Resolution Way (31 page)
Someone shouts, that’s a Chinese company, one of the older guys from Elephant who Graeme hasn’t spotted, must have been lying down on one of the camp beds. He looks years older than six months ago when Graeme last saw him, perhaps he’s ill, gaunt, an unnatural almost luminous greyness to his face, starts saying in a quavering voice, you know what that means, that means fifteen hour days, and punishments for toilet breaks, and a dormitory to sleep in. That’s how the Chinese run things.
Racism, that’s racism, the girl over in the corner says, interrupting him, it’s capitalism it’s not about the nationality of the exploiter it’s about exploitation that is inherent to capitalism. The idea that there is something uniquely barbarous about the Chinese plays into Western Imperial discourses about …
Get in line! Anyone not in line in fifteen seconds will have five hours added to their cards.
You can’t do that, that is illegal. We know our legal position. Graeme glances over at the mouthy one, hood still up, and thinks just shut up mate you’re only getting yourself in more trouble.
Then the whole group sits down. Dickheads. Clarke turns back, about halfway down the queue, wants them to get up, they’re going to get everyone nervous, get everyone cuffed, hooded, taken out to the bus one by one when what they want is the element of surprise, everybody doing what they’re told till suddenly blam, Clarke knows if he takes off across the car park none of these fat fuckers weighed down with their vests and boots are going to catch him.
Get the fuck up, man, he shouts at them in irritation.
Two of the guards have stepped forward now, taking cans of Mace out of their holsters.
You are not allowed to deploy Mace or Tasers in a confined space, one of the activists shouts.
The bigger of the two guards smiles slightly, a twitch at the corner of his mouth. He is 32 years old, joined the Army at eighteen and spent most of his twenties driving around Afghanistan and Iraq in an armoured car shooting people, then for a year or so he was a bouncer in Maidstone until he lost his job for being a little too pro-active. Now he has some students, some troublemakers, some activists, cornered in a room and the full permission of the State to make examples of people and overstep the mark.
These pricks think their degrees and long words and good homes mean something anymore, if they ever did. That no one would dare to abuse them as the poor have routinely been abused. These cunts think they are special, that their indignation is some magical force that will have people like security guard number two re-holstering his Taser and bowing his head meekly in order to be lectured.
Graeme is slowly edging his way toward the door, shuffling along behind Clarke. He trusts Clarke, somehow. Clarke looks tense; lips pressed tight, head to one side.
The prick in the hood is saying, we are peacefully refusing to cooperate with what we believe to be an illegal use of force by a private security firm which has no legal mandate. Maybe he will get arrested again, this time go to prison, maybe he fantasises about the idea of travelling all over Europe to symposiums and colloquiums, publishing a book every few years re-exploring the great doomed disobedience of the twenty-tens, he needs to have his niche, his backstory, an insurrection he can be a part of, spend some time in jail, the romance and authority of the prison notebook a virtual guarantee of his legend.
Fuck’s sake. Get the fuck up man. You’re wasting our time.
Please, please, the girl in the Christina Aguilera t-shirt shouts. All we have now is each other; all we have now is each other. Her voice trembles with excitement.
Remember these people are private security guards they are not allowed to employ force unless they are directly threatened.
Someone’s been on the phone and reinforcements are coming in through the front door, filing into the room and surrounding the activists, some of whom are being pulled by their feet into a more containable, orderly grouping.
Come on man, Clarke shouts to the security guard at the head of the queue, let us get through before this kicks off. I don’t want to be in here with Mace and Tasers and shit.
The guard casts a glance around, gets the nod from someone higher up, starts rapidly scanning Claimant Cards and letting people through into the main hall then out the front door. Perfect, now there are even fewer
USG
s out there. Graeme is right behind Clarke and he knows that they should wait a few moments in the car park, give everyone the chance to get out, go slow between the front door and the coach so everyone is in the open air before they all go in different directions. He keeps his eyes down, hands holding his precious cargo tight against his chest, the light of the hall, the carpet, the steps, cool night air, a drift forward, Clarke checking back over his shoulder making sure everyone’s out. Graeme glances up, sees a familiar face hurrying past him into the hotel talking on a phone.
