Love and Fallout (7 page)

A woman's refuge, I wanted to say. A welfare centre for the victims of war crime.

‘An estate agent.'

Angela glanced at me and returned her eyes to the newspaper.

In silence we watched a flame take purchase on a knobbly branch. My fingers and toes were warming even as my back chilled. It was like being a slice of baked Alaska.

I asked Rori if she'd been at the camp for long.

‘About five months, on and off. More on at the moment.' She perched beside Barbel at the end of the log. Two silver hoops pierced the cartilage of her ear, and through both lobes she wore silver earrings shaped like peace symbols, their surface flecked by firelight. ‘Angela's been here longest.'

Angela turned another page. Barbel stopped strumming and paused to calculate.

‘What is the date today? Twenty-seventh of October?'

‘Twenty-eighth,' Angela corrected.

‘Then I have been here for two months. Before I was living on the Moshav,' she said in her up and down voice, ‘and then the peace camp in Soesterberg. It was beautiful. And then I come here. Not so beautiful, but necessary. I come to make friends with all these crazy women, don't I?' She nudged Angela, who gave a pale smile, eyes still fixed on the print. ‘But I better not speak too much because of my loose lips, that's right?'

‘I'm really not a journalist,' I said. The smoke was beginning to make my eyes smart and I edged backwards.

‘What's new in the world, Angel?' said Rori, crossing a long leg. I wondered who she was talking to, but saw it was Angela, who answered by reading out part of an article about Helmut Kohl, the new chancellor of West Germany. It was pretty dry stuff. After that she read a piece about a group called the Mujahideen who were fighting a civil war in Afghanistan.

‘There you are, girl,' said Sam, who'd returned with the mug. Now I could see her in the light she looked quite a lot like the women from the enraged tabloid articles I'd seen. Was she a lesbian? I'd never met a real lesbian. She wore two jumpers on top of each other which came down to the middle of her thighs, and her Mohican, which stood about two inches tall, ran in a stripe down the centre of her head.

‘Admiring the barnet?'

‘Oh, no I was just…' I must have been gawping.

She winked and slumped back into her car seat.

‘It's nice to have people to talk to,' I said. ‘I met a woman on the way here but she wasn't exactly chatty,' I ventured, in a chums together way. ‘She was sitting by herself on the side of the road.'

‘That's Di. She's witnessing,' said Angela from inside her paper.

Witnessing? ‘Oh. Right.' My face prickled. ‘She seemed very nice anyway.'

‘Everything set for this evening?' said Rori, filling my mug. The tea tasted faintly metallic, but it was hot at least. Bitter and hot. I sat quiet, afraid to get anything else wrong. ‘We've a meeting later at Main Gate. I'd ask you to come along but we ought to be cautious just until we tell the others we have a visitor. After that nasty experience with the journalist it's made some of the women nervous. You understand?'

‘Of course,' I said, not sure I did. Even if I was a journalist what were they going to do about it, how were they going to prove it? This was the sort of unjust treatment that a person wasn't supposed to expect when she was demonstrating against other injustices.

‘I think I will cook,' announced Barbel. Her voice was interesting to listen to, every time she spoke she sounded as if she were surprising herself.

‘Where's Jean?'

‘Gone to visit Ruby gate.'

The women didn't look enthusiastic about the prospect of one of Barbel's dinners, and two hours later, after sharing a kidney bean and cauliflower stew, I understood why.

By eight-thirty I was huddled in my sleeping bag for warmth, my belly bloated. After the others had gone to the meeting, I'd done my best to locate myself, walking around the area with my torch, but I couldn't get the fire going properly and had given up in the end, retreating to my tent. I'd also given up trying to read Simone de Beauvoir and was thinking instead about Mum and Dad at home watching
Name that Tune
. They never missed it; Dad could say ‘Boom Bang-a-Bang' before the contestants had their fingers anywhere near the buzzer. I usually made a big fuss when it was on, complaining at the sound of all that easy-listening piping its way into our living room, but the truth was I would much rather have been looking at Tom O'Connor than lying by myself in a tent on the frozen ground.

I'd tried my best not to think about Tony, but without distraction I began picturing him with his arm around Lisa the Social Sciences student, teasing her about her faulty grasp of Marxist theory in some romantically lit bohemian bar. There weren't any bohemian bars in Stevenage but he'd be in London by now, Camberwell, that's where he was headed. Well, who cared. I was making a new life too. I dug around for my exercise book, intending to make a note of Helmut Kohl in case his name came up in conversation, but in order to get to a fresh page I had to leaf through the old ones. Resisting a glance at the earlier entries was like resisting the sight of a motorway pile-up:

Since you said your goodbyes

the tears mist my eyes

I'm a broken flower without feelings

to be thrown onto vegetable peelings.

It didn't even scan. I flicked over and began writing up my journey, stopping to consider the women I'd met. Barbel with the guitar was nice, and Rori was brilliant, I'd liked her immediately, but that Angela was unnerving. The way she'd folded the newspaper into a rectangle and tucked her elbows in as I sat beside her, as if we were passengers on a bus. While I'd been putting up the tent Rori had mentioned that Angela had lost patience with all the fair-weather visitors coming and going. Perhaps that was it. I realised it had been a mistake to arrive on my own. I should have asked Maggie – it wasn't her sort of thing but she might have done it for an adventure, stayed a couple of days at least. Too late now. Mum and Dad and Maggie and Tom O'Connor were miles away; the tent, the lumpy ground, the wind plucking creepily at the canvas, these were all to be endured. I lay back and shut my eyes. I had my clothes on plus an extra jumper, but it was still freezing. An owl hooted unnaturally loudly. Now and again there was a thin rumble of traffic from the main road. Eventually I fell asleep.

