Jim Crace - All That Follows

“I want to know the story. I don’t get anything about you lot, my mum, my father, Mr. Lemon and his gun. You firebrand sofa-hating activists.”

Leonard laughs out loud at this. If only it were true. “No pasarán,” he says, raising his right fist, enchanted by any description that includes him among the activists.

“What’s that?”

“ No pasarán? You know the Spanish Civil War?”

She shakes her head. “Were you in that?”

Leonard throws his head back again, not laughing at Lucy’s innocence but delighted by it. Why should a girl of seventeen know about the Spanish Civil War or, come to that, the compulsive part it has played for so many years in his imaginative life? “No, that was way before any of us were born. More’s the pity, possibly. I might have gone and done my bit.” And he embarks on telling her — his captive audience, who at least is pretending not to find him tedious — about his political epiphany. “Let’s see, I was twelve years old, so 1987.” He was, he explains, “a fervent and precocious little boy, a bit too earnest for my age perhaps,” and one that was as keen to take part in politics as others at the time were to play in football games or form a gang. “It was all Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Out! Out! Out! in those days. Thrilling times.” Lucy nods as if she knows who Maggie Thatcher was, from her mother, possibly. “I remember …”

Leonard stops to check her expression. Celandine always grimaced or held her hands up in mock horror whenever her stepfather said I remember . “Try to remember wordlessly, Unk,” she once suggested, spitefully. But Lucy has tilted her face in interest. Her shoulders are still rubbing his.

“… there was this older man, one of the organizers. Mr . Perkiss,” Leonard continues, failing to recall the Christian name and then fleetingly recognizing that he is now the older man and one who also hopes to be inspiring. “He had only one hand, the left. The right was missing from the elbow. He always had the empty sleeve of his jacket turned up and safety-pinned to his shoulder. Walked a bit crablike. He must have been getting on for seventy. But he was still the fastest leafleteer among us. He’d been a milkman.” Leonard smiles to himself; he’s never forgotten Mr. Perkiss’s oddly sideways bearing, nor his unhesitant agility — even though he was not a southpaw by birth — at gates where others fumbled, and his confidence with growling dogs and hostile residents. This, to a lad of only twelve, looked like political heroism. Leonard wanted nothing more than to earn this man’s approval.

“Did you find out about his arm?” prompts Lucy, as dutifully as a TV host, rescuing Leonard from his short silence.

“I didn’t like to ask at first. It was a bit too personal, I thought. But I did ask him, finally. I said, ‘What happened to the other one?’ Not exactly subtle. I can still remember Mr. Perkiss lowering his voice, as if he thought it all too small a matter to discuss, and telling me, ‘I left my arm in Catalonia.’”

“Hey, that would make a mighty lyric for a song.”

“He’d been a volunteer, you see? In 1937. The Spanish Civil War. That’s why I mentioned it before. No pasarán . ‘They shall not pass.’ He was a member of the International Brigade, when he could hardly have been out of his teens. Maybe just a year or two older than you are now, Lucy.”

“Boys are not like that these days. Not at my college. They go to Spain to get a tan. And to get wrecked.”

“My Mr. Perkiss, he got wrecked — in the old sense.” Leonard begins to tell her about the battle of the Ebro, in which Perkiss was a stretcher-bearer. “Nineteen of his troop were killed that day. Can you imagine it? Frenchmen, Russians, Americans, Italians. The International Brigade. Good mates of his, Lucy. He’s doing what he can to save some lives and then this Fascist soldier lobs a grenade at him. He takes full blast.” Leonard slaps and detonates his chest, a brass player’s concert trick. “He takes full blast of it. Got shrapnel in his face and legs and chest. They had to pick the pieces out with kitchen tongs!”

“Did my father know this man?”

“Of course not, no.” Her question puzzles him. But then he understands why she was so thoroughly attentive at first but is now fidgeting. Maxie is the one she wants to hear about. That is what she thought all this was leading to. Leonard would rather tell her about the pivotal and inspiring day that Mr. Perkiss let him see and touch his “war damage,” the shiny scar, six centimeters long, below his knee, the other scar along his underjaw and down to his Adam’s apple, a hairless and pitted length of tight and damaged skin. He could never grow a beard, thanks to General Franco. “The worst luck was that the detonator hit Mr. Perkiss just below the elbow,” Leonard continues, speaking more quickly. “Can you imagine, Lucy, what a chunk of steel the size of a pigeon’s egg can do if it hits flesh at speeds like that?” Lucy starts to roll a cigarette. “It punched a hole in his arm. It sliced the artery and then passed through and only missed the comrade behind him by a whisker. Half a centimeter closer and that man would’ve lost his face. Mr. Perkiss’s arm was hanging from a thread. Snip, snip, and that was it. Neat job. They left it where it fell. In Catalonia. Didn’t even save his watch. Didn’t stop him doing this, though. One arm’s enough.” Leonard raises his clenched fist, feeling foolish, finally. “The Socialist salute. That’s who I got it from.”

By now it’s obvious Lucy is not truly interested in Leonard’s hero of the left or the fact that Leonard himself, when he was Lucy’s age, still dreamed of emulating this man and hoped, when he was older, in his gap year possibly, to make a sacrifice, though not of a limb, for something he believed in.

“I’m only telling you all this,” he says, hoping to regain lost ground, “because the one other man I’ve met who’s come close to Mr. Perkiss is your father. You know, prepared to lay down his life for a cause. He was always lost in one cause or another.” He doesn’t add out loud what he is thinking: that unlike Mr. Perkiss, Maxie Lermon could be brutal and stone-hearted, that his high-sounding principles were only a smokescreen for his transgressions, that her father was fanatical, preoccupied with action, careless of effect.

“That’s why we have to stop him, isn’t it?” she says. “Because he’s not the sort to stop himself.”

What she proposes is a mirror kidnapping. “You kidnap me, or seem to anyway,” she says, too sweetly passionate to warrant opposition. “You threaten tit for tat. It’s quite a neat idea. It’s biblical. It’s eyes and teeth. No one’s going to guess what’s really going on.”

“So what is really going on?” Leonard hasn’t understood. The drink has made him sluggish.

“Not a lot, in fact. And that’s the joy of it. I only disappear into your spare room for however long it takes. A week at most … Come on!” She slaps his hand. “I bet three days. I just hang out, read books and stuff. I’ll be your cook! And you send ransom notes and make phone calls. You say, ‘We’ve got the headbanger’s darling girl here. She won’t get free until the hostages get free. And if he hurts the hostages, then she’s hurt too. If they go hungry, she goes hungry. Shout at them, and she gets shouted at. Simplissimo as that. But when you free them, the family, we free her, the long-lost daughter. It’s your call, Mr. Lemon.’ No, this is really genius.” And it does seem genius. It seems the sort of intervention that is both honorable and risk-free and, with red wine on its side, might even be mistaken for daring.