Mendolin Kay, thirty-five, roared out of her anti-war meeting at nine in the evening, electrified by a vision that she had worked up, during the meeting's final and perhaps least directional hour, of herself as the charismatic focal point of the whole anti-war exercise.
'I am Mandela!' she told herself, the crowd of Mendolin-enthusiasts in her head growing so large that she couldn't always see herself through it. 'I am Scully!’ she said. I am...' Her chin was up and her shoulders were back and her timing with the rain was tremendous as she trotted to the station with a hand inside her plastic handbag, at ease on her umbrella. The dainty evening mist conditioned her hair, rather than soaked it, and she seemed to have developed an extra sense about the placement of the grimy potholes that yawned underwater along the pavement and usually collected anybody who was wearing light cotton boots.
This time, Mendolin arrived at the station with both boots beautifully dry. Her vision of herself as a world event gained in colour and toadies with each step, and, every few seconds, she broke into a wild and hungry smile that rattled the oncoming foot-traffic, and Mendolin, with its force and autonomy.
The meeting, oddly enough, had not been among the best that Mendolin had attended. It had taken place, as ever, in a clean, freshly-painted meeting-room in a brightly-lit, brightly-coloured arts centre, but the turnout had only been about five people clear of a total washout.
The reason for this had become clear to Mendolin as soon as she had arrived at the train station and seen the first posters advertising the anti-war meeting. The supposedly left-wing political party that Mendolin belonged to, (if only just these days) and that was attempting to seize the whole anti-war movement by engaging in, and perfecting, exactly the attack-dog politics that had led the bigger parties to war in the first place, had not done enough to hide its involvement in the event. The Party’s logo, although downsized, had been tucked into the lower left-hand corner of all the posters, and had drawn the eye, to the poster’s detriment.
Mendolin had handed out enough Party bumph on the streets to know exactly how unloved the Party was, with its belligerence, righteousness and undying penchant for chasing anybody - even its own members – up and down streets, through parks and picnics, and even around mass demonstrations in its eagerness to relieve itself of copies of its newspaper.
'How about you keep that, love,' a young, pleasant-faced man had once said to Mendolin when she'd handed him a Party leaflet at a tube station and offered him a newspaper. 'I'd stick it up my own arse, but then I'd still have it. Why don't you hang onto it and stick it up yours?'
This district's Party organiser had yet to pick up on these nuances. Weighed down with Party posters, t-shirts and clattering tin badges, he had raced through the door just as Mendolin had been folding her long coat over her arm and looking for a seat. Rumour had it that this district organiser was on borrowed time and couldn't afford another thin turnout.
There seemed to be something in this. Certainly, the district organiser’s panic had wrecked every attempt to laugh the small turnout off. The one MP that the Party supported, and viewed as its only Hope for an in to Westminster and the halls of power that the Party was supposed to loathe by definition, had been due to speak at the meeting this evening, and the district organiser's terror had reached such proportions that he had hardly been able to breathe through his nose.
One long-time, popular activist called Chalaz had almost brought the house down by rapping a baseline to the melodic whistling that came from the district organiser’s nostrils. The district organiser had missed this: he had been too busy pushing all thirty chairs in the room into inward-facing, almost airtight groups of three that might, from some angles, have suggested congestion and, in what seemed a matter of seconds, had almost papered the whole facility with his own long, humourless posters of the Prime Minister.
If we shout
You'll go out
Without a doubt.
Shout!
Out!
Liar.
The posters had said.
The meeting had started at seven, and by seven-thirty, twelve of the chairs had been filled. Mendolin had recognised everybody, which had not been promising, particularly for the district organiser's chances. Everybody in the audience was already a member of the movement and, with one or two exceptions, had been a member for long enough to have seen off at least ten district organisers with a relish that everybody liked to recount in detail whenever the group got together.
The district organisers always tanked in exactly the same way, and Mendolin occasionally wondered if it was time for them to compare notes and nut out a new approach. The group would give a new district organiser the benefit of the doubt for a couple of months, and agree to sell the Party newspaper at work, and hand out leaflets on the streets and at tube stations, and the group would even do those things and turn up on time.
