Mark calls me from work at 7:23 A.M. Something’s wrong. There’s panic in his voice. He’s stifling it, but I can hear it.
I sit up in my chair. I’ve never heard even an inkling of this tone in his voice before. I shudder slightly, even in the warmth of the room.
“Erin, listen, I’m in the loo. They’ve taken my BlackBerry and I’ve got to leave the building right now. They’ve got two security guards outside the bathroom waiting to escort me off the premises.” He’s breathy but he’s holding it together.
“What’s happening?” I ask, visions of terror attacks and shaky mobile-phone footage racing through my mind. But it’s not that. I know it’s not that. I recognize the bones of this story already. I’ve heard it from enough people by now. It’s eerie in its sterility. Mark’s been “let go.”
“Lawrence called me into his office at seven o’clock. He told me he’d heard through the grapevine that I’m looking elsewhere and he thinks it’s better for all concerned if I take leave from today. He’s happy to offer references but my desk has been emptied already and I’ll have to hand in my work phone before leaving the building.” The line goes silent for a second. “He didn’t mention who told him.”
Silence again.
“But it’s fine, Erin. I’m fine. You know they make you go straight into an HR meeting after they let you go. They lead you out of the room and straight into another one with an HR rep in it! They cover their fucking backs, by God. Such a load of bullshit! The rep asks, Was I happy here? And then I have to say, ‘Yes, it’s been fantastic and it’s all worked out for the best in the end. Lawrence has done me a favor. Freed me up for the next challenge, blah blah.’ ” Mark’s ranting. He can sense my worry through the phone.
“It’s fine, though, Erin. It’s going to be fine. I promise you. Listen, I’ve got to go with these guys now but I’ll be home in an hour or so.”
I’m not at home, though.
I’m currently in Holloway Prison, about to do my first face-to-face interview. He can’t have forgotten, can he? I’m in a prison holding room. Shit! Please don’t need me there now, Mark. Please be okay.
But if he needs me, I’ll go.
Oh fucking hell. Those two constantly tugging needs: your own life and “being there.” Your relationship or your life. No matter how hard you try, you can’t have both.
“Should I come home?” I ask.
Silence.
“No, no, it’s fine,” he says finally. “I need to make a fuckload of calls and sort something out. I need to get in somewhere else before this gets too big. Rafie and Andrew were meant to get back to me yesterday—”
I hear banging on the door on his end.
“Fucking hell. Just a sec, mate! Christ. I’m taking a piss!” he shouts. “I gotta go, honey. Time’s up. Call me after the interview. Love you.”
“Love you.” I make a kiss noise but he’s already hung up.
Silence. I’m back in the hushed holding room again. The guard glances over and frowns, his dark eyes kind but firm.
“Didn’t want to mention it, but you can’t use that in here,” the guard mumbles, embarrassed to be playing the role of hall monitor. But it is his job; he’s doing his best.
I put the phone on airplane mode and set it on the table in front of me. More silence.
I stare at the empty chair on the other side of the table. The interviewee’s chair.
I feel a brief shiver of freedom. I’m not in that washroom with Mark. The whole world is still open and clear for me. It’s not my problem.
The guilt follows immediately. What an awful thing to think. Of course it’s my problem. It’s our problem. We’re getting married in a couple of months. But I can’t make that feeling stick. I don’t feel Mark’s problems like I feel my own. What does that mean? I don’t feel like something devastating has happened. I feel free and light.
He’ll be fine, I reassure myself. Maybe that’s why I don’t feel anything. Because it’ll all be fine by tomorrow. I’ll get home early tonight. I’ll make him dinner. I’ll open some wine. Wine and fine.
A sudden buzzer blast from the electric doors snaps me back to the present. It’s followed by the low clunk of sliding bolts. I straighten my notepad. Realign my pens. The guard catches my eye.
“Any point you feel uncomfortable, give me the nod and we’ll terminate,” he says. “I’ll be staying in the room, I’m sure they told you.”
“Yes. Thank you, Amal.” I flash him my most professional smile and press record on the camera, lens trained on the door.
Amal presses the door release. The buzz is deafening. Here we go. Interview one.
The door release thunders again and a short, fair-haired girl comes into view through the wire-meshed window of the door. A pair of eyes land on me, bore through me, before sliding off.
I’m standing before the impulse reaches any decision-making area of my brain. The buzzer blast thunders around the room. Then the clunk of bolts, the magnets releasing.
She steps into the room, interviewee number one, all five feet three inches of her. Holli Byford is twenty-three and painfully thin. Her long hair messily piled high on top of her head, her blue prison tracksuit loose and heavy on her tiny frame. Cheekbones sharp. She looks like a child. They say you know when you’re really getting old because everyone around you starts to look impossibly young. I’m only thirty. Holli Byford looks about sixteen to me.
