All That Follows (29 page)

“Okay. So what do you say now? Take to the Curb with me?” she suggests. “Let’s go and shake our fists at the limousines. For Dad.”

Leonard looks up at the sky. It’s mild and still. No hint of rain or wind today. Francine will not be home till late; she has taken the afternoon off school and is meeting her daughter, on the neutral ground of a gallery bistro. Their first encounter in the flesh since April 24 last year. Francine has taken a bunch of lilies—a womanly and mature gift, not motherly. He can almost sense their tears, their cautious bickering, their boisterous relief at being back in touch. Their house is empty, left alone to its wedges of light and shadow. The burglar alarm is set. He has no convincing reasons to go home just yet. “Why ever not?” he says; it is the second time that Lucy has occasioned him to use this phrase and take the risk. “Let’s Take to the Curb. Yup, Lucy Lucy, do it now.”

“It’s no big deal.”

“You’re right. It’s no big deal,” he says. “But we can’t all be bigdeal firebrands, can we? Still, I guess we should at least stand on the pavement and boo.”

She gets up to take his wrists and pull him from the bench.

It’s best to go on foot, even though it is more than two kilometers from the pub yard to the nearest point of contact with the curbside vigil. The first part is eerily familiar. It’s been walked before, by both of them. Here’s where they first met, just down the road from his parked van, his walking shadow clipping her heels. They have to deviate a bit, dipping down a side road, to take their final look at Alderbeech. There’s nothing on the waste ground now except the tire-marked, turmoiled earth, peg holes where the marquees were erected, and an urban construction notice, announcing that in two years’ time there will be modern landscaped maisonettes here, “Affordable Family Opportunities.”

The street itself is daytime quiet: a pair of cats disputing on a wall; a plumber’s van; a bouquet of lost balloons deflating in the clutches of a sorbus tree, now stripped of leaves. There is no longer any interest in the hostage house. The family has sold their stories, and they will even sell the house and move out west when they grow tired of all the fuss. There’s not a single moving car for the moment, even though Alderbeech is a twenty-minute walk away from the vigil and traffic could move freely if it wanted to. Starting five hundred meters to the south, the police have closed and coned most of the townways. The route between the airport and the Reconciliation Summit has become a Security Exclusion Zone. The first of the sixteen heads of state should be arriving by now and being collected off the runway by their bulletproofed limousines and the motorcycle outriders. The world is watching, alerted by the arrest of the Final Warning cell to the possibility that there could be a shooting or a bomb.

The pavements grow busier as Leonard and Lucy turn away from Alderbeech. They are not exactly thronged with protesters yet, but there are several groups striding purposefully in the same direction as they are. They give the normally unassuming streets the thrilling kind of rationale that Leonard remembers from his teenage years, when he was always there—part of the gathering, though not at the front—for any demonstration of the left. His walk, then and now, assumes a resolute and cocky swing. It says, Get up off your arse like me, and we will change the world. He takes his sun cap out and pulls it down over his hair. It’s not that he feels cold. He has decided that the cap can make him brave. Lucy links her arm round his. “Oh, boy, you look so bloody weird,” she says. “Leonard, Leon … No, I’m gonna call you Unk, okay?”

The first part of her “genius plan” once Leonard “chickened out,” she explains as they approach the comrades at the curb, was to cut her hair. She knew “a scalping” would make her almost unrecognizable. Any photograph they had of her or any description that the police might issue was bound to emphasize her mass of thick and bouncy hair. So before she walked out of her mother’s house, she took the scissors to herself and “hacked away,” only keeping one thick lock for use in her kidnap communiqué.

“If those boneheads had had the brains to look inside the compost bin, right under their noses in our kitchen, they would have found a wodge of it,” she says, pleased with herself and her good luck. Then all she had to do was to take the train to Exeter and call “a really solid friend” who had a flat where she could “throw her stuff—for as long as it takes.”

“I told you, didn’t I?” she says. “Come on, admit it. I promised three days, three days max. And that’s exactly what it was. Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Job done.”

