SERGE: The global elite 2 страница

'Hey! He's well fit!' olie waves both hands at a traffic warden busily ticketing a row

cars by the shopping parade. Although she didn't mention this ^{e s}°cial worker, Oolie's uninhibited sexuality is also a worry. Oolie remember to take the pill every evening if there was no one to remind her?

'Come on, Oolie. We're there.'

Clinging on to the handrails they stagger down the stairs and out I on to the pavement of Hardwick Avenue, where Oolie makes a bee-line for a puddle left by the recent rain and stamps in it with both feet.

Their inter-war semi is set back behind holly bushes in a quiet tree-lined street where their neighbours are dentists and accountants; it has three generous bedrooms and a small sunny garden - it's the sort of house they could never afford if they moved back to London now, they'd be lucky to get a one-bedroomed flat for the same price. It's because of the deindustrialisation of the North, Marcus explained. All the time they thought they were experimenting with revolutionary ways of living, the real revolution was slowly taking shape under their noses: the demise of manufacture, the triumph of finance.

Since he's retired from the Institute, Marcus has ensconced himself in Serge's old room, which he uses as a study. If Serge wanted to come home to finish writing up his PhD, they'd have to come to some arrangement. Goodness knows what Marcus gets up to in there. He says he's writing a history of the non-Communist non-Trotskyist left - the Fifth International, he calls it. It can't be good for him to spend so much time picking over the past, which only makes people unhappy. Yes, he's become much more withdrawn and grumpy recently.

She puts the kettle on and opens the fridge for milk.

'Be the change you want to see.' Mahatma Gandhi's words are fixed to the fridge door with a green frog magnet; they've taken the place of 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, which hung on the fridge door at Solidarity Hall, held in place by a red flag magnet.

She takes a cup of tea upstairs and sets it down on Marcus's desk-

'How's it going, love?' She ruffles his hair with her fingers.

He starts and looks up at her, smiling, blinking owlishly behind round glasses, as though he's just woken up from a deep sleep.

'That Italian comrade who came over in 1984 - can you remember his name?'

'Bruno. Bruno Salpetti.'

Doro shuts her eyes for a moment, and finds she can remember not only his name but the rough-smooth texture of his cheeks where the stubbly bit ended and the baby-soft bit began, the clean smell of his soap, the fine black hairs on his forearms and belly, and the thicker mass of black curls below.

'That's it!' He scribbles it down. 'Was he in Potere Operaio?'

'Lotta Continua."

Does Marcus know about her and Bruno? And, after all these years, would he mind?

'That was my first encounter with the politics of autonomy. Listen to this.' He leans forward and reads from the screen of his computer.' "Although the workers have to sell their time to the capitalist who owns the workplace, their human needs and desires are opposed to those of the capitalist."'

'My most beautiful compagna,' Bruno had called her. It's a long time since Marcus said something like that. Yes, in those days she could still give Moira Lafferty a run for her money, despite her long auburn hair and DD boobs. The new men, it seemed, weren't that different from the old men.

' "Autonomy is the workers' struggle to assert their own personal and economic goals …’

Even Fred the Red, who spent his days wandering in the wordy thickets of Marxist theory and his nights with a succession of tearful girlfriends from London, found time for Moira. In fact, he was probably the father of Star.

“… in the face of the employer's relentless pursuit of profit. …"'

The dictates of sisterhood meant you weren't supposed to feel ^angry or jealous towards other women, because we were all victims °f sexism, and we had to solidarise. Beautiful women were oppressed because they were only sought after as sex objects, and plain women "Were oppressed because they weren't sought after at all.

We were sisters, Moira and I, she reflects. We stuck together like asters, but we also squabbled and fought like sisters, especially over ^Bmno Salpetti.

