“So let me get this straight. These death threats – they’re not coming from us then?”
“Use your head, Smithy,” Gus said tiredly. “Use a bit of grey matter. Do I look like I sent the fuckers? Do I look happy about it mate? Why would we want to send death threats to him? Why would I want to nullify weeks of patient spadework by bloody tipping the prick off now?”
A long and uneasy silence. Gus sucked once more on his huge and unprecedented cigar. The glass of his drained schooner was cobwebbed internally with shreds of dried foam.
“So who did send them?” said Blue, after a while.
“That’s the question, Bluey.” Gus squinted at them solemnly through the rank smoke haze. He plucked a sliver of something brown from his displeased tongue. “That’s the question.”
The emergency meeting. Three-twenty p.m., the Union Bar, the Maoists’ usual table. Recently Gus had taken to calling this the “Situation Room,” even though it was a table rather than a room. Or did he mean that the bar was the Situation Room? Right now, with the afterburn of her handshake still tingling on his palm, Fenton had more fundamental questions to ponder. For example: her touch, and the way she’d looked at him while bestowing it. Why on earth would she have looked at him like that if he didn’t stand a chance? On the other hand: if he did, then why on earth did she look at him the way she looked at him the rest of the time, as if he were blocking her view of something else she wanted to look at more, although still not necessarily very much. As if he existed only as some kind of chart or table that she could periodically glance at in order to remind herself of the relative merits of Gus. Where the hell did he stand with her? His inability to answer this question deepened with each new encounter. Was he gaining ground or losing it? Or was he still more or less where he had started? If so, where was that? Was he incredibly close or incredibly far away? Was he doing well enough yet to stop hating Gus and start pitying him instead? He kept getting this strange impulse to feel sorry for the big man, to share his pain over these constant impediments to his terror plot. Was this impulse right or wrong? Could he afford to start viewing Gus’s travails with magnanimity now, from the glorious standpoint of erotic victory?
He thought not.
And here was something else to ponder: where was Warren? Why was the chair of the munitions guru empty, for the first time ever? Was it paranoid nonsense to fear he might actually be working on the bomb right now, bent over some wire-strewn bench in his backyard lab? Or was it well-founded nonsense, nonsense that would soon get hideously borne out by the facts? Fenton ached to know the answer, but feared to ask the question. He’d just have to wait till the information came out naturally.
“My suspicion,” Gus was thoughtfully saying, “is that they’re coming from the Anarchists. This caper reeks of their amateur-hour tomfoolery. This’d be them in a nutshell – gallivanting round with their scissors and glue sticks, thinking they’re up to something radical. And meanwhile fucking up a proper bloody operation in the process. Strokers! Geese! I swear to God, sometimes I reckon the Anarchist manifesto is specifically framed round the goal of fucking up my life.”
Fenton said: “So we’re snookered then.” He made his face display bitter disappointment. “We’re back to square one.”
“Oh fuck no.” Gus frowned at him. He dispensed a puck of ash from his wicked cigar. “Why would I call an emergency meeting to announce that? No mate, we’re going in tonight.”
Around now Fenton’s palm stopped tingling.
“It’s bold Fent, I know. And I dare say it runs counter to your perfectionist instincts. But we’ve got no choice mate. This death threat situation, it changes everything. The clock’s ticking now. The time for dicking around is very much in the past.”
“Gus,” Fenton said, “I hear that. But let’s think this through.” He respectfully steepled his palms. “These threats, I don’t like them. I don’t like the way they smell. Maybe we should wait and see how they play out. Just sit tight for a while till they blow over.”
“But who’s to say they will blow over, Fent? This is precisely what’s worrying me. The Anarchists are incompetent gimps, I’ll grant you that. But who knows what their ultimate game plan is here? Who’s to say they won’t turn round one day and actually try and do the bloke? And who’s to say that day won’t be tomorrow mate? Or today? Call me paranoid, Fent, but this is the idea that’s haunting me. I refuse to just sit back and watch while this bunch of abject bloody jokers takes out our target. Could you live with that mate? Cause I sure as hell couldn’t. It’d be like watching some other bloke walk in and root your girlfriend. I can’t put it more starkly than that. And it’s not just the Anarchists I’m scared of, not any more. Lego’s getting more famous by the day. And you know what that means. It means every sicko and mental deviate in the world has suddenly got a solid-gold motive to waste him. Every quiet loner with a grievance against society. The longer we pussyfoot around, the more freaks there’s going to be joining the queue. No mate, it’s got to be tonight. We’ve worked our rings off on this thing. I’m rooted if I’ll let us come out of it empty-handed. Just think, Fent, just think of what we are if we don’t do this. We’re nothing. We’re a joke. We’re just a pathetic bunch of nobodies who sit on our arses talking about stuff we never actually do. Call me a pessimist, but these are my demons mate. These are the very personal demons I’ve been wrestling with.”
