A Small Revolution in Germany Read online

  Once the event with the major had dissolved into a series of embarrassed thanks and calls for acclaim, Percy Ogden had left the hall. He stood with his supporters outside. People leaving were treating him as some kind of host, as if he were saying thank you for coming, or perhaps welcoming them in at the beginning of festivities. They said, ‘You twerp,’ or ‘Fuck off, Ogden,’ or, now and then, they chortled and offered congratulations. Ogden hardly seemed to register any of this. I hesitated and watched him accept or deflect the comments of passing children. I knew who he was. I had no idea whether he would recognize someone as insignificant as I was. He stood with his phalanx. They were not like him. If there was a common style to them, as there was to most groupings in school, it was in their dissimilarity. A couple of years back, they were the failed and disorganized dregs of the school, the ones who were friends with each other in a dissatisfied way only because nobody else would pick them up. The black boy, the one whose parents wore clothes from India and could not speak English, the girl constantly being excluded for fighting. They had nothing in common, as far as anyone cared to see, but they all had to talk to someone. That someone had, strangely enough, been Percy Ogden. He had always been, by contrast, a sort of heroic figure, changing at ten from a bright boy with interests – trains, cactuses, dinosaurs, historical buildings – into someone marked by the curled lip and the smart comeback. He had elevated each of them by his interest. It had never occurred to anyone but Percy Ogden that there might be a dignity in the girl who even eleven-year-olds shouted ‘Slag’ at, the boy whom the French teacher called Mustafa, eliciting a laugh every time. >(His name was not Mustafa. It was Mohammed. He was named after the Prophet, peace be upon him. That was what Ogden had said once, on Mohammed’s behalf.) The oppressed outcast (I am talking in Ogden’s terms now, the terms I would soon be repeating) joined up with another, and gazed at the powerful levelly, with patience. They imitated Percy Ogden, of course they did. Just now James Frinton, the boy no one would sit with because of his dirt, his soiled socks and his smell of old boiled peas, was rubbing his nose with the heel of his palm in just Ogden’s way. Soon he would lower his hand and honk as they all did, use the words amortize and hegemony and cunt. What Ogden was imitating and learning from, I don’t know.

  I approached the group of them. I knew that soon I would be laughing like Ogden and repeating his words. I was not an outcast. I would make myself one.

  ‘You don’t think that,’ I said to Ogden.

  ‘Who’s this?’ said Tracy Cartwright.

  ‘You don’t think that,’ I said. ‘About measuring how much it costs the state when someone’s killed.’

  ‘I meant what I said,’ Percy Ogden said, but genially.

  ‘There’s other ways of looking at it,’ I said. ‘It’s not just because it’s wasted, all that money.’

  ‘If you’re merely going to kill them,’ James Frinton said, ‘then why bother educating them at all? Feed them and exercise them and then send them out to be shot. Or burnt to death. Or dropped from a great height. From a plane. With a malfunctioning parachute.’

  ‘Splat,’ Mohammed Ahmed said. They all laughed – that Ogden honk. It was famous in the school. Ogden was looking at me. He wasn’t laughing. If he had been forty years older, I would have said he had a twinkle in his eye.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he said. ‘We’ve seen you around.’

  ‘In geography. And history,’ Eric Milne put in. ‘What do you think of Dick?’

  I had no idea what he was talking about. The group was so resilient and enclosed that it not only had nicknames of its own for school figures, it assumed that the world in which these nicknames were understood was the entirety of the world.

  ‘Dick and the capitalist miracle,’ Ogden said. ‘I wouldn’t waste my breath on him. Do you know who his hero is? Take a guess.’

  ‘Cecil Rhodes,’ Tracy Cartwright said, performing a kind of dance, three steps up towards the physics lab, three steps down, her arms in the air. ‘Harold Wilson. Nixon. Clive of India.’

  ‘We love Clive of India,’ Eric Milne said. ‘He wrote a little book to show men what they were shooting at. Go on, ask me anything. Who caused the French Revolution, Mary Queen of Scots and her haemophilia, that’s who. Ask me another.’

  ‘Russian,’ Ogden said. ‘So what’s wrong with totting up the value of the lives you’re disposing of – the public resources you’re spending?’

