Looking for Jake and Other Stories

“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 FORCHRISTMAS,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