The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

“As much as anybody would need to know. That’s to say, not that you’re anything special. You can be a help if you want, and if you don’t want, we can do accordingly.”


He spoke as if he had companions. He was only one man. But a bulky one, even without the jacket. Suppose I had been a true-blue Tory, or one of those devout souls who won’t so much as crush an insect: I still wouldn’t have tried anything tricky. As it was, he counted on me to be docile, or perhaps, despite his sneering, he trusted me to some small extent. Anyway, he let me follow him into the bedroom with my mug of tea. He carried his own tea in his left hand and his gun in his right. He left the roll of sticky tape and the handcuffs on the kitchen table, where he’d put them when they came out of his bag.

And now he let me pick up the phone extension from the bedside table, and hand it to him. I heard a woman’s voice, young, timid and far away. You would not have thought she was in the hospital round the corner. “Brendan?” she said. I did not imagine that was his real name.

* * *

HE PUT DOWN the receiver so hard it clattered. “There’s some friggin’ hold-up. It’ll be twenty minutes, she reckons. Or thirty, it could even be thirty.” He let his breath out, as if he’d been holding it since he stomped upstairs. “Bugger this. Where’s the lav?”

You can surprise a person with affinity, I thought, and then say, “Where’s the lav?” Not a Windsor expression. It wasn’t really a question, either. The flat was so small that its layout was obvious. He took his weapon with him. I listened to him urinate. Run a tap. I heard splashing. I heard him come out, zipping his trousers. His face was red where he’d been toweling it. He sat down hard on the folding chair. There was a bleat from the fragile canework. He said, “You’ve got a number written on your arm.”

“Yes.”

“What’s it a number of?”

“A woman.” I dabbed my forefinger with my tongue and slicked it across the ink.

“You won’t get it off that way. You need to get some soap and give it a good scrub.”

“How kind of you to take an interest.”

“Have you wrote it down? Her number?”

“No.”

“Don’t you want it?”

Only if I have a future, I thought. I wondered when it would be appropriate to ask.

“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.”