Looking for Jake: Stories Page 16

It was getting more bolshy. It was turning into a tinsel riot.

  Oxford Street was jammed; I was in the middle of what was suddenly thousands of protestors. It took me anxious ages to make headway through the demonstration. What had seemed an anonymous mob suddenly sprang into variety and colour. Everyone was marching. I was passing different contingents.

  Where the hell had all these banners come from? Slogans bobbed overhead like flotsam. FOR PEACE, SOCIALISM AND CHRISTMAS; HANDS OFF OUR HOLIDAY SEASON!; PRIVATISE THIS. One placard was everywhere. It was very simple and sparse: the letters TM in a red circle, with a line through them.

  She’ll be ok, I thought urgently. She said as much. I was looking around as I made my way toward the party, only a few streets away now. I was taking in the demo.

  These people were crazy! It wasn’t that I didn’t think their hearts were in the right places, but this was no way to achieve things. All they were going to do was bring down trouble on everyone. The cops would get here any moment.

  Still, I had to admire their creativity. With all the costumes and colours, it looked amazing. I have no idea how they’d smuggled this stuff through the streets, how they’d organised this. It must have been online, which means some pretty sophisticated encryption to fool the copware. Each different section of the march seemed to be chanting something different, or singing songs I hadn’t heard for years. I was walking through a winter wonderland.

  I went by a contingent of Christians all carrying crosses, singing carols. Right in front of them was a group of badly dressed people selling copies of a left-wing newspaper and carrying placards with a photograph of Marx. They’d superimposed a Santa hat on him. “I’m dreaming of a red Christmas,” they sang, not very well.

  We were beside Selfridges now, and a knot of people had stopped by the windows full of the usual mix of perfume and shoes. The demonstrators were looking at each other, and back at the glass. Over on a side street, a few passersby were staring at the extraordinary spectacle. It brought me up short to see “regular” shoppers—it felt as if there was no one but the marchers on the streets.

  I knew what the Selfridges-watchers were thinking: they were remembering (or remembering being told—some of them looked too young to recall life before the Christmas™ Act) an old tradition.

  “If they won’t give us our Christmas windows,” one woman roared, “we’ll have to provide them ourselves.” And with that, they pulled out hammers. Oh God. They took out the glass.

  “No!” I heard a man in a smart wool coat shouting at them. A contingent of the demo was looking horrified, laying down its banners, which read LABOUR FRIENDS OF CHRISTMAS. “We all want the same thing here,” the man shouted, “but we can’t support violence!”

  But no one was paying him any attention. I waited for people to steal the goods, but they just shoved them out of the way along with the broken glass. They were putting things into the windows. From bags and pockets they were taking little crèches, papier-maché Santas™, gaudily wrapped presents, Holly™, and Mistletoe™ and they were scattering them, making crude displays.

  I moved on. A man stepped into my path. He was part of a group of sharp-dressed types at the edges of the crowd. He sneered and gave me a leaflet.

  INSTITUTE OF LIVING MARXIST IDEAS.

  Why We Are Not Marching.

  We view with disdain the pathetic attempts of the old Left to revive this Christian ceremony. The notion that the government has “stolen” “our” Christmas is just part of the prevailing Fear Culture that we reject. It is time for a reevaluation beyond left and right, and for dynamic forces to reinvigorate society. Only last month, we at the ILMI organised a conference at the ICA on why strikes are boring and hunting is the new black . . .

  I really couldn’t make head or tail of it. I threw it away.

  There was the thudding of a chopper. Oh shit, I thought. They’re here.

  “Attention,” came the amplified voice from the sky. “You are in breach of section 4 of the Christmas™ Code. Disperse immediately or you will be arrested.”

  To my astonishment this was met with a raucous jeer. A chant started. At first I couldn’t make out the words, but soon there was no mistaking them.

  “Whose Christmas? Our Christmas! Whose Christmas? Our Christmas!”

  It didn’t scan very well.

  I passed a group I recognised from the news, radical feminist Christmasarians dressed in white, wearing carrots on their noses: the sNOwMEN. A little guy ran past me, glancing around, muttering, “Too tall, too tall.” He started to shout: “Anyone 5 foot 2 or under come smash some shit up with the Santa’s Little Helpers!” Another shorter man started furiously remonstrating with him. I heard the words “joke” and “patronising.”

  People were eating Christmas™ pudding, slices of turkey. They were even forcing down brussels sprouts, just on principle. Someone gave me a mince pie. “Blessed be,” yelled a radical pagan in my ear, and gave me a leaflet demanding that once we had won back the season, we rename it Solsticemas. He was buffeted away by a group of muscular ballet dancers dressed as sugar-plum fairies and nutcrackers.

  I was getting close to the venue where the party was supposed to be, but if anything there were even more people on the streets now. The place was going to be surrounded. How would we get in?

  Figures were moving in on the crowd. Oh shit, I thought, the police. But it wasn’t. It was an angry-looking, aggressive bunch, smashing car windscreens as they came. They were dressed as Santa Claus™.

  “Fuck,” muttered someone. “It’s the Red-and-White Bloc.”

  It was obvious that the R&Ws were out for trouble. Everyone else in the crowd tried to draw away from them. “Piss off!” I heard someone shouting, but they paid no attention.

  Now I could see cops, massing in the side streets. The Red-and-White Bloc were drawing them out, chucking bottles, screaming, “Come on then!” like pissed-up Football™ fans.

  I was backing away. I turned, and there it was: the site for the party. Hamleys, the toy store. The armed guards who normally protected it must have run ages ago, faced with this chaos. I looked up and saw horrified faces at the windows.

  I should be up there, I thought. With you. They were the partygoers. Kids and their parents, besieged by the demonstration, watching the police approach.

  And oh, there was Annie, shouting to me, standing under Hamleys’ eaves. I wailed with relief and ran to her.

  “What’s going on?” she shouted. She looked terrified. The Yule Squads were approaching the provocateurs of the Red-and-White Bloc, banging their truncheons in time on tinsel-garlanded shields.

  “Bloody hell,” I whispered. I put my arms protectively around her. “There’s going to be trouble,” I said. “Get ready to run.”

  But as we stood there, tensing, something astonishing happened. I blinked, and out of nowhere had come a young man in a long white robe. Before anyone could stop him he was between the ranks of the Red-and-White Bloc and the police.

  “He’s mad!” someone shouted, but all the hundreds and hundreds of people were beginning to hush.

  The man was singing.

  The police bore down on him, the R&Ws made as if to shove him away, but his voice soared, and both sides hesitated. I had never seen anything so beautiful.

  He sang a single note, of unearthly purity. He made it last, for long seconds, and then continued.

  “Oh little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie.”

  He paused, until we were straining.

  “Above thy deep and dreamless sleep, the silent stars go by.”

  The R&W Bloc were still. Everyone was still.

  “Yet in thy dark streets shineth, the everlasting light . . .”

  And now the police were stopping. They were putting their truncheons down. One by one they set aside their shields.

  “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.”

  More white-clad figures were appearing. They walked calmly to join thei
r friend. With a start, I realised I was shielding my eyes. There was an implacable authority to these astonishing figures who had come from nowhere, these tall, stunning, uncanny young men. The white of their robes seemed impossibly bright. I could not breathe.

  Now all of them were singing. “How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is giv’n. So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of His Heav’n.”

  One by one, the police removed their helmets and listened. I could hear the frantic squawking of their superiors from the earpieces they removed.

  “No ear may hear His coming, but in this world of sin . . .” The singers paused, until I ached to have the melody conclude. “Where meek souls will receive Him still, the dear Christ enters in.”

  The police were smiling and tearful amid a litter of body armour and nightsticks. The first singer raised his hand. He looked down at all the discarded weaponry. He declaimed to the Red-and-White Bloc.

  “You should not have tried to fight,” he said, and they looked ashamed. He waited.

