Cally Phillips' Another World is Possible
Episode Nine – CONFLICT
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: 1989 London – ROISIN
Swearwords: None.
Description: 1989 London – ROISIN
1989 reads like a travelogue. Roisin has been round the world and back by the time her twenty fifth birthday rolls around. She spends it sitting with Mary in a mental hospital. But the madness has been all around Roisin this year.
It’s time for an update. Roisin is still with Jim. Just. The relationship has been a habit for a while and it’s a habit either Jim or Roisin will have to break soon. But this year has been extraordinary and it’s never quite the right time to break up even though a break up is inevitable. Roisin knows it. She just doesn’t quite have the strength, or purpose, or direction. If she can just hang on till she graduates next summer….
In the five years since Roisin met Jim a lot has changed. Unsurprisingly perhaps, she bailed on the art college thing. Spent a year or so mixing it with Jim and his ‘creative politicals’. She does a lot of reading and a lot of thinking, in between the long nights of the politics of music. The longer she is involved in it, the less involved she feels. She begins to think that it’s just another fashion statement, and Roisin has never really been one for fashion statements. And it seems you can’t be in the music scene without being in the drugs scene and Roisin doesn’t need reminders of that life.
While Roisin draws away inside herself, practical reality sees the miners sold down the river and Mrs Thatcher going from strength to strength. As she celebrates ten years in power, London becomes a boom town and everyone’s making mega bucks. The money begins to flow and capitalism begins to spiral out of control. For every upside there’s a downside, of course. Interest rates are rising and if you can’t keep up with the crowd, you’re into a spiral of debt that will end in serious tears. For all those who’ve never had it so good there are many more who have never had it so bad. It’s just that no one pays any attention to those people. Money is the really big drug in Thatcher’s Britain.
In the late 80’s Roisin still feels like she’s swimming against the tide and starts to develop an idea of what she wants to do with her life. It’s synthesised in 1987, the twentieth anniversary of Che’s death. That’s a tough time for Roisin.
She did tell Jim about Che being her father. She picked her moment. It might not have been the best one. Jim was pretty wasted and Roisin thinks that Jim thought it was a sort of metaphor – Jim’s big on metaphor. Anyway, it’s kind of accepted, or Roisin thinks it’s accepted in the private world Jim and she inhabit, that Che is her father and so on the anniversary itself they hold a private commemoration. Jim certainly knows that Che is important to Roisin but maybe he doesn’t actually believe her story. However, Jim is pragmatic, his philosophy is that you can believe what you like because belief and reality don’t ever coincide in any sensible way. Deep, huh?
So for her birthday Jim gets hold of some transcripts of speeches made by Fidel in Cuba on the twentieth anniversary and Roisin takes them very much to heart. This becomes the start of a great life change for her.
There’s a lot to read, and she reads herself into every sentence uttered by Fidel:
People like Che are essential, men and women who imitate him, who think like him, who act like him; men and women whose conduct resembles his when it comes to doing their duty in every little thing, every detail, every activity; in his attitude to work, his habit of teaching and educating by setting an example; his attitude of wanting to be first at everything, the first to volunteer for the most difficult task; the most self-sacrificing; the individual who gives his body and soul to a cause, the person who displays true solidarity, the person without a flaw, who doesn’t live any contradiction between what they say and what they do, between what they practice and what they preach; a man of thought and a man of action.
This speech convinces Roisin that she’d better shape up her life. Do something. She begins to feel that as Che’s daughter she might in some way carry on his legacy. And at twenty-three she believes she could do this on the world stage. Or at least a bigger stage than the one Jim and his mates inhabit. She looks at them again and sees armchair radicals. She’s beginning to see too many rich hippies. Too many who espouse radical theory, but with comfortable capitalist lifestyles.
She retreats into the writing of Fidel. She reads: Che would have been appalled if he’d been told that money was becoming people’s concern, their fundamental motivation. And the penny drops. Or a penny drops. Roisin decides she’s going to study Economics. So that she can understand the system she wants to beat.
So it is that in 1988 she enrols at North East London Polytechnic (who have an open policy towards mature students without the traditional qualifications) and begins a course in Economics. Of course the Economics is boring as hell but Roisin sticks with it. She’s constantly in conflict, though, because even though the Poly is more left-wing than many places, radical economic theory of the kind she’s interested in is not on the undergraduate economics syllabus in Thatcher’s Britain.
