Only a few hundred people attended the hastily arranged funeral service for Christopher in Liverpool, but by the one-month anniversary of his death, our Christopher had become famous. Very. Actually, our Christopher had nothing to do with the public persona. He became the strike initiator, the prophetic dreamer, the only person Julian and Clementine listened to, our quiet leader, a brilliant chess player, the reason Clementine left Julian, and lots of other things. All over the world they wrote obituaries and poems. They kept posting YouTube videos with pictures of him and awful ballads playing in the background. Bands dedicated songs to him at their shows. Sometimes it was funny: David’s little sister wasn’t really interested in how he was doing or in the strike, she just kept saying, “Did you really know Chris? That’s amazing…! He’s so gorgeous, I have to tell Kailey!!” We got contacted by people who said they’d pay £10,000 for Christopher’s underwear, a casino owner from Macau wanted us to sell him a “private photograph” of Christopher for $100,000, and Peter the butcher sold a sketch of Violet with Christopher’s signature on it to some rich twit for £25,000, which kept us going after Julian’s money ran out.
There were also some dangerous aspects of the madness around Christopher. Clementine explained that the people out to crush the strike wanted to separate Christopher from us, to depict him as a kind-hearted boy who’d shown huge potential,* a man who disavowed violence, unlike the hooligan anarchists he was hanging around with. We, on the other hand, kept saying that lots of our ideas were actually his. There was something calculated in our response, but Christopher was one of us, and we weren’t prepared to have him made out as some poster boy for impoverished youths who could achieve great things if they only did their homework and had the right sort of friends. The policy regarding Christopher also symbolized a compromise that had emerged between Clementine and Julian. If we understood correctly, she had concluded that Julian’s secret adviser, whom she’d never met, was actually “fairly useful,” and she stopped pestering Julian about him.
Anyway, when rumors started about a gathering in Trafalgar Square to commemorate a month since Christopher’s death—it was organized by two new groups that had sprung up in London and Liverpool—everyone urged us to respect the deceased and exercise restraint. The assholes wanted a quiet memorial service, like he was some two-hundred-year-old lord who’d fallen off his horse. Well, we decided to give them a little surprise. We declared that the memorial would mark the deaths of all those who had been killed in the past two months: Angélica and Joaquin Rosares, of course; Patrick Taha from Paris; and some less familiar names, too. Well, the two groups who’d come up with the original idea went berserk because we’d interfered in their event, and they called us “bossy” and denounced the “cult of personality” around us, and said the protest had “lost its community dimension and become part of commercialized mass culture.” In the end we wore down the Liverpool group, but the East London one declared it wouldn’t take part in our “bourgeois globalized event.”
Stupid fucks.
In general, whereas in the past it was just Julian and Clementine (and Alberto a little) who’d been in the know about things happening around the world, now all of us were pretty involved. This wasn’t an obvious development, considering that none of us had ever left Great Britain—apart from Alberto of course. We didn’t really know much about the world, and when we heard there was a demonstration in Chad we weren’t sure if it was in the Middle East or in Africa. We were also quite surprised to learn that there were so many Catholics in Brazil, and couldn’t quite figure out where Bermuda was. But within a few months we became quite knowledgeable, and if someone had woken us up in the middle of the night and asked how many people lived in Nigeria or which countries bordered with India, we’d have known the answer.
We were sleeping in Brixton again, on Overton Street, in a two-room flat that a friend of Peter the butcher got for us. Peter spent fourteen days in jail after the police raided the butcher shop. The cops kept harassing him for a while, but after the new policy toward us was declared—the papers called it “the containment policy”—they left him alone. At night we discussed whether we should go to the protest in Trafalgar Square. Clementine and Julian said we had to be there. David and Conal weren’t too excited about the idea, and David warned that more people could die. Then Alberto declared that we needed to see people and trees and grass: living things.
So we decided: we would be there.
