TERRY

The number 15 bus from Whitechapel to Aldgate stopped running at twenty past nine, and Terry Clough was standing at the stop on Commercial Road with the rain starting to come down sideways, the kind of rain that found the gap between your collar and your neck no matter how you hunched. He had four pounds and thirty-seven pence in the pocket of a jacket that had belonged to his brother-in-law, a jacket that still carried the coal dust in its seams even though the pit at Cortonwood had been closed since March and the brother-in-law had gone to Scotland to work on the rigs. The bus shelter had been vandalized, the plastic panels kicked out, the timetable board showing a route map for the summer of 1983, the summer before the strike, before the year that lasted thirteen months and cost him everything: his job, his marriage, the house on Coronation Street that the Coal Board had wanted back, the certainty that a man who worked with his hands would always find work for his hands to do.

He walked east along Whitechapel Road past the closed stalls of the market, past the Royal London Hospital where the lights in the upper windows were the orange of sodium and the fluorescence of the wards, past the boarded-up front of the Lord Rodney's Head pub that had been closed for two years and spray-painted with the words CLOSED BY THATCHER in letters two feet high, and turned left onto Brick Lane where the curry houses were still open, their windows fogged with steam from the kitchens, their doorways exhaling the smell of cumin and turmeric and cardamom into the wet air. He walked past the Tayyab, past the Clifton, past the Aladin where the menu board outside listed chicken tikka masala for two pounds fifty and a pint of Kingfisher for a pound ten, and at the corner of Bethnal Green Road he stopped in front of number 117, the basement door below a launderette that had a hand-painted sign in the window reading EAST END COMMUNITY ADVICE CENTRE — WALK IN — ALL WELCOME. A second sign, this one handwritten on a piece of cardboard torn from a shipping box, said ARTIE'S — COME IN FOR A CUPPA. The cardboard was damp from the rain and the letters were running but the word ARTIE'S was still legible because it had been written in permanent marker, the ink soaking through the cardboard's corrugation in a way that made the apostrophe bleed into the S.

On the pavement outside number 117, two white Ford Transit vans were parked at angles that blocked the traffic lane, their back doors open, their liveries reading IMMIGRATION SERVICE in blue letters on a white ground, and on the pavement between the vans and the basement door, six men in dark coats were standing, and among them, with his hands in plastic restraints behind his back, was Arthur Onwuka, whose name on the sign had been written in the same permanent marker as the word WELCOME on the window above.

Terry Clough watched the men in dark coats put Arthur Onwuka into the back of the first Ford Transit. The back doors closed with a sound like a pit cage slamming shut, the same sound he had heard at the Cortonwood number three shaft every morning for seventeen years until the morning of March 5, 1984, when the cage had stayed at the surface and the shift had stayed in the yard and the pickets had started forming at the gate, and what he thought, standing on the pavement on Brick Lane in the rain in November of 1985, was that the same thing was happening here, to Artie, that had happened to every man he had stood beside on the picket line: the state had arrived in Ford Transits and the state had decided who got to stay and who got to go, and the difference between a pit closure and an immigration raid was a difference of paperwork but not of power, not of the way the men in dark coats looked through you like you were already gone, like the decision had been made before the van arrived, like the cuffs and the door slam were just the paperwork catching up with what the paperwork had decided three months earlier in some office where no one had ever seen Artie's face or heard him say "sit down, mate, let's have a look at your form" or watched him walk a woman from the Boundary Estate through the housing office labyrinth at Bethnal Green Town Hall.

The rain was getting into the collar of the brother-in-law's jacket. The coal dust in the seams was turning to a thin gray paste against his neck. He stood on the pavement until the Transit vans pulled away, their diesel exhaust mixing with the curry steam and the rain, and then he walked to the phone box on the corner of Fournier Street, a red BT kiosk with half its glass panels replaced by plywood and a receiver that smelled of urine and stale tobacco, and he dialed the number for the West London strike support office, a number he had not dialed in eight months, and when a voice answered he said, "They've taken Artie," and the voice said, "Who's this?" and he said, "Terry Clough, Cortonwood, I was on the picket with you at Orgreave," and the voice was quiet and then said, "Right. I'll put the word out."

