Love and Fallout (25 page)

‘I've got other friends. Proper friends.'

‘What, the posh girl with the hair?' said Maggie, picking out a glac
é
cherry and passing it to me. My mind flashed to the scene in the woods; that was something I hadn't mentioned to Maggie.

‘You shouldn't judge someone by the way they speak.'

‘Not just the way they speak,' said Maggie, taking a bite of cake. ‘You can't stay here, Tessa. Imagine what they'll do to your hair next time.'

We laughed. The fire snapped and we sat watching it, picking at lumps of cake.

‘Your job, is it better than The Old Volunteer then?' I asked.

‘You know what pubs are like,' she shrugged, checking for more glac
é
cherries.

‘Ever see anyone we know?'

If she understood where I was going she was choosing not to. All right, if she was going to make me say it. ‘Does Tony ever come in?'

‘Tony Mercer?'

What other Tony was there? She shook her head.

‘Aren't you too busy with your sisterhood to be bothered about men?'

‘I'm not bothered about men and I'm certainly not bothered about him. It's nice to be living among women where the conversation doesn't revolve around them.'

The cold was at our backs but our knees and faces were warm.

‘Hey, what are they up to?' said Maggie and I followed her gaze to the borders of the trees where a group of orange women were moving their arms in a sideways figure of eight. I recognised the blonde fuzz of Deeksha's hair.

‘Rajneeshees. They visit sometimes.'

‘Looks like fun,' said Maggie. ‘Come on.'

I didn't want Deeksha to think we were laughing at them, but Maggie had already got to her feet and was pulling me up. ‘This is my night off,' she said, ‘if there are no blokes around we can at least have a dance.'

We'd been to all the worst clubs in Stevenage and if we got to dance we considered it a good night out. We picked our way across the mud, trying to walk without bumping into guy ropes. A woman and her friend were juggling. Two others canoodled beside their tent.

‘Bloody hell, Tess, there's a lot of lezzers about.'

‘Shh.'

Deeksha greeted us, still swaying her arms above her head, her hair wobbling like a cloud of blonde candy floss. Balanced on a folding garden chair, a tape recorder played a dreamy mix of pipes and chime bells.

‘This is my friend Maggie,' I said. Deeksha smiled and kept dancing, making a space for us on the bracken-strewn ground. Music filled our heads. We joined in the dance, turning around and around, the camp behind us, the fire where we'd been sitting and where a new group had now gathered, huddling together for warmth. I felt a deep sense of the shared nature of life.

By midnight we'd snaffled down a third of the CND cake – I could tell it was a third because we'd followed the white wings of the piped symbol – and were both feeling the effects of the Bacardi circulating at one of the fires. A gang of women with dreadlocked hair and multiple piercings had taught an enthusiastic Maggie one of their satirical songs.

Down at Greenham on a spree

Working for the KGB

Dirty women squatting in the mud…

At one o'clock we turned in.

I lit the fat candle I kept in a jar. The ground was sodden outside but I'd lain down hay and plastic sheeting the way Rori had instructed, so inside the bender it was relatively dry and warm.

‘Where's the baby Jesus?' whispered Maggie, swirling her torch. ‘You are properly mad, Tessa.' She flopped down, laughing, and picked up a large stone with a flower painted on it.

‘That's from Vicky. She's a sort of witch. It's called a home stone,' I said, wobbly with Bacardi. ‘She blessed it.'

‘She did what?'

‘She has this ritual, we had to sit around it and she called in our foremothers and instructed them to look after me. And then… and then…' I was laughing now, ‘I had to put my hands on it and pray to the goddess. She said it'll soak up all the bad energy and protect me during the night.'

‘What, this?' said Maggie, lifting the stone from her lap.

‘You haven't seen the other side yet.'

Maggie turned the stone over and stared at it. ‘What's that?'

The sides of my eyes were wet, the sentence came out in a convulsion.

‘It's a peace snail.'

There was the happy face of the painted snail, his shell off balance, smiling his innocent smile. Maggie looked at me in disbelief. ‘A peace snail?' she repeated. We collapsed on top of each other, the way we'd done when we were kids, the home stone between us, its painted yellow petals on one side, and on the other the snail with his amiable smile, turning it over and over, not knowing which side was funnier.

21

Stripping the Fence

It was a few days after Embrace the Base when they came to strip the fence. MoD police officers, soldiers and local volunteers moved along it with their Stanley knives and bin bags, cutting down the decorations and mementos. Me, Barbel and Rori were there too, watching.

Barbel ran to one of the volunteers, a middle-aged man in a cap.

‘Please don't do this,' she said as he snipped a sparkly dragonfly from the wire. ‘Don't you think it's pretty? Somebody made it.'

But the man didn't reply. He was steadily filling his dustbin liner like a farm hand gathering crops.

‘Please. This belongs to someone.' Barbel put her hands up to protect a damp babygro which was next in line for the bag. ‘They wanted it to be here.'

The babygro dangled its empty legs and the man, unsure of how to proceed, looked at Barbel, half annoyed, half questioning. He saw her long skirt edged with mud, and her cape made from squares of old curtain which she'd artfully stitched together. He saw her blonde hair braided with beads and ribbon, poking every which way from beneath her cloche hat.

‘Please,' she said, still clutching the babygro. ‘You don't have to be part of this.'

‘Do you require assistance?' called an MoD police officer standing a few yards away.

The man's eyes flicked from Barbel to the babygro, and he opened his mouth as if to say yes, but then thought better of it.

