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Paolo sighed and reached for his wallet.

  ‘Paolo Bennett, BBC,’ he said to a nearby officer. He’d chosen him more or less at random, or intuitively as he liked to put it, perhaps because his posture appeared a little more assertive than those around him, although who could tell under all the padding and body armour?

  ‘Can you explain why you’re not intervening?’

  ‘You’ll have to talk to our communications team.’

  He tried again. ‘There’s been a breach of the cordon.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘If that man is injured as a result of your negligence –’

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘I need to speak to the senior officer on the ground. Is that her?’

  He pointed and the officer turned his head. It was an old tactic but it seemed to work. Paolo ran through the cordon before the officer could stop him, hoping that his arrest wouldn’t be on the news, but as he reached Mark, he saw that the woman was no longer throwing stones. She was crying, speaking into a phone. Mark was on a phone too, presumably speaking to her.

  Then she walked away and stood in front of a police officer, looking patiently into his eyes while his brain turned over and he realised she was waiting to be arrested. He escorted her away, but uncuffed, as if he were hoping she’d get away and save him the paperwork and the explanations.

  Somehow, while Paolo had been watching this, he had become handcuffed to one of the buddies. Then the burner rang.

  ‘You said you wanted to talk, now we can. But nothing operational. I’m recording and I’m probably not the only one.’

  ‘You mean I can’t ask you if you killed Sid?’

  Mark didn’t respond.

  ‘Perhaps you can ask your friend to let me go.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Paolo handed over the burner to his new comrade-in-arms, who began speaking to Mark. Paolo watched him. He was thinking that just as he’d thought the old crusty cliché was dead, he had to get bound to one.

  He was wearing layers of torn clothes which looked unwashed, as did his hair. No doubt he was one of those people who said the oils cleaned the hair by themselves. He seemed to apply the same logic to his teeth and armpits.

  Crusty was listening to whatever Mark had to say, but before he spoke he glared at Paolo. ‘This is private,’ he said, and turned away from Paolo, as much as he could when they were cuffed together.

  After a while he handed the burner back. Paolo held it a little distance from his ear, thinking that it had only moments earlier nestled against Crusty’s skin.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ said Mark. ‘He wants the police to have to release you, because it will mean they take longer to get to the tower.’

  ‘Can’t you tell him?’

  ‘We’re a non-hierarchical organisation. We reach decisions by consensus.’

  ‘But there is no consensus here.’

  ‘No,’ said Mark. ‘There are limitations to all systems.’

  Tilda was still filming. He’d be all over Twitter by now. BBC journalist gets himself chained to protesters. Laughing stock. Or they might claim he had willingly joined them, which would be worse. That would seriously dent his BBC impartiality credentials and in the current climate it was a touchy subject. Still, there was nothing to be done. He tried to relax, let his mind wander.

  He looked to the police and security guards and gestured hopefully at the handcuffs but he wasn’t getting the response he had hoped for. What did they think of him? Did they see him as a protester rather than a bystander in a ludicrous position? He was going to shout, ‘I’m being held against my will!’ but it sounded too ridiculous and melodramatic, and anyway, they knew.

  He took out his phone and called Clarissa. He didn’t expect to get her but she picked up.

  ‘Darling, I’ve already seen it on Periscope,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t sound very concerned.’

  ‘Of course I am. I’m concerned for your welfare. Sorry I just need to sneeze.’

  He could hear her sniggering. ‘Will you get Legal to sort this out?’

  ‘On a Saturday?’

  ‘There must be someone on call.’

  ‘That’s for emergencies, Paolo.’

  It was starting to rain.

  30

  Time passed slowly. A woman who must have been in her eighties brought them tea in paper cups. She had a little stall with a gas burner on the verge behind the cordon. Paolo was surprised the police let her through. She reminded him of his nan, his dad’s mum, with her shampoo-and-set and her bifocals.

  He drank it gratefully until Crusty said, ‘You want to go easy on that, cos you won’t be able to piss for a while.’

