by James Runcie
‘I’ll have one to be polite,’ I said. ‘But don’t think this is going to work.’
I knew it wasn’t right. Why was he doing this if he was still married, and where was his wife anyway? I hadn’t asked about his daughter. That might have stopped him, I suppose, if I’d asked about her.
Then I realised I didn’t want to know about either of them. I’d rather he kept it secret so that I could pretend that we were young again, and that we hadn’t messed up our lives, and that the whole idea of a future together was possible once more.
Perhaps if I gave in to him I could find some of that hope again, some of that love.
Len
Today people want to tell each other too much. I’ve never thought that’s right. I don’t want everyone knowing what I get up to and what makes me afraid. I’m a great believer in secrets but Vi kept saying I had to have a word with Martin.
‘If you can’t be straight with your own son then what’s the point?’
We were having a bit of sausage and mash. Martin reminded me he was a vegetarian but I liked to corrupt him now and then. That was the easy part. It was the conversation that proved tricky.
‘You all right, son?’
‘I’m fine, Dad. Just a bit preoccupied, that’s all.’
I remembered what Vi had said and I didn’t want to let her down. ‘I don’t mean to be nosy or anything …’
‘Well, don’t …’
‘But if you ask me it looks like you’re letting someone get to you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You want me to spell it out? I mean Linda.’
‘Look, Dad, I just wanted to see her again. I haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘Not yet, you haven’t.’
‘Anyway, how did you know?’
‘Never you mind about that.’ Vi had seen them getting fish and chips. ‘You be careful, son. Claire’s a good wife to you.’
‘You don’t need to say anything, Dad.’
‘I’m not saying anything. You know what I think.’
‘I’m not sure I do.’
‘I don’t want your brain going south.’
‘It’s not like that.’
‘It’s the truth. You’ve just got to hang on to what you’ve got. There isn’t such a thing as a one-hundred-per-cent marriage. The best you’re going to get is seventy: the very best. Sometimes you might meet someone and you think she can get you up to a hundred but it only lasts an instant and as soon as it’s over you’re down to ten. Stick to seventy per cent. That’s the best you’re going to get and I’m telling you, son, it isn’t bad.’
‘But what if I aim for seventy and get stuck with forty?’
‘You’ve got seventy, son …’
‘It doesn’t feel like it.’
‘That’s because it isn’t a hundred.’
‘You don’t need to worry, Dad. It’s under control.’
That’s what people say when it isn’t, I thought.
I didn’t like my son lying to me. I could tell from his reaction that it had already started up again with Linda. I’d rather not have known.
Claire
We almost got used to the night attacks by vigilantes: the rocks that were thrown, the buckets of maggots, the ox blood and the pig shit. Our tents were daubed with paint, trampled and slashed with knives. People started fires to try and smoke us out, hurled firecrackers and shouted that we were either slags, lesbians or fat cows who’d never had a shag. They couldn’t make up their minds which. One night I heard an American voice saying, ‘If it was up to me I’d pour gasoline over them and torch the lot.’
Newbury District Council revoked bylaws which made Greenham common land and announced that they were now private landlords. Our squatting was illegal. Eighty police and fifty bailiffs came at dawn with warrants and bulldozers to destroy the camp, arrest us for trespass and take our possessions away. A fat man in a black leather jacket that was far too small for him got out a knife and ripped into our tent. Then he started pulling it up from the pegs. Other men began to kick away whatever was in front of them. They weren’t so much clearing the site as taking revenge. Some of the women were in tears, others shouted back, but whatever they did to us, and however aggressive they were, we knew that we could not be violent. I saw my friend Cathy pick up a rock but four other women immediately stopped her.
‘We’re not doing it that way,’ one of them said. ‘If we start to behave like them then they have won. We have to remain nonviolent. Then we can stay here for ever.’
‘You’re not staying anywhere,’ said one of the bailiffs.
We circled the men and Joyce got us singing to show that we weren’t afraid.
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Are you on the other side from us?
Which side are you on?
The first dustcart drove off with our tents and belongings to ironic cheers. Black plastic sacks had been filled with personal things the bailiffs couldn’t possibly sell on: diaries, quilts and children’s toys.
Are you on the side of suicide?
Are you on the side of homicide?
Are you on the side of genocide?
I ask you: ‘Which side are you on?’
It rained throughout the day and we still had a few umbrellas to protect the children but the police wouldn’t allow us to fix them into the ground because they said it turned them into a structure. Even the Portaloos had been removed. When we asked why, we were told it was to stop people camping in them.
Lucy had had enough. She had been brave not to cry amidst all the destruction but once everyone had gone she let go. ‘I want to go home, Mummy.’
‘Soon, darling, I promise.’ If a car had passed and I could have hitched a lift, I would probably have done it there and then.
‘Can we only go home when the men behind the fence go?’
‘Yes, darling.’
‘I miss Daddy.’