Bruno arrived in Solidarity Hall from Modena in 1984, at the start of the miners' strike, declaring he wanted to share the straaggling of the proletaariat. He slept on a mattress on the floor of the Marxism Study Centre, which had long since been transformed into a playroom for the kids. His only luggage was a little backpack which contained a selection of readings from Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, a razor, and a pair of very small black underpants. (Moira, needless to say, found some pretext to investigate and whispered her findings to Doro.) The razor went unused - he grew a beard, which usually Doro didn't fancy on men, but on him it looked excitingly leonine. The underpants appeared on the washing line with pleasing regularity. He broke the monotony of their bean-grain diet with wonderful spaghetti dishes made with fresh tomatoes and olive oil; he maintained that Gramsci had more to offer to the revolution than Trotsky; and he believed in, and practised, free love. He was only twenty-five, but what's a decade or so between friends?

Moira, as you would expect, was the first to get in there.

'He's got a dick like a gorilla!' she reported with characteristic refinement.

Doro felt a flush of annoyance. What does she know about bloody gorillas?

'Oh, really' she said.

It was bad enough that Moira was bedding Bruno at any time of day or night, but she had to advertise what a good time she was having with little crescendos of shrieks and sighs that could be heard in every corner of the house. Although it was solidly built, there was something about the layout of Solidarity Hall which meant that sound percolated through stairwells and corridors. And whatever you were doing you had to stop and listen - there was no escape. Once it was the curly-haired milkman collecting his money; Doro was on the doorstep in her dressing gown, fumbling in her purse for some change, and suddenly his ears pricked up. Their eyes met. A little smile spread across his face and he looked at her enquiringly.

'She's got TB,' said Doro. 'She often coughs like that. I expect she'll die soon. It's quite tragic' She slammed the door.

The kids naturally were curious, and Nick explained that it was a sign that Moira was very happy. This was confirmed for them one day when two women from Women Against Pit Closures came collecting for the soup kitchen which had just been set up in the village hall. Doro invited them in and offered them tea. They entered gingerly, stepping over the debris in the hall, looking curiously at the posters on the walls ('the tears of Philistines are the nectar of the gods' was still there), sniffing the lentil-flavoured air. Sticking close together, they followed her down the long gloomy passage into the kitchen, where Clara and Serge were having an after-school snack of peanut butter and cornflakes at a table which hadn't been cleared since last night. As they sat down and Doro put the kettle on, the ceiling above started to creak, and the sounds of Moira's bliss were suddenly very audible.

'By 'eck, she sounds 'appy Must've seen t' fairies at bottom o' t' garden,' said the younger one, who was called Janey.

'D'you rent 'im out?' asked the older one, called June, who had a smoker's voice and a sagging crinkled face.

'Yes,' said Doro, 'but there's a queue.'

They exchanged quick looks.

Janey said, 'D'you want to 'elp us in't kitchens?'

'Sure,' said Doro.

'Bring 'im too,' said June, flashing two rows of incongruously pearly teeth.

Another time, it was a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses.

'It's a bad case of devil-possession, we're trying to exorcise...' Doro began, but they didn't hang around for an explanation.

Maybe it was the milkman, or June and Janey, or even the Witnesses, but somehow word got around the village, and they started to get a steady trickle of visitors, male and female, who would call on some pretext and stand on the doorstep trying to peer through the open door into the house. In those weeks of the miners' strike, there was always someone coming to their commune collecting for petrol-money for the pickets or donations for the soup kitchen where miners and their families could get at least one meal a day, and they were pleased and excited that they seemed at last to be making links with the local community, who had previously shown little interest in the Marxism Study Centre or the Anti-Colonialism Discussion Group.

Bruno was delighted when Doro conveyed the news that the women in the village had invited him to volunteer in the kitchen.

'They like to experience the Italian cuisine?'

'Er... I think so,' said Doro.

Moira was less pleased. She'd cut quite a figure on the picket line at Askern, with her flaming hair and interesting slogans ('Miners are the midwives of socialism!') which drew puzzled but admiring glances from the ranks of the pickets.

'I've been called all sorts,' declared Jimmy Darkins, Chairman of the National Union of Mineworkers' local branch, 'but never a midwife. I shall 'ave to give it a gooa.'

Moira obviously revelled in all that male attention. She and Bruno would regularly rush home exhilarated after picketing duty, fling themselves down on the mattress and make noisy love. It was awful.

