Free A Place Of Strangers by Geoffrey Seed Page B

claustrophobic
bubble from which there was no escape. Kill or be killed. On the back, he had
written :
    All tail gunners must surely all go mad. It is like
being suspended in space, looking into a void with no sense of being part of
the aeroplane or the crew. I feel so detached, just me, running my own little
war against the enemy, waiting and watching.
    Francis always said Edward had nerves of steel and they
brought each other luck. That was how they survived. McCall held to this as he
put the picture in his memory box and closed the lid.
    But something nagged at him, some little pinch of guilt he
had first felt at Evie’s questions. Why had he shown so little curiosity about
this unlikely warrior, still less about the woman he had married and borne him
a son? Who were these people, what were they?
    He forced himself to imagine his father taking off that late
afternoon, the blood, guts and fragile bones of the man, so aware that a single
burst from an enemy gun could cast him down to earth, screaming at the stars as
he fell. Only a fool would not be terrified.
    McCall, weaker than he would admit, became nauseous at the
very thought. He went to the bathroom and sank his face in a bowl of cold
water. For a brief second in the mirror before him, McCall fancied he
recognised this man he never knew. He went to touch his reflection but there
was nothing... just silvered glass and a memory of terror not properly
understood.
    *
    Evie gazed towards Piccadilly from behind the long net
curtains of her anonymous office in Leconfield House. Distant, anonymous
figures came and went, heads down through the drizzling January day, each
unaware of the plots and conspiracies fomenting on her desk.
    Here were transcripts of phone intercepts, tape recordings
from listening devices in office walls and Special Branch memos written by cops
who had got their press and trade union snouts pissed in Gordon’s wine bar by
Charing Cross Station or the Blue Posts pub in Soho.
    But the miners were now a broken force, down on their knees,
never to rise again. Mrs Thatcher had slain the enemy within as surely as she
had seen off the Argentine generals without. Dancing on graves could now begin
in the Carlton or Travellers clubs or wherever power took money to bed and
fucked the rest of us.
    Evie had tried to warn her father without showing out too
much.
    ‘You’re being led to defeat, Dad... why don’t you start
thinking for yourself?’
    ‘Like you do, you mean – spying for the bloody bosses?’
    He accused her of treachery in the row that followed. That
cut deep. But her father was not a wicked man, nor did the Realm need defending
against him. He had never even been to London and only got to Oxford once – by
motorbike when she went up in the year of revolution which was ’68.
    Evie took him for tea along The High. She had already
assumed a new accent which he mocked as la-di-dah. He was soon gone home again,
back to the world he knew. Evie had wanted him to feel proud of her, not ill at
ease. But in a place of funny gowns and silly hats, it was him who was the
oddity. It was kinder never to invite him again.
    She remembered a covertly filmed baton charge by lines of
police on horseback. Miner standing with miner, forming a single, fluid mass
like starlings yawing from a hawk. The camera zoomed in to the main
troublemakers. Each face was a contorted image of alarm and hate, hands raised
for protection against the stamping hooves. Evie actually knew some of these
men – one especially. Not that his name ever went into her official report.
    Something Bea said reminded her of all this.
    ‘Never forget, Evie – every law is man-made. Some are so
morally wrong, it can be one’s duty to break them.’
      She had taken to Bea
but the old lady’s Leftist sympathies seemed out of character. Then again,
communistic traits often ran in the duplicitous ruling classes of England.
    *
    Doctor Preshous had ordered McCall to exercise. He had taken
to