Game of Stones

by David Maughan Brown

  The crowd of rubber-neckers was melting away, taking most of the remaining protesters with them. The latter would be anxious to make themselves as scarce as possible, rather than be associated in any way with what had happened. Jean had come over to ask Cameron whether he was alright – by which she probably meant of sound mind – before she left. But her query had been voiced in a tone more like that of the dutiful committee Chair than of a concerned friend. The two committee members who had been standing nearest to Cameron had been asked to stay behind, and Hudson was busy taking their statements. Both were standing with their backs to Cameron, who felt very much alone. Better get used to it.

  An ambulance arrived just before the police car. The victim of the assault, as he was now labelled, was still holding a handful of bloodied tissues to what was left of his nose. He had clambered somewhat groggily to his feet, still shaking his head, and, when the ambulance arrived, had refused to get into it or allow either of the paramedics to tend to him. After a few final words from Hudson and a greater number of answering headshakes, the cameraman turned away and walked off up the street. Cameron hadn’t been able to hear anything of what Hudson had been saying to him, but as the man walked away Hudson raised his voice a little and Cameron caught the words ‘statement’ and ‘police-station’.

  The police car drew up beside Cameron. The arresting officer opened the back door and pushed Cameron’s head down as he eased himself onto the back seat. It was OK to tear the muscle or cartilage in his shoulder to shreds, but it would never do to allow him to bump his head as he got into the car. The trip to the police station was made at a sedate pace in stony silence, with the arresting officer sitting on the back seat beside Cameron. The smell of cigarette smoke from his uniform was not quite managing to get the better of the underlying smell of stale sweat.

  Cameron was escorted to the charge office where he was formally introduced to the Custody Officer, who, like Hudson, was large and looked out of condition. There was a clear glint of recognition, and the flicker of a smile, when Cameron gave his name. He was told that he was under arrest and that he would be formally charged with Common Assault or Assault Causing Actual Bodily Harm, and probably Affray, once the process of taking the necessary statements had been completed.

  Cameron was required to hand over his belt, his shoelaces and everything in his pockets. Anyone who could head-butt a man with a camera had to be out of his mind and needed to be treated as a suicide risk. But Cameron was pretty sure they didn’t actually think he would try to commit suicide – they just wanted to make life as difficult as possible for him. To the extent that he had to hold onto the waistband of his trousers to stop them falling down, they were succeeding.

  Once the formalities had been completed, Cameron was led down a corridor and locked into a cell. An inventory of its contents didn’t take long. The dominant design feature was a stainless steel toilet without a seat or lid. As an entry for the Turner Prize it might have stood a good chance up against Tracy Emin’s bed; as an aesthetically pleasing item of domestic furniture it left a lot to be desired. It confirmed for Cameron, if confirmation were needed, that the South Yorkshire police – perhaps all UK police for all Cameron knew – were not a particularly cuddly lot. The only other item of furniture was a narrow bunk built into the wall topped by a long cushion, covered in virulent blue plastic, which was thin enough to guarantee discomfort. Cameron found himself wondering whether there were cells reserved for women where the plastic covering of the cushion was an equally virulent pink.

  The choice of what to do was limited. Cameron could either pace backwards and forwards in the cell, trying to make sure his trousers didn’t fall down, or he could sit on the cushion. The march had been enough exercise for one day, so Cameron, still feeling strangely detached, sat and contemplated the irony of finding himself languishing in a cell in a police station in England after all the years he had spent successfully avoiding the police cells in South Africa.

  They hadn’t demanded that Cameron hand over his watch. It would have been stretching a point to claim either that he could use it to commit suicide, or that it would make a good assault weapon, but he suspected that if they had thought of it they would have made him take it off – just to make his life more difficult. His watch confirmed that that he should have had something to eat some time ago – they clearly weren’t intending to feed him. Nobody came to invite him to contact a lawyer, which they should probably have done when he first arrived. He heard voices and people walking up and down the corridor from time to time, and on a couple of occasions he heard the jangling of keys and the opening and shutting of cell doors, but none of the keys was used to unlock the door of his cell.

  It wasn’t until nearly 6.30, almost six hours after he had been brought in, that Cameron’s cell door was opened and the Custody Officer came in.

  ‘You can go now,’ he said, an oddly jaunty lilt in his voice.

  ‘What do you mean, I can go?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘What don’t you understand about “you can go”?’ the policeman asked. ‘I said you can go.’

  ‘You mean you aren’t going to question me or charge me? Does this mean you are releasing me on Police Bail?’

  ‘No. Go means go,’ the Custody Officer said. ‘The man you assaulted is refusing to lay a charge and nobody else saw what happened. Or that is what they say. Now get the hell out before I charge you with wasting police time.’

  The process of being led back to the charge office and signing for his property felt even more unreal than the process of handing it over in the first place. Threading his belt back through the loops on his trousers was reminiscent of the security checks at airports. The Custody Officer stood over him as he sat on a bench along one wall of the charge office rethreading his shoelaces. Being watched inevitably made his threading clumsier than it would otherwise have been – the ends of the laces were getting tatty – and the Custody Officer had started heaving theatrical sighs long before the job was completed.

