Love and Fallout (24 page)

‘Do you want to wear my hat?' I passed her my beanie and she inspected the inside.

‘When did you last wash your hair?' she said, raising her voice over the clarinet player, who was now wandering like a minstrel behind a troop of older ladies carrying banners for the Ecology party.

‘Very recently,' I said, but she'd already pulled it on with a grin.

More seeds showered our heads. The clarinet player began ‘You Can't Kill the Spirit'. By now the songs had become as familiar as any chart hit I might have hummed in the bath, so I joined in with the seed flinger whose voice rose in a church choir soprano. Maggie liked singing and joined in too.

I asked her again about home, and she gave me another run-down of work, who'd been going out with who, her new shift patterns at the pub. There was only one Stevenage-related subject I was truly curious about, but I didn't have time to steer the conversation because a familiar voice came sailing towards us.

‘Skittle!' Rori weaved through the bodies, an older woman at her side. ‘Skittle!'

‘She's coming this way,' said Maggie in warning.

‘That's my friend.'

‘Who's Skittle?'

‘It's my nickname.'

‘Since when?'

Rori launched herself at me, slinging an arm around my neck. We always hugged, even if we'd only been apart for a few hours. We were as close as ever, and though the memory of the woods had been bothering me, pinching like a blister, I knew today definitely wasn't the day for that conversation. I'd have to wait and in the meantime live as Barbel did, happy in the moment.

‘This is my friend Maggie, from home,' I said. ‘This is Rori.'

‘All right,' said Maggie.

‘Isn't this fantastic!' said Rori. Her face was shining and I heard her voice new, the way it must have sounded to Maggie, polished like silver. Dressed in an astrakhan coat with a paisley shawl draped over her shoulders, and a camera hanging from a strap around her neck, the other woman seemed oddly familiar. She smiled the same smile as Rori. Of course.

‘You must be Rori's mum.'

‘Jocasta,' said the woman, offering a leather-gloved hand.

It was like seeing Rori in thirty years' time, the same green eyes, the same wide mouth that curled up at the edges as if she were contemplating something interesting. Jocasta was what my Mum would have called an Oil of Ulay mum.

‘Wonderful to meet you, Tessa,' her tone was warm and husky and she stressed her words, so that wonderful became
wuuunderful.
‘Auri's told me all about you.'

Had she? The thought made me stupidly glad and the scene in the woods receded.

‘We've been walking around for ages, trying to take it all in,' said Rori. ‘Incredible isn't it?' Her eyes flicked between us. ‘Oh, you'll never guess who I saw,' she said, addressing us both. We couldn't.

‘Vi.' she said. I drew a blank. ‘You know, from the public loos.'

‘Oh,
Vi.
Really?'

‘Public loos?' said Maggie.

‘It's a long story,' I said.

‘All this creativity,' Jocasta remarked deeply, stooping to get a shot of the yellow party dress on the fence.

‘You don't have to photograph everything,' said Rori laying a hand on her mother's arm.

‘This is documentary evidence, darling.' Jocasta straightened up. ‘This is history.'

‘Apparently there are twenty-five thousand women,' I said. ‘Maybe more.'

‘Extraordinary,' said Jocasta. ‘It makes me so proud. How could you not be moved by all this, all this life?' Her eyes darted around and settled on Maggie as if she were expecting an answer. Maggie turned, surveying the heads of the women who poured below us into a dip in the path and out of sight. Open displays of emotion made us nervous in Stevenage.

‘Let's have one of you girls,' said Jocasta, shuffling us together.

‘You two be in it,' said Maggie.

‘No, come on,' Jocasta directed the three of us into position. I stood in the middle and we held our smiles for the flash.

‘Now one of the Greenham girls,' she called. Rori's grip was tight around my shoulder. This time there was a problem. ‘Hang on,' said Jocasta, and slipped off a glove, ‘it won't wind on.' Me and Rori clamped together, swaying each other from side to side until the camera flashed.

‘Perfect!' Jocasta surveyed the scene around us again. ‘I haven't found the right spot for my memento yet.'

‘What did you bring?' I asked.

‘Ahh,' she said, and removed from her pocket a photograph of three suntanned children, two boys and between them a little girl of about seven, all sitting on a white boat made whiter by the blue sky and surrounding water. ‘Who's this?' she asked. The girl in the sunflower-splashed costume held a fishing rod over the side of the boat, her curls tumbling around her head, a gap in her front teeth as she grinned.

‘Aren't you sweet,' I said to Rori, holding the photograph to show Maggie.

Rori laughed at herself. ‘Where was that one taken?'

‘Quinley, that summer in '68.' Quinley was their home in Cornwall.

‘What did you two bring?' Jocasta asked.

‘Tessa and Barbel made the most amazing peace symbols,' said Rori.

‘We pinned them up near Amber,' I said. Barbel and I had fashioned our contributions earlier in the week by reshaping wire coat hangers into peace symbols and decorating them with beads and ribbon. Jocasta turned encouragingly to Maggie.

‘I didn't have much time,' she said.

‘Oh, I know, take one of these,' said Rori pulling a packet of luggage labels from her pocket along with a felt-tip pen.

‘To write a message on,' I explained.

Maggie made the face of a non-smoker presented with cigarettes. ‘You're all right.'

‘Go on
,
' said Jocasta. ‘That's why we're here.'

‘Okay,' said Maggie, stuffing the luggage label into her coat pocket, ‘I might need to, you know, give it some thought.' She eyed me sideways but I pretended not to notice.

While we'd been talking there'd been movement. Five women in matching rugby shirts, each with an individual letter stitched on the front, organised themselves to spell out PEACE. Other women were joining hands.

