Hari Kunzru - My Revolutions

The van was packed with prisoners, five men and a woman, each handcuffed to an escort. A middle-aged man in work overalls nodded warily at me. The others, younger, looked at the floor or held their heads in their hands. On the way to the station, the policemen made small talk. Their eyes gradually settled on the woman prisoner, whose blouse had lost its buttons and was sagging open, revealing a section of white breast cupped in a lacy beige bra. After a while she gave up trying to cover herself and stared dejectedly at her feet, pretending not to hear the dirty jokes being made at her expense.

Finally the van stopped and we stepped out into the pandemonium of Bow Street police station. The corridors were full of arguing, scuffling people; police and prisoners, lawyers, newspaper reporters. We joined the crowd, jostling and pushing, the uncontrolled energy

of the demo still surging on through the solid old building. As I lined up outside the charge-room I spotted someone from the LSE, a friend who’d been involved in the occupations. He raised his fist in a salute. I called out and waved. It felt good to see a familiar face, a reminder that I was there for a reason, part of something larger than myself.

I waited for almost an hour, as the prisoners in front were taken down to the cells and what seemed like hundreds of new arrivals piled in behind. In the charge-room an angry sergeant stood on a chair and shouted over the din, as another man took down details in a ledger. “I didn’t do anything,” I told him when it was my turn. “I was exercising my right to peaceful protest.”

“Put a sock in it,” he said.

A few minutes later I was shown into a cell. The first hour of my captivity was spent uncomfortably, as I tried to delay the moment when I’d have to use the stinking, lidless toilet in front of five strangers. We sat, three to a bench, staring at one another in silence. Finally I couldn’t wait any longer and shuffled over to the porcelain bowl, where I produced a shameful stench.

Gradually, I began to slide into a state of trancelike despair. In my back pocket I found a penny piece, which I used to scratch “Victory to the NLF” in the plaster of the wall behind my head. The slogan took its place in a palimpsest of names, dates, and obscene drawings. I felt hungry, but the stink from the toilet was so strong that when a constable brought in dinner, I couldn’t eat. I’d been staring at a discolored patch on the ceiling for what seemed like days when I heard the sound of raised voices in the corridor and the rattle of keys. A man was pushed into the cell. As soon as the door slammed behind him, he pressed himself against it, shouting through the spyhole in a noticeably well-bred voice, “Let me out of here, you fucking pigs! Let me out! One day we’re going to raze this fucking place to the ground, you Gestapo fuckers, you fucking Nazi cunts!” He kept this going for several minutes, pausing occasionally to cough and spit on the floor. From the corridor a bored voice told him to shut up.

After a while the man stopped shouting and slumped down on the bench beside me, forcing the others to shuffle up to make room. I leaned back and scrutinized him. He was dressed unremarkably in jeans and a brown corduroy jacket, but his expensive Chelsea boots caught my eye. I knew what they’d cost because I’d seen them the previous week in a shop on Newburgh Street. I’d wanted a pair but didn’t have the money. How clean they were! My own shoes were scuffed and spattered with mud. The boots annoyed me. He annoyed me. “You seem to have come out of it OK,” I observed sarcastically.

He stared at me, running his hands through his wavy blond hair. He had an equine face, drilled below the forehead by small eyes walled off from the outside world behind thick black glasses. Below the glasses hung a long nose and a pair of lips, full and fleshy and rather pink, which drew the gaze involuntarily to the inside of his mouth. It was as if he was only now registering my presence in the cell.

“What do you mean by that?” he asked, folding his arms. “You’re looking very fresh. They obviously didn’t knock you about too badly.”

“I’m not feeling well, so I couldn’t put up much of a fight. And, anyway, I was trying to save my equipment, not that it did much good. The bastards took it all anyway.”

“Equipment?”

“Camera equipment.”

“Are you a journalist?”

He cocked his head to one side and examined me. “They certainly gave you a going-over,” he said, showing his teeth in a sort of half-smile. To my surprise, he reached forward and touched my bruised cheek with his fingers. I recoiled. He sat back. Again came that same half-smile. There was something illicit about it; an under-the-counter expression, suggestive of brown paper wrappers, specialized tastes.

“Blast my throat,” he said, rubbing his neck with one hand and sticking the other out for me to shake. Reluctantly, I took it.

“Miles Bridgeman.”

“Chris.”

“Chris what?”

As soon as I told him my surname I felt like checking to see if my wallet was still there. As I was to discover, Miles always jumped on things. He was never content until he’d pinned them down, all the specifics, the whys and wherefores. I used to forgive him for it; in an odd way, his clumsy avidity felt like the most straightforward thing about him, the part closest to honesty.

Years later, under the Market Cross, it was still there. The same question, the same poorly concealed intensity.

“Mike what?”

“Frame. Michael Frame. As I’m sure you know already.”

Miles sat down beside me, tugging fussily at his trouser legs and smoothing his coat under his bottom. His movements were stiff. He seemed to be having trouble turning to his left side. “Bad back,” he said, answering my unspoken question. “I have to use this bloody awful chair at the office. Designer must have worked for the fucking Stasi.” The afternoon shoppers wandered past, averting their eyes from the Big Issue seller on the corner. I thought uneasily about all the people who might walk by and see us. Miles told me about his chiropractor. Miracle worker, reasonable rates. So how had it turned out for me? I must have looked puzzled. “Life,” he explained, gesturing at Chichester. “All this. I have to say — it’s not what I’d have guessed.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“You know, it’s amazing to see you. I always wondered what had happened to you. I assumed you’d gone abroad — and then — well, I don’t know what I’d assumed, but I never thought I’d see you again. Certainly not — well, not in such ordinary circumstances. But here you are. You haven’t changed, by the way.”

“Bollocks, Miles. All bollocks, from start to finish.”

“No, I mean it. You look just the same. You’re looking fit.”

“I take vitamin supplements.”

For all his pampered sheen, Miles didn’t look so well himself. The skin on his face had a coarse, slightly flushed look. Around

his nose there was a little web of broken capillaries. He shook his head, as if in wonderment. “There’s so much to say. I barely know where to begin. How many years is it? I last saw you in — when did we last see each other?”

He knew perfectly well. The houseboat in Chelsea. The conversation in which I’d told him all the specifics, the whys and wherefores.

I felt like one of those Japanese soldiers they used to find holding out on remote Pacific islands, still fighting the Second World War decades after it had ended. At last, here was Miles Bridgeman, come to receive my surrender. I felt an overwhelming need to confide, to place myself in his hands. Perhaps his appearance meant my problems were over and no one cared anymore. But that seemed too optimistic. I’d seen Anna and now Miles; there had to be a connection. Whatever Miles wanted, my well-being was unlikely to be a factor in his calculations. Once upon a time, I’d have immediately checked any thought of my own needs with the stern reminder that there was something greater than the personal — but that was when I thought I knew what it was. I had enough presence of mind, though, not to make it easy for him just because I felt sentimental. Just because he’d called me by my real name.