Joolzy!
He almost calls out to him then realises, no, surely not. He stops in his tracks for a second and the girl behind bumps into him, discreetly twists round to follow Joolzy’s back as he jogs up the steps nodding to the guys stationed at the door.
Go! Suddenly everyone bolts, leaving Graeme the slow, distracted centre of starburst of flapping clothes and pounding feet. What?
He looks around, two of the coach drivers have grabbed someone already as another one leans back in the doorway, smoking a ciggy, and watching: not my job, mate. Three
USG
guards are barrelling out of the hotel, heading in three different directions. Graeme starts to run, his limbs distant and heavy, his mind still reeling, the bag held in his arms slowing him further as he sees Clarke, ahead of him, hitting the main road and veering left then going across it and into a side street, head back, limbs chopping the air, momentum, power, force, as Graeme plods and shuffles past the fag-smoking driver, as though in a bad dream, fleeing from some childhood demon in slow motion, unable to shake off the invisible harness pulling him back, unseen forces weighing on him.
Past the coach, someone shouting, you, stop there, stop there, as he turns right and sees the coast, the glittering lights, hears a noise behind him and sees his pursuer stumble and go heavily down onto the pavement, skid out into the road, winded.
A window in the hotel dining room is broken as he begins to run. Then one of the curtains is pulled down.
It’s getting very messy inside.
All we have is each other now, all we have each is other now, the girl is shouting over and over again, her voice fervent.
All we have is each other, and if only we could just somehow shove the world to one side, shake it off, dodge it, then we could really live together, think with one mind, speak with one voice. If we could just duck under it and around it in large enough numbers, turn our back on it, build up a different world that would slowly displace the one that has done so much to hurt us and divide us from each other, dissolve it from within through some fervent refusal to judge or stand apart or stand above, through some warm inner reserve of love and freedom just below the surface almost close enough to touch.
All the promise, all the bounty of the world is there waiting for us to seize it and make it our own, paradise, as always, just a question of levering up those paving stones, the true life of ease and brotherhood, it could be so easy, all of this oppression and hierarchy and competition is so unnecessary, don’t you see that, instead of the sixty-hour shifts they will be pulling come Monday, instead of lying bandaged in the camp beds in the cold dormitory, the machines could be carrying us all away into a golden future. Look at the stupidity of it all, the waste.
That’s what the prick in the Adidas hoodie would like to say, but then he goes down under a couple of truncheon blows and the
USG
boys know they can have a good time out here tonight, a long way from anywhere, a group of people who have fallen off the radar, let them poke their fucking phones in peoples’ faces.
Discipline. A disciplined populace. If you cannot learn the rules, if you cannot learn to obey, if you cannot learn to discipline yourself then you will be disciplined.
A blow breaks a wrist, the phone falls to the floor, gets stamped on. Mace. Tasers. Carte Blanche.
Paradise.
Graeme doesn’t know where he is now, he has tried to get to the station indirectly, jogging up side roads until he heard the edge of what sounded like music on the breeze bellying in off the coast,
Return to Dreamland
. He has followed it, losing the thread sometimes, doubling back to recapture it and weaving around as it slowly builds and intensifies. He clambered through a hedge at one point, scratching his face, and is tired now, half jogging, half limping across a rutted field, the unmistakable sound of drum and bass hacking away the night. He can hear sirens too, and see lights flashing along the coast, going up to the hotel. He slows down and begins to walk, takes his Claimant Card out and snaps it, crouches down, digs in the earth, scooping a couple of inches of topsoil away, buries it.
There’s a fence ahead of him and beyond it the rave is going on, a marquee, some power generators, toilets. Probably security guards somewhere, he should be careful, but he thinks, if he can get over, get in, someone will help him out, get him up to London so he can do the deal.
Back to ’96 the MC is saying. Back to ’95, Back to ’94. Where were you in ’92?
Maybe that’s Matty in there soundchecking. Should he take the risk of scaling the fence? Might be security guards in there, dogs, does he want to drag Matty into this anyway, even if he can get over?