Then, after a couple of months, the group would stop taking the district organiser's calls. This was because after couple of months, the district organiser began to treat the group with even more contempt than the public did. Mendolin thought that the reason for this was fairly simple. The Party's aggressive sales pitch rather clashed with its claims to compassion, which meant that it consistently failed to recruit anyone who thought logically for the longer term. After a couple of months, the district organiser, whose tenure was closely aligned to recruitment, began to see that the recruitment statistics for his district (the district and central organisers were usually men) continued to crash and burn ahead of the national rate.
Even the parliamentary Hope’s fame hadn’t generated a great deal of sustained interest or many new members in this part of London, and the district organiser had to find someone to blame for this, not least because the Party’s central organisers, in their turn, were always looking at the recruitment numbers and for failed district organisers to blame and hang out to dry.
'Why have you only sold five papers?' the district organiser would shriek at whichever member of the group had enough credit left to phone the results in after a paper sale. 'That is useless. I can't believe you’re telling me that. Why are you telling me that? Why would I want to hear that? This country's whole population is depressed and lost and our newspaper shows them the way out of that and you can only sell five? I sold thirty papers in ten minutes outside the tube station yesterday and people were really interested in everything we had to say and…’
It was usually somewhere around here that the group began to work to rule. People would agree to help the district organiser at a paper sale, then show up late and leave before time, or they'd not show up at all, or they’d gather in the pub across from the tube station and watch the district organiser fight alone with the trestle table and the wind and wet leaflets and his hair. The group in the pub would look at the district organiser and smile and cheer the wind on a little when it started to get high, and then they would look at each other around their glistening pint glasses, and smile, and raise a small Party fist.
---------------
Mendolin liked - probably even cherished, if she thought about it - everybody in the group, for the very simple reason that each was the genuine article: a true mutineer. There was one notable exception to this, though: a grasping, humourless tub-thumper called Tim. Prominently blue-veined, gummy-eyed, forever tearful and impossible to shout down or lose, Tim was a pragmatic depressive in his forties who had been well-known as a costume-designer on the theatre circuit at the start of his working life, but had taken a job as a district organiser after a wardrobe strike, and had spent the twenty years since pursuing everybody in the movement for an analysis of his reign and the names of the people responsible for the end of it.
He had been at the meeting this evening – Mendolin understood that he lived in medicated terror of the group meeting without him – and he had been as contemptible as ever. His conversation consisted almost entirely of a demand for a definition of leadership qualities and an annihilation of anybody he suspected of having them, although he was not above putting the boot into lesser players if they appeared in frame. He had been terrible this evening, following Mendolin around the room with tales and tears and a fistful of incriminating emails from his ex-partner that he'd printed out for distribution.
Mendolin hated Tim with a festering psychosis that, a year after meeting him, formed the basis of at least half of her fantasies. It also increasingly occupied the minds of people in the group, but because they were as afraid of Mendolin as they were of Tim, and their inclination was to address external, rather than internal, strife, and because they weren't sure yet whether Mendolin was likely to beat Tim or Tim was likely to beat Mendolin, they simply watched and waited and hoped things would become clear before they became terminal.
Mendolin, meanwhile, would sit on the tube and think about Tim's thinning, greying hair and his forlorn, staring eyes and his grasping fingers and the terror that his vicious, unstoppable commentary visited on the weaker members of the group, and she would picture herself luring Tim to her flat by telling him that everybody else was there, then fastening him head-first and face-down on the wooden staircase in her flat and giving him a gory hiding with a computer cable.
Mendolin understood that her feelings for Tim were neither normal, nor constructive, but she did not believe in shelving aggression for the common good, so she didn't. She brooded and ruminated on his invective and impotence and endless snivelling and brutal monologue, and spent hours and hours thinking of ways to raise the bar. Tim, meanwhile, was terrified by the fearlessness with which Mendolin was able to demonstrate hatred, but he was also gratified to know that he'd generated that in her, so he’d been reluctant to move past her thus far. She felt like his only achievement.
Things had shambled on in this tenor for some time. Once, just after Mendolin had met Tim, he’d turned up in her office to demand, tearfully, to know what she and her friends thought of him. Mendolin had spent about an hour deciding and in the end, had sent Tim and the hundred or so people in her address book an email that contained a table that listed each question Tim had raised, and asked people to respond in the spaces provided, which about half of them did.
