Love and Fallout (15 page)

‘A
fling
?' He makes himself sound like a debutante in a Noel Coward play.

‘But it's over.'

‘…as in the flinging off your clothes variety?'
The ground feels like water. ‘So what you mean is that you've been sleeping with someone?' He says nothing. ‘Who?'

It's a long moment before he gives up the information. The house is still but for the low purr of the fridge. ‘A supply teacher.'

‘Fresh out of teacher-training college?'

He looks up. ‘It was nothing. I didn't want anything to happen.'

‘Am I supposed to be grateful? I don't believe this.'

‘Look, it didn't mean anything. I promise.'

‘When did it start?'

‘It's over. It only lasted a few weeks. It was a mistake.'

‘When did it start? How?' I am shouting, trying to shout. My voice doesn't feel like my own. Nothing feels like my own.

He sighs. He is not answering. ‘Tess, I'm so sorry.'

I start laughing. He's startled, spot-lit by the lamp, his hair sticking up like an exclamation mark from where he's raked through it.

‘What a perfect day.'

‘Tessa.'

I look away from the face I know better than my own, towards the sweet peas in their yellow jug. ‘Get up, go to work, find out council isn't renewing funding for charity that's taken four years to establish. Come home, discover husband having an affair.'

‘What? They can't do that,' he says. ‘After all the work you've…'

His sentence dissolves. The letter came today. Two brief paragraphs telling us our grant has been pulled. We won't last more than another four or five months without it. He's the one I needed to talk to: he's the one I needed to come home to, because even if things aren't perfect he's my husband. But I don't know him. The familiar kitchen suddenly feels alien too, as if it belongs to someone else. I'm leaning against the sink, still holding the colander. The room and everything in it is a bleary mess.

12

The Arm of the Law

After half an hour of singing and swaying, nothing much had happened except the truck driver had got angrier, the women had got louder and my feet had got colder. Traffic had built up behind the truck but it was difficult to see exactly what was going on because there were at least four rows of women in front of me. My leg was going to sleep, but changing position was tricky in such limited space.

‘Sorry,' I said, twisting into Debbie, ‘pins and needles.'

‘Jiggle when you need to, don't bother about me,' she said. I liked her, and talking was good, it made me feel calmer.

The Sapphire-gaters at the back started a loud jeering. ‘Here they come,' said Debbie.

‘What is it?'

Debbie and Cat, the girl with the rat's tail, were jeering too.

‘What is it?' I repeated, raising my voice.

‘Wagons.'

Through the gap between heads, I saw police officers tumbling from a van in a cascade of navy blue and lining up in pairs, ready to remove the first women from the road. My heart struggled for a way out of my chest.

One of the legal observers rushed towards the police. ‘You're being
used
,' she cried, ‘you're being
used
.'

‘And you're obstructing the public highway,' said a policeman.

The officers set to work, lifting the protestors and dragging them away.

‘Shame!' cried a woman at the front. The cry went up from the women on the verges. ‘Shame! Shame!'

Grannies against the bomb started singing, ‘We shall overcome.'

I rocked around, trying for a better view.

‘Where are they taking them?' I asked Debbie.

‘Dumping them out of the way, I should think. That's what they usually do, drag and dump.'

The truck driver looked on with his red face. Some of the women who'd been dumped were running back to the blockade. The police gave chase. It was like a crazed game of girls against boys.

I didn't hate the police. I'd never had any reason to. I'd never got on the wrong side of the law, never been caught shoplifting or drinking litre bottles of cider in the park.

‘I've never done this before,' I said to Debbie.

She put her arm around me in a hug made awkward by the cramped position of our bodies, ‘Don't worry.'

But I was worried. Very worried. ‘What do I do?'

‘What do you mean?'

Why was she being stupid? There wasn't time. They were fetching and heaving rapidly, soon their big gloved hands would be on me.

‘When they come, when they come. The police.'

Debbie smiled like an indulgent big sister. ‘Calm down,' she said, over the noise. Easy for her to say, she obviously enjoyed this sort of thing if she turned up for other people's actions. ‘Don't struggle, they've been trained. Make your body go limp. If you struggle, it'll hurt more.' I'd heard that some police put their knees into you, or dug into your pressure points or pulled your hair.

Even with the women running back to sit in the blockade, the margin between me and the front line was thinning. Two policemen bent over the woman in front. ‘Be careful!' scolded her neighbour, ‘don't hurt her.'

‘Come on then, we don't want to drag you,' said a policeman to the woman, whose hair was a soft spray of white. She obviously wasn't going to show weakness by standing with the grannies.

‘I'm staying here.'

‘Come on, love.'

‘I am not your love. I've lived through two wars.'

The policeman sighed. ‘Let's clear the rest,' he said to his colleague.

‘They're preparing to store bombs in there,' said the white-haired woman.

‘And you're obstructing a police officer in the course of his duty,' said the policeman as he got a grip on the woman beside her.

‘Wake up!' she called, but the policeman said nothing and only worked around her.

Soon there was no one left between me and the front line, I
was
the front line. Two policemen were coming towards us. Debbie linked her arm through mine. ‘Nooo!' she yelled. They stood behind her and hooked their arms under her sides, straightening up to take her weight, and as they pulled she resisted, yanking hard on my arm and crying ‘No cruise!' She was making a proper song and dance. ‘No, no, no.' I tried to get her arm out of mine, but she was locked in. They pulled again and she tugged me harder, so hard I thought my arm would rip from its socket. ‘AOOwe!'

‘You're hurting her,' said Debbie.

