Fifty-First State (3 page)

He set off through the darkness to his bus stop in Whitehall. He had joined the governed, rather than the governors now: an old man carrying a black plastic bag wandering down to the river to find somewhere to sleep; a group of cleaners chatting in a foreign language on their way to the tube station. Two bemused teenagers wandered down the wide and empty Whitehall, dwarfed by the sombre height of the government buildings. There was little traffic other than the patrolling armoured police cars. The air was fresh, with a feel of spring about it.

After eight hours in the enclosed atmosphere of Sugden's William felt
invigorated. He was content. Of course, he and Lucy didn't have enough time together, with Lucy on shifts beginning at 6 a.m. It was hard to meet friends who worked more normal hours. But they managed, somehow, to make their days off coincide. The mortgage got paid and they were saving to get a bigger flat, with a second bedroom, and a garden. Then they would have a baby, they hoped.

The bus eased round the corner from Parliament Square. William Frith, a happy man who had waited only five minutes for his bus on a spring night and was going home to a wife he loved, climbed on.

Off the bus, heading home, William saw, under the street lights on the other side of Shepherd's Bush Green, about 400 yards away, a group of Auxiliary Police, in their olive green uniforms. They were standing behind two young men who had their arms high up against the bonnet of an old car. The policemen were patting them down, not gently, for weapons. They were shouting, ‘Don't move! Don't speak! Bastards – stand still! Bastards!' The voices of men who are aggressive – in charge – afraid. The contents of a gym bag were tipped out into the street. One of the young men, dark-skinned and terrified, turned his head towards the heap of clothing on the ground. One of the Auxiliaries handcuffed the second man. William walked by, on the other side, still hearing the shouts. Just after Christmas, on a Saturday, a suicide bomber had blown himself up in a north London synagogue. Six men had died and thirty others had been injured. Another bomb had been discovered in an underground train at New Maiden. It had failed to explode. Raids on houses, chiefly Muslim, had been stepped up. Stop and searches of men who looked Mediterranean or North African increased. The powers of the Auxiliary Police had been augmented. William had no quarrel with this. Obviously the two young men weren't bombers but they might have been. Somebody had to check. He'd been stopped himself on the way home twice in a month, pushed back against a wall, sworn at, searched and let go without apology. Even so, the scene he had just witnessed made him feel uneasy, though he was not sure why. He was trying to recall some old film he must have seen on daytime TV as a boy – a dark street, old-fashioned cars pull up, uniformed men leap out – no, he'd forgotten what it was. He put it out of his mind and went home.

The White House, Washington DC, USA. April 4th, 2015. 10 p.m. (GMT).

Seated on two couches in the Oval Office, the President of the USA sipped mineral water while her Secretary of State, Ray Hollander, drank Scotch and water. Hollander's tie was loosened and the top button of his shirt open. His cheeks and chin were darkening. Had there been any public meeting that evening he would have shaved for the third time that day. His President wore a pale-blue linen suit, a baby colour Hollander associated with his second wife, who had often worn it when about to deliver a sucker punch. The President's hair and make-up were impeccable, as always, but a long day was ending and, like a flower in a vase, though unwilted, she gave the impression wilting was not far away.

‘So,' she said. ‘Call the Chiefs of Staff, recheck the time of the meeting and then, just late enough to catch them and not so late they think we're playing with them, get that Harvard professor into the meeting on Presidential say-so. I need the input.'

‘They're not going to like it,' Hollander said.

‘I don't want them to like it. I want them to know I want the truth, not a twenty-page report saying ten different things. I want to know – can we handle Afghanistan and a reinvasion of Iraq, if we need to. And will they back me, really back me, if that is what we need to do?'

‘Madam President,' Hollander said. The Army did not have enough men. Already the military was discussing the possibility of a draft, hoping Vietnam was enough of a memory now. Hollander knew the spectre of the draft was for ever rising before the President's eyes. And no one thought she would introduce any form of compulsory recruitment in an election year.

