Читать книгу To Hell in a Handcart - Richard Littlejohn - Страница 10

Then

‘You’re WHAT? You can’t be serious?’ Justin Fromby unscrewed the top of another bottle of Bulgarian Beaujolais and filled a dirty half-pint mug to the brim. He scratched his balls and adjusted his flaccid dick. His Y-fronts had seen better days.

‘Oh, I’m serious, all right. I have never been more serious in my life.’ Roberta Peel rolled over on her grubby futon, reached for a cigarette from a pack on the sticky glass-topped coffee table, lit it and drew deep.

‘But what about your work?’

‘It will be my work.’

‘I mean, the law centre. You can’t turn your back on that.’

‘I can do whatever I please, or do you only pretend to believe in women’s lib?’

‘Of course not. That’s not fair. You know I’m committed to the Project. That’ s why I’m doing it.’

‘But, the police, for God’s sake. They’re the enemy. You’ve always agreed on that. You saw what they did to the gay rights marchers. You were on that picket line at the power station. They’re animals, pigs.’

‘Precisely,’ Roberta replied with a self-satisfied smirk. ‘And what do you do with animals?’

‘Liberate them?’

‘Don’t be daft, they’re not smoking beagles or laboratory rats.’

‘What then?’

‘You train them.’

‘Train them?’

‘Haven’t you ever heard the expression, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em?’

‘Sure.’

‘Well, we’re never going to beat them. Not by marching and demonstrating. That’s for students and idealistic dreamers. It’s waning in public.’

‘But we’ve had some successes.’

‘Such as? A few occupations, petitions? Stopping the traffic outside the Old Bailey? Gestures. You can’t beat the system from without. You have to be within it to make any real difference. We have got to capture the institutions.’

‘But that could take years.’

‘About twenty, I reckon. Maybe twenty-five years at the outside.’

‘But that’s an entire lifetime.’

‘Only if you’re in your twenties. Look at the bigger picture, Justin. You’ve got a brain, use it. Ask yourself who, eventually, is going to have the biggest influence on the way society works – a 45-year-old overgrown student activist, pissing around on the fringes? A middle-aged trades union leader, locked outside the factory gates? A 45-year-old journalist churning out agitprop bollocks in a small circulation revolutionary newspaper on sale outside Woolworth’s? A 45-year-old lawyer up to his arse in housing benefit applications and claims for wrongful arrest? Or a 45-year-old judge, a 45-year-old Cabinet minister, a 45-year-old editor of a national newspaper, a 45-year-old Commissioner of Police?’

‘Hmm,’ mused Justin, downing his rough red wine and pouring another from the bottle on the mantelpiece, perched next to a six-inch bust of Karl Marx, under the watchful eye of a Che Guevara poster on the voguish mud-brown wall. He wiped a tumbler with his discarded T-shirt, filled the glass and handed it to Roberta, still lying naked on the futon.

Two middle-class kids with law degrees, fresh out of university, sharing a top-floor bedsit in shabby Tufnell Park, their lives stretching out before them. It was a nowhere district between the Holloway Road and Kentish Town, north London, a tube station between King’s Cross and Finchley Central, two and sixpence, Golders Green on the Northern Line. And it didn’t have a park.

Roberta was plain, but that’s the way she liked it. At 5ft 7ins, she was stocky, not fat, with full hips and firm tits like rugby balls, and had nipples you could hang a child’s swing on. She favoured kaftans and sensible shoes. Daddy was a vicar, the Rev Robert Peel, in an affluent part of Surrey. He had wanted a son, so Roberta was named for him. Mummy something in the WI, a parish councillor and magistrate. Roberta was an only child and she was pampered, at least to the fullest extent of a parson’s C of E stipend.

They were thrilled when she left her all-girls grammar school and went off to university to study law. Roberta was sad to leave St Margaret’s, not because she was loath to shed the shackles of school. She had a crush on the games mistress.

Justin was the son of Edward Fromby, sole proprietor of Fromby & Fromby, the biggest retail coal merchant in Nottinghamshire, and, as he always referred to her at the Round Table cheese and wine evenings, his lady wife Mary.

Justin was christened Edward Albert Fromby, like his father, his grandfather and his father before him. Mr Fromby Snr wanted his only son to follow him into the coal and smokeless fuel business. But Edward Jnr persuaded him that the discovery of North Sea oil and gas would spell the end of the retail coal business.

After the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974, no government was ever going to allow the nation to be almost wholly dependent on a dwindling resource subject to frequent interruption on the whim of a union run by Communists. He was very convincing. Secretly young Edward admired the Communists who ran the National Union of Mineworkers, but was too scared of his father to mention the fact.

Edward Fromby Snr was nothing if not a pragmatic man. ‘I’m nothing if not a pragmatic man,’ he said frequently. ‘You don’t succeed in the retail coal business without a healthy helping of pragmatism.’ He acknowledged the merit in his son’s argument and, after unsuccessfully trying to persuade him to go into the North Sea oil business, agreed that he should go to university to study law, hoping that he would return and get himself articled to the town’s leading firm of solicitors, perhaps one day becoming senior partner.

Young Edward had a different compass. Wills and conveyancing held no attraction for him. He wanted to be a street lawyer, fighting for the rights of the downtrodden, the workers, the oppressed minorities. He wasn’t going back to Nottinghamshire. He was going to London.

As soon as he got to the LSE, he dropped the Edward Albert and adopted Justin as his given name. Very Seventies, he thought. And if anyone asked about his family, he simply said his dad worked in the Nottinghamshire coalfields. He was careful not to lie but not to tell the whole truth, either. He must have been cut out to be a lawyer.

‘Justin. That’s a funny name for a coal-miner’s son,’ Roberta remarked when they were introduced.

‘Hmm, yes, I suppose so. I wasn’t christened Justin actually, but whenever I came home from school, my mother would call out “You just in, are you?” and it sort of stuck. A bit of a family joke,’ he claimed. He almost believed it himself.

‘So what were you christened?’

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’

‘You’re right. It doesn’t matter. What’s in a name? This is the 1970s. We can be who we want to be. If you want to be Justin, that’s fine by me.’

Their friendship was forged at university. They weren’t so much lovers as good friends who had sex sometimes, usually unsatisfactorily for both of them. But neither was experienced and neither was sure what to expect. Perhaps that was all there was to it. Roberta had been cloistered in an all-girls school and opportunities for adventures with the opposite sex were limited. Justin, or Eddie as he then was, had been an awkward, lanky youth. His overbearing mother had discouraged him from forming relationships with girls.

At university, Roberta experimented with other men, but they were usually pissed and it didn’t seem much of an improvement on what she had with Justin. For his part, Justin didn’t seem to mind who she slept with. Their friendship transcended the sexual. He contented himself with his studies and increasing involvement in student politics.

Their relationship was more brother and sister, even if it was occasionally incestuous.

They were at ease with each other. They squabbled but had few hang-ups. They were not embarrassed to be naked together, or to bare their emotions.

Justin and Roberta lay on the futon and drained the last of the Bulgarian Beaujolais. Justin rolled a joint, which he liked to smoke with cupped hands, Rastaman style.

‘Hey, stop hogging that,’ Roberta complained. ‘Pass it here.’ She sucked hard and inhaled the weed, holding her breath for several seconds before releasing the smoke.

‘This will have to stop, you know.’

‘What?’

‘Dope, booze. If you join the police.’

‘There’s no if about it. I have joined. I start two weeks on Monday.’

‘Better make the most of it, then.’

He passed her the joint again. She took it, greedily.

‘You sure it’s worth it?’

‘One hundred and fifty per cent certain. You are sharing a joint with the future commissioner of the Metropolitan Police,’ she wheezed.

‘Get real.’

‘This is real. You watch me. And if you take my advice, you’ll get out of that law centre and find yourself a proper job with a real law firm. Make a difference, Justin. Make a difference. You can do your pro bono social work in your spare time. We’ve grown out of “the revolution starts when this pub closes” stage of our lives. The revolution starts now.’

‘If you’re serious about this police thing, you’re going to need me. You’re going to have to make compromises, bite your lip, never let go in public. But there will always be somewhere for you to come. I will always be here for you. I will keep your secrets and never betray you. I do love you.’

‘Then make love to me,’ she demanded.

This was the bit Justin was dreading. He adored Roberta, loved to lie naked with her, but somehow the sex thing didn’t really work for him. Still, he tried.

He rolled on top of her and kissed her dirigible breasts, almost choking on her rigid nipples.

‘Fuck me. Fuck me hard,’ she pleaded. ‘Inside me, now.’

They’d already made love once that evening and it had been over in an instant. He’d taken her from behind. He found that doggy-fashion, in the dark, was the only way he could muster any enthusiasm. Twice in a night was asking a bit much and this time she wanted it on her back, with the light on.

Roberta reached down, ripped off his pants and squeezed his balls, but the best he could manage was a lazy lob.

By now she was frenzied, as the alcohol and narcotics kicked in, maybe for the last time in her life.

She grabbed his cock and pulled it towards her, willing him to harden. But it was no good. It was like trying to push a marshmallow through a letter box.

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ Justin kept repeating. ‘It must be the dope, or the booze or both. Just give me a minute.’ He so wanted to please her.

But Roberta didn’t have a minute to spare.

She reached up and lifted the six-inch bust of Karl Marx off the mantelpiece.

She lay back on the futon, raised her sturdy arse, parted her knees and thrust the father of international socialism head-first between the thighs of the future Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.