Now she'd just have to choose between spending her time with a load of women doing boring domestic chores on an epic scale, or letting her lover loose in that hormone-heavy environment.

'The role of the women is absolutely crucial in this struggle, Bruno,' Doro said.

'But the picket line is where it's at, comrade,' urged Moira.

'Hm. However, as Gramsci says, is important to build the counter-hegemonic positions in all social institutions.' Bruno twirled his fork through the pasta.

'Exactly!' cried Doro.

Moira shrugged defeat, slurping in a mouthful of spaghetti alia Napoletana, letting the sauce dribble down her chin.

'Oh my!' said June, when Doro led Bruno into the Askern miners welfare hall next day.

The room fell silent as twenty women stopped what they were doing and stared at the newcomer.

'Come on in, duck! Don't be shy! We're not gonner rip yer keks off. Not till after dinner, any rood.'

Bruno smiled innocently.

Janey whispered to Doro, 'Does 'e talk English, love?'

June whispered, 'Does 'e talk the language of love?'

Unfortunately Doro had a class that afternoon, so she had to leave. Bruno came home several hours later, hitching up his jeans as he lurched through the door, his face covered with reddish blotches.

'How was the cooking?' asked Moira sulkily

'The ingredients were poor.' His voice sounded faint. 'It is a disaster the British masses have a diet of such impoverishment.'

'How did you get on with the miners' wives?' asked Doro.

'The proletarian women displayed extreme... how I should say...?' He fumbled for words,'... class consciousness.'

The problem of class consciousness dogged Doro for days. If that's the secret, there could be no hope for her, she fretted, drowning her disappointment in soapy water as she rinsed the breakfast clutter in the sink. For she couldn't help being thoroughly and undeniably middle class. But then so was Moira. So were all of them, in their thoughts, their habits, their tastes and preferences. The fact that they'd all just gone off picketing didn't alter that one iota. Did any of the women in the soup kitchen wear dungarees or read George Eliot or eat vegetarian mush? Although they'd lived up here on the fringes of this working-class community for fifteen years, they'd barely touched its inner life. Having finished the washing-up, she smoked a joint and brooded on the inherent unfairness of the class system, which suddenly seemed to cut her off from all possibility of happiness.

Why are you sad, my most beautiful compagnaY

His arm was around her shoulder.

Oh! I'm...' her eyes filled with tears, '... I'm just thinking of the unfairness...' a sob rose in her throat,"... of the class system.'

'Do not weep, my noble spirit. It is of course unjust. But this is ^wny _We are in straaggle, yes?'

His fuzzy cheek pressed against hers, his warm hands searching die opening of her blouse.

'Yes!'

'Pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will?'

'Yes!'

Doro learned a great deal about class consciousness and struggle that day. And her pleasure was enhanced when she later bumped into Moira coming out of the bathroom with a mardy look on her face.

Sometimes Bruno slept with Doro (who also slept with Marcus, who didn't know), and sometimes he slept with Moira (who also slept with Nick Holliday and Fred the Red, who did know) and sometimes he got back from the soup kitchen too exhausted to do anything but sleep. Then one evening when he arrived back from the soup kitchen, there was a young woman with him.

'This is Megan.'

He introduced her to the group, repeating their names for her.

'Hi.'

She looked up from lowered eyes, not smiling, and stuck to Bruno like a shadow.

Doro didn't feel particularly threatened by Megan at first. She wasn't pretty - at least, not in a conventional way - she had a fhin angular body with heavy breasts, a long curtain of dark hair, and grey-green watchful eyes. She moved silendy, like a cat, and hardly spoke. In fact, she's not sure, even after so many years, who Megan really was, except that she'd been married to a strike-breaking miner, and was brought into the commune by Bruno. Doro can still remember that night. She shivers.

It was the dead of winter, the long bitter winter of 1984-5, and it was strange, Doro recalls, that Megan had no possessions with her, not even a coat. Bruno explained that she was running away from an abusive relationship. They welcomed her unquestioningly, made up a bed for her in the annexe in Moira's studio, and the women lent her the clothes she needed.