He hung up the receiver. The coin mechanism did not register the call. His four pence sat in the slot. He left it there for the next person.

NASEEM

Naseem Begum was wiping down table six in the back corner of the Shalamar Tandoori when the white vans pulled up. She saw them through the front window, which was steamed on the inside from the kitchen and streaked on the outside from the rain, so that the white of the vans was a blur of light that could have been an ambulance or a delivery lorry or the white Volkswagen Golf that her uncle Mohammed drove when he went to the cash and carry in Leyton on Thursday mornings. She saw the blur of the white vans stop outside number 117, directly opposite the Shalamar's front door, and she stopped wiping table six with the grey cloth that had started the shift as pale blue and would end the shift as the colour of garam masala and burnt ghee, and she watched the doors of the van open and the men in dark coats spill out onto the pavement like liquid, like the dal that had boiled over on the stove at four o'clock because her cousin Farouk had turned the flame too high and then gone out back to smoke a Benson and Hedges behind the kitchen bins.

She knew Artie. Everyone on Brick Lane knew Artie. He came into the Shalamar every Tuesday for the lunch special, chicken bhuna with an extra naan, and he always paid in coins, stacking the pound pieces in towers of five on the Formica tabletop, and he always left a tip of exactly fifteen pence regardless of the total, and he always said "give my regards to your uncle" even though her uncle Mohammed did not approve of Artie, did not approve of the way Artie helped the Bengali families fill out their housing forms, did not approve of the way Artie's advice centre had a sign in the window in Bengali script that Naseem had painted herself on a Sunday afternoon in September using a brush from the hardware shop on Bethnal Green Road that cost thirty-five pence and paint from a tin of white gloss that Artie had found in the basement when he first rented the space. "That man draws attention," her uncle had said, and Naseem had not answered because to answer would have been to disagree and to disagree would have been to invite a lecture about the immigration officer who had visited the Shalamar in the spring of 1984 and asked to see the papers of every employee, and the papers of Naseem's father had been in order but the papers of her cousin Farouk had not, and Farouk had spent two nights in the detention centre at Harmondsworth before a solicitor from the Law Centre on Whitechapel Road had sorted it out, a solicitor whose number Artie had given them.

She watched the men in dark coats bring Artie up the basement stairs. He was not struggling. His face was calm, calmer than she had ever seen it when he was sitting at table six with the towers of pound coins and the fifteen pence tip and the bhuna that was always too spicy because the chef added extra green chilies when Artie came in, not out of malice but out of a sense that a man like Artie, a large man with a large laugh and hands that gestured in circles when he talked, a man like that needed extra heat, needed the chilies to match the energy that came off him like the steam from the tandoor. His face was calm but his eyes were moving, scanning the street, scanning the windows of the Shalamar, and for a moment Naseem thought his eyes met hers through the steamed glass, through the rain, through the space of twenty feet of wet pavement, and in that moment she felt what she had felt on the morning the immigration officer had come to the Shalamar, the cold in the stomach that was not fear of a specific thing but fear of what the thing represented, the knowledge that the line between the person who was taken and the person who was not taken was a line drawn by someone else, somewhere else, for reasons that were not explained to the people who stood on either side of it.

She went to the back of the restaurant and told her uncle what she had seen. Her uncle was in the kitchen stirring a pot of lamb karahi with a long wooden spoon that had been his father's, brought from Sylhet in 1962 on a BOAC flight that had taken thirty-one hours with stops in Karachi and Cairo and Rome, and her uncle did not stop stirring. "This is what happens," he said, and Naseem waited for him to finish the sentence, but he did not finish it, and after a silence that lasted the length of time it took the lamb karahi to come to a simmer, she understood that the sentence was finished, that "this is what happens" was the whole thing, that there was nothing after it, no explanation, no resolution, just the stirring of the spoon and the steam from the pot and the knowledge that Artie's chair at table six would be empty on Tuesday and the Tuesday after that and the Tuesday after that, and that the line had moved, and that she did not know which side of it she stood on, and that no one would tell her until the white vans pulled up outside the Shalamar's door and the men in dark coats came in through the steam.

