The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

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.”

“It might not be a bad thing,” he said. “Hanging. In some circumstances.”

I stared at him. “For an Irish martyr? Okay. Quicker than starving yourself.”

“It is that. I can’t fault you there.”

“You know what men say, in the pub? They say, name an Irish martyr. They say, go on, go on, you can’t, can you?”

“I could give you a string of names,” he said. “They were in the paper. Two years, is that too long to remember?”

“No. But keep up, will you? The people who say this, they’re Englishmen.”

“You’re right. They’re Englishmen,” he said sadly. “They can’t remember bugger all.”

* * *

TEN MINUTES, I thought. Ten minutes give or take. In defiance of him, I sidled up to the kitchen window. The street had fallen into its weekend torpor; the crowds were around the corner. They must be expecting her soon. There was a telephone on the kitchen worktop, right by my hand, but if I picked it up he would hear the bedroom extension give its little yip, and he would come out and kill me, not with a bullet but in some less obtrusive way that would not alert the neighbors and spoil his day.

I stood by the kettle while it boiled. I wondered: Has the eye surgery been a success? When she comes out, will she be able to see as normal? Will they have to lead her? Will her eyes be bandaged?

I did not like the picture in my mind. I called out to him, to know the answer. No, he shouted back, the old eyes will be sharp as a tack.

I thought, there’s not a tear in her. Not for the mother in the rain at the bus stop, or the sailor burning in the sea. She sleeps four hours a night. She lives on the fumes of whiskey and the iron in the blood of her prey.

* * *