Jim Crace - All That Follows

On the left is Leon Lessing, the nation’s most nervous militant, on the evening before AmBush, and only a half hour or so before the restroom beating. He has a decent head of hair but nothing lush. He’s not an especially handsome young man, not least because his eyes are small and fearful: fearful of the meat spread out in front of him, fearful of the company, fearful of the day ahead and the undertakings he has given. Leonard has not noticed this before, but the fat man who beat him in the restroom hallway is hazily discernible in the upper background, pictured from the shoulders down, a mist of cloth and flesh. Leonard closes in and sharpens. Now he can just make out some of the darker lettering on the Texan’s shirt: “Bar and Grill.” It could be the title of a tune.

Leonard restores the Gruber’s image to its full dimensions, sending T-shirt Man into the bleary background again, and pans across to the right and the second portrait of himself, the one snatched from this morning’s newscasts and Web sites. Here he’s fifty years and one day old but, despite the pressure of the combat boot and gun, not betraying any fear, not revealing any of the dread that was his foremost feeling at the time. He seems fierce, and triumphant. His eyes are wide open; his mouth is slightly parted. He doesn’t quite resemble himself. The photograph, his photograph, is deceiving, Leonard knows, but it is thrilling too. It looks as arty and theatrical as a cinema still. He is mythologized by it. Already he can imagine the image on a music download file. Sax Warrior , perhaps, with Lennie “the Lion” Lessing and the Warrior Quartet. He’ll compose some stirring tunes for it. Jazz for Militants. Riffs for Radicals. Improvising for a Better World. He’s tapping out a clothy rhythm on his chest.

It is even more thrilling when, a moment later, Leonard finally discovers the video clip. It has only just been cleared and returned to screen after an hour’s embargo. As a paste-over explains, the faces of the NSF operatives have been obscured “to comply with security and operational guidelines.” Leonard’s face has not been touched. Here, in these moving and more expressive images, the resemblance is more accurate. He’s recognizable enough to have been named at last. Someone — a jazz nerd, probably, or a neighbor — must have spotted him. He gets down on his knees, hardly comprehending what he’s seeing, and studies the screen just within his focus range. He can almost feel the fizzy heat of broadcast on his forehead and cheeks. Certainly his whole body flushes hot with a kind of tumbling displacement, the deepest déjà vu. It is as if his dreams were filmed. He watches it again.

The news video must have been shot, he realizes, from under the entry porch of the press marquee, where he faked such convincing cigarette smoke this morning. The lens is shielded from the weather but the heavy rain is visible nevertheless, smudging the outline of the houses. The wind is flapping canvas, just in the shot. The segment scans across the street and settles on the hostage house for a few seconds before a commotion can be heard off-camera. Several voices shout at once: “Stay where you are,” “Get down, arms out,” and “On your knees.” The framing lurches for a moment — crews and journalists running forward have pushed the cameraman aside — but he steadies quickly and clamps his focus on Leonard again — no mistaking him — moving deliberately but calmly toward the waste ground. Red lights are dancing on his coat. His yellow cap is jaunty on his head. He does not look nervous in the least, just walking catlike from the hips. He manages five steps before three men in combats with pixilated faces burst into the shot, like killers from a wildlife film, like hunting dogs. Their duty sticks are drawn. They pounce on him and knock him to the ground with what seems like redundant violence, exactly as the NSF command knew it would. The camera follows Leonard to the ground. Their feet and arms are going in and out. The spoken commentary mentions something about “suspensions,” then Leonard is identified again as “the jazz composer and cult musician”—he’s pleased with that — and not displeased and not entirely surprised when it is suggested he is “a known associate of the Final Warning faction.” He summons up the Clip Save menu on the screen and sends the video to his Austin file. “Bravissimo,” he says.

Leonard is exceptionally tired all of a sudden. It has been a surprising and dramatic Sunday. The drama of it is catching up with him. He stretches, rubs his shoulder, rubs his face — he still hasn’t shaved or washed, or changed his clothes — rubs his shoulder again. It hurts even more than usual, but it is less troubling. He welcomes it. Overnight, his rotor cuff disorder has ceased being an older man’s condition, a sign of the body losing tone and strength and seizing up in premature rigor mortis. Now it has a stirring narrative. It is a young man’s injury, a war wound in a way, his scar of opposition to the Reconciliation Summit, a twin of Mr. Perkiss’s shattered, noble arm. He can carry it with pride. It’s something that the NSF has done to him: “You must have seen the video.” He lifts his right arm as high as he can. Yes, the pain is worse. His movement is more restricted than it has ever been. He turns his ouch of pain into an unexaggerated yawn.

Leonard is still on his knees gazing at the telescreen when Francine calls, leaning over the banister in her clean nightclothes, to let him know that finally she has recovered — and is hungry. Hasn’t he promised her a brunch in bed when she wakes up, she asks, or has she dreamed it? He thinks for a moment, incorrectly, that he can hear her coming downstairs, that she will catch him out again, praying at the screen, the surfing serf, that she will see the press photographs and the video before he has a chance to prepare her and explain. “I’m bringing it. Go back to bed,” he shouts. She’s happy to.

Brunch will be a mushroom omelette and grilled tomatoes with finger toast. He’ll halve a grapefruit and loosen the segments with a curved knife. He’ll make a pot of tea. He’ll take great pains to lay her tray attractively, to decorate the plate, to make it clear that he’s taking care of her. He’ll carry the bag of gifts and cards upstairs with him and sit on the end of the bed to open them. She’s bound to sing “Happy Birthday,” as she always does, in that pretty voice with which she entertains and educates her kids. It’s been the strangest week, he thinks, adding the smell of eggs to the kitchen’s residue of strangers’ nicotine. A farce. Too much of a farce, maybe, to justify how smug he feels, how pleased he is with his new public image. Who knows what Francine will make of it? She hasn’t got an inkling yet. He will try not to exaggerate in his account. Nothing he has done has really made a difference, after all. She could think that, given what has happened since, he might as well have simply picked up the phone Wednesday night and done his duty as a citizen, a compliant and dreary citizen who’s never dreamed of Catalonia.

The omelette is ready and on the plate when Leonard lifts the bag of gifts and looks inside. What he sees is startling. Another Sunday shock. He has to steady himself on the kitchen worktop and look again. No, he has not imagined it: one of the envelopes inside is marked with a single word, written in a familiar hand with one of Francine’s blue wax crayons. The word is Unk . He pushes back the flap — it isn’t sealed — and pulls out the card. She’s taken an old family photograph from the album in the living room — a picture of the three of them and Frazzle the terrier, labeled “Norfolk, Summer 2017”—and mounted it on an oblong of thin board. Everyone in it is smiling. Even Frazzle has a phlegmy grin. Leonard turns the card over. She has written on the back in capitals and in the style of texts: “HAPPY 50 BDAY — UNKX. ALL OK — VERY SOZ 2 MISS YOU ALL. GOT YR MESSAGE FROM MY FRIENDSHIP BOX. CAME HOME. MUST GO TODAY.” No signature but underneath, and written more conventionally, there is a further message: “I Saw You on the News This Morning. Absolutely Star,” and then a name — Swallow — a row of kisses, and a cell phone number.