On several other occasions, Mendolin had agreed to babysit Tim's little son Flynn, and failed to turn up, or, in a move she had thought was rather inspired at the time, had left early, so that Tim had come home to find the front door unlocked and his tiny son asleep and alone in one of their two darkened, squeaky-floored bedrooms. Tim had not said a word about this, even behind Mendolin's back. He'd simply chased her with greater intent, and had begun calling her every day. Tim had sole custody of Flynn, which struck absolutely everybody as extraordinary until they spent a day or two with Tim and began to understand that his ex-wife, who had taken out several non-molestation orders against Tim over the years, had decided that the only way to survive was to withdraw from shared projects with Tim as far as possible. That seemed a wise choice. He’d been after the poor woman again tonight.
'That bitch,’ he’d spat at Mendolin as soon as he came into the room. ‘She said he'd be around at seven to pick Flynn up, but she just didn't turn up. She has never turned up. I'd say he wouldn't know her if she came at him with a sign. I'd say he wouldn't know one of you from the other by now. You all run together in his mind. If he thinks of a woman, he just sees a clean pair of heels. That's the kind of person his mother is. She's supposed to be his parent and she runs around the place, selling herself as this great leftie and trade unionist and whatever, but we all know the truth there. What a climber. She fiddles her annual leave so that she can take days off and spend them chasing anything in the movement that looks remotely male and that's her idea of a trade union contribution.
‘Meanwhile, I’ve got Flynn sitting at home saying Daddy - why doesn't Mummy want to come and get me? Why doesn't Mummy want to meet me? Why doesn't Mummy want to spend any time with me? Charming. That's why I'm late, in case anybody here is asking, although I'm sick of people asking. I'm sick of people saying that I don't make any contribution. You've heard them say that, haven't you, Mendolin? I know you would have heard that and I know exactly what you would have thought of it. I'm a single parent trying to bring up a son by myself and it's almost like people want to exclude me.'
Flynn had been at the meeting tonight - held very still and in place, as usual, by his father's thin, hairy hands. Tim rarely looked at Flynn. He held Flynn to the side, or in front of him, settled his hands on Flynn's shoulders and monitored them for movement. Mendolin thought that when it came down to it, Tim would have more trouble recognising Flynn than Flynn's mother.
Flynn had stood very still and smiled at Mendolin with obvious pleasure as soon as he had seen her, and Mendolin had smiled and waved, and had been extremely relieved to note that he didn't seem to know that only a fortnight ago, after a pleasant and amusing evening making Fimo cows together, she'd left him exposed to every pervert and freakout in the neighbourhood to score premium points against his father, which she had done. She knew that it was an act that she was likely to repeat, too, and had wondered briefly if it was possible to remind herself to behave properly when the time came.
Flynn was a very handsome little boy, with thick, reddish hair, his father's big eyes, and a wide, beautifully-cut mouth. His mouth had started to disturb Mendolin lately though, if only a little. Flynn’s mouth was beautifully shaped, but his second teeth were growing in and the result was not necessarily to Flynn’s advantage. His front teeth, which had only recently arrived, had grown in at angles – almost side-on – so that they looked as though they'd been forced up into the blood-red gums and twisted into place, instead of having descended.
After a few drinks sometimes, Mendolin had amused herself by picturing Tim's hairy hands screwing a screaming Flynn's teeth deep into his head. Even now, when Flynn smiled or spoke, his mouth, with its bared, twisted, adult-sized teeth and angry flounce of dark-red gum, looked to Mendolin like a wincing animal's. It had looked that way again to her this evening, when Flynn had seen her and smiled. Her reaction to the teeth was becoming problematic: the vision of Tim face-down on the staircase with the cable dangling between her fingers and across his back had filled her head immediately, and acquired complex lighting and a soundtrack. She and Tim had looked at each other, and glared.
'For Christ's sake stop looking at those two, Mendolin,' a deep, accented voice had said as she'd stood next to the tea-and-coffee table, glowering at Tim and smiling at Flynn and chewing the inside of her cheek. 'You look like a maniac who is coming to some sort of conclusion.' A large hand had lowered itself onto her scalp and dragged it backwards. 'I'm just changing your face,' the voice had said.
