All the boys down Deptford High Street know she has a girlfriend, the boys in the gym, always coming on to her, trying to turn her. Chatting all that shit about needing a real man and how they will take the pair of them on. Such stupid shit they talk. Her mum tells her just to ignore them. They are just boys, she says. Lee wasn’t like that. Neither was Dad. I know, her mum says. Well, you’d be amazed by how different people can be. Look at you, she says and strokes Lewis’ face, I am so proud of you.
Yes, pride. Fuck you. You can’t take that away from me. She is half drunk on her own refusal to play the game, on her own determination to fuck them over, even if it is purely through her refusal to be intimidated, to be broken, to fall apart. A few months ago she shaved her head, a number three cut all over, and Laura says she loves running her hands over it, especially when Lewis’ head is down between her legs and she has her beautiful feet up on Lewis’ strong back. She loves Laura’s flesh, her belly, her big hips, her boobs, her lack of shame about taking up space. She never tries to disguise her size; spilling out of her clothes, undulating down the High Street in a feather boa, high heels, and a skin tight second-hand business suit and planting a fat, warm kiss on Lewis’ lips outside PayBank, grabbing her bum as all the market traders pause momentarily in their barking and wheedling, and the old Rasta who has been sitting in his blue deckchair mid-street as long as anyone can remember shouts encouragement.
She is 17 years old and she will take on the debt to study even if she has to work for the rest of her life to repay it. The world is bigger and stranger than you imagine it to be, there are people in this world, she knows, because she is one of them, that you wouldn’t dream existed, that seem fantastical. Sometimes at night she seems fantastical to herself, and the prospect of what she might do, how extraordinary she might become, intoxicates her further so that sometimes the only release from the waves of excitement that sweep over her is to nudge Laura awake and make love. At other times, true enough, she hears her brother moaning in his room, snorting, making noises, hears his head thrashing and then she is dropped suddenly, violently out of life and bounds back up scalded with rage. Sometimes she goes to him and puts her arms around him to try and soothe his fears, other times she is appalled and the idea that it would be better if he had died, better still if he did die, assaults her and she rolls over and over in the bed, trying to outmanoeuvre her own thoughts.
What to do about Lee, now? It has been eighteen months since he was injured and the appeal is just due to start and there will be no justice. Everyone knows what happened. They say his brain turned in his skull with the force of the blow and that was it, in an instant he was gone, evacuated, jettisoned, nothing of her brother left at all. Some knotted cord twisted too tight, a few threads snapped and all that he was is lost, unrecoverable. They know the name of the policeman that did it; there is phone footage everywhere. She has seen it, once. She won’t watch it again. The officer moving forward with his baton raised, the police horse coming in from behind. Lee trying to back away from one, backing in to the other, the man on the horse flailing his baton around. The blow is deliberate; anyone can see that except the jury, the Police Complaints Commission, the press. In defending himself against attack the officer accidentally catches Lee on the head with a downstroke. And it’s true that the police officer, the pig, the fucking filth, does get hit with placard, bouncing off his protective visa as he cracks her brother on the head with his truncheon. Distracted, confused, in fear of his life, responding to a volley of abuse. The whole situation “regrettable”.
The abuse they have received for campaigning, for pushing the trial through the courts, then appealing. All the social media stuff, the sheer, almost fanatical hate and poison. The smears in the press, press run by rich men. Pointing out that Lee was “typically” raised by his mother alone, no mention that her Dad died or acknowledgement of just how fucked that is for her mum, to lose her husband, for the children to lose a father and then to not even lose her son but have him go out one day to support his friends on their protest, to go out to protest because he knows what it will mean for his sister, who wants to go to University in a couple of years’ time, and be returned to them as a shell, twisted up, eyes blank, rocking back and forth in a wheelchair, unable to feed himself or wipe himself, or speak his own name.
