Broken Ghost

by Niall Griffiths

  —I know where you’re going. It’s not an Occupy thing. It needn’t concern you.

  —It’s private land and it’s being occupied. In my book that makes it an occupy thing. He does the air-quotes with his fingers.

  —It’s public land.

  —Oh, d’you think? Nowhere is public land, matey. It’s all privately owned. And the owners want you all off it and it’s our job to get them what they want.

  The exhaust in hanging phantoms. There could be a nothingness all around.

  —Where’s your number?

  —Must’ve forgotten it. Silly me.

  —I want your number.

  —Do you? Well you aren’t getting it son. And I’ve got your number, by the way; idle parasitic trespassing scumbag who’d sooner live in your own shit than do a decent day’s work. Sound about right? Now are you gonna move aside and let us pass?

  The man stands firm. Looks about himself calmly, almost pleasantly detached.

  —Answer me. I’m a policeman. You will be arrested and taken in.

  No answer. The policeman takes his cuffs from his belt then he too looks around, at the lack of habitation, at the night unpricked by house lights. And he hooks the cuffs back on his belt. And then the truncheon comes up and comes down against skull and a cheer goes up from the lead van and a horn is honked three times in triumph and the unconscious body is dragged to the side of the track and dumped there and some blood blooms on the bilberries.

  The policeman gets back in the van. Has his back thumped and hair mussed. —Drive on. And that’s the only thing you need to know, lads, up here: No. Fucking. Nonsense. Nip it in the bud. Let’s get this done. Prepare.

  The convoy shunts into motion again and inside the vehicles visors are lowered, stab vests secured, black tape pressed across numbers. Shoulders are rolled, neck bones and muscles popped. Outside the helicopter comes out of the moon to a loud cheer from inside the vehicles and now between the trees can the lights of fires be seen. Turn left says the satnav. You have reached your destination. A line of cars blocks further approach so the convoy is halted in the trees and they get out of the wagons, the bulked-up figures, hefty, faceless behind masks. Bludgeons are slapped against gauntlets. Balls of booted feet are bounced on. Amongst the trees and beneath the swooping moon and the clattering bank of the chopper all is psyched up. Horses are released to stamp and snort and be mounted and strut side to side, turn around and then around again in dark dressage. Once this place saw horses. Such animals. And once this place saw armour. Never this neon and never this need, that need, at the far end of the line of parked cars, on the fiery beach, the little people ranked there now to stare upwards at the hovering machine and its hanging light. All the little white faces looking up. Rang, once, to steel on bone this place, all of a roil it was. And now the lake a shimmer of bioluminescent stew.

  They advance as one, tutored in this. The riders above the ranked helmets. The roll of clubs on shields, that drumbeat now. Batons expanded and tonfas twirled. Canisters of pepper spray capture light and gleam like a beetle’s wing-case.

  UP HERE

  She was nice, that lady who touched the snake’s head. Nice pretty lady. And the snake was nice too with his tiny tongue that came out and flickered.

  The little boy in the tent looks down at the surface of his cup of juice, balanced on a rock. It ripples because there is a movement on the mountain that makes it do so. He remembers the scene in the first Jurassic Park film and tells his mum that dinosaurs are coming.

  —What? His mother looks up from her sketchbook. —What did you say sweetheart?

  The little boy points at his cup. —Dinosaurs coming. Look.

  And too there is retreat of small things, across the hilltops, amongst the undergrowth, between the trees: low quadrupeds with tails down leaping over fallen logs and from high branch to high branch, away from the lake and deeper into the massif where there is no human need played out. Some burrow wriggling into the earth; some slip into cracks. Others rise upwards on hauling wings and become specks shrinking against the yellow moon. On kukri wings the sand martens return to their warrens. Hares re-find their forms. Onward comes something else. Dinosaurs says the little boy in the tent once more to his mother.