It turned out that Megan had a son, a sullen five-year-old called Carl, who stayed with Megan's mother in Harworth during the week but often came to Solidarity Hall at weekends. He was a clingy insecure child who didn't mix with the other kids, and stole from the kitty. His nickname was Crunchy Carl from his habit of crunching insects - spiders, flies, butterflies, or whatever he could get hold of- between his fingers. Once when Chris Watt reprimanded him, he spat at her and called her a fat slag. His father was never talked about and, when Doro asked, Megan just shrugged and said, "E took off, din't 'e?'

Chris and Doro tried to explain what the commune was about without sounding too preachy.

'See, we're trying to create a society based on common purpose and sharing what we have, and looking after each other.'

Megan stared for a long time. 'You mean, you don't have your own possessions?'

'We do have some possessions. But we share the money we earn, and everyday things like books and clothes.'

'In't nobody gonner share my clothes.'

Doro refrained from pointing out that actually she was sharing their clothes.

We have moved away from the post-war vision of a society based on shared prosperity, to a society based on grotesque accumulation of personal wealth on the one hand, and increasing insecurity on the other."'

Marcus, still reading from the computer screen, looks up to catch her eye.

Drink your tea, love, before it gets cold.'

SERGE: The rabbits

Serge must have been nearly six when he first encountered Fibonacci, because he remembers the Groans at Solidarity Hall were all preoccupied with the miners' strike that year, and the kids were often left to their own devices. However, one day Nick Holliday and that Italian guy built a wire-mesh rabbit cage in the back garden, with two rabbits which were supposed to teach the kids responsibility, non-competitive play, and introduce them to non-patriarchal social communities, i.e. there was supposed to be no Mr Rabbit.

Despite this, the kids came back after school one day to find five baby rabbits snuggled up around their mother, still blind, almost bald, and unbearably cute. They took them out one at a time and passed them around. There was him, Clara, funny little Otto and Star, who at that time was a toddler in permanently stinky nappies. (Oolie-Anna hadn't been born.) Anyway, they kept passing the baby rabbits around and stroking them and kissing them, maybe squeezing them a bit too much, especially Star, who wanted to make them open their eyes, and when they put them back they realised they weren't moving a lot. In fact, they weren't moving at all. In fact, they were dead.

Clara, who was the oldest, and had already experienced pet-death trauma, said they should bury them in the garden and not tell anybody. So they did. He didn't know where exacdy they buried them, but he recalls how hard and dry the ground was as they scraped away with a trowel to make a big enough hole, and he remembers being sick on the grave.

But amazingly, as if by magic, a few weeks later, more baby rabbits appeared. Five of them. Otto thought they'd come back from the dead, and started to blub. His own fear, which he kept to himself, was that they'd never really been dead at all. Clara told Otto not to be so stupid, and she said they should leave them alone this time, and alert the Groans. Nick Holliday who was Otto's dad and a school teacher, took the opportunity to give the kids a long lecture about sex and where babies come from. It sounded highly implausible.

Two of the new baby rabbits died within a week, but three survived. Then just as they were getting used to having five rabbits instead of two, six more babies appeared. This really freaked all the kids out. It seemed like the rabbits which kept on appearing so inexorably were in fact zombie-bunnies linked in some supernatural way with those litde hairless corpses they'd buried. They started to burrow their way out of the cage; before long there were rabbits and rabbit holes all over the garden. Every month there seemed to be more.

"We planted them in the garden and they growed,' whispered Otto.

As the rabbits multiplied, all the flowers and vegetables in the garden were nibbled down to the roots, apart from the gooseberry bushes and the sunflowers, which were too tall or too tough. The herbs planted around the back door in plastic buckets and a cracked chamber pot disappeared. Only the rosemary bush, planted well off the ground in a disused toilet bowl, escaped. What had been the lawn was now bare earth with a few patches of grass and grotty bits of leftover vegetables scattered everywhere, because of course now the rabbits had to be fed. Little balls of rabbit pooh clung to everybody's shoes and got trodden into the already grungy carpet. Sometimes he noticed a strange sinister smell lingering in the garden.