Real life provides the lessons for radical economics in the late 1980’s, represented by mandatory grant levels frozen in 1989 at £2,200. This is a forerunner of the abolition of grants and the introduction of loans – the free market coming home. For the moment, though, however radical the students are, they are all taking the Iron Lady’s shilling in the form of grant cheques. Their options will soon be more limited of course when in 1990 all full time students become ineligible for unemployment benefit and lose the right to income support and housing benefit. We’ll get them on their bikes and out to work.
This climate does breed economic radicals in theory of course but practicality dictates that the economists who prosper are the ones who embrace the system and Roisin just gets on everyone’s nerves with her constant criticisms of those using capitalist economic theory as a means to developing socialism.
She quotes Fidel’s comments on Che: ‘He was radically opposed to using and developing capitalist economic laws and concepts in building socialism.’ It meets deaf ears. For such statements Roisin is just labelled an oddball, someone to be left alone or ridiculed. Mainly she’s left alone because none of the students or even the lecturers want to get into economic theory arguments with Roisin. None of them are that interested in economics, after all. The students just want to get good jobs. The lecturers just want to keep their good jobs! Generally Roisin is just too much hard work for those around her. Too serious. You might even say she knows too much economic theory for her own, and everyone else’s, good. Only one lecturer, Mark, displays any interest in her but his interest has far reaching effects.
It’s a time of change all over and North London Poly is about to become the Polytechnic of East London. But Roisin is going to make a bigger move than from Stratford to Barking. She’s going way off the District Line. Her constant belly-aching to Mark about the shallow restrictiveness of the economic theory they are taught has resulted in him putting her forward for, and ultimately her getting a place on, an exchange programme. It’s a unique, ground-breaking exchange (for which read: no one else would want to do it). Roisin is going to enrol for a term at Peking Polytechnic – yes that’s Peking/Beijing, capital of China. She’s going to get the opportunity to study Chinese economic theory as her research project.
Although at forty-two Jim doesn’t really get excited as such, he’s excited about the prospect of a trip to China. While he won’t be able to get a visa for the whole time, he and Roisin decide that they’ll go out as soon as exams finish in late May and travel around China till Roisin’s language course starts at the poly in mid-July. She will then be there on her own from July till December, when she’ll be home in time for her birthday.
Roisin is excited. She feels like finally she’s getting a chance to do something, to experience something, to be something. She has read a lot about Che and China and thinks she’s going to be following in his footsteps, albeit in baby steps. It’s a chance, and Roisin hasn’t had a lot of positive chances in her life. It’s the beginning of something and she’s ready for a new beginning. She has no idea what it will be the beginning of, of course. We never do.
The only real problem is she’s not sure how to break it to Mary. Mary’s health is very fragile at the moment. Mary has embraced crack cocaine in the 1980’s as a means of ‘controlling’ her heroin habit. Unsurprisingly, it’s not successful. The only thing that keeps Mary out of prison is her mental health record, which means she spends regular stints in The Maudsley or Springfield. Mary is lucky. You think? Well, read the papers. Places like this are being closed down all over. Care in the community is the coming thing. The only care Mary finds in the community is people to supply her the wherewithal to chase the dragon. At a price, of course. Drugs and economics are firm bedfellows.
For Mary, the mental hospitals have become a revolving door but it’s only a matter of time before someone with a degree in social policy or some such decides she’s had her share of help and needs a short sharp shock, or something similar. Mary is on borrowed time. And she knows it.
When Roisin sees Mary in May, she’s in a particularly bad way. She’s about to be admitted for the third time that year. Roisin tells Mary she’s going away. Somewhere in the confused, disjointed conversation Corfu is mentioned. If questioned, neither Roisin nor Mary can remember who it was who said Corfu. It’s never going to be clear if Roisin says she is going to China and Mary hears Corfu, or if Mary says Corfu because she wants to go on holiday there or if Roisin says Corfu because Mary cries and complains that if Roisin is abroad there will be no one to help her and she’ll be left alone. And they’ll keep her in hospital if there’s no one to release her into the care of. Patrick is (how can we put it delicately) indisposed at Her Majesty’s pleasure throughout 1989 and 1990. No need to go into that one. He just got unlucky. He got caught. His mistake? He gave Mary as his alibi and Mary was in hospital at the time. Even the dimmest judge and jury could see past that lie.
However it happens, Mary is convinced that Roisin is going for a holiday in Corfu. Without her. Mary would refuse to be admitted if Roisin said she was off for six months in China. But Corfu for a fortnight gives Mary enough leverage of guilt to demand Roisin be back to be there for when she gets out of hospital. Roisin knows (and maybe Mary knows) that Mary isn’t going for a fortnight. She’s going for a stretch. Patrick may be out before Mary. This could be Mary’s last chance. So Roisin doesn’t feel quite so bad about the lie – if she tells it. It’s a confusing time for everyone.
