Authors: Owen Sheers
As soon as they started one of the Twins clamped his hands to his ears, pressing them hard against his head.
‘Arrgghhh,’ he screamed. ‘I can hear one, I can hear one!’
‘Go, go!’ his brother shouted back at him.
And he was off, sprinting into the graveyard, while his brother ran to the wall of the underpass, picked up a piece of chalk and stood there, poised, ready to write. I didn’t know what was happening, but whatever it was, I didn’t want to miss it, so I ran after the first one, into the graveyard.
It was the Dead again, only this time not in film, but in person.
There was one of them standing beside every gravestone, standing in crooked lines like chess pieces in a half-played game. They weren’t moving, just standing there, speaking. At first I couldn’t make out what they were saying, all their voices mixing together in that drone. But when I stepped nearer to them, I realised they were telling stories. Each one telling a story about whoever’s name was carved on
the stone beside them. Not stories of their deaths either, of how they’d died, but of their lives and how they’d lived.
I looked over to where the first Legion Twin was hurrying between them all, hands still at his head, pausing by each person, leaning in to listen – to a little girl, to an old man, to a young woman.
‘Find them! Find them!’ his brother called from the underpass.
He ran faster, searching between the stories, listen ing to the voices outside and inside his head. ‘Loved… loved… loved John the most! John the most! Where are they? Where are they?’
Then he stopped. All of a sudden, he stopped beside a grave where a little boy was reciting the poem of his life, over and over.
‘Dewi Phillips!’ he cried. ‘Dewi Phillips! Write it! Write it!’
I looked over to the underpass where the other Twin was searching now, searching for space on the underpass wall which was already scrawled with thousands of names.
‘Can’t find space! Can’t find space!’ he yelled back, panicking.
‘Arrghhh,’ his brother replied. ‘Quick, find space! Find space!’
Then from the underpass, ‘Writing! Writing!’
And as he did, the voices faded down, his brother took his hands from his head, and, standing up straight again, strolled over to his twin under the road.
‘Ta,’ he said. ‘Ta very much.’
‘No problem,’ his brother replied, slipping the chalk in his pocket. ‘Tidy.’
And that’s when it dawned on me. It was like what Johnny had said about Alfie on Llewellyn Street. What I was seeing and hearing was what the Legion Twins had always seen and heard. All of it, the memories under the ground, the stories of the lives of the dead, all of this was what the poor sods had been carrying around with them for years until now, finally, it was out, out for all to see.
I had to go get Johnny. I wanted him to see this too, wanted to know
if
he could see it too. But I was
too late. Coming out of the graveyard I ran straight back into them all – the whole crowd from Llewellyn Street, rushing into the underpass. They must have heard the voices too, I guess, and seen the lights of the films. Or at least the Teacher had, and let’s face it, wherever he went by then, whatever he did, so did that crowd. I looked around for him and sure enough there he was again, already walking among those memories coming out of the ground, bathing in them, standing in their beams, allowing the gone faces and places to play all over him, to wash him in their flickering light.
I felt a tug on my sleeve and turned round to see Johnny.
‘Have you seen this?’ I said to him, throwing my arms at the underpass. ‘And in the graveyards? The twins and everything? What’s going on Johnny?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, waving his phone in front of me. ‘But never mind this, we got to get over to the shopping centre.’
I looked at the screen of his phone. Someone had sent him a photo from the centre. At least, it looked
like it was from the centre but, just like Llewellyn Street, it looked totally unlike the shopping centre too. It was packed. Not just a busy Saturday either, I mean totally roofed. I could make out huddles of people in red blankets, makeshift stalls and stands, a tower of old TVs and in the foreground a band playing on the roof of the café, all of them in balaclavas, their faces hidden.
‘When was this taken?’ I asked Johnny. ‘When’s this photo from?’
Pocketing his phone he leant in and, with that sense of drama he’d come to love so much, whispered into my ear.
