Secret Society for Journalistic Terrorists

Louis typed like ticker tape. Click click click. His ginger hair jittered like fire and his fingers worked in a fury of resentment. Beside him, drafts, abandoned, scribbled in red pen, scrunched into balls, folded into origami, paper planes and cranes. A pile I’d have to burn later.

Somewhere a telephone rang. He looked up, cigarette dangled, grey ash curling backwards towards his lips.

‘Don’t answer that,’ he said.

‘What if it’s Jules,’ I said. A pause. Louis nodded, keys pressed down again like automatic fire. I squeezed between two letterpress trays, balanced precariously on stolen bar stools. A cup wobbled on table ledge, water dripped from the ceiling, and neighbours danced over our heads. Rain hammered against the window. Somewhere, schoolgirls squealed in horror or delight under the downpour. Surely it would flood the basement studios, I thought, but that was hardly my problem.

I picked up the telephone.

‘Hullo? Is this Mr Lehtinen?’ A deep, mannish voice I didn’t recognise. A pause. ‘Mr Lehtinen?’

‘No,’ I said, looking at Louis, ‘no he’s not available. Who is this?’

‘This is PC Thompson, I have a Jules Leroy at the station here.’ Louis was staring from his seat, face scrunched, his black beady eyes upon me like a dog.

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘is he in any trouble?’

This PC Thompson smacked his lips. I could hear the scratch of his stubble as he rubbed his chin. ‘No, I don’t think so son, just a misunderstanding is all,’ a long moment, ‘well he asked me to call. Just letting you know.’

‘Can he come to the phone?’ I asked, aware of, as Louis might have been, of my own feeling of distrust.

‘I’ve actually,’ his voice was laboured, ‘you know, I’ve just sent him on his way. Yes well, we’ll be in touch if anything happens. Good evening.’ The line clicked. My hand went limp, and I opened my mouth. Louis put his finger to his lips.

‘On the hook first.’

I hooked the telephone with a jingle. We stood for several minutes in silence. Somewhere a car sped past, spitting up water in the blue gloom outside our apartment, squashed between a dance studio and campus offices.

‘They asked for you, Louis.’

‘Who did?’ he said, jarred.

‘Some constable,’ I said. He shrugged, and then he grinned, his lips wobbling only for a moment.

I retold Louis everything this PC Thompson said, which, we both agreed, was odd. I lost all my energy for the day, and I perched on the windowsill, picking my fingernails and thinking about what I should have for dinner.

The room had a dusty, neglected smell; printer ink and wet wool, dust and bookshelves stacked with yellowed paper, cups blackened with stale coffee and newspapers, their distinctive polished earth smell plastered on workbenches. Dead flies by the window, arms across their tiny bodies like mummies. Our printing press, the crown jewel of this operation, which Jules had traded for an old scooter and a puppy, on a bedside table by the door. A sandwich, half eaten, left beside Louis as he drummed his fingers on the space bar.

‘I bet they caught him shoplifting or something,’ he said.

I laughed. ‘Shoplifting?’

‘Yes,’ he said, annoyed, ‘that kleptomaniac, I've caught him stealing women’s flip-flops before, entire biscuit tins, actually, I remember him stuffing a whole sewing kit down his trousers.’

I was surprised. ‘Do you think they charged him?’

‘Well, I hope not. He doesn’t need attention right now.’

I agreed.

A motorcycle gurgled just outside the building, juddering in its place for a long moment before the engine roared and it sped off again.

My cheek was pressed against the glass thinking about how hungry I was. I remembered the bone broth I made the night before, the potatoes growing fingers and wrinkled carrots in the cupboard. But what I was really craving was meat, something slow cooked or seared that I could eat with my hands like a savage.

We waited for Jules for several hours, and it was going dark. The brick wall glowed yellow, then a sad blue, before going black in the nighttime.

‘What are the chances he's on a detour right now?’ I asked.

Louis, who, unable to write in his jittering period of waiting, was folding pages in pamphlets, snickered.

‘None,’ he said, ‘and I’d be very cross if he was.’

