Читать книгу Peace, Love & Petrol Bombs - D. D. Johnston - Страница 10

7

Nobody knows exactly how Benny’s Resistance Army started. Conventional history focuses on Spocky for introducing the idea and on Buzz for suggesting the name; Marxist interpretations point to a developing conflict between material productive forces and existing relations of production; the feminist analysis contends that Kit and Lucy’s contributions have traditionally been under-theorised. The truth is that nobody remembers: Spocky had gone home and the rest of us were pissed. This isn’t a problem if you’re writing about the Warsaw Pact or the Declaration of Independence. Nowhere in Robert Service’s three-volume biography of Lenin will you find “The Politburo was divided over whose idea it had been to introduce War Communism: Trotsky blamed Stalin, who pointed to Kamenev, who insisted it had been Comrade Lenin himself. The truth is that nobody remembered; they had all been absolutely steamboats.” But such were our inauspicious beginnings.

However, regardless of the ins and outs of the matter, by December’98, Kieran was convinced that a plot existed, that some kind of intrigue was being spirited by some sort of… cabal. Although his understanding of the conspiracy was vague, he was certain he’d identified at least some of the conspirators. In Kieran’s version, Spocky was the commander-in-chief, while Buzz, Gordon, and I were his lieutenants. Kieran wrote lengthy reports with titles such as “Staff refuse orders and vote for who should empty the bin,” or “Plug from sink missing, theft suspected.” He always included the full names of suspects and witnesses, along with the exact times and dates. When he finished a report he would read it back to us and close by musing “Dawn’s going to be very interested to read this. Oh yeah.”

But Dawn, the restaurant manager, wasn’t interested in much that happened at Benny’s. She referred to items of equipment as “The thingummyjig... you know, the big thing that makes that loud noise.” The only work she had any enthusiasm for was typing signs—she enjoyed typing signs. Maybe she’d have continued to ignore Kieran’s paranoid intelligence reports had several of her signs not been defaced. In Kieran’s reports, this vandalism, like the power cut in November, like the time the drains blocked and the kitchen flooded with faeces, like the time he lost his fucking car keys, was attributed to conspiratorial sabotage.

“Have you, or have you not, been drawing penises on official company notices?” Dawn had a scrotum beneath her chin, and it swayed from side to side when she spoke. Face up on her desk, next to a bumper book of puzzles, lay a freshly printed notice:

IMPORTANT: ALL STAFF!!!

THE NOTICEBOARDS AND

NOTICES THEM ARE

COMPANY PROPERLY!!

ANYBODY TAMPERING

WITH OR REMOVING OR

DEFACING GOMPANY

NOTICES WILL BE

DISCIPLINED!!

YOU HAVE BEEN

WARNED!!!!!!!

The office was little bigger than a telephone kiosk: Dawn sat on a revolving office chair; Kieran leant on the safe; Spocky, Buzz, and I squeezed into a tight line, as though about to dance the Dashing White Sergeant. We all shook our heads.

“You are asking me to believe that you know nothing about this?” She reached into a drawer and produced exhibit A:

“I like it,” said Spocky. “An early Matisse, perhaps?”

Dawn dredged some anger from the back of her throat. “Button it, sunshine. You can take this as a formal verbal warning. You three jokers are walking a tightrope, literally.”

“I’m not wearing it,” said Lucy, pushing the suit across the table.

Gordon pushed it back. “Ye have tae.” He was already sporting a red felt hat and a candy floss beard.

“I’m not wearing a beard.”

“Of course you don’t wear the beard. You’re Missy Clause.”

“Missy Clause?” asked Buzz, distracted from Macaulay Culkin’s silent struggle on the Railway’s sixteen inch corner TV (they hadn’t had satellite at the Railway Arms since the people from Sky caught them using a black-market decoding device).

“Santa’s wife,” said Gordon.

“And what’s her role?” asked Lucy. “What does ‘Missy Clause’ do while Santa’s bringing joy to children everywhere?”

“Makes the tea,” said Gordon.

Lucy shoved the suit back across the table. “No thanks.”