A Small Revolution in Germany Read online

  ‘Poor her,’ Tracy said unexpectedly. Carole set the teacups down with no awareness that she was being discussed. ‘More than five per cent. A boy baby comes out of that. Looks back. Sees all the work that’s been undertaken. He says, “I love my mummy. I’m never going to love another lady as much as I love my mummy in her lovely clothes.” Thirty per cent at least. Turn anyone homo.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t want to do that,’ Carole said vaguely. ‘Tea cakes in a minute.’

  ‘It’s all probability,’ Percy Ogden said. ‘Nothing is certain and nothing is ruled out. What about “isn’t black” because the father of her child might more probably be white? Or “isn’t disabled” because birth defects only affect a few babies in a thousand?’

  ‘But we all say that,’ Eric said, ‘is, isn’t, when the probability is overwhelmingly in one direction.’

  ‘No name is anything but overwhelmingly improbable. Likelihood of child being called Nigel – less than one per cent. Do we say he isn’t called Nigel? He isn’t called anything!’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘The probability of him having a name of some sort, given that he exists – nearly a hundred per cent.’

  ‘I suppose so. And here come the teacakes. With these sad little pats of butter on the side. One per teacake. Come on, Carole, that’s not enough butter. Can we have two more?’

  ‘If you pay for more. Five p each.’

  ‘We’ll manage.’

  ‘I don’t know why we come here,’ Eric said. ‘When the revolution starts up—’

  ‘Carole’s first up against the wall,’ Eric said.

  ‘No,’ Tracy said. ‘I want to re-educate her. Like Mollie in Animal Farm. Now I want to hear about the rest of Mohammed’s dream. Go on, Mo. The last thing, you were taking a great big throbbing engine all the way up a tight crevasse. I’m thinking hard here. If only we had that Mrs Macdonald and her book of Dr Freud’s theories.’

  ‘I like Dr Freud’s phallus,’ Mohammed said idly. ‘I mean theories.’

  At the end of that first afternoon Eric, to my astonishment, stopped at the bike rack outside the café. He unlocked a gleaming red road bike, the uncool type with drop handlebars. The astonishment was fairly equally divided between the fact that Eric had a bicycle, and the calm acceptance of that fact by Ogden, Tracy, Mohammed and James. And me too. At least I didn’t laugh as I might have done a week before. Nobody came to school on a bicycle. It would have been the cause of endless ridicule among the student body, to know that one of their number came to school and rode home again on something so infra dig, so spod, to use a favourite school word, as a bicycle. Any bicycle would have been terrible, but an old-school road bike with drop handlebars would have been at the extreme edge of the ridiculous. Probably Eric knew this perfectly well. It was for that reason that he parked his bike outside Le Café Carole rather than in the school bike sheds – there were some in there, quite unused. Nevertheless it was wonderful to me that Eric just said he’d see them tomorrow, got on the bicycle and sprinted off. Wonderful, too, that they said in return nothing more mocking than they’d see him, or just a simple ‘Bye’, the syllable with which we end an encounter whether what follows is an unremarkable stretch of the other’s life when away from us, or the sudden, unseen, violent death of our friend, something that will make us think for the rest of our lives of the inadequacy of that bye to say what we almost meant to say to Eric.

  A manicured hand turned the sign in the café window behind from ouvert to fermé. Over the brow of the hill a number 51 bus lumbered.

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ Percy Ogden said to me too. He, James and Tracy ran for the bus, their Adidas bags with their stuff in banging against their bodies as they ran. In a moment I was alone with Mohammed. He looked at me. Perhaps he did not know who I was or understand why I had been taken into the group. I was not conspicuous in school, not famous for anything much. The name Spike, which I had given Ogden, was, in fact, only the slightly unconvincing nickname I had evolved for myself in solitude, which nobody ever used, not even my father or the two or three friends I had at the top end of the top English set, busy as they were mastering the recommended quotations from The Winter’s Tale. Mohammed said, ‘See you tomorrow, kid,’ and crossed the road, running. In the snobbery of schoolboys, I had assumed that he was one of the Asian kids who lived up the hill with parents who worked at the university. He ran across the road and down the hill. He must live where all the Asians lived, among the grocers, the mosque, the rows of terraced houses in the part of town bang up against the city centre. All the Ogden gang had gone away from me at speed, running off or fleeing on wheels. I was alone. I walked towards the 51 bus stop. In fact, I could have caught the same one that the others had caught.

  I lived with my father in a house too big for us, with two spare bedrooms, not just one. The second spare bedroom had been colonized by my father for one of his interests: in it, he made exquisite small objects, models of early industrial processes and machines. There was a lathe in the shed in the garden, where he had originally been supposed to make them. The house had been shaped by my mother’s hopes and ambitions. It had then been allowed to fall apart, first through neglect and then through masculine roughness. As a sex, we have little interest in the state of cushions or curtains, and none in acquiring scented candles. In his battered workroom, once a spare bedroom, my father finished a scale model, 1:25, of an early Bessemer converter after months of labour. He picked it up. He placed it on the shelf where other scale models sat. They were exquisite, his scale models. He could have sold them for a sum not quite commensurate with the hours of delighted labour.