“Gus, I want this thing as badly as you do,” Fenton stressed. “You know that. But let’s not be rash here. As you say, we’ve put a lot of work into this thing. Months of planning. Or … weeks, anyway.” He swivelled inclusively to his left and right as he spoke, trying to make the other Maoists feel part of the debate. They looked back at him with blank eyes and open mouths, like a row of trout displayed on ice. “These threats,” he went on, “they’re a setback, sure. But let’s not,” he soberly counselled, “let them panic us into moving prematurely.”
“I hear what you’re saying, Fent,” Gus open-mindedly said. “And it’s cogent. But ask yourself, how much more planning do we really need to do here? This is a bombing mate, not a royal wedding. In every practical sense, we’re ready to rock and roll. All we’ve really got to do is shift the hardware onto campus and get it into the guy’s building. I’m talking about a five minute operation, tops.”
Fenton looked back at the stolid lunatic through the pall of hanging smoke. Why, incidentally, was the fat fool smoking a cigar? He’d never smoked one before. Was it meant to symbolise something about his leadership, perhaps? Were its length and rigidity trying to tell him something?
“The hardware,” he said. “Are you saying …” He could scarcely bring himself to complete the question. “Are you saying it’s ready? It’s finished?” If there was a finished bomb, he told himself, he was going straight to her. It was as simple as that.
“Practically, Fent, practically.”
“Practically?”
“It’s in good hands, Fent. Let’s just say that.”
“In Warren’s hands, you mean?”
“Exactly.”
“He’s still working on it then?”
“He’s taking care of it as we speak, mate.”
“So it isn’t finished, then?”
“Steady on, Fent. Jesus. A minute ago you were looking to put the brakes on. Now you can’t wait to get your hands on the gear!”
“I’m just trying to establish whether or not we’ve got a live bomb yet. It seems like an important point.”
“I’ll put it this way, Fent. I’ve given the bloke a new deadline, and I’m confident he’ll respect it.”
“With a fully working bomb? With a bomb that’ll definitely explode?”
Gus frowned. “Wouldn’t be much of a bomb if it didn’t, Fent.”
“But does he even know how to make one?”
Gus didn’t even seem to like the cigar. He kept removing it from his mouth and subjecting it to close inspection, as if to confirm that it hadn’t mutated, since the last time he’d looked at it, into a fuming cylinder of dogshit. Now he looked from the cigar to Fenton and said:
“What are you driving at, Fent?”
“I’m just wondering, what makes you so confident he knows what he’s doing? Has he been doing tests or something?”
“Fent, are you going mad mate, or what? You can’t ‘test’ a bomb. It’s not like a mouse trap. Once you blow it up, it’s gone.”
“Yes but you can test other bombs, Gus. You can make trial ones and blow them up.”
“Look,” Gus said amicably, “if you’re worried about the level of his competence, believe me I used to share the same fears myself. Get this. About a week back,” he recalled with an indulgent smile, “I asked him if he’d made any headway on plastic explosives yet. And he’s replied – you’ll love this – he’s replied that he’d prefer to move straight onto real ones!” He chuckled richly at the memory.
“But now?” Fenton said.
“But now,” Gus replied, “he’s really knuckled down.”
“And what? Has he been getting tangible results?”
“My word he’s getting tangible results. This lab of his – actually it’s his old man’s shed, but anyway – apparently he’s got the whole fucking joint just strewn with batteries and vices and wires and stuff.”
“Apparently?”
“The way he tells it, yeah.”
“You haven’t even been there?”
“Jesus Fent – you don’t seriously reckon I’d go round to the deathtrap!” Once again Gus chuckled, with undiminished affection. “Ah Fent, what did we ever do without you, mate? That inquiring bloody mind of yours – it never stops ticking, does it? But with all due respect, this is exactly the reason you’d never make a good head honcho. You worry too much mate. You dwell too much on the minutia. You’ve got to look more at the big picture.”
