White Rage by Campbell Armstrong

How did you even pronounce it? Majister? Did you drop the numbers?
    He’d met her in Maryhill on a wet night last January. He’d been drinking alone, and she was standing beside him at the bar, and they just sort of drifted into conversation; she listened more than she spoke – at first anyway. She listened to his views on the state of the nation. She was sympathetic, even when he launched into a long beer-fuelled rant, the memory of which embarrassed him.
    The more she listened, the more attractive he found her. She was quietly lovely. No flash, no eyeshadow and warpaint, but definitely a face you’d look at a long time because the features – green eyes and thick black hair and an expressive mouth – were a delight to him.
    Despite the slender body and the sweet face, she was as gentle as a howitzer. She had firm views about the world, and a way of expressing them that silenced Beezer, and made him feel inadequate. He was transported by her passion and the funny manner she had of chopping the bar with her small clenched hand when she had a point to make.
    There were solutions to the sickness in Britain, she told him, but they’d take time and courage. Did he have that courage?
    And he’d said, Fucking right.
    She’d asked if he wanted to meet a few people who felt the same way. Kindred spirits, a kind of loose group.
    I’m in, he said.
    A few nights later, in a ground-floor flat in Garnethill, she introduced him as Beezer – a name she bestowed on him for no apparent reason –to a long-haired cadaver of a man she called Swank, who wore a beaded choker. By candlelight, Swank spoke of revolution and blood in a serious monotone. Bobby Descartes thought he looked completely wasted, a doper. Swank created a dire picture of the future: the United Kingdom would be plummeted into third-world chaos. Total breakdown. Nightmare. Bloated corpses floating in rivers. War in the streets. The last great battle, Swank said. Do you want to be a soldier, Beezer?
    Bobby was overwhelmed by Swank’s gloomy vision. He said he’d gladly be a soldier. Just point the way. Swank told him it wasn’t that easy, the movement needed to evaluate potential recruits, he’d be observed and assessed, and when the time was right – maybe, maybe – he’d be given an important task. Swank stared at him red-eyed for such a long time Beezer felt uneasy, sort of spellbound.
    A week later, Magistr32 took him to a pub near Bridgeton Cross. At a corner table in the lounge bar, she introduced him to a man by the name of Pegg, who wore an eyepatch and talked in a buzz-saw rasp about how the heavy guns were going into action. People would die. But somebody had to take a stand. Pegg raved about the number of illegals now in the country, and how they were draining the system dry; decent people were being taxed all the way up the anus so that black and yellow and brown immigrant scum and an assortment of unwanted unwashed foul-smelling asylum seekers could ride the Great British Gravy Train. Hello, newsflash. This train was out of freebies. This train wasn’t running any more.
    We must fight the good fight, Pegg said.
    Beezer said Jesus, he’d fight. He’d be at the barricades. By Christ, he wouldn’t let anybody down. Suddenly he belonged to something, a cause , he was meeting like-minded people – even if he’d never seen the men called Swank and Pegg again.
    But that was how it worked: the less you knew the better. The fewer faces you remembered, the better chance the organization had. Magistr32 said the organization was big, even she didn’t know many members; he accepted that.
    An organization . I belong to an organization, he thought. He cherished the notion.
    A tennis ball came bouncing towards him. He caught and squeezed it. He enjoyed the feel of crushing it in his hand; it was like demolishing the swollen testicle of somebody he hated.
    A kid shouted to him.