In the morning it was still raining and we all sat around the kerosene heater and hoped the sky would clear. When we got to the train station it was getting brighter. Three full trains went by until we managed to squeeze onto the fourth one. You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out that everyone was going to Trafalgar. We crowded in and everything looked pretty ordinary, with people shouting and drinking beer and singing, until the noise died down and we stood there, surprised, until someone shrieked: “Julian!” The train car filled with feverish whispers, which was a bit scary. Everyone was looking at us, and some people stood on their seats to get a better view, loads of people took pictures of us. Well, we didn’t know how to react. Some of us stared at the floor, or fiddled with buttons and zips; others grinned stupidly, or struggled to keep their faces expressionless. Suddenly we heard applause and cheers, and then the whole train car was throbbing with whistling and screaming, and people started banging on the walls and windows. We already knew that people appreciated what we’d done and supported our ideas, and we’d seen lots of pictures of ourselves online with dedications and poems (we laughed at an article called “The Latest Fashion Trend: Crooked Noses,” which claimed that companies trying to reach young, politically aware consumers wanted models with long, straggly hair and a crooked nose like Julian’s; we followed Clementine: Age of Chaos, a new comic strip, whose authors said they were big fans of Cannabis Jazz and that Clementine was the heir to his enemies), but when we stood there in that train car, we really understood that a lot of people believed in us, and felt that our acts expressed their fury, or whatever you want to call it. Standing close enough for us to look right into these people’s eyes, we were forced to cope with the enthusiasm and hopes we’d aroused, and it filled us with a heavy sense of responsibility. All the screeching about the damage we’d caused, which had supposedly reached £4 billion, hadn’t bothered us even for a second—that money had never belonged to us or to anyone we knew—but the people in the train were more or less like us, and we were afraid to disappoint them.
The train stopped for twenty-five minutes in the middle of a tunnel, and everyone was convinced it was a malicious plan to hold us up until the protest was over. It turned out there were a lot of Liverpudlians on the train, and they started singing songs about Christopher. We all joined in. Even Julian and Clementine. He put his hand on her shoulder, too. We all saw it. We’re not embarrassed to admit that a few of us had tears in our eyes.
When we walked out of the train station it was evening. All the streets around Trafalgar Square were empty, no taxis or buses or cars, the shops and offices were closed and completely dark. All the streetlamps were off, and we could hardly see Nelson’s Column. The blinding lights from the National Gallery were gone, as if someone had hung a black curtain between it and the square. For a while we huddled outside the station, staring at this familiar piece of the city that looked so different.
“Look at those cowards,” White Tyson said with a laugh, “hiding the city away from us.”
“It feels strange,” David said. “Anything could happen.”
Elizabeth shook him. “It’s wonderful!”
The only sounds we heard were the shouts of demonstrators pouring into the square. Many of them had torches or mobile phones shining. The police spread out, encircling the area. By the time we got to the square the lanterns had been lit and little flames flickered around us, and black smoke curled up. That was our light—they’d darkened everything and we’d lit up the square! Clementine said: “Do you realize that if we hadn’t met, all this would never have happened? Do you understand how big this is?” She held on to Julian and White Tyson, stood on her tiptoes, and looked around. Her upper lip was trembling, which usually happened when she got angry.
As soon as we got near the square, people recognized us. They called out our names, cheered us on, and some took photos. Conal and Elizabeth counted fifteen T-shirts with Christopher’s image on them, including a horrifying one that showed his face bleeding. A lot of hipsters favored shirts with Angélica Rosares’s picture, and there was a Soviet-style one: Christopher, Angélica Rosares, and Patrick Taha, gazing out at the horizon—the only thing missing was a sickle. And then we saw a T-shirt that sent chills down our spines. It was the last picture of us. We were dressed up in the barn, Clementine and Julian sat on chairs in the middle, and on either side of them were Alberto, Justine, Conal, and Christopher, all looking grave, and the others stood behind them. People wearing the shirt stopped, put their hands on their shirts to frame the picture, and stared at us, as if to commiserate with our pain. In principle, we don’t put much trust in people’s good intentions—until proven otherwise, a stranger is a scoundrel who has some stupid plot to get the change out of your pocket, your sleeping bag into his backpack, or your lips around his prick. And there were these people surrounding us, quietly showing us the shirts. Well, nothing had prepared us for that gesture. There was another thing, too: the picture was real. It wasn’t about glorifying Christopher anymore, it was the last moment he’d been with us, a short blond boy with a pockmarked face, a slight stutter, and soft, cautious speech. If we felt in the past few weeks that we’d lost him, and no longer always remembered what was true and what was a lie in all the legends we spread about him, those shirts took us back to the place where he really was. One of us.