  There appeared to be movement among the police. Some were talking into their headsets, others were looking around. The private security guards were edging in, trying to find out what was going on.

  Suddenly Paolo thought of the day they’d gone to demonstrate against Willowview Laboratories. They’d gone on a coach from outside the uni, all laughing and joking. Some people were dressed as rabbits. Claire, for reasons that now escaped him, was dressed as a chicken. Ratman had left his rat at home but was wearing his famous fur coat.

  Isabel had helped him splash it with red paint. She had done it in their back yard, on an old sheet from a jumble sale, frowning with concentration. Ratman wanted to pour the paint all over it and said he didn’t need a Jackson Pollock but Isabel ignored him and experimented with a number of techniques (flicking, splashing, spraying) before settling on her preferred approach. The final effect was quite beautiful, thought Paolo, and not what they wanted at all.

  They stood among the crowd, the jugglers and the political campaigners and the concerned people who normally just signed petitions but today had driven in from North Yorkshire market towns, moved to do something more. They were drawn to Claire (a chicken suit, it turns out, is a great ice-breaker) and she was smiling, hardly her default expression but she seemed really happy that day. There was an innocence to it all, an odd assortment of people brought together by a common cause. It was great.

  Paolo was bored.

  Then the police moved in. He didn’t know why. Perhaps there had been an incident elsewhere in the crowd, or perhaps they just wanted to teach people a lesson. Battle-hardened by the Miners’ Strike, hungry for action? For the sheer thrill of violence? Or angry that the overtime they had cherished had been so suddenly withdrawn? They stood, unmoving, watchful behind their little shields. Paolo felt a surge of adrenaline.

  Claire was gone, apparently swept away by the rabbits and the suburban mums, but Paolo didn’t want to go. Instead, he fought his way to the front. Something was going to happen. He sensed Mark beside him. Was Mark excited by it too? He didn’t look round but knew he was there, that they were in this together, ready to fight. It felt a little like love.

  Then the shields went up and suddenly they were there. He saw a man’s face behind the visor, and he thought, they are human, after all, as in infinite slow motion a baton went up and he waited for it to smash his skull and all he wanted to do was hurt someone and –

  The baton never landed. And then he was gone. Yanked from the crowd, Mark’s arm in his, the crowd that had seemed so dense somehow parting to let them through.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ said Paolo. He hated Mark now, shook himself free, feeling like when his mum once pulled him from the path of an oncoming car. All that fury, that was ready for battle, now turned on him.

  Mark looked at him but said nothing. Just stood there, letting Paolo shout, waiting for him to let it all out.

  Later it became Paolo’s battle story, told in the pub. Paolo had been ready to get himself killed, but Mark had been cautious. He mocked himself in the telling, grateful to Mark for his lucky escape. Now he thought, was it luck? Or had Mark known what was going to happen?

  The police were reversing in a pickup truck. An officer came forward again and asked Mark if he was willing to come down. When he got the
refusal he expected, he told Mark that he was under arrest for obstructing the police in their duties. Mark asked, calmly, patiently, how was he obstructing them? He wasn’t blocking the road. The officer didn’t answer. The police began unloading scaffolding poles from the back of the truck.

  Crusty was feeling expansive. ‘They’ll build their own structure, although there’s no need. Ours is built to the same standard as theirs will be. Maybe better. Then they’ll climb up their tower and climb across to get him down.’

  Paolo rubbed at his wrist where the cuffs were beginning to chafe.

  ‘You can take those off now,’ said Crusty. ‘They’re just sex shop cuffs with a safety catch. I was going to file it off but I didn’t get round to it.’

  Paolo imagined it was one of a long list of things he hadn’t got round to. Like having a bath.

  He went to the other side of the cordon and stood beside Tilda. She went to turn the camera on him but he shook his head slightly and she turned it back onto Mark. They watched as the second tower went up. He called Clarissa to let her know he was fine, and this time got voicemail. Tried Salma, left her a message too, nothing personal, in case it got picked up on a recording.