The voice and the hand belonged to Chalaz. Chalaz was the core of the hard core - one of the people who'd been members and activists during appalling years in loathsome countries and had been beaten, arrested, falsely charged and mown down by police in tanks and even on horses, but had always come back for more, often waving now-collectable placards that had a picture of the then-Prime Minister's face on one side and a picture of a horse's arse on the other.
Chalaz was a South African immigrant to whom Mendolin was greatly drawn and increasingly, if still only occasionally, on the verge of listening to. He was a short, overweight, abnormally knock-kneed, dry wit of about 45 who always wore a suit of navy demin, thick glasses and a rigid support splint around his misshapen right wrist.
'Bet that hand slows the evening up, Chalaz,' people would grin as a smiling Chalaz limped in late to a meeting and began to wave the people at the back towards the door and to the pub. They'd all get up and leave: people always followed Chalaz's instructions, even if they'd never seen him before. 'I need both hands, me. Suppose you have to do the downloading with your toes.'
Legend had it that Chalaz had been to Cambridge, and had even finished. He was extraordinarily well-read and impossible to beat in debate, and about twice a year, and perhaps more often than that in recent times, he would pick a pub and a topic and set aside an evening to reduce Tim to a kind of cognitive rubble, to give the group a lift.
'Well, women do hate you, Tim,' he would cheerfully observe towards the end of the evening as Tim handed round the latest emails from his ex-partner's lawyers. ‘You're a psychopath and you don't own anything.'
'I'm not a psychopath!' Tim would scream, pushing his chair back and grabbing the table's edge and rocking all the beers. 'Prove it! Prove it! I want to know what you mean by that! You do not have my permission to say that. Do you hear me? I feel hurt. I feel harassed. You do not have my permission to say that. You back that statement up.'
'Okay,' Chalaz would say, leaning back in his seat. 'I am fairness itself, as we all know. How about you give us a ten-minute monologue and we'll all decide what you are at the end of it?'
Chalaz was highly-placed in central IT at a council out West somewhere, where he did absolutely nothing as he worked to a job description that he had written in an open-plan office that was lined with novels, and overpaid a very large team of open-source insurgents. The councillors, who'd been blinded by the Cambridge connection when they'd first met Chalaz, were too frightened to sack him, or to outsource. They all had a vision of Chalaz tearing around London with their online histories and an axe to grind, so they ignored him and saved their bile on the subject for Human Resources.
The Party had mixed feelings about Chalaz as well. At a recent meeting, he'd arrived late again, found a chair with a district organiser in it and turned the chair around very quickly to face him, with a view to putting his feet up in it. The chair's legs had screeched and its height-adjuster had failed and the district organiser had jumped to his own feet quickly and moved to another chair. Chalaz had stretched his legs out on the seat of his new chair and lifted his arms to stretch out his good hand above his dark head. 'Burnout, Mendolin,' he had grinned. 'Burnout. You have to make sure it doesn't get you. It's a constant threat.'
Mendolin had not been on the verge of listening to Chalaz this evening, unfortunately. Tim had been too present and the concentration needed to take advantage of every possibility that this presented too consuming.
'The problem I'm having not looking at that crazy wanker is that he's only ever two inches away from me,' Mendolin had sputtered, furious, when Chalaz had grabbed her hair. Indeed, Tim had been standing closer to her than Chalaz by then. 'Why do you always come to me when you want someone to be reasonable? He's the problem. He's the maniac. He's the one who needs to know that his stupid line of chat chases people away.'
She'd been so angry then that she'd started to choke on her own saliva. 'I'd go as far as to say that he's the main reason that people don't come to meetings around here,' she'd coughed and wheezed. 'Who do you know would want to get two tubes and a bus and then take a ten-minute walk in the rain just to be abused by that idiot? I've said it before and I'll say it again: we have to change the way things are done and we need to start by taking Tim outside and executing him. How about a field-trip to Basra, Tim?'
'How about you go with him?' Chalaz had smiled. Tim had appeared directly in Mendolin's eyeline, then, with the tiny, wide-eyed, terrified Flynn tucked into his side.
'You bloody bitch,' Tim had said, glaring at Mendolin with the crazy, crusted eyes. Flynn had kept twisting his neck to look at his father and then Mendolin, and Mendolin had thought she'd almost been able to see his heart thumping: his white, too-thin t-shirt had juddered and fluttered where it hung loose.