  My mother had left us five years before. I still don’t know why. I took it quite personally – I had a sense of nervous inadequacy as a child. I always felt that I was failing to interest her in any of my small doings or intimate concerns. I was old enough at eleven to search about for reasons. But I was not old enough to understand that not everything that happens in the world that affected me was also brought about by me. I didn’t know that I would always be peripheral to the dramas that touched me. She had, clearly, left me because I was not good enough for her, an inadequate son. I expect my interest in social justice, or rather injustice, comes from that perception. Anyone who is left by a mother, and who has a father who takes no interest in them, is bound to end up touchy. My father’s hobbies and occupations were comfortably established as modelling small engines, his job running a hospital, the Conservative Party, and ferns, an apparently fascinating range of which filled not just the beds in the garden but the space where a lawn might have been, both before and behind our grubbily curtained house. I would no sooner have expected him to show curiosity in my friends than I would have waited for him at night to read me a bedtime story and tuck me in.

  There was no particular mystery about why my mother had left my father. I can’t quite understand why she should have married him in the first place. She left him with no particular excuse. She went to the other side of the world, to a city called Broome in Western Australia, famous for pearl fishing. Sometimes – perhaps at Christmas, which for both of us was gruelling, slow and immured with nothing better than the television to bring us together – my father would, out of the blue, say, ‘I’d never heard of Broome before. I don’t think she had, either. God knows what took her there. Hell of a long way away.’ I had been once – or to Sydney, where she and I had spent a guilt-laden fortnight together. I guess there was less to entertain a thirteen-year-old boy in Broome. Or perhaps she didn’t want me reporting back in detail about her daily life. If so, she underestimated the awkwardness between my father and me. He would never have been able to ask a direct question about my mother. I had never have been able to offer anything in return, except the rough and embarrassed sharing of photographs in their yellow envelope, once they had returned from Boots the Chemist.

  This is a story about politics, and how some people are drawn to the political l
ife. Politics hopes to improve individual lives. Looking back, I wonder whether anyone would ever have been in a position to make my life with my father better. Put like that, the idea is obviously absurd. You would have had to find a medical diagnosis for my father’s defects of personality, justifying outreach ‘workers’ and health ‘professionals’, paying for support in the home. I imagine he could have been labelled a high-functioning autist. But what diagnosis for me? You cannot pathologize half the human race. That is what men are, unreachable by diagnosis. Politics should not talk just about lives as a diffuse and examined mass, but about ours, with the two spare bedrooms and the scale model, 1:25, of a Bessemer converter to occupy the long evenings. Politics probably thought that the life I led with my father was good enough. It was not worth remedying. It ought to have been an early lesson in the pathetic limits of current political life.

  My father was in the kitchen when I got home, washing up in his bony way. He had changed from his daytime suit and tie into his evening and weekend clothes of a flannel shirt and corduroy trousers. Last night’s dinner plates, the breakfast things and the dishes he had used to prepare the Wednesday dinner clanked under his thin hands like a desultory avant-garde composition. He had long ago decided that washing-up was a task that should only intrude once a day. Before dinner was the best moment, with spare time and optimum build-up of soiled debris.

  ‘You’re home late,’ he said, without disapproval.

  ‘I saw some friends after school,’ I said, dropping my bag in a corner of the kitchen.

  ‘I had an interesting issue to deal with at work,’ my father said.

  ‘What was that?’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What was the interesting issue at work?’

  ‘Oh,’ my father said. ‘A strange case. A consultant in oncology. That means cancer.’

  I knew what oncology meant.

  ‘She took time off eight months ago and said she was sick with stress. Then she disappeared. At statutory intervals the notes arrived from her GP confirming that she was sick with stress. Eight months on and she’s still no better. I would like to suggest to the GP that his plan of treatment, should he have one, does not seem to be having any effect. We have no prognosis. If it’s an illness, is the wretched consultant getting better or worse? Recuperating or declining? We have no word.’

  My father was getting absorbed in scrubbing a pan. Round and round, up and down, the brush went; his eyes were cast with fascination into the soapy depths.

  ‘So what happened today?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What happened? The interesting decision you had to take? Today?’

  ‘No decision. But we discussed it. I don’t know what the point is going to be when we pay her off and engage with dismissal procedures. I was arguing for yesterday. Her colleagues regard her as a pretty poor doctor. Got made consultant in the end. Lucky we haven’t had more lawsuits from her incompetence. Great fat woman. She was always stuffing her face with chocolate at odd times. Just after breakfast. Ten minutes before lunch. I can’t understand that kind of behaviour.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s the stress she’s suffering from,’ I said.

  ‘Everyone’s stressed in the public service. I’m stressed. Your teachers are stressed. You don’t see your headmaster or me stuffing our faces with chocolate all day long to console ourselves because someone’s been horrid to us. And that’s the last of it.’

  He heaved a solid pan back onto the stove top where it lived. He’d cooked mince in it last night.

  ‘What’s for supper?’

  ‘It’s Wednesday.’

  I pretended to think. ‘It’s shepherd’s pie.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Can we have peas with it but no carrots?’

  ‘I shall cook both and you may choose to take only one. How was your day?’

  There was always something effortful about these enquiries of my father’s. Somebody had told him once that you should ask other people about the details of their lives. You should pretend to take an interest. When it comes to children, it’s sometimes hard to engage with their concerns, their swift and intense friendships and fallings out, their habit of trying to explain every detail and rule of each game and encounter without quite having the words to do so. By the time I was sixteen, my father and I had, in reality, given up on each other. The bridge between us was down, never to be rebuilt. In a very few years – I was still at university – the news came through to me in a note in the porter’s lodge that something had happened at home, that I should contact the Senior Tutor, that my father had very sadly died, that he had committed suicide, and finally that he had hanged himself with a belt from the banisters. The cleaner he had hired when I left home had found him. (And why had he hired her? I came to think so that there would be someone to find his body.) Suicide is the most powerful way of saying to someone that they mean nothing to you. It states that you don’t care what effect this ending will have on the rest of their lives. At the very least, it is a selfish demonstration that you haven’t been touched, or even reached, by those who should have been closest to you. But my father had demonstrated that long before, sometimes only by saying, ‘How was your day’ with routine indifference.

  We had finished our shepherd’s pie and my father was getting up to fetch a yogurt for dessert – his plain, mine cherry. The doorbell went.

  ‘That must be your joggers,’ my father said.

  ‘I don’t think they’re coming today,’ I said.

  ‘They always come,’ my father said. He hopped over to the kitchen window. He looked through the blinds. ‘It is they. They always come about now. I’m going upstairs.’

  The joggers were my friends at the time, Matthew and Simon. They were keen runners – I don’t think they would have used the word ‘jog’. For about a year, their evening run had formed a large circuit of which our house occupied one of the furthest points. It was convenient for them to pause and have a glass of water. They’d been doing it every night. (This was before the rise in popularity of little water bottles, marketed by corporations. There were still water fountains in the streets.) I had assumed that Matthew and Simon would not call on us that night or, to be more exact, I had not given either of them a thought. I had been sitting with them during Major Urch’s presentation, but at the end, I had got up and left them without a word about walking home. My life had changed with Percy Ogden’s first words, the first jabbing of his finger. To be reminded of Matthew and Simon with this ring on the doorbell was to be reminded of a long-standing but tiresome social obligation, a visit to Grandma, a sick neighbour’s dog to be walked, which offered no enchantment in anticipation or substance. I had thought they would correctly interpret my trancelike rising to seek out Ogden. I had thought they would tactfully assume our friendship was over. But what we want and think is never apparent to people around us, even the ones who know us well. They have to read us through our faces and movements and gestures if we say nothing. That is not enough to base an understanding on.

  I led Matthew and Simon into the kitchen as usual. They were decent dull boys, I can see that now, boys with hobbies like my dad – the violin for Matthew, who came from a big musical family of sisters. No one could object to their son having them as friends, with their string-orchestra practice and their Oxbridge-entrance classes. Matthew was going to demonstrate commitment and idealism by spending the next summer teaching English in Africa, or packing mosquito nets, I forget which. (And the year after that Oxbridge would turn him down flat: Merton College was less interested in whether an applicant for engineering could pack mosquito nets in a warehouse in Kigali than whether he could do the sums.)

  ‘I bet José is going to kick up a row tomorrow,’ Simon said, leaning against the sink with a big glass of water.

  ‘I bet he is,’ I said. José was what some sixth-formers called the headmaster, Mr Stephens. He h
ad once taken an English class when Mrs Macdonald was off, and had confessed that he and Mrs Stephens went to the same town in Spain every year where they were the only English visitors, and ‘The fisherfolk treat us like natives.’

  ‘There’s a limit to what you can say,’ Simon said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I thought maybe that was a good thing to say. They shouldn’t get away with—’

  ‘What?’ Matthew said. ‘She’s going to get expelled for saying that.’

  ‘Who?’ I said, thrown by ‘she’.

  ‘Beverley,’ Matthew said. ‘Didn’t you hear? After the talk? What she said to that major bloke?’

  Beverley Ibrahim had somehow found herself at the front of the hall during the major’s talk, not at the back as usual. The major and the headmaster had, Simon explained, been going off stage, pottering a bit – ‘You know how José is, “After you, no, after you”,’ when Beverley called up from the hall.

  ‘I say, Major,’ she called. ‘Major.’ It was surprisingly good, her imitation of a real pukka plate-glass military accent. She got his rank right, too. The major turned around. He might have thought that now he was going to get a sensible question from someone of his own sort. Not everyone feels comfortable asking a question in front of an audience of their peers – it could have occurred only now to this top-notch-sounding pupil. He smiled expectantly.

  ‘I say, Major,’ Beverley sang out. ‘I don’t suppose you have a squaddie chappie to hand you could lend me for the afternoon? An ordinary sort of fit private soldier? I’d simply rather like to be thoroughly fucked by a fit squaddie.’ Then she went into a sort of horrible Cockney, and screamed out, ‘’Ave yer got one, mister?’ before running out.