  Mark was brought down by a couple of guys in climbing gear. As soon as he was on the ground, he played dead. It needed four of them to carry him. All around him, protesters were cheering. As he was brought past Paolo, Mark smiled and mouthed, ‘Good one.’

  Paolo felt ridiculously proud, then reminded himself that Mark was not his friend. He didn’t know who Mark was. What he did know was that Mark had gone from actively avoiding the police all week to courting arrest today in a very public fashion. Why?

  The police were suddenly all listening to their radios. They began clustering in groups near their vehicles. Then Tilda was beside him, showing him her phone. ‘Mark’s a decoy,’ she said. ‘A load of activists have cut through the wires at the back of the site. It’s a mass trespass.’

  31

  Paolo told Isabel about the two guys at the Leeds Student meeting who got their article in the Guardian. He liked talking to Isabel. That is, he hated talking to Isabel because he became tongue-tied and stupid (he hoped the long silences made him seem deep but more likely she thought he was sullen). That was until at a certain point he would relax enough to forget she was Isabel and talk to her like she was just a person.

  They were in her room. It looked not unlike everyone else’s – posters of bands on the walls and the obligatory shelf made of a plank and two heaps of bricks, a wine bottle with a candle in it and a little vase for holding joss-sticks – but somehow, Isabel’s room had style, as if it was exactly the right vase in the right place.

  There was a sketch on one wall of a young Isabel, done by her mother. He looked at it from time to time, thinking he should say something profound about it, but to him it just looked like an ordinary picture of a pretty young girl. He couldn’t see anything of his Isabel in it.

  Paolo had read the words ‘Hampstead Socialist’, mostly used as a term of abuse in his parents’ Daily Mail, but Isabel’s family actually were socialists from Hampstead. Her mother was an artist (though not a famous one, he had gathered) and her father was a Philosophy lecturer. They were both active in CND and knew a lot of senior Labour Party people. Claire had told him that Isabel went to some sort of progressive private school – her intonation confirming their tacit agreement that there was really no such thing.

  Isabel was still in bed, wearing some exotic silky garment. She was drinking coffee. She had a proper stainless-steel espresso jug. She had asked if he had one at home, because his mother was Italian, but when he said not she had shown him how to use it.

  He had watched reverently as she filled the bottom with water before adding the ground coffee, tamping it down and laying two cinnamon sticks on top. She explained how the water turned to steam on the stove and was forced up through the coffee, into the top part of the jug. She had a set of six tiny espresso cups and saucers. She was sipping from one now.

  ‘Coffee?’ she said and passed him her cup.

  He preferred tea but he took a strategic sip. He could see little smudges of make-up round her eyes, catch the musky, boozy smell of her slept-in flesh.

  He looked around the room. Isabel had an old mono record player. The kind they’d had at home when he was a kid, where you had to wait for the records to drop, so you could put several singles on at once. She was listening to the twelve-inch of ‘Song to the Siren’ by This Mortal Coil. Good choice. He looked at the photos she had arranged, not on a cork board like most people, but in a proper picture frame, gilt with engraved flowers and vines. The photos were all overlapping each other and were black and white. Mainly they were her friends from home. They were good-looking and moody, like they were in a band you weren’t cool enough to have heard of.

  In one corner he saw an image of him and Claire outside the house. Isabel took it when they first came to view, before the landlord arrived. Claire was peering in the front window in an exaggerated pose, hand over her eyes like a sailor looking out to sea. He was facing the opposite way, as if he was scanning the horizon (really he was just calculating the distance to the nearest offie). It made them look as though they were each on their own existential quest, which just showed that everyone looked more interesting in black and white.

  She didn’t ask what the point of the anecdote was but when he had finished she said, as if in passing, ‘I know someone at the Guardian. Tristan Lefevre.’

  She gave his name the proper French pronunciation. Paolo, who was taking French as a subsidiary, always struggled with using French words in English conversation. Anglicising them made him sound stupid, but he thought if he made them too French he might seem pretentious.

