It begins in Lewes, naturally.
Not in a church hall exactly. In the Meeting House. Friars walk the mean streets.
The Boy sits beside his mother on a hard wooden chair beneath the pale windows. The room is full of people making very little noise.
Cool Hand Luke appears. As he does.
I don’t care if it rains or freezes. Long as I got my plastic Jesus…
In the Boy’s mind the song is on loop, his imaginary future earbuds already plugged in.
The Boy is seven. 1975 again. Somebody is discussing Chile. CND. There is a long, grave disagreement about whether the Americans are worse than Mrs Thatcher.
“Can we go?” the Boy whispers.
“No,” says his mother.
“When?”
“When the meeting ends.”
“When’s that?”
She looks at the clock.
“Soon.”
This is a lie.
The meeting, like socialism, appears to have no clear mechanism for ending.
On the wall above the table hangs the old clock from his grandmother’s house. Three mice run around the face.
They chase one another endlessly beneath the hands, which move slowly and with immense dignity toward some future always discussed and never reached.
The Boy watches the mice because they are the only things in the room that appear to be alive.
One mouse chases another. Round and round.
The Man, who is not yet the Man but is already on his way, looks up at the clock and feels, for reasons he cannot explain, briefly powerless.
The Editor, naturally, loves the clock.
“Excellent image,” he says. “Circular time. Repetition. The loop. Keep the mice.”
“I’m just bored waiting,” says the Boy.
The Editor writes this down.
This is Lewes socialism. Dark, chilly, Protestant. A socialism of raincoats and pamphlets and saying ‘one simply doesn’t’. No joy. No banners, no brass bands, no shouting, no dancing, no men called Dai singing revolutionary songs in pubs.
Broomfield. His mother’s maiden name is folded invisibly into the room.
The Boy does not yet understand that he is being raised not merely in a politics but in a style of suffering. Pleasure is suspect. Noise is frowned upon.
The food is awful. Afterwards there is always food. Brown bread. Raisins. An apple. Tea so weak it is not really tea.
Judith has made a lentil bake.
The lentil bake tastes exactly like what the Editor imagines an East German prison might serve.
“Eat it,” says his mother.
“I hate it.”
“That’s the point.”
A retired teacher in a duffel coat says that nobody reads William Morris any more. A man called Peter says the trouble with the Labour Party is that it has lost its moral seriousness.
Everyone nods.
Nobody knows exactly what this means, but they all know it is true.
The Boy, despite himself, loves them. Not because they are fun. They have made a positive moral choice not to be. But because they are good. Or seem good.
They are the sort of people who would hide Jews in the attic. The sort of people who write letters to Amnesty International and buy sandals. With socks. The sort of people who think people called Rupert probably shouldn’t be trusted.
“When I grow up,” thinks the Boy, looking at the mice running round the clock, “I will be one of these people.”
On a bus to the Meeting House in Brighton the road sign says “Brighton welcomes careful drivers.” Underneath someone has daubed ‘Sex Pistols, Anarchy in the UK.’ It is by now 1976 and the rumblings of discontent, summers and winters alike, are rumbling. There is a white man somewhere in a place called Hammersmith Palais. Joe Strummer is still working on a building site. His daddy is yet to become a bank robber. But the seeds are sown. The Boy wonders what sex is, and how pistols have anything to do with it.
His mother talks about sex – her own sex life mainly – with a freedom the two boys find both interesting and deeply worrying.
One day, his mother literally washes his brother’s mouth out with soap. He has blasphemed. “Cor blimey,” he has said. God blind me. If only, the Boy thinks. The inner life is more interesting than this.
The three mice are still running. Only now the clock has moved to Warsaw.
One of the men speaking has a LinkedIn profile.
Neil is, among other things, a historian.
Or so it says on his profile.
He also, apparently, tells stories about love.
Lacan stares at the screen for a very long time. Then he says, in a tone of genuine philosophical injury, “Jesus. What in fuck’s name is that supposed to mean?”
There is a silence. Somewhere in a land not so far away a Quaker quakes.
Even the Boy looks shocked. Jacques has never previously used language stronger than “bourgeois.”
The Man stares into the middle distance.
“Jacques does, actually, have a point,” he says quietly.
Neil loves Poland in the way certain Englishmen love Poland: not as a country exactly, but as a flattering mirror held up to their own face.
Poland confirms everything he already believes. Dynamic. Entrepreneurial. Anti-communist. Full of sensible people who, unlike the British, do not spend all day talking about guilt, colonialism, pronouns or the miners.
He walks around Warsaw like a man inspecting a start-up he believes he personally founded.
“You can really feel the energy here,” he says.
He says this while standing outside a café where a woman in her fifties is carrying trays for twelve hours a day on a three-day contract.
Neil speaks of ‘the Left’ with the confidence of a man who has never knowingly encountered it. For Neil there are only two categories in history: communists and sensible people. Jaruzelski, Razem, Leon Trotsky, Jeremy Corbyn, the women from the abortion protests and the cashier in Żabka who looked faintly bored one Tuesday afternoon all blur into one large smear somewhere to the left of Margaret Thatcher.
Neil has read books, has opinions. Neil can say post-communist mentality and civil society in the same sentence while chewing gum. But none of it connects to anything.
The world, the Man thinks, increasingly belongs to people like Neil: smiling, managerial, speaking a language that has swallowed politics whole. A language in which solidarity becomes networking, conviction becomes branding and history becomes content.
The Man knows this because he has begun, despite himself, to speak it too.
He knows how to write the email. How to describe himself as a storyteller, a connector, a journalist with a strong track record of cross-border content and stakeholder engagement.
He knows the voice.
He has used it.
Sometimes because he wanted the money. There are children. The house.
Neil earns. Neil does not sit by the lake wondering whether the language of power has entered his soul. He tells himself he deserves it.
The Man hates him a little for this.
And envies him more.
“That’s the worst bit,” says the Boy. “He isn’t even ashamed.”
“No,” says Lacan. “Why would he be? Shame requires an outside. Neil has swallowed his outside.”
The Boy laughs.
Then stops.
Because he suddenly understands that this is not really about Neil.
“This is about us, isn’t it?”
“No,” says the Man automatically.
“Yes,” says Lacan.
Something older, nobler and therefore harder to surrender.
The Left. Or something like it. Not always as doctrine. Sometimes as atmosphere, moral furniture, the conviction that beneath the chaos of things there existed a structure which, if seen correctly, restores order.
This was not false, but it had begun to function as protection.
“We were good,” says the Boy.
The Man nods.
“Yes.”
He wants to defend it. History. Class. Decency. Not selling out. Not becoming Neil. But the defence is porous.
“We weren’t rich,” he says.
“No one said you were,” says Shankly. “But you weren’t exactly poor, were you?”
Allardyce appears with a beer glass full of wine.
“If we are not that,” he says quietly, “then what are we?”
Nobody answers immediately.
Because that is the real question.
What remains when the atmosphere in which you were formed begins to thin? When being one of the good people stops feeling like a position and begins to feel like nostalgia?
“What am I supposed to believe in then?” the Man asks.
Outside, somewhere in Warsaw, a courier is still cycling through the rain with somebody else’s lunch strapped to his back, while Neil is explaining to a room full of people called Tomasz and Claire that what really excites him about Poland is the energy.
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