anne’s eyes, bewilderment, disbelief. An awkward silent thirty seconds before she registered realization. ‘Chris is dead? Oh my God.’
She gripped the back of a chair, knuckles white, head down, shoulders heaving. Sam edged away, uncomfortable, embarrassed by the display of emotion, not quite certain how to react, feeling guilty for breaking the bad news. She wondered whether Chris would have just melted away in Anne’s consciousness if she hadn’t said anything. She shuffled around by the door for five minutes, maybe more. She was on the point of making a quiet getaway, giving up on the possibility of talking, when Anne wiped her eyes on the back of her hand, groped for a pouch of Golden Virginia lying on the table, took out the Rizlas, rolled herself one, offered the packet to Sam.
‘No thanks, I only smoke—’ she curtailed the sentence, changed her mind. ‘Actually I will have one,’ she said. Solidarity, more than anything, hoping the comradeship of shared nicotine might ease the atmosphere. She fumbled with the Rizla and managed to roll a camel-humped tube with stray baccy strands straggling from its ends. Anne passed her a flame-tarnished silver Zippo. Sam flipped the lid, flicked the flintwheel with her thumb, held the dancing flame to her limp effort, dragged, clacked the lighter’s lid and replaced it on the table.
Anne shook her head. ‘Chris is dead. It just doesn’t seem real.’ She paused. The thin skin on her forehead wrinkled. ‘But you know he didn’t think he would be around much longer.’
She raised her rollie to her mouth. And then her arm froze in mid-air. ‘Oh my God. Perhaps Intelligence did him in. He thought they were after him.’
Sam threw her a bewildered expression. It wasn’t an act. It was hard to keep up with Jim’s stories. ‘Intelligence? What you mean secret agents? Spies? Why would Intelligence be after him?’
‘He was working on labour issues, workers’ rights, for the
Black Flag
.’
‘
Black Flag
?’
‘Anarchist newspaper. Didn’t he tell you about it?’ There was a hint of suspicion in Anne’s voice now, or perhaps it was a slight one-upmanship. She dragged heavily on her rollie as she eyed Sam quizzically.
‘No. He never really talked about…’ Sam stalled helplessly, floundering, flustered, unable to finish the sentence, convinced she’d done it now, given herself away. But Anne greeted her confusion with sympathy rather than mistrust. ‘It must have been difficult when your parents split up.’
Sam stuck her hands in her pockets, shrugged, sensing the best tactics to use. ‘You’ve probably seen him more often over the last couple of years than I have,’ she said, improvising now, feeling her way towards her lines, searching for the sentences that had a certain ring of truth. ‘He didn’t really tell me that much about what he had been doing. All that stuff about the
Black Flag
. Intelligence. It doesn’t really mean much to me.’ It was easier than she had been expecting to act the part. It didn’t feel like lying.
‘It almost seemed like he became a different person when he left us. I feel like there’s a part of my dad I know nothing about at all.’ She sighed. ‘It would really help me deal with my dad’s death, if you could tell me what you think might have happened, what he was doing before he died.’
She felt Anne examining her face with her wide, childlike eyes. Anne was, Sam suspected, cynical about the system but gullible about people; too trusting. Anne pulled a thin, pained smile. A heavy step outside on the veranda made them both turn to the window. The robin flitted past the pane. Footsteps clattered down the stairwell. They exchanged nervous glances. Anne walked over, peered out, shook her head and draped a scarlet blanket over the glass, casting a deep red shade over the already dim womb-like room. Neither of them spoke for a moment, listening for tell-tale sounds of an external presence: a tread, a breath, a rustle. But Sam could hear nothing now apart from the blood rushing through her head. Anne stubbed the butt of her rollie out on a saucer, reached for the Golden Virginia pouch, rolled herself another, lit it, puffed a couple of times and moved to the far end of the room, perching on the arm of a rickety chair. She beckoned Sam to come closer. Sam balanced awkwardly on the other arm. Anne stared into space, eyes moist, puffing on her rollie. Sam wondered whether she had lost it again. She was beginning to feel slightly frustrated with Anne’s inability to control her emotions.
But then Anne sighed, stubbed out the damp remains of her fag. ‘I’ll tell you what I can.’
‘Chris documented details of workplace accidents for the
Black Flag
,’ Anne said. ‘He had contacts in the unions, contacts all over the place in fact. He was always chasing up stories. Nobody paid him, of course; he did it in his spare time. He was really passionate about it, particularly when young people were involved. He thought teenagers were too easy to exploit, happy to do dangerous jobs because they had no idea about the risks involved.’
Anne’s hands fiddled nervously with the tobacco and papers.
‘It was his union contacts that told Chris about Intelligence’s plans. They said that the security services were trying to use the trouble in the coal industry to expand their surveillance networks, crack down on anybody who steps out of line. Chris was trying to find out more. But he began to suspect that Intelligence was after him because he knew what they were up to. That was why he moved out of his flat in Stockwell. He decided to leave town, lie low for a while. He warned me before he left to be careful, not to trust anyone. He said Intelligence might be trying to plant someone in a squat round here to pick up on our contacts with the miners.’
She shook her head as she lifted a rollie to her mouth, lit it. ‘About a week or so after Chris had left, this bloke appeared, started hanging around. Steve. South African Steve. I didn’t think there was anything odd about him at first. Everybody liked him; he said he was on the run from the South African army. He had to do National Service, but he absconded after six months because he couldn’t take it, hated the apartheid regime, went AWOL, headed north, working his way up through Africa doing casual labour here and there, and ended up in Brixton. I met him at the bookshop.’