Brand New Friend Page 10

Ratman was drinking a pint. Paolo asked him about it and Ratman said he didn’t think it was true that bottled beers were vegan.

  ‘Lager tastes like piss and we obviously can’t give up beer, so – cheers!’

  Paolo raised his bottle in a toast, the others said nothing.

  Ratman knew about direct action. He had contacts. He and Mark were speaking to each other with the air of two sparring boxers, respecting each other’s experience but also probing for weakness. (Paolo had no experience of boxing, of course, and never watched it because he was opposed in principle, he must have seen this in a film).

  Then it became clear that Ratman and Claire had already spoken. The idea that seemed to have sprung spontaneously from both of them (although Claire mentioned it first) was to liberate some hounds from a hunt. One they knew from their weekends as hunt saboteurs. Paolo had been sabbing a couple of times, when he managed to get up on a Saturday, but he wasn’t hardcore like they were. Mark and Ratman were among the leaders, they had proper Ordnance Survey maps and even understood them and knew how to use the horn to call the hounds off and where to lay a false trail and how to mask the fox’s scent. They’d been using garlic spray the day Paolo went, but the Union said if they wanted to hire their vans they’d have to stop using it because the smell lingered for weeks. Someone had asked if they could use Mark’s van but he said he couldn’t get insurance for that. So now they had to use an aerosol which was designed for disguising the smell of bitches in heat.

  When Paolo went he just followed the directions of the people who actually knew what they were doing, did his best to keep up, was impressed how one of them always stayed behind to make sure the stragglers didn’t get lost or isolated (Claire sometimes took on this role).

  Once or twice they’d spoken to local people – fellow protesters demonstrating by the road or landowners who welcomed them onto their land, saying the hunt were trespassing and they were glad someone was there to try and stop them. Sometimes they got near the hunt and words were exchanged, but Paolo hadn’t seen any real trouble from either side, although he knew it happened. Always somewhere else, he thought sadly.

  ‘I think it’s too complicated,’ said Mark. ‘We’d have to take care of the animals, find homes for them. We’d need to hire a van. We should start smaller. Make sure we can work well together, that we trust each other.’

  Ratman said he had contacts. He hinted (without actually saying) that he had done similar actions before. He could find homes for the dogs.

  Paolo’s vote was for Ratman. He thought of the drama of it, them going in under cover of darkness, the buzz of doing something that was pretty fucking dangerous. But before he could speak, Ratman said, ‘You might have a point, mate. What have you got in mind?’

  ‘Flemings department store is still selling fur. We go in, leave a small explosive device in the upholstery section, timed to go off at night. The sprinklers go off, cause thousands of pounds worth of damage to stock. We phone the local paper, claim responsibility.’

  ‘Economic sabotage,’ said Claire. ‘And no one gets hurt.’

  ‘The stores don’t have anyone there at night?’ asked Paolo.

  ‘We should reccy it,’ said Mark.

  ‘I don’t think they have night staff,’ said Claire. ‘One of my friends worked there over Christmas last year. She said in the morning they had to wait outside for the manager to arrive. If they’d had a security guard he’d have let them in. And she said a lot of the staff drink at the Horse and Trumpet after work.’

  ‘That’s good to know,’ said Mark. ‘Maybe I could spend some time there, see what I can find out.’

  No one offered to go with him. With Paolo’s crimped and backcombed hair and Claire’s random shaved patches and colour experiments (the latest was pink streaks) and their penchant for paisley clothing, Paolo’s and Claire’s looks screamed student. And Ratman just looked mad. While Mark could blend in.

  ‘We’ve got a plan then,’ said Mark. There was a lull in the music so while Mark went to the jukebox, Paolo and Claire talked about whether to stay for the gig and weighed up the relative merits of lentil burgers and falafel from Theo’s, the takeaway they would likely stagger into on the way home. Ratman said he couldn’t stay because he had to get back to the rat.