  “You would have been trounced. Whereas now,” he continued, “these idiots have disarmed. Now’s the time to fight.” And he swivelled, and en masse, he and his fellow singers launched themselves at the police, their robes flapping.

  The helpless cops gaped, turned, ran, and the crowd roared, and began to follow them.

  “We are the Gay Men’s Radical Singing Caucus!” the lead singer yelled in his exquisite tenor. “Proud to be fighting for a People’s Christmas!”

  He and his comrades began to chant: “We’re here! We’re Choir! Get used to it!”

  “It’s a Christmas miracle!” said Annie. I just hugged her until she muttered, “Alright Dad, easy.”

  Behind me the crowd were shouting, taking over the streets.

  “That’s the trouble with the Red-and-White Bloc,” muttered Annie. “Bloody ‘strategy of tension’ my arse. Bunch of anarchist adventurists.”

  “Yeah,” said a boy next to her. “Anyway, half of them are police agents. It’s the first principle, isn’t it? Whoever’s arguing fiercest for violence is the cop.”

  I was gaping, my head swinging between the two of them as if I were a moron watching tennis.

  “What . . . ?” I said finally.

  “Come on, Dad,” said Annie. She kissed me on the cheek. “You’d never have let me go otherwise. I had to get you to walk here or we’d have been too early. Trapped like them.” She pointed at the still-staring prizewinners in Hamleys’ top floors. “And then I had to run off or you’d never have let me join in. Come on.” She took my hand. “Now that we’ve bust through the police lines, we can reroute the march past Downing Street.”

  “Well then it’s the perfect opportunity to get out of here . . .”

  “Dad,” she said. She looked at me sternly. “I couldn’t believe it when you won that prize. I never thought I’d have a chance to be down this way today.”

  “Someone grabbed you,” I said.

  “That was Marwan.” She indicated the young man who had spoken. “Dad, this is Marwan. Marwan, this is my dad.”

  Marwan smiled and shook my hand politely, shifting his placard. MUSLIMS FOR CHRISTMAS, it said. He saw me reading it.

  “It’s not that much of a big deal for me,” he said, “but we all remember how this lot came out for us when Umma Plc tried to privatise Eid. That meant a lot, you know. Anyway . . .” He looked away shyly. “I know it’s important to Annie.” She gazed at him. Ah, I thought.

  “Marwan’s handfulofflowers, Dad,” she was saying to me. “Off the internet.”

  “Look, I have to tell you I’m pretty annoyed about all this,” I said. We were getting close to Downing Street now. Marwan had said good-bye at Trafalgar Square, so it was just the two of us again, along with ten thousand others. “I bought you, I, I’ve lost a lot of, there’s a big present in that party . . .”

  “To be honest with you, Dad, I don’t really need a new console.”

  “How did you know . . .?” I said, but she was continuing.

  “The one I’ve got is fine: I mostly use it for strategy games anyway, and they’re not so power-hungry. Besides, I’ve got all the pinkopatches in my machine. It would be a pain in the arse to transfer them, and downloading them again is too risky.”

  “What patches?”

  “Stuff like Red3.6. It converts a bunch of games. Turns SimuCityState into RedOctober. Stuff like that. I’m already up to level 4. The end-of-level baddy’s a Czar. As soon as I can work out how to get past him I’ll have got to Dual Power.”

  I gave up even trying to follow.

  At the entrance to the Prime Minister’s residence was a huge Christmas Tree™, in white and silver. Everyone began to jeer as we approached. The army were guarding it, so people made sure the booing was good-humoured. Someone threw Christmas Pudding™, but everyone sorted him out sharpish.

  “That’s not what Christmas looks like,” we all shouted as we went past. “This is what Christmas looks like.”

  As the skies darkened, the crowd were beginning to thin a bit, before the police could regroup. We went through a contingent all in red bandanas, and joined in with their singing. “Deck the halls with boughs of holly, tra la la la laaa, la la la la. ’Tis the Season for the Internationale, tra la la la laaaa . . .”

  “Still,” I said. “I’m a bit sorry you didn’t get to see the party.”