Mary is admitted on May twenty-fourth and on May twenty-sixth Roisin and Jim head out for Beijing as it is now being called. By May twenty-ninth they are in Xi-an seeing the Terracotta Warriors and on the first of June they come back to Beijing, walking right into the middle of the Tiananmen Square protests. Which of course are impossible for Jim to resist. Plus, it will save them some money on a hotel room if they camp out in the Square. This is some real protest. Something to write home about.
Roisin is a bit more troubled than Jim about the whole thing. The protestors want democracy. Roisin doesn’t feel she knows enough about the Chinese system to agree that democracy is the answer to their problems. With all the protests going on around them, on the third of June, in the middle of Tiananmen Square, Roisin and Jim have a furious row about why they are in a pro-democracy rally when communism is a superior system to capitalism. The row ends up with Roisin storming off and booking into a hotel. A five-star hotel. It’s the only one she can get into as a Westerner. She has enough yuans to see her through till December, so one night in a hotel isn’t going to break her bank.
Consequently the communist sympathiser is holed up in the hotel which is a testament to encroaching capitalist values and the man accused of selling out to capitalism is in the middle of the Square which traditionally sees the biggest communist show of power on May Day bar none. Life is full of irony.
So it is, that watching CNN on satellite TV in her five-star hotel in Beijing just ten minutes from Tiananmen Square, Roisin spends the fourth of June 1989 watching the events unfold, wondering what’s happened to Jim. She tries to go down to the Square but there’s no way through, certainly not for a Western woman. She is bundled unceremoniously back to the hotel. Not for the first time in her life she feels powerless. And confused. And out of her depth. While the might of the Red Army is being concentrated elsewhere, there are still plenty of young soldiers left over to marshal the odd foreigner (tourists are still an alien concept to the urban Beijinger) back to where they should be. Without the basics of a common language, Roisin is powerless to protest. And she’s seen what happens when people who do speak the language protest, so she’s not feeling that committed to bravery.
Late at night there’s a knock on the door. She doesn’t know how he found her but it’s Jim. Behind him stand a couple of Red Army guards. They are younger than Patrick but with guns in their hands you don’t feel like pointing out that they aren’t wearing heavy boots and that their coats make them look like refugees rather than soldiers. In June 1989 Roisin learns first-hand that guns change everything. When the door closes Roisin doesn’t know whether to be angry, relieved, to cry or to scream. Jim looks a bit the worse for wear but swears it was just a result of the crush.
They spend the next day alone together in the gardens behind the Forbidden City. High on the hills you’d not even know that there was or had been anything untoward going on. Except now, even in the outdoors they don’t feel free to talk. There’s a sense of oppression in the very atmosphere. They decide to get out of Beijing. The Forbidden City is most definitely closed to them at the moment. Travel, which has previously been difficult, is now made pretty easy for them and they head off down South to Guilin and relative peace, to reflect on the realities of China.
Roisin is destined never to study economic theory in China. When they get back in time for her language course, on July ninth, she discovers her student visa has been revoked and she’s sent packing. She spends the autumn term of 1989 in the newly named Polytechnic of East London, not in the Far East of Beijing Polytechnic as planned. She never gets to see the Forbidden City from the inside. Fortunately for her, Mark has been headhunted by LSE, so she doesn’t have to face the embarrassment of having let him down. She certainly feels she’s let herself down, though. And Che.
It’s back to another autumn of the crush on the District Line tube and an increasing sense that the relationship she’s in is as doomed as the course at Beijing. Jim can tell the Tiananmen Square ‘story’ to anyone who is interested with passion and candour but Roisin can’t talk about her time in China to anyone. It has cut deeply into her sense of identity and her beliefs and she is struggling to come to terms with it all. She reads everything she can find about Che and China. But she realises that things have changed in twenty years. That London isn’t Cuba and that even if she is Che’s daughter, her life cannot be a mirror of his. She realises something that Che never knew – that the Cuban revolution was a one-off. That the world has changed. Not for the better. International revolution is a dream. That’s what killed Che, after all. His belief didn’t match external reality. Not then, not now.
When she first read Fidel’s appraisal of Che, He was very consistent in everything he did; he set an example in everything he did, she vowed to be like this herself. She wants to ‘be like Che’ as young Cubans are exhorted. But now, after Tiananmen, she has no idea how or what to do to achieve this. Constancy has vanished from her life.