“So when you say Warren’s taking care of it,” Fenton summarised, “all you really mean is, he says he’s taking care of it.” By now he had given up all hope of acquiring any hard information about Warren’s capacity to produce a functioning bomb. He simply wanted to explore, in a spirit of horrified fascination, the general question of just how nuts Gus was, to map the great dark continent of his derangement.
“What’s your point?” Gus asked.
“That maybe he’s just saying he’s taking care of it because he’s scared of letting you down, Gus.”
“Fent, if he’s scared of letting me down, he’ll be bloody sure to deliver me a viable package at midnight, won’t he?”
And here Gus slapped the table as if the argument was over. Getting laboriously to his feet, he waded around to the area behind Fenton’s chair, and laid his hands on the muscles of Fenton’s shoulders, and began subjecting them to a vigorous heterosexual massage.
“You’re so tense, Fent! Let it go, mate. Take the leap of faith. Trust me, in a matter of hours we’ll be planting the gear. Savour the moment, mate. Suck it in. Relish the build-up.”
“Well anyway, it can’t be tonight,” Fenton said gruffly. “I’ve already got plans.”
“I’d hardly call a threesome a ‘plan’, Fent,” Gus chortled, continuing the massage. “Well okay, maybe I would. But you can have one any night of the week, you greedy bastard. Which reminds me, comrades – as of right now, I’m putting a total sex ban in force. And I very much include wanking in that. It’s like the eve of the grand final – we’ve got to conserve them vital energies. Me included. I’ve already told Charmers I’ll be out of commission tonight. Told her I’m going ten-pin bowling. Fent, you’ve gone all tense again.”
“Yeah well something’s just occurred to me. If we kill him now – ”
“Whoa there, Fent. Could we stick with the term ‘liquidate’? Or ‘eliminate’? The word ‘kill’ – it tends to put us down on a par with blokes like Neville Aggot.”
“And we can’t have that,” Fenton said tartly.
“Exactly, Fent. Exactly. A diseased little monkey like Aggot, there’s no rhyme or reason to the kind of stuff he gets up to. The guy’s sick. He’s a fruit loop mate. An operation like this” – he worked the muscles near Fenton’s spine – “let’s face it, this has got levels a fucked-up little deviationist like that could never even dream of. But anyhow: you were saying?”
“That if we do it now, while the Anarchists are sending him all these death threats, aren’t the Anarchists going to get all the credit?”
“Again, Fent, a valid point. But I’ve thought this through. And the fact is, we know the threats are coming from the Anarchists. Or we think it. But we only think it cause we know they’re not coming from us. And of course nobody else knows that. As far as the general public’s concerned, these threats are anonymous, aren’t they? The credit’s not going to go to anyone.”
“Including us,” Fenton returned smoothly. “We won’t get it either. So we’ll have the absurd situation where we go to all the trouble of killing the guy – ”
“Liquidating him, Fent.”
“All right, ‘liquidating’ him. We go to all that trouble and we get absolutely nothing out of it. Credit-wise we won’t be any better off than the Anarchists. Or anyone else for that matter. Why should we risk life imprisonment for that? Shouldn’t we at least send him a few threats of our own first? Something specifically Maoist?”
“First of all, Fent,” Gus said, winding up the massage and plodding thoughtfully back to his chair, “I strongly quibble with the idea we’d be looking at life imprisonment. You keep forgetting the clinical nature of what we’re up to here. This is a planned hit we’re talking about. This is a surgical, well-thought-out thing. This is light years away from the sort of random, pointless slaying that people get life sentences for. Don’t get me wrong. I still hope to Christ we won’t get caught. But if we do, we’ll be looking at a slap on the wrist, believe me.”
“What?”
Gus held up a traffic-stopper’s palm. “But to get to your other point. You’re right, of course. In an ideal world we would get a few Maoist threats out there in advance. Out into the marketplace. But I think you’d have to agree, Fent, time’s pretty much passed us by on that. There’s no way we can mount a coherent threat campaign by tonight. We’ve already missed the post, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”
“I’m suggesting,” Fenton clarified, “that we not do it tonight. I’m suggesting putting tonight off till we can get a few threats out there. Just for a couple of days. Maybe a week. Plus that’ll give Warren more time to finish the bomb.” Yes, and then Fenton would be faced with this selfsame nightmare again in a week’s time. Which would be bad, but still a lot better than facing it now.
