Love and Fallout (42 page)

Jean must have been ten years older than we are now when she arrived at Greenham.

‘She was one of a kind,' I agree.

The conversation turns back to Easy Green and Angela swipes her phone to find us a meeting date.

‘It's good of you to give up your time like this,' I say. She knows we can't afford to pay, but she shakes her head. ‘Pleasure. Anyway, you're helping ease my corporate guilt.' She glances up, ‘It's not as if I don't occasionally wonder why I didn't become a human-rights lawyer.'

‘Why didn't you?'

‘Honestly? I wanted to have more fun.' Angela and fun were not two words I would have equated once upon a time. ‘On the flip side, if the business is earning enough we have some flexibility about which clients we take on, so we can work with the people who need us regardless of their budgets.' She catches something in my expression. ‘Alex, my partner… Alex says advertisers will tell themselves anything for a good night's sleep.' This is the first time she's mentioned her personal life and my ears prick up.

‘What line of work is Alex in?'

‘Academia – Development Studies.'

A few light spots of rain darken our picnic bench. I'm poised to ask more about Alex but my breath catches before any words form – a figure weaves through the benches, pulling up the hood of a red sweatshirt. I straighten, alert as a gun dog. It's her, I'm sure it's her. Angela is talking and I tune back in with half an ear. She's saying something about a party ‘…one of the festival sponsors is putting it on, they're a client. Nice company, they make the cider you've probably seen everyone drinking.' I'm keeping one eye on the red hood. ‘It might be useful for you to meet, see if we could get them interested in a relationship…' The figure in red is queuing at a food stall, it's her turn to pay. ‘Are you all right, Tessa?'

Angela follows the direction of my gaze.

‘Sorry, yes. Think I've seen someone I know.'

Two more drops of rain catch my arm. Faces tilt skyward. ‘We'd love to come. Listen, can I text you…'

Umbrellas go up. I'm on my feet. A bare-chested musician stops playing his African drums and runs them to shelter. I follow the red hood across a stretch of open grass towards a network of stalls which drip with beads and scarves and tie-dye skirts. Two women in front are struggling to put up a fuchsia golfing umbrella and when they succeed everything goes pink, but I manage to overtake them and yes, she's still in view, pausing at the walkway which connects two main arenas, taking shelter under a cedar tree. Rain flicks at my eyes and bodies pour past, fresh from the Feeling Funny tent. She takes a bite from the hot dog then checks her phone and returns it to her pocket. What if he's sending her messages? Oh God, what if they planned it together? Perhaps that's what happened, he decided to meet her while I was rattling my charity tin all day.

My body feels light as I approach the tree. The wet wind changes direction carrying a surge of world music over from another field before veering away again. We're close to each other, as close as you have to get to ask a stranger the time and indeed when she faces me she thinks the answer to a question is expected.

‘Hello.' I try to keep my voice steady.

She frowns slightly inside the hood, wiping the side of her mouth with a paper napkin. A strand of hair whips across her face and she tucks it back. I thought she might recognise me but actually no, I hadn't thought that far at all, only as far as not letting her slip away, and my heart is pumping as if it's still on the chase.

‘Do you recognise me?'

She bites her lip, half apology, and considers for a second. ‘I don't think… but you do look familiar. Sorry. Were we at college together?'

‘No.' That's all. I want her to guess again. She hesitates, confused.

‘Was it a PTA?'

‘No.'

Any conviviality is all but gone. ‘Then I'm sorry but…' Her face lightens as the answer comes, ‘You came round collecting…'
She's pleased to have remembered yet this satisfaction is overtaken by further confusion because what I say next throws her off balance. She asks me to repeat it.

‘I said I'm Pete's wife.'

The pearly inside of the sausage glistens and falls from the bun.

‘Peter Perry.' I say his name.

‘Sorry, I don't quite.' More people are channelling over the walkway, a few are running for shelter under the trees. ‘But the charity… you said… are you…' her voice falters. ‘Are you stalking me?'

‘
Stalking
you?'

The rain gathers force. Neither of us moves. It's what Mum would call a clear-up shower, but nothing has been cleared up. Not yet.

‘What are you doing here?' Her voice has a note of demand, coloured by fear.

I blink at her, incredulous. ‘Isn't that the other way around?'

‘Look, I have nothing to say to you,' she declares and still holding the empty bread roll, walks away towards the busy thoroughfare. I hurry after, against the crowd and against the rain, dodging a group of lads, a Superman cape flaring out behind one of them, hurrying to catch up, and when I do I stand square in front of her, because I have to know.

‘Are you here because of him?'

She's breathless and when she speaks the Irish accent is more pronounced. ‘No… no, I didn't even know he was coming.'

‘So what are you doing here?'

‘Trying to have a good time. Like everyone else.'

Is that true? I don't know what to believe anymore. Whatever has to be said, has to be said now.

‘We've got children!' The words are louder than I expect and two women in flowered rain-capes nudge each other and pause to watch, as if this were a piece of close-up theatre, part of the entertainment. The supply teacher becomes quiet and official.

‘I'm not having this conversation,' she says and turns away.

But she's not going to brush me off like an awkward parent, this woman who's been circulating in my thoughts for weeks. ‘How convenient for you!' I shout at her back. ‘How bloody convenient!'

She stops, hesitates and then retraces the few steps towards me. The crowds are still herding past, rained on, exuberant. When she speaks this time her voice falls away. ‘Look, I promise you, it's over.'

Her eyes meet mine for the briefest second and I see in them something I recognise, something I've experienced myself, on a different expanse of wet grass many years ago; the dim sorrow of rejection. A little girl wearing a fairy outfit and a cagoule sploshes by hand-in-hand with her mother.

