My Little Armalite (16 page)

I drove onwards, stunned, now merely trying to avoid a crash, but my cheeks and stomach grew cold with the knowledge that I had set out, with an assault rifle under my passenger seat, into a world whose most basic coordinates were completely unknown to me.

The last time I had been out anywhere near this time of night in London had been on my twenty-seventh birthday. Which was not that long ago, for God's sake! We pub-crawled down Holborn to hit the late-night Fleet Street pubs (which had an
extension
, oh, holy word!), then wandered Smithfield, looking vainly for this amazing pub someone swore he had been to, where we could get a drink
even at 3 a.m.
! We never found it, and had headed back to Soho, where there was allegedly a Greek restaurant that would serve you wine all night if you kept buying food. We did not find that either, and ended up drinking coffee in Bar Italia, with Soho stone-dead around us, before walking back home to that rough, cheap place, Notting Hill.

Was it possible that during the span of my full-blown adult lifetime someone had fundamentally altered the genetic make-up of London's humanity, erasing all biological need for rest? How could people cope with this? Did nobody work any more? Or sleep? For a
hundred thousand years,
Homo sapiens
had, unless excessive heat demanded a siesta or excessive latitude made everything nuts, gone to bed roughly when it got dark and risen roughly when it got light. Night had always been for thieves and troubled minds. I had been pissed many, many nights as a student but could count on one hand the times I had actually stayed up all night. No one stayed up all night. There was nothing to do if you did, and nowhere to do it, and no cheap substances to make it physically possible anyway. You couldn't even watch telly.

But now here everyone was.

I was still trying to adjust to this new reality as I arrived at the final approach to Tower Bridge. From the high Victorian iron walkways, lasers flashed and music blared. There was some kind of bloody night-club up there for God's sake, in full swing, at this time in the morning. On a weekday! And the pavements down here at ground level were thronged with drunken idiots photographing each other with telephones.

A billow of human seaweed suddenly washed out right in front of me: part of a large scrum of pissed gits had overflowed from the pavement and on to the roadway. I had to brake hard. The gun slid forward. I bent sideways in order to reach down, to shove its bagshrouded butt back under the passenger seat. The bloody black plastic had snagged on something. I leaned further, feeling with my hand for what the hell was going on under the seat. I looked down too long, veered the car slightly, scuffed a kerb. Wild-eyed pedestrians shouted and spat. A horn sounded long and hard behind me. Headlights flashed angrily in my mirrors.

I looked hastily up from the gun and found myself staring right into the lens of a CCTV camera mounted high on the ironwork.

I froze. Somewhere a monitor must be showing, and a hard disk must be recording, a pale monochrome image (or did they have colour, these days?) of my amazed face looking up through my windscreen.

Of course, I knew theoretically about CCTV now being everywhere. Indeed,
The Paper
had expressed outrage many times over the last few months, (a) at the fact that Big Brother Britain apparently had more CCTV than anywhere else in the world and (b) that Britons themselves seemed perfectly happy with this state of affairs and, rather than taking to the streets in defence of their liberties, as demanded by the stout burghers of N1 and NW3, usually demanded only to know how come
their
street had not got cameras yet.

So yes, I knew about the cameras all right: I had simply not factored them into my plans. CCTV belonged to the realm of MyFace, SecondLife and YouTube. I knew about things like that, and here and there I might even name-drop them into the odd lecture just to keep up the fiction that I was a relatively young lecturer, but I had no real conception of them, having grown to full adulthood in a world without them. They were not on my working maps of the world. They existed and I knew that they did, but they concerned me no more than online multiplayer gaming.

Except now one of the bloody proto-Fascist things must have just recorded me weaving slightly but definitely as I leaned over to do something under the
passenger seat while driving through a mass of partying drunks on Tower Bridge.

Hastily, I thrust the gun back out of sight, snags and all.

Christ, what kind of country had this become? A place where everyone was under surveillance all day every day (or
24/7
as the idiots would no doubt say now)? Where we were all assumed to be vaguely guilty until proven innocent?

But calm down.