But Gus was firmly shaking his head. “Fuck that, Fent. We’re going in tonight, I’m adamant about that. If claming credit’s all you’re worried about, we can always do that with a simple phone call afterwards. Why waste a couple of days when we can let our fingers do the walking mate?”
Fenton answered with a peevish shrug, as though anything he said was bound to be given short shrift anyway.
“Aw Fent mate.” Gus looked at him with a rush of genuine concern. “Don’t be like that. I relish your input, mate. I really do. You’re always thinking, and that’s a quality I dead-set respect. But this thing, it’s … it’s just got to happen tonight.” He helplessly spread his hands, as though changing this deadline were utterly beyond his power. “It’s not ideal, I know that. I never said it was. But remember, I never asked for this fucking death threat thing. Fate bloody thrust it on me, and I’m doing my level best to get my head around it and come up with some sort of credible response. That’s what leadership’s all about. If it seems like I’m pissing on everything you say, mate, I can only assure you, that’s not my intention. Hey Fent?” His tone grew softer here, more conciliatory. “Listen. Tomorrow night, when this thing’s all over, we’re going to have a huge night out on the piss. All of us, mate. My shout. You can’t fairer than that. I’m talking about a huge Chinese feed – Yum Cha, steaming face towels, flaming plates of pork, the lot. And then we’ll culminate the night round at one of them nightclubs where the strippers smoke cigarettes with their vaginas.”
Gus sketched out this disgraceful plan of action with a serene and masterful grin, confident that it would make everything all right. And sure enough the other Maoists greeted it with various hoots and howls of unqualified approval. Fenton, on the other hand, found the proposal a seriously disturbing one, on several levels. Until this moment he hadn’t known that such a method of smoking was physically possible, let alone marketable as a form of entertainment. And yet none of the other Maoists seemed at all surprised to hear about it. To judge from their responses, the practice was broadly known of, indeed went on pretty much all the time. Was he really so naive, so out of touch? And if he was naive on this point, what other points might he also be naive on? What else didn’t he know about that everyone else did? How many other things went on all the time without his knowing about them? It occurred to him that maybe he was the mad one here. Maybe conspiracies like this one went on all the time too. Maybe it was backward of him not to know that, and rather old-fashioned of him to be so concerned.
Gus took a satisfied pull on his foul cigar. And then, eager to capitalise on the groundswell of positive feedback, he said: “All we need now is a volunteer to plant it.”
Fenton watched the merriment of the junior Maoists melt away around him, and turn to awkward silence. Well, here it was. He’d always known, in theory, that it would come: the moment when his watery brand of passive resistance would no longer do. The moment at which it was simply no longer possible to keep pretending he wasn’t in serious trouble. But it had arrived so suddenly. He’d always imagined he would have a lot more time, a long and uncluttered future in which he could lay out all the rock-solid arguments against Operation Lego at his leisure, and make sanity prevail without ever having to seriously put himself out. But suddenly here it was. Here was Gus calling for a midnight volunteer to plant this bomb that might very well turn out (although Warren was – and this fact had to be remembered, and clung to, and cherished – an absolute moron) to be real. Here was the moment when the tide of events would pass, perhaps, out of his supervision for good.
Unless of course he volunteered to plant the bomb himself.
And he didn’t want to do that.
But didn’t that probably mean it was the right thing to do?
Gus waited, with diminishing bonhomie. Then he turned to Blue, in an abrupt and to-the-point fashion that brought a look of queasy panic to the face of that gingery Maoist.
“Blue mate. How would you feel about putting your hand up?”
Blue redirected his gaze to the ceiling. He rubbed his chin, in poor imitation of a man giving a question some serious thought.
Gus added: “It’s really a no-risk procedure, provided you know what you’re doing.”
“I don’t think I would know what I was doing,” Blue replied.
“Smithy?” Gus said, dismissing Blue from the equation with a disgusted wave of the hand.
But Smithy proved to be bent double, attending to a fiendish-looking itch in the region of his ankle. “Why don’t you ask Wozz?” his voice floated up from below the table.
“As if I’d risk sending our explosives expert in there!” Gus indignantly said.
