After all this time, people still ask us about that day: How did you hear? Were you standing or sitting? What exactly did you say? Tell us everything, spare no detail. We want to know, we want to understand.
Two young women from the Dublin branch came to the village late at night and slept in the barn. They’d brought fake student IDs and two suitcases packed with hair dye, makeup, glasses, false beards, wigs, and hair extensions, all stolen from a theater in Dublin. In the morning, we put our disguises on: some people dyed their hair, others cut it, White Tyson and Conal stuck on little beards and moustaches, Christopher colored his hair black, Elizabeth went blond and chopped off everything except her fringe, Clementine put on a twenties-style wig, Alberto dyed his hair gray and wore glasses, Julian was already unrecognizable with his bald head. Then we each had our picture taken for a fake student ID that was supposed to get us on the Dublin–Liverpool ferry. We’d already thought up our fake names. We posed for a group picture. It’s the famous photo everyone knows: Julian and Clementine sitting on a chair in the middle; Alberto, Justine, Conal, and Christopher beside them, all very stern; and the others standing stiffly behind them. Elizabeth was the only one who looked amused.
The girls from Dublin kept talking about the Rosareses, who’d been killed in Bolivia, and the riots that broke out all over the world. Most of us hadn’t heard of the siblings until that morning, but Clementine had seemed sad for a couple of days, and we realized she’d known Angélica Rosares a little. Obviously their deaths (and the death of the guy in Paris) scared us. We regularly engaged in gallows humor, but it had never occurred to us that we would die: the limits of our imagination stopped at the prison gates, and now a girl Clementine had emailed with was dead. Some of us were troubled by the notion that if we hadn’t met, Angélica Rosares would still be alive. But then Clementine said that even though the Bolivian protesters had called for a strike on 11.11, they were really protesting their government’s decision to sell silver mines to a foreign conglomerate. That consoled us a little. And the deaths seemed to demand of us that we hold the strike, if only on behalf of the people who’d died. We started to feel that the strike was ours again, like it had been in the early days. Julian and Alberto said something big was happening, the world was going crazy, and we all needed to do our part. We split up into pairs, and the plan was to get to Dublin, take the ferry, and meet up in Liverpool, at a flat that one of the strike supporters had made available to us. After that: London.
If only we could retrace Christopher’s steps that morning. Sometimes we still talk about it, still feel an overwhelming desire to understand where he went, what his mood was, which thoughts went through his mind. There are things we do not understand about that day and about Christopher in general, and when you see troublesome gaps like that, you never abandon your hope of filling them in. We know he got to Dublin with White Tyson. Tyson wanted to meet up with a girl who was into him after she’d seen him in the papers. Tyson and Christopher split up and arranged to meet at the ferry that evening. They weren’t really supposed to separate, and White Tyson said he would regret that for the rest of his days, but we’d been packed in together for so long that it was very tempting to spend a few hours alone. Christopher walked around Dublin, probably had some coffee and a bite to eat. We know he spent £9 out of the £20 he had, we also know that at 9:15 he bought his mum a gray shirt with a print of James Joyce wearing a top hat. He paid £4.75 for it; the receipt was still in the bag. He also bought a stick of Vaseline for chapped lips and two pairs of underwear.
At around 13:00 he got to Grand Canal Square, where he ran into a hundred or so kids gearing up for an action. Even though he’d dyed his hair black, someone recognized him. They asked for his signature, and one guy hoisted up his shirt and demanded that Christopher sign his chest! Apparently Christopher seemed pretty embarrassed by all the attention and kept mumbling that he was in a hurry, but they wanted to know things: Was Julian a megalomaniac like everyone said? Was Clementine hot? Alberto’s songs were pretty crap, weren’t they? Were he and Justine in love? Some witnesses say that after a few minutes Christopher loosened up; he told them about the dream and said that’s where it had all started. One idiot tweeted something like “You’ll never believe who we ran into!” and posted a picture of Christopher on Instagram. We don’t know whether the police saw it. The conspiracy theorists say they did, but the guy barely had twenty followers.