Voices woke me. Bright lights somewhere outside. I propped up on my elbows, aware of the blood pumping at my temples. Laughter. Two male voices, or three? I unzipped the door flap. Branches obscured the view, but the glare was coming from car headlights, the driver leaning out of the window and shouting, his mate standing nearby.

‘Smelly cow, why don't you piss off home!'

‘This is my home!' It was Barbel's voice.

‘Gyppo!'

‘She's a Kraut.'

‘Dutch, you idiot. Go away!'

‘What you gonna do, have me arrested? She's gonna have us arrested, Dave.' Two more women came to join Barbel. From the shadows, I recognised Rori.

‘Alright darling, gis a blow job.'

‘She don't like fellers, do you?'

Another woman stepped protectively in front of her.

‘That your girlfriend?'

All at once there was a noise, the sort of warbling Red Indians made in old films. A handful of other women came out of their tents until they half surrounded the car making their shrill cry. You couldn't hear what the men were saying, you could only see the women and hear their tongues flicking, the same single pitch in unison.

Car doors slammed, then came the guttural rev of an engine.

I closed my eyes again and lay on my heart as if smothering it might stop it from beating so quickly.

5

Fallout

I'm trying to draw up a leaflet for the Heston Fields campaign: what I'm trying not to do is think about the argument, specifically the phrase
Like a woman for once.
After Pete stormed out I didn't feel like cooking so Dom ordered pizza. Now he dances the remote across channels, settling on a news story from Spain, where an encampment of young people are massed in a public square, banners and candles flickering against a purple-blue sky. They are chanting. Forty-two per cent of young people are unemployed, says the reporter. This annoys Dom and he begins to recount an article he's read about global economics. I listen, fiddling again with a format button before eventually asking his advice. He leans towards the laptop, taps rapidly a few times and realigns the page in an instant.

‘How did you do that?'

‘I'm a digital native,' he says, raising a slice of pizza until strings of hot mozzarella break from the box. ‘You're at a disadvantage because you're basically operating in a second language.' I think about that, and the Spanish protest, how he'll be able to access the details in seconds, unlike years ago when we had phone trees and chain letters rather than webcams and instant streaming.

Madrid and the purple sky disappear but Dom is still thoughtful. ‘So what were you doing in your camp?'

‘Protesting against cruise.' He nods but the word is alien. ‘You know, nukes. Weapons of mass destruction.'

‘Right.' He chews on a lump of pizza the size of a golf ball. ‘Dad said it was only for women.'

‘Men could visit.'

‘Did you have portaloos or what?'

I stop typing and raise an eyebrow. ‘Is that your best question?'

‘When Ed went to Glastonbury he said they were rank, he said it was like open sewage and he nearly puked, he had to hold his t-shirt over his face.'

‘Thanks for that charming dinner conversation.' Ed going to Glastonbury is something we've been hearing a lot about recently and it's more than likely Dom will start petitioning soon.

‘So?'

‘If you really want to know we had a trench.'

‘A trench?' This delights him. ‘Nasty.'

‘We were living outside, remember.'

‘Commando style.'

I laugh this time. He considers. ‘If you'd have met Dad by then do you think you would have gone?'

‘I hadn't met Dad then, had I?'

‘Yeah, but say you had.'

‘Maybe.' A tiny window opens up, a window where Pete and I hadn't met. Would I be with someone else, or alone? And if there were children, what would they be like? I glance at Dom, my beautiful boy with his crazy teenage hair and his black clothes, and wonder who he might be: how much of him is himself, and how much is us.

He removes an olive from his pizza slice and sends it my way. I open my mouth obligingly. ‘Did they have kids there?'

‘Some of the women took their children.'

‘Would you have taken us?'

‘I don't know. It was just me then. Not Dad. Not Pippa. Not you.'

He loses interest in a world which doesn't contain him. The adverts are on and his eyes follow a bare-shouldered model as she exits the shower.

‘Dad said they didn't do that much in the end. He said it was the Russians and the Americans who had a summit, that's why they got rid of the missiles.'

‘Really?' I flick my eyes from the laptop, irritated by the idea of Pete holding forth, keen to make teacherly corrections, keen to ensure his son doesn't go running away with the wrong ideas. ‘Why are you asking me about this if you've already talked to Dad?'

‘Get your side.'

‘Well Dad obviously thinks he's the one with the answers.'

There's a reflective silence before Dom announces that if those Spanish protests come to England he's going to join in. Definitely. He uses the word disenfranchised, which he's recently become fond of.

‘I think it's good you went to your camp, Mum.'

‘Thanks, love.' I pull him in for a quick cuddle, which he allows, because no one is here to witness it.

He picks off another olive. ‘Did you ever get arrested?'

The ads are finished. I try a deflective move. ‘You can watch a DVD if you've done your homework. Whatever you like, while Dad's out.' Since he's become a Goth, Dom's very into narratives which feature tortured heroes in floor-length black coats. Pete is losing patience, especially since he caught Dom in the bathroom experimenting with an eyeliner. That's another thing we've argued about: me wanting to let Dom be himself, or whatever new version of himself he's perfecting, Pete wanting him to be the boy he used to be, the one who was in football squad and spent every weekend outdoors.

Dom repeats his question about being arrested.

‘I really need to finish this tonight, love.'

He sighs deeply, but gets up to fetch one of his films and I'm off the hook.

When Dom's in his bedroom I run a bath, easing gently into the heat.
Like a woman for once
. I swish at a cluster of bubbles as if to dispel the words, then lean back, wondering how it came to this. What happened to the booth, me on his lap, him puckering up for the comedy kiss? That photo would have been taken soon after we met, by accident, a real accident that had us sitting side by side in a hospital corridor.