The door buzzes shut behind her. Amal clears his throat. I’m glad Amal’s staying. The prison called yesterday; although Holli’s progressing they’re not entirely happy for her to be unsupervised just yet. Holli continues to stand there, unselfconsciously, halfway into the room. Her eyes play lazily across the furniture, the camera. They skip over me. She hasn’t acknowledged me yet. And then her eyes alight on my face. My body tenses. I brace myself. The gaze is hard. It hits me. It’s solid. It makes her seem far more substantial than her slight frame.
“You Erin then?” she asks.
I nod. “It’s nice to finally meet you in person, Holli,” I reply.
Over the past three months our telephone conversations have been brief. Mainly consisting of me talking, explaining the project, and silences occasionally peppered by her distracted “yeah’s” and “no’s.” But now that I can see her, I understand that those silences, which sounded empty over the phone, were actually very full. I just couldn’t see before what they were full of.
“Would you like to sit down?” I offer.
“Not really.” She holds her ground by the door.
A standoff.
“Sit down please, Holli, or we’ll take you back to your cell,” Amal fires into the heavy silence.
She drags the chair across from me slowly out from under the table and sits demurely, small hands in her lap. She looks up to the frosted window high on the holding room wall. I flick a look over to Amal. He gives me a reassuring nod. Go ahead.
“So, Holli. I’ll just dive in with the questions, just like we discussed over the phone. Don’t worry about the camera, just talk to me the way you normally would.”
She’s not looking at me at all, her eyes still lingering on the square of light above. I wonder if she’s thinking of the outside. The sky? The wind? I suddenly imagine Mark in a taxi on his way home, a file box of his belongings on his lap, trapped in his own mess. What is he thinking right now as he glides through the City with nowhere to go? Now I look up to the skylight too. Above us two gulls swoop in the open blue. I take a deep breath of bleached prison air and drop my gaze back down to my notes. I need to stay focused. I push Mark to the back of my mind and look up into Holli’s sharp face.
“Okay, Holli? Is that clear?”
She lets her eyes flop back down onto me.
“What?” She asks it as if I’d been talking gibberish.
Okay. I need to get this back on track. Plan B. Let’s just get this done.
“Holli, can you tell me your name, age, sentence length, and conviction, please.” It’s an instruction plain and simple. My tone has slipped into that of Amal’s. We don’t have time for whatever game this is.
She sits up slightly in her chair. For better or worse, this dynamic she understands.
“Holli Byford, twenty-three, five years for arson in the London riots,” she answers briskly, by rote.
She was one of the thousands of arrests over the five days of rioting across London in August 2011. The riots began when a peaceful protest at the unlawful shooting of Mark Duggan swiftly escalated into something else entirely. Opportunists, fueled by a sense of self-righteousness, quickly took advantage of the mayhem, and Tottenham descended into chaos. Police were attacked, shops burnt, property destroyed, and shopping malls looted. The chaos spread across London over the next few days and nights. Rioters and looters, realizing they were one step ahead of the police, started to coordinate their attacks via social media platforms. Looters gathered, united, and raided stores, then posted trophy shots of their hauls online. Stores closed, people stayed away, terrified of being attacked or worse.
I remember at the time watching the grainy camera-phone footage of people smashing into JD Sports, desperate for sneakers, desperate for sports socks.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not belittling it. You can only taunt people with the things that they can’t have for so long. You can only push people so far. Until, for better or worse, they push back.
London was in free fall during those five days in August 2011.
Of the 4,600 arrests made over those days, a record 2,250 of them went to court. The sentencing was rapid and it was harsh. The authorities feared that if examples weren’t made of the young people involved, then troubling precedents would be set. Half of those charged, tried, and sentenced were under twenty-one. One of them was Holli.
She sits across the table from me, her gaze once again on the window above.
“And what did you do in the riots, Holli? Talk us through that night, as you remember it.”
She stifles a laugh, her eyes flashing across to Amal, looking for an ally, then slowly traveling over to me, her face hardening again.
“As I remember it”—she smirks—“it was the weekend they shot Mark Duggan. I look on Facebook and everyone’s doing this crazy stuff—they’d broke into this retail park thing and they’ve got all this stuff, like clothes and that, and the police don’t even care, and they’re not even going there to stop anyone.” She adjusts her messy bun slightly. Tightening the knot. “My mate’s brother said he was going to drive us up there to get some stuff but then he got worried about his license plates coming up, so he didn’t.” She stops and looks again at Amal. He’s looking blankly ahead. She’s free to say what she likes.
“Anyway, on Sunday it all kicked off for real everywhere. I got a text from my mate Ash saying they were about to do the Whitgift Centre. It’s like the main shopping center in Croydon. Ash says we’ve gotta wear hoodies, cover our faces, for the CCTV. So we go down there and there’s loads of us. There’s crumbled glass all over the ground in the street and everyone is just standing around. So Ash starts smashing into the electric doors of Whitgift. The alarm starts going then, so we all join in together ’cos we think there’s not gonna be much time till the police come. But no one goes through; we just stand there. Then this guy who’s running past just pushes straight through the crowd and he’s like, ‘What you fucking waiting for, you Muppets,’ and he goes straight in. So then we push in too.