‘No. All's well,' he replied, switching his attention to a length of orange wool, part of a tapestry which had come loose. Ignoring Barbel, he clipped it free and held it in his hand for a moment like a horse's tail, before dropping it into his rubbish sack. Barbel turned to us in despair.

‘Don't worry B,' said Rori, swinging an arm around her shoulders and guiding her away. ‘
A luta continua
.'

‘But these people,' Barbel said, indicating the clusters of volunteers clearing the fence. Her eyes were large. ‘Why must they?'

‘There's Vicky,' I said, in an attempt at distraction. We looked down the hill towards her. What was she doing?

‘Come on,' said Rori, and grabbing our hands she ran us down the slope. At the bottom, Vicky was crouched down, whispering in the direction of a police Alsatian. Though she coaxed him, the dog stayed at his master's heel.

‘Oh no,' said Rori, ‘she's doing her animal telepathy.'

Apparently Vicky believed the military were poisoning their dogs' minds and it was her duty to save them. Nobody at camp was particularly interested in Vicky's psychic abilities but she guarded them with a special intensity and we were given to understand that in some indefinable way and at some deep level she knew the secrets of the universe. The dog, aware it was being stared at, twitched an ear and barked. Its handler gave Vicky a wary glance and walked the animal away. Vicky sighed and got up from the grass, shaking her head, and Barbel, always the most sympathetic in any situation, gave her a hug. We stood together steering Vicky's conversation away from stories of animal laboratories and back to the demonstration and its success.

The fence still fluttered with life, but piece by piece the mementos were being cut down and soon it would be stripped to bare wire. I thought about the photograph of Rori as a little girl, gap-toothed and grinning in the fishing boat. Jocasta would be distraught to know what was happening.

As we stood talking, the figure of a woman in a Barbour neared us. She was working her way along the fence, determined not to be distracted by our presence, and as she got closer, steadily tearing down a cardboard rainbow, a spray of peacock feathers, a wooden peace symbol, our conversation fell away.

‘Let's save some of the photos,' I suggested. Hundreds had been fixed to the wire, many of children – seated before birthday cakes or building snowmen, arms around their mothers or hand-in-hand with siblings. We began detaching any we could find. I didn't know what we were going to do with them, but it seemed wrong they should end up in a dustbin sack.

The woman continued towards us, pausing at intervals with her secateurs. She stopped beside Vicky, cutting through a tricky piece of wire that held a paper dove: the bird had already been assaulted by the wind and its wings drooped. Vicky screwed up her face and whispered ‘Hex' into the woman's ear, hissing like a cat.

‘They used to burn witches you know,' said the woman, raising her head. I nudged Rori and whispered
It's her
. It was the woman from LAWE, the one we'd spoken to in Newbury.

‘Hello again,' said Rori, pleasantly.

The woman glanced at us without acknowledgement.

Rori began humming, softly. I hummed too. Vicky joined in, so did Barbel until we broke into song.

Are you on the side who locks the door

Are you on the side who loves the Law

Are you on the side which wants a war

Which side are you on?

We continued to sing and she ignored us until, hands shaking with rage inside their gardening gloves, she couldn't contain herself any longer.

‘I'm on the side of the decent rate-payers of Newbury, that's which side I'm on, and you're a lot of filthy beggars. We can't sell our houses because of you. This,' she said, waving her hand about to include the airbase, ‘used to be a beautiful common until you came along and spoiled it. You should be ashamed.' Two blotches of fuchsia had risen on her cheeks. She stalked off trailing her dustbin liner.

The volunteers were obviously giving us a wide berth because no one else was around, it was only me and Rori and the wind sweeping across the common. Barbel's cape flapped as she and Vicky disappeared further down the hill to rescue more photographs.

This was my chance. After turning it over and over I'd decided I had to say something about the woods. Me and Rori were friends, close friends, she could tell me, she could tell me anything. Surely it was just some kind of mistake, perhaps she'd even been pressured into it. I took a deep breath.

‘There's something I wanted to talk to you about.'

‘Oh yes?'

She was stooping to detach a scarlet ribbon from a sagging balloon. ‘This might cheer Barbel up,' she said. ‘She could put it in her hair.'

I'd been trying to think of a way to begin. ‘Last week… last week.' I stopped.

‘Spit it out, darling.'

‘Last week, I was in the wood. And I saw you.' The words came in a rush.

‘Saw me what?' she said, manipulating the knot.

One of the police dogs barked on the other side of the fence. I took a breath, light with anxiety. Something told me I shouldn't have started this but it was too late to stop. She straightened up, coiling the freed ribbon around her fingers.

‘I went for a walk to be by myself, to think and…' My voice trailed off. She was holding my eye.

‘And what?'

I looked away, embarrassed.

Rori nodded and gave a sigh. ‘Ahh, I see. In flagrante with the Yank.'

‘What if you get caught?'

‘This isn't school. We're not doing anything illegal.' There was an edge to her voice.

But what about everything the women said at the camp about the patriarchal militarist society.

‘Isn't he the enemy?'

‘Enemy?' she threw her head back. ‘No, he's a young guy from Palookaville who joined the forces so he didn't have to work in a gas station all his life. He doesn't know anything about the world. And he certainly doesn't know anything about politics.'

I nodded, but I didn't understand. She noted my anxiety.

‘You look shocked.'

I shrugged.

‘It doesn't mean anything. A few bonks in the cover of darkness. This isn't Romeo and Juliet.'

A few.
How long had it been going on?

‘It's just sex. You don't think men have the exclusive right to no-strings sexual intercourse do you?'