He said, ‘So it's really going to be Sheikh Mohammed this time?'

‘That would seem to be Allah's will.'

Sheikh Mohammed Al Bactari was a senior Shia cleric, fiercely patriotic and ferociously anti-American.

Hollander looked his President in the eye and said, ‘Muldoon.'

She looked straight back and said, ‘Ray. Not again.'

He had never understood her distaste for Britain and British politics. It could not have been historical. The President knew no history. If it had been personal he would have known about it. Maybe she disliked the style of the Brits, how they talked, walked and thought about things. He sympathized;
he couldn't take that traditional evasive cunning either. He said, ‘If these Iraq elections go bad on us and we have to reinvade, the Brits will have to go with us. The other big Europeans won't. But a lot of the Brits were against the 2002 invasion. They couldn't wait to get out. And Frederick Muldoon has no power in the House of Commons and won't ask for the support of the country because he knows he won't get it. But we have to have them, with China and India on the Security Council accusing us of trying for world domination. Then there are the Russians—'

He read her mounting impatience. She interrupted, ‘You've told me the problem. Where's the solution?'

Hollander had no illusions about his President. She was tougher than he was, and more ruthless. If he was tungsten, she was kryptonite.

‘There's only one. Muldoon goes and the new PM is one of ours and has a strong majority. He backs us militarily and gets rid of the nests of Islamic vipers in their major cities.'

‘Just tell me what we need to do,' she said and stood up. He did the same.

‘Goodnight, Madam President,' he said.

‘Goodnight, Ray, and thank you.' After the President left the room two men came in, nodded and stood against the door, watching him. He nodded back and stood up. ‘Just leaving, guys,' he said. But for a moment he paused, staring up at the portrait of a long-dead politician in knee breeches.

‘Subvert the government of Great Britain,' he said to himself. ‘Yes, ma'am. OK, ma'am. Anything you say, ma'am.'

12 Emscott Drive, Hamscott Common, Kent. April 5th, 2015. 2.30 a.m.

Thirty-year-old Kim Durham woke up, sweating, with a start. She pulled herself up and lay back against the pillows. Oh, no, she thought to herself. No, not again. The dream was back, the one where Jonathan told her when he came in from work that the marriage was over, told her while she stood at the kitchen counter, cutting up peppers ('Only fresh, organic food eaten in our house,' she had boasted then), told her there was someone else, someone he worked with, as she desperately tried to understand what he was saying, while another part of her mind equally desperately hoped that five-year-old Rory would stay where he was, watching TV in the sitting room – that dream was back. It had never gone away, really, but over eighteen months it had come back less and less often, filling her with despair, wrecking the night and the next day as well.

But now it had returned. Night after night, there it was again. She knew why, of course. Because one day soon she would have to tell Rory, asleep with his plastic figure of Grimgraw, probably still muttering to him on the pillow beside him, that on the other side of the world he had a brother – half brother – his father's new son. And until she did that, she'd have no peace. But for now, she could not decide when to do it, or how. She was a teacher. She'd seen often enough the effects of such news on a child. Seen it done badly, seen it done well – she ought to be able to manage this, but she couldn't. You couldn't imagine how it would tear you apart twice – once on your own account, the second time when you looked into the eyes of a bewildered, betrayed child.

There was the scream of a flight of fighter jets overhead, that noise those who had been born and bred at Hamscott Common knew well enough to sleep through. Kim knew she wouldn't sleep tonight, or only for an hour or so, before her alarm went off. She lay down and closed her eyes, though.

Resting's as good as sleeping, she told herself. And, it'll all look better in the morning.

It did look better, a little better, as Kim and Rory drove down the country road to the school they both attended; he as a pupil, she as a teacher. It was a clear, sunny day. Big clouds were blown lazily across a blue sky. The hedgerows on either side were throwing out the first, pale budding leaves.

