Separate tracks, p.15
Separate Tracks, page 15
An officer who had been walking up scanning the marchers paused before Orph, blocking his view, and spoke swiftly into his walkie-talkie. Noise was coming. Driving very slowly, an open backed lorry with a group and loudspeakers balanced on the back. Their electrified voices rang out shrilly. The marchers following them danced along, laughing and joining in the song. The officer moved on, pausing to speak to each policeman on his way.
Orph left his post at the railings and began to walk down alongside the marchers but still in the park. People at the railings were waiting for their friends to march past so they could join them. There were several photographers hovering there too. A group of people emerged from a flashy hotel on the opposite side of the road and stood staring in amazement, clutching their thick fur coats to them. There were two women in the party, both with glossy black hair piled up above their carefully made-up faces. People passing shouted at them and they recoiled fastidiously and ducked to enter the waiting taxi. A policeman stopped the marchers for them and waved them out into the road. There were fewer smiling faces now. The marchers conversed in low voices, looking forward to the thin straggle that the often-broken march had become and back to the milling crowds still waiting to move in Hyde Park. From among the slogan-chants of various groups emerged a deeper ground swell, a beat like the breathing of the march. Only one word was distinguishable, stressed: “Out! . . . Out! . . . Out!” Policemen stood straight-backed, eyes narrowed, staring into the march or over the heads of the marchers.
Orph moved on, walking faster than the marchers, past photographers, police, idle spectators, past the glittering revolving doors of smart hotels, past trails of rubbish left by the marchers. Suddenly there was a shout and two police darted into the body of the march. The marchers coming behind piled up and gathered round. Some who had gone on ahead ran back to see what was happening. Within seconds there was a mob blocking the entire width of Park Lane, with police tearing people away from the outside and pushing their way in. A siren raised its wail and the black van at the front of the waiting queue peeled off and crept round the corner into Park Lane. It moved along slowly, accompanied by shouts and boos from the excited marchers. At Speakers Corner the police cut off the march, holding back the traffic also, until the way was cleared.
Orph leaned against a tree watching the vigorously pushing backs and arms. People were shouting, someone was screaming. A trickle of people were detached from the mob by the police and packed on their way towards Piccadilly. Then the crowd split and three policemen ran out, holding/dragging between them a figure whose face was smeared with blood. The doors of the van opened and closed on them. People turned in confusion; some of them, not knowing what had happened, found their friends and walked on. A smaller group gathered quickly around the black maria, shouting and gesticulating. The police answered them in lower voices. One of the arguing marchers took a quick step forward then froze, right arm half-raised. The others crowded in behind him, pushing him closer to the police. Suddenly he turned, snarling, to them and as he did so two policemen stepped forward and took each arm. An ultimatum was delivered to the others. Against the crowd and helicopter noises Orph heard that silence, of fear and hesitation, as they glanced at each other. The man who was pinioned by police shouted something angrily and a woman joined in his cry, while the others fell back. The police took the woman who had shouted. The van doors were opened again and the two people shoved inside. The engine revved and the van moved off quickly.
The little group who had confronted it stood watching it go, then turned helplessly to one another. They drifted back into the body of the march, which absorbed them easily as if nothing had happened. That section passed by and its passing was punctuated by a flow of traffic, and then the next section came on.
Alison, Phil and Emma were under the next banner. Orph jumped over the railing and joined them, his arrival as unnoticed as his departure had been. They were complaining about the police.
Emma spoke with the indignant outrage of a respectable citizen who suddenly finds she’s been conned. “How dare they! How dare they!” A rumour had filtered back about someone a group of police had attacked, dragged along the ground and kicked.
Phil was shaking his head sceptically. “I doubt it somehow, I doubt it. They may be nasty, but they’re not stupid. They’d have a riot on their hands—” Orph walked silently beside Phil, near the kerb.
“But look how they’re treating people. Look how it feels now, compared to before—” Emma gestured around her.
Phil nodded. “Well, what d’you expect? Of course, this is all new to you, isn’t it? You’ve never seen our mighty police force in action before!” Emma was snubbed and did not reply, but the atmosphere of the march made an impression on her. There was anger and violence in the air, and it felt justified.
By the time the final sections of the march reached Trafalgar Square, the speakers had finished and gone and so had the leaders of the march. The circling helicopters watched the monster melt away into the dusk, disintegrating into groups and blobs that disappeared down subways and into doorways while the bright orange street-lamps flickered on all over London. It was gone without a fight—easily, as if afraid of the dark blue evening air.
Chapter 35
Emma began to take more notice of Orph’s activities. The household regrouped into a tighter, more inward-looking circle. They ate at home nearly every night now, and quite often there was a group of Phil’s friends as well. The kitchen became a special place. In the daytime it was bare, exposed, uncomfortable, but in the evening with the lamp turned to face the glowing red wall and half a dozen people round the table, with cigarette smoke coiling above them and smells of food and drink and the steady hiss of the gas fire, it was as secure as a cave against the wilderness. Condensation in thousands of drops on the window provided a curtain against the outside. From time to time a huge drop, becoming over full, would tremble and slither down into the drop beneath, and joining together the two made a dribbling run down the pane, clearing a little strip to outside view. But that soon misted over again. They were enclosed in that room, safe from everything outside. The conversations that took place there were different, insulated from the wariness that you needed outside. It was a room for friends, for conspirators.
