Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

floor, black-painted ironwork, fluted mahogany at the
reception and stairwell, a lot of flowers and stained glass. The
militiamen and the driver were standing off to one side, some
hotel-management chap was hurrying up with a politely concerned
look and a mobile phone, and – looking back – she saw
that everyone was inside and the steps were clear and the door
was being secured.
    Jesus H. Christ,’ she said. By now she was thoroughly
ratded. She reached inside her coat again. Everybody froze.
    She stayed her hand, and looked around; smiled grimly.
    ‘Anybody else need a cigarette?’
     
    The iron fire-escape door was spring-loaded and would clang if
she let it swing back, so she closed it slowly, letting go of its
edge at the last moment.
    It clanged.
    Myra looked up and down the fire-escape and around the back
yard of the hotel. Dripping pipes, rattling ventilation ducts,
soggy cartons, moss and lichen and flagstones. She padded down
the steps, almost silent in her battered sneakers, old jeans,
sweater and padded jacket. At the bottom she pushed her eyeband
under the peak of the baseballcap under which she’d piled
her still-grey hair, jammed her fists in the deep pockets,
feeling the reassurance of the passport and the gun, and strolled
across the yard, through another one-way gate, along an alley to
Pitt Street then down on to Sauchiehall.
    She caught her reflection in a shop-window, and smirked at how
like a student she looked. It wasn’t a perfect reflection,
so it also made her look flatteringly young – like
she’d look in a month or two, she hoped. And she already
had the bearing, she could see that as she glanced sideways at
the reflection of her walk, jaunty and confident. Her joints
didn’t hurt and her heels didn’t jar and she had so
much energy she felt like running, or skipping, or jumping about
just to burn some of it off. She couldn’t remember having
felt this good when she really was young.
    And things were coming back, memories of an earlier self,
earlier personal tactics, like, before her rejuve, if she’d
got caught up in a situation like that outside the hotel
she’d have turned to the Guards to protect her, as though
by reflex, and no doubt sparked a riot right there; not now, it
had been a lightning calculation that the demonstrators, however,
hostile to each other or to the militia, would not attack an
innocent minion like the driver an would not attack her while she
was shielded by the comrades. No violence in the workers’
movement, no enemies on the Left – it didn’t work all
the time, but by and large the truce was honoured; mutual assured
deterrence, perhaps, but then, what wasn’t?
    Sauchiehall, Glasgow’s main shopping street, had been
depedestranised since she’d last been here and it thrummed
with through traffic, electric mostly but with a few coughing old
internal-combustion engines and speeding cyclists and, jeez, yes,
cantering horses among them. Myra raced the red light at the end
of the street, kept up her jog as she crossed the pedestrian
bridge over the howling intersection above the M8 and up into
Woodlands Road. There she slowed and strolled again, relishing
the old patch, the familiar territory, the nostalgia pricking her
eyes. (God, she’d flyposted that very pillar of that
overpass for a Critique seminar in 1976!)
    But the area was posh now, full of Sikh men in suits –
bankers and lawyers and doctors – and women in saris
accompanied by kids and often as not a Scottish nanny; pavements
over-parked with expensive, heavy Malaysian cars. Not like old
times, not at all, except for the occasional curry aroma and the
feel of the wind and the look of the scudding clouds above.
    Talking to the comrades in the New Brit, that had been
like old times. It had been like fucking time travel, and
far more like homecoming than any encounter she’d had in
New York. After she’d thanked the militia officers, flatly
refused to press assault charges, and insisted on giving a huge
tip to the driver, she’d retired to the hotel’s cafe
for a coffee and a smoke with the five young people who’d
escorted her in: Davy and Alison and Mike and Sandra and Rashid,
all proud members of the Glasgow branch of the Workers’
Power Party, an organization much fallen-back from its high-water
mark in the 2020s under the old Republic but still struggling
along, still recruiting and still the British section of