  ‘Because the army, when it acquires the property,’ I said – I tried to do the sarcastic fall of the voice – ‘doesn’t buy it. It leases it. I mean, you sign up for five years, don’t you? It doesn’t pay anything like the value of the investment. If it had to pay a quarter of a million upfront, then it would value the acquisition. The cost of the purchase would be commensurate with the investment.’

  It was that word commensurate that did it – that word so remote from speech, which I had spoken. The Ogden clan relished grand, empty, abstract words, the noise they made, like thunder, though they were only peas rattling around a drum. By now almost everyone who had been in the hall had gone. We were in the school’s atrium by the two half-dead Swiss cheese plants and a whiteboard advertising the music teacher’s production of The Mikado with a willow tree and slant-eyed masks. The world could have gone in so many other directions, and stopped me meeting Percy Ogden and the others at this, the exact right moment. If the headmaster and his guest, Major Urch, had come out the same way as the pupils, Ogden would have been engaged in some way, in reprimand or continued disagreement. All the others must once have gone in either direction, towards Ogden or away. Each of them had had the experience of what followed, which was Percy Ogden saying, ‘What are you up to? We’re going to Carole’s. That café. We need to talk.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  I walked through the hall with faint dizziness. I was in the Ogden group. I had joined it not through a lack of options but through my own choice. But that reading of the group, as a miscellaneous bunch of losers, was fading quickly. We didn’t use the word loser then, but we certainly had the concept. They had no reason to see themselves like that. There was no one left to watch me take a first step into this world of the commensurate, of amortization, of a shared purpose and commitment except two fourth-formers who were sitting on a bench, kissing furiously, as if inspired by this talk of death. They weren’t watching.

  ‘What are you, then?’ James Frinton said, once we were outside. He had a mellifluous, mild voice, a television announcer’s way.

  ‘He doesn’t know what you mean,’ Tracy Cartwright said. ‘He thinks you mean is he a boy or a girl.’

  ‘What does he mean?’ Eric said. ‘The question is inadequately defined. It could mean anything. He could answer, “A multi-cellular organism,” or “The product of historical forces latent towards the end of late capitalism,” or, as you say, “A boy.” Define your question and get an answer.’

  Tracy Cartwright had joined in with the last three words, making me think this was a maxim among them.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ James Frinton said. ‘What are you, Eric?’

  ‘I’m a classical Marxist,’ Eric said.

  ‘He believes in perpetual revolution,’ James said, ‘and Tracy’s an anarcho-syndicalist.’

  ‘And James invests too much in single-issue causes,’ Tracy said. ‘Bourgeois diversions. Animal rights. CND …’

  We had reached the bottom of the steps that led down from the school’s main entrance – an entrance we were not, as pupils, allowed to use. If the portico at the front had ever been used as a grand entrance, it was not within our memory. The main entrance now was at what might be assumed to be the side of the building. At the mention of CND, Eric dramatically collapsed, spinning around gracefully, a finger in his mouth to fake puking.

  ‘It wasn’t CND,’ James said. ‘Or only for five minutes.’

  ‘What’s—’ I was
about to ask what was wrong with CND. For me, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, with its clear and surely indisputable proposal that mankind should not be wiped out and, even more, its simple and elegant logo, was exactly the sort of thing that thinking people would support. I held off while Eric got up off the dusty driveway, brushing himself down. In time I would learn why CND was beyond consideration. In the last hour, I had had my definition of thinking people changed quite sharply. I had a CND badge at home – I had worn it in public, putting it on my winter coat once I was safely far from home and not likely to be glimpsed by my father. Whatever the Ogden lot’s objections to nuclear disarmament were, they were not the same as my father’s.

  The writer I have come to love best has told us that ‘We would know far more about life’s complexities if we applied ourselves to the close study of its contradictions instead of wasting so much time on similarities and connections, which should, anyway, be self-explanatory.’ The different and contradictory attitudes I took now, on that short walk down the hill to the Café Carole, towards my father’s and Ogden’s shared scorn for the disarmament movement, had nothing to do with their reasons, which no doubt were different. I had never bothered to listen to one. I hadn’t yet heard the surprising other. The complexities and irreconcilable differences coming down on me were many, though at that moment it felt, falsely, as if a huge and single truth was opening up, a solid shining object for my embrace, or my worship.

