Then – 5th August
It was 79˚F degrees according to Ella’s phone, but that was the air temperature when she was standing up. Down on the ground, on the sun-baked tarmac, surrounded by a crush of seated and sprawled bodies, suffering from heatstroke and dehydration, she was sure it was closer to ninety. She’d dressed for an English summer in jeans and a T-shirt and a lightweight parka that she’d shed within minutes of arriving at the demonstration.
At first, she’d seen a lot of half-familiar faces; other students she recognised from around campus and the reading rooms and the roads nearby where most of them lived in shared houses just like hers. A few lecturers, mostly junior ones who would feel the force of the new zero-hours contracts sooner than their senior peers, and who probably felt they had so little to lose already that the fight was worth taking to the streets.
When Ella asked around, she discovered that the older men and women were mostly from the unions, while a few others were dismissed as professional agitators. The kind who turned up anywhere there was a possibility of clashing with the police or taking a small chunk out of whichever branch of the establishment was available that month.
The man who told her that was a lecturer in the politics department. A young fogey in a cream linen jacket who seemed to loathe anything vaguely left wing. Until he needed them to turn out and protect his employment rights.
He went on talking, while Ella scanned the crowd for someone she knew and could join, complaining about the recent no-platforming of an Israeli historian. Ella had been at that event too, remembered discussing it with Dylan afterwards, feeling a mounting sense of frustration as he dismissed her concerns. The man was passionate about the upsurge of anti-Semitism in academia, rattling off the names of splinter groups she was surprised he knew. He warned her about getting involved with them.
‘Unless you’re planning on taking your PhD to Al Jazeera.’ He laughed and reached into his bag for a bottle of water. ‘In all seriousness, though, you should be careful which causes you support. You’re young, you don’t want to get blacklisted.’
He pointed towards the police cordon, where fifty riot officers sweated inside their gear. A woman in civvies, large sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat shading her face was standing near them.
‘See the woman with the video camera? Intelligence gathering. They identify troublemakers and sell access to the lists to employers.’
‘Aren’t you worried about being on it?’ Ella had asked, shocked by his coolness.
‘I’m in it for the love, not the money,’ he said, with an enigmatic smile.
A couple of hours after she arrived, she thought she caught sight of Dylan crossing the street on the other side of the cordon. But when he drew closer she realised it was just someone who looked like him, a touch heavier, and slightly younger.
Another text vibrated her phone and she looked at them stacked up on the screen.
I’m at the flat, where are you?
I’m at yours. Has something happened?
The meeting’s in fifteen minutes! Where the fuck are you?
The meeting had been and gone and Ella imagined him making excuses for her, unable to hide his annoyance from the rest of them. People just as exasperated as he was, thinking that her failure to show only served to prove Dylan’s fears about her state of mind were well founded.
It had been coming for months. She’d tried to hide it from him, kept working to maintain the image of someone fully in control, making progress, juggling her PhD and everything else she had going on. But Dylan saw through the facade. He started calling more often, at odd times of day and night, checking in on her, always catching her at the wrong moment. It was like being under surveillance. Then he found the pills, a prescription in her mother’s name, stolen from her bathroom cabinet during Ella’s last visit, and they had The Talk.
After that there was no question what happened next.
She was to go home for a while. She needed to recuperate. A month, he suggested, maybe two. And just like that, it was agreed.
But Ella knew once she stepped on that train there’d be no getting back here. Her father would have his say, her mother would find out everything and between them they’d make sure this new life she’d built for herself would be over for good.
Sitting on the road, a white line burning hot under her calf, the distant prickle of a broken light casing digging into her palm – not unpleasantly – she surveyed the scene around her. More people were sitting than standing now, which gave her a clear view across the tops of all those heads to the police cordon.
It had started as a march but the police were ready for them and they’d been corralled quickly on to a side road, allowing the Saturday-morning traffic on Camden High Street to keep flowing. Then the cordons started moving in, riot shields up, faces hidden behind helmets. Not as aggressive as Ella had expected, but they walked with determination, never gave ground, never slowed, just kept compressing the loose crowd of two hundred protestors into the smallest space they legally could.
It was smaller than Ella was comfortable with, but she’d managed to keep her claustrophobia at bay by talking to people. If she focused on their faces she could block out the clammy crush of bodies around her and the fact that she couldn’t just get up and walk away.
Now, with the sun at its height, burning her skin, making the roots of her hair sweat, she was beginning to feel the familiar climb in her heart rate, the telltale constriction around her lungs.
‘Have you got anything to drink?’ she asked the girl next to her.
‘Just Coke.’ The girl offered her the bottle.
‘Thanks.’ Ella drank a mouthful of flat, hot liquid.
The police in their riot gear were breaking away at regular intervals to remove their helmets and pour water over their heads, other officers filling in the gaps they left in the unbroachable wall. They were getting impatient, she realised. Overheated and irritated.
When a young man went up to the shield wall to try and get out, he was barked at, told to sit his arse down. It wasn’t meant to be like that; when you wanted out they were supposed to let you out, Ella thought.
But she remembered Garton, the men and women she’d trained alongside, and how single-minded they could be. Unable or unwilling to accept nuance in any situation. Some of them could be behind those masks, she realised. The bigger, dumber ones who were never going to make it to plainclothes and who were too aggressive to be satisfied with the day-to-day tedium of walking a beat. One man sprang immediately to mind, but he’d left Garton when she did, talking about joining the army, where the real action was.
The girl next to Ella let out a low groan.
‘Are you alright?’
‘Bloody period pains,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think we’d get trapped like this. I don’t suppose you’ve got any ibuprofen or anything on you?’
