Love and Fallout (32 page)

Everyone had. I'd written the digits in blue biro on the backs of both hands.

‘This is it,' said Rori, drawing us into a triangular hug. I had my arm around Angela's bony shoulder, the feel of her, so light, almost snappable. She and I drew away from each other as quickly we could.

The queue was moving. It reminded me of the first time I'd waited on the ladder at Stevenage swimming pool to jump off the high board, trapped at the top, no way of going down again, heavy splashes as the invisible bodies fell forwards. I followed Rori as she climbed. Despite the beams from the torchlight, it was nearly impossible to discern shapes with any clarity. At the top I cocked my leg over the carpet, clinging and wobbling, no idea where to put my feet.

‘Swing your left foot,' Rori whispered from below. I felt my way with the toe of my boot, found the rung, descended halfway and waited to guide the next woman down. Through the shadows a hat appeared and then Angela's white face. She got to the top easily enough and then manoeuvred her leg and halted with a muffled Ouch.

‘What is it?'

She was lying on her stomach, one leg behind her on the ladder, the other caught in a prickle of barbed wire.

‘If you stay still, I can…' I climbed back up and put my hand on her leg.

The wire had twisted in the material of her trousers and she was stuck. We were supposed to help each other. ‘Let me,' I whispered, and tried to lift her leg, but she forced free and with a rip, her trouser tore. She wriggled to reposition herself for the descent. I gave up and went to crouch in the bracken with the others, our tinsel and deely boppers springing from the undergrowth.

More flightless angels thudded to the ground, bouncing to their feet and hugging. They obviously hadn't heard Angela's advice to keep low in the bracken, or were too excited to remember.

‘Is this everyone from Amber?' said Jean from somewhere close by.

‘Not quite,' I said. The small round figure of Di emerged over the fence. ‘Tessa!'

The voice came from behind and I jumped as Sam rustled out of the darkness in her tutu. ‘I can't get the thing done up at the back.' Hysterical all over again, we took turns fiddling with the zip and hooks.

One minute I was grappling to get Sam's tutu back on, and the next everyone was running. I didn't hear a command, we simply went with the flow of movement, my hand in Rori's, her hand in Angela's, running out of the trees, tack-tacking across soft ground, and then over the runway towards the ghostly outline of the silos. Up ahead, the first women had reached them and were scaling their sides. Mounds of concrete, they were only half-built, with steel rods sticking out of them like spoons from giant upturned Christmas puddings. We followed the women and then we were clambering onto the silos too. My boots were still gluey with mud and I leaned forward for balance, scrambling to get up, Rori just behind me, up and up until we must have been nearly forty feet high. And then we were standing on the surface, rubbled like a moon crater, the black airfield spread out below.

Rori reached to hug me, her paper wings beating as we jumped up and down. Everyone was embracing, elated. More women were making the ascent. We offered our help. Hands gripping hands. More hugs. A high-pitched ululation, that red-Indian noise I'd heard on my first night and now understood to be defiance. The nearly full moon drifted from behind a cloud. We were standing on top of the place where the missiles would be stored; a drawbridge door was in construction on one side of the silo for the purpose of letting them in. In the freezing air we waited for everyone to gather.

Someone stepped forwards and asked to sing. Di.

She began in a good steady voice, the only sound but for the crackling of plastic sheets harnessed to the silo. We instinctively held hands while the words rang out,
All is calm, all is bright
. Stars picked at the black sky. The woman beside me cried softly. The magnitude of where we were and what we were doing swelled between us and when Di finished singing it was a moment before anyone spoke. Then a few women cheered and clapped, their gloves deadening the applause. Barbel thrust her arms out. ‘We're here!' she called ‘Peace! Happy Christmas!' We were laughing. ‘Happy Christmas!' we shouted.