“I hear the message. I didn’t prove to be your really solid friend, okay? And, yes, yes, yes, you were correct about everything. You’re such an unbearable little genius,” Leonard says, looking straight ahead. “It wasn’t Francine, you know. Not only Francine, anyway. It wasn’t just a woman thing. I had my own doubts as well.”

“Well, that was obvious.”

“It was?”

“I think I frightened you.”

“I think you did.”

“It didn’t matter anyway. At least you didn’t let on and spoil it all. Except to Mum. And that was good. I hated seeing her at that press conference where she couldn’t even speak and looking, you know, so destroyed … You took a risk …”

Leonard’s smiling now, a touch awkwardly. “What else was I supposed to do? Mothers and daughters. It’s … umbilical. I know the score, more than anyone.”

“But it was absolutely radiant to see you being such a maniac when Dad was marched away. Those guys were terrified of you.”

“You think?”

“Took three of them to bring you down. I thought I must be dreaming. I couldn’t believe it was you. I played it over and over again, slo-mo, freeze frame. I recognized your little cap.”

Leonard taps his head.

“Everybody’s watching it. You’re the man right now. That bit where you were strolling off as if you couldn’t give a damn. They’re shouting out. They’ve got their red sights all over your back. It’s Dead Man Walking. And you’re, like,
cucumber
. Everybody wants to get your music now. All the downloads have been jammed. Did you know that?”

“I heard.”

“You can already buy a poster of that photograph. Under the jackboot. And there’s a T-shirt on the Web.”

“I heard that too. I won’t be getting one.”

“You ought to, though. A souvenir. You look like Che. You saw the film? That final photograph.”

“Except not dead.”

“No, not quite dead. What were you hoping to do?”

“What when?”

“When you were running up to Dad.”

I wasn’t hoping to do anything, he thinks. I was just hurrying, but hurrying forward for a change, heading for the lights instead of for the shadows. I only wanted to be seen. I wanted to be recognized. By Maxim Lermontov. To show my face to him.

“A bit of solidarity,” he says. “No more than that.”

“No pastarán.”

“Exactly so.”

Leonard and Lucy reach the vigil just in time and at a point, in the forty-kilometer route that the premiers and presidents will follow, where it is possible to step up to the very edge of the road. The plan is that at exactly 2 p.m. everybody will link hands and Take to the Curb on only one side of the road to form an unbroken, silent, disapproving line between the airport exit (by the Zone superstores, in fact) and the summit gates. Someone has done the adding-up: if the average span of two arms spread wide is about a meter and a half, completion of the vigil line will require about twenty-seven thousand participants. On a Sunday those numbers might be easily achieved, but on a Tuesday afternoon it is bound to be more difficult. Sympathizers have to work or be at school or be at home. Thank goodness that no rain has been forecast. The weather is being supportive of the cause. Nevertheless, the worry remains that there will be gaps in the line, especially in the long, remote, out-of-town stretches at both ends of the route, where the only guaranteed demonstrators will be those in their own vehicles or those bused in by the cleverly acronymed CARS, or Coalition Against the Reconciliation Summit.

Certainly, though, there are enough demonstrators on the section of road where Leonard and Lucy have finished up. At the moment everyone is hanging back, away from the curb, not wanting to dilute the drama of the link by standing in place before the moment comes. It is pleasing to witness such diversity, in sex and age and race, that is. It’s odd too to see so many smiling, self-approving faces. Unlike the usual street throngs, where pedestrians are impatient, rushed, ill at ease, harassed, aggressive, fearful, this crowd seems to have a single expression, a mixture of satisfaction and longing. It is an expression that intensifies, a little before the hour, when the groups of policemen gathered in the central reservation spread out in pairs and take up their stations in the nearside gutters of the road, facing the crowds. A moment later the last civilian vehicles—a couple of slow hybrids and, ironically but to cheers, a World Food delivery truck—pass by and the familiar roar of traffic ends. The route is clear, and there is brief silence until the marshals, counting down the seconds, put their playground whistles to their lips and play their single notes. The hour has arrived for Taking to the Curb.

Lucy and Leonard step forward with the rest. It is a scrum at first, but soon thins out, though not enough, as people jockey for a place. Unk and his very nearly goddaughter grip each other’s hand. He takes her left; she takes his right; and then they reach out for their nearest comrades in the line. Leonard finds a man about his own age. They nod and smile at each other, acknowledging the embarrassment and in doing so dispersing it. Lucy’s neighbor is a tall, pregnant woman in a blue cord coat and garden boots. Her rings clack with Lucy’s bracelet as the two link up. There are too many people. Nobody has to stretch their arms. Their shoulders cannot help but touch, competing for a place in line. Many demonstrators need to turn sideways if they want to poke a toe out into the carriageway.

Slowly, imperceptibly, as the minutes pass and the cavalcades of heads of state progress beyond the airport, the pack of participants around Lucy and Leonard starts to tug apart. The gaps between them widen. Their arms begin to lift. Their chests, which have been cramped, expand. It is as if they’re being pulled from both far ends by some force that is as strong and out of sight as gravity. It feels like falling. In all those places on the route where numbers are not so high as here, the CARS supporters are reaching out with their fingertips, dragging their companions after them, in order to close the gaps. And every gap that’s closed beyond the town is marked by widened arms in town. At last—it seems to take an age—there is a sudden settling. The pressure’s off. The final fingertips have touched. The hands have found a decent grip. No one needs telling that the line is complete, that all forty kilometers are now linked up. Everyone can feel it running through them, the kind of fizzing static that generates a shiver in the spine. Now no one dares or even wants to scratch his nose or reach into his pockets when his cell phone sounds. Leonard does not even mind his shoulder pain. His arms have never stretched this far before. He waits with twenty-seven thousand at his side, all hand in hand and ready for the hum of motorbikes and limousines.

18

FRANCINE IS SLEEPING DEEPLY
through the night, no longer waiting to be called, no longer sitting up in bed abruptly woken by a silent phone. She has a daughter now. They talk. They meet. They do their best. Life’s not perfect, but it’s better than it was. She and Nadia stay in touch once in a while—a birthday card, a text, a scrap of news. Lucy and Swallow exchanged an e-mail each and meant to meet in town when they had the time, but time is short when you are young. It’s hard enough to stay in touch with people that you’ve loved.

And as for Leonard Lessing, he is well. Every dawn renews his hope and courage, he still finds. Each day provides a further chance to love his wife and make love to his saxophone. He leaves his instrument case open on the futon downstairs, ready to resume his long affair with music. He is composing and he is practicing again, determined to recapture any confidence he’s lost. “Lennie’s back in town,” his agent says, amazed to find that his client has attracted so many new, young fans so late in life, and so many offers of work. Next week he’s in the studio, recording his latest haul of tunes. He has accepted concert dates. He’s doing
Desert Island Discs
. He’s working on the sound track for a film.

Tonight he’s gigging in Brighton at a pacifist benefit, for free. Back in the Factory once again. It’s no big deal, he reminds himself. But it’s not nothing either. He drives off early, takes the van down the country route, and arrives with enough spare time to walk along the promenade in the dark and practice embouchures and breaths. It won’t be long before he’s on the stage, all brass and fingertips and bulging throat. The audience will not know what to make of him. He doesn’t care. It’s Francine that he’s performing for again. He’s bound to think of her as she was on the night they met, damp, storm-tossed, and slightly drunk in her red coat, sitting in the third row of the gallery.

It’s almost time to play. He turns and heads back to the Factory. The tide is dragging shingle off the beach. The saxman cometh and his head is bursting now with jazz.

With thanks to

Roy Fisher (piano)
Gerard Presencer (horns)
Ryan “Chopper” Fisher (guitar)
and Birmingham Jazz