Even Fidel’s statement, Success or failure is not what indicates whether a line is correct, is cold comfort to her now. She reads. And reads. And shuts herself off from the world, from Jim, from everything. She tries to lose herself in another reality. To find Che. But in 1989, no one knows where Che is. His body has never been found. There is no grave, no ‘remains’. Nothing. Fidel summed it up, in the world today, in which there is no specific place to go to pay tribute to Che’s remains, tribute is paid to him everywhere, and that is cold comfort.
Roisin’s tribute is going on in her mind. She begins to have dreams. One night, while lying next to Jim in bed, Roisin is transported to Cuba during the revolution. She is on a train, next to Che. They are hunting him down and it’s important that she keep close by him, to stop him from being shot. She has a gun. He is young and very handsome. He’s funny, witty but serious when he needs to be. Not full of his own importance. In her dream, Roisin lives through a week or ten days and gets to know her father so well that when she wakes she feels both an incredible sense of loss and an overpowering feeling of well-being that she has actually met and spent time with her dad.
For days afterwards the dream feels more real than anything that is going on around her in London in 1989. Eventually, though, like all dreams, it melts into a memory. And the memory of a dream or of reality end up indistinguishable over time. Only a feeling remains. The same feeling she used to get when she looked at Che’s face on the poster on her wall in Agamemnon Road all those years ago. An emotional connection she can do nothing about.
It is after this dream, sometime in December 1989, she re-reads Fidel’s statement, what we do is really the best homage we can pay Che, which seems to echo Che’s own statement, words that do not match actions are unimportant. Roisin first encountered these two statements some two years previously, indeed they set her on the path to studying Economics. They seem to mean something very different now. Roisin has lost confidence that she can change a world in which it’s so clear she is less important than an ant. Post-Tiananmen Square, Roisin realises she could have been killed without a thought, just for being in someone else’s quarrel, irrespective of what she believed. She is powerless on a world stage. So what homage can she pay? What can she do? She concludes that she has to take a smaller step She can’t change the world but maybe she can begin to understand her own place in it. She really has to try and get to the bottom of the story of Che and Mary.
So it is that on her twenty-fifth birthday Roisin sits down with Mary to try and talk about Che. It’s not going to be easy. Mary has been in hospital for six months now and the prescription drugs don’t seem to be doing her any more favours than the heroin that got her put there in the first place.
Roisin feels she’s struggling to get Mary to come back into her world, the real world, this world. Not least because she feels she’s losing a grip on that reality herself. But it’s important. She has to communicate. She has to find out the truth.
Roisin says, ‘Mum. I want to read you something.’
‘Is it something you’ve written?’
‘No mum, it’s written by Fidel Castro. About…’ She’s about to say ‘my dad’ but she doesn’t feel she can make that ownership statement now. ‘About Che Guevara.’
There’s a flicker in Mary’s otherwise dead eyes.
Roisin takes a deep breath and begins to read, For me it has been hard to accept the thought that Che is dead. I have dreamed many times – I dreamed I spoke with him, that he was alive. It’s a very special thing, a person whose death is hard to resign yourself to. What’s the reason? In my opinion it is because he has a permanent presence in everything.
He really lives on, almost as if his were a physical presence, with his ideas and deeds, with his example. If one imagines that Che is alive, that he is in action and that he never died, it’s not strange if one feels his presence not only in everyday life, but even in dreams. In the end we must reach the conclusion that to all intents and purposes in the life of our revolution, Che never died, and in the light of what has been done, he is more alive than ever, and is a more powerful opponent of imperialism than ever.
Roisin pauses. Tears are running down Mary’s face. She asks, ‘Is that how you feel, mum?’
For the first time Roisin thinks she might understand her mother. That Mary’s love for Che might just be the thing that has sent her into a grief so deep that it led to the spiral of drugs and mental illness from which she is powerless and unwilling now to return. What else is there for Mary in her life?
And sitting there, beside her mother, for a moment Roisin is beginning to put a context to her feeling of powerlessness. As a child she expected to feel powerless but as an adult she thought she could change things, that things would be different. Beijing showed her otherwise. That life is bigger. And doesn’t care. And that if you don’t know who you are, you’ll never become who you might be.
Mary’s tears fall and Roisin holds her, a physical closeness she can’t remember having since Patrick was born and she was about four years old, and Roisin says, ‘Mum, talk to me about it.’