  I had walked past Carole’s a thousand times. I had never thought of going in there. It was a business that, like bookmakers or city pubs, I just did not see. It had nothing to do with the purposes of my life. I don’t know that Café Carole had anything to do with anyone else’s purposes but her own. In the weeks and months afterwards, we went in there many times as a group. We were almost always the only people in it. It was a little girl’s suburban dream of the café she might run when she grew up. The interior was pale pink and blue and white, like Edinburgh rock. The cakes grew stale under large glass bell domes. There were frilly lace curtains, which went halfway up the window, hanging from a brass rod. The sign of the café was in pink on green, Le Café Carole in cursive handwriting, curlicues heading off fancifully. Carole herself was sitting behind the counter, smoking a weary cigarette and reading with flaccid inattention about the doings of tiny Prince William. The business had not gone far. Carole was a divorcee of fifty-seven. She still made the tea in the café she had named after herself. She still looked, without surprise or interest, at who was coming into her scuffed pastel café at three forty-five on a Tuesday afternoon.

  We took a table in the window. James got a packet of menthol cigarettes out. He offered them round. Only Tracy took one.

  ‘I was in a plane, a jet plane,’ Mohammed was saying, in a meditative way. He was continuing a conversation he had been having with Tracy and James, walking down the hill from school. ‘It was flying quite low over the landscape – I could see the countryside very clearly, it was all English, wooded and hilly and green.’

  Tracy had not been looking at him. She had taken the cigarette from James without looking at him either, but now she fixed her attention on James, as if Mohammed were not speaking at all. ‘Bushy,’ she said. ‘Densely bushy. With foliage.’

  ‘And crevasses,’ James said gravely. ‘And don’t forget the hills, round, full hills.’

  ‘The plane started to fly really quite low—’

  ‘Never forget the round, full hills,’ Tracy said.

  ‘Do you want to hear my dream or not?’ Mohammed said. ‘This plane – it started flying down the river valley, just above the river, by the side of a busy road.’

  ‘How wide was the river?’ Ogden said.

  ‘I don’t know – well, I suppose a sort of stream, a bit more than a trickle. Like a river in a hot country in summer. Why? Does that matter?’

  ‘Fecundity. Carole’s used to be broad and flowing,’ Ogden said, flashing an open smile at the owner. She had finished her cigarette and had come over to take the order.

  ‘What is it?’ she said.

  ‘Come on, Carole,’ Ogden said. ‘You remember me. We always have the same.’

  ‘I remember you always say, “We always have the same.” I can’t be expected to remember everything that someone who’s just walked in off the street ordered three weeks ago. Just tell me.’

  ‘Lapsang souchong and three ordinary teas.’

  ‘We don’t have any lapsang souchong in.’

  ‘You never have any lapsang souchong.’

  ‘Getting it tomorrow.’

  ‘You said that yesterday and the day before.’

  ‘Getting it tomorrow.’

  ‘You might as well take it off the menu, you know. It’s only there to indicate that she’s better than the usual greasy spoon. She doesn’t fry anything and she’s got tea with a Chinese name.’

  ‘Getting it tomorrow. What do you want today?’

  ‘Darjeeling, if you’ve got it. Otherwise another ordinary tea and a filter coffee. What do you want?’

  He was talking to me. ‘The same. A tea, I mean.’

  ‘And two tea cakes.’

  ‘Minimum charge two pounds fifty a head.’

  ‘More indicators of status. Two tea cakes.’

  Carole gave up. There had been no other customers all afternoon, I guessed, or any sign of any more to come. She generally stopped smoking only when customers were actually there. The room was thick with the smoke the day had conjured up.

  ‘I don’t know why we come here,’ Eric said. ‘Six of us at two pounds fifty a head ‒ that would be twenty-one pounds. I’m not spending that here. I don’t know how you could spend that much.’