'Look at this,' Tim had said to Mendolin, still glowering at her. He’d shoved one of his sheets of paper at her with such force that she had to step to one side as she took it, to avoid his fist as it came through. 'It's from the first of May, so it's fresh off the slut's computer. Look at this. Dear Flynn,' Tim had read, wrapping a leg and his free hand around Flynn. 'Dear Flynn. I wanted to see you tomorrow, but your Daddy has said that I can't come, so it looks like we won't be meeting until next Saturday, or until Daddy calms down. Jesus Christ!' Tim had screamed. Everybody in the room had jumped and stopped speaking, and the district organiser and the Hope had looked away from each other and smiled nastily. Tim's lips had trembled and he'd scratched them with the email’s edge.
'This is what I have to put up with,' he'd said. 'She calls my friends and asks them to give statements about me that she can take them to court with her and get him taken away from me. I want to kill that bitch. I don't go to sleep anymore. I sit up in our flat and think about ways to kill her where they wouldn't find my DNA. He's been with me for six years now. Where has she been? Where is she now?'
'Where all the smart girls go,' Mendolin had said, pointing at the door. 'Where girls run faster than boys.' Flynn's eyes had filled with tears, and he'd looked at the floor and frowned. Mendolin had finished stirring her tea with one of the filthy tin teaspoons on offer, then, and then rested the heated spoon against Tim's free hand.
'Ow!' he'd screamed. He'd dropped his printout. 'You're a crazy bitch!' he'd said.
'Stop it, Mendolin,' a member of the group called Martina had laughed. 'You new ones have got to learn to think things out.' Like Chalaz, Martina was short and overweight and wore dark-rimmed glasses. Her hair was thick, wiry and black, and she always wore it in two pigtails which swayed backwards and forwards on the top of her head, like feelers. Her strong, white chin was covered in tiny, dark speckles and she had long, chimp-hairy fingers which newcomers observed with quiet panic. 'So what,' she usually said when people mentioned the hair. 'You want blonde, piss off to Norway.'
'Oh, come on,' Mendolin had said as she'd leaned against Martina. 'Come on. I'm not the one who needs to back off. I'm just sitting here, minding my own business and suddenly, I feel this hot breath down the back of my neck and I turn around slowly with style, like Scully, and it's him.'
'Mendolin,' Martina had said, rolling a little dusting of pot into her cigarette with her long, furry fingers. 'One day I'm going to take you into the carpark and get into my old red shitter and run backwards and forwards over you. You'd be loud at first, but then you'd be quiet.' She'd lit the cigarette, brought it up to her bristly lips, and then offered it around.
'Accidents,' Martina's partner had said then. 'I'm in.' Martina's partner was a skinny, enthusiastic, pink-haired, pot-eating Antipodean called Cameron. Cameron was a transport engineer whose line of chat was perhaps the group's least discrete: he was happy to publicise names, directors' salaries, botched contracts, crashes and derailments, and CCTV pictures of people who clearly knew each other better than they should have: his turn at the moment was a narrative about people who had tried, and failed, to end it all under one or another of London's privatised trains.
'You know that people don't want to die, eh, when they jump off the far end of the tube platform, you know, not the end where the train comes into the station, but the other end, eh. We've got this one tape, right, where this woman jumps onto the tracks right down the far end from where the train comes into the station. The train stops about five metres in front of her, because the train was short, because they had to take a carriage off or something, eh, so in the end, she has to just climb back on the platform, which was totally crowded, eh, and go home. It's hilarious.
'Last week, there was this guy who jumped right in front of the train, yeah, about halfway up the platform, yeah, so you know he really meant it, but he hit the door that's on the front of the front carriage and he ended up going through the door, because the lock didn't work or wasn't there or something, or anyway it was buggered even before he went through it, eh, and so then this guy ends up in the front carriage, sitting next to the driver. I mean, there's the driver, eh, just sitting there, and suddenly this guy turns up next to him, covered in all this blood and cuts, man, total mess. Ha. I mean, imagine what that was like?'