It’s time for an update. Roisin is still with Jim. Just. The relationship has been a habit for a while and it’s a habit either Jim or Roisin will have to break soon. But this year has been extraordinary and it’s never quite the right time to break up even though a break up is inevitable. Roisin knows it. She just doesn’t quite have the strength, or purpose, or direction. If she can just hang on till she graduates next summer….
In the five years since Roisin met Jim a lot has changed. Unsurprisingly perhaps, she bailed on the art college thing. Spent a year or so mixing it with Jim and his ‘creative politicals’. She does a lot of reading and a lot of thinking, in between the long nights of the politics of music. The longer she is involved in it, the less involved she feels. She begins to think that it’s just another fashion statement, and Roisin has never really been one for fashion statements. And it seems you can’t be in the music scene without being in the drugs scene and Roisin doesn’t need reminders of that life.
While Roisin draws away inside herself, practical reality sees the miners sold down the river and Mrs Thatcher going from strength to strength. As she celebrates ten years in power, London becomes a boom town and everyone’s making mega bucks. The money begins to flow and capitalism begins to spiral out of control. For every upside there’s a downside, of course. Interest rates are rising and if you can’t keep up with the crowd, you’re into a spiral of debt that will end in serious tears. For all those who’ve never had it so good there are many more who have never had it so bad. It’s just that no one pays any attention to those people. Money is the really big drug in Thatcher’s Britain.
In the late 80’s Roisin still feels like she’s swimming against the tide and starts to develop an idea of what she wants to do with her life. It’s synthesised in 1987, the twentieth anniversary of Che’s death. That’s a tough time for Roisin.
She did tell Jim about Che being her father. She picked her moment. It might not have been the best one. Jim was pretty wasted and Roisin thinks that Jim thought it was a sort of metaphor – Jim’s big on metaphor. Anyway, it’s kind of accepted, or Roisin thinks it’s accepted in the private world Jim and she inhabit, that Che is her father and so on the anniversary itself they hold a private commemoration. Jim certainly knows that Che is important to Roisin but maybe he doesn’t actually believe her story. However, Jim is pragmatic, his philosophy is that you can believe what you like because belief and reality don’t ever coincide in any sensible way. Deep, huh?
So for her birthday Jim gets hold of some transcripts of speeches made by Fidel in Cuba on the twentieth anniversary and Roisin takes them very much to heart. This becomes the start of a great life change for her.
There’s a lot to read, and she reads herself into every sentence uttered by Fidel:
People like Che are essential, men and women who imitate him, who think like him, who act like him; men and women whose conduct resembles his when it comes to doing their duty in every little thing, every detail, every activity; in his attitude to work, his habit of teaching and educating by setting an example; his attitude of wanting to be first at everything, the first to volunteer for the most difficult task; the most self-sacrificing; the individual who gives his body and soul to a cause, the person who displays true solidarity, the person without a flaw, who doesn’t live any contradiction between what they say and what they do, between what they practice and what they preach; a man of thought and a man of action.
This speech convinces Roisin that she’d better shape up her life. Do something. She begins to feel that as Che’s daughter she might in some way carry on his legacy. And at twenty-three she believes she could do this on the world stage. Or at least a bigger stage than the one Jim and his mates inhabit. She looks at them again and sees armchair radicals. She’s beginning to see too many rich hippies. Too many who espouse radical theory, but with comfortable capitalist lifestyles.
She retreats into the writing of Fidel. She reads: Che would have been appalled if he’d been told that money was becoming people’s concern, their fundamental motivation. And the penny drops. Or a penny drops. Roisin decides she’s going to study Economics. So that she can understand the system she wants to beat.
So it is that in 1988 she enrols at North East London Polytechnic (who have an open policy towards mature students without the traditional qualifications) and begins a course in Economics. Of course the Economics is boring as hell but Roisin sticks with it. She’s constantly in conflict, though, because even though the Poly is more left-wing than many places, radical economic theory of the kind she’s interested in is not on the undergraduate economics syllabus in Thatcher’s Britain.
Real life provides the lessons for radical economics in the late 1980’s, represented by mandatory grant levels frozen in 1989 at £2,200. This is a forerunner of the abolition of grants and the introduction of loans – the free market coming home. For the moment, though, however radical the students are, they are all taking the Iron Lady’s shilling in the form of grant cheques. Their options will soon be more limited of course when in 1990 all full time students become ineligible for unemployment benefit and lose the right to income support and housing benefit. We’ll get them on their bikes and out to work.
