The Malcontents Read Online Free

temples, where the hair didn’t grow.
    ‘We’ve got to take it,’ said Stephen, voice cool and biting, ‘that someone’s on to us.’
    ‘Sod them. Sod the whole gang of them.’
    Neil was exuding anger, all through his compact powerful body. His capacity for passion was no surprise to the rest of them, but it still impressed them and made him formidable. It would have been hard for an outsider, looking on, to guess whether he or Stephen had more authority over this group, or which was likely to be it’s leader. What was certain was that the others took for granted this young man’s animal force, took his personality for granted and had ceased to wonder about him.
    Earlier in their acquaintanceship, which had begun about two years before, they had done so. He was actually the youngest of them, only twenty, and a student in sociology at the local university, the one Tess was attending. He came from a family much poorer than any of theirs, poorer even than the Bishop’s used to be, and from a slice of society that even the Bishop wouldn’t have known first-hand. His father was a docker, their home was in Bootle, how they had acquired that grand-sounding surname no one knew, and Neil himself cursed it away as though he had been an American black loaded with a slave-master’s name. His father and mother were both Irish Catholics, and that was another heritage which Neil cursed away.
    He hadn’t yet become an intimate friend of the other three, but he was one of their springs of action, and they trusted him. That was why he was the first person Stephen had asked for that night. In fact, it had been his initiative, more than anyone else’s, which had started their present plan: the plan which, as they sat round the table in the pub, once old-fashioned, now tarted up, fairy lights and noise and all, with a jukebox conveniently blanketing all they said, seemed now at risk.
    Mark, efficient, gentle with the barmaid, had bought pints of beer just on the call of time. They had no need to discuss the plan, which they all knew off by heart. Both as part of his field work and as part of his politics, Neil in the past year had been ‘casing the joint’ of the back streets in the town. Near his own lodgings, he had discovered a street of terraced houses let to West Indian families: in some the conditions were ‘all right by Irish standards’: in one section of three houses the blacks were being rack-rented as they might have been in a nineteenth-century slum. Those facts were not in dispute. All four had visited the rooms, and so had the other three members of the core. Two families to one room: a turnover of comings and goings which defeated the local authorities: evictions of some immigrants who didn’t know the laws nor whom to turn to.
    If the victims had been white, that would have been bad enough. But they weren’t white, and for all these young men and women, that brought them to a fighting-point. This Saturday night no one foresaw what was soon to happen: and when it did happen, some simplicities were forgotten. But there were real simplicities. Tess was concerned for sheer misery: Mark wanted people to be good: Neil was outraged by the helplessness of the poor: Stephen, who sometimes seemed the hardest and most sceptical, couldn’t tolerate the sight of suffering. But though they were affected each in a different fashion, they were together about race. To them race, or rather the wiping-away of race and its effects, was as near a faith as any of them had, or as most people ever had. So far it was simple. But the plan did not end there, but began. Neil had tracked down the sub landlord of those three houses. He too was a West Indian, with the name Finlayson. He had been persuaded to talk (it was here that the first scruples had entered and been argued away). The chain of property led from him – that was true in law, and, anyone could persuade himself, in fact – back to an agent: and beyond the agent to the