The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

“I had some feelings,” Lola says. She held out her hands in a curve around herself, to show how emotion distends you. It makes you feel full up, a big weight in your chest, and then you don’t want your dinner. So she had begun to leave it, or surreptitiously shuffle bits of food—pastry, an extra potato—into a piece of kitchen roll.

She remembered that night in November when they went barefoot down to the computer. Standing behind Morna’s chair, she had touched her shoulder, and it was like grazing a knife. The blade of the bone seemed to sink deep into her hand, and she felt it for hours; she was surprised not to see the indent in her palm. When she had woken up next morning, the shape of it was still there in her mind.

* * *

MARCH: ALL TRACES of Morna have gone from the bedroom now, but Lola knows she is still about. These cold nights, her Mr. Men pajamas hitched up with one hand, she stands looking out over the garden of the small house. By the lights of hovering helicopters, by the flash of the security lights from neighboring gardens, by the backlit flicker of the streets, she sees the figure of her sister standing and looking up at the house, bathed in a nimbus of frost. The traffic flows long into the night, a hum without ceasing, but around Morna there is a bubble of quiet. Her tall straight body flickers inside her nightshirt, her face is blurred as if from tears or drizzle, and she wears no readable human expression. But at her feet a white dog lies, shining like a unicorn, a golden chain about its neck.



TERMINUS



On January 9th, shortly after eleven on a dark sleety morning, I saw my dead father on a train pulling out of Clapham Junction, bound for Waterloo.

I glanced away, not recognizing him at once. We were on parallel tracks. When I looked back, the train had picked up speed, and carried him away.

My mind at once moved ahead, to the concourse at Waterloo Station, and the meeting which I felt sure must occur. The train on which he was traveling was one of the old six-seater carriage-and-corridor type, its windows near-opaque with the winter’s accumulation, and a decade of grime plastered to its metal. I wondered where he’d come from: Windsor? Ascot? You’ll understand that I travel in the region a good deal, and one gets to know the rolling stock.

There were no lights in the carriage he had chosen. (The bulbs are often stolen or vandalized.) His face had an unpleasant tinge; his eyes were deeply shadowed, and his expression was thoughtful, almost morose.

At last released by the green signal, my own train began to draw forward. Its pace was stately and I thought that he must have a good seven minutes on me, certainly more than five.

As soon as I saw him, sitting sad but upright in that opposite carriage, my mind went back to the occasion when … to the occasion when … But no. It did not go back. I tried, but I could not find an occasion. Even when I scrubbed the recesses of my brain, I could not scour one out. I should like to be rich in anecdote. Fertile to invent. But there’s no occasion, only the knowledge that a certain number of years have passed.

When we disembarked the platform was slick with cold, sliding underfoot. The bomb warnings were pasted up everywhere, also the beggar warnings, and posters saying take care not to slip or trip, which are insulting to the public, as few people would do it if they could help it: only some perhaps, a few attention seekers. An arbitrary decision had placed a man to take tickets, so that was fumbling, and further delay. I was irritated by this; I wanted to get on with the whole business, whatever the business was going to be.

It came to me that he had looked younger, as though death had moved him back a stage. There had been in his expression, melancholy though it was, something purposive; and I was sure of this, that his journey was not random. And so it was this perception, rather than any past experience—is experience always past?—that made me think he might linger for a rendezvous, that moving toward me and then away, on his Basingstoke train or perhaps from as far as Southampton, he might make time for a meeting with me.

I tell you this: if you are minded to unite at Waterloo Station, lay your plans well and in advance. Formalize in writing, for extra caution. I stood still, a stone in the rude stream, as the travelers crashed and surged around me. Where might he go? What might he want? (I had not known, God help me, that the dead were loose.) A cup of coffee? A glance at the rack of best-selling paperbacks? An item from Boots the Chemist, a cold cure, a bottle of some aromatic oil?

Something small and hard, that was inside my chest, that was my heart, drew smaller then. I had no idea what he would want. The limitless possibilities that London affords … if he should bypass me and find his way into the city … but even then, among the limitless possibilities, I could not think of a single thing that he might want.

* * *