  Paolo had only just noticed that he was alone. ‘Why didn’t you bring her?’

  Ratman shook his head mournfully. ‘She’s barred.’

  27

  Tilda called him. ‘I think I know why Mark’s disappeared,’ she said, without preamble. ‘There’s a big day of action at the Threapton fracking site this weekend. He’s involved in direct action workshops.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The workshops? If I told you that I’d have to kill you. But the demo is public, obviously. Want to go?’

  Of course he did. It would mean another weekend away from home but he would make up for it.

  ‘I need to check a few things but yes, in principle. I’ll call you.’

  ‘Need to speak to your wife, I guess.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you think she’d come?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘She is so cool. I’ve seen her on Al-Jazeera and on Channel 4 News. Giving hell to that guy from the Muslim Brotherhood.’

  That was back in 2012. Channel 4 had posted the clip to YouTube and it went viral worldwide. It was during the protests against then-President Morsi’s decree that effectively granted him unlimited powers. Salma – both of them – had friends who had been killed or injured in those demonstrations.

  ‘It’s shit that she can’t go home,’ said Tilda, more subdued now.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, a little curt, because he knew, because he didn’t want to be reminded of it, because when the anger stopped there was only sadness.

  ‘Maybe we can talk about it at the weekend. Hey, will you be driving?’

  He didn’t want his licence plates recognised or his car damaged at a demo. ‘I’ll get a hire car,’ he said.

  ‘Make it a van?’

  ‘I can’t be involved in anything political, you know that,’ he told her.

  ‘Okay. Well can I get a lift? In your hire car.’

  ‘Are you going as an activist or a journalist?’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘I bet your wife doesn’t agree. Look, I’m not planning on doing anything illegal, or even bringing anything.’

  ‘Okay.’

  As he put the phone down he wondered what he was doing. Driving hundreds of miles in a weekend to see a potential murderer who had strenuously avoided talking to him. Like a spurned lover confronting their ex. Except he called me, thought Paolo. And I want to know why.

  In the car, Tilda was still gushing about Salma.

  ‘She’s one of my heroes. It took real courage to walk away from her BBC career and join the revolution.’

  He laughed. ‘Courage which I lacked, I suppose.’

  ‘I’m not judging. I guess you worked out that shit between you. I’m just saying. She’s a role model to a lot of us. Showing what activist journalism can be.’

  He nodded. He felt oddly emotional, although this wasn’t the first time he’d heard such words. Perhaps it was their proximity in the bubble of the car, the enclosed fug of the heating, the raindrops on the windscreen, the comforting familiar sound of the World Service with its hourly updates on conflicts and wars that were not his.

  Of course most people in Britain had no idea who Salma was, but in a certain politically engaged subculture, Salma was held up as a hero, even an icon. So much so that she was known only by her first name. Salma.

  The word sent a wave of longing through him. He wanted to be with Salma in all her complexity. Not just revolutionary Salma but the Salma who frowned when she helped the girls with their Maths homework, or the Salma who lounged on the sofa with a glass of wine when the kids were finally asleep and they had a rare night together toiling through a
box set. Then there was the Salma who thought nothing of spending the UK-average weekly pay on a pair of shoes she would wear once. He wondered what Tilda would make of that.

  ‘I know she paid a heavy price,’ said Tilda, more softly now. ‘I guess you both did.’

  It was an irony that, after her fierce opposition to the Brotherhood, it was the regime that succeeded it that had put her on trial on charges of terrorism and spreading false news. Salma had been out of the country in 2014 when members of her loose alliance of journalists, bloggers and activists were arrested. Paolo and Salma had thought that her reputation, her former BBC role – and bluntly her dual British citizenship – would save her, but one of her colleagues had joint US citizenship and he still ended up in jail. Salma had been charged and convicted in her absence.

