Intrusion (15 page)

Apart from that, and Hope’s total, gut-level disagreement with assumptions that everyone in the branch seemed to take for granted, Maya had been correct about her fitting right in. The North Islington branch of the Party was run almost entirely by Islington mothers and grandmothers. The only opposition came from the daughters, one of whom was – much to Hope’s surprise – one of the young women who’d joined in Maya’s flash mob. Her name was Louise and she betrayed no
sign of recognising Hope. Her dissent was articulated as a grumble that the Government and the Council were ‘doing all right on the green issues, but not so well on the red issues’, a comment that Hope felt not at all inclined to ask her to elaborate.

The other person Hope had recognised, to her even greater surprise, and who had recognised her and welcomed her to the room, the branch, the Party and the whole great global movement in one rush and gush, was Deirdre, one of the friends whose unhelpful response to her initial panicked email about the nature-kids thing had been so disheartening. Deirdre was a tall, slim woman with slightly forward-placed teeth, a feature she evidently disliked but which – when she forgot it enough to let her lips open – gave her a bright, pleasant grin, and an enigmatic, questioning look when she smiled with her lips closed. She managed a café – smoke-free of course, but also sugar-free, fat-free, caffeine-free and salt-free – in Seven Sisters Road, just opposite Finsbury Park Station. Her two children, both New Kids and thriving with it, attended the school where the meetings were held. Her husband dropped the kids off and picked them up, made their breakfasts and their dinners, and minded the house with more or less competence, in between co-ordinating from the front room a vast, unending cameradrone operation over Peru, allegedly for some coalition of development and human rights NGOs but (Hope had long suspected) actually wirelessed in to the ongoing counterinsurgency: fingering militants to death squads, targeting air strikes on peasant villages. In short, an ideal Labour family.

At the second meeting, one soggy Wednesday evening in
mid-April just after Hope’s first pre-natal check-up, Deirdre had introduced the item on the preparations for May Day, and gone on to explain the issue that the branch and the whole CLP and indeed all of London’s Party wanted to highlight, and the importance of the issue itself and the relevance of the suffragette theme, and had wound up by enthusing about how all the women in the branch had pitched into dressing up for it, a detail that had apparently been decided months ago and which had led on Hope’s part to an hour of indignant wardrobe rummaging for old maxi skirts and even older fancy blouses, followed by annoyed dusting and repairing and decorating of a much-despised straw sunhat that her mother had bought her on their last shared holiday, in her mid-teens, back when there were holiday flights.

And here came Deirdre now, carrying a ‘SAFE WORK FOR WOMEN’ placard that was, like all the rest that bobbed above the crowd (‘PROTECT WOMEN AND CHILDREN’, ‘SAFER WORKPLACES FOR ALL’), neatly printed to look as if hand-lettered with a marker pen.

‘Great, isn’t it?’ she said, glancing over her shoulder at the assembling marchers and doing her relaxed grin. ‘It’s so inspiring.’

‘Yes,’ said Hope, uninspired.

Deirdre did the closed-lips enigmatic smile.

‘Are you warm enough?’ she asked. She’d had the sense to wear a jacket, a neatly fitted long-sleeved and short-waisted velvet number in a dark blue that pointed up the white lace jabot at her throat. The whole look suited her a lot better than
it did Hope, who felt dumpy in an old skirt that had fitted fine when she was a student but whose waistband opening was now secured by a well-concealed safety-pin halfway down the zip.

‘I’ll be fine when we start walking,’ said Hope.

Deirdre took glasses from her handbag and slipped them on, checking incoming messages. ‘Just a few minutes,’ she said. ‘See you in a bit.’

And with that she bustled off, up towards the front.
Literally
bustled, Hope noticed, as Deirdre trailed her hem up the street. She seemed to be taking the stunt far too seriously. Hope’s partner on the other pole of the banner, a stocky red-haired man in his sixties called Fingal, grinned across at her as she turned away from watching Deirdre.

‘Very committed, our Deirdre,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Hope. ‘Just what I was thinking.’