Surely to God, the cameras would not be sharp enough to actually have seen the gun winking out from under the seat? Unless they really could see number plates from orbit. Could they? Could the police really say
enhance, enhance, enhance
and zoom for ever into the picture, the way they do in all spy films these days? Surely not? But what did I know about CCTV technology? Nothing. And now that my eye was in, I could already see the next bloody camera rearing up before me.

Fear gripped me. Not fear of the cameras as such, but fear of my own horrific ignorance, of my insane stupidity. My intelligence about this world was hopelessly out of date. I simply had no chance out here. I had to get back to safety, that was all.

I forced myself to drive slowly and carefully over the bridge. It was OK. The little shimmy had been nothing, really, had it? Surely, even if the CCTV were connected to some actual screen being watched by real live people, my tiny loss of direction would not be thought enough to send out a car to look for me, let alone make it worth checking up on me tomorrow? Of course not. And yet, I had an Armalite under my passenger seat. In central London, where there must be more cameras and cops per inch than anywhere else
in the country. There was no question of dumping the gun here now. Flight and concealment were now paramount.

I U-turned as soon as possible and cruised carefully southwards back across the bridge. Figures flitted and loomed out of the bright-lit darkness, scanning me with reddened, dullard eyes to see if I was indeed an unlicensed minicab. I ignored them, other than to avoid crushing them.

It was OK. I already had another plan.

I would drive, very carefully indeed, to the M25. I would simply beetle slowly along in the leftmost lane amidst the massed traffic of a dark winter's morning rush hour. I would make quite sure that there was no one close enough behind to read my number plate and no cameras about. It did not matter how long this took or where I saw my chance. If I had to go right around the blasted thing twice, who cared? When the time came, when I saw my chance, I would just let the gun slip from my window, on to the hard shoulder and away for ever. Even if anyone saw the bin-bagged lump falling, no one in their right mind would stop on the dark, wet M25 just to see what crap some git had chucked out of their car. I would be free. Surely? So long as I was not actually on film throwing out the gun, I would be all right, wouldn't I? The gun would in all probability not be found for days, maybe even weeks. By the time it was stumbled upon by some trucker taking a leak, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of cars would be on film passing by in the vicinity. The police would not, could not check every plate, could they? Anyway, how would they know which batch of film to choose? Surely, even today, there was no way they would be able to …

—Christ! I slammed on the brakes, my wheels juddered as the ABS kicked in and my body shot forward against the seat belts. A ghostly young woman with a thin-lipped face and staring eyes, dressed in little more than underwear, stood square in front of my bumper, drumming on my bonnet, having leapt bodily out to stop me.

—Ta-xi-i! she screeched. —Yee-haah! Claire, get in!

—Peckham! screamed a voice beside my head. I jumped and turned. At my window battered another girl. She had employed blonde hair dye, shades and lipstick to construct, on some instinct, a Freudian mask of such primal effectiveness that all I could register was: blonde, shades and lipstick.

I could not move. My windscreen was almost filled by the half-naked, bloodless girl, who was now actually clambering over the bonnet in front of me. To my right, the insanely exaggerated assembly of eyes, hair and lips banged on the window three inches from my head. In the corner of my vision (I did not dare to look down) I could clearly see the black-wrapped gun, which had decelerated its way almost completely out from under the seat and had, on the way, torn partially through the plastic. The end of the
buttstock
was now sticking clean out.

For a wild second I considered simply gunning the engine and speeding off, with the mad girl still on the bonnet, if necessary. And then I saw, beyond her pale, young-old face, the eye of the next CCTV camera, staring directly into mine.

This time I was in genuine trouble.

No doubt it took something a bit special to grab the attention of the underpaid, half-trained, part-time para-police minions who were idly scanning the banks of night-time images piping endlessly down the wires from the myriad cameras of London. And no doubt a screen filled by the half-dressed arse of a skinny girl climbing over the bonnet of a car while her friend screams at the driver, a shifty-looking middle-aged man out alone in his Merc at this time of night, was just the thing to do it.

Christ, they must be zooming in and locking on already. I had to stop this, and in a friendly way, and fast.

