The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher(36)

“Make us another brew. And put sugar in it this time.”

“Oh,” I said. I was flustered by a failing in hospitality. “I didn’t know you took sugar. I might not have white.”

“The bourgeoisie, eh?”

I was angry. “You’re not too proud to shoot out of my bourgeois sash window, are you?”

He lurched forward, hand groping for the gun. It wasn’t to shoot me, though my heart leapt. He glared down into the gardens, tensing as if he were going to butt his head through the glass. He made a small, dissatisfied grunt, and sat down again. “A bloody cat on the fence.”

“I have demerara,” I said. “I expect it tastes the same, when it’s stirred in.”

“You wouldn’t think of shouting out of the kitchen window, would you?” he said. “Or trying to bolt down the stairs?”

“What, after all I’ve said?”

“You think you’re on my side?” He was sweating again. “You don’t know my side. Believe me, you have no idea.”

It crossed my mind then he might not be a Provisional, but from one of the mad splinter groups you heard of. I was hardly in a position to quibble; the end result would be the same. But I said, “Bourgeoisie, what sort of polytechnic expression is that?”

I was insulting him, and I meant to. For those of tender years, I should explain that polytechnics were institutes of higher education, for the young who missed university entrance: for those who were bright enough to say affinity, but still wore cheap nylon coats.

He frowned. “Brew the tea.”

“I don’t think you should sneer at my great-uncles for being cod-Irish, if you talk in slogans you found in skips.”

“It was a sort of a joke,” he said.

“Oh. Well. Was it?” I was taken aback. “It looks as if I’ve no more sense of humor than she has.”

I indicated, with my head, the lawns outside the window, where the prime minister was shortly to die.

“I don’t fault her for not laughing,” he said. “I won’t fault her for that.”

“You should. It’s why she can’t see how ridiculous she is.”

“I wouldn’t call her ridiculous,” he said, mulish. “Cruel, wicked, but not ridiculous. What’s there to laugh at?”

“All things human laugh,” I said.

After some thought, he replied, “Jesus wept.”

He smirked. I saw he had relaxed, knowing that because of the friggin’ delay he wouldn’t have to murder yet. “Mind you,” I said, “she’d probably laugh if she were here. She’d laugh because she despises us. Look at your anorak. She despises your anorak. Look at my hair. She despises my hair.”

He glanced up. He’d not looked at me before, not to see me; I was just the tea maker. “The way it just hangs there,” I explained. “Instead of being in corrugations. I ought to have it washed and set. It ought to go in graduated rollers, she knows where she is with that sort of hair. And I don’t like the way she walks. ‘Toddles,’ you said. ‘She’ll toddle round.’ You had it right, there.”

“What do you think this is about?” he said.

“Ireland.”

He nodded. “And I want you to understand that. I’m not shooting her because she doesn’t like the opera. Or because you don’t care for—what in sod’s name do you call it?—her accessories. It’s not about her handbag. It’s not about her hairdo. It’s about Ireland. Only Ireland, right?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “You’re a bit of a fake yourself, I think. You’re no nearer the old country than I am. Your great-uncles didn’t know the words either. So you might want supporting reasons. Adjuncts.”

“I was brought up in a tradition,” he said. “And look, it brings us here.” He looked around, as if he didn’t believe it: the crucial act of a dedicated life, ten minutes from now, with your back to a chipboard wardrobe glossed with white veneer; a pleated paper blind, an unmade bed, a strange woman, and your last tea with no sugar in it. “I think of those boys on hunger strike,” he said, “the first of them dead almost two years to the day that she was first elected: did you know that? It took sixty-six days for Bobby to die. And nine other boys not far behind him. After you’ve starved yourself for about forty-five days they say it gets better. You stop dry-heaving and you can take water again. But that’s your last chance, because after fifty days you can hardly see or hear. Your body digests itself. It eats itself in despair. You wonder she can’t laugh? I see nothing to laugh at.”

“What can I say?” I asked him. “I agree with everything you’ve said. You go and make the tea and I’ll sit here and mind the gun.”

For a moment, he seemed to consider it.

“You’d miss. You’re not trained at all.”

“How are you trained?”

“Targets.”

“It’s not like a live person. You might shoot the nurses. The doctors.”

“I might, at that.”

I heard his long, smoker’s cough. “Oh, right, the tea,” I said. “But you know another thing? They may have been blind at the end, but their eyes were open when they went into it. You can’t force pity from a government like hers. Why would she negotiate? Why would you expect it? What’s a dozen Irishmen to them? What’s a hundred? All those people, they’re capital punishers. They pretend to be modern, but leave them to themselves and they’d gouge eyes out in the public squares.”