After that a woman from the folk group started thrumming a bodhran and Barbel, who was now well practised, played her recorder while Jenny picked up a flute, and we sang songs from the camp. We'd instinctively formed a rough circle. Rori's face shone beside mine. Jean raised her arms and we raised ours with her, processing clockwise, our black silhouettes against the deep blue sky like a chain of cut-out paper dolls. Christmas Day. The circle gathered pace. We added a hop and a skip. The stars whirled above us.

I lost track of how long we were dancing, ten minutes, fifteen. Underneath our feet the space designed to house the weapons, and above us a sky that went on and on. For a while I felt separated from my body; part of the other women and part of the sky.

And then came the sound of a siren.

There wasn't a plan for what happened next.

‘Americans,' said Sam from her place in the circle. ‘Must be.'

‘Don't stop!' said Barbel. I tightened my hold on Rori's hand. Adrenalin coursing through my heart. Distant barking echoed now as we continued to rotate, raising our voices.

‘Skittle,' Rori turned to me, breaking from my clasp. ‘I'm going to look over,' she said, moving towards the silo's edge. ‘Hang on!' The gap closed and I went to follow her but another voice said, ‘Are they coming? The police?' It was the woman on my other side, I could see she was younger than me, perhaps only seventeen. ‘It's all right,' I said, clutching her to calm us both. We continued to rotate.

The whoop of more sirens soon followed. And voices from the circle,

‘Are they MoD?'

‘Can't tell, keep dancing!'

‘We did it!'

‘We've done it!'

And yet more sirens. Jenny stopped playing her flute and the circle broke. Barbel played on. Women were hugging or calling out, or dancing in pairs and threes. Where was Rori? I shouted her name. The sky had grown a shade lighter, but it was still too dark to see clearly. ‘The Americans can't touch us,' said someone I'd only spoken to a few times. She had a blunt fringe and her expression was calm. ‘They have to wait for the police.'

Was that right? Suddenly I didn't know what I should be doing. Some of the women were sitting down in protest. Where was Rori? I wound through the women, crossing uneven ground to the other side of the silo, and there was the outline of a body climbing over the edge. I knew from her curls and the line of her shoulders that it was Rori. I shouted. She turned briefly, her face half shadow, but she didn't pause, she kept moving, the paper wings bobbing on her back. ‘Wait!' I followed, calling her name, keeping her in sight as I skidded down the steep face of the silo until my boots met with earth. Long-legged, she ran.

Military vehicles gathered on the other side of the silos, their sirens tearing through the early morning, and she didn't slow, she was running towards the inkiest trees clustered at the fence. My heart hurt, but I ran behind her, my breath came short and sharp, but I could nearly touch her. I reached out, grasped one of her angel wings, but she didn't slow. Instead she pulled away and as she tore free I fell. She turned. We were near the bracken. I cried out with the pain coming from inside my boot. I tried to kneel but couldn't get up. She stood three feet away, breathing hard. She looked at me and her expression was of someone at first alarmed and then withdrawn, as if she were witnessing an event many miles distant in which she could play no part.

‘Rori, please,' I heard myself say. She took a step back, another, and then she ran, disappearing into the black, and I was alone.

Unable to force myself upright I gave in and lay still, fingers curled around the papery angel wing. Sounds from far off, a dog barking, a loud hailer. My ankle throbbed until pain was all I could feel.

And then someone coming near and a voice I knew. ‘What's happened?' Angela was kneeling beside me.

‘I'm all right,' I tried to tell her, but the words didn't come out, only a jerky sob.

‘Lean on me.'

‘It's okay.'

But it wasn't okay, nothing was. I raised myself and leaned on her slight body. Lights flared behind us at the base, a policeman was shouting through a loud hailer but whatever he was saying was drowned by a helicopter circling overhead. We stood isolated.
Breathe, steady breaths
, came Angela's voice. Two police officers were running towards us and then my arm was pulled so vigorously behind my back I thought it might break.

‘She's not resisting arrest,' said Angela as they cuffed her.

‘Shut your mouth.' The policeman had his face up close to hers. ‘They ought to shoot you lot on sight.'