This climate does breed economic radicals in theory of course but practicality dictates that the economists who prosper are the ones who embrace the system and Roisin just gets on everyone’s nerves with her constant criticisms of those using capitalist economic theory as a means to developing socialism.
She quotes Fidel’s comments on Che: ‘He was radically opposed to using and developing capitalist economic laws and concepts in building socialism.’ It meets deaf ears. For such statements Roisin is just labelled an oddball, someone to be left alone or ridiculed. Mainly she’s left alone because none of the students or even the lecturers want to get into economic theory arguments with Roisin. None of them are that interested in economics, after all. The students just want to get good jobs. The lecturers just want to keep their good jobs! Generally Roisin is just too much hard work for those around her. Too serious. You might even say she knows too much economic theory for her own, and everyone else’s, good. Only one lecturer, Mark, displays any interest in her but his interest has far reaching effects.
It’s a time of change all over and North London Poly is about to become the Polytechnic of East London. But Roisin is going to make a bigger move than from Stratford to Barking. She’s going way off the District Line. Her constant belly-aching to Mark about the shallow restrictiveness of the economic theory they are taught has resulted in him putting her forward for, and ultimately her getting a place on, an exchange programme. It’s a unique, ground-breaking exchange (for which read: no one else would want to do it). Roisin is going to enrol for a term at Peking Polytechnic – yes that’s Peking/Beijing, capital of China. She’s going to get the opportunity to study Chinese economic theory as her research project.
Although at forty-two Jim doesn’t really get excited as such, he’s excited about the prospect of a trip to China. While he won’t be able to get a visa for the whole time, he and Roisin decide that they’ll go out as soon as exams finish in late May and travel around China till Roisin’s language course starts at the poly in mid-July. She will then be there on her own from July till December, when she’ll be home in time for her birthday.
Roisin is excited. She feels like finally she’s getting a chance to do something, to experience something, to be something. She has read a lot about Che and China and thinks she’s going to be following in his footsteps, albeit in baby steps. It’s a chance, and Roisin hasn’t had a lot of positive chances in her life. It’s the beginning of something and she’s ready for a new beginning. She has no idea what it will be the beginning of, of course. We never do.
The only real problem is she’s not sure how to break it to Mary. Mary’s health is very fragile at the moment. Mary has embraced crack cocaine in the 1980’s as a means of ‘controlling’ her heroin habit. Unsurprisingly, it’s not successful. The only thing that keeps Mary out of prison is her mental health record, which means she spends regular stints in The Maudsley or Springfield. Mary is lucky. You think? Well, read the papers. Places like this are being closed down all over. Care in the community is the coming thing. The only care Mary finds in the community is people to supply her the wherewithal to chase the dragon. At a price, of course. Drugs and economics are firm bedfellows.
For Mary, the mental hospitals have become a revolving door but it’s only a matter of time before someone with a degree in social policy or some such decides she’s had her share of help and needs a short sharp shock, or something similar. Mary is on borrowed time. And she knows it.
When Roisin sees Mary in May, she’s in a particularly bad way. She’s about to be admitted for the third time that year. Roisin tells Mary she’s going away. Somewhere in the confused, disjointed conversation Corfu is mentioned. If questioned, neither Roisin nor Mary can remember who it was who said Corfu. It’s never going to be clear if Roisin says she is going to China and Mary hears Corfu, or if Mary says Corfu because she wants to go on holiday there or if Roisin says Corfu because Mary cries and complains that if Roisin is abroad there will be no one to help her and she’ll be left alone. And they’ll keep her in hospital if there’s no one to release her into the care of. Patrick is (how can we put it delicately) indisposed at Her Majesty’s pleasure throughout 1989 and 1990. No need to go into that one. He just got unlucky. He got caught. His mistake? He gave Mary as his alibi and Mary was in hospital at the time. Even the dimmest judge and jury could see past that lie.
However it happens, Mary is convinced that Roisin is going for a holiday in Corfu. Without her. Mary would refuse to be admitted if Roisin said she was off for six months in China. But Corfu for a fortnight gives Mary enough leverage of guilt to demand Roisin be back to be there for when she gets out of hospital. Roisin knows (and maybe Mary knows) that Mary isn’t going for a fortnight. She’s going for a stretch. Patrick may be out before Mary. This could be Mary’s last chance. So Roisin doesn’t feel quite so bad about the lie – if she tells it. It’s a confusing time for everyone.