He shrugged off his suspenders. Neatly beside him, a stack of pamphlets on thick cream paper I had stolen from the library.

I lit a cigarette when a frantic knocking came about the door. I stood quickly and Louis made a sharp hushing noise. We stood like deer. What if it’s the police, I thought. If they busted in now, I’d look terribly guilty, enough to get the rope I imagined. Louis was done the moment that PC Thompson said his name, probably from some list of other indefinitely guilty names. It was only by some stroke of luck, mine was not.

‘It’s Jules,’ said the muffled voice from the other side. His voice, breathy, wobbling dangerously.

Louis started and opened the door quickly, gliding about the room like a ghost. Jules took a step backwards, almost falling, his hands windmilled like something out of a Chaplin picture.

The light in the hallway made him glow like a lantern.

The three of us stared at one another.

‘Where were you?’ Louis asked, a quiet rage shaking in his hands.

Jules pulled his scarf off and shook his damp hair like a dog. Dark strands stook to his forehead, and he fumbled for a cigarette. He ran a hand through his hair, and I saw plasters on each one of his left fingernails.

‘Nowhere,’ he said. Louis raised an eyebrow.

‘I just had a drink is all. After I left.'

‘Why did the police call?’

Jules shrugged, blowing out a long, happy bloom of smoke. ‘I don’t know anything about that.’ He looked about the room for a moment and walked towards the new pile of pamphlets Louis had just worked on.

‘All for this,’ he said, holding one up to his face. ‘Are they done?’

‘Yes, just now,’ Louis said, annoyed, and after a moment, ‘why were you arrested, Jules?’

Jules opened the pamphlet and read over each page—at least, he pretended to. He ran his finger down the lines and puffs of smoke came from one side of his lip. It was an excruciating silence, and my stomach groaned.

Several dogs barked outside, and I heard the same grumblings of a motorcycle. Something about these noises alarmed me, a suspicious busyness, while not uncommon, I didn’t like the absence of a human element. Tires squeaked, and dogs whined and barked, and shoes clacked on the stone pavements, engines standing sleepily along the road, but nobody spoke, and I didn’t like that at all. I peeked outside the window.

Police.

Two trucks of them unloading their soldiers, dogs pulling on leashes, with boyish officers holding them away as if docking a boat, several sat idly on motorcycles, more just outside the main entrance of our building, holding batons and small pistols, some in suits, some in the those dreadful green parade uniforms.

I hadn’t noticed Louis beside me, breathing hard, his eyes bulging.

‘Put that fire on,’ he said to Jules, his hand waving quickly behind him, still staring at the unloading forces. I was going to ask, how would they know to come in here? But, and maybe it was rather obvious in retrospect, somehow, I did know.

I grabbed for the pamphlets, for the one in Jules’ hand but he swiped away.

‘It’s too late for all that,’ he said.

‘What the hell are you talking about,’ Louis said, ‘give it.’

‘They know already.’

I stared, struck dumb.

‘What?’ Louis said, his voice a frightening whisper, ‘did you rat?’

Louis, turning swiftly from the window, grabbed at Jule’s collar. He shook him like a ragdoll, and his head lolled about uselessly. For a terrible moment, I thought maybe he’d kill him.

I dragged a hand down my face. Sweat trickled down my back and I felt ill, sleepy and hungry.

Then there was a terrible pounding on the door, as if it were being attacked with iron rods and bullets. The doorknob jingled, revealing the bare outline of clean, bright wood.

‘What do they know?’ he asked.

‘It’s too late,’ Jules said. And to our utter, utter surprise he began to cry. I looked to Louis, and he looked at me.

‘What did you tell them, Jules?’ Louis said, almost affectionately, letting go.

Jules shook his head.

‘They had shit on me. You don’t get it, when you’re in that room, and they show you all this stuff, they said they had me in for high treason. That I’d be hanging by tomorrow morning. I told them about this and the pamphlets and the authors, I said I didn’t know who you guys were at first, but they didn’t believe me. I said that I didn’t know who James was, or where to find him, which is true, I don’t. But they don’t believe me.’