Orph was always there. Sometimes he was reading one of the badly printed newspapers or pamphlets that Phil scattered like confetti wherever he went. Sometimes he was simply sitting staring at his hands; only rarely did it look as if he was listening to the talk. His face was expressionless, his spiky sandy hair standing up above it like fur. Sometimes his eyes would follow a conversation, moving to each speaker’s face as if he were watching a silent movie, waiting for some explanation. Alison moved round the kitchen, providing platefuls of food, cups of tea, rising to get the salt, to place the butter in front of Phil, to pause affectionately with her hand on his shoulder. He never acknowledged her publicly. Always there was a half-frozen expression on her face, something that could not be warmth and so was wistfulness, her desire to please. She looked too often at his face, moving purposely so that she brushed against him, aware of his needs before he was himself. He was absorbed in his own ideas and only irritated by her closeness when he noticed it or it intruded on what he was doing.
“For God’s sake Alison, sit down and stop fussing. Nobody wants any more, do they?” He didn’t give time for an answer, turning back quickly to his conversation with Steve. “So he reckons that with a bit of a push we could get most of them out within a week?”
Steve, who wore a striped blue woolly hat pulled so far down it nearly met his beard, nodded.
“Yeh—OK. Well, what we need to do is get some leaflets run off—a hundred or so—and distribute them at the factory gates tomorrow night and in the morning. Nothing complicated—figures mainly—give them a breakdown of the redundancy offer, and a few recent statistics about unemployment. Most important thing really is to talk to ’em, get as many as we can dishing out leaflets and stopping them—” He talked fast, and white flecks of saliva gathered at the corners of his mouth. Emma found it repulsive.
He was talking about a small local factory where half the workforce were being made redundant. A shop steward had been sacked several weeks before the redundancy news. Phil and the others had originally become involved in an attempt to stir up a strike on his behalf, but they had met with an apathetic response. Since then good work had been done, according to Phil, building up contacts. They were really getting through to the workers now. Alison was sitting on the edge of her chair, her face tight, smoking rapidly and staring at the bowl of fruit. Emma broke up a lump of cigarette ash with a match stick until it was fine dust and began to draw her initials on it, making its edges into a circle, then a square.
“—we need more people. We need to saturate them as they come out of those gates. We need at least six leafletters who know what the fuck they’re talking about and can—”
“There’s a union meeting tonight.” Ellis was very bashful; now he was bright red with the effort of that sentence. Emma wondered how long he had held it in his throat, formulated, waiting for the moment to slip it in.
“So?” Phil turned on him angrily.
“Well,” apologetic, “wouldn’t it be worth asking them?”
“Students’ union?”
“Yes.”
“Crap,” said Phil viciously. He was becoming a good performer—they all looked up at his angry face, waiting in the pause he created for what he would say next. “You know damn well it would be a waste of time—I’d be lucky if they’d even put it on the agenda. You’d get nothing from them. Half of them don’t even know what redundancy is, and the other half’d run a mile if they saw a worker.” There was a silence. “OK. We need more people. Well, we haven’t got them. Who’s gonna write the leaflet?”
There was a pause then Steve said, “I will. But I need that article, the one you were talking about, from the Morning Star.”
“Yeah, yeah, with the figures. OK, I’ll walk home with you and get it then.” Alison stiffened in her chair. She liked Phil to stay the night. He did not often stay. “Alison, if he brings it over here tomorrow morning and you type up a stencil for 11.30 you can bring it down to me in the Union and I’ll get it run off.”
“No.” Alison’s face was contorted as if parting with that syllable were parting with some portion of her own flesh.
The word barely checked him. He turned, half noticing, irritated. “What? I’ll be in the bar, I’m meeting Alex.”
“No.”
“No what?”
“No I’m not typing it.”
“Why?”
“I’m busy tomorrow. I’ve got to write an essay.”
Everyone was watching Phil and he knew it. Slowly he raised his eyes to the ceiling, tilted back his head and began to laugh—a grating, humourless sound. Emma watched the Adam’s apple in his throat jiggling up and down. When he’d finished laughing he shook his head slowly. “I don’t believe it,”
Alison’s face was burning, anxiety and the knowledge that she would be misunderstood put a squeaking whine into her voice that was painful to listen to. “Phil, you’re not fair, listen. It’s just not fair. You talk about doing things—working together for it and all that—and look what happens. You’re just using me. I’m the typist. It’s just—like women used to make cups of tea. At political meetings, women made cups of tea. And now you do all the talking—and all the planning—and write the leaflets and have the ideas—and expect me to do the typing—the mindless work. It’s not right. Why don’t you type it? Why doesn’t Ellis?”
Ellis turned red but had no chance to speak. Emma sat forward in her chair to see Alison’s face. She knew it wasn’t simply what Alison was saying that was important. Alison was making a bid for Phil’s attention by opposing him. She was trying to change the basis of the relationship somewhere, so that he would look at her with respect—well, so that he would look at her. She would be better off without him, thought Emma.
