Love and Fallout (40 page)

‘Honestly?' The idea of Dad cutting out clippings with the kitchen scissors is incredible.

‘Oh yes. He really blew his top with them, came back here steaming. Didn't go in there for a month.'

Tomorrow I'll hunt out the scrapbook and see what Dad was collecting, but not tonight; tonight I don't want to think any more about that Greenham Christmas and everything that followed. My gaze wanders back to the ballerina's porcelain slipper.

‘So will you be seeing your advertising friend again?'

‘We're keeping in touch.'

Whoever Angela is these days, she's been true to her word when it comes to Easy Green, and since our meeting at the riverside she's invited me to Feel Good, one of the new and fashionable summer festivals her company helps promote. She's offered me a stand in the charity tent. When I mentioned this to Pete he suggested coming along too. I've wanted us to get back into camping for years, but not like this, as a last resort, the two of us zipped together in a last ditch attempt at intimacy. But Valeria tapped her pen against her notebook and said we should see the festival as an opportunity. So now it's arranged.

‘Is it just work that's bothering you?' says Mum, still uncomfortably attentive to my mood.

‘I'm fine… I just… I think I'm a bit over tired that's all.'

‘You go at things too hard, Tess,' she says, ‘why don't you at least drive down when you visit instead of mucking about on those trains?'

That's another conversation, but it's too late at night to discuss carbon emissions. Not that I want to. The energy efficiency leaflets for pensioners. The polystyrene cut-outs for primary school children. Suddenly it all feels so pointless. I think of that girl today with the hard face.

Mum sets down her cup. ‘How's everything with Pippa?'

With that ‘everything' I take a guess that Pippa's rung. If Pippa can talk to Mum, why can't she talk to me? Probably because I've made it that way. Too judgemental. Too quick to fill her with my own ideas.

‘Did she tell you about the competition?'

Mum nods. ‘Sounds like quite a night.'

She anticipates my question before I find a way to say it.

‘Pippa only confides in me because I'm her old granny, it doesn't matter what I think.' Mum doesn't keep giving her opinions all the time, that's probably the truth of it. ‘She wants you to be proud of her, Tessa.'

‘I am proud of her.'

Mum doesn't comment further, and settles back on the sofa. ‘It'll pass. Quite honestly I never knew what was going on in your head when you were Pippa's age, couldn't work you out. And you and Pippa aren't so different, same stubborn streak.'

It's painful, the knowledge that I've got things wrong with Pippa somewhere along the way, and failed at so many other things I wanted to get right.

‘You look dead beat, love.' Mum shuffles over and puts her arm around me, frail now, so that when I lean into her I can feel her bones under the quilted dressing gown.

‘What is it Tessie?'

‘Nothing.'

‘You can tell me.' At that moment I love her more than anyone in the world. ‘Touch of the mid-life crisis is it?'

‘I don't know. I've been thinking about the past lately, that show stirred it all up, I expect.' The past with its liquid language,
Time and tide,
Water under the bridge,
but this water never truly passes, it washes back and forth bringing its freight of memories, all those faces, and that one face in particular.

After three or four quiet minutes Mum turns off the lamp. ‘You'll feel better after a good sleep.'

‘I've got a few things to do before tomorrow,' I say, thinking of an unfinished grant proposal.

‘Never mind about that,' she says, moving my laptop bag out of reach. ‘Come on missy, up those stairs.'

35

The Muncher

I was stirred from sleep by a commotion and sat up, straining to make sense of the jumbled sounds. It was early morning and I hadn't been asleep long – after two weeks in prison I'd found the return to camp disorientating, even though I was glad to be back among friends. Now there was shouting. Machinery. Shapes moving outside the walls of the bender. I pulled on my boots and when I peered outside my worst suspicions were confirmed: bailiffs. One crossed the centre of the camp carrying an armful of tarpaulin from somebody's bender, stomping past the flameless fire pit towards a machine like a dustbin truck – this must be the muncher I'd heard about. A woman dragging the nylon chrysalis of her sleeping bag stumbled in the other direction. Conflicting voices echoed through the clearing, ‘…orders from the council … my home…' and fragments that were indistinct, phrases that clashed and careered into each other, male and female voices coming underneath or overtop the constant grinding of the truck. ‘…out the way there… Stop!…' and in an accent which sounded like Barbel's the word
please
. But unlike that first night, when the local youths had arrived in their car, the women weren't able to force the men away; no ululating cries could dispatch them back into their vehicles.

One of the bailiffs, wearing gloves like a bin man, a donkey jacket over his round shoulders, lurched towards Rori's empty bender carrying a large-handled knife, presumably to hack through the strings and branches which held the frame. With a desperate heart I dived into my own bender to gather what I could – jeans, jumpers and the little pile of Rori's belongings I'd saved after she went – stuffing my trainers into my rucksack, snatching my sleeping bag and running with it towards Jean's tepee. The handful of women camping at Amber gate were moving in panic, grabbing to save what they could and I nearly collided with Angela who appeared out of the mist holding the portable typewriter. Sam clutched a stack of paper bundles from the fridge and followed behind. ‘The van!' she shouted. ‘Get stuff in the van! Who's got the keys?'

‘Jean,' I said. My sleeping bag overspilled my arms, slippery and difficult to grasp, so I dropped it and ran to Jean's tepee. One of the bailiffs was already there, turning everything upside down as Jean did her best to reason with him, wearing pyjamas under her coat, her hair in uncharacteristic
disarray.

‘Council orders,' said the man, who had his arms around a wicker basket, a cigarette on the corner of his lips.

‘Keys,' I mouthed to Jean behind his back as he lugged the crate towards the muncher. She took them from her coat pocket and threw, I snatched them out of the air as the bailiff turned, the crate of Jean's belongings clattering with him. Forgetting to go back for my rucksack I ran across the foggy clearing towards the van which was parked under the trees a short distance from the road where Angela and Sam were waiting, and quickly we began piling stuff inside.

‘We need to fill it up with everything we can and move it to the public highway, then they can't claim it,' said Angela, dumping the typewriter on the back seat.

I returned for my things, telling the other women to take whatever they could to the van. Already my bender was in the process of being destroyed: a bailiff pulled at one of the walls and a whole sheet of plastic came away so that for a second I paused to see it lifting through the mist like a weather-beaten sail. He tugged another sheet and the entire frame gave way, but I didn't have time to watch and went running to salvage what was left in the kitchen – saucepans, cutlery. Angela struggled with a roll-up mattress and between us we got it to the van while the benders collapsed one by one around us. The men worked quickly. The same one who'd been carting away Jean's belongings set about pulling down her tepee, the last structure standing. A furious Jean shouted at him but he carried on regardless.

‘We're taking stuff to the van,' I said as calmly as my adrenalin-fuelled body would allow. She looked on, clutching an armful of her clothes, a candy-striped blouse draped over her arm, and reached into the tepee, which now flapped open at the seams, to try and retrieve a zip-up holdall.

‘Leave that, we've got to clear the lot,' said the man, tearing the canvas free as if he were unwrapping a giant ice-cream cone.

‘My clothes. Where's your decency?' said Jean. But the bailiff didn't want to talk about decency; he had a job to do.

I grabbed the bag for her. The man stopped unpeeling the canvas from the tepee frame, and seeing where my hand was going next, he snatched Jean's Indian print elephant cushion and threw it out of reach. I remembered the embroidery, all those hours of labour, and scooted past him to pick up the sewing basket.

‘Come here!' he said, discarding the cigarette from his mouth. I had my hands firmly on the basket. ‘Give it over. You lot shouldn't be here,' he said striding forwards, but I dummied him, racing as quickly as I could to the van. Angered, he followed, knowing nothing about what was in the box, only that it was important.

‘Sam! Sam!' I shouted as she piled two garden chairs onto the back seat. ‘Start it!' I clambered in with Jean's sewing box, the bailiff's shouts growing louder, and we slammed the door, panting, as Sam wiggled the unwieldy gearstick, ground the gears and steered onto the road. The bailiff's face receded in the wing mirror to the sound of our cheering. ‘They'll want to clear the other gates next,' I said. Most of our camp must have gone into the jaws of the muncher by now.