‘No,' said the policeman, ‘
you're
hurting her.'

He had a point.

The policeman counted, ‘one, two,' and quickly as possible I wriggled my arm free of Debbie's, so that on ‘three' she was being carried off, giving the Red Indian whoop. I watched her boots kicking the ground as she was pulled backwards. She was flopping around like a fish. Now it was proper chaos again, the whooping was coming from everywhere, not only that, there was an awful miserable wailing starting up behind as if all the women had collectively found their dogs dead in the road.

‘What is it?' I said to whoever sat behind.

‘They're keening.'

‘Cleaning?'

The woman didn't answer, something had caught her eye. ‘Alma!' she said above the howling. ‘They've got Alma!' she shouted. Now they were all upset. Alma was obviously popular. The wailing got worse.

‘Calm down,' I heard myself saying. ‘You'll make them angry.'

But they ignored me. Oh God, Oh God. The blood fizzed in my ears making me want to run, to get up in my big achy boots and run as if I were in a school sprint, but I knew I couldn't. There was an empty space beside me where Debbie had been. I had clear sight of another body going into the van.

Two officers bent down to me, a youngish one with sandy hair fringing his helmet, and an older one who leaned so close to my face I could see his nose in detail, red and bumpy like a planet. I tried to think of the Suffragettes – Emily Davison must have been scared too when the King's horses came thundering towards her.

‘Come on.' He looked too old for this, in fact he could have been married to one of the grannies against the bomb. He gave a quick glance over my shoulder to see how much was left, like a farmer assessing a half-ploughed field.

‘Nearly there, Don,' he said to the younger officer. ‘Let's be having you,' he said to me. I wondered if he could see my fear. I wasn't singing or whooping or wailing. Before I could do anything about arranging myself for the move, he and Don had hooked their arms under my armpits and we were off. I remembered to make my body go limp. I was also trying to remember that I was furious about the war machine, but a large part of my mind was concerned about the amount of effort it must be taking them to drag me along – I could feel the mass of myself, arms and belly and thighs, heels scuffing the road as we travelled.

Abruptly I dropped onto wet grass. The old policeman leaned over me, his black helmet causing a partial eclipse. ‘Don't try going back over there or I'll have you in the van, all right girlie?' I nodded into his milky blue eyes, and off he went to drag someone else from the pile while I lay, exhilarated, noise crashing around me, staring at the sky as if this were the first time I'd seen it, really seen it, the pale belt of cloud scudding quickly by, my body firing with adrenalin as if I'd escaped a deathly fairground ride.

‘Hello.'

I looked up to find a concerned woman of about Mum's age beside me. She was one of the women I'd seen earlier, part of the group dressed entirely in orange. Her hair clouded her head in a fine halo of blonde like a dandelion clock. ‘They didn't hurt you, did they?'

‘Actually, my shoulder's a bit sore.'

‘Oh.'

‘But I think I'm all right.'

She nodded, assuming an expression of great empathy, and wrote something on a notepad. ‘I'm Deeksha,' she said kneeling down. She looked more like a Carol. ‘I'm here to observe.' We regarded the scene before us, the women still singing, police officers dragging others away, women running or splayed out on the road like starfish. Another police van had arrived and there was a struggle going on between two officers and three protestors who were trying to prevent their friend going into the van. I straightened, the woman going in the van was Cat, the Sapphire-gater who'd been sitting in my line. Nearby, two policemen were dragging Angela's light body rapidly across the ground. This must be her second removal from the blockade. I ought to be like her, I ought to go back and sit down.

‘Do you want some of this?' asked Deeksha, producing a bottle of orange juice from her cloth bag. For a moment I wondered if she only consumed orange foods.

‘It's freshly squeezed.'

‘Thanks,' I said, taking a sip. ‘Lovely.' And it was. Sweet and sharp.

A pair of policeman neared us and I moved aside in time for a woman to be dumped next to me: she sprang up like a jack-in-the-box, took a deep breath and ran back in the direction of the blockade. We sat there watching the scene from the verge, like spectators at a bizarre sports day. I knew I should go back. I should be brave. This is what I was here for. Where was Rori? I hoped she'd seen me getting moved by the police.

‘Anything you want me to record?' asked Deeksha.

‘Um, I don't think so.'

Around her neck she wore a string of beads with a circular medal in the centre containing a picture of a man who resembled an Indian Jesus.

‘That's Bhagwan, my spiritual master. Want to see?' Before I could answer she'd taken the medal off and handed it to me. The beads were inlaid with silver, and the medal itself edged with gold. ‘It's called a mala, everyone in my community wears one to remind us of his perfection.' The man in the tiny photograph had a beard like Jesus, but close up he looked creepy, his eyes were staring out like he knew what you were thinking. I handed the mala back.

‘One of his commandments is to live wakefully. That teaching has brought me here.' She looked out at the chaos, appearing to contemplate something special. ‘How did you get here?' she asked. It was obviously a spiritual question, could be she was trying to get me to live with her in an orange house. I considered my reply.

‘Did you come on the coach?'

‘Oh I see. No, I live here, I'm a camper at Amber gate.' Her expression transformed into one of admiration, softened with sympathy. I couldn't really call myself a camper, but it sounded better than visitor or stayer, the two other terms I'd heard.

‘You women are so brave.'

I maintained a modest silence. From the corner of my eye I noticed Angela being dragged along again. For such a slight person she had a lot of energy. ‘So brave. It must be difficult.' She touched my arm. ‘You're doing this for all of us and we're so grateful.'