Misspent Youth

49. TALKING ABOUT A REVOLUTION

TIM WAS SURPRISED by the reception at Kings Cross. As soon as he and Vanessa got off the train the police marshaled them along the platform, a busy line of people all treading on one another’s heels. It was the start of the pushing that he’d have to endure most of the day.

“Are you with this lot?” a policeman shouted at him as they got to the end of the platform. The man’s voice was muffled by his helmet filters; he was jabbing a gauntlet toward the yelling, chanting protestors packed into the concourse.

Vanessa pulled herself tighter against Tim, her face anxious as she took in the huge mass of bodies.

“No,” Tim yelled back. “We’re here to visit some friends.”

“Wrong day,” the policeman said. “Get out over there. This lot are all going to Docklands. You don’t want any part of that.”

The two closest protestors screamed obscene abuse at him. Tim shoved his way through the throng toward the side exit the policeman had indicated, keeping a close hold on Vanessa. They finally made it outside to the deserted taxi rank. Tim took a deep breath. Vanessa was shaking.

“I didn’t think it was going to be like that,” she said in a small voice. There was no traffic on the Euston Road; the crowds outside Kings Cross and St. Pancras had spilled over the tarmac as they waited for their march to Docklands to begin. Stewards had long since given up trying to shepherd them along their designated route. Every arriving train seemed to bring hundreds more.

Tim put his PCglasses on and called Colin.

“Where the hell are you?” Colin asked.

“Just got in. Where are you?”

“Halfway to Docklands, I think. Simon and Rachel are here. We’re in the middle of a march. Nobody knows what’s happening. There aren’t any stewards. We’re just following along.”

“Can you get out? We should meet up.”

“Yeah, right. Hang on, my GPS says we’re on Whitechapel. We’ll try and get across to Bethnal Green tube station. Can you get there?”

“I think so.” Tim’s PCglasses showed him a London street map. “We’ll walk up to Angel and catch a tube. It might take a while.”

He was right. They had to take a long detour to Upper Street, where the tube station was. Traffic had backed up into a solid gridlock to make way for the various marches. Everywhere they went, tempers were fragile.

The tube trains were crammed with unhappy passengers. As always, the only air below ground was hot and stale. They had to switch lines twice, waiting a long time for each connection on platforms that became dangerously crowded. This part of the network was nothing like the efficient, modern central zone that Tim normally used when he came down to the city.

An hour and a half after arriving at Kings Cross they finally met up with their friends outside Bethnal Green station. Tim was relieved to see them. Somehow he found comfort in numbers.

“What now?” Colin asked.

“I guess we walk,” Simon said.

Tim and Vanessa exchanged a look. “You still want to do this?” Tim asked.

“Sure.” Simon gestured around. The road they were on seemed normal enough, with open shops, pedestrians, and plenty of bus traffic. “This is history, you know. There’s never been a protest this big before. We have to be part of it.”

“I’m not going with any more marchers,” Rachel said firmly. “Half of them were looking for trouble.”

“No problem,” Simon said. His PCglasses were throwing up a map. “We’ll just head east, then cut south when we’re above the summit.”

The five of them started off along Roman Road, with a visible lack of enthusiasm. Tim could hear emergency vehicle sirens in the distance; the sound was near constant in London today.

“Hey, Tim,” Colin asked. “Is your dad still taking part in the summit?”

“Yeah,” Tim said glumly.

BY TWO O’CLOCK they’d reached East Ham, and were heading down toward Beckton. They’d all been accessing the news streams, seeing the protest based around the university campus grow and grow. Any eagerness among them had all but vanished.

Participants in the Million Citizen Voices were all around them on the street, everybody striding out to join the main protest. They weren’t quite what Tim and his friends were expecting. It was as if they were caught up with a bunch of soccer supporters straight out of the tabloid news streams, the ones that featured tribes and organized violence. For a start, most of them were carrying bottles or cans, from which they were swigging heavily. Ordinary pedestrians were thinning out rapidly, intimidated off the streets. Shops were bringing down their metal roller blinds.

“Where have they all come from?” Vanessa asked. There was a nervous edge to her voice, which she was trying to disguise. The voices and shouts around them were mostly foreign, with German and Spanish in the majority.

“Same places as the delegates, I guess,” Colin said.

Rachel was staying close to Simon. “I wonder why they’re really here,” she muttered disapprovingly.

“Come on,” Tim said generously. “Everybody’s here for the same thing.”

“You reckon?” Simon said.