Rory watched a field of leaping lambs, then looked keenly forward as the car rounded a bend. To one side of the now-unhedged road was a fringe of grass. Behind this an expanse of Hamscott Common, old woodland, gorse and unfurling ferns, spread as far as the skyline. On the other side of the road the Common stretched away, except for the area, a mile and a quarter square, which had been cleared and flattened over seventy years ago, at the beginning of the Second World War. Then it had been Hamscott Common airfield. The buildings, hastily erected, had housed the RAF squadrons fighting the Battle of Britain. From its short runways Spitfires and Wellington bombers had taken off to fight over the coast of England. A very old man who had been one of the pilots lived in the old folks' home half a mile from the base.

Since the war the airfield had expanded and been rebuilt. A short stretch of grass led to the perimeter fence, where two guards in US uniforms stood outside the high-wire gates. Seventy-five metres inside the outer fence lay a second one, also patrolled by armed soldiers. Behind a second fence was a parade ground and, to the rear of this, administration buildings. To the right was the vast expanse of runways, on which military planes stood, to the left, small homes for service personnel, all identical. Behind all this, against the backdrop of tall trees where Hamscott Common, outside the base, started again, were towers and low buildings, always patrolled. Here some thirty nuclear bombs were stored, readied for mounting on the new, heavy B63 bombers.

Rory's head was turned sharply to look at this much-looked-forward-to part of his daily trip to and from school. Often a fighter plane would scream down the runway and lift off steeply into the air, leaving a trail behind as it disappeared like an arrow into the sky. There might be soldiers drilling on the parade ground. Or sometimes a soldier would have stopped a van, and be searching the back, with two other soldiers, rifles at the ready, standing by. Today, however, from Rory's point of view, there was nothing very exciting to watch. The inside of the airbase might have been deserted. There was no one near the runways, on which fighter planes stood; no one came from or went into the administration building. The houses were quiet. Then a small boy came to the door of one of the houses, carrying a ball. A woman followed him. Her eyes seemed to flick, involuntarily, past the fences and over the narrow road, to where, as ever, there was a group of twenty people, men and women of varying ages, in anoraks. A long banner, supported on poles planted in the ground and sagging slightly, read, ‘Close the Hamscott Common Nuclear Base.'

The Hamscott Common permanent vigil consisting of Quakers, left-wingers, CND members and others, had been in place for seven years. Though the personnel changed the number remained much the same. Some were people from the local area, attending on a rota system, others
were more permanent and living in roughly constructed huts or tents among the trees of the Common. Occasionally, on a random basis, the police came at night in force, with bright lights and dogs, and knocked down these habitations.

The permanent demonstration had a deal with the almshouses down the road. They kept their Portaloo in the garden in front of the ancient almshouses and were offered bathing facilities by the residents. This had been done on a vote, 13-2, by the elderly residents of the almshouses. The trustees of the institution, established in the seventeenth century by a wealthy wool manufacturer, could probably have overturned this decision by their pensioners. However, the old man who had earned the DFC in 1943 and been shot down soon after, and another resident with a granddaughter on the local paper, had been vociferous. The trustees therefore thought it better to leave well enough alone. Thus, the retirement home supplied water in buckets to the demonstrators, and sneaked them in for showers, while the demonstrators replaced electric light bulbs, shifted furniture and, occasionally, smuggled in bottles of port, Guinness and whisky.

Young Rory, though, had little interest in the shabby group of people on the margin of the road opposite the base. To his mind, they just stood there, doing nothing while, on the base, there were uniformed men moving about with guns, the scream of the planes lifting off, people going in and out of the administration block and other children playing in the small gardens.

A year or so earlier he had asked his mother about the demonstrators and Kim had explained they were people who wanted the base closed down. Rory had expressed incredulity and asked why. ‘They're against war,' she had told her son, knowing quite well this was hardly an explanation which would make sense to a seven-year-old. A more complicated answer could be worse. The protesters' basic objection to the base was that nuclear weapons were held there, ready to be deployed. And that might frighten her son. It was an aspect of the base that no one in Hamscott Common wanted to dwell on, rather like people living on the slopes of a not-quite-extinct volcano.