Renegade

Renegade

Jane Austin

Published by Leaf by Leaf

an imprint of Cinnamon Press,

Office 49019, PO Box 15113, Birmingham, B2 2NJ

www.cinnonpress.com

The right of Jane Austin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988. © 2021, Jane Austin

Print Edition ISBN 978-1-78864-934-6

Ebook ISBN 978-1-78864-951-3

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers. This book may not be lent, hired out, resold or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior consent of the publishers.

Designed and typeset by Cinnamon Press.

Cover design by Adam Craig © Adam Craig.

Cinnamon Press is represented by Inpress.

Renegade is inspired in part by events surrounding the ‘Angry Brigade’ described by Gordon Carr as Britain’s first urban guerrilla group. In fact there were a number of such groups across the country, but this one attained notoriety in a lengthy court case in 1972. The characters in the novel are entirely fictional.

Acknowledgements

With warm thanks to York Novelists and to Farrell Burnett for reading my early manuscript. Special thanks to my editor Rowan Fortune for his care and patience.

Jane Austin was born in Liverpool, studied French, and lives with her husband in London. In the 1980s she was a political activist. She has since worked in a number of settings including schools, adult education and the University of York. Her debut novel, News from Nowhere (Cinnamon Press 2017), was showcased by New Writing North.

Renegade

For Sarah, Dave and Jim,

my dear sister and brothers.

Chapter 1

Justin lowered himself gently into a sofa at Mellow Vélo Café, trying not to spill a brimming mug. He looked at his son dismantling a bike with ease and Sanjay smiled back. The boy was in his element with likeminded twenty-somethings who’d put together a business plan and were making a go of it. It wasn’t the career he’d imagined for his son, but the world had changed.

There was a scattering of newspapers, for old geysers like you, Sanjay had taken pains to say. He took a scalding sip of Colombian coffee and picked up The Guardian. He flicked through it out of habit, then did a double take…

‘a little-known revolution in northern Syria… the Kurds have created a utopian area based on cooperation… an ecological society committed to women’s liberation… Rojava…’

The background blare from the local radio station was interrupted by a newsflash in a bizarre moment of synchronicity: A South Yorkshire man has died in Rojava, Syria, the first Briton killed while fighting against ISIS… joined a mobile guerrilla unit… hit by a missile launched by Islamic State militants…’

Justin’s heart pounded. His instinct was to get up and warn Sanjay, but he forced himself back into his seat. Rojava stuck like a barb under the skin. It was where Farida planned to volunteer in some women’s group, and Sanjay had talked of a sponsored bike ride—it sounded innocent. Farida was her own woman and Sanjay would follow her to the ends of the earth, Justin knew that. He tried to relax and took a slug of the liquorice-black liquid, then studied the familiar décor with its posters of bikers in colourful flocks, flying up and down improbable gradients.

He could be overreacting given recent events, his own past under scrutiny. The risks he’d taken and decisions he’d made shouldn’t overshadow Sanjay, though age and experience counted for something. Harpreet accused him of being controlling while he blamed her for mollycoddling. This old friction was petty in the greater scheme, particularly if Sanjay was caught up with a cause in a far-flung corner of Syria nobody knew much about—except that people got blown up there.

Sanjay was by his side. ‘Hey Dad, you okay? You look a bit out of it.’

Justin looked through rather than at him and tried to block the inane babble on the radio. ‘I don’t like the idea of Farida going to Rojava—d’you know how dangerous it is?’

‘It’s a lot less dangerous than most parts of Syria. What’s brought this on?’

Justin thrust the newspaper article under his nose. ‘This, for starters. And the lad from South Yorkshire who got himself killed, but I suppose you knew about that. It’s an unholy mess over there, Sanjay, with Turkey, Russia and the US fighting for control. Don’t get mixed up in it—what if Farida wants you to follow her?’

Sanjay looked at his phone. ‘Give over, Dad, I haven’t got time for this. It’s not what you think, believe me. We’ll talk about it more once Mum comes back—where is she?’

‘In a hotel on the Moors where they lock up lawyers for a week and retrain them. She’ll be back next week.’ He examined the floor, despising himself for this half-truth.