SANDRA

Sandra Bates was in the queue at the DHSS office on Vallance Road when the news reached her. She had been in the queue since nine-fifteen, standing on the grey linoleum floor in a line that stretched from the counter to the door and back again like a snake that had forgotten which end was its head and which its tail. The woman in front of her had a baby in a pushchair with one wheel missing, a condition that caused the pushchair to list to the left at an angle of approximately fifteen degrees, and the baby's face was red from crying and the woman's face was grey from not crying, and Sandra knew that look because she had worn it herself for three months after the council put her and the kids in the temporary housing on the Boundary Estate, a flat on the seventh floor with a lift that worked on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Tuesday was the day she had her appointment at the housing office, so the lift worked when it needed to and not when she needed it, and the difference between those two things was the difference between living in the flat and living anywhere else.

The news came through a man who came in from the street, a man she recognized from the launderette on Brick Lane, a man whose name she did not know but whose face was familiar in the way that faces in the launderette were familiar, the way you recognized someone because you had seen them folding sheets at nine in the morning on a Wednesday or because you had heard them drop a pound coin into the dryer and curse when the machine ate it without starting. The man said, loudly, to the queue in general, "They've only gone and taken Artie, the bastards have taken Artie from the centre," and the word "taken" traveled down the queue from person to person like a relay, mutating as it went: "taken" became "arrested" became "deported" became "the advice centre is closed" became "they're shutting down the whole of Brick Lane," and by the time the mutation reached Sandra at position fourteen in the queue, the information was no longer information but a feeling, and the feeling was that the one person who had ever helped her fill out a housing form without looking at his watch, the one person who had watched her two kids for an hour on a Thursday afternoon while she went to the doctor for the cough that had lasted six weeks and turned out to be nothing, the one person who had written a letter to the council in handwriting that was entirely capital letters because he had taught himself to write as an adult and capitals were the only letters he trusted, that person was gone, and the queue she was standing in was just a queue, and the woman at the counter was just a woman at a counter, and the form she was holding in her hand, form B47, supplementary housing benefit claim, page three of four, was just a form, and there was no one left who could tell her which box to tick, which section to skip, which lie to tell to make the system work for her instead of against her.

She left the queue. The woman with the pushchair watched her go. The baby had stopped crying. The baby was looking at the grey linoleum floor with an expression that contained no expectation, no disappointment, only the blank attention of someone who had not yet learned that the floor was the wrong thing to look at, that you should look at the counter, at the woman behind the counter, at the form in your hand, at anything but the floor, because the floor was where you ended up when there was nowhere else to look, and Sandra Bates had been looking at the floor for three years and she would not look at it anymore, not today, not without Artie to tell her that the floor was just a floor and that the queue was just a queue and that the form was just a piece of paper and that she was a person, a mother, a woman with two children who needed a flat with a working lift on all seven days of the week, and that this was not too much to ask, and that the system could be made to understand this if you knew which box to tick.

The pavement outside the DHSS was wetter than the linoleum inside had been. Her shoes were the trainers she had bought at the market on Petticoat Lane for two pounds, the soles worn through at the heels, the laces replaced with string from a package of mince that she had bought at the butcher on Cheshire Street for forty-five pence. The water came through the holes in the soles and she did not feel it. She was walking toward Brick Lane. She did not know why she was walking toward Brick Lane. The advice centre would be closed. The launderette would be open but Artie would not be in it, would not be sitting behind the desk made of a door laid across two filing cabinets, would not be waving at her through the glass partition that separated the washing machines from the advice desk, and she was walking toward it anyway, walking toward it the way she had walked toward the colliery after her father died in the Houghton Main pit in 1971, walking toward the place where the thing had happened because to walk anywhere else would be to admit that the thing had happened, and she was not ready to admit that, not yet, not with the rain soaking through the string in her shoelaces and the cotton of her jacket, not with the children at school and the form in her bag and the queue she had abandoned still winding its slow way along the grey linoleum floor of the office where nothing was ever decided and everything was always postponed.