The kids told Christopher they had a plan. After the Rosareses and Patrick Taha were killed, there was something called Personal Accountability. The idea was started by the Argentina branch, who’d decided they were sick of sitting around all day raging against governments and banks and all those vague entities. Behind the crimes stood human beings, and they hardly ever paid a price. So they burst into the executive offices of a large insurance company in Buenos Aires, after it came out that the company had denied the claims of 50,000 impoverished claimants for no good reason. They got to the CEO’s office, stripped him naked, slathered his whole body with a mixture of rubbish and mud, and forced him to confess on camera to the company’s methods of cheating the people they insured. By the time the police came and arrested them, they’d already posted the clip online, and it spread around the world. Eighteen hours later, young protesters in Madrid turned up at the home of Jose Ruiz Cazares, the chairman of Mundo Acelerando, which was responsible for the Bolivia affair. They grabbed him, stripped him, and painted his body red. They forced him to confess that the corporation had given money to the Bolivian president’s campaign in return for “an understanding that the mines would be ours.”
Within a few hours, groups of strike supporters all over the world were carrying out copycat actions. Young people grabbed senior executives, stripped them, spread their bodies with all kinds of substances and paint, and forced them to make confessions. Some of the executives were so frightened that they confessed to personal sins, too: adultery, tax evasion, call girls. One guy admitted to killing the doves that nested on his balcony. The police posted guards outside office buildings, but the kids waited for the executives on the street, outside restaurants or members-only clubs, next to their homes or their parents’ homes. A hundred executives around the world were taken by Personal Accountability groups. It was completely mad!
The group Christopher met in Dublin was planning to capture Thomas Duffy, who managed LQLB’s banking division in Ireland. The bank was slapped with huge fines after they were caught manipulating interest rates, and in response they made five hundred employees redundant. We will probably never understand why Christopher joined them; Julian had given us clear instructions not to risk arrest. Maybe he wanted to be the hero they believed he was. So they broke into the building and got to Duffy’s office, undressed him, and started painting his body. A few bank employees put up a fight, and the police arrived very quickly.
Christopher and a few others barricaded themselves inside Duffy’s office. They shattered the enormous windows—the whole building was essentially one giant window—and told the police that if anyone touched the door handle they’d throw Duffy out onto the street. They walked him to the window and made him wave at the huge crowd outside. It never occurred to them that there were already snipers positioned out there, awaiting orders. There were photographers, too, and even though the police shooed them away, one of them got a shot of Duffy, his naked body covered with gray muck, waving his arms at the crowd like some deranged dictator. The picture was broadcast immediately, which must have made the police furious. The snipers fired in the air and the idiot cops threw smoke grenades into the building and broke into the office wearing gas masks. A vicious fight broke out, the police using riot gear and batons, the kids charging them with potted plants and pieces of furniture. We don’t know exactly where Christopher was, and whether he wielded a table leg or a chair back. It was hard to see through all the smoke. And no one saw the baton smash his skull in.
Julian was the first to hear. He got a text message from one of the girls in Ireland. He told Clementine, and then they sat waiting in the flat in Liverpool, and every time a pair of us arrived, they told us. They repeated the story three times. The last to turn up were Elizabeth and David. No one was asleep when they knocked on the door. Julian, who was huddled under the window, said he couldn’t talk anymore, so Alberto told them that Christopher had been killed. Elizabeth sat down next to Julian. She didn’t say anything, just sat close to him. Then we ate baked beans, bread, and tomato soup, and drank water.
White Tyson said: That bloody Christopher, it’s all my fault.
David said: I told you people were going to die.
Elizabeth said: Everything’s swirling around us.
Justine said: I loved him even when he told everyone my secrets.
Alberto said: Now London, yeah?
Conal said: And you shall weep and weep, troubling the one you loved.
Samuel said: Maxwell, Christopher…I remember what it’s like to lose people.
Violet said: And then there were ten.
Clementine said: The whole world is fuming because of us, and the pain is killing me.
Julian didn’t say anything.