“I thought you said it was no risk,” Smithy’s voice came back.
“Col?”
But Col was immersed in a fascinated study of one of his fingernails.
“For Christ’s sake you deadshits!” In hurt bafflement Gus moved his eyes around the table. Sooner or later he was going to look at Fenton, and Fenton still didn’t know how he was going to handle that. “I suppose you want me to plant the bloody thing myself?”
As disillusioned as he was, Gus still spoke as if this suggestion were plainly preposterous, and bound to meet with a typhoon of objections. Instead it met with a silence so deep that one could quite distinctly hear, from a remote pool table, a male voice declaring an intention to put the nine into the corner pocket.
“Because I will, you know,” he went on, his voice beginning to crack and creak with emotion. “If that’s what it comes to, I will.”
More silence.
And now, finally, Gus did look at Fenton. Straight at him. His great dark eyeballs were spiked with hot tears.
“Et tu, Fent?” he said, horribly.
Fenton looked back into the wounded eyes. He pictured the big man trying to plant the bomb himself, and failing, and dying. He pictured going to the funeral, and opening his arms to embrace her, moving in for the frontal hug – and getting a slap in the face instead, if not an outright bullet of spit. Then he pictured Gus planting the thing successfully, blowing Lego into the next world as per plan – and pictured how she’d find a way of believing that he, Fenton, was infinitely more to blame for that than Gus was. It would offend the laws of logic, but she would find a way. He pictured Gus doing stir, with her on the outside waiting for him, keeping the flame alive, the flame only fortified by lack of daily exposure to what he was really like. Then he pictured Gus taking a premature bomb blast but not quite dying, surviving the incident as an extensively maimed freak, getting spoonfed his every meal by her and read to by her at nights, a twisted monster, pink and lumpy and utterly hairless. And he pictured spending the rest of his own days feeling like the exact moral equivalent.
Then he pictured planting the bomb himself: at the bottom of the university lake.
Anyway, he reminded himself, the thing would be made by Warren. Almost certainly it would be a dud.
“I’ll do it,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“You just told him you weren’t interested in that sort of thing …”
“And that was it. He scrapped it. The whole plan.”
“I told you so, didn’t I?”
“You were right, I was wrong.”
“I know him so well, don’t I?”
“Like the back of your hand.”
“So that’s why he’s going ten-pin bowling tonight! So he can celebrate that it’s all over.”
“Something like that.”
“I’m so happy! It’s going to be just like old times again. I’ll be allowed to come to the meetings again. And Gussy won’t be moping round all the time with all this stuff on his mind.”
“This ‘stuff’? I don’t want to revive an old argument, but this ‘stuff’ did come out of his mind in the first place. Let’s not forget that.”
“ … You realise you owe me five bucks now, Fenton? For that bet. But I guess you did buy me all those coffees. So I guess I’ll let you off. I’d say we finished up about even.”
“Finished up?”
“Well, now this thing’s over … I mean, I guess I’ll just see you at the meetings now. Of course we’ll have to pretend we don’t really know each other.”
“Assuming it is over.”
“Well is it or isn’t it?”
“Okay. It is. Or it seems to be. But I don’t see why that should stop us having coffee. Now and then.”
“You seem a little out of it this afternoon, Fenton. You should be happy about this. Aren’t you happy?”
“I guess I still find it all a bit odd. The way none of it ever really seemed to bother you.”
“Oh not that again.”
“But just in general. The whole thing. The whole you and Gus thing. It does seem a little … strange, to the outside eye. You do seem an odd couple.”
“In what way?”
“I don’t know. I mean – you. You’re sort of …”
“Sort of what?”
“I don’t know. Sort of classy.”
“Classy!”
“Whereas Gus …”
“Whereas Gus what?”
“Well … you know what he’s like. Surely I don’t have to say it.”
“No, come on. What is he like?”
“I don’t know. He’s the kind of guy who … Oh don’t worry.”
“No: the kind of guy who what?”
“I don’t know, the kind of guy who goes to places where women … smoke cigarettes with … you know, with their …”
“Oh yuck, Fenton! That’s disgusting!”
“Well, he’s the one who goes there.”
“What makes you think I want to know that?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry I mentioned it.”
“Now, tonight. Don’t you be too hard on my Gussy, will you?”
“Tonight?”
“At ten-pin bowling. You go easy on him, Fenton. Make sure he comes home in a good mood. You’ll do that for me, won’t you?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Sometimes he wondered if they revealed a serious flaw in his character.
Sometimes he wondered if they revealed all that his character really was.
It was one forty-five a.m. He paced and loitered, shrouded in his own steam. A broken streetlight across the road winked on and off. Dark things stood behind the shop windows: a rack of clothes, drained of all colour; a butcher’s tray devoid of meat; bargain bins that came in from the footpaths by night; a row of three barber’s chairs, left at three different angles. The air was vaguely moist and vaguely moonlit. It put him in mind of a fridge at midnight, the wedge of chilled light that spills over you as you stand there on the lino under your own hulking shadow, not for a moment relishing how fundamentally good it is to be standing barefoot in front of your fridge instead of standing out on a dark and empty street somewhere, a long way from home, wondering if a bomb fashioned by a first-time bomb-maker and known cretin will still blow up after you sink it to the bottom of a deep body of water, assuming it hasn’t blown up in your face on the way there.
The wind came up again. A block away something metallic scuttered rapidly across some bitumen, then trundled into silence. Gus had been meant to get here at one, in the van, with the gear. And now it was one forty-five. How long were you meant to wait around in cases like this? An hour? Two? He shivered, and sent out another speech-balloon of head-vapour. He wished she could see him out here, doing what he was doing. Given that he had to be out here, he wished she could see it. He paced up and down along the shopfronts till the echo of his footsteps began to sound too criminal. Then he stood still for a while. When that began to feel too criminal too, he went back to pacing up and down. He checked his watch again to persuade himself that time was still moving forward. He looked back up at the pale sky. It was more grey than black. Paler smudges where the clouds were. But still no rain. The parts of the early evening he hadn’t spent defecating in terror he had spent looking at the weather forecasts, checking the odds of a rain-affected operation. The odds had appeared good. Rain periods, said one report. Rain periods developing, said another. Showers possible, said a third. Rain, said a blunt fourth. But now, opening both palms towards the sky, he remarked the continuing failure of these things to occur. Or develop. Or seem possible. Anyway, what was the point in hoping for them? A bit of drizzle was hardly likely to worry Gus. Rain delays were strictly for the sane.
The winking streetlight hummed and clicked across the road. A dog let out a volley of yaps somewhere. So how long was he meant to wait around? An hour? Ninety minutes? It was one forty-nine now. A lesser man would have gone home twenty minutes ago. An even lesser man than that wouldn’t have turned up in the first place. But here he was. And he had to stay. He knew that. If Gus turned up and found him gone, there was every chance the crazy bastard would proceed to campus and plant the gear himself. And that could not be permitted. That could not be allowed. He would stay here till dawn if that was what it took to prevent it. If that was what it took to get the gear safely out of Gus’s possession, and get some quality time alone with it, and get it deep deep down into the bosom of the lake.
And if Gus should decide to accompany him to the planting site, in a last-minute fit of zeal … ?
Some things were best not thought about.
His eyes went nervously back to the phone booth on the corner. He flexed his leaden limbs. Where was the famed adrenaline that was meant to pump through your veins at times like this? Where was it? His veins were lifeless, torpid. His blood sat thickly in them like dough. His body felt flaccid and old. Resigned. Comprehensively unready for what lay ahead. He had to keep fighting this odd sensation that he wasn’t really here. Because this wasn’t the sort of thing he did, was it? This was the sort of thing other people did. It followed – did it not? – that he couldn’t be here …
But he was. He tried to reconstruct the chain of events that had brought him here. To this street at this hour, waiting for what he was waiting for. But all he saw was a blur – a blur with her at the centre of it. In the end, that was about all you could usefully say: he was here because of her. She was the object on which his life had snagged and unravelled like a garment caught on a nail. And now it could scarcely be recognized as his life any more. It was just a loose heap of yarn. Not that his life before her had been especially coherent or enjoyable. But at least it had taken place within the confines of the law. Also, it had called for a lot less standing around outdoors in the middle of the night. Being a Maoist had now required him to do this twice. He vowed that this time would be the last. Whatever else tonight should bring, he was adamant about that.
Another surge of wind, rattling things in the distance. How did the wind know it was night? He blew on his numb fingertips. He stamped his feet. Odd that in a situation like this you could still be bothered by the cold. And by other small things. He was getting hungry. His sphincter, moreover, was in a state of grave discomfort. But above all he was cold. He had worn no coat or jacket. Just his standard Maoist outfit, jeans and T-shirt and jumper and desert boots. Leaving home, he’d believed he would have far worse things to worry about out here than the cold. He now found it was possible to worry about those things quite strenuously and still feel very cold and have a very sore sphincter at the same time. The wool of his Maoist jumper was thin and worn. It wasn’t up to a night like this. But it was a key part of his plan to look as left-wing as possible while taking delivery of the gear. Looking left-wing when he took delivery of it might go some way to offsetting the credibility damage he would do himself by depositing it in the University lake. Because it was silly to pretend that this measure would go unnoticed, wasn’t it? When the target building failed to explode, eyebrows were going to be raised. Questions were going to be asked. He didn’t know yet how he was going to answer them. There were parts of his plan, to be sure, that still had to be ironed out. But its central element – the element where he consigned the bomb to the watery resting place – was sound.
The point was this: he was doing the right thing, and he was going a long way out of his way to do it.
In the shop windows opposite, a shifting of light occurred. A pair of distant white headlights settled there, took root there and bloomed, fattening towards him like dissolving aspirins. He found himself actively wanting them to be Gus. Nothing could be worse than more waiting. The lights grew huge in the glass, floating forward on a wide and airy swell of sound. Coming to take the corner, they blurred and merged into a furious lake of light. And then the vehicle was here in the street, and the lake of light was all over him. He looked back into it. But already he could see it was a car, not a van, and now it was sliding slowly straight past him and on, continuing on its legitimate way. Light briefly crossed the business-shirted shoulder of the decent citizen at the wheel. Then there was just a shrinking set of tail-lights, moving smoothly back into the mainstream world.
So now the empty street had a thick black shape superimposed all over it, a floating afterimage of all that light. He wanted the light back. He missed its company. He missed that sturdy shoulder behind the vehicle’s wheel. He had liked the evidence it supplied that the everyday world was still turning, only without him. His eyes went back to the phone booth on the corner. That was where Gus was meant to pick him up. Or that was the plan. It was getting harder with each minute to believe it would ever happen. It was easier to picture just crawling into the phone booth right now and never coming back out. Just curling up inside and living out the rest of his days in Spartan simplicity within those shatterproof walls, with no space around him for things to go wrong in. He wasn’t cut out for this. He just wasn’t. How many times, precisely, had he defecated in fear before leaving his home? Five? Seven? And the smell … It had smelled like somebody else’s. Trixie or Tara must surely have entered the toilet by now, and discovered the state he’d left it in. And already they would be plotting their revenge …
As if that sort of thing still mattered.
Someone was coming down the footpath. Straight towards him. Here she came, in a dark woollen hat with tied-down earpieces: a little old lady, walking a dog! The dog was small and bony, eager on a taut leash ahead of her. The shopfronts echoed with their trebly footsteps. What in Christ’s name did she think she was doing? A little old lady, out at this time of night! Seeing him there, loitering near the phone booth in his black clothes, she stiffened and slowed for a moment. Then she made a feisty decision to keep coming, with a grim redoubling of speed. Sternly averting her face, she moved hurriedly past him. The unflustered pooch veered over to sniff his Maoist boots. It was stretching the leash rigid. The old lady, saying nothing, tugged the animal on with a testy yank of leather. On a whir of tiny legs the friendly little guy span round and trotted after her, and both of them were gone.
Alone again, he looked at his watch. But he had no real desire to know the time any more. The thing with the old lady had left him disturbed. Something unpleasant lingered in its wake: the sense of an encounter botched, an opportunity wasted. Weren’t old people on the street meant to say “hello” to you whether you knew them or not? Instead the old lady had looked at him as if he were an obvious criminal. A hoodlum, a vandal, a vagrant, a hooligan, a mugger, a pimp, a rapist, a psychopath. And he’d done nothing to put her right. Maybe the onus had been on him. He really should have bent down and patted the dog. He should have said something to put the old lady at her ease. Something like “Good evening“; or, “Cold enough for you?” Something to demonstrate that he was on her side, a decent mainstream fellow with nothing to hide. Maybe it wasn’t too late to run after her and pat the dog now. Maybe he could chase her down and explain the whole thing to her. Inform her of the impeccable reasons he had for being out here. Tell her how he was basically the Robin Hood of terror, out here to impose civilized values on a world gone mad.