  She had campaigned tenaciously on behalf of her colleagues. The last member of her team was freed in 2016, in part because of diplomatic efforts by the US and UK, in part because she had used her contacts ruthlessly to keep their story in the news. They were free but not pardoned. Salma could not go back to Cairo. More than that, there was a long list of countries she could not visit throughout the Middle East and Africa in case she might be extradited.

  ‘What’s she doing now?’

  ‘She’s writing a book,’ he said.

  ‘About her experiences? Fantastic. When the time comes, will you get me a signed copy?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, not bothering to correct her assumption. ‘Now tell me what’s going to happen today.’

  ‘There’s a lot I don’t know. That’s kind of the point. Only the relevant people are told, and as late as possible, so the police can’t get wind of it.’

  ‘How do they communicate?’

  ‘Mainly through Whatsapp groups.’

  So much for Mark’s refusal to use technology, thought Paolo. Had the burner just been a ruse to avoid contact with him? Tilda told him the little she did know, and looked at the map and suggested where to park and explained they’d have to take the bus to get near the site, then they both fell quiet, until Tilda said, ‘It must be horrible for Salma. Not to be able to go home.’

  Paolo didn’t say it had been his home too.

  He asked her to tell him about the background to the Threapton fracking site.

  ‘It’s been all the way through the local planning system. Turned down at every stage. So eventually it went to the Secretary of State who overturned the decision of the council. All that shite about localism, when it comes to it they look after their friends. Corporations, lobbyists –’ She waved her arm vaguely, taking in the universal Them.

  ‘And the protesters?’

  ‘You’ve got everything from environmental groups, to anti-capitalists, to local community groups. Including a few Tory councillors. And a whole group of people who probably never thought of themselves as political till now.’

  ‘Ah, the Great British nimby,’ he said. Not In My Backyard had become a term of abuse in some quarters. People who would fight to the death if a housing development was proposed on their local green space while watching the value of their own house escalate. Congratulating themselves on their shrewdness in accumulating a paper fortune when they had done nothing more than buy a house and live in it.

  ‘That’s harsh,’ said Tilda and he immediately felt rebuked. ‘This could be a first step for them. Okay, it’s an issue that affects them personally, but they start to join the dots, see what else corporations are doing to people worldwide, to see that it’s all part of a pattern –

  ‘I’d love to think you were right,’ he said. ‘I’m just a bit jaded by experience.’

  God, how he’d hated to hear that when he was her age. He’d been told that he would grow out of it. Wait till you get a job and buy a house and then you’ll see things differently. Well, he still saw injustice and inequality, now more than ever. It was just he was less optimistic that they could change it.

  ‘It must have been tough,’ said Tilda. ‘I mean shit happens here and we should never be complacent but in Egypt it’s a whole other level of bad.’

  28

  Paolo and Tilda got off the bus on a dual carriageway with no distinguishing features, aside from the turn-off to the fracking site with its security gates and barbed wire fences and the earthworks and machinery beyond. They had left the car parked a safe distance away. Most of the other passengers had been protesters. He wondered who got off the bus when there wasn’t an anti-fracking protest. There seemed to be nothing else in the area.

  His musing was disrupted by the two women in front of him who had pulled open a rucksack and, quick as stage conjurors, had lain in the road in front of the gates and locked an arm each into a plastic tube.

  ‘They put a metal bar in the middle of the tube,’ Tilda explained. ‘Then they use a carabiner to fasten themselves to it.’ He looked blank and she explained. ‘The metal snap hooks that climbers use to secure themselves. The police won’t be able to get them out without careful cutting.’

  Tilda seemed to know them, although they hadn’t acknowledged one another on the bus. She went up to them, filming with her phone, and spoke to them. She asked them what they were doing and why.

  ‘Corporate interests want to poison our water purely for their profit,’ said one.