  ‘Do you want his number?’ she asked, as if it were nothing, as if she were offering him a biscuit or the dregs from Claire’s chipped teapot that she found in a charity shop.

  Just like that. ‘Thanks! And can I mention your name?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How do you know him?’

  She frowned slightly. ‘I’m not sure. I think maybe my mother was at school with his mother, or maybe his sister was at Oxford with my brother. I just – well, we all know lots of people, don’t we?’

  There was knowing people and knowing people. There was Isabel’s world, where you knew people who were lords and famous authors and journalists and there was the one the rest of them lived in. How he longed to know people who were people! Who made things happen, rather than just watching them on TV.

  He didn’t say any of this to Isabel. No doubt she would think it absurd. That was the kind of word she could use and get away with. Absurd. Though on reflection why couldn’t he? He might even get away with ‘on reflection’ at a push.

  A couple of weeks later he was having these thoughts as he headed for the phone box by the Royal Park pub. It wasn’t the nearest. There was a phone on Brudenell Grove but it was one of those bubbles you stuck your head under, like a giant hairdryer. He needed a kiosk so he wouldn’t be overheard sounding like a dickhead on the phone.

  Isabel hadn't asked what he was planning to write and he was grateful. He couldn’t tell her the truth and he might have stumbled trying to make something up.

  He had bought a £2 phone card. He hoped that would be enough. He didn’t ever make calls during the day so he wasn’t sure how much they cost.

  He dialled the number, ignoring his nerves. In fact, it was only at the third attempt he dialled the whole number. The first two times he hung up before he got to the last digit. He got through to a switchboard and asked for Tristan Lefevre. There was a pause on the line and then he was put through to another phone that rang and rang. A woman answered.

  ‘Hello?’ She didn't give a name. Paolo had done work experience at school so even he knew that wasn’t the way to answer the phone in an office. He started to feel less in awe.

  ‘Is Tristan there?’ he asked, trying to match her casual tone.r />
  ‘Sure,’ she said. He heard her call, ‘Tris?’ and plonk the receiver on the desk.

  He waited. He watched his credit tick away on his phone card. It was already down to £1.20. A man came to the phone. He could tell it was a man even before he spoke because of the heavy tread and the impatient sigh.

  ‘Tristan Lefevre.’ It sounded like an accusation. He sounded like a busy man who would brook no interruption. Paolo had written what he wanted to say, not just notes but a full script. The script was based on the idea that he was a mate of Isabel’s, the tone he would have used if they’d met at a party. It no longer felt appropriate with that forbidding voice. He was worried that by the time he got to the end of the introductory spiel, Tristan Lefevre would have hung up.

  So he just said, ‘Isabel Bayley gave me your number. I may have an article for you –’

  ‘Yes?’ he asked, interrupting, but with a glimmer of recognition, as if he was acknowledging Isabel’s existence, but whether in a good way or not, Paolo couldn’t decode.

  Paolo continued where he’d left off, his irritation overcoming for a moment his nervousness. ‘About animal rights direct action.’ He had 70p left on his card.

  ‘An investigation?’

  ‘An eyewitness account.’

  ‘Okay, you could send it in.’

  ‘It hasn't happened yet,’ said Paolo.

  ‘Oh.’ He could see Tristan smirking. ‘Well, when it does happen.’

  ‘Shall I address it to you?’ He should have said, Shall I mark it for your attention? but he was down to 20p now so he didn’t correct himself.

  ‘No need,’ said Tristan. ‘Just send it to features.’

  Features? He was thinking Society or Environment or even News. Was features just Tristan’s private joke? Code for ‘straight in the bin’?

  But his credit was nearly gone. At least he hadn’t been cut off mid-call. He imagined the shame if that had happened.

  He bet Tristan didn’t even know what a phone card was.

  Still, he had an offer, a tentative one. Maybe his article would be read, though he was beginning to hope not by Tristan.