‘You get out and help the others, I'll take the van and warn Ruby gate,' said Sam.

I jumped out and ran back towards the camp in time to see Barbel try to wrestle her guitar free. ‘No!' I yelled, going to help. But there was nothing we could do. The man had the guitar by the neck and threw it in an arc towards the muncher. Barbel shrieked. The muncher didn't discriminate; it guzzled anything they fed it. With nothing left to save, we watched as two of the men hauled the Welsh dresser up off its feet and lowered it into the mouth of the machine.

An hour later, there was nothing left, only a handful of women sitting in the mud beside a shallow pit where the fire usually blazed, a few ragged bits of debris strewn around. One long pole staked in the ground was all that remained of Jean's tepee. They'd even torn down the WOMEN AGAINST CRUISE banner.

‘Shall we put the kettle on?' I said. Jean gave a smile.

‘Have we still got one?' someone asked.

‘It's in the van,' replied Sam, who'd returned from warning the others. ‘Anyone seen the teabags?'

Di, who'd been sitting silently on the log opened her coat. ‘For emergencies,' she said, unfolding a polythene bag with a dozen loose teabags inside. Everyone laughed. Everyone except Angela who sat unmoving at the end of the log, staring a thousand-yard stare.

‘Angela,' I said, rousing her out of her trance. ‘Help me gather some wood.'

‘Come on girl, stir your stumps,' said Sam, giving Angela a friendly shake on the shoulder. ‘Can't do anything without a fire.'

Angela got up automatically, without seeming to register who we were, and did as she was told.

36

Feel Good

It's day two of Feel Good and the nine-hundred-acre site is thick with activity. Thousands of people swarm over the grass in search of entertainment or food or something they haven't quite decided on yet. From my station in the charity tent, I catch glimpses of the human traffic: a group of teenage boys dressed in togas, a golden-limbed mum with her golden infant bobbing in a papoose, couples swigging cider from recyclable pint glasses. Pete is out there too somewhere, a programme marked up with his must sees, and apparently Pippa is here with her university friends, but I haven't seen her. Since the Miss Student Body fiasco, mother/daughter relations have reached an all-time low. There haven't been any phone calls, only text messages to Pete. I am very definitely persona non grata. Despite this I continue to scan the crowds for girls with long chestnut hair.

The festival is cleaner and altogether more attractive than any I've known, with theatrically designed canvas spaces set up to host hundreds of events. Whatever you're feeling – poetic, jazzy, funny, thirsty – there's a dedicated space for you to feel it in. The Feeling Thoughtful tent is propped with giant book-cum-armchairs, and audiences gather inside for lectures by popular scientists or TV historians, while those who are Feeling Flirty can visit the red-feathered marquee to watch burlesque performed on love-heart-shaped stages. Smiling twenty-somethings wander around giving out free copies of
The Guardian
, or trial sachets of herbal hand-wash, and little flowered vans patrol the grounds collecting rubbish and attending to the wondrous paraphernalia: talking toadstools which offer directions, networks of stepping stones which light up magically at night. If you don't want to be performed to by the roaming jugglers, singers or stilt walkers, you can always relax in the super-sized trifle, an arrangement of beanbags and squishy cushions. Entire families are welcome to lie back in the custard while couples drowse below them suspended in jelly.

Angela's company, MPP, has been promoting Feel Good since it began, growing it from what she called a boutique cultural event to a place everyone wants to visit – teenagers, hip young families and the youthfully retired. It'll be the perfect platform for Easy Green, she said. So here I am in the Feeling Caring Zone, slotted between Save the Children and Amnesty. Looking around on the first day, I couldn't help suspecting the charities had been handpicked to promote the right image: there's plenty about human rights, environmentalism and overseas development, but not much in support of battered women or nasty degenerative diseases. Still, I'm happy to be among the chosen and grateful to Angela. Each charity takes a turn to run a workshop in the Feeling Factual tent next door and the scattering of people who turned up to mine were among the most relaxed audience I've ever addressed, content to sit back and nod appreciatively before making their way into the sunshine to queue up for enchiladas or just have another nice flop on the grass.