Mary is admitted on May twenty-fourth and on May twenty-sixth Roisin and Jim head out for Beijing as it is now being called. By May twenty-ninth they are in Xi-an seeing the Terracotta Warriors and on the first of June they come back to Beijing, walking right into the middle of the Tiananmen Square protests. Which of course are impossible for Jim to resist. Plus, it will save them some money on a hotel room if they camp out in the Square. This is some real protest. Something to write home about.
Roisin is a bit more troubled than Jim about the whole thing. The protestors want democracy. Roisin doesn’t feel she knows enough about the Chinese system to agree that democracy is the answer to their problems. With all the protests going on around them, on the third of June, in the middle of Tiananmen Square, Roisin and Jim have a furious row about why they are in a pro-democracy rally when communism is a superior system to capitalism. The row ends up with Roisin storming off and booking into a hotel. A five-star hotel. It’s the only one she can get into as a Westerner. She has enough yuans to see her through till December, so one night in a hotel isn’t going to break her bank.
Consequently the communist sympathiser is holed up in the hotel which is a testament to encroaching capitalist values and the man accused of selling out to capitalism is in the middle of the Square which traditionally sees the biggest communist show of power on May Day bar none. Life is full of irony.
So it is, that watching CNN on satellite TV in her five-star hotel in Beijing just ten minutes from Tiananmen Square, Roisin spends the fourth of June 1989 watching the events unfold, wondering what’s happened to Jim. She tries to go down to the Square but there’s no way through, certainly not for a Western woman. She is bundled unceremoniously back to the hotel. Not for the first time in her life she feels powerless. And confused. And out of her depth. While the might of the Red Army is being concentrated elsewhere, there are still plenty of young soldiers left over to marshal the odd foreigner (tourists are still an alien concept to the urban Beijinger) back to where they should be. Without the basics of a common language, Roisin is powerless to protest. And she’s seen what happens when people who do speak the language protest, so she’s not feeling that committed to bravery.
Late at night there’s a knock on the door. She doesn’t know how he found her but it’s Jim. Behind him stand a couple of Red Army guards. They are younger than Patrick but with guns in their hands you don’t feel like pointing out that they aren’t wearing heavy boots and that their coats make them look like refugees rather than soldiers. In June 1989 Roisin learns first-hand that guns change everything. When the door closes Roisin doesn’t know whether to be angry, relieved, to cry or to scream. Jim looks a bit the worse for wear but swears it was just a result of the crush.
They spend the next day alone together in the gardens behind the Forbidden City. High on the hills you’d not even know that there was or had been anything untoward going on. Except now, even in the outdoors they don’t feel free to talk. There’s a sense of oppression in the very atmosphere. They decide to get out of Beijing. The Forbidden City is most definitely closed to them at the moment. Travel, which has previously been difficult, is now made pretty easy for them and they head off down South to Guilin and relative peace, to reflect on the realities of China.
Roisin is destined never to study economic theory in China. When they get back in time for her language course, on July ninth, she discovers her student visa has been revoked and she’s sent packing. She spends the autumn term of 1989 in the newly named Polytechnic of East London, not in the Far East of Beijing Polytechnic as planned. She never gets to see the Forbidden City from the inside. Fortunately for her, Mark has been headhunted by LSE, so she doesn’t have to face the embarrassment of having let him down. She certainly feels she’s let herself down, though. And Che.
It’s back to another autumn of the crush on the District Line tube and an increasing sense that the relationship she’s in is as doomed as the course at Beijing. Jim can tell the Tiananmen Square ‘story’ to anyone who is interested with passion and candour but Roisin can’t talk about her time in China to anyone. It has cut deeply into her sense of identity and her beliefs and she is struggling to come to terms with it all. She reads everything she can find about Che and China. But she realises that things have changed in twenty years. That London isn’t Cuba and that even if she is Che’s daughter, her life cannot be a mirror of his. She realises something that Che never knew – that the Cuban revolution was a one-off. That the world has changed. Not for the better. International revolution is a dream. That’s what killed Che, after all. His belief didn’t match external reality. Not then, not now.
When she first read Fidel’s appraisal of Che, He was very consistent in everything he did; he set an example in everything he did, she vowed to be like this herself. She wants to ‘be like Che’ as young Cubans are exhorted. But now, after Tiananmen, she has no idea how or what to do to achieve this. Constancy has vanished from her life.
Even Fidel’s statement, Success or failure is not what indicates whether a line is correct, is cold comfort to her now. She reads. And reads. And shuts herself off from the world, from Jim, from everything. She tries to lose herself in another reality. To find Che. But in 1989, no one knows where Che is. His body has never been found. There is no grave, no ‘remains’. Nothing. Fidel summed it up, in the world today, in which there is no specific place to go to pay tribute to Che’s remains, tribute is paid to him everywhere, and that is cold comfort.
