My Little Armalite Read online

  JAMES HAWES

  My Little Armalite

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Also By James Hawes

  Prologue: The Primal Scream

  Part One

  1: What I Knew About Guns

  2: The Very Important Paper

  3: London, at Last!

  4: Into the Hole

  5: The Armalite

  6: Opening Up

  7: Thank You, Sir, and Goodnight

  8: Not in My Name

  9: The Big Match

  10: Sash Windows

  11: Einstein and Newton

  12: The Last Person

  13: Heiner Panke

  14: What We Do Not Know

  15: An Englishman’s Nightmare

  16: Mortgage Repayment: 2/6

  17: A Goal for England

  18: A Shit-Hole Run by the Red Army

  19: Careers Advice

  20: Antarctica Breaks Away

  21: Sucking Diesel

  22: Archaeology

  23: Liberal Blather

  24: How Hard Can It Be?

  Part Two

  25: Power

  26: A Thick Bed of Liberal Broadsheet

  27: Thinking Clearly

  28: An Icy Male Paradise

  29: The Home of the Black Rifle

  30: Special Relationship

  31: The Irrational Fear of Physical Violence

  32: A Lump of Metal from the World of Men

  33: The Genetic Make-up of London

  34: Cameras

  35: Good as Gold

  36: No Cameras

  37: Dad Pants

  38: Unencumbered by Trousers

  39: Respect

  40: My Little Armalite

  41: Vulnerability Assessment

  42: Superbug

  43: Prague, Of Course!

  44: The Enemy

  45: Of Course!

  46: Legroom

  47: An Anglo-Saxon Name

  48: Tons of Flab Wobbling About in a Big Net

  49: Waste the Pig

  50: Into the Forest

  Part Three

  51: Singing for the Dying

  52: A Mere Liberal Englishman

  53: Outside the Liberal Box

  54: A Black, Bloody Insurrection

  55: A Deep and Very Middle-European Ditch

  56: God Knows

  57: What Things Will Come

  58: Erbyerk Again

  59: The Shock Outrunning All Pain

  60: In The Paper, At Last

  61: Gunsmoke

  62: A Little Speed Hump for Real-Estate Speculators

  63: Leader, Lead: We Demand to Obey!

  64: Women, Indeed!

  65: Like any Good Teutonic Politician

  66: I Have a Dream

  67: Tutus for Party Bosses

  68: The Global Locusts

  69: Straight Down the Line

  70: Low Overheads

  71: Saved

  Part Four

  72: Et in North London Ego

  73: Sic Incipit Gloria Mundi

  74: The Avoidance of Tragedy

  75: Normality at any Cost

  Acknowledgements

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781407014609

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Vintage 2009

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © James Hawes 2008

  James Hawes has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Jonathan Cape

  Vintage

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  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099513254

  The Random House Group Limited supports The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the leading international forest certification organisation. All our titles that are printed on Greenpeace approved FSC certified paper carry the FSC logo. Our paper procurement policy can be found at: www.rbooks.co.uk/environment

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Bookmarque, Croydon CR0 4TD

  To Nerys Lloyd and our three sons

  MY LITTLE ARMALITE

  James Hawes is the author of five novels, including A White Merc With Fins and Speak for England. He is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University and lives in Cardiff.

  ALSO BY JAMES HAWES

  A White Merc With Fins

  Rancid Aluminium

  Dead Long Enough

  White Powder, Green Light

  Speak For England

  Prologue: The Primal Scream

  Darling, it’s three a.m. and I’m sitting here in my clever little study area under our stairs, just where I should be. But I’m afraid I’m not working on the Very Important Paper. Instead, I’m recording this prologue, headset in place and hands free for … well, listen.

  Do you know that sound? Of course not. Let’s hope you never will. But millions of living men know it just as our ancestors knew the knap of flint on flint, the screech of blade on whetstone, the drone of bombers overhead. The soft click of shells being thumbed home against the surprisingly gentle spring of a …

  That noise again outside! Now, that one you know all too well. A carful of hooded little sods snarling and rapping past, rattling our Victorian sashes. At three a.m.! So much for on the borders of the conservation area. Yes, OK, cities have alway been noisy, but the Pooters only had trains to ignore, not deliberately unsilenced primate bloody braying. Even uPVC units would only dull it, but uPVC is obviously out of the question and we simply can’t afford quality double-glazed hardwood sashes right now. Even if we wanted to invest even more in a depreciating bloody asset. So we say (especially to ourselves) that you get used to the noise, that we hardly notice it, that it’s just part of life in this vibrant, diverse …

