Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [261]
‘Anyway,’ Annette said, in sudden decisiveness, ‘you can’t stay down there forever. OK, I’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes. Broadway at the lights. Usual.’
She was in Acton, not at home but not in hiding either.
‘Right, see you there love.’
I gathered my gear, swept up any traces of my presence, and when the basement looked again like nothing but a computer hobbyist’s cubby-hole, climbed the swing-down aluminium ladder and stepped out from a cupboard under the stairs into my host’s hallway. It had that dead aroma of a house where nothing had moved all day but the letter-box flap, the thermostat and the cleaning-machines. I left an envelope containing a few gold coins on the umbrella-stand and let myself out.
The house was on a street behind Ealing Broadway. The chestnuts lay like green sea-mines on Haven Green. A light drizzle was falling. I remembered a spray-bombed slogan from the Chernobyl year: it isn’t rain, it’s fallout. I turned up my collar and hurried. There were cops outside the Tube station – Republican Guards, to my surprise. I didn’t give them a closer look.
I crossed the Broadway and walked away from, and then towards, the traffic lights. The Odeon across the way was showing The Blue Beret, advertised by a huge back-lit poster of some grizzled veteran played by Reeves or Depp (I forget) holding a bayonet’s edge to a Peruvian peasant’s throat.
I turned back, spotted Annette’s black Volvo a hundred metres away in the sparse traffic and turned again and sauntered to match velocities as she slowed to a stop. I leaned over, opened the door and got in. There was always that moment of checking that you hadn’t given someone the shock of their life.
We laughed, and she accelerated away from the lights.
‘Everybody all right?’ I asked.
‘Everybody we know,’ she said, her voice taut.
‘Tell me later about the comrades,’ I said. ‘We’ll do what we can.’
She nodded, concentrating on the road and the traffic-screen updates. Our route was charted along the Uxbridge Road until just past Southall, then sharp left along the Parkway to Heathrow.
‘What’s wrong with the Great West Road?’
She grunted. ‘Troop transport.’
Hanwell, a middle-class residential suburb, was quiet. Southall, an Asian immigrant area, solid Republican, had dozens of gutted shopfronts.
‘What happened here?’
‘A mob from Hayes,’ Annette said. We went up and across the bridge over the Grand Union Canal. The factories of Hayes, to our right, had been precision-bombed to charred splinters by the Yanks. I admit to feeling a certain grim satisfaction: the area had been a racist, imperialist bastion for years. Even the Trotskyists had given up selling their Red weeklies to its White trash.
‘What goes around comes around.’
‘Rather a hard lesson,’ Annette said.
Every park we passed had its encampment of black plastic domes, lurking cowled aircraft, black helicopters. As we neared the airport the numbers of black-uniformed US/UN troops increased. No need for roadblocks – a wave of an identity-reader did a neater job. The lasers made you blink, always too late: the retinal scan was in.
Heathrow was like a scene from the twentieth century. Nobody was flying but those who had to: refugees from the war zones, wounded soldiers and civilians, desperate emigrants. It had a Third World of people waiting for flights, waiting to get through the re-imposed immigration barriers, waiting to die; and a Second World of officials and officers ordering them about. In this bedlam the First World consisted of volunteers trying to help and entrepreneurs trying to help themselves. Each passenger lounge had its field hospitals and hawkers; each gate its unpaid advisers and legal sharks and medical aid team.
We arrived