‘She can be a bit overbearing sometimes,’ Fingal said, out of the side of his mouth. ‘But still, can’t hold it against her. I remember when the branch could hardly muster enough warm bodies to hold both poles of the banner.’

Hope laughed, just enough not to show too much interest. She didn’t know Fingal very well, even for someone she’d seen only twice, sitting at the back of the meetings, precariously tilting his plastic chair, letting one or both of his straggly eyebrows rise as he listened to some point being made. She had a suspicion that at the slightest prompt he would want to talk about old times or, worse, inveigle her into internal branch or Party politics. He had the air of someone on the lookout for kindred spirits.

She was saved from having to answer further by the sound of the brass band at the front striking up.

‘Speaking of which … ’ she said.

Fingal nodded. He and Hope leaned further into the wind and started walking forward.

Hope had never been on a demonstration before, and she’d found the prospect daunting. Hugh had been happy enough to look after Nick for the day – it was a public holiday, after all, and he’d intended to take it as a day off rather than a day’s overtime – but had worried about Hope getting into trouble.

‘Especially with you … ’ he’d added, looking pointedly at her belly, which was showing the beginnings of a bump.

‘Oh come
on
,’ Hope had said. ‘It’s not like one of
those
demonstrations. The Party’s the
Government
, for heaven’s sake! We’re not going to get attacked by the police, now are we?’

Hugh had given her that sullen, doubtful, cynical look that Hope privately thought of as his Lewis face. She’d known exactly how his next sentence would begin.

‘As my father always said,’ said Hugh, blithely confirming her silent prediction, ‘you should never go on a march unless you’re ready for a fight.’

‘Piffle,’ said Hope. ‘Leosach whinge.’

‘My father’s not a Leosach,’ said Hugh, in a slow, deliberate way.

‘No, but the iron got into his soul. And the rain rusted it!’

Hugh laughed. ‘Spoken like a Leosach yourself,’ he said. ‘All
right. But it wasn’t from Lewis he got that about the marching. It was from London, when he was young and marched against the war.’

‘The war?’ Hope asked. ‘It hadn’t even started then.’

‘The war before this one,’ Hugh explained.

‘Oh!’ said Hope. ‘Ancient history. Anyway, it’s not
that
kind of march. It’s May Day. It’s a celebration.’

‘Hands across the sea,’ said Hugh, again with the Lewis face. He scratched the balding patch towards the back of his head. ‘Oh well. Take care.’

‘Of course I’ll take care.’

But he’d left her worried. Her first morning sickness, the following day, hadn’t helped.

Now, however, out on the street and into the swing of it, Hope felt quite different. The brisk walk soon warmed her. The flurries of snow ceased. The brass band up at the front was blaring out something martial but bouncy, and a few dozen rows behind her a Jamaican steel band on a truck was playing a different tune and different music altogether, whose rhythm snaked around and intertwined with that of the band.

The local contingent swung around the corner into Stroud Green Road, past helpful police in no riot gear whatsoever, and slotted into a gap in the main march coming down over Crouch Hill. Now they were part of a column of thousands. Hope glanced over her shoulder, and along to the far front of the march, entranced.

‘Wow!’ she said, impressed despite her doubts. ‘There’s so
many
of us.’

‘That’s nothing,’ said Fingal. ‘Try your glasses.’

Hope opened her shoulder bag awkwardly, one-handed, as the banner pole tilted and recovered, and put the glasses on. Something local and eager pulsed in a corner of the sky. She blinked it up. The shopfronts and shoppers and trees of Stroud Green Road were rendered as a faint, pencil-sketch overlay, through which to her right she could see nothing but crowds all the way to the horizon, with red banners and balloons and long dragon puppets bobbing above their heads: Beijing, earlier in the day. Elsewhere, more or less in front of her, a similarly huge demonstration filled Tehran’s Revolution Square. From Mumbai and Calcutta came more recent images, of streets a mass of red flags, a sea whose every shore was pebbled with the black helmets of the police, and fringed with long black sticks beating down relentlessly and rhythmically on every head they could reach. Way off to the left, and almost in real time, a smaller march in Moscow was holding out against the traditional baton charges and tear-gas rounds, red and grey smoke intermingling merrily above the skewed flags and hurled placards. By late afternoon the view would no doubt include the gigantic May Day parades in Washington, Chicago, NYC and LA, but for now the Americans were mostly still abed.