  Fuck, ow! Sorry, darling, shit, that noise was me banging my head on the underneath of the staircase. Again! I know, I know there was nowhere else for my desk to go, even with no piano for you. I’m not saying there was, it’s just that … hardly notice? It’s three bloody a.m.! We’ve got a baby scarcely sleeping through, kids to get to school, careers to service. Hardly notice? Christ, when we were twenty (which isn’t that long ago!) you had to shove a half-warmed kleftikon around a dirty plate if you wanted a drink after eleven. At midnight, London (where ordinary people could afford to buy in Zone 2) was settling to sleep. By four in the morning (which we hardly ever saw, even at twenty) the streets we
re patrolled only by defenceless milk bottles. And now? Now midnight is just the start for the uppers-raddled shits whose little brothers and half-brothers and step-brothers will make our darlings’ schooldays hell if I don’t do something fast. What was so bloody bad about grammar schools anyway? Oh, if those little fuckers … Sorry, darling, but, well, if they knew that I could walk out now and just put a whole clip right through their tinted bloody windows and into their stinking …

  … Sorry. Not very liberal. I admit that it’s hard to restrain myself from employing my new skills. When you know that you can do something, morality easily follows suit. But my sights are set higher than tactical victories, however tasty. A prophet armed at last, I’m aiming for the only thing any of us can do, nowadays: I’m going to make bloody sure that our own darlings are ahead of the pack when the ice caps finally melt, the floodgates burst and the border guards tear off their uniforms, throw down their guns and run.

  Of course, there’s a chance it’ll blow up in my face.

  Not literally, I mean. But figuratively it’s possible. My cover story of Muslim extremists is good and timely. In the present funding-friendly climate it’s hard to see why any thinking copper would want to challenge it. But I still might get caught.

  In which case you’ll need financial support. Which is why I’ve recorded my story for you to sell. I don’t believe my fate will be without some resonance. The world must be full of ex-lefties riddled with despair, bafflement and shame. If it isn’t, it’s full of cretins. This might tide you over until my pension kicks in. As far as I know they can’t strip me of my superannuation rights for having stepped a wee bit beyond the liberal consensus! Knowing that you’re financially catered for, I’ll sit happily in my prison cell, vastly respected by my stupid and violent companions due to the nature of my offences, as smooth and smug as those men in every life-insurance junk-mail flyer: men who have provided for their loved ones adequately and protected their mortgage.

  Christ, that bloody word again, that primal scream of our times!

  What? Did we ask for the earth? For gravel drives, lofty gables, double fronts and all-round gardens? No. All we wanted was the sort of everyday thing navvies chucked up by the tens of thousands all over north London between Dickens and Hitler to house medium-grade clerks. Just the usual modest period semi, for God’s sake, with a pair of tallish bays and four half-decent bedrooms, set ten feet or so back from the pavement of an averagely quiet residential street within realistic toddler-wheeling distance of a fair-sized park with the standard ducks and suchlike in any, repeat any, repeat any, old part of Zones 2 or 3 that lies a safe-ish height above sea level and diesel fumes, with ordinary human neighbours who sleep at night and reasonable schools where our children will not go in fear because they speak normal bloody English.

  Well?

  Sorry?

  Was that really so much to ask in return for twenty years’ unbroken CV in a highly respectable graduate career?

  Ah.

  I see.

  Of course. Silly me. I was forgetting we’ve committed a mortal sin that will blight the rest of our lives and our children’s too: we didn’t buy a house in London last millennium. End of family story. Social mobility crash-stops. History swallows us up.

  Oh, but I think not.

  Do you hear this noise, darling?

  Listen.

  Cthlick!

  I’m pressing the last round down. My clip is full.

  So be it. The world has chosen to renege on the clear agreement I made with it back in nineteen eighty-four. All I am doing is setting things right. There is a fine Anglo-Saxon tradition which holds that crime is in fact not crime, riot not truly riot and even revolution not really revolution at all when it aims merely to restore good old normality.

  Result? Happiness.

  If all goes well tomorrow, if my gun doesn’t jam and shoots straight, if I don’t lose my nerve at the vital moment (which would be quite understandable), none of the friends who will, in the fine years to come, gather from the neighbouring streets to eat no doubt organic meat and drink good red wine around our big old table in our high-ceilinged home whilst we discuss the burning cultural and political issues of the day, guided, as we have ever been, by the wise and liberal comments in The Paper that morning, will ever suspect me. We’ll simply have become what we always were, round pegs in round holes, with no gap for darkness to shine through. Even you’ll never know.

  I’ll have come back from my war and I’ll never speak of it.

  We’ll have not truth, but love.