Sanjay touched his shoulder. ‘I get why you’re supersensitive about me being involved, but I know what I’m doing, Dad. Anyway, it’s up in the air—Farida hasn’t even been accepted.’

Accepted for what? he wanted to ask. ‘Maybe we could go for a ride sometime?’

Sanjay was already on his feet. ‘Sure thing, Dad. Must get back to work. Thanks for dropping by.’

He watched Sanjay’s bouncing step, sporting leg muscles like knotted rope. He levered himself as his grown-up son got on with his life. He shook his head as if to dislodge the email that kept replaying like an ear-worm and left him spinning.

Dear Professor Caffrey,

My name is Stephen Scott. You knew my father, Max, who died last year. My mum has since found his prison memoirs and he writes quite a lot about you. Could we meet sometime? I’d like to understand more about his life back then. Work sometimes brings me to Leeds…

Harpreet had always known about Max and how he’d been wrongly convicted in the 70s, because Justin had told her about the campaign. You’re the patron saint of Lost Causes, she’d told him, and said she loved him for it. Decades later, the touching obituary by Max’s wife had alerted him to a son and Harpreet had asked if he’d be sending the family condolences. He said he wouldn’t. His evasions opened up a rift between them and this latest intrusion from the past had blown up in his face.

How come you never told me about this? She’d asked, after he’d told her about the email from Stephen and his involvement in the wave of protest and revolution of the day. She’d said, I don’t know who you are any more, and he knew he had to come up with answers, if only for himself.

He dropped a gear on his carbon fibre steed and stood from the saddle in readiness for the hill and the last lap before home. The sight of their house always filled him with warmth, sturdily built in locally quarried stone, impervious to the elements. Autumn was late and the house was screened by a red-gold canopy of copper beech glinting in the early evening sun like fritillary butterflies. He pumped the pedals to the last moment up to the grey flagged drive. The adrenaline carried him through the front door and into the kitchen, then plummeted. He looked around and a prickling ran down his back, like snow stuffed down his shirt as a boy, before his brain could interpret it. Today he felt it as loss and shame.

The kitchen was a memory box, from the pencilled height-marks on the wall he wouldn’t paint over, to the curling holiday photos of the three of them. Sanjay’s fridge magnet from a distant geography trip to Orkney clung on. The dresser was filled with mismatched plates, it was their thing when they were newlyweds, to collect oddments of china. They’d never grown out of the habit.

Normally, he’d put a bottle of Chardonnay in the fridge and cook dinner for when she came home. He’d hear the front door clunk and her heels click on the tiled floor and she’d appear, wearing a navy suit and white shirt, her court uniform as she called it.

He conjured the silken day when he’d proposed, and she’d said yes, but would have to talk to her parents. It took a while. Nothing against you, they’d assured. When we fled Uganda, we knew that Harpreet might fall for an Englishman. They’d tied the knot two years later and Harpreet’s parents had always treated him like a son.

What he hadn’t told Sanjay was that Harpreet had finished her training course and decided to stay on for a few days, to think. Infuriatingly, there was no mobile coverage at the hotel and when he’d reached her on the hotel phone, she’d made it clear she wouldn’t be sitting on a gate in the corner of a field to receive messages. She needed time alone before seeing him again and she couldn’t say when. There was nothing more he could do and now there was this new worry about Farida going to Syria, which he was desperate to talk about.

The fridge leftovers turned his stomach and he resigned to cooking a frozen pizza, leavened by a large glass of red wine. This soon turned into a poisoned chalice as his head seethed with Harpreet’s untethered rage.

‘You were actually a member of  The People’s Militia? Is that what you’re telling me? And all these years, I’d believed you were the nice guy fighting for justice and exposing police malpractice.’

‘Corruption,’ he’d corrected, and regretted it.

‘Okay, let’s get this straight. You identified with a group that planted bombs…’

‘…but the bombs were symbolic, we only targeted property...’

‘We!’ Her complexion darkened. ‘You were one of the bombers? Tell me this isn’t true.’

