Love and Fallout (3 page)

‘A placard walk?' repeats Alice Ainsley. This is the first time she's done anything in the way of campaigning. ‘Do you… do you think that's necessary?'

‘We need to be visible, Alice. This is common land, public green space. It'll take work but we can turn things around.'

She nods as if willing herself to believe it and we begin to brainstorm publicity ideas. Pru, who's been unusually quiet for the past few minutes, sits up. ‘You know Tessa, I've had a thought, something to get the message out.' Everyone looks towards her. She pauses, ‘Television!'

I laugh. ‘Full marks for positive thinking but that's slightly beyond budget.'

She smiles and lays down her pen. ‘But doesn't one of us have the opportunity to become a television star?'

‘Oh marvellous,' says David Parish, ‘top drawer.'

Oh God, she's right. If I go on the programme and mention the campaign it'll be the best publicity we're ever likely to get. Then again, what about the Greenham Common angle? An uneasy feeling trickles into me. Television? No. I can't.

‘Things are so busy at work,' I say, which is true. It's only a two-person office and we're approaching a funding review, Frieda can't get everything done by herself.

Four pairs of eyes fix on me. Pru's gaze is unwavering. ‘I'm sure filming is swift.'

But I couldn't have them package me up as a Greenham Woman, not after everything that happened. While the others talk, memories start to move around in my head like uninvited guests at a party, they initiate unwelcome conversations and hold forth with embarrassing anecdotes and pass around snapshots which I attempt to snatch away: a journalist in a burberry hat, a bicycle with a bent wheel, a flaring camp fire on a winter afternoon.

Pru knows the format of the show, she says they could easily include a couple of minutes on Heston Fields. We could make it a condition. Whatever my personal feelings, I can see it's a brilliant idea. Imperilled, like a woman balanced on a high diving platform, I agree.

Coffee cups are chinked in celebration. David Parish, who's taking notes in his beautiful copperplate handwriting, asks if he should amend the minutes with a new action point and his fountain pen hovers over the page:
Tessa to appear on television.

It takes a while to find the right shoebox, and in the process I sift through a succession of others crammed with the odds and ends accumulated over years – cards from long-forgotten restaurants, books of souvenir matches, wedding invitations with felty corners, a handful of snaps from the early days with Pete. In one strip of pictures we're squashed together in a passport booth, me on his lap, him pressing his mouth to my cheek in an exaggerated comedy kiss. Strange to stumble upon that intimacy again after so long, almost an intrusion, like passing lit windows and glancing at figures caught in an embrace.

Among the memorabilia are photographs which have never been sorted into albums and I find a picture of Mum in her early thirties, hair backcombed into a beehive, showing off her slim legs in a mini dress printed with overblown pink and orange roses. There's a photo I thought we'd lost, Pippa as a newborn, soft and curled into herself, staring solemn-eyed at the camera. In another she's sitting on my lap after her fourth birthday party, giggling while I hug her to me. I stare at the photo for a long time. Then I remember what I'm supposed to be looking for.

The Greenham stuff must be under the bed. I feel around behind a tartan rug and an old pair of trainers until the Freeman, Hardy & Willis box slides free. It's a few seconds before I lift the lid. Inside is a badly knitted scarf – an early attempt before I gave up knitting for good – and beside that a few handwritten leaflets, two snapshots and an exercise book, the cover smeared with ancient splatters of mud. I pick it up as if it might bear radioactive traces and, with a deep breath, flip it open.

28 October 1982

Hope this wasn't a mistake. Too late now. Met a girl called Rori (sp?) who helped me put up my tent. They've all gone to a meeting somewhere. Not sure what I'm supposed to be doing. It's freezing. Fingerless gloves a mistake.

As I unravel the scarf, a little velvet box drops into my lap. Inside is a pair of silver earrings in the shape of peace symbols. They feel as strange as tiger's teeth after all this time.

The photos are smaller than I remember. The first is a shot of a blockade. I'm squeezed up with a dozen other women, singing. This is the one I'll show to the TV people. But the other is not for public view. I pick it up by the edges, and there we are, me and Rori with our arms slung around one another, the heads of passing women blurring in the background and at the far corner of the frame a child grasping a stick with a paper dove attached, just in shot. On the back of the photo, in handwriting that hardly resembles mine any more is written
Embrace the Base, 1982
. We're both laughing at some private, lost joke, faces turned towards each other, eyes meeting in an instant of joy. And the day returns with all the sharpness of cold weather. Rori's smile, her springy curls spilling from her hat, the two of us clamped together as if we could stay like that forever.

I sit on the edge of the bed gazing down into the image and her lovely face rises up from where it's been buried so long.

2

Life and Death

Mum sat on the settee peeling a saucepan of potatoes with the smallest, sharpest knife in the drawer, something she could do while barely taking her eyes off the six o'clock news. It was September, still warm, and outside a few kids were kicking a ball about before their mums called them in for tea. When a clip from Greenham came on, Dad mumbled to himself and turned his attention back to his
Daily Express
while I took a deep breath and said, ‘I was thinking, I might join them for a bit.'

Mum gave a quick little gasp as if she'd cut herself. ‘What?' Her hands stopped in mid flow, a strip of peel drooping over her wet thumb.

‘The camp. I've decided to go and visit.'

Dad let out a snort. ‘We better get you some dungarees then.'

‘Don't be daft, you can't go and live on the roadside with that lot,' said Mum.

‘They don't live on the roadside.'

‘They do.'

‘No they don't. They live in tents.'

‘Pitched by the roadside.' She looked at me closely, the way she did when she thought I was coming down with something. ‘What about your job, they're not ten-a-penny these days.' And, after a pause, because she was still harbouring hopes we'd get back together, ‘what about Tony?'