Cameron had said that the most extraordinary part of this episode had been that the two men hadn't looked at each other after the failed suicide had arrived in the cab. The failed suicide had frowned a lot and rubbed his forehead and looked at his fingers. The driver had stayed in his seat and stared straight ahead with his hands still on the controls. He hadn't moved, or spoken. After a while, the driver had sighed, and the failed suicide had fainted, or dropped out of shot, and the screen had suddenly filled with people wearing official blue jackets.
Tim had turned around with Flynn still attached to his hand and his leg.
'I have to tell you about something that's happening to me,' Tim had said. 'I have this dream.' The whole group had been present by then and he'd managed to swing himself and Flynn into the middle of it. He'd scratched his chin and his beard had rasped against his fingers. Grinning, Martina had scratched her own chin slowly and made exactly the same sound. Cameron had clapped.
'Rock on,' he'd said.
'I have this dream,' Tim had said, tears of his version of injustice, Mendolin noticed, filling his eyes. 'I've had this dream where we find out that Flynn's got leukaemia. He is lying in his bed, just talking to me, and suddenly he says that he feels sick. The nurse puts a blue bowl under his mouth and he stops talking and vomits straight into it. He fills the whole bowl up with sick. It almost goes over the edge, but he measures it exactly somehow, so it just finishes below the line. Then, he just wipes his mouth nicely and starts talking to me as though nothing has happened. He just picks the conversation up as though nothing has happened. It breaks my heart. And then I ring his mother and tell her there's a crisis and that the end is getting nearer and that I can't handle it anymore, and she tells me that she can't get to the hospital because she's got a work meeting. I can't believe it. I can't believe it.' He'd put a hand up to wipe his eyes.
Flynn's large mouth had dropped open and he'd grabbed his father's shirt and almost, Mendolin had thought, tried to climb up it. 'No, Dad,' he'd said, wrenching at the shirt. 'That never happened to me. I'm not sick like that. You don't have to worry about that.'
'Mother of God,' Mendolin had said to Tim. 'You need to see how disgusting you are. But you shouldn't be ashamed of it. You've achieved something, in a way. Absolutely everybody in the world finds you repulsive.' Tim had shoved her then, and her hot tea had washed over her hand.
Everybody had gone to find a seat, then. Mendolin had sat down in the front row and Tim had found places for himself and Flynn in the row behind her: she'd been able to hear, and even feel, Tim hyperventilating. Then, the district organiser had appeared before her, or, at least, his rear-view had: he'd placed his legs apart, bent forward, thrust his shapeless backside at Mendolin's row of seats, and dangled a wet finger over the pages of the speech on the table in front of him. Mendolin's anger had been so violent then that she had felt that it had taken form: she'd almost been able to see it slam out of nowhere into the room and the district organiser, like a surprise lorry.
Why were things like this? How did men like this organiser filter through the ranks? Why had the Party decided to back an MP who drove an expensive car and happily spoke against abortion, and earned an enormous salary, and thought, and probably voted, along exactly the same lines as Mendolin's own one-eyed Australian grandma? Why had the Party decided to back an MP at all, come to think of it? The Party's own constitution blacklisted representation in parliament, because representation in parliament led to - well, inflated salaries and expensive cars and reactionary views and unchanged circumstances for everyone else. Did the Party seriously think that people like Chalaz, Martina, Cameron and even Mendolin would abandon socialism to follow the parliamentary Hope, or to follow anybody, when it came down to it?
'Hypocrites,' Tim had muttered. 'This room is full of hypocrites. They're here in front of me. I can almost smell them. I can definitely hear them.'
'Be quiet, Dad,' Flynn had wept. 'Please be quiet, in front of those men. You're on my hand.'
'Get a look at those two, will you?' Mendolin had whispered to Chalaz, dropping her arm to her side, cocking her hand, and pointing a lowered, stiffened finger at the top table. 'Why are we supporting that wanker, please? Our great leaders have just decided to graft themselves onto that asshole because he's got a profile. And okay, okay, he's fun and he's loud and he's not afraid to tell the world to get stuffed, but everybody I know is in all of those categories. He's an anti-abortionist, thanks very much. Do you want to know why women stay on low pay, and drink and breed with guys like Tim? It's because people like that organiser find politicians who like things the way they are and shout at the rest of us to follow them. That guy will show his true colours in the end and he’ll drop all of us like a stone.'