It got dizzying, and Hope took the glasses off and put them away. Despite herself, despite her lack of interest in politics (‘but politics is interested in you’, some earnest lad at university had once told her, a remark she now recalled with a belated
shiver, instead of the dismissive laugh she’d given it at the time) and in what she’d called, to Maya,
all that
, meaning all that justice and equality and progress stuff that the Prime Minister banged on about – despite all that, Hope found herself uplifted and enthused by the feeling, no, the
perception
of being part of something huge, worldwide, hands across not just the sea but across the stormy fronts of the Warm War. Her eyes, too, could sting to the tear gas in Russia; her shoulders could flinch and her feet stumble under the
lathi
slashes in India; and likewise, her feet could skip and dance along with all those enjoying the day in the parts of the world where they were free to celebrate it in peace.

America, Britain, Germany, Iran, China … she could see, she could literally see why they called the New Society countries the Free World.

On they went, down past the station and around the corner into Seven Sisters Road, and then into the broad open green space of Finsbury Park. Past the small enclosed patch of sand and swings and shelters where the One O’Clock Club had given her such a respite and Nick such fun when he was too young for nursery. Out on to a wide, sloping green, already dotted with stalls and fronted by a stage and sound system. As she and Fingal stopped, two women from the branch who’d walked behind them offered to take the poles.

‘Thanks,’ said Hope, letting her shoulders slump and arms hang loose. Her biceps ached. She looked at Fingal.

‘Well done,’ he said. He might have winked. ‘Be seeing you.’

He wandered away, but after a few steps into the crowd
struck off in a purposeful stride. Hope looked around. The march, which had filled a main thoroughfare more or less from side to side and from end to end, now looked a small huddle in the wide-open space. Around its edges stood a scatter of stalls, some selling political literature and merch, others snacks and soft drinks. Faint smells of candy floss and veggie burgers drifted and mingled. Stray balloons floated up through the steady drift of apple and cherry petals and soared and sped through the silver sky like UFOs. The park was busy with its predictable public-holiday crowds, couples and kids and families and picnic parties braving the stiff breeze, and few of them paid any attention to the compact mass of the march. The latest hit of some local trash band that had made it big and daringly called itself Urban Heat Island thudded from the sound system. Police and park attendants – it was hard to tell which was which – patrolled the edges of the gathering and now and then, in an apparently random but (Hope did not doubt) algorithmically choreographed pattern, elbowed their way through it, sniffers and other sensors prominently deployed.

Hope headed for the front of the crowd, wending her way between clusters of people around various banners, avoiding eye contact with anyone who offered her leaflet, journal or chip. She arrived just a few rows away from the front of the low stage as the music stopped. The band filed off to loud applause and the dignitaries filed on, to lesser applause. The Mayor and her wife, the chair of Islington Council, a couple of other councillors, a trade union speaker, Deirdre, and Jack Crow, MP. Crow was a wiry man in his thirties who wore a leather peaked
cap, a denim jacket, corduroy trousers, black yellow-laced Docs and a pointed ginger beard. He was greeted with louder applause than the band. He waved his thanks and sat down on one of the folding stools on the platform. Hope had a bit of grudge with Jack Crow. He hadn’t answered her letter. She ignored him and smiled up at Deirdre, who nodded and smiled back.

The Mayor took the mike, thanked everyone, and hastened to assure them that the speeches would be short. By her standards they probably were, but not by Hope’s; after twenty minutes she had resorted to putting her glasses on and catching up with her mail. Nick and Hugh had sent her pictures from Hampstead Heath, where they were flying a kite that Hugh had somehow magicked up from scrap plastic and an old fishing line. Hope found herself shame-facedly jealous and idly curious as to when Hugh had ever been fishing … he couldn’t have been more than, what, fifteen, when the sport was banned?