  THE FORCE

  The bellies of the clouds above would be lit with this as if with stored lightning but there are no clouds above. This scald of a summer. Only the beam of the chopper and the drone follows it like a remora, the gnatty hum of its rotors submerged in the blare and blatter of the blades. Everything seen, witnessed:

  Troglodytic they come from their tents and bashes and burrows to be broken on the shore in the charge. The decks dragged from their podium and shattered beneath hooves, ending jaunty Belafonte and now is all screams, in these high lands, the screaming out of throats and the thud of baton and boot on bone, gloved knuckle, and it seems a release of some sonic storehouse in the stones roundabout, some sound memory of steel on steel. Roars of outrage find their partners separated by centuries. Everything seen:

  The stimulants in the fast-working faces. Shatter the champing jaws. In the red of the fire light. Caught in the ’copter-beam. Trampled tents. A gauntleted hand grabs a hank of blonde hair, drags a woman across the pebbles, between the sprawled bodies. The scalp rips up behind the ear and exposes tattooed stars which blacken with blood and the neck and face around them bruises, breaks under the blows of a truncheon. Teeth tinkle out. A man dressed in a robe has his cross smashed and is pushed beneath the water and told to walk on it instead. Belly-crawling and broken on the beach. The drone sees it all; the helicopter lights it all up. The people are kettled into the lake, now a slick of blood that hands reach through. Arms wrap around children but some children run alone shrieking. The horses circle, stamp and snort and so do the armoured men. Batons are brought down. Batons are brought down. Again again again. Bone is splintered and skin is split. A big man with a dragon on his neck roars like that dragon and rises out of the water holding a boulder above his head but before he can bring it down on the nearest helmeted head he is bludgeoned back beneath the churn. Batons hack at the black water. Fingers crunch beneath heels. A half-naked man, shirt torn away from his chest pounds across the beach, stumbling over bodies, screaming for someone called Emma; a tonfa is whipped from horseback, shatters his skull to eggshell. Belly-crawling and broken on the beach. Visored eyes consider the rasher of skin caught on the gauntlet, inked with stars, discarded with a flick. The slack torn face is still pleasing in its forms and a boot ensures it will never be so again. A dog-collared man is helped to his feet by one of the black shapes; Sorry you had to see this, Father. Get yourself away from here. Go safely, now. Wrists are clamped in cuffs. A mouth is shouting so that mouth is punched, its accent stoppered; the following collapse tears the shirt completely away and reveals a date tattooed below the collarbone: And that’s your first day sober, I bet? God, you people are so predictable. That collarbone is snapped. The ribs beneath it too. The batons fall and fall and skin swells and splits and teeth lie amongst the pebbles like pebbles themselves and sprayed gas turns eyes to bleeding slits and mouths to whooping holes. Lungs rattle and expel, as do stomachs. Skin become bubblewrap. The dark figures pick across the twitching retching beach and still the batons rise and fall and it’s finished, now, whatever it was; what was happening up here is done, now. All over. Ended. Behind the rocky ridge a sun burns brightly and waits to rise again.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Much of this novel was written whilst under employment at Wolverhampton University. My thanks there to these fine people (with apologies to anyone I’ve forgotten): Ade Byrne, Sam Roden, Roz Bruce, Rob Francis, Bas Groes, Paul McDonald, Glyn Hambrook, Jacqui Pieteryck, Dew Harrison, Frank Wilson, Ben Colbert, and Candi Miller.

  In Mostar: Mirko Bozic. How I love your fierce and undefeatable city.

  In America: Bill Parry and Frances, Jim Gregory and Rachel, Willy Vlautin and Lee. Zoe Fowler, too, both there and here.

&nbs
p; Thanks to Nicoletta Laude.

  Thanks to Chris Taylor and Beth.

  Thanks to Rupert Crisswell.

  Thanks to Gary Budden.

  Thanks to Angie McAuliffe for sharing the invaluable wisdom of her boy Ollie.

  Oh, and as far as I know, Cardiff City Council does not, never has, and never will utilise anti-homeless spikes.

  And I actually like Tregaron, very much; honestly I do. It’s a joke. To prove it, I’ll buy all of you a pint in the Talbot tomorrow.

  Thanks to some of the Stinging Fly fellers in Dublin: Declan Meade, Sean O’Reilly, Thomas Morris.

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  Copyright © Niall Griffiths 2019

  Cover image © Getty Images

  Niall Griffiths has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published by Jonathan Cape in 2019

  penguin.co.uk/vintage

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781448162048