  ‘You’d have to buy slices of Carole’s son’s cake. He makes them at home, you know,’ he went on to me. ‘They talk about Carole’s divorce and the fact that Nigel has turned out a homo, and the disappointment seeps into the cakes. Coconut, walnut, or a last one – Nigel invented it – rhubarb, lavender and almond.’

  ‘He’s making it all up,’ James said. ‘There might be a son but he’s not called Nigel.’

  For some reason this contradiction sparked something in Ogden. I’ve often thought since of the way the political mind needs, thrives on dissent. It will leap on any disagreement hopefully. In the best political mind, this relish of disagreement clarifies matters, rules certain considerations out of play as the argument progresses. In the weak political mind, the disagreement is carried on for the sake of conflict alone, like crowds of supporters of some sport or other, yelling assertions at each other across a square of green, a square of expensive ice. Of course Ogden was practising taking up a position that would not permit James’s contribution to be just. Whether this was in search of clarity or driven by the energy rage possesses, I couldn’t say. He was into James like a terrier on a joint of beef.

  ‘He may be called Nigel,’ Ogden said. ‘It’s a possibility, just as it’s possible that Carole has a son at all, that the son is a homo, that he makes cakes, that the cakes Nigel makes are coconut and walnut and rhubarb, lavender and almond. All of these are possibilities. Some are so probable that we say that it’s so. For instance, that the cakes for sale are coconut, walnut, and rhubarb, lavender and almond. We say that is definitely the case. A hundred per cent. But is there an element of probability that means they’re not for sale? I mean, it says in the menu that Carole sells lapsang souchong. But she doesn’t. She never has.’

  ‘I can see the cakes, though,’ Eric said. ‘They have a label on them, look.’

  ‘Still the probability fails. What if someone switched the labels with those in another café while Carole wasn’t looking? And those are actually bacon-, cauliflower-, and strawberry-and-liver-flavoured cakes? Or what if a small malevolent demon has in fact created the whole world as an illusion? What if there are no cakes, no café, no Carole, no Eric or James or Tracy or M
ohammed or—’

  ‘Spike,’ I said quickly. I was terrified that Percy Ogden wouldn’t know my name, or might take the opportunity to show in passing how unimportant it was.

  ‘Or Spike,’ Percy Ogden said, with a touch, surely, of regret.

  ‘That’s Descartes,’ I said. I was proud to know it. My father was fond of dealing with life’s difficulties by thinking of Descartes’s demon, the one who might be putting all this into his head while he lay supine and unconscious in some pit of Hell.

  ‘Very good,’ Percy Ogden said. ‘So that probability is less than a hundred per cent. Probability that Carole has a son – forty per cent. We know she was married—’

  ‘But the world doesn’t exist!’ Eric said, leaping forwards or backwards a few points.

  ‘No. Probably does exist. Not definitely. In the ninety-nine-per-cent world Carole was married. Had a child, probably – most married women do. Eighty per cent, halve it for sex. Probability that the son turned out to be a homo, five per cent of that forty per cent.’

  At this point, I would have expected those around the speaker to start laughing crudely, but Tracy merely said, ‘More than that. Look at her.’ Carole was approaching with the order on a trolley – her idea, I guess, of refinement. She was, when you looked at her, wonderfully structured and controlled along certain lines. Overall she had been pushed, or pushed herself, towards yellow – her hair, skin, her jewellery, though yellow was not the word she would have been taught to use for any of it (blonde, bronze, gold …). Her clothes hindered her, the pencil skirt, the pussycat bow, the ruffled wrist and neck, the height of her shoes. Time was made difficult for her, the measure by which we control our lives and design our own days. She wore a watch half the size of the fingernail on her little finger. She had to peer at it, and then could hardly be sure. Who was all this for, this femininity codified and pushed towards a weaponized discomfort and inconvenience? The major that afternoon had elements of performance about his masculine display, but Carole was all feminine display. There was no consensus reached with function. Her fingernails were cultivated to a length at which it was hard for her to use a pen, operate a till, type. She was incapacitated. What it was for, I could not imagine. I was struck by biological imperatives at that age. How I looked at a woman in her mid-fifties, still engaging in the formalized and incapacitating displays that femininity in this culture requires! I thought with all the cruelty of sixteen: But the menopause! It’s over for you!