'How many rabbits d'you think we'll get?' he asked Nick Holliday one bedtime.

Surely Nick would know when it was time for this scary torrent °f zombie-rabbits to stop. He liked talking with Nick, because he always answered the kids' questions seriously, though he could sometimes get long-winded.

h s a Fibonacci series,' Nick explained. It just goes on getting ^bigger.'

'Fibber who?'

'He was an Italian mathematician from the twelfth century. He discovered this series.'

Serge felt a great urge to confess the terrible secret of the buried rabbits. Nick was a gentle guy and he might be more forgiving than the other Groans. He was about to explain what had happened that afternoon, how it had all been a terrible mistake, when Nick reached for a sheet of paper, and started to draw.

Pairs Time =

When the number of rabbits in the garden reached twenty-six (fortunately some had died) the Groans convened a meeting to debate what should be done. Marcus suggested taking them to the miners' soup kitchen, up at Askern, but other members of the commune who were vegetarian reacted with horror. Moira Lafferty tried giving them to a pet shop, but they weren't pretty enough, and the owner already had too many. Doro put a notice outside on the gate saying 'lovely baby rabbits free to good homes' and one day a bloke came in a van and took all the babies away.

'They'll go to poor children who haven't got any rabbits,' said Doro.

But next time he came Serge noticed the sign on the side of his van: 'randy's reptiles'. He didn't say anything to Doro. To be honest, he was getting spooked by the rabbits too. He'd pinned Nick's diagram up on the wall by his bed, and he studied it nightly as he drifted off to sleep. He realised the sequence could be extended.

1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377...

Three hundred and seventy-seven rabbits. He felt his chest tighten with panic as he added the new numbers.

He and Otto shared a bedroom up in the attic, so they often talked together, even though Otto wasn't yet four and talked a lot of rubbish, because of his mum, Jen, who didn't live with them any more but took Otto away to her commune at weekends and holidays where they practised primal screaming. Otto usually came back with a sore throat.

'You sit in this William Right organ box,' he explained to Serge in a croaky voice, 'then you scream and you get energy.'

'What does it feel like?' asked Serge.

'I dunno.' Otto sucked his thumb and twirled a finger in his hair, which was white-blond and curly like an angel's. 'I think it's like the rabbits. They get reborned.'

'But rabbits don't scream, Otto.'

They screamed under the ground. We din't hear them.'

But one night, the rabbits did scream. The sound was terrible, isceral, primal. It ripped through his dreams, making him jump ^ut °f ^Ded and rush to the window. The garden was in darkness, but there was just enough moonlight to see a flicker of movement down below, shadows chasing shadows.

'They're doing it,' said Otto, standing beside him on tiptoe with a multicoloured crocheted quilt wrapped around him, because he didn't have any pyjamas. That's how they make their babies.' His skinny shoulders were trembling.

Serge put his arm around him for comfort, then took it away quickly - although he was only six, he already knew that boys didn't do that sort of thing.

"We might see them in the morning,' Otto said.

'No, because...' He guessed Otto was wrong, but he couldn't explain why. Then there was another sound in the garden - human voices, yelling.

'Get away wi' you!' A woman's shriek, and then a man's voice shouting, 'Scarper!'

In the morning, there were no babies. A mess of fur fragments and mangled bunny limbs was spread out all over the garden. There was that strange smell, pungent and pissy He realised now it was the smell of death. Not a single rabbit was left. Otto went very quiet. Star started to cry.

'It was only a fox. Let's get going,' Clara said in her usual bossy way.

It was her job to see them all safely to school.

When they got home at four o'clock, they found that there had in fact been two survivors of the rabbit massacre, who must have bolted underground when the fox attacked. Over the next few weeks he and Otto went back every day to check for babies, but none appeared.

'It's because they're both mummies,' he explained, but Otto maintained it was because they'd run out of energy and needed the organ box.