It wasn’t the moment to say that their aim was to show that workers could take power into their own hands, something he might have said to his students. He enjoyed his reputation as a renegade, while remaining opaque about his involvement, buried in the mists of time along with the Second World War, as far as millennials were concerned. Harpreet needed a different story. ‘There was a Miss World Contest in 1970, you were too young to know…’

‘Yes, yes, the one disrupted by feminists at the Albert Hall—what’s that got to do with anything?’

‘I was there, at least I was there the night before, helping to blow up a BBC recording van. I was the lookout. It was to make a political point about the exploitation of women.’

The sky was moonless, pricked with hard bright stars, the pavements gleaming with frost. The comrades’ footsteps rang out in the frozen air and his spine tingled. His task was to raise the alarm as per the pre-op briefing. If you spot anyone, whistle a tune. You can whistle? Good. Keep calm, even if you see the cops. Remember your cover? Calling on a girl you met, she said she lived round here. Nothing too specific.

Harpreet pushed away the bowl of stir-fried vegetables he’d snipped and diced, cooked with juicy orange and cream scallops and cashews for extra crunch. She’d once said she’d married him for his cooking and he suspected she was only half joking. The meal had lost its magic. He met her smouldering eyes. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘We’ve been married for thirty years and this is the first I hear of it? I feel betrayed.’

‘By the time we met, I’d put it all behind me. There were things I preferred to forget.’

He’d interviewed her parents as part of a research project on refugees and there’d been a photo of their daughter in her graduation gown on the mantelpiece. It was Harpreet, and she’d agreed to be interviewed after work. It was love at first sight, at least for him.

‘It’s curious that you married a lawyer, isn’t it? A form of subconscious self-defence, perhaps? You planted bombs and escaped justice, and now there’s a memoir as evidence. What else do I need to know?’ Her lips were curled thin.

There was so much more. Their arguments had always been hot, but today he’d stumbled into hostile territory and floundered. ‘Look, darling, I know this must come as a ghastly shock… I never imagined I’d have to dredge it all up again… I’ve messed up and of course you feel betrayed, I get that. I should have told you long ago. Does that make me a bad person?’ He’d yet to talk about his betrayal of Max, which he couldn’t do without facing his own shame. How could he ever be forgiven?

The acrid smell of burning pizza brought him back to himself and he got up to inspect the damage. He chucked the incinerated object into the bin and ordered a takeaway curry on a mobile app, thanking the gods for modern technology.

Harpreet had impressed on him the importance of meeting Stephen ASAP and finding out what he wanted. A chance to connect with a hidden part of his father’s life? To clear his father’s name? Or revenge. He tried to step into Stephen’s shoes—the email, after all, had been anodyne. I’d like to understand more about his life back then. It suggested a fondness between father and son and he imagined Max would have been good and kind as a father, just as he’d been as a comrade. He did reply, saying he’d be only too pleased to meet and talk about his old friend, Max. It begged the question of why they’d lost touch, which he hoped to avoid. As he pressed send, he realised he urgently needed to talk to someone who knew him back then and the only person left was Sofia, his old flame. His stomach knotted, but what did he have to lose?

Justin had made London his own, a place to reinvent himself. The way he’d met Sofia was something he loved about being in a big city, where a fleeting encounter could become intimate.

The Underground train swayed as he stood holding a leather strap in one hand and a book in the other, when he was thrown bodily against the person behind.

‘Watch yourself,’ a woman cried sharply.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, looking apologetically at the book, as if it were to blame. ‘I got carried away.’

‘I suppose one would, reading that,’ she said, smirking.

‘Ah, yes, gripping stuff!’ He offered a lopsided smile and shoved the book into his duffel-coat pocket, not sure if she was mocking him.

‘I’ve read it,’ she said, serious. The train lurched and he grabbed tighter onto the strap for fear of colliding again. This was the moment he truly noticed her. If asked what she was like, he wouldn’t have mentioned chestnut glints in her eyes or dark hair falling down her back. What captivated him was the vibrancy of her presence, which expanded to fill the space around her. He could have sworn other passengers had the same sensation as necks cricked in their direction.

The train jolted to a standstill and she edged towards the door. ‘We can discuss Kropotkin over a cuppa if you like.’

He hurried after her feeling the shape of the book in his pocket.