Chalaz had swung his feet from his seat onto Mendolin's and held her bottom in place with his trainers. ‘Mendolin,' he'd said, rubbing his trainers against her thighs, 'you have to learn to shut up and compromise somewhere. You have to learn to compromise. I learned to compromise. I mean, at home, we looked at Desmond Tutu and we all thought Christ, a religious nutter, great, shit, but we could put that aside, because he had what it took to get the thing moving and on the agenda and you have to see that.
‘We looked at Mandela and thought, yeah, okay, some weird thing going on there, what with the wife and all the other, but you know, forget it. We had to have him. I mean, what's your plan? We all know you grew up at a time when it was all about you, but you can't move forward on that. Who cares about women? Who cares about men? See the movement, not yourself. Anyway. I'd tell you to piss off, but I quite like having you around.'
The district organiser had started to speak then. 'My name is James McKellan,' he'd begun, 'but I don't think that's important.' He'd paused here and stared at the audience for some time. About twenty seconds into the silence, Chalaz had put his head in his hands and groaned loudly.
'What is important is that we don't just sit there,' McKellan had continued quickly. 'I don't just sit there. I spoke to a delegation from the mosque this morning and they don't just sit there. You can't just sit there. My speaker doesn't just sit there. The Prime Minister is a warmonger and people who don't do anything about it are warmongers. Organise meetings. Get speakers in. Get moving. Don't just sit there. I don't. The Prime Minister has the blood of 100,000 on his hands, dead in his war...'
'One hundred thousand war dead - that's terrible,' Mendolin had whispered to Chalaz. 'One hundred thousand women dead in back-street rooms with knitting-needles up them, though - well, that's all right. That we can do. Bring it on.'
'Silence,' Chalaz had said. He wiggled his trainers, until Mendolin’s skin started to bruise against the seat of her chair. 'I'll give you a knitting-needle and I won't just stop at your fanny.'
McKellan had turned out in his usual navy jeans, white t-shirt and long canvas jacket. He had, Mendolin had noticed, grown strange little strips of beard since she'd last seen him: two very thick, elevated red muttonchops which grew high on each cheek, and a thin, brown tube which started just under his bottom lip and dropped from view at the bottom of his face, where his chin did.
It had taken him at least fifteen minutes to introduce the Hope. The Hope had leaned back in his chair at the speakers' table, eyeing the good-looking females in the audience, staring past the bearded ones, winking at newcomers, saluting the delegation from the mosque when it arrived, and shooting the cuffs on his sparkling grey-silver suit. McKellan had prefaced the Hope's contribution by telling the audience that massive recruitment on the left should have happened, but hadn’t, but would now, now that the masses were finally in a position to abandon their jobs, houses and comfortable lives to join the revolution and till the fields and follow a guy who drove a very expensive car, and that the main point to remember was that the Prime Minister was a liar and a sell-out and that he needed to be replaced by... well, we'd get to that, but for now...
That had been enough for Mendolin. She'd wanted to break the meeting up by jumping to her feet and putting her fury about women and abortion and all of life to the Hope, but she knew that she stood an excellent chance of finding herself publicly dismissed as a menopausal crank and she wanted to put that off for as long as she could, now that she was thirty-five, so she had leaned back in her chair with Chalaz's feet in her lap and had seethed and seen red and believed she heard nothing except boasts and empty rhetoric, and it had been somewhere around here, as ever, that she had begun to fantasise about herself as the movement's divine leader. She had seen herself as Mandela, but female and lovely and thin.
She had imagined great weather and herself on a lectern and she'd heard hundreds of genre-setting one-liners pour from her pretty mouth.
The crowds that had come to see her fantasy-self were huge, too, and they grew even as she'd watched. There were extended and re-uniting families, journalists, good and bad teenagers and millions and millions of well-to-do people who were wearing suits, but who were also handing out cash and trade secrets and hugging the homeless. To start with, the crowds had appeared at Mendolin's local town hall, but she had upgraded this to Trafalgar Square after a few minutes.
'Here's what I want you to do!' Mendolin had shouted at the crowds in her mind's eye.
'Okay!' the people had roared. 'Yay.'
Mendolin had lifted a finger. The crowd had shut up and stared at the finger. 'The next time you get a payment demand from your credit card company...' Mendolin had yelled, 'don’t pay it!'