Who does he know who can get him out of this mess? He takes his phone out of his pocket and waves his hand around, finds a signal. There’s only one number he can dial at this point, the OkupaUK emergency number that got passed onto him six months ago, the informal helpline he can only hope still operates. It rings three times, four and is answered, warily.
What’s the nature of your emergency? The voice asks.
I have gone
AWOL
, Graeme Ferris says. He doesn’t know if that’s the right term. There’s shitloads of us, down in Margate.
A long pause as something gets checked.
Get rid of your Claimant Card, the voice says.
I have done that. His heart is racing, he swats away a fly that circles in near his ear with a buzz, remembers the stories that got put round of tiny drones with microscopic cameras, too small to see, that
USG
released in a cloud over an area when they needed to track escapees, how they could get up a few centimetres in front of your face before you could even tell it was one.
Looks like you are in the right place right time, we have got a colleague in the area. He’s been notified, stay there he’s coming round to get you.
I need to get back up to London, Graeme says.
That’s something you will have to negotiate with your contact, the voice says.
I have got information about the cops.
A longer pause. Talk to your contact. The line goes dead. He hangs up and squats down, back against the fence. This won’t come free, he will be in someone’s debt for getting him out of here; you are always in someone’s debt. All he has is his bag, his contacts, his information.
Sweating in the dark, chewing at his bottom lip, trying to understand what his options are, his choices, if he has any, crouched there and his brother a hundred feet away, laughing and drinking a beer with his mates, getting ready for Saturday night’s good times.
Someone is coming along the edge of the fence, flashing the light on their phone to make him aware of their presence. Graeme? She asks in a low voice.
Yeah, Graeme says. Can you get me back up to London?
Joolzy leans back in the chair, sipping at a bottle of water, watching events in The Walpole Hotel unfold on a colleague’s laptop. He recognises most of them. One of those guards is ex-Millwall. Someone’s been bending the rules landing him a job. Peters is in there, causing a ruckus, getting everyone to sit down, he’s a good lad, one of the better of the new undercover lot. That one, there, Petra, particularly militant Activist, part of North London Women’s Refuge
AAF
. Their paths have crossed numerous times, an endless capacity to denounce, declaim. All we have is each other, all we have is each other she is shouting as the
USG
boys move in.
Typical anarchist. She wants collapse, she calls it freedom, but really she wants everyone dependent, forced into her arms, levelled, humbled, made to beg for crumbs of love from mummy and nuzzle at her bosom for succour. Love. These kids are always going on about how much they love each other. Perhaps they do, but Joolzy is outstanding in his field precisely because unlike many, too many of his colleagues, he has never identified with, or fallen in love with his targets. Stockholm Syndrome is the term they misapply to the situation. Even after all these years, twelve in Deptford at least and before that in Croydon, then back as a youth, deployed into the free party scene in the late Eighties.
They ask him how he’s managed it, thirty years pretending to be someone else, living a bogus life. I am just the same as everyone else is his usual reply. In some way he has always felt like a spy, an informer, in his home, at school, among friends. The police was an obvious choice. We are all double agents, anyway. That’s what Julian thinks.
He has had to pull a few strings to keep Graeme Ferris in his flat until he can get down here and pick things up off Nick Skilling, now he can see he’s gone
AWOL
and that Clarke has got him out. Very smooth, perhaps some co-ordination between Clarke and Peters to set up, good to see different departments collaborating, though Joolzy is unsure whose interests Clarke is currently representing. Hilarious to think that Peter’s has been shacked up with the shrieky
AAC
co-ordinator for three years now after he distinguished himself as one of the leading lights of the second wave of student protests five years ago. That really is service above and beyond. He has been surreptitiously filming their painfully politically correct sexual encounters and uploading them for the delectation of the rest of the squad and Joolzy imagines that if that ever goes public there will be an absolute shitstorm of public protest. Understandable, it is not ethical and whoever is allowing it to happen on their watch, probably Davis, is clearly at fault, though the exact responsibility for subordinate’s actions is always diffused by the layers of hierarchy and sub-contracting designed to act as shield for the top brass.