  And I’ll remain for ever the boldly liberal man whose story I’ve set down over the last few long, lonesome evenings but who now, as I sit here under our stairs at three a.m., trembling somewhat, it is true, at what I am to do tomorrow, as well I might, but firm in my intentions, my little Armalite and I all ready at last (at last!) for manly action, seems so very far away from me that I find I can scarcely recall his name …

  PART ONE

  Summons

  1: What I Knew About Guns

  I, John Goode, was a normal, liberal man who, apart from stoning policemen during the Miners’ Strike (as I frequently admitted at dinner parties), had honestly never even fantasised (as far as I could remember) about seeing anyone getting physically hurt (apart from Maggie and George W. Bush, obviously).

  I’m sure I would have stayed that nice man my whole life long, but one November evening, while I was out planting some young plum trees in our small London garden, I found a machine gun buried under our little patch of lawn.

  Actually it’s an assault rifle.

  But how was I to know the difference (if any)? What did I know about machine guns? Nothing. I wasn’t American, so I’d never met otherwise-sane folk whose domestic equipment included machine guns. I wasn’t European, west, east, north, south or middle, so I’d never been made to spend time in a barracks, learning about machine guns. And I wasn’t from the Rest of the World (pretty well all of it, except for the bits that still have Elizabeth on their coins), so I hadn’t been used from birth to seeing snappily dressed paramilitary policemen swanking around the place, slinging machine guns.

  No, I was English, and though my militarily useful years (now gone) had coincided almost entirely with an era (now past) when her central foreign policy was readiness for a war (now unthinkable) in which national annihilation was the probable outcome, England had never remotely expected me to go soldiering. So like most normal Englishmen, I had never felt the slightest need to concern myself with developments in personal weaponry.

  It’s true that some three months before, while sitting in a taxi from Paddington to WC1, feeling important (because I hadn’t been in a black cab for years, let alone when someone else was paying) and excited (because I knew I had a real chance of getting this job, which meant London was beckoning me home at last) and scared (because I might yet blow the interview, thus probably dooming myself and my beloved family to northern cities for ever), I had seen quite a few guns.

  Amazed and affronted, I had seen English bobbies swanning toughly about with small machine guns and stylish earpieces as they patrolled the concrete-block ramparts of the American Embassy. The mere fact of cradling guns seemed to make them swagger heavily from overfed hips, in a deeply un-English fashion. Next thing, they would be wearing reflective bloody shades. Oh, some of them already were.

  I laughed with outrage at this charade and asked my cab driver (until then we’d been happily chatting about the weather, as required by local custom) what the hell good were machine guns against suicide bombers, eh?

  What, for God’s sake (I demanded roundly), did the famously incompetent, historically corrupt and structurally racist Metropolitan Police intend precisely to do if somebody suddenly tugged sweatily at a suspicious belt amid those innocent visa-queues of people? Just open up, with no doubt inaccurate little machine guns, from every angle? In the middle of London? Ridiculous. Even if it really was a terrorist for once and not just some p
oor bloody Brazilian plumber with skin a shade too dark for his own good, adjusting his trousers at the wrong time and place! They would probably kill more people that way than would ever be hurt by a small bomb going off in an open space. You didn’t have to know a thing about guns (and thank God we don’t have to, here!) to see that the whole, well, yes, charade was complete nonsense. Just the government trying to make us feel under permanent threat, obviously. And how did we get into this mess in the first place, with terrorists in London? By kowtowing to the bloody Yanks and their insane neo-imperialist war of choice!

  My arguments were so clearly sound that the cab driver contented himself with chewing his gum and looking in his rear-view mirror.

  No, I knew nothing about guns and had no desire to know more. Naturally, I had been taken, as a boy, and had, just two weeks ago, taken our own children, now that we were living in London (at last, at last! Daddy has delivered!), to see the chocolate soldiers in Whitehall, horse and foot. But when I noticed that my sons were more interested in the flak-jacketed police standing nearby with their stupid bloody real little machine guns again, I hurried us on, with a stout huff of public annoyance, assuring little Mariana, for all around to hear, that we would come here again to see the funny soldiers and their nice horses, for longer, properly, once London got back to normal!

  I was, in short, uninterested in guns. I recall, for example, one Sunday some few weeks ago, shortly after our arrival here, when I was out with one of my new colleagues, shopping for the lunchtime joint, and we popped in somewhere for a quick sneaky schoolboyish one on the way back, to chat about matters sporting and cultural, the way liberal Englishmen do. Guns did, in fact, enter the conversation, but only as follows:

  —Hey, here’s one. Before the Civil War, the American one, I mean, not ours, what was the most popular sport in America?

  —God knows. Shooting bison? Shooting Native Americans?

  —Ha ha! No. Cricket!

  —Cricket? In America? You sure, John?

  —Well, it said so in The Paper.