Joyce had managed to get to Newbury and returned with matches, firelighters and a few blankets from the local charity shop. We still had our sleeping bags but the ground was a soggy mass of grass, mud and heather. We were going to have to live off the donations of well-wishers and build shelters amidst the trees. I wondered if I could sell the idea of a tree house to Lucy to make her stay.
Then the council came back with tons of rocks and rubble and dumped it all by the Yellow Gate so we could not resettle. They said the area was due for ‘landscaping’.
As soon as they had gone, we began to rearrange and paint the rocks, making them the perimeter of a new camp. Then we gathered reeds from the side of the River Kennet and formed them into frames for makeshift tents. Friends arrived with cars full of polythene sheets, blankets and booze and we started to build our benders: wigwam-like structures with polythene walls and ground cover, straw and blankets. We decorated the interiors with wildflowers. I told Lucy that we were playing at being Red Indians and she began to holler in the same way that the women keened whenever a vehicle came near the base. Someone gave her a pack of felt-tip pens and a pad of paper so she could do a series of drawings of all our friends, Joyce, Cathy and Julie, and we pinned them up inside the bender along with beads, necklaces and mementoes of home. There was even a photograph of Martin with Lucy in a blue-striped buggy eating her first ice cream, vanilla all round her mouth, father and daughter smiling like they had both done something secretly naughty. It made me remember the first time we had offered Lucy chocolate and she had given us a bemused look of surprise and indignation, as if she was saying to us: ‘Why have you denied me this pleasure for so long?’
‘It’s cosy here, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘No, Mummy, it isn’t. But I like it for now. Just for now. Then we can go to our proper home.’
In the evenings, we sat and sang and lit candles and fires. We had to be careful with all the straw around us, we didn’t want to do the bailiffs’ job for them by setting light to the camp, but in a way w
e were even more comfortable than we had been before they tried to evict us. The men kept coming back, but by then we had learnt not to give our real names and they couldn’t work out who lived in which bender. As a result, they had to pin their eviction notices in big brown envelopes on nearby trees and the camp began to look like something out of the Wild West.
Joyce taught Lucy to weave a spider’s web out of black wool. She said it was a web to bind us so that when we next did our die-ins or any direct protest it would be harder to move us because we would all be tied together. To move one of us would mean moving us all.
A few weeks later, a group of workers came to lay the fuel and sewage pipes for the base. Stopping them was our next action and we became a continuous wave of women lying down in front of the JCBs. We webbed ourselves up with Joyce’s black wool and it took them a whole day to cut us apart and lift us away. But even then, we returned individually, continually obstructing their progress. As soon as one woman was pulled up, another lay down in her place. We were a revolution of women, turning over and over in front of the trucks.
We are women, we are women,
We are strong, we are strong,
We say no, we say no,
To the bomb, to the bomb.
The police kept yanking us away, and we kept singing:
We say no-o, we say no-o.
Still we were determined that whatever happened there would be no violence towards the people moving us. I think I went into a kind of trance in order to avoid the pain of continually lying down in the road and being pulled out and away by the arm sockets. I tried to remain so calm that the protest was almost like an out-of-body experience. Every time I thought, Why am I doing this? I heard the reply in my head like a mantra: Because I have to. Because there is no choice.
A police officer was shouting, ‘These missiles are to protect you. They will be for your own good. Can’t you see that?’
‘We would rather die than see that day,’ I said.
‘I’d rather have missiles than live under the Russians.’
‘This is our land,’ I said. ‘We don’t need to live under anybody. We want to be free of all this evil.’ I lay down again in the road.
‘Haven’t you done enough?’ said the policeman. ‘Aren’t you tired of all this?’
‘You can’t do anything to me. You can’t stop me.’
‘Try me.’ The policeman leant down to pull me away once more.
I turned on to my stomach to make it more difficult for him. ‘I’d rather die doing the right thing than survive and do nothing.’
‘Well, you’re a daft bitch. Coming back for more all the time.’
This time he grabbed me by the legs and started to drag me so that my head bounced on the road.
‘Careful,’ I shouted.
‘What’s there to be careful of? Why should I care about you?’
‘Oh God, forget it,’ I replied. And then, just as I was nearly clear of the crowd, I gave him a playful little kick and added: ‘No wonder your wife’s unfaithful.’
‘Right, that’s it, you can say goodbye to your career, smartarse.’
Suddenly there were five of them, one for each limb and a fifth for the hair. I tried to collapse my weight, make myself as heavy as possible.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘You know what we’re doing. We’ve just told you.’
‘Let me go,’ I shouted. ‘My little girl’s here. I must get back. She needs me with her.’
‘Well, some mother you are, assaulting a police officer.’