And now they smear her and her mum when they can. Some of her relatives have asked her to tone it down, to not be so openly rebellious, even if by that they just mean out and proud and in love. Do it for her own sake, make herself less of a target, make the family seem more respectable, but her mum says no, no way, you be who you are I am proud of you, proud of you. They don’t like the fact that her mum is educated, articulate. They want to dismiss the whole thing, they want to make it, make it part of some whole chip on the shoulder thing, a column in The Telegraph referred to the regrettable role model of Doreen Lawrence, a woman simply unable to let go, as though you could ever let go of the death of your child, the murder of your child, and counselled acceptance, suggesting that her mum’s constant demands for justice represented a form of harassment of police officers already under considerable strain and attempting to do their job under difficult circumstances, what with all the recent unrest.
Her mum laughed at that one, a bitter laugh in the kitchen and then her eyes filled, for a dazzled second, with tears she quickly squeezed away. That’s how it was, she was victimising them. Her mum has cut the articles out and kept them to remind her just what they are up against. Another columnist had asked just what her child, a personal trainer, “and clearly not himself academically gifted”, had been doing at such a demonstration anyway, and whether his presence hadn’t perhaps been due to his mother’s seemingly radical convictions rather than his own, that perhaps the root of this “highly” regrettable incident might not lie there; the blame, the culpability, the final responsibility, lying with, as always, as always, the mother. What radical convictions are those, Paula Adonor asked in a letter back, that education should be free for all, here as it is in many countries, that the police should not be able to ruin a young man’s life with impunity?
Lewis cannot exactly see what she will do, how her revenge will manifest itself, in what ways she will make them pay, cause justice to come into being in the world, but that is not as important as her desire and her will. First she must understand the world more fully, the way her mother understands it, the way Laura and her friends understand it. She sees herself now, even more fully, as part of a struggle. What it is to be seized that way, when you are still young, by a conviction that will shape your life. Certainly she was always interested but everything that has happened in the last two years has strengthened her resolve. Even before, even as a kid, she was dipping into the books that filled the house, books which are proving invaluable now as she does all the reading for the degree that maybe, probably, she will never be able to afford. Perhaps the Open University, which is itself getting more and more expensive every year, is her only option, now she has to help her mum look after her brother, especially now they have cut benefits, taking away his help. Perhaps she can do some online courses and build up credits, some
MOOC
s and
UAC
s and cobble it together that way.
Why does it have to be this hard just to live? How many different battles should a person have to fight just to live? Work all day, look after a disabled child, try to get some justice through the courts for an obvious and grievous wrong that has been committed against you, fight to keep the little support you are offered while the people you rely on and who rely on you in turn are swept up out of places they have lived all their lives and dumped somewhere miles away like so much rubbish.
Her mother tries to calm her sometimes, nodding along to Lewis’ ranting, telling her she knows, she knows, she understands, and yes of course she is angry too, but she is also careful and tired and she has to conserve her energy and hate is exhausting when you get older. And when you were my age? Well, of course I wanted change and of course that is what I struggled for in a way, but life was a lot easier for me, your grandma didn’t have to pay for me to go to University, there were more jobs around, rents were lower. And I hadn’t had any tragedies in my life. Yet, Paula almost says. Yet.
Fuck tragedy, she gets pissed off if her mum uses that word, it is not a word she accepts for herself, for her own experience. Once when her mum said it she spat back, best thing that has ever happened to me. And her mother then flew into a rage, this is not about you, this is not all about you, it’s about all of us, the three of us. They didn’t speak for the rest of the day and Lewis went out, up to New Cross with Laura for a rare day of drinking and almost got into a fight with some boys, some typical, fucking stupid boys halfway down Lewisham high road who started kissing their teeth and catcalling. Moments like that she wishes she was bigger, physically bigger, so she could slap them down, humiliate them; five foot four is not much when her mum is five foot nine. How come she didn’t grow taller? No one knows. Maybe her Dad dying stunted her. The shock, suddenly like that when she was thirteen. Her mum kept telling her she would have a surge but it never came. If she was taller, six foot tall, which was Lee’s height, six foot five, six foot eight, she would beat them down, she would make them beg, these stupid fucking stoned, drunk boys never read a book in their lives and think they are masters of the fucking world, think they are running things. Slaves. She remembers a line she liked from a film she watched with her mum when she was a kid,
Once Were Warriors
, all about the Maori in New Zealand. She bugged her mum like mad after that to get a tattoo and she dreamed of a face tattoo, permanent war paint. That line, she’s wanted to use it herself sometime but is just too corny to do it, when the drunk husband has pinned his wife up against the wall and is going to her hit and she says, “Go on Jake, hit me, hit me. You’re still a slave. A slave to the bottle. A slave to your fists.”