“I get some clothes and some nice stuff. Is this what you’re after?” She breaks off. Her dead-eyed stare on me, again, hard.
“Yes, Holli, it’s exactly what we’re after. Keep going, please.” I nod her on, trying to stay blank, impassive; I don’t want this thrown off track.
She smirks again and shifts in her seat. She continues.
“Then we get hungry and wander back along the main street. People are throwing stuff— those newspaper dispensers, bricks, bottles on fire. Blocking off the road with those big bins. Anyway, Ash joins in and then when we see the police we run for it, Ash and me and his mate, back toward the bus station. It’s quiet round there, no police, and there’s this bus stopped right in the middle of the road, lights on with some people still on it. We wanna get safe for a bit, so we try and get on the bus too but the driver won’t open up the doors. The driver starts having a fucking meltdown, shouting and waving his arms around. Then someone opens up the end door and the people on the bus start pouring out the other end ’cos they’re scared we’re gonna jump ’em or something. The driver’s shitting himself ’cos now the door’s open he’s not so brave anymore. Then he runs for it too and we’ve got the bus to ourselves.”
She leans back into her chair, satisfied, eyes cast up to the glass again.
“It was nice. We went up top and had a lie-down on the back seats and ate some chicken. Had a drink. That’s when they got all our faces.” She says it pensively.
“Anyway, I poured some Jack Daniel’s on the back seats and lit it up with one of those free papers, as a joke. Ash starts laughing ’cos he didn’t think I’d do it, and the whole back bit of the bus goes straight up in flames. So we’re all laughing and throwing more papers on it ’cos it’s fucking messy up there anyway. And it’s burning really hot and stinking, so we go outside to watch. Ash is telling everyone I did it. And now the whole double-decker’s on fire. People passing are high-fiving and fist-bumping me ’cos it looks completely mental. We got some insane photos on my phone. Don’t look at me like that,” she snarls. “I’m not completely retarded. I wasn’t posting the pictures up online or anything.”
“Holli, how did you get caught?” My tone neutral.
Her eyes slip off me. Challenge dropped.
“Turns out I’d been caught on someone’s mobile phone footage, of the bus on fire and us watching it. Ash saying I’d done it. There was a photo on the front page of the local paper the next day. Me watching the bus burn. They used it in court. They got the footage of us on the bus too.”
I’ve watched the burning-bus footage. Holli, her eyes bright like a kid at a fireworks display, joyful, alive. Her friend Ash a menacing wall of muscle and sportswear beside her, her protector. It’s unsettling to watch, the laughter, the excitement, the pride. It’s chilling, given her demeanor now, to know what it takes to make her smile.
“And are you excited to go home soon, Holli?” I have little expectation of an honest answer here but I have to ask.
She shoots another look across at Amal. A pause.
“Yeah, it’ll be good. I miss my crew. I wanna put some normal clothes on.” She shrugs her loose sack of a sweater. “Get some proper food in me. They’re basically starving me in here it tastes so disgusting.”
“Do you think you’d ever do something like that again, once you’re out, Holli?” I ask. It’s worth a shot.
She smiles, finally. Sits up in her seat.
“Definitely not. I won’t be doing anything like that again.” She’s smirking again now. She’s not even trying to lie well. She has every intention of doing something like that again. The conversation is starting to make me feel uncomfortable. For the first time, I wonder if Holli has mental health issues. I want this interview over now.
“And what are your plans for the future?”
Instantly her demeanor changes; her face, her posture, shift. She looks smaller again somehow, vulnerable. Her tone of voice is suddenly normal, a normal twenty-three-year-old woman. Polite, open, friendly. The change is deeply unsettling. I have no doubt that this is the face a parole board will see.
“Well, I spoke to the prison charity about helping to speed up my sentence. I want to give back to the community and prove I can be trusted again. They’re going to help me get a job and work with my probation officer to help me get back on the straight and narrow,” she says, full of sweetness and light.
I press her.
“But what do you want, Holli? For the future? What do you want to do with your life once you get out of here?” I try to keep my tone flat but I can feel the flavor of my own words.
She smiles again, innocently. She’s getting a rise out of me and she’s enjoying it.
“That would be telling. I just want to get out of here first. Then I don’t know. You’ll have to wait and see, won’t you? But expect…great things, Erin. Great things.” Her unnerving smirk is back.
I look to Amal. He looks back at me.
This is the utterly terrifying shape of things.
“Thank you, Holli. That’s a fantastic start. We’ll call it a day there,” I say.
I turn off the camera.