RAZOR

Michael Kent, known to the forty-seven regular listeners of Radio Free Bethnal Green as Razor, was on the roof of the Tredegar House tower block in Globe Town at the moment the first Transit van pulled up on Brick Lane. He was two miles away as the crow flew, or would have been if crows flew over Globe Town, which they did not, the crows having abandoned the East End for the parks of Westminster and the gardens of Hampstead sometime in the late 1970s, a migration pattern that Razor had noted in a broadcast on the third of March and that three listeners had called in to confirm, one of them claiming to have seen the last crow leave Victoria Park on a Tuesday afternoon in September of 1980, a claim that Razor had not verified but had repeated on air because the point was not whether the crow had actually left on a Tuesday in September of 1980 but whether the listeners believed it had, and belief was the only currency that mattered in pirate radio, the only thing that separated Radio Free Bethnal Green from the noise on the FM dial, the static and the pop songs and the voice of Maggie Thatcher on Radio 4 saying that there was no alternative, a phrase that Razor had turned into a jingle that played every hour on the hour, seven notes on a Casio keyboard, the voice of Margaret Thatcher pitch-shifted down to a growl, NO ALTERNATIVE, NO ALTERNATIVE, followed by Razor's own voice, pitched up, saying, THERE'S ALWAYS AN ALTERNATIVE, THIS IS RADIO FREE BETHNAL GREEN, and then a blast of the Clash, London Calling, the opening riff that made the aerial on the roof vibrate at a frequency that Razor could feel in his fillings.

The transmitter was a home-built rig assembled from components purchased at the electronics shop on Roman Road, its heart a crystal oscillator that had come out of a broken taxi radio, its antenna a length of copper pipe salvaged from a skip behind the gas works on Old Ford Road. The mixing desk was a Realistic four-channel model from Tandy, its faders scarred with cigarette burns, its input jacks held in place with Blu-Tack. The turntable was a Technics SL-1200 on semi-permanent loan from a DJ who had owed Razor a favour since the night they ran the pirate broadcast from the top of the Ronan Point tower, the one that had collapsed in 1968 and been rebuilt, the one that everyone in Newham said was haunted by the four people who had died, and Razor had broadcast from its roof for six hours on Halloween of 1983 to prove that the only ghosts in Ronan Point were the ghosts of the people the council had forgotten.

His phone, a rotary-dial model in cream plastic bolted to the wall of the flat on the fourteenth floor where his mother still lived, was connected to the transmitter shack on the roof by an extension cord that ran up fourteen flights of stairs, through a fire door that had been propped open with a brick since 1982, and across the roof to the lean-to shed that Razor had built from corrugated iron sheets liberated from a construction site on the Isle of Dogs. The phone rang at eleven minutes past eleven, and the voice on the other end was Terry Clough, whose name Razor knew because Terry had called the show six times since arriving in London, requesting songs by the Pogues and Billy Bragg and once, memorably, the entire side two of Arthur Scargill's speech to the TUC conference, which Razor had played in full and which had generated seventeen complaint calls in twelve minutes, a station record.

"They've taken Artie," Terry said, and Razor said, "Who's this, who's taken who, what are you talking about," and Terry said, "Artie, the advice centre, Brick Lane, the bloody immigration, they've put him in a van," and Razor said, "How long ago," and Terry said, "Twenty minutes, I'm at the phone box on Fournier Street," and Razor said, "Stay there," and hung up.