‘Now,’ he said, low and hoarse, his voice all excite ment and wonder. ‘That photo is now.’
We heard the shopping centre kicking off before we saw it. It sounded like a mix of a music festival and a prison riot, all amplified by the big echoing space of it all, like the whole place had been turned into a giant speaker.
There were that many people it was a job to get
inside. But when we did I knew right away this wasn’t going to end well; that there was no way the Council, much less ICU would let what was happening in there go unnoticed or unpunished.
One part of the floor looked like a refugee camp. The Company Man obviously hadn’t wasted any time with those plans of his, with his moving of people from their homes. But something must have gone wrong too. Because usually the Company wouldn’t let us see the results of their dirty work, would prefer to brush them under the carpet or move them out of sight. But this time that hadn’t happened, and that’s why the camp on the floor of the centre was crammed with families and people who’d been chucked out of their homes. For once they hadn’t gone elsewhere, but had stayed instead; not-forgotten, still burning. Some local groups had been handing out red blankets to them which just made them stick out even more, as if ICU had cut into the flesh, not the soil of this town, and these people flowing into this camp were its blood. Which, of course, they were.
All around that camp were the possessions they’d managed to bring with them. Not in piles, not just strewn about but ordered, arranged, like shrines. Their owners were quiet beside them, not kicking up a fuss or anything. As if they knew that by just being there, by not going away, by being in sight and therefore in mind, they were causing trouble enough.
The rest of the centre though, well, that wasn’t quiet at all. Something – the assassination attempt on the beach the day before, the leaking of ICU’s plans, the shooting of the woman, the Teacher – something had lit a spark that had lit a fire, the flames of which were now burning brightly in that shopping centre. Banners of protest, flash mobs of kids playing havoc with the Council police, banks of TVs showing testaments from the imprisoned and the disappeared. No wonder the Resistance boys were in there too. Must have thought it was their hour, their day, that finally the Town was going to listen to them and wasn’t going to take ICU’s messing lying down any more. The very fact The Band had turned up again, well,
that was a sign of just how confident they suddenly were.
Still, no one really knows who The Band were, other than every now and then they’d crop up, sing their Resistance songs, then disappear again before the Council could get their hands on them. Always played in balaclavas, and hardly ever on a stage. Always somewhere they could cut and run if they had to – on a car-park roof, down some back alleyway, in the derelict cinema. I hadn’t seen them for ages and, I’ll be honest, I think we’d all assumed they’d been caught or disappeared. Or, like most everyone else, that they’d just given up. But they obviously hadn’t, had they? And now they were back to prove it, back to help fan those flames which had caught all over town.
Like I said though, as soon as I’d seen the state of the shopping centre, all those people gathering, the protest stalls, the shrines of belongings, The Band, I’d known ICU wouldn’t let it go on for too long before stepping in with their size nines. And sure enough, that’s just what they did, a full raid on the
place, about twenty or so pairs of size nines to be exact, all attached to the feet, legs and riot armour of ICU security, Old Growler at their head.
It was The Band they were after but as ever The Band were too quick. They’d set up their signaling chain before they’d started playing, and the call had come down the line a good few minutes before the security came barging through. So by the time they did The Band were already gone, just their kit abandoned on the café and the buzz of a single amp; that was all that was left of the song that had, just minutes before, been filling the place.
Seeing the security come in we’d all braced ourselves for what would happen next. But ICU must have been more nervous about what was happening than we thought, because there was no clearing of the place, no arrests, just regular ID checks, a few searches of bags and then they drifted away to the edges to keep an eye on everything from there.
The Company Man must have known he’d have to play this one subtly, I reckon – that he couldn’t just come down hard again. That what was happening
was something new, something different and as such he’d have to come up with something new and different himself to counter it. If only we’d known exactly how new and how different then we might have been able to stop it. Except of course, he never wanted it stopped, did he? The Teacher, I mean. Because he might have walked down that dune on Friday morning looking like a lost child, but by the time the shopping centre was kicking off, he already knew, I reckon. Somehow, from all he’d seen and heard, he already knew what was going to have to be done. And how he was going to do it.