‘Sorry, no. Have you asked about?’
‘A few people, yeah. Nobody else was organised either.’ She wrapped her arms around her abdomen and let out another muted wail. ‘It’s bad enough with pills. I don’t think I can stay here.’
There was a film of sweat on the girl’s brow, pain etched in every angle of her body. Ella felt her own midsection tense up in sympathy and knew she had to do something.
‘Let’s get you out of here.’
Ella stood up and helped her to her feet. They picked their way across legs and around bags, up to the cordon, Ella trying to find the most sympathetic-looking face behind the steamed-up visors. They all looked the same, though.
‘Please, my friend’s in a lot of pain,’ she said to the man. ‘She needs to get out and take her medication.’
‘Back into the middle.’
‘She’s going to pass out,’ Ella said. ‘Look at her, can’t you see what a state she’s in?’
‘Should have stayed at home then.’ His tone was flat and disinterested. ‘Back into the middle.’
The girl gripped Ella’s arm. ‘It’s fine, I’ll ask some more people. Someone’s bound to have brought a first-aid kit with them.’
She drifted away and Ella stood for a few seconds longer, trying to find the face through the visor, convinced in that moment that it was someone she knew behind there and that was why he was being such an arsehole. He was the right age, no older than her. Barely more than a boy once you stripped away the uniform and the borrowed power it gave him.
‘Move,’ he barked.
Ella’s phone rang and she answered it without thinking, eyes still fixed on the man’s face. She almost ended the call when she heard Dylan’s voice.
‘You’re at that fucking demo, aren’t you?’
‘I’m kettled,’ she said, smiling at the irony of this ring of police protecting her while they thought they were imprisoning her. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Too fucking right, you’re not,’ the man said, his mates laughing behind their shields.
A door slammed at Dylan’s end. ‘Ella, we talked about this, you agreed to take a break.’
‘No, you said I had to. I never agreed to anything.’
The copper nudged his mate. ‘Feminist.’
More laughter.
‘Your parents are expecting you to be on that train.’
‘I’m not going,’ she said. ‘You can’t make me.’
She turned her back to the shields and the comments and the sniggers, seeing that the people in front of her were listening as well, could tell from their studiously averted eyes and the tilt of their heads. She didn’t care.
‘Don’t be such a child,’ Dylan snapped. ‘This is why you’ve got to go home. You’re burnt out, for God’s sake. It happens all the time. Just accept it.’
‘What if I refuse?’
‘You don’t get to refuse,’ he said. ‘This isn’t your decision to make.’
Because he’d found pills with her mother’s name on and he wouldn’t believe she hadn’t taken any. Which meant she was potentially unstable and a liar and because prescription drugs could lead to recreational drugs and her issues with them were already a matter of record. Even though it had only been a few months and she had stopped cold.
‘I’m staying here.’
‘Aww, listen to her,’ the man said. ‘Stamping her little feet.’
Ella rounded on him.
‘Fuck you!’
‘Who are you talking to?’ Dylan asked.
The copper grinned at her through his visor.
‘Fuck me?’ he asked. ‘Probably do you some good, girl. You look like you’ve not been well fucked in months.’
Ella stepped up close to his shield and he bounced it lightly off her chest, still smiling. The man next to him said something under his breath, too low for her to hear, but it sounded like a warning and it wasn’t aimed at her.
A ripple went through the crowd, the ones who’d seen it telling the ones who hadn’t.
‘Big man, yeah?’
‘Oh, yeah.’
‘Hiding behind a bit of fucking plastic.’
At her back people were stirring. She heard the scrape and rustle as they started getting to their feet, a murmur of rising voices. Of dissent. They’d seen enough, scented the coming trouble. Somebody grabbed her elbow and told her to walk away, but she shrugged them off. Someone else told the copper he couldn’t touch them.
When she glanced over her shoulder she saw that they were being recorded by several people.
‘Ella?’
Dylan in her ear, distant now. Unimportant. She knew what she was going to do.
The lecturer with the immaculate cream jacket was by her side, face so close to her ear she could smell the staleness of his breath. ‘Don’t give them the satisfaction.’
‘Listen to your boyfriend,’ the copper said. ‘Walk away before you get yourself in trouble.’
She bared her teeth at him, held her ground.
The crowd was gathering. Not unified yet, but there was a tremor of anger running through them, shouts and sneers, jostling for a position closer to the cordon.
‘Ella, don’t make me come and fetch you.’ Dylan’s voice was wavering and she knew that he was worried. She ended the call, slipped her phone into her pocket.
Someone shoved into her back and she stumbled towards the riot shield. The man ducked down and braced for impact, lifting it at the last moment and slamming it into her shoulder.
Pain shot down her arm, up into her neck. Around her the crowd noise fell away and she took a deep breath, flashed a grim smile at the riot officer, their eyes locked.
Then she was moving. Quicker than she’d moved in her life. Thinking with her body. She grabbed the top of the shield, jammed her foot against it at thigh height. Her muscles screamed as she levered herself up, one hand on a plastic helmet, one foot on a padded shoulder, springing up and over the cordon.
She landed heavily in the open road, rolled on to her side but regained her footing fast. Blood rushed in her ears, blocking out the crowd noise, the traffic noise, the shout she only saw on the man’s face as he broke away from the line to come after her.
His baton swung through the air in a low arc, whipping her legs out from under her. Ella screamed, falling, and her head slammed into the tarmac. White light flashed across her pupils then a black blur came at her. She threw her arm up instinctively and heard herself cry out as the bone shattered.