He put on a record, a twelve-inch single of Ghost Town by the Specials, which ran for six minutes and two seconds at thirty-three and a third revolutions per minute, and during those six minutes and two seconds he wrote down on the back of a flyer for a benefit gig at the Hackney Empire the words that he would say when the record ended: the time of the raid, the location, the name of the man who had been taken, and the phone number for the immigration detention hotline that Artie himself had given Razor six months earlier with the instruction to "only use this if something happens to me," an instruction that Razor had laughed off at the time because nothing ever happened to Artie, Artie was the thing that happened to other people, Artie was the center, the hub, the node in the network that made the network hold together, and if Artie could be taken then the network was not a network at all but a collection of points in space with nothing connecting them, particles floating free, and the only thing that could hold them together now was the signal, the broadcast, the voice coming through the copper pipe antenna into the FM band at one hundred and four point three megahertz, the frequency that Razor had chosen because it sat between Capital Radio and Radio One in a gap that the regulators had not yet filled, a gap that could be filled with anything, with music or with speech or with silence or with the voice of a man speaking six words into a telephone handset in a phone box on Fournier Street, six words that were not information but a call to gather, a call to refuse, a call to fill the gap that Artie had left in the network and in the air and in the lives of forty-seven people who tuned in every night at eleven to hear a voice say, "This is Razor, and you're listening to Radio Free Bethnal Green, and tonight we have some news, and the news is that they have taken one of our own."

GEORGE

George Abbott watched the raid from the window of the Duke of Wellington on the corner of Bethnal Green Road and Vallance Road, a pub in which he had been drinking since May of 1950, when he had walked through the door at the age of twenty-three with his first week's wages from the West India Docks in his pocket, a sum of seven pounds and twelve shillings, of which three shillings had bought him three pints of bitter, a meat pie, and the company of men who had loaded and unloaded the ships of the Port of London since before the Blitz, since before the General Strike, since before the first war, men whose fathers had been dockers and whose grandfathers had been lightermen on the Thames, and who had welcomed George Abbott into their company with a nod and a pint and a silence that meant more than any words the union organizer had spoken at the hiring hall that morning.

Thirty-five years later, on the afternoon of November 8, 1985, George Abbott was one of four men in the public bar of the Duke of Wellington. The other three were pensioners whose names he had known for decades and whose conversations had repeated themselves so often that he could recite the day's dialogue before it was spoken: the weather, the football, the price of a pint, the state of the country, the woman on the television who was closing the pits and selling the docks and breaking the unions and calling it freedom. The pub's windows looked out onto Bethnal Green Road, and through the rain-streaked glass George Abbott could see the white Transit vans pull up outside number 117, could see the men in dark coats descend the basement stairs, could see the door to the basement open and the man inside come out with his hands behind his back, walking the way a docker walks when the foreman tells him the ship has been moved to another berth and his gang is not needed, walking with the dignity of a man who knows that the work he did was good work and that the work has stopped for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of his labour.

George Abbott knew Artie in the way that men who live in the same neighbourhood for thirty-five years know each other: through the accumulation of small moments, nods in the street, conversations in the launderette while waiting for the spin cycle to finish, a shared table at the caff on Vallance Road where the tea was strong and the bacon was fried in lard that had been in the same pan since 1972. He knew that Artie was Nigerian. He knew that Artie's father had come to London in 1952 and worked on the railways. He knew that Artie had been born in St Bartholomew's Hospital in the summer of 1953, the summer of the Coronation, the summer when every street in the East End had hung bunting and every pub had put a television in the saloon bar and every docker had raised a glass to the young queen and then gone back to work on Monday morning for the same wages, the same hours, the same foreman, the same ship. He knew these things not because Artie had told him but because he had been alive in the East End for fifty-eight years and had absorbed the knowledge of his neighbours the way the Docklands mud absorbed the tide: naturally, inevitably, without effort, as part of the process of being where he was and living among the people who lived there too.