If he laid it all out for her like that, would she understand it?
No. Probably not. Because his tale was of a distinctively modern kind, wasn’t it? An old person might well fail to appreciate its intricacies, its nuances, its ambiguities, its ironies. An old person might judge him, and condemn him, by the crusty moral standards of a simpler age. Other categories of people not likely to appreciate his plight: pedants, puritans, right-wingers, left-wingers, knee-jerk offence-takers, writers of letters to newspapers and public institutions, headmasters of private schools, kings of talkback radio, the humourless, the unimaginative, old-school feminists, new-school feminists, bigots of correctness, dead-inside academic theorists, professional detectors of sexism, enemies of the human, deniers of carnal verities, arseholes. To understand his position properly – to get it – you needed a certain suppleness of mind. You needed a liberal sense of the timeless comedy of human folly and frailty. You needed the bawdy knockabout good cheer of an Elizabethan playwright. You needed a fine eye for the many shadings and gradations that inhabited the spectrum between wrong and right …
Over in the phone booth the telephone started to ring.
He went instinctively to get it. He felt personally responsible for its violation of the night. He felt as though it were a crying baby awoken by him.
“Yes?”
“Fent?”
“Gus?”
“Yeah mate.” The voice sounded deflated and very far away.
“Gus: what is it?”
Long silence. Wind on the line. How had Gus got a public telephone to ring? Not the time to ask. Finally: “It’s about Wozzer, mate. There’s been a freak accident. Over at his lab. An explosion. He’s … There’s no going to be any delivery, mate. Not tonight.”
“Is he …” Fenton swallowed. “Is he … ?”
“I don’t know, Fent. I don’t know. All I know is, he’s in hospital. I think minus a few of his fingers, but the details are sketchy. I rang up … He was running late. So I rang him up to put a rocket up him. And I got his old man instead. And frankly, the cunt was a little bit hot under the collar. Seemed to think I had something to do with it. So he wasn’t that forthcoming on the details, was he? Stroppy old dick. He’s not dead but, if that’s what you’re thinking. But his days of taking shorthand might be behind him, mate. And he’s fucking finished as our explosives expert, you can rest assured on that. If that sounds callous mate, I’m in shock. I’m also a little ripped, to tell you the truth. Frankly, we could all do with some rest. You go home, Fent. This is a time for reflection. A time for contemplation. Be with your loved ones, mate. Hold ’em close to you. Life’s a precious thing. Me, I’m over at Charmaine’s place. I’ve – ”
“But we’re still observing the sex ban,” Fenton said.
Gus gave a dry and bitter laugh. “Wake up, Fent. It’s all over, mate. This is a clusterfuck. The whole operation’s in tatters. Oh I know, we’ll most probably pick up the pieces. We’ll find a way of moving forward. But that could take yonks mate. And I’m damned if I’m going that long – ”
“Still, we might be wise to keep it in force.” Strange how the relief didn’t feel nearly as good as the waiting had felt bad.
“Fent, I appreciate your professionalism. I do. And I wish I could share it. But I can’t. Not at a time like this. Anyway, it’s too late. I’ve already shattered it mate. Twice. And seriously, I urge you to do the same. It’ll do you the world of good, believe me. Go home. Have a brief lash at your best bottle of Scotch. Then wake up those better halves of yours and take it from there. You’ve had a long day, pal. You’ve earned it. We can start thinking about the way forward tomorrow.”
Twice?
“And Fent? You did good out there tonight, mate. I won’t forget that. The way you put your hand up for this – I can’t speak highly enough of the class of that. That could be you laying there in that hospital tonight, mate. That could just as easily be you. And I’m going to remember that. Next time I’m looking for a wet worker, the job’s yours. No questions asked. You’ve earned it. You’ve cemented it with your work out there tonight. And there will be a next time, Fent, make no mistake. Okay, it most probably won’t be a bomb. Fact it definitely won’t be. I think I can say that with certainty. But we’ll think of something. We’ll pick ourselves up, we’ll dust ourselves off. We’ll get ourselves back into the fray. This isn’t over, Fent. Not by a long chalk. Lego hasn’t heard the last of us, you can rest assured of that.”
Then the line went dead, and Fenton began to wonder how he was going to get back home.