Johnny and me hung around the centre for a few more hours after the raid, just to see what was going to happen next. But not much else did. It seemed like the happening had all slowed down for a bit by then, and in its place there was a sense of waiting instead; the whole town waiting for the next trigger, the next move – by us or by them, by the Company Man or by the Teacher.
We were on our way out, heading back to
Johnny’s to finally have that practice, when I got a clue as to what that next move might be. A flyer, palmed into my hand by a kid in a black hoodie, walking past me as quick as a whippet. By the time I looked round he was already gone, melted into the crowd.
‘What’s it say?’ Johnny asked.
I looked down at the flyer. There was nothing fancy about it, no illustrations, printed in a hurry by the looks of it. Just some words on a page.
But that was enough.
TONIGHT
Sandfields Social and Labour Club
THE LAST SUPPER
Be There
They’d started closing the social clubs the year before all this happened. At first no one really noticed. After
all, the kids and grandkids of the men who’d founded them had moved on to the pubs now, hadn’t they? There were no Sunday drinking laws any more, so who needed them old clubs? The Naval, the Social and Labour, The Royal Legion. The first ones were taken under the story of property developers. The lights were turned off, the bar equipment sold off, the pool table auctioned off. Boards went up on the windows and the club went quiet, waiting for the bulldozers. Only the bulldozers never came. The ‘development’ never happened, as if those companies weren’t developers at all, more like assassins.
It was around then, with people starting to complain, starting to miss the gone socials, that the Resistance realised the clubs left might still be of some use to them. Handy fronts for organising meetings, recruiting, getting their pamphlets out among the people. And it worked for a while too. Council didn’t want to be going in and mess up a good honest working man’s night, now did they? Not likely. ICU, however. Well, they weren’t so touchy-feely about the clubs. They soon got wind
of the connection between the socials and the Resistance. They had their people, their eyes, their ears, their spies. They had their cameras and their recording equipment, so no surprise when they started closing down the clubs themselves. No developer story needed any more either. Just straightforward ‘support of an illegal organisation’ notices, papers served, then sweetened a few weeks later with empty offers to set up meetings for a new ‘leisure facility’.
By the time all this happened with the Teacher the Sandfields Social was the last club left in town. But even the Sandfields’ time was up now. The committee had been issued with an eviction order and a hefty fine if they didn’t comply. Like so much else they’d had to accept, but there was no way they were going quietly.
The party for the last night of the club had been planned ever since we got news of its closure. A proper send-off for the old girl, that’s what the committee decided to do, and for the old boys who’d sailed in her for all those years, weaving their way
across her floors, unsteady as regular sailors on a real ship at sea. And at first, that’s all that night was going to be. The best bloody party the town had seen for ages; half celebration, half wake. But not any more. Not now, not with what was stirring in the town, with the shooting in the civic centre and with these crowds the Teacher was gathering. No, with all that going on the closing dinner had become something else instead. It had become the next move in this new game. And I’m telling you, after what I’d witnessed so far, there was no way in hell I was going to be missing it.
The club looked beautiful for her send-off. Fair dos, the committee had sunk their hearts and souls into this party, and, no doubt, the last of the club’s coffers too. Now, nobody can say she’s the prettiest looking thing from the outside, the Sandfields Social. I think even her most dedicated drinkers would have to admit that. Big lump of moulded plastic slumped at the end of a weed-ridden car park. But step through her swing doors upstairs and it turns out under that
grey exterior she’s only wearing the club equivalent of pink frilly knickers, isn’t she? Decked out like a regular 70s crooners palace she is, little stage and all. And for the party that night they’d really gone to town. Fixed the lights, taped up the slipped gels, even got two big screens up and the old disco ball turning again, like a glittering moon above us all.