Movement (11 page)

Too hot to read. Too hot to write. Too hot to eat. Not that she had much. Fifty dollars to the border and a plane ticket from there. A box of Arrowroot cookies, a can of Spam, a loaf of bread she bought yesterday in Guatemala City. The cookies were all she had last night. Still, she couldn't bear to open the can of carnal imitation. Maybe she would chew on the bread. Maybe that would wake her from this goddamned stupor.

The Indian woman in the next seat watched closely, more fascinated by the khaki youth hostel backpack than by its contents. The woman was from Nabaj. You could tell by the
huipuil.
What was she doing this far north? After six months, you get used to observing and being observed.

The bread was moldy. Green pimples. Since yesterday? Had they cheated her? Did they know it was rotten? Gringa sucker. How could she get mad at them? She had fifty dollars to get to the border. Fifty dollars was gold to them. Cortez stole the gold from Montezuma. She closed her eyes. She would be home soon. Whatever that meant. And now they were pulling into La Puerta. There was bound to be at least some warm Coke at La Puerta.

She took only her wallet and the bag of bread with her when she got off the bus. Once she bought the Coke, she chugged it greedily, and walked toward a fence where she could dump the loaf of bread. As she moved the bread over the edge of the fence, she felt a tug, pulling back her hand. The woman from Nabaj. She looked at the Indian woman silently and released the bag. The woman, whose face shone with determined indifference, put the bread under her
huipuil
and returned to the bus. It was 4:15, July 20, six months on the road.

VII

Cooperative

Susan had a terrible time finding the cooperative. They told her to look for the broken-down factory on Hemingford Road, but she cycled by the New You Bra Company three times before recognizing the building. As Susan chained her bicycle to the wrought iron gate, a sari floated past her. Odd to think of herself and this Indian woman both as immigrants. They had moved to such different Englands.

Inside, the building was colder than outside, drafty. A heavy metal door resisted the latch. Wind lashed down through broken windows. Susan stepped around the clutter of old furniture on the first landing. The corridor was littered with cardboard boxes, rusting dollies, a dress rack with Santa Claus costumes. She recognized this as the conscious neglect with which people design their “alternative spaces.” She almost missed the green sign, “Cooperative Press.” Drafty even up here. Securing the peacoat with its only remaining brass button, she commended herself for appropriate dress.

The corridor turned into an open door—rather into an open wall. Three people sat clustered at one end of the long factory room, around a small electric fire. They were two pale women and a thin, blond man.

The man looked up, waved with great angularity, strode over to her and in a bright Australian accent, declared, “Hello, you must be Susan.”

Susan, who was staring at the women huddled over their work, nodded.

“You're the girl Alexander sent, right?” He reached behind himself for the ringing telephone. “Hang on a minute. Hello, Gordon Moore speaking.”

The cold red concrete floor was scattered with throw rugs in a desperate claim on warmth. And books. Parcels of books. Great 100 volume cases. The mailing table was piled with small packages. Galleys were draped over a sawhorse. Manuscripts, mostly unopened, spewed over a cluttered desk. Susan's Copperfield fantasies were interrupted by the bright posters: Madame Binh, Ché, Malcolm X, Leila Kahled, Chairman Mao and a blazing Soviet headline dated 1917. Shivering, she wished she had sewn on the other buttons, wished they owned more than one electric fire. The only warmth was an electric breathing from the New You Bra Company upstairs, a loud machine hum sewing through the ceiling. She wondered why the Indian woman had left so early. Had she been fired?

“Hey, Ghilly, Lynda. This is Susan, the journalist Alexander sent to solve all our problems.”

Ghilly glanced up from her ledger and smiled. Lynda regarded Ghilly closely and said, “Welcome, we could use a Joan of Arc.” Her voice was broad Yorkshire.

“Here, here.” Gordon said. “Won't you have a cup of coffee? And let me show you around.”

Reassured by scraps of paper on the floor, Susan thought of the frantic, busy, good days when she worked at
The Artisan.

“That's the darkroom.” he said. “Well, today it's the loo, but tomorrow with a little imagination, it's the darkroom.” He plugged in the kettle.

Susan turned to laughter coming from the entrance. From a tall, red-haired woman and a friendly couple with a baby.

“Wina, Malcolm, Rita,” Gordon shouted down the long room. “What's this? On time for a meeting? And just in time. I've plugged in the kettle and Susan had arrived to save us.”

Susan sat in a corner of the couch sipping Sainsbury's instant coffee and watching them greet each other. Hugs, jokes, gossip. Running out to the shop for more long-life milk; moving the fire; boarding up a hole in the window.

“Rocks,” sighed Gordon. “Damn kids. Come the revolution, they'll understand we're on their side.”

Everyone laughed. They were friendly.

“Can you type?” Lynda asked.

“A little,” Susan answered, trying to hide her disappointment and look cooperative.

“We all share the shitwork around here,” Gordon explained.

“And the glory,” laughed Malcolm.

“Ah, yes, the glory,” sighed Wina.

Gordon cleared his throat. “Let's get down to business. How's the anarchist book, Wina?”

“Super,” said Wina, her rich Dutch accent surfacing even in one word. “Just got ten more pages. Jan's lawyers smuggled them out. Not having so much luck with the women's stuff. Apparently security on them is tighter. I think if we could just postpone the printing two months, we'd have it.”

Ghilly held her arms across her chest and spoke in a small, tight voice. “But we agreed to keep to timetable. Labor costs are going up in November. To say nothing of paper costs which have skyrocketed in the last year. We all
agreed
to stick to schedule.”

“Come on, now, Ghilly,” Wina leaned toward the smaller woman. “The Dutch government is going to cooperate with us as much as our anarchists cooperate with them. Nobody else would dare take on the politics of the book. We've got to do it, even if we're worried about losing a few quid.”

“We're worried,” said Ghilly sharply, “about losing the Cooperative if this goes on.”

Susan was thinking of the book on Zimbabwe by her friend Alexander. “Too hot for the straight presses,” he had said in an idiom that was 40 years younger than his own. If they were doing Alexander's book, Susan told herself, they were good people, good political people.

“On the bright side,” said Rita, “I sold forty-five
Chile Diaries
to Queen Mary College.”

“And I've rented a storefront on Camden Road for the women's bookshop,” Gordon smiled.

“You what?” asked Ghilly.

“I think it's a fine idea,” said Wina.

“It's now or not at all,” said Gordon confidently. “I had to use a little entrepreneurial spirit.”

“‘Gall,' I'd say ‘gall.'” Ghilly shouted. “We're supposed to discuss that kind of decision. This is a cooperative, Gordon.”

“Relax, love,” he brought over another pot of instant coffee. “The city needs a women's bookshop.”

Susan had first heard about the Cooperative from Alexander, during one of their lunches at Moishe's in Leicester Square. They used to meet there every week before his bout with pneumonia. At the beginning, they talked about Salisbury where she had spent two weeks and where he had lived for thirty years before his exile/escape to London. The intensity of their friendship came from those ineffable characteristics which cause expatriates to choose a common home, arriving at the same cafe from forty years and ten thousand miles apart.

“This Cooperative may be idealistic enough even for you,” Alexander had teased her. “It may be enough to shake you out of this London drear.”

“A situational depression,” her therapist called it. Situation: she had a cold all winter from her freezing basement room. Situation: she had gained twenty pounds on lentils and white bread and not a little beer. Situation: her gas fire leaked. Sometimes she had visions of her grandfather who died of tuberculosis in Edinburgh. Sometimes she had dreams of Sylvia who drowned in gas two miles away in Hampstead. Situation: she didn't have any money. The average free-lancer in London made less than 2500 pounds a year. So she would opt for 15 pounds a week at a cooperative in a drafty warehouse? “Temporary insanity,” her friend Carol would call it.

How like Alexander to worry about her. To forget about his pneumonia and loneliness to tend to her sad face.

“Just what you wanted,” Alexander had said. “Good politics. Good writing. I've reviewed one of their non-racist, nonsexist texts. They edit, publish and distribute themselves. You could write that book …” he interrupted himself. “The only problem.…”

“Is that there's no money,” she said.

