Ferret wasn't on the phone. His real name is Jack Murray, but he is always known as Ferret; a friend of the old mole, the revolution, he said. I reckoned it was because of his pointed nose and scuttling manner. He is thirty-four, small and dark. He had left Glasgow six years ago to continue a disastrous liaison with a woman who had come down to seek her fortune, and, I suspect, to escape from Ferret. It took her two years to lose Ferret and three to find the pot of gold in every TV researcher's knapsack.
I'd met him at a party and we had got on. He took to me, I suspected, because he liked to have someone to flagellate politically. He was a walking anthology of the left, having tried Labour, the Communists, the Nats for two days, the Socialist Workers, a short-lived Maoist group, the International Marxists, and had finally settled down with a cosy little group of Trotskyists who were apparently based in Stockport and were attempting to Bolshevise that town. This had the double advantage of allowing him to spin romantic stories of the proletarian upsurge there, whilst ensuring that he and the mass base of the organisation were kept at a safe distance from each other. The group were called Workers for Revolutionary Change, or 'those creeps the Wircs'. It was an unwieldy title, but this was common in such groups and represented a satisfactory permutation of the key syntax of red vocabulary. Ferret was effectively the London branch.
I'd met him at a party and we had got on. He took to me, I suspected, because he liked to have someone to flagellate politically. He was a walking anthology of the left, having tried Labour, the Communists, the Nats for two days, the Socialist Workers, a short-lived Maoist group, the International Marxists, and had finally settled down with a cosy little group of Trotskyists who were apparently based in Stockport and were attempting to Bolshevise that town. This had the double advantage of allowing him to spin romantic stories of the proletarian upsurge there, whilst ensuring that he and the mass base of the organisation were kept at a safe distance from each other. The group were called Workers for Revolutionary Change, or 'those creeps the Wircs'. It was an unwieldy title, but this was common in such groups and represented a satisfactory permutation of the key syntax of red vocabulary. Ferret was effectively the London branch.
He lived in Stoke Newington. It took me an hour to get there.
He blinked at me from behind his door.
'Christ, haven't you had enough?'
His room was in a house of reds of varying shades, who met to abuse one another on the stairway on their way to work, the duplicator and the pub. Ferret had made a marriage of convenience with that section of the radical lower middle classes questing timidly for the proletariat. Occasionally he would go and ham up his days in the Gorbals, particularly when drunk, but otherwise would happily sneak off to the National Film Theatre. He was a sharp man, and a good organiser when he could be bothered.
I followed him upstairs, past a Paris May 1968 'REFORMES CHLOROFORME' poster. It was held in place by a flightless dart.
He paused on the landing to cough. I was vaguely nauseated to see that he was swallowing the phlegm, but that was preferable to spraying me with it, I supposed.
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