Over on the other side of the street a middle-aged Asian woman with a scruffy tartan-print shopping cart was trying to avoid a group of drunk young men who had their arms around one another, chanting and jiving as they hurried along the pavement. One of the cart wheels got stuck on a cracked slab, and the woman struggled to free it. The next second she was sprawling on the tarmac, and the men were screaming and jeering in Italian as they jostled on past.

Tim rushed over to help, the others following right behind him. When he reached the woman he was horrified at the way she cowered from him. “I’m helping you,” he protested. At the back of his mind he realized that nobody else had hurried to lend a hand. The protestors surged past, either ignoring the teenagers or sneering.

Oranges and tins of beans had spilled out of the woman’s cart to roll along the gutter. Rachel and Colin scampered after them, picking them up. Tim took one of her arms, and Simon the other. They gingerly lifted the woman to her feet. “Thank you, dear,” she said uncertainly. Blood was oozing from a graze on her wrist; she dabbed a handkerchief at it.

“You should go home,” Vanessa said.

“I was trying to,” the woman said, close to tears. “Thirty years I’ve lived here. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Not even on Cup Final day.”

“It probably won’t happen again,” Tim said. “I don’t think I’ll be bothering to support them next time round.”

“Support who?”

Rachel was stuffing battered tins back into the woman’s cart. “The Million Citizen Voices, down at Docklands. It’s a big political rally.”

“Oh, I don’t pay attention to any of that stuff,” the woman said. “Politicians, they’re all as bad as each other.”

They walked with her for another dozen meters or so, until she headed off down a little side street. She gave them a halfhearted wave as she left, still not sure if they weren’t hooligans like everyone else. Almost everyone on the street now was a protestor. All the shops were shut.

“Come on,” Simon said. “Let’s go with the flow.” It sounded like the last thing he wanted to be doing.

Tim’s PCglasses threw up an incoming call icon. It was Jeff.

“Hello, Dad,” he said cautiously.

“Tim, where are you?”

“Uh…just outside Brampton Park. We should be there in twenty minutes or so.”

“Son, please, don’t. It’s getting nasty outside.”

“So?”

“I don’t want you to be part of it.”

“We’re not going to accomplish anything by sitting at home doing nothing.”

“Believe me, your side is achieving quite a lot without you.”

Tim came to a halt in the middle of the pavement, and put his hands on his hips. “That’s so typical of you to patronize me like that.”

“I am not patronizing you. I’m concerned about you, actually. Very concerned.”

“Look, I don’t want to walk into any kind of trouble. But this is all we’ve got left to us. You people just won’t listen.” Shouts broke out up ahead. Tim peered through the graphic icons to see a fight, nothing like the pushing and shoving when tempers got lost at school. These men were trying to kill each other. Fists flew, and boots kicked. A bottle smashed, glass flying in wild arcs. Then they were wrapped together, rolling over and over along the road as they mauled at each other like a pair of dogs. Blood began to flow over their clothes. He could see one biting at the other’s ear, jerking his head back to try to rip it off. A gang of men formed a circle around them, cheering them on and pouring beer over them.

“Don’t include me in this,” Jeff’s voice said in his ear, a sound now so remote it could have come from New Zealand.

“You’re there, aren’t you? You’re going to decide our future for us.” The brutal fight was over. One of the men climbed to his feet, swaying badly. Blood was pouring down his face. He aimed a kick at the head of his unconscious rival. It connected with a sickening crack. Tim spun away. Vanessa’s hand was covering her mouth. She’d turned pale, on the verge of being sick. Tim hurriedly put his arm protectively around her shoulder.

“I’m presenting a physics paper, for Christ’s sake. There’s only thirty people in the world who really understand the math involved.”

“Then you don’t need to be there, do you? You’re just helping Brussels.”

There was such a long pause before Jeff answered that Tim wasn’t sure if the connection had failed. The gang of fight spectators was breaking up, leaving the body sprawled on the road, soaked in blood and beer. Eventually his father said: “I’m not helping Brussels, Tim. I had no idea this summit had become such a symbol, nor that it meant so much to you. You know damn well I don’t want to make things worse between us.”

“Then leave.”

“What?”

“I’ll do you a deal. I won’t go, I won’t take another step forward if you leave; today, now.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Then look down, I’ll be there waving at you. Click, end call.”

“You did the right thing,” Colin said. He kept glancing at the motionless fight victim. “We can’t show any weakness.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s just…” Tim gave Vanessa a quick squeeze; she was shivering as she pressed up against him. “He did sound worried.”