‘I've told you, me and Tony are finished, and anyway, I'm not hanging about just because of some bloke.'

‘She'll fit right in,' said Dad.

‘It's not funny, Brian.' Dad put down the paper then and pointed the new remote control to silence Moira Stewart, who was reading a story about the Iran-Iraq war and regarding us with her serious woman-in-a-man's-world expression. I knew instinctively that in another life, Moira would be doing her bit to safeguard humanity.

‘What's put this into your head?' said Dad.

‘Nothing's put this into my head.
I've
put this into my head. One nuclear warhead can do the damage of twenty-nine Hiroshimas.'

I reminded them about the dangers of cruise missiles, even though I'd gone through it with them all before; bits I'd got from the CND meeting at Knebworth village hall, bits I'd picked up from Tony, snippets I'd filleted from
The Guardian
. They exchanged a look that said
Do you
think she's serious
? I thought Dad was going to tell Mum it was just as well I didn't go to university, the way I'd overheard him saying once when they were washing up. That was soon after I'd given them a lecture about the cruelty of factory farming and told them I was thinking of going vegetarian. ‘But you don't like vegetables,' Mum said. I didn't have an answer for that one.

‘It's that bloody leaflet isn't it?' said Dad.

‘No.'

‘The one with the bloke making a bunker under the stairs?' asked Mum, still clasping her half-peeled potato. ‘Oh Tess, you don't want to worry about that. Just because some little lad in the civil service is handing out leaflets, it doesn't mean me and your dad will be panic-buying pineapple chunks.'

‘It's not a joke.'

‘I know it's not, you sleeping on the cold ground with that lot.' She contemplated the murky saucepan.

‘That leaflet was written by the Ministry of Defence,' I reminded her.

Protect and Survive
advised, in illustrated steps, how best to cope before and after a nuclear strike. A shelter was vital.
You and your family may need to live in this room for days after an attack, almost without leaving it at all
. That alone sounded pretty awful, like Christmas Day and Boxing Day but without any decent food or telly, only the promise of a radioactive dust cloud if you tried to step outside. The leaflet said a pair of stout boots should be kept on standby for trips beyond the front door and that these trips should, if possible, only be conducted by people over thirty.

The problem was, we didn't have a cellar or a bunker, our house was a new build and there was hardly enough room to keep the things we needed, let alone stock-pile things we didn't. The people on Bishops Road would be all right because their houses had big cupboards under the staircases, I knew that from babysitting, but we couldn't very well rush to Bishops Road and start knocking on doors with only four minutes warning. And anyway, who'd let us in? If you didn't have the facilities, the leaflet suggested making a lean-to: there were drawings of a man carrying sandbags and looking busy with a hammer as if he were enjoying some Sunday DIY. He'd nailed three doors together but it didn't say where he'd got them from. I couldn't imagine Dad taking our doors off their hinges.

Mum seemed to have forgotten about the potatoes. ‘How long are you planning to go for?' I told her I wasn't sure yet, my visit was open. ‘How will you wash?' She glanced at Dad whose eyes had slid back to the mute TV. ‘What about your monthlies?' She mouthed. I made a shushing face. ‘Perhaps you should find another job, love. That place isn't stretching you much, is it, and you could be earning a better wage too. You don't have to stay in Stevenage now you've got your licence, you could go anywhere. Letchworth. Baldock. Or you could get something in London if you really wanted, couldn't she Brian, go up on the train?'

Dad sighed. He was looking at me as if I were a map of somewhere foreign.

But I wasn't bothered about getting on the train every day. I'd always known Hirshman & Luck was a temporary measure until I'd decided on the next step, and while I was going out with Tony, I didn't care what the next step was. I loved clocking off and leaving it all behind, not having to think, let alone worry about anything until the next morning. Even when I was there I could use half my mind for the work and the other half for sifting through thoughts of our time together. But then Tony dumped me in the middle of a routine phone call about weekend plans. There'd been the slightest break in the conversation, and I knew it was coming, sure as an F16 out of a clear blue sky.

‘I was thinking, what if we put things on ice for a while?' he said.

On ice
? What did that mean? I wasn't a polar bear. I didn't want to be put on ice while he strode into the white wilderness and found himself a dozen Eskimo girls, giggling in their beaver skin dresses.

He stumbled something about really liking me but thinking it was best for both of us. There was a pause before he added that he thought we could be friends, but when it came down to it, he needed someone he could really talk to. I knew what he meant, he meant about current affairs and politics. He'd just finished his degree at the Polytechnic and was going to move to London. He said he was going to be busy, he had plans.

‘I have plans too. It's not as if I want to hang around in Stevenage all my life.' That's what I said. Not bad. Not true either because actually, yes, I would have hung around in Stevenage, I would have hung around anywhere if Tony was there to hang around with. Instead we agreed it was a big world and he told me again how much he liked me and I just about maintained my dignity until we reached the end of the conversation and I was free to cry in the privacy of my bedroom with The Human League turned up loud to disguise the wailing.

After Tony dumped me, I carried on at work, soothed by the repetitive rhythm of the days: the post at nine-thirty, tea-break, minute-taking, the little tapes of dictation clattering onto my desk at intervals, each containing the slow drone of Mr Hirshman's voice telling me where to put my full stops and when to start a new paragraph; the reassuring presence of Peggy, the senior secretary, the deliberate way she'd stop at exactly one o'clock every day and stretch up her arms to the ceiling saying, ‘Rest for the wicked, Tessa,' then rise from her desk to retrieve her foil-wrapped sandwiches – chicken roll with piccalilli or tinned salmon and cress. Routine offers a modicum of comfort when your heart has been broken.