‘She's injured,' said Angela.

The policeman marched me forwards. ‘Trying to earn your Holloway wings are you?' he said, and I realised I was still grasping the torn paper from Rori's back. I dropped it on the mud. As we neared the vans, we saw other policemen carrying down the women who refused to walk off the silos. Di was hustled along with her hands held behind her. Some of the women continued to sing as they were arrested, snatches of song travelled on the air.

‘You lot are taking the piss now,' said one of the policemen when they'd clanked the door of the van shut. There were six of us inside, all cuffed, separated into wire cages. Two of the women were still singing. The van smelt of dogs and diesel.

‘Shut your noise, will you?'

The women sang louder. One of the officers began Land of Hope and Glory, and when that stopped he talked about what he'd do with us if it was up to him.

I'd had nightmares of being in a police van, and now it was actually happening. My face came back at me reflected in black glass.

‘Can't you take these cuffs off?' said the woman beside me. ‘They're digging in.'

‘Should have thought about that before you went on your little spree.'

‘Which station are you taking us to?' asked Angela. At a sharp turn in the road we swerved to one side and my weight shifted abruptly, sending a new and violent pain to my ankle.

‘We ask the questions, darling.'

After that Angela was quiet. I shut my eyes. Rori had run. She'd abandoned the action. She didn't care what happened to us. And it was plain as the cuffs on my wrist that she didn't care what happened to me.

28

A Two-Seater Sofa

‘I don't understand why he…'

‘Why Peter,' corrects Valeria, because one of her rules is that we only refer to each other by name. ‘Why Peter…' I never call him by his full name, only Mum does that, ‘…always has a problem with what I'm doing.'

Valeria is haloed by the glow of the Tiffany lamp at her shoulder. Petite and calm, she sits with a notepad on her lap, her black hair wound into a coil and fastened with a silver chopstick. She waits for Pete's response. He shifts on his side of the sofa, a dusky pink sofa which blends warmly into the room's burnt oranges and mustard yellows.

‘I don't have a problem, it isn't like that…' His body is angled towards me but he speaks to Valeria. ‘The point is, I don't think Tessa enjoys half the things she does.'

Valeria is attentive, she notices folded arms, she's keen on eye contact. Perhaps remembering our session on Better Communication, Pete lifts his eyes to meet mine. ‘I'm not going to encourage you to take on every cause you find. It's got ridiculous.'

‘So I'm ridiculous?'

The remark is automatic and defensive, and defensiveness is another of the code red words we learned about in Better Communication; but that was some weeks before we found ourselves picking over the problem of infidelity.

‘I didn't say you were ridiculous. I said, I'm saying…'

Pete sighs with closed eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose, like someone who's lifted an uncomfortable pair of glasses, but he doesn't wear glasses and I find the gesture annoying. ‘What about the Justice and Peace group at the Catholic church?' he says. ‘You don't even go to church.'

‘It's only a couple of hours a month, they needed someone to help steer it.'

He folds his arms and sighs again, returning his attention to Valeria. Is he really criticising me for attending a Justice and Peace group when he's been messing about with another woman? But we are not meant to be talking about her this week, at least not directly, that was for last week when I learned what Pete was so unwilling to tell me at home: the details. They'd slept together twice apparently – that took place in her neat little terrace. I recalled her running her hand along the black cat, imagined a bedroom with the curtains drawn, marigolds drinking in the sunlight below. Pete narrated in a low voice. Valeria looked between us and I looked at my hands to the scuffed wedding ring. I thought of a boy at primary school who used to pull out matchboxes from his pockets and slide them open to reveal dead insects, nobody wanted to look but we all did. Valeria waited for us to negotiate the silence afterwards. Pete told me he loved me, told Valeria he loved me, told me he loved me again. But that was last week. This evening we're supposed to be using our session to get at the reasons for his infidelity so we can find a way back to wherever it was we were, the place when we were happy. Or at least happier than this.