‘Quick sweetheart, they're linking up,' said Jocasta, her camera flashing as the late afternoon sky darkened. Jean had suggested we all bring scarves so that if too few women turned up we'd link together by holding onto their ends, but there was no need. There were women everywhere, moving along the cramped line to let others squeeze in. Jocasta held Maggie's hand, Maggie held Rori's, Rori held my mine, and I held the hand of a woman in a red coat. The chain fizzed with excited energy. ‘This is it,' said Rori, ‘it's happening.'
We squeezed hands.

It was all strangely quiet, and then a distant cry went up and rippled along the human chain until it reached us. ‘Freedom!'

‘Freedom!' we repeated, raising our joined hands in the air, moving the cry along the line of bodies. The shout carried to the women around the corner out of sight, distantly echoing back to us, ‘Freedom!' Spontaneous laughter and cheering. My throat tightened. The women who hadn't got a place in the chain assembled in a ragged line, mirroring us. The cry moved over us a second time, we caught it and sent it on – it carried towards us again and with a whoop we raised our hands in a mass expression of exhilaration. We were here. It was happening.

A helicopter's blade thrummed across the darkening sky.

‘It's probably the television,' said Rori, looking up.

Maggie broke out of the chain and waved her arms above her head with sudden energy. ‘They might see us on telly at The Volunteer, Tess!'

Rori smiled with non-understanding, the way one might at a foreigner.

I had the sensation of seeing myself as if from above, through the eyes of the helicopter: Maggie knew me and Rori knew me, but at that moment, I didn't know myself.

Dusk came swiftly. By four o'clock the fence was one long jumble of women, half-lit figures in hats and scarves, their gloved hands clasping fire torches and candles. Groups were silent or talking or still singing ‘You Can't Kill the Spirit' into the oncoming evening. Moths flittered around the bushes at the fence, attracted to the lights that crowded like a mass of votive candles beside photographs and poems and haphazard flowers, a collective shrine for the deaths that hadn't yet happened, but could if nobody took stock. Maggie said she was glad she'd come, which I took as a personal victory, but now the temperature had dropped and we needed a fire. Rori and Jocasta had arranged to stay with family friends in Oxford, so it was only Maggie and me returning to camp.

Amber gate had swollen with all the visitors, and by the time we arrived half a dozen different fires were burning, creating an extra cheer. Around these fires guitars were being strummed and tents erected.

‘So this is it then, this is where you live?' Maggie's boots squelched as she made a semi circle, taking in the scene.

‘This is it.'

She fell silent, recalculating some list of information in her head. Was it more or less awful than she'd expected?

‘Bloody hell.'

More. I dug a shallow pit using the trowel we kept in the kitchen, filling the space with kindling and crowning the arrangement with a Sainsbury's firelighter from the store box the visitors didn't know about. Not that they'd go near our stuff, most visitors behaved around the camp with a good deal of trepidation, though today was different, I could see that from looking around. Embracing the base had united everyone and put us on a high.

‘Didn't know you were such a girl scout,' said Maggie, watching me work.

‘I've been learning.'

‘Suppose you've got to.' She lit up a B&H and offered me one, but I was used to smoking rollies. ‘Why aren't there any blokes anyway?'

‘They wouldn't do the washing-up,' I said, fanning the baby flames. ‘Anyway, the women wanted to live on their own terms, because the camp is about creating a female space, somewhere away from the male gaze where women can be themselves.'

Maggie was eyeing me curiously as she dragged on her cigarette.

I found us a straw bale. There was a basket of treated timber nearby, a gift from some visitors no doubt, so I arranged some on the fire. The cold fingered our necks, but soon the flames were leaping and gasping into life.

‘All I need now is a cup of tea,' said Maggie.

‘I can put the kettle on.'

‘No, I'll have one in a bit otherwise I'll need to visit that ditch again. I don't know how you stand it, Tessa.'

‘You get used to it. Life is so sanitised outside, you forget what it's like to live simply.' I was about to venture a speech about the benefits of returning to nature when she interrupted.

‘Talking of basic needs, I nearly forgot.' She unzipped her overnight bag and removed a tin. ‘Present from my mum,' she said revealing a round cake iced with a CND symbol in white piping.

‘Great, we'll have a piece before I put it in the store.'

She frowned. ‘What store?'

‘It'll have to go in the supply box. That's how it works.'

‘Don't be soft. Anyway, you don't even know this lot.'

‘But that's not the point.'

‘What is the point?'

‘This is a community and it works on shared resources and trust. All property is shared. No profit or ownership.'

‘It's a
cake
, Tessa, it's a bloody fruit cake. My mum didn't spend all afternoon making a cake for some Doris she doesn't even know.'

The cake sat on Maggie's lap like an undetonated bomb. Her brow had grown a vertical crease. If I said the wrong thing now, if I pushed the principles of communality, the fruitcake could go off in my face.

‘The thing is…'

She looked at me determinedly. ‘If we don't eat it, I'm dropping it in the fire.'

‘Maggie…'

‘Watch me.' She stood up with the tin and held it over the flames. I sighed and gave in.

‘Thank God for that,' she said, easing the lid free. ‘Thought that was going to be another Tara Mason.'

I laughed. When Tara Mason picked on me at primary school, Maggie had promptly waded in and sat on her.

‘So when are you coming home?' she asked. I shrugged, cutting two jagged lumps of cake with my penknife. The cake tasted wonderful, soft and rich with brown sugar and rum. ‘Not exactly fun times here, is it. Seems like the locals hate you, and that girl Angela sounds like a pain in the arse.'

It had been a relief to talk about the Angela episode. Since our run-in I'd been doing my best to avoid her though it was difficult living cheek by jowl.