I stand still to watch the pink gauze of her wings bob into the distance. When I look back, the supply teacher has gone.

37

Departures

Two days after the eviction, I lay in Rori's bath imagining my way through one of her books, a collection of Greek myths. Every goddess had her face. When Actaeon lingered in the wood to watch the beautiful Artemis bathe, I saw Rori turn towards him, fierce and lovely, surrounded by nymphs. She cried out with fury and transformed him into a stag.

The afternoon was bright but cold, and the bath's high sides were protection from the wind. It was a relief to slip away to read, especially since there was almost nothing left of Amber gate, only six of us sitting around like refugees in the mud, trying to keep our spirits up. The two other camp members had gone home, leaving me, Jean, Sam, Barbel, Angela and Di. We'd managed to fashion a new shelter for ourselves with donations, one long tent-like structure which accommodated us all, but there was hardly anything left of our original camp. The bailiffs had crammed everything we owned into the mouth of the muncher, but they didn't know about the bath hidden in the trees. We'd survived. The rebuilding hadn't begun in earnest yet, but we had shelter and food. The women were regrouping.
A luta continua.

Sunlight turned the leaves to yellow medals. If I had no one else to talk to, there were always the trees, and they kept my secrets, however dreadful. If I whispered her name at night, the trees themselves would bring it back,
Rori, Rori, Rori
.

Lying where she'd lain, I thought of her that first morning, crunching on a carrot. She'd once said that boarding school had prepared her for the meals at camp. During my two weeks in Holloway I'd eaten the sloppy macaroni cheese and grey stews without complaint, although I'd had little appetite. An edgy, queasy feeling stayed with me all day and all night. At camp, the missiles hovered on the edges of our imaginations though we'd never seen them up close, only television images or newspaper pictures, but the prison with its metal and echoes and frigid spaces was frighteningly real. For the first time I saw what it meant to be poor and disenfranchised and brought down. I shared a cell with a woman called Ronda who told me she'd been locked up for shoplifting. Her mother was looking after her two kids, and her boyfriend was in Pentonville for doing something she wouldn't talk about.

For the first two nights I didn't sleep at all. On the third night I dreamed of Rori walking into the sea alone on a Cornish beach. She swam up to me and tried to pull me down with her until I woke up gasping and screaming. ‘What is it?' said Ronda in the darkness.

‘I've killed someone,' I whispered into the pillow. If she heard she pretended not to and hushed me until I was quiet.

During the day we sat in a high-ceilinged room assembling dolls. We had to fit their plastic body parts together: two slim legs, two slim arms, torso with two smooth bumps for breasts, the final plunk of a head with long nylon hair in either blonde or glossy brown. Bernice from Sapphire gate wouldn't do it, said she was having nothing to do with brainwashing little girls, and there was a scene with the wardens. She got transferred to the laundry instead, where she had to load and unload sheets from the dryers and couldn't sit down all day. I stayed silent, plunking the heads onto the dolls and fitting them into their beach wear/party wear: it was strangely trance-inducing work and helped me not to think. They paid us £1.65 a week. I bought tobacco and chocolate and shared them with Ronda.

Ronda couldn't see why the camp women were there when they didn't have to be, but she listened when I tried to explain about the weapons in my own words, without Angela's statistics and vocabulary. I didn't need to try and impress Ronda anyway. ‘No peace in this life,' she said. She'd been bringing up her kids since she was sixteen, she'd taken beatings for them, she'd stolen for them and she'd been locked up for them. She knew about causes. She said she was glad if we were doing something that was worth it, and traced her long nails through her plaited hair so they made a scratchy sound. Ronda took pride in her nails, she painted them with care using two coats of acrylic polish and filed them so they formed squares with level tips, not rounded tips the way Mum did hers. She offered to do mine one night after lock up, but I'd bitten them down so far there was nothing left to polish.

When I got out, I circled the base with my eye to the wire, looking for the tall airman, but I never saw him again. Perhaps he'd been posted somewhere else. Perhaps he was dying of a broken heart. More likely he was simply getting on with his invisible life in there, doing whatever it was they did to prepare for the arrival of the missiles. Mum and Dad wrote me a letter on blue Basildon Bond notepaper, which was delivered to Main gate. I'd never had a letter from them before. They wrote on one side of the paper each, Mum's handwriting round and neat, like the writing on the labels she attached to pickle jars, Dad's sloping and narrow. He passed on football results and made a couple of jokes. Mum said she wanted me to come home. But I couldn't go back to Stevenage. That girl had gone.

Thoughts of my parents and prison and Rori went through my head as I lay in the bath that February afternoon reading passages from the book, turning them over as the trees moved overhead. I didn't notice Angela until she was standing nearly beside me. She raised a hand and we exchanged hellos.

‘If you're looking for firewood, they had a delivery at Ruby gate, they said we could go and pick some up.
There isn't much left here.' A lot of the visitors had taken dead wood and even a few branches, there was no brushwood left at all.

‘No. I wasn't looking for wood, I was looking for you. I wanted to say goodbye.' She looked even thinner than usual.

‘You're not leaving?'

Of all the women I knew at camp, I imagined Angela as the very last person to go.

‘I've been discussing it with Barbel, and I'm going with her to the States.' She regarded me through her glasses.

‘What for?'

‘They're creating a peace camp like this one.'

‘Seneca?'

She nodded.

‘What about us?' I said, because I couldn't help it.

‘I think I've done all I can do here. Anyway,' she smiled, a brief, tired smile, ‘you know what you're doing.'

‘But you can't go…' She stood at the foot of the bath, a shaft of pale light falling onto her hair. ‘I know we've had our differences but the camp needs you.'