And then she knew, she got her first taste of how not to be slave. Stay away from the bottle, use your mind not your fists. And yet, she dreams of violence, and she asks Laura sometimes, don’t you want to kill them, kill them all? All the pigs, all the fascists, Tories, Labour. You can’t trust any of them. She doesn’t trust anyone except Laura and a few people she knows from demos and occupations, people she follows on Twitter. Her mum, of course. The boys who run the arts centre, her uncle James and her cousins and some of the people down the gym, so, really, she laughs at herself, actually if you spread it out, if you imagine it like water flowing out and around obstacles in rivulets and streams and hooking up, merging and combining with other streams that seem to be seeking hers out, then she trusts really a lot of people, but no one higher up, maybe, although her mum’s colleagues are decent people too and her teachers and Lee’s lawyers. So many good people all wanting the same thing, the right thing, for the world to be put right, for there to be some justice. So why isn’t there, why not?
How come? How come we can’t just shake all the bullshit and all the bullshitters off and just live together?
She asks her mum and mum says it’s a constant fight, sometimes we have the upper hand, sometimes they do, but Lewis can’t remember a time when she felt like her family had the upper hand, maybe when she was a kid and her Dad was still around, and Lee was OK and they weren’t fighting this court case and worried about her mum losing her job and money money money all the time being a problem.
Fuck money. She’ll take on the debt even if she has to clean toilets to pay it back, even if they put her in jail because she can’t repay it. She will still have learned it all, it will still be in her.
They can’t take that away from me. That’s mine for life, that and my friends, that and my mission. That and my demand for justice.
But look at Lee. Maybe even that, your learning, your self, the self you struggle and sweat to build, they can take that away from you too, the most valuable thing you have, and no one has to be held to account. They just laugh in your face. Tell you it is “regrettable”.
She rolls over in the bed, worried suddenly that perhaps finally there is nothing that can’t be taken away from you.
Perhaps they will never stop until the whole world is used up, until the last tree is felled, the last fish left floating, the air unbreathable, all of humanity squatting in the dark in poverty and disease and fear.
Lewis is cycling, head down, fast as she can along the South London Cycle Route, part of the Green London Urban Trail initiative connecting Deptford to Peckham to London Bridge and beyond, which cynics say is really just there to compensate for the poor quality train service into the centre and help defray the added weight and inconvenience of all those eager new workers, urban explorers, professional pioneers reclaiming South London’s under-appreciated and neglected living-spaces, flooding in from the gentrified concrete council blocks and flimsy steel and glass new builds.
She is going to see Dan, an old friend of Lee’s from when they were kids. Dan has his degree now and debts he has no hope of paying; also, astonishingly, a job.
He works at Heart of Chicken.
It goes by a number of names but Heart of Darkness or Arsehole of Chicken are the most common. Is there a worse place to work? A worse employer? Maybe Amazon now they too have introduced A.M. for all warehouse staff, who aren’t even customer-facing and, just like Heart of Chicken, publish daily service stats and insist on monthly and weekly unpaid development sessions and reviews on putative days off. Heart of Chicken prides itself on being “a Total Employer” and “an engineer of attitudes and outlooks” helping partners “make the mindset of intense customer focus a 24/7/365/4Life orientation” using a “holistic affective regimen” developed through “synergizing the ground-breaking techniques of
NLP
and Total Physical Response”.