He leant forward, putting his elbows on the table, exaggerated speech and gestures as if she were simple-minded. “My dear Alison, the reasons are perfectly simple. I quite agree, it would be very nice, it would be perfectly delightful, indeed, if you had an idea—or if you planned something or wrote something. Likewise, it would be useful if I could type. But as it happens, I don’t. And as it happens, you don’t have any ideas—do you? Do you? I’m sorry, have I been missing something? Have I been sitting here talking while at the end of the table there great plans and ideas have been languishing unheard? I’m sorry Alison. Tell us your ideas. What do you think we should do?”
Alison’s lips drew back into a thin straight line, as if sewn. After a second she pushed her chair back sharply and it fell over backwards making a loud noise. “I’m going to bed.”
They listened to her going up the stairs. Phil slumped his head over his folded arms. “Christ. What’s the matter with her?” He wasn’t asking though. He’s not interested, Emma thought. Wait for it. Yes. He turned to her. “What about—”
“No.” He had known what she would say.
“Why not?”
Emma hesitated. “What’s the point of it, Phil?”
“Of typing?” He put outrage into his voice, ready to bulldoze ahead.
“No. Behind all this. Look—just explain it to me. The factory’s losing money. So they’re going to make people redundant. So that they can carry on employing at least fifty. So you want them to go on strike. And if they go on strike, they lose the orders and contracts they’ve got for making things and the factory loses even more money, and ends up closing down. So everybody’s made redundant. And that’s fifty less jobs still—”
He ran his hands through his hair, vigorously, till it stood on end. “The point, dear Emma, is that if you lie down and take the shit, they’ll shovel more on top of you. The point is that no matter how they explain their losses and needs and reasons to the press, it still so happens that the directors and shareholders continue to rake in a tidy fat profit while the workers work their balls off to be allowed to be underpaid in a shitty job. The point is that it doesn’t even matter what happens to this fucking factory—I don’t care if it closes tomorrow—the point is that they should learn what’s being done to them and they should start creating hell about it. What’s going to happen—all over England—it’ll happen—is that this fucking system’s going to break down. It’s up to people like us to get into factories—to tell them what’s happening—to show them how they’re being treated—to fill them with rage, till the whole fucking country’s in an uproar and the fat cats have to notice, nothing works anymore, no transport, no goods, no imports and exports—chaos—that’s the point—make chaos, till the whole rotten barrel cracks apart at the seams and we can start again.” He paused staring at her. “You’re like a pair of fucking ostriches, you and Alison. Ask Orph! He knows.”
Emma glanced at Orph. It was unheard of for him to be dragged into such an argument.
But Phil steamrolled on. “He knows what it’s like out there, he’s been traipsing round after jobs in some of these shitty places, he knows what people put up with. But no, you don’t even look under your bloody noses, just lift them daintily a little higher in the air and ‘la-di-dah, I’ve got to write my essay on romantic love’ or whatever the fuck it is.” She opened her mouth but he had started again. “Weren’t you there on that march in London? Couldn’t you see? Don’t you ever read the papers? Look!” He snatched a paper from the heap on the fridge and jabbed at the front page with his index finger. “Look, just read the headlines here—” 500 more jobs lost in Liverpool’. Here—‘Police chief calls for stronger laws on pickets; Boy, 9, shot in Londonderry night of riots’—look that’s on one fucking page—and again—‘Savage housing cuts’. How can you ignore it? It’s all part of the same thing. Are you blind?”
“Stop shouting, stop treating me like a moron, for Christ’s sake, Phil!” She was trembling with anger. “All right, yes, no, I’m not blind, I can see what’s happening. But Alison’s right. That’s what you think, it’s what you see—and because you do, you expect us all to rush about and do what you say—and you don’t treat us like equals, you treat us like tame morons and give us little tasks to do to help carry out your great ideas—”
“They’re not my fucking ideas, they’re what’s happening in the world around you, that you’re too short-sighted to bloody see—” He stopped speaking abruptly, as if he’d run out of words.
She stared at the table top, waiting for the heat to drain from her face. “You’ve still got no right to treat people like that. You assume you’re right and everyone else is wrong. You set yourself above us.” She paused, but he said nothing. She felt the four of them were looking down on her. Even Orph. Trying to move quietly, without looking at any of them again, she went out of the kitchen.
She went into her room but she was still so angry that it was pointless to go to bed. She should go and see Alison, but she didn’t want to. What was the point of comforting her? She’d be better off without him. Why should he expect her to be something she wasn’t? What right had he got? She stood on the landing and listened. They were talking, in the kitchen. She heard Orph’s voice, though she couldn’t tell what he was saying. Phil had really sucked him in. She found herself resenting it. That wasn’t particularly fair, after all it was better than him watching TV all the time. But it made her angry too. All part of Phil’s “holier than thou”. He could see what was wrong with the world and do something about it, while she merely worked for a silly degree. He could befriend Orph and give him a worthwhile interest, whereas she had merely dragged him into an incompatible household and left him to rot.