He watched Artie being put into the van and he thought about the docks. The West India Docks had closed in 1980. The London Docks had closed in 1969. The St Katharine Docks had closed in 1968. The Surrey Commercial Docks had closed in 1970. The Millwall Docks had closed in 1980. The Royal Docks were still open but the ships were getting bigger and the river was getting smaller and the containerization that had been sold as progress had turned out to be progress for the shipping companies and redundancy for the men who had loaded the ships by hand, crate by crate, bale by bale, barrel by barrel, for two hundred years. George Abbott had taken his redundancy in 1981, a lump sum of four thousand pounds that had lasted eleven months, and then he had gone on the dole, and the dole queue had been full of men he knew from the docks, men whose names he had shouted across the cargo holds, men whose hands he had bandaged when the ropes slipped, men whose families he had known for thirty years, and now those men were collecting their giros on a Thursday morning and sitting in the Duke of Wellington on a Thursday afternoon and watching another man being put into another van by another arm of the same state that had closed the docks and broken the unions and sold the country to the people who had never loaded a ship in their lives.

He did not go outside. He did not shout from the window or run across the road or try to stop the men in the dark coats from closing the doors of the Transit van. He was fifty-eight years old and his hip gave him trouble in the wet weather and his left hand had a tremor that had started after the stroke in 1983 and had not stopped, a tremor that made his pint glass shake in its puddle of condensation on the bar, and what he thought, watching the van pull away from number 117, was that community was not a thing you could hold in your hands, was not a thing you could sign a form for or queue up for or wait for the postman to deliver, community was a thing that happened between people, and when the people were gone, when the docks were gone, when the advice centre was closed and the launderette was empty and the pub had four pensioners in it on a Thursday afternoon, community was a word that appeared in election leaflets and council documents and the speeches of politicians who had never stood in the Duke of Wellington and watched a man being put into a van with his hands behind his back, a man who had helped more people in the East End than any politician who had ever stood for election in the borough of Tower Hamlets.

He finished his pint. The glass left a wet ring on the bar, a ring that the barman wiped away with a cloth that smelled of stale beer and disinfectant, a ring that was exactly the same shape and size as the ring George Abbott had left on the bar at the end of his first shift at the West India Docks in May of 1950, thirty-five years and six months ago, when the pub had been full and the docks had been open and the future had been a thing you could carry in your pocket with your wages, a thing that had weight and substance, a thing you could count and spend and share, and he did not know when the thing had become weightless, had become a word in a speech, a line in a manifesto, a promise that evaporated like the ring on the bar, leaving nothing behind but the memory of a time when the ring had meant something, when the pint had been paid for with money earned by hands that had held the ropes and the crates and the future itself, and the future had held back.

He did not say any of this. He sat in the Duke of Wellington with the three other pensioners and watched the rain on the window and listened to the conversation that had been repeating itself for thirty-five years, the weather and the football and the price of a pint, and somewhere in the hiss of the rain on the glass he heard the voice of the Thames, the tide coming in, the mudflats filling with water that had crossed the Atlantic and the North Sea and had come up the estuary to Docklands, to the West India Docks that were no longer docks but a development site for the London Docklands Development Corporation, a corporation whose logo appeared on billboards around the Isle of Dogs and whose offices overlooked the water that had once carried the ships whose cargo George Abbott had loaded with his hands, the same hands that now held a pint glass in a pub where the conversation never changed because the men in the pub had been the conversation for thirty-five years, and the conversation was the only thing that remained, and even the conversation was fading, was becoming a murmur, was becoming the sound of rain on a window that looked out onto a street where a man had been put into a van and driven away, and no one in the pub had spoken his name, and no one in the pub had said anything at all, because there was nothing to say, because the thing that had happened had happened, and the thing that had happened was the thing that had been happening for thirty-five years, for two hundred years, for as long as men had loaded ships and the ships had stopped coming and the docks had closed and the pubs had emptied and the men had sat in the emptying pubs and watched the rain and said nothing, nothing at all, because the only words that could describe what had been lost were the words for the things that had been lost, and those words had been lost too.