'Okay!' the crowd shouted back. Mendolin had wondered if a longer, explanatory, speech was in order, but the crowd seemed to be on a wavelength and anyway, she couldn't make herself heard over the imaginary applause. She knew that the crowd got the drift. Civil disobedience – that was the idea. It would certainly excite more people for the longer term than the Hope and his new Audi.
'That organiser is some kind of prototype for a millennium moron, isn't he?' Mendolin had asked Chalaz. 'This is some kind of experiment, isn't it? They're trying to lower the bar. I'm also very confused. Sometimes, when I'm presented with that tool, I could swear that I'm watching Tim making a comeback.'
'Shut UP, Mendolin,' Tim had spat. He'd been dangerously close to the back of her neck by then: his breath had started to come with such violence that it had begun to part her hair. Mendolin had narrowed her eyes.
'That's it,' she'd told Chalaz, furious. 'That’s it. I refuse to spend another second of my life with that pig in it.' She'd picked up her bag and her coat and pushed Chalaz's feet off her lap.
'Oh, come on, Mendolin,' Chalaz had pleaded. He’d raised his eyebrows and put his good hand out to hold hers. 'We have to work together. We need you. There's just not enough of us. Can’t you let it go? Why can’t you let it go? You have to work with him.'
'Actually, I don't,' Mendolin had said. 'I don't remember reading that anywhere. I don't have to work with anyone if I don't want to. I don't need that halfwit and you're lost if you think you do.' She'd stamped out of the room then, and loudly. The Hope had been forced to raise his voice as he'd launched into his opening lines.
'Hello, people,' the Hope had begun.
'Piss off,' Mendolin had said.
Mendolin returned to her vision of herself at Trafalgar Square, and remained completely lost in it as she'd made her way through the ticket-gate and down the wet, wooden stairs to the train platform. The vision dried up as soon as she arrived on the platform, though. People on platforms and trains distracted her: she found madness enthralling in proximity.
She wasn't able to develop her crowd scenes without music, anyway, and she couldn't use her player and headphones at the moment, because her headphones and phone-charger had tied themselves together in an impossible, embarrassing knot at the bottom of her bag. She'd tried to untie the knot on the train on her way in, and had realised somewhere along the line that her big green comb had been sticking out of her bag with long hairs hanging from it. It had been there for everybody to look at, which was exactly what everybody had been doing. She stood on the platform and rocked on her heels and practised balancing on the yellow line on the platform as she waited for the train.
Then suddenly, a tiny, sweaty pair of hands settled on Mendolin's forearm. She was horribly frightened and instantly tried to flick the hands away. She looked down quickly, and then up, and saw that the hands belonged to Flynn. She couldn't get her mind around this for a minute or two. She hadn't heard or seen him, or anyone else on the platform, for that matter. It was almost as though he'd stepped out of her bag.
His eyes and nose were streaming: he must have run all the way to the station in her wake. His hair and arms were wet with sweat and his leather shoes had lost their shine and their shape to some extent, because they'd absorbed so much water. It seemed that he'd landed in a few of the potholes. Mendolin stared at him, wide-eyed, while he kept hold of her arm. The touching began to worry her. Tim was likely to gallop around the corner at any minute, and with the police: on this occasion, there would be no reason for him to contain his hysteria and he wasn't exactly the type to look for one. Mendolin tried to think. She couldn't understand, suddenly, how Flynn managed to escape from his father, or how he'd managed to get this far after breaking away. Perhaps he'd made an excuse about going to the toilet. Perhaps he'd said that he wanted to go to the top table by himself and meet the MP and the district organiser. That may have been enough to impress Tim. Perhaps he'd simply cut and run.
Mendolin looked down at him and began to talk quickly, but Flynn shut her up. He dug his small fingers into her arm and shook it. Mendolin raised her eyebrows, and put her hand on his. He stared up at Mendolin, and then he opened his mouth. Mendolin winced a little as the twisted, adult teeth and blood-red gums came into view. The teeth really did look as though they'd been turned slowly in the flesh: the gums were uneven and warped at the base of the front teeth, as though they'd been bruised. The boy gulped loudly: he still had his mouth open and he was trying to swallow. 'Hello, Mummy,' he whispered finally. 'Help,' the bloody mouth said.
Copyright Hangbitch 2005