  As Cameron walked back to find his car, three issues jostled for primacy in his mind. The first was bound to win out because it was backed by a steadily growing indignation that rapidly supplanted the detachment he had felt in the police station. They must have known from the time they brought him into the police station that they weren’t going to be able to charge him. The shaking of the cameraman’s head as he walked away must have meant that he was refusing to press charges, and nobody else had seen what had happened – or so they said. They had kept him in a cell for as long as they could just to pay him back for his ongoing criticisms of the South Yorkshire Police.

  The second issue had to do with the cameraman. He had been hurt badly enough to justify a charge of common assault, and probably a charge of assault with actual bodily harm. His flattened face was going to look like a very squashed tomato for some days to come. Why would he not want to lay a charge? The only possible answer was that he didn’t want any publicity – he didn’t want anyone to start asking what he had been doing and, in particular, who he had been working for. Given that the protest had been about Israel, the odds had to be heavily stacked in favour of his employers being Mossad.

  The third issue was more puzzling. The two policemen who had been standing chatting had been facing the other way and wouldn’t have seen what had happened clearly enough for a charge to be laid on the basis of their testimony alone. Hillsborough had demonstrated that policemen in Sheffield weren’t above inventing their testimony, but for some reason they hadn’t done so on this occasion. The other protesters could be relied on not to have seen anything. But what about PC Hudson? Whenever Cameron had looked in his direction Hudson had been watching the protesters. He must have seen what happened. Why would he not have said so? Even if he just happened to have been looking the other way at the crucial moment, he could have been expected, after Cameron’s verbal assault on him on the allotment, to swear to having seen Cameron head-butt
ing the cameraman. Yet he claimed not to have seen anything. What was that about?

  Chapter 5

  ‘I don’t know a whole lot about Mandela,’ Neil said, ‘but I doubt that he would have been particularly concerned about some random photographer in Sheffield calling him a fuckwit. I’m sure he has been called much worse things by much less insignificant people.’

  ‘That’s for sure,’ Cameron responded, ‘people like Reagan and Thatcher, for a start. But that isn’t the point. The trigger this time was a flash-back to a morning in the 1970s when I was monitoring a Black Sash stand and one of the Security Branch agents went right up to Jules and pushed a camera in her face. I managed to hold myself back – you would have been proud of me. I only lost my temper with this man when he came right up to me and insulted Mandela.’

  ‘I would have been a lot prouder if you hadn’t lost your temper at all,’ Neil said.

  Cameron had phoned Neil as soon as he got back home from the police station. Neil had decided that having one of his patients get himself arrested for assault, even if he hadn’t been charged, probably justified fitting him in for an emergency appointment on a Sunday morning. So Cameron had duly dragged himself out of bed early enough to make it to a mid-morning appointment.

  ‘But you haven’t told me why that mattered so much,’ Neil insisted. ‘If Mandela wouldn’t have been bothered, why would it make you angry enough to do something that could have landed you with a criminal record and cost you your job?’

  ‘Mandela is the symbol of what we were fighting for,’ Cameron replied, ‘what so many people were disappeared, and tortured, and died for. He led my country to democracy, and he was instrumental in the hammering out of the most progressive constitution of any country in the world. The fact that South Africa hasn’t succeeded in living up to that constitution since he retired makes it all the more important to honour him and what he achieved. I wasn’t about to let that thug insult him.’

  ‘Does the fact that the country hasn’t lived up to its constitution in recent years – I assume you are referring to corruption in particular – make you feel that all you went through wasn’t worth it?’ Neil asked.

  ‘What I went through was utterly insignificant compared to what thousands and thousands of others went through,’ Cameron replied. ‘And if we are talking about corruption let’s not forget that just ten days ago our High Court ruled that Tony Blair’s government broke the law when it abandoned the fraud investigation into the multibillion-pound arms deal involving BAE Systems and Saudi Arabia. To date that arms deal has been the worst single example of corruption any senior South African politicians have been implicated in, but, please note, the South African government didn’t pull the plug on any investigation into South Africa’s involvement.’

  ‘You haven’t answered my question,’ Neil said.

  ‘I suppose there is an element of disillusion underlying the anger,’ Cameron conceded after a few moments of reflection. ‘But what did anyone expect? If you are going to spend three hundred years oppressing people on the basis of their race, depriving them of education and opportunity, don’t expect perfect government at every level when they finally shake the shackles off. As for me, why should I worry? I can’t live there any more.’

  ‘It is perfectly obvious that you do worry,’ Neil said. ‘You obviously care deeply about what happens there. Why, anyway, can’t you live there? You haven’t told me anything about what has happened since 1985. All I know is that you have been back, possibly more than once, but won’t talk about it. The first time you came to see me I asked you what one word best summed up how you were feeling. Your answer was “deracinated”. You’ve told me several times since then that you feel uprooted and that you miss South Africa terribly. Surely there’s nothing you could have done in the struggle against apartheid that would prevent you going back to live there now – more than twenty years later?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t feel ready to talk about any of that yet,’ Cameron replied. ‘I hope that I will in due course.’