It had just been a little kick and a joke but now I saw the sky wobble and policeman faces all around me: sweat, spit and moustache, steamed-up glasses and toppling helmets. I could hear the women still singing and the sound of bulldozers revving their engines but none of it seemed to have anything to do with me. There was the noise of doors being opened, then of handcuffs, and I felt my wrists go tight before I was swung into the back of a van, the metal floor coming up to meet me, slamming into my side and my shoulder. The door was banged shut and then locked. I couldn’t move. My hands were strapped together, the floor was throbbing against my face (or was it the other way round?) and I could smell petrol. The engine was running and women were beating on the sides of the van, whooping and keening, and in the momentary darkness I wondered where I was, and if any of this was part of my life. I couldn’t tell whether everything was happening far too quickly for me to understand or if it was all as slow as a dream.
But then my eyes began to adjust to the dim light inside and I could make out the other people in the van: Sasha, Bridget and Min. They were smiling at me but I could tell that they were tired smiles that couldn’t stay up for very long. Kate started a chorus of ‘Show Me the Prison’, trying to make the whole thing sound like an adventure.
The woman next to me was wearing a badge. It said: ‘Pregnant. Handle with care.’
‘I’m frightened,’ she said.
Martin
I kissed Linda on the cheek and I saw her eyes and it was the look that I remembered. I knew that I should not be there, in her flat, and that nothing about it was right. But I couldn’t stop, I didn’t want to stop.
She was wearing a dark-red T-shirt, jeans and some beaten-up high heels that matched her top. ‘I haven’t done much. It’s only pasta.’
‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘I’m not that hungry.’
The living room was painted a dark brown, with raffia blinds out to the street. There was a television with an internal aerial, a three-piece suite that had seen better days, and on the coffee table there was a full ashtray and a bottle of vodka. I looked at the bookshelf: The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Prophet. There were cassette tapes round an Amstrad music system and some old jazz LPs.
‘I didn’t know you liked this kind of stuff,’ I said.
‘Charlie Parker or Duran Duran? John Coltrane or Spandau Ballet?’
‘Bessie Smith or Sade?’
‘You get the idea.’
There were two other rooms, one of which had been turned into her studio. It was the brightest space in the flat, and I could see a series of canvases facing the wall by the open door.
‘Drink?’ she called. ‘I’ve got the vodka.’
‘I brought some wine.’
‘The vodka’s open.’ She came towards me and put a glass into my hands.
‘Cheers.’ She drank, still looking at me, smiled and then kissed me full on the lips. ‘There. That’s better, isn’t it?’
I was about to hold her to me when she turned and went straight back into the kitchen. To the left I could see a dark-red bedroom. On a high shelf were bottles of miniatures from all over the world.
‘How do you do this?’ I asked.
‘Oh, same old stuff. The dole. I help Masood out downstairs in the newsagent’s when they’re short. Sometimes I tell a fortune or sell a painting. And then there’s always the dealing.’
‘What?’
‘Only joking,’ but I couldn’t tell. ‘Do you want this pasta or not?’ she called.
‘All right.’
‘Well, put some music on then.’
I found some Sarah Vaughan and we sat on the floor, side by side, our backs leaning against the sofa, and ate our tagliatelle. I opened the wine and Linda smiled.
‘Can you remember?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘You know, the two of us, together.’
‘Of course.’
‘And what do you remember about it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It felt right.’
‘Even the first time?’
‘No. I wasn’t so good the first time.’
‘You made up for it later.’
‘I did my best.’
‘You were good, you were. I remember.’
‘Well. We loved each other.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘I know so.’
We sat in s
ilence, drinking and listening to ‘The Nearness of You’.
Then Linda stood up and took off her T-shirt. ‘I think we’ve got the message by now.’
She slipped off her shoes, unbuttoned her jeans and pulled them down. ‘Come on.’
Her skin was darker and fuller than I had ever remembered.
‘It’s what you want, isn’t it?’ She threw her jeans on to a chair and walked off into the bedroom in her bra and knickers.
I followed.
When it was over we lay side by side and I felt Linda curl up against me as she had done in the past.
‘Happy?’ she said, stroking my chest.
I had promised my father I would be home. ‘Of course. But I should go soon.’
‘Why? We’re not seventeen any more.’
‘I know that.’
‘Then what’s the problem?’
‘My dad. He disapproves.’
‘He knows?’
‘No, of course not. How could he? We’ve only just started.’
‘I can never tell with your family. They get to hear things pretty quick …’
‘He knows I’ve seen you.’
‘You told him?’
‘I think Vi saw us.’
‘God, some things never change.’
‘I don’t want him suspecting. I promised I’d sort a few things out for him. I’ll come back tomorrow if you want,’ I said.
‘Of course I want. I want you now.’
‘Again?’
‘Yes, again, Mr Married Man. Don’t be lazy. You’re in for it now.’
We made love slowly and more tenderly. I did not know if it was regret that we had taken so long to find each other or whether there was already an awareness that it could not last. Then I started to get dressed.
‘I can’t stay,’ I said.
‘Of course you can.’
I pulled on my shirt. ‘I know I can, but please …’
‘Why?’
‘I can’t stay here for ever …’
‘Why not?’
‘You know why …’
‘Then promise you’ll come back.’
‘I promise.’
She turned on her side and watched me try to find my shoes. ‘Don’t leave me this time.’