—OK, OK. Peckham. Fine, whatever. Just get in. No, no, the back, the back! I'm not opening the front! Right, get in and shut the door.

—Just drive, mate, we got money, see?

—Never mind the money. I don't want your money.

—Well that's all you're getting, mate, so don't kid yourself!

—No, I mean, look, I'm not a bloody taxi, OK? Now, please, sit still and just let me get off the bridge before I kill someone.

—Claire, he's a fucking weirdo. Let us out! I'm outta here!

—Don't! We're moving, for God's sake. You'll hurt yourself.

—You fucking stupid, Jez? You want to go back and see Skaggsy? Stay in the fucking cab.

—He said he isn't a cab. I'm outta here.

—Stay in the fucking cab, Jez.

—He's a weirdo.

—
You
stopped
me
, for Christ's sake!

—Skaggsy'll fucking kill us, you stupid cow. Driver, Peckham. We got money, see? And you just shut the fuck up, Jez, right? Stay in the cab.

—Ha ha ha!

—Ha ha ha!

—Now, er, ladies. Where did you want to go exactly? I don't really know London very well yet and …

—Peckham.

—Well, you'll have to show me the … this is ridiculous. Look, I'm not a cab. I'll drop you by the nearest tube and …

—We'll scream.

—What?

—If you drop us in the middle of fucking nowhere, we'll scream.

—We'll tear your fucking face off, mate.

—We'll tell everyone about you kerb-crawling.

—I wasn't! I'm a married man, with kids.

—Your missus know you're out here then, mate?

—What? Well, no, not exactly, but that's because …

—You like young girls, do you? Bet you do. You all do.

—Shut the fuck up, Claire, ha ha ha!

—Look, I was just, well, I just decided to go out, I …

—Yeah yeah yeah.

—He ain't going to make a fuss, Claire, you can tell.

—Na, he don't want to make trouble. You can tell.

—He'll take us home, won't you, mate?

—He'll be good as gold, won't he?

—Well, yes, of course, I'll take you, but honestly, you'll have to direct me. I really don't know this area at all.

—There you go, Jez. Told you he was all right.

—Cheers, mate. Ta. Next left, second right.

I obeyed, thinking only of the gun lying almost openly beside me. Just do what they say, and get rid of them. Then straight to the M25. Or maybe not? God, I needed to be careful. I needed to think, quietly and logically. I needed to sit in an old library somewhere, my natural habitat, and …

—Second right you said, er, girls?

—Yeah. Then keep on for a bit.

I turned as ordered. There was absolutely nothing else I could do.

We couldn't have been more than half a mile from Tower Bridge, but now we were at the end of the world.

I turned again as ordered and entered a long, low street where hopeless-looking shops, all with graffiti-covered steel shutters, stood in the patchy sodium light as far as the eye could see. A single grey-white lighted takeaway joint buzzed with shadowy groups of young people in hoods, gathered about cars drawn up at self-consciously crazy angles. Over the scene loomed high-rise flats which seemed to rear up from directly behind the dead shops, their tops lost in the foggy darkness. Their few lit windows, high in the air, made me shiver.

Sniff!

—That's better. Oh, nice gear, Jez.

—Excuse me, um, what are you …? Oh God, look, that stuff's illegal. Sorry, look, you can't just go and take cocaine in my car …

—You want a line, driver? Fair's fair, Jez, give the man a line.

They smiled up at me with whacked-out eyes. What if I did? What if I took their drugs and then had a laugh with them and took them home and showed them the gun? Then they would know I was no ordinary boring old bastard! Then they might, who knew, they might even
both
decide to …

BAAAARP!

Suddenly the cabin was flooded by headlights and filled with the outraged blast of a horn right behind us. My grip on the wheel locked tight, my foot instinctively
lifted off the accelerator and covered the brake. The glaring lights veered out, the horn blared again and then the car was past us and in front, brake lights glowing angry red. Eyes shone back at me from the death-pale masks of furious male faces, black faces and white faces but all lit to a zombie pallor by my own headlights. I had no choice but to stop or ram them. I hit the brakes.