He didn't bother to argue, because something else Nick had told him was preoccupying his mind. The complex branching pattern of the rabbit couples in the diagram, Nick pointed out, was the same pattern you could see in the head of a sunflower, a pine cone, or in leaves, twigs and branches of a tree. It was there coiled in the shell of a snail or in the spiral of a galaxy spinning through space. You could find it in a violin string when you divide it to make a musical scale, or in the perfect proportions of classical building. He talked faster and faster, and his eyes shone the way Marcus's eyes would shine when he was on about socialism.

Serge started to collect snail shells and pine cones in an old shoe box that he kept under his bed, and every night he added a few more numbers to his sequence. When things got bad, he talked to the numbers almost as if they were his friends, and made up rhymes to help him remember.

Over the next few years, after Oolie-Anna was born, and Megan disappeared, and the fire happened, and the break-up of the commune, and all the Groans went mad, and Doro got into a fight with Moira Lafferty and Jen came and took Otto away for the last time, and Nick Holliday left, and Clara went off to University, and the Chrises and their weird kids vanished into the night, he often went up and sat on his bed in the attic and arranged his snail shells and pine cones in a pattern, and dwelled on the mystery of the Fibonacci numbers, the way they seemed to unwind one after another in an infinite spiral of order and harmony which swirled everything up together like the stars in the sky.

1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987 1,597 2,584 4,181 6,765 10,946 17,711 28,657 46,368...

PART TWO

Family Snaps

DORO: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need

Doro has been trying to get through to Serge, without success, so she phones Clara instead on Sunday evening, not about anything in particular, but because she wants to chat. However, what starts out as a perfectly friendly conversation about plants and trees suddenly turns into an attack upon her vegetable-carving demonstration. Why is Clara so prickly? Surely the hormones of adolescence must have calmed down by now. A bit embarrassing, she said. What's to be embarrassed about? She was just trying to be helpful.

'If just one family eats more vegetables as a result, it will have been worth it!' she shouts, and slams the phone down.

The post-argument silence reverberates in the kitchen. Upstairs, she can hear the clack-clack-clack of Marcus's keyboard. The sound makes her feel hollowed out and useless. It's as if all her energy has gone into external things - her relationships, her children and the daily life of the commune - leaving nothing but memories, certainly nothing she could write a book about.

'D'you want a cuppa?' she calls up the stairs.

Serge was more placid than Clara, even as a baby, engrossed in his own funny little world. Yes, if only he could install himself in his old bedroom with his computer, away from the distractions of student life, she's sure he'd soon polish off his PhD. This project at Imperial College London seems to be a pointless diversion. And she can't understand why Clara insists it's University College and not Imperial College - she must have got confused. If only she'd calm down, and stop trying to organise everybody, she'd soon find someone tolerant and good-natured to setde down with. It would be nice to be ^a grandmother. And if only the weather were better she could have gone up to the allotment with Oolie, but Oolie threw a tantrum and ^{she di}dn't feel like going on her own.

If only...

She switches the kettle on and tries to find the news on die radio, but her ears are still ringing with Clara's invective.

Clara was the first of the babies in the commune, and everyone practised their parenting skills on her, so maybe that's why she turned out to be so cussed. Doro feels a pang of guilt about Clara's communal upbringing, though that can't be entirely to blame, for right from birth she was a grizzly and fretful little bundle. She learned to walk and shed her nappies early, and by the time she was three she could sustain a lengthy conversation, consisting of one word on her part - why? - and a detailed and ideologically correct response from the person who was supposed to be looking after her. Yes, there were occasional mishaps. Like that time she caught her brushing her teeth with a tube of Canestan, which one of the sisters had left in the bathroom. That's what happens when you have four or five intensely involved co-parents, all bringing their own experiences and agendas to the task of childcare, and no one in overall authority. It must have reinforced Clara's sense of self-importance. After all, she wasn't just a child, she was a prototype of a new kind of human being - the torch bearer of the non-bourgeois non-private non-nuclear non-monogamous non-competitive nonviolent society they'd set out to create.

Poor kid.

By the time Serge came along, then Otto, Star and finally Oolie, the adults had got a bit bored with all that, and were content to play football or watch TV with the kids. Besides, the commune itself was undergoing so many changes that the idealistic principles they'd embarked with more than fifteen years ago were coming under strain.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-24