  ‘As you know, you come to me for “talking therapy”,’ Neil said. ‘Talking therapy only works when people talk – surprising as that may sound.’

  ‘Is sarcasm supposed to be one of the tools in a talking therapist’s tool-kit?’ Cameron asked. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that was very professional.’

  ‘I’m sorry, you are right,’ Neil said, ‘it isn’t very professional. I sense that you feel frustrated about not being able to talk about some things, and I feel frustrated that I haven’t yet found a way to help you. What do you think it would take for you to feel ready to talk about the things you can’t talk about yet?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cameron replied. ‘I honestly don’t know. I’ll think about it and maybe come up with an answer when we meet next week. Thanks very much for seeing me on a Sunday at such short notice.’

  ‘I’m afraid I haven’t been much help,’ Neil said.

  ‘Don’t say that,’ Cameron said. ‘Even if I can’t talk, it is always helpful to talk about not being able to talk – if that makes any kind of sense.’

  As Cameron walked home, he pondered Neil’s question about what it would take to get him to talk. The answer turned out to be a lot easier than either of them expected.

  As soon as he got home, Cameron phoned Brian and suggested that they meet for a drink and to listen to some live music that evening – he had a story to tell. Brian suggested that they should meet at The Leadmill, ‘famous as the venue for the launch of the Arctic Monkeys’ Brit Award-winning albums.’ Cameron told him that he didn’t need to add the advertising blurb every time he mentioned the place just because he happened to have been at both launches, and said he would rather go to the New Barrack Tavern near Hillsborough, which tended to feature blues rather than rock. The blues would suit his frame of mind rather better. After a bit of token haggling, Brian gave way and they agreed to meet at six. Cameron realized he must have sounded almost as low as he felt.

  The mustard-coloured tiles of the pub’s frontage would not have looked out of place on an upmarket public toilet, Cameron thought as he climbed the four steps to the front door. But the blue of the signage did set them off to good effect. The day had not been a good one, mostly spent going back time and again over the previous day’s march and its aftermath. The only positives to be taken from the whole dog-show had been the press photographers’ lack of fortitude in the face of the weather and the fact that the reporters who would have been assigned to report on the protest appeared not to have put in an appearance at all. Perhaps PSC marches just weren’t newsworthy, which rather defeated the object of the exercise.

  Brian hadn’t arrived yet so Cameron ordered a pint of Harvest Pale for him and an orange and passion fruit J2O for himself. The wit in the pun on H2O was long past its use-by date, but the flavor of the passion fruit came through well and reminded him of home. Home in this instance wasn’t to be found in Manchester Road.

  Cameron chose a table as far from the stage as possible so that conversation wouldn’t be entirely drowned out by the music. When Brian arrived fifteen minutes late, his hair visibly wet despite the rainless afternoon, he made up for lost time – buying another pint on his way to the table and flattening the one Cameron had bought for him as soon as he sat down. At which point he was ready to take care of the niceties of greetings.

  ‘Hi, sorry I’m a little late,’ Brian said, ‘but I hate to disappoint my friends’ expectations, so I would have been even sorrier if I hadn’t been late.’

  ‘Thirsty, or just eager to get drunk as quickly as possible?’ Cameron asked. The pint of beer he had bought for Brian was enough by way of greeting.

  ‘Both,’ Brian replied. ‘I spent the afternoon riding over the hill and down to Bakewell for tea, which was thirsty work – no, I didn’t go to find a tart, in case you were thinking of asking. You told me you had a story to tell. Given your pench
ant for living dangerously, any prospective listener is bound to want to fortify himself before lending even half an ear.’

  Telling Brian the story of the march and its aftermath took some time, partly because Brian interrupted from time to time to ask questions, partly because quenching his thirst required Brian to make a couple more trips to the bar.

  ‘How big was the video-camera, or, was it a camcorder?’ Brian asked. ‘Did you get a good look at it?’

  ‘It couldn’t have been more than five yards or so away,’ Cameron replied. ‘I don’t know much about video-cameras so don’t have much to compare it with size-wise. Front-on all you could see was a large lens in a shiny metal casing with a thin upright black box attached to one side proclaiming that it was a Sony. Why does it matter?’

  ‘As it happens, I’ve been looking at camcorders on the net,’ Brian replied. ‘It sounds as if that could have been Sony’s new SR45. It matters because the more sophisticated and expensive the camcorder, the more likely it seems that your cameraman was an agent of some sort, rather than an over-enthusiastic amateur. But the crassness of the behavior you describe doesn’t seem to fit. Mossad would no doubt like to be able to identify every single person, toddlers in pushchairs included, who ever joins a PSC protest, but I don’t think your cameraman can have been a Mossad agent.’

  ‘But who else could it have been?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘Lets make a list shall we,’ Brian said. ‘On the assumption that everyone’s attention doesn’t necessarily have to be focused on you the whole time, let’s start with people you haven’t pissed off.’