“How did you guess?”

But he explained that it would give her a base. And he was right, she needed to spend more time with people serious about publishing. Free-lance journalism was like a cottage industry. Susan fancied herself an old woman knitting all day in a Caithness croft and sending her wares to London. She hated the isolation. Deadlines and checks were her only link with the real world. The checks were infrequent and late. She would stand in the darkroom for hours, staring at the red light in passive resistance. If she finished this assignment, there would only be another. This was definitely not the London she had imagined. Maybe she would find it at the Cooperative.

“How can a man run a women's bookshop?” Lynda was asking.

“I wouldn't run it, exactly,” said Gordon defensively. “I just found us the space.”

“And rented it already,” reminded Ghilly.

Susan had hoped they would ask her some questions, tell her a little about what they wanted her to do, but it was getting late and Rita had to take the baby home for his nap. She would ask what happened to Alexander's book at the next meeting.

The following morning Susan found Lynda alone typing labels and she joined in. Eight-thirty, “American Time” to start work. She could never get used to starting at ten o'clock the way they did here. Half the day seemed gone by then. Her British friends found such diligent Americanism to be quaint, rather schoolgirlish. She found their two hour lunches on Fleet Street romantically decadent at first and then plain boring.

When Ghilly and Gordon arrived, they seemed relieved to see Susan.

“Hey, man, good to see you,” said Gordon. “Typing labels? Into the hard stuff already? Hey listen, we'll get that darkroom set up today or tomorrow.”

Ghilly set in to washing yesterday's coffee cups. “Gordon,” she said. “Look at the time, love.”

“Right,” he said. “Catch you later. I've got to get down to the Whitehall Gallery. They're interested in Malcolm's prints.”

Lynda looked up from her labels. “Why didn't you bring that up at the meeting yesterday?”

“I thought everybody knew,” Gordon said briskly. “Look, I'll give you the details soon as I return. Can anybody take care of unpacking those IRA books while I'm downtown?”

Ghilly told Susan that she and Gordon had been editing until 11:00 p.m. the previous night. She was worried about Gordon's ulcer. No matter how much they all shared the work, no matter how many workers they took on, Gordon was frenetic. Some people had problems with inertia. Gordon suffered from centrifugal force.

Susan liked Ghilly. One of those
very sensible
English-women. Oxbridge without the tailored drawl and dress. Her modesty came from integrity rather than inhibition. Ghilly was absolutely the sort you would expect to wind up with an unschooled political refugee from Brisbane. She had no doubts about her right to change the world.

“I'll stack the books,” said Lynda.

That left Susan the rest of the labels. She didn't mind the tedium; she was just glad to have something of her own to do.

The rape book arrived that week. A month late, so they skipped their meeting. No time for lunch or even coffee as they hustled books off to the shops. Susan piled a dozen copies in her basket and cycled down to the Women's Liberation Workshop in Soho. Such a crisp May day. The black taxis gleamed like beetles after a rain. While she waited for the light to change at Tavistock Square, Susan watched a Japanese couple in matching Fairisle sweaters rushing off to pay tribute at the statue of Ghandi. The woman carried a huge Selfridge's bag. Coasting through the traffic, not one bus farted in her face. Susan felt something she hadn't felt in months—that she was in London, not in some dreary, damp, tense shadow of a city, but that she was in London and there were reasons to be here.

At the Coop meeting that Friday, which was kept short because they still had 300 rape books to deliver, Susan asked when they were scheduling Alexander Norton's book.

Everyone except Gordon looked blank.

“The Zimbabwe poet?” asked Rita. “But he's under contract to Longman's.”

“They don't want the new book,” Susan explained. “They say he's lost his edge.”

“More likely his edge is too sharp for their liberal politics,” said Gordon. “I told him we would probably do the book.”

“But,” Susan stumbled. “He thinks it's definite.”

“He's in his seventies,” said Rita blankly, “and not very well, I understand.”

“Of course, let's see the book,” said Ghilly.

They liked Susan's suggestions for illustrating the Dutch anarchist material. And although Ghilly was apprehensive about costs, they told Susan to start shooting next week.