Hari Kunzru - My Revolutions

“No, she wasn’t. She was a voguish liberal who went with the

flow. She was following fashion.”

“I’m sorry to say not everyone shares your sanguine view.” “Meaning?”

“Meaning there’s a public-interest question.”

“Speak English, Miles.”

“It’s the Home Office, not Culture, Media, and Sport. There’s a feeling that someone with her background isn’t suitable for the job. A former revolutionary in charge of the security services? That’s a little too much baggage, don’t you think? She’s not a safe pair of hands.”

“So she’s not a safe pair of hands. What of it?”

“It’s a widely shared opinion.”

“She must have been security-vetted. Isn’t that what you do?”

“Oh, absolutely, but vetting committees can make mistakes. They found no connection between her and the fourteenth of August actions, for example. Completely in the clear. But there were dissenting voices. Some people don’t think the checks were thorough enough.”

“I’m telling you, she had nothing to do with fourteenth August.”

“Let’s take it by stages. When did you last meet her? You saw her after you got out of prison, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Did she come to your squat?”

“I suppose she must have done. I have a picture of her at the women’s group, but that might have been earlier on.”

They picked me up outside the prison. Leo, Anna, and Claire. I was expecting Sean’s old van. Instead they were driving a big blue Rover, an expensive car.

Anna kissed me on the mouth. “We got rid of Rosa,” she explained.

It was about time. Back in Notting Hill the van’s loud exhaust and distinctive pink paint job had become a liability. By the time we moved out of Charlie’s we were spending half our time by the side of the road, watching sour-faced constables kick her tires and

poke around under the seats. Eventually we’d taken her to a friend’s garage in Shepherd’s Bush and had her sprayed white, but it was a sloppy job. You could always see a faint pink sheen on the hood and the back doors.

“Where did you get this from?” I asked, running my hands over the car’s creamy upholstery.

“Somewhere in Belgravia,” said Anna.

“I thought Sean was still in prison.”

“He is.”

“Anna and Claire took it,” muttered Leo.

“Leo says it’s too flashy, but really he hates it because stealing cars is man’s work.”

“You should bloody get rid of it.”

“Oh, calm down.”

We parked the car in the yard behind Workshop Thirteen and covered it with a tarpaulin. I found the place full of people I barely knew. Two or three agit-prop friends of Jay’s were lounging around, bumming cigarettes and waiting for someone to cook. A young black woman was running off leaflets on the printing press.

In the Brixton prison rec room there had been a television. The news pictures seemed to tell a simple, chilling story. Glass on the streets of the Bogside. Blazing cars. “We have to fight back,” I told Leo that night. It was late and we were whispering. Everyone around us on the mattresses was asleep, bundled in blankets and sleeping bags. Nearby Anna spooned closer to Shirley, the young black woman. I was expecting to be with Anna on my first night of freedom. Either her or Claire. I was angry. Leo was too, though for different reasons.

“They’re ganging up on me,” he hissed, “calling me a misogynist. Anna said I was unable to distinguish rape from ordinary sexual relations. Fucking bitch.”

There was always a lot of tension at Thirteen. I think that was partly because so many things weren’t said. I wanted to talk privately, not least with Anna, but it was impossible. With Sean still away in prison, Anna had exerted control over the collective.

She’d become the advocate of a policy of absolute openness. The individual was a politically suspect category; privacy was just another name for isolation; the atomized worker was subject to feelings of depression and alienation that could only be cured by participation in an authentically communal experience. It was as if she subsumed herself entirely into Thirteen. Everything she did, whether it was washing herself or going to the toilet, she did in the presence, at least potentially, of someone else. And somehow she succeeded in placing herself entirely on the surface. Her nakedness became meaningless, even to me. It was as if she had no inner life at all. But that totalitarian sharing became the rule for every one of us that winter, not just Anna, and in most of us it bred furtiveness. It was easier not to speak about your feelings to anyone than be forced to offer them up to everyone, yet another sacrifice on the bonfire of openness.

Soon after I got out of prison, there was an argument among the women involving Leo’s traditionally minded girlfriend Cynthia, who rolled his joints, did his laundry, and looked at him with big eyes when he spoke at our meetings. Cynthia was told she was politically backward. She was informed that she was no longer welcome. Leo was furious at her expulsion and moved out with her to stay in a huge unruly commune that had been set up in an empty mansion in Piccadilly. When I went to visit I found more than a hundred people crashing in high-ceilinged reception rooms, climbing on the roof and shouting down from the windows at a besieging crowd of police and hostile gawpers. You had to get in and out using a makeshift drawbridge. After a couple of weeks, the place was stormed. Leo came back. Cynthia didn’t. Was Pat Ellis there when they expelled Cynthia? I think she was. I remember her face, twisted, shouting. I was upstairs, dozing on the mattresses. I went down to watch. Pat was listing Cynthia’s faults. Other women were joining in. Cynthia was whimpering. “You just aren’t human, you people. What’s so bloody revolutionary about being cruel?”

That would have been just after we burned down the first army recruitment office.

The noise of chatter in Miles’s Soho club was increasing, forcing us to raise our voices. “Are you telling me,” he said, draining his second glass of wine, “that Pat was completely unaware of what you were doing?”

“We weren’t exactly advertising it.”

“Not at first.”

“She was part of the women’s group. Most of them split off and set up some kind of commune in Tufnell Park.”

“She didn’t go, though.”

“She was married.”

“But she didn’t go. She wanted to be in the action faction, not the sisterhood.”

“Where did you get that? You sound like someone’s uncle trying to talk jive. She wasn’t part of either. The feminists thought she was soft because she wasn’t prepared to leave her husband. We thought she was just another bourgeoise . She was useful because she was a lawyer, but we didn’t trust her.”

“Regardless. She must have known.”

“Known? Why? She hardly ever came to Thirteen.”

“I’m not sure you’re remembering correctly.”

How is my memory? When Leo showed me the crate of petrol bombs it made sense. I didn’t discuss it. I didn’t really stop to think very much at all. Milk bottles filled with four-star and engine oil, ballasted with sand, stoppered with wadding. We drove the Rover down to a recruitment office in Blackheath where the two of us broke a window and threw a couple of our crude devices through the hole. As we drove away all I could think about was Kavanagh the junk man, me and Brian setting fire to his garage as kids.

When Anna found out, she was furious. We hadn’t consulted the group, meaning we hadn’t consulted her . “How could we?” I hissed. As we argued, Shirley was lounging nearby on the mattresses, pretending to read Régis Debray. The place was full of people I didn’t know and didn’t trust. That evening, we told the various interlopers and sexual partners and hangers-on that they needed