Roisin’s tribute is going on in her mind. She begins to have dreams. One night, while lying next to Jim in bed, Roisin is transported to Cuba during the revolution. She is on a train, next to Che. They are hunting him down and it’s important that she keep close by him, to stop him from being shot. She has a gun. He is young and very handsome. He’s funny, witty but serious when he needs to be. Not full of his own importance. In her dream, Roisin lives through a week or ten days and gets to know her father so well that when she wakes she feels both an incredible sense of loss and an overpowering feeling of well-being that she has actually met and spent time with her dad.
For days afterwards the dream feels more real than anything that is going on around her in London in 1989. Eventually, though, like all dreams, it melts into a memory. And the memory of a dream or of reality end up indistinguishable over time. Only a feeling remains. The same feeling she used to get when she looked at Che’s face on the poster on her wall in Agamemnon Road all those years ago. An emotional connection she can do nothing about.
It is after this dream, sometime in December 1989, she re-reads Fidel’s statement, what we do is really the best homage we can pay Che, which seems to echo Che’s own statement, words that do not match actions are unimportant. Roisin first encountered these two statements some two years previously, indeed they set her on the path to studying Economics. They seem to mean something very different now. Roisin has lost confidence that she can change a world in which it’s so clear she is less important than an ant. Post-Tiananmen Square, Roisin realises she could have been killed without a thought, just for being in someone else’s quarrel, irrespective of what she believed. She is powerless on a world stage. So what homage can she pay? What can she do? She concludes that she has to take a smaller step She can’t change the world but maybe she can begin to understand her own place in it. She really has to try and get to the bottom of the story of Che and Mary.
So it is that on her twenty-fifth birthday Roisin sits down with Mary to try and talk about Che. It’s not going to be easy. Mary has been in hospital for six months now and the prescription drugs don’t seem to be doing her any more favours than the heroin that got her put there in the first place.
Roisin feels she’s struggling to get Mary to come back into her world, the real world, this world. Not least because she feels she’s losing a grip on that reality herself. But it’s important. She has to communicate. She has to find out the truth.
Roisin says, ‘Mum. I want to read you something.’
‘Is it something you’ve written?’
‘No mum, it’s written by Fidel Castro. About…’ She’s about to say ‘my dad’ but she doesn’t feel she can make that ownership statement now. ‘About Che Guevara.’
There’s a flicker in Mary’s otherwise dead eyes.
Roisin takes a deep breath and begins to read, For me it has been hard to accept the thought that Che is dead. I have dreamed many times – I dreamed I spoke with him, that he was alive. It’s a very special thing, a person whose death is hard to resign yourself to. What’s the reason? In my opinion it is because he has a permanent presence in everything.
He really lives on, almost as if his were a physical presence, with his ideas and deeds, with his example. If one imagines that Che is alive, that he is in action and that he never died, it’s not strange if one feels his presence not only in everyday life, but even in dreams. In the end we must reach the conclusion that to all intents and purposes in the life of our revolution, Che never died, and in the light of what has been done, he is more alive than ever, and is a more powerful opponent of imperialism than ever.
Roisin pauses. Tears are running down Mary’s face. She asks, ‘Is that how you feel, mum?’
For the first time Roisin thinks she might understand her mother. That Mary’s love for Che might just be the thing that has sent her into a grief so deep that it led to the spiral of drugs and mental illness from which she is powerless and unwilling now to return. What else is there for Mary in her life?
And sitting there, beside her mother, for a moment Roisin is beginning to put a context to her feeling of powerlessness. As a child she expected to feel powerless but as an adult she thought she could change things, that things would be different. Beijing showed her otherwise. That life is bigger. And doesn’t care. And that if you don’t know who you are, you’ll never become who you might be.
Mary’s tears fall and Roisin holds her, a physical closeness she can’t remember having since Patrick was born and she was about four years old, and Roisin says, ‘Mum, talk to me about it.’
About the Author
Cally Phillips has written fiction and drama in English and Scots, much of which is published through HoAmPresst. She also currently works as editor for Ayton Publishing Limited and runs a number of online projects, including The Galloway Raiders, which is the online hub for Scots writer S. R. Crockett. Her latest project to hit the virtual shelves is the #tobelikeche serial, which started in October 2016.
For the archive of Cally’s fiction and drama, follow this link.
For the archive of Cally’s fiction and drama, follow this link.