‘Did you tell them we did? That we know where James is?’

‘No, no I swear to God I didn’t.’

I don’t believe you, I thought, but as Jules said, it was much too late for that.

The door came forward and collapsed with a thunderous, terrible crash.

Six officers, all giant and dressed in black, their faces covered like burglars, came straight for the three of us, piling through the door like a thick cloud of smog.

I remember the ugly expressions on both Louis and Jules’ faces. Contorted into bizarre, cartoonish, caricatures of themselves; wrinkled mouths, snot, spit as they shouted, the shrieks of pain when one officer grabbed Louis by the neck like a puppy.

And I watched, confused, as they disappeared in the back of a van. I felt cheated. All this hassle and drama, and yet, I was left on the street while officers dawdled, passing lighters and flicking through clipboards.

The van drove into the blackness, kicking up fetid rainwater onto my trousers and leaving fat, stinking patches of brown. Much afterwards was a slurry of strange, often frustrating conversations—of what I did that morning, who I spoke to (which was only my landlord, James in the afternoon, Louis, Jules, and this PC Thompson), what classes I took, what buildings I had access to as a student, etc.

I said what I needed to say, and I was free, thrown onto the streets just as the rain finally died down.

I don’t remember falling asleep, or the walk home, or if I had hailed a taxi or when I had undressed, but I did have a dream, a strange, exhaustive dream that I was in some kind of bog. Both of my feet were submerged, and as I struggled, the mud ingulfed my knees, until, it was to my stomach, and I couldn’t move at all. I flailed my arms stupidly, and crows squawked from their dead tree branches.

They flapped their wings and swivelled their heads, so their blue eyes were upon me. I had some terrible feeling I was dying, and, despite my judgement, I grabbed at the mud around me, trying to hoist my weight out, but I only sank deeper. It was too my neck and then to my chin. I could taste it in my mouth, and the grit snapped in my teeth like popping candy.

As it went over my eyes, and I was submerged into darkness, I felt the little pointed bird feet on my head, and, at the point I was to run out of air, I awoke, jerked out of sleep and drenched in sweat.

I woke face first in my pillow, water dripped from the ceiling onto the carpet, muffling the little plink of the droplets.

I turned on my side. I was so hungry I thought I might be sick. I needed air, meat, something rare and bloody.

Several streets away from campus was a stage, fitted with a guillotine like a pop-up carnival ride, busy with a crowd, waiting for something to happen. Children on the backs of their drunk fathers, girls holding baskets, wearing straw hats with ribbons. Birds fluttered from one lamp to another, holding twigs and cotton.

Hands clasp over faces, whether in anticipation or horror I do not know, as figures busied the stage. Knees trembled, three hoods revealed, and for a moment, I could recognise those tired, pale faces. Blue lips like vampires, unaffected by the sudden sunshine.

I heard the pleasant singing of a bird, the quiet scream of its chicks from some nest above my head and the gradual appearance of a rainbow in the morning sunshine just as the blade had been hoisted to the top of those wooden beams.

The sun hit the blade edge and struck me in the eye, and as I covered my face, I heard the quick, smooth sound of metal, standing from one place, and falling to another.

I stopped paying attention here and I remembered the sandwich I wanted to eat.

Fried bread, tomatoes, steak slices, garlic, maybe cheese or fried chilies. Wrapped in newspapers nobody read, and I’d take it to some bench by the river and eat it slowly, enjoying the flavours and considering how my life should now be after the adventure of the night before.

I felt a sleepy melancholy, as if I had just said goodbye to my childhood home, a quiet feeling one might put upon an old man, dining alone, eating politely with a knife and fork, napkin on his lap.

Behind me, a police dog barked furiously, a hideous beast, with tiny black eyes and a red tongue that spat and gurgled. Its white fur was spiked and dirty. Its feet where knee deep in rainwater, and its ears, one flopping, the other pointed like a horn.

I thought it was the ugliest thing I had ever seen.