  ‘Climate change is already having devastating effects worldwide. We should be investing in clean energy and good public transport,’ said the other. They were not only articulate but completely at ease with speaking to camera, with their orthodontically even smiles and shiny hair. Quite unlike the stereotype of the crusty. Of course it shouldn’t matter what they looked like, but he knew that on TV, and even on social media, it did.

  A group of supporters had joined the women and stood round them protectively. Tilda explained that they would be there when the police and private security came to make sure they didn’t break the law they were supposed to uphold. Or at least to record it if they did.

  Paolo was able to take in the whole scene now. There were clusters of protesters holding placards on the side of the road, held back by stewards. There was a group of women with a Grans Against Fracking banner. Then there were groups in the road. There were more pairs lying down locked on to each other. He saw a chain of three women in folding garden chairs. The youngest was in the middle, in an armlock with the woman on each side.

  Tilda said, ‘They’re three generations of the same family.’

  There were police and private security everywhere, vans parked up, lines of officers in body armour, others walking round or watching, one or two speaking on radios. One officer was filming. She and Tilda found themselves, for a moment, filming each other. But this activity was desultory, uncoordinated. There was a sense of waiting. Paolo thought of Cairo, of Tahrir Square, the moments between the drama that made it onto the TV. Making sure you had water, gossiping with the cameraman, texting Salma’s mother to see if the girls were okay, but underneath it an alertness to the slightest move from the other side (because he had known which side he was on, even if he couldn’t say it). Knowing that this lull would not last.

  A steward was kneeling by the two women with the armlock in the road, talking to them. No doubt there was a procedure to go through. They would have to be asked to unlock themselves, though it was clear they would not do so. Paolo and Tilda kept walking, heading for the gates, so he couldn’t see the steward’s face. Or the women. How were they feeling now?

  He would be afraid, he knew. He was not ashamed to admit it. When the revolution came, Salma was ready to throw herself into the protests, to take risks, feeling that being known would offer some protection from government forces but also aware it could make her a target to others. Knowing what happened to the people who were arrested. She had stood with the protesters, he had stood behind a camera.

  Perhaps Mark was afraid of prison too. An ex-copper wouldn’t have a good time in jail and his backstory would not endear him to the prison officers either. Was that why he had avoiding te
lling the truth about Sid? Simple fear?

  If so, he seemed to have overcome it now.

  29

  Tilda spotted it first. Paolo was so busy looking around him that he hadn’t thought to look up.

  ‘It’s an observation tower,’ she said.

  This seemed a grand term for what was just a simple structure made from scaffolding poles and planks. Four verticals, forming a square, with horizontals above head height, and a platform that was, he guessed, about fifteen feet off the ground. A platform with Mark on it.

  He could see a couple of people standing nearby, one by each leg of the tower.

  ‘They’re buddies,’ said Tilda. ‘There to make sure he’s safe. Call for help if he needs it, or a lawyer.’

  Mark was lying down. Paolo didn’t know if that was to conserve energy or because it was safer. He waved at Paolo.

  Just then a woman came out of nowhere, broke the cordon and ran towards the tower. She was wearing what looked like climbing gear and Paolo assumed she was going to join Mark on the tower but as she got closer she screamed, ‘Traitor!’ and threw a stone at him. Her aim was good but Mark caught it and placed it calmly beside him on the platform. One of the buddies, a young woman bundled in layers whose face still looked red with the cold, came towards her, tried to speak to her but she already had another stone ready to throw.

  Mark was very still, attentive to the woman but doing nothing to protect himself. Thinks he’s Gandhi, thought Paolo, but still part of him was impressed. Wouldn’t you instinctively cover your head with whatever you had to hand (the blanket, his coat, his bag)? Move to the other side of the platform?

  The police and security, who had done so much to hold the line, seemed oddly unconcerned by the breach. They stood watching the woman. A couple were laughing, the rest impassive, as if they hadn’t seen a thing.

  ‘She could really hurt him,’ said Tilda. ‘He might not catch the next one and he has nowhere to hide.’