  “Dad,” said Annie, and shook me. “This was the best Christmas ever. Ever. OK? And it was so lovely to have it with you.”

  She looked at me sideways.

  “Have you guessed yet?” she said. “What your present is?”

  She was staring at me, very seriously, very intensely. It made me quite emotional.

  I thought of everything that had happened that day, and of my reactions. Everything I’d been through and seen—been a part of. I realised how different I felt now than I had that morning. It was an astonishing revelation.

  “Yes . . .” I said, hesitantly. “Yes, I think I have. Thank you, my love.”

  “What?” she said. “You’ve guessed? Shit.”

  She was holding out a little wrapped package. It was a tie.

  JACK

  Now that things have gone the way they have, everyone’s got a story. Everyone’ll tell you how they or their friend, which you can see in the way they say it they want you to think means them, knew Jack. Maybe even how they helped him, how they were part of his schemes. Mostly though of course they know that’s too much and it’ll just be how they or their friend was there one time and saw him running over the roofs, money flying from his swag-bags, militia trying and failing to track him down below. That sort of thing. My mate saw Jack Half-a-Prayer once, they’ll say, just for a moment. As if they’re being modest.

  It’s supposed to be respect. They reckon they’re showing their respect, with everything that’s happened. They ain’t, of course. They’re like dogs on his corpse and they disgust me.

  I tell you that so you know where I’m coming from. Because I know how what I’m about to say might sound. I want you to know where I’m coming from when I tell you that I did know Jack. I did.

  I worked with him.

  I was lowly, don’t get me wrong, but I was part of the whole thing. And please don’t think I’m talking myself up, but I swear to you I ain’t being arrogant. I’m nothing important, but the work I did, in a little way, was crucial to him. That’s all I’m saying. So. So you can understand that I was pretty interested when I heard we’d got our hands on the man who sold Jack out. That would be one way of putting it. That would be mild. I made it my business to meet him, let’s put it that way.

  I remember the first time I heard what Jack was up to, after he escaped. He was daring enough that he got noticed. Did you hear about that Remade done that robbery? someone said to me in a pub. I was careful, couldn’t show any reaction.

  I’d felt something when I met Jack, you know? I respected him. He wasn’t boastful, but he had a fire in him.
Even so, I couldn’t be sure he’d come to anything.

  That first job, he got away with hundreds of nobles and gave it away on the streets. He scored himself the love of the Dog Fenn poor that way. That was what had people all excited, told them he was something else than your average gangster. He weren’t the first to do that, but he was one of few.

  What got me wasn’t so much what he did with the money as where he stole it from. It was a government office. Where they store taxes.

  Everyone knows what the security on those places is like. And I knew that there was no way he’d have done something like that without it being a screw you. He was making a point, and my good bloody gods but I admired that.

  It was then, in that pub, when I realised what he’d done, how he must have made that night-raid work, how he must have climbed and crept and fought his way in, with his new body, how he must have been able to vanish, weighed down with specie, that I realised he was something. That was when I knew that Jack Half-a-Prayer was no ordinary Remade, and no ordinary renegade.

  Not many people see the Remade like I do, or like Jack did.

  You know it’s true. To most of you they’re to be ignored or used. If you really notice them you wish you hadn’t. It wasn’t like that for Jack, and not just because he was Remade. I bet—I know—that Jack used to notice them, see them clear, before anything was done to him. And that’s the same for me.

  People walk along and see nothing but trash, Remade trash with bodies all wrong, shat out by the punishment factories. Well, I don’t want to be too sentimental about it but I’ve no doubts at all that Jack’d have seen this woman—whose hands yes were gone and been replaced with little birds’ wings—and he’d have seen an old man, not the sexless thing he’d been made into, and a young lad with eyes gone and in their place an array of dark glass and pipework and lights and the boy stumbling trying to see in ways he weren’t born to but still a boy. Jack’d see people changed with engines in steam, and oily gears, and the parts of animals, and their innards or their skin altered with hexes, and all those things, but he’d have seen them under the punishment.