They had several rendezvous in cheap cafés, over endless mugs of instant coffee. Justin found himself articulating his credo as Sofia teased it out of him.

‘Why Kropotkin?’

‘The whole anarchist thing—I’m fascinated by the notion of propaganda of the deed and doing something to shift the balance of forces.’

‘Really? I can’t make you out, Justin. Tell me more.’

‘Let’s say that on a spectrum from Gandhi to Che Guevara, I’m with Che. There’s no such thing as a peaceful revolution.’

‘So, you’re not squeamish about violence?’ she asked, provocatively.

‘That’s jumping the gun, isn’t it? I believe a better society is possible and that conflict, however undesirable, is unavoidable. Dictatorships never cede power—take Spain, for example.’

Sofia’s features sharpened as she told him how her parents met. ‘Mum escaped Nazi Germany and went to Spain to fight the fascists after her parents were shot. That’s where she met Dad, who was with the anarchists. They brought me up to understand how the world is divided into the powerful and dispossessed. How about you?’

‘Whatever I say is going to make me sound spoilt and privileged, which I suppose I am…’

‘Go on,’ she encouraged, touching his sleeve. ‘We don’t choose our parents, but we can choose how we act in the world. Why have you rejected your advantages? That’s the story I want to hear.’

He felt self-conscious and looked deep into the outsize mug on the table. ‘My father owns an engineering business in Sheffield and expected me to take over. I was an over-sensitive child and he scared me. By eight I had an appalling stammer, made worse when he was anywhere near. Funnily enough he solved the problem by sending me away to school. I realised that to survive, I had to fight back. Something clicked. I started rebelling against petty rules and cruelties and learned that if you stand up for something, things can change. Nothing earth-shattering, obviously,’ he added, glancing from the coffee’s filmy surface and allowing her to look him in the eye.

She acknowledged him with a steady gaze. He’d never spoken to anyone so openly and stripped of bravado; he found he trusted her. He wanted her to know it hadn’t been all plain sailing.

‘So, what happened next? You went to University, got involved in sit-ins and demos and stuff, I imagine.’

‘I was kicked out of school and sent to live with an uncle who let me do my own thing. I went to night class in Scarborough and saw hardship. The lads I met swam against the tide, grappling for opportunities I’d been handed on a platter. That changed me. I realised I didn’t have to work in shipbuilding or fishing to survive, but I could make a difference by exercising my freedom—the freedom to act in the world. We are what we do. So I came to London and studied at the LSE with every intention of getting involved in politics.’

‘Very existential, I’m sure. But who decides whether our actions are good or bad? You could wreak havoc for the sake of having an adventure. Action for its own sake, so to speak.’

He took this as a challenge. ‘I believe if I act in order to be free, it must be so that others can be free.’

She nodded conditionally. ‘You’re on the right road, comrade. Just remember, we don’t act on behalf of the masses, but expose the contradictions of capitalism and its oppressive systems.’

He tried to melt her brittle exterior with a joke. ‘Don’t be daft lass, d’ya tek me forra wasak or summat?’

‘A wasak?’ she giggled. ‘Definitely not, unless that means a dark bearded man with eyelashes to die for.’

‘Now you’re taking the piss,’ he said, catching her wrist, and knew they’d end up in bed sooner or later.

Sofia eventually invited him to visit the squat to meet the comrades. He felt this to be a sort of test. She’d been tantalisingly vague about their activities and said labels were a distraction. They were engaged in conscious communal living, challenging gender stereotypes and the nuclear family. For a horrible moment he’d imagined free love and partner swapping, but no, she reassured him, that’s bourgeois hippy crap. It was then she’d outlined the Miss World gig at the Albert Hall, reeling him in. She spoke of the profits of the Mecca Corporation, sexually exploiting women in the name of entertainment for the gratification of men.

‘Okay, I see where you’re coming from,’ he’d said, ‘but Miss World is pretty popular with women too. My mother will be watching.’

‘Sure, but that’s how they trick us,’ Sofia hit back. ‘Women absorb idealised versions of the female body, which we see plastered on billboards, buses, everywhere, to persuade us to spend our pitiful wages on fashion and makeup. It’s a con, don’t you see?’