At exactly eight o’clock, an announcement came over the loudspeaker about the demonstrations all around the world, and the crowd roared back the names of cities and the numbers of demonstrators. There were protests in La Paz, Athens, Paris, Jakarta, Madrid, Johannesburg and Cape Town, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Tunis, Vilnius, Bangkok, even China. Altogether, about four million people were out on the streets that night!
People started sharing pictures from Fatahillah Square in Jakarta: flames towering four or five meters high, with thousands of people circling them, and the police moving in. The crowd in Trafalgar was going wild, especially when footage came through showing the police beating demonstrators in Rome and Madrid, and one picture showed a woman who’d been killed in Mexico City, after demonstrators lit huge fires in Polanco; Alberto said that was a rich people’s neighborhood.
Everyone waved their torches around madly, and the people in the middle of the square pushed the crowd back. The people on the edge started backing out, until they ran into the cops. People got shoved, knocked down, and bruised. In the commotion, we got separated. All the investigations later claimed that the police were attacked, that a human wave had rushed toward them, they had no time to consider whether people were attacking or trying to get away. That was a lie, of course, and there were lots of other lies. They claimed we threw torches at the cops and at buildings, that a big group broke into the National Gallery, that another fire was started under Nelson’s Column, and that if they hadn’t done anything the column would have burned down, which was ludicrous.
Fires were burning in several places around the world by then, and the internet was exploding with images. After a while the space between the two fountains in the square emptied out and people started tossing in torches, T-shirts, coats, sleeping bags, and jumpers, and a colorful blaze leaped up to the sky. There was a stench of kerosene. Hundreds of people danced around the flames, and others stood around cheering them on. Julian, Clementine, and Elizabeth were in there dancing. We could hear fire engines, and then we saw row after row of police in black uniforms, black helmets, each holding a transparent shield in one hand and a baton in the other. They spread out across the square. The circle of demonstrators around the fire and the dancers closed ranks to stop the police from advancing, but the cops started hitting them. Some people got scared, but they could only run at the cops or into the fire. There were several seconds of silence before the chilling recognition: there was no way out. A massive roar rolled through the square and waves of people linked together, moving toward the police, where they split up and then linked back together and stormed the cops.
You could see batons swinging, helmets ramming into heads, eyes torn wide with terror. You could see arms bent behind backs, fingers gripping necks and shoulders, shields slamming against bodies and belts lashing. You could see lots of peculiar motions of bodies falling, each one hitting the ground at a slightly different angle. You could hear curses, truncated screams, grunts of pain, and the nauseating sound of bones cracking. You could see bloodied shirts, blood trickling from foreheads down to noses, blood on necks and arms, thick dark stains on the paving. You could see cops and protesters falling down with twisted faces and swollen veins, trembling human heaps.
After the police came the firemen, who marched down the narrow paths the police had cleared. There were still lots of protesters surrounding the dancers, so the firemen couldn’t get to the fire. A few managed to break through, but they faced hundreds of people. There were helicopters circling overhead, and blinding lights flooded the square. On the streets, where many protesters had fled, small fires erupted every so often, and there were sounds of glass shattering and lots of different alarms ringing. The circle around the dancers began to break up, more and more new policemen moved in, and after about an hour, once the fire was almost extinguished, hundreds of cops crossed the first circle.
They were battered, bleeding, and furious; some of their friends had been seriously injured; and they attacked the dancers. One protester got pushed right into the fire and you could hear his screams and see a body disappear into the flames, then a silhouette burning, and then nothing. The shouts of horror and fury were deafening, and the people who’d been in the first circle, and could still move, turned around and went back to the fire to help the ones still dancing there. The police hit them with batons and they struck back with whatever they could find: burning torches, extinguished torches, belts, backpacks, sleeping bags, screwdrivers, shoes.
The only sounds now were feeble groans and heavy thuds. Movements were getting slower: the belts, batons, torches, and shields all swung lethargically, suspended in mid-air. Blows were taken with indifferent expressions. A certain dullness had descended upon everyone. Even when you got a baton to your gut, deep down inside you refused to believe it was happening. Not the beatings—most of us had already got that from our parents, or from cops, or from someone else, and we knew the shock that comes after an especially bad blow, which often causes a false pain to spread through your body. But what you refused to believe was that this square now looked like a prehistoric battle arena, that we all looked like the tortured figures who grip each other in paintings depicting historic wars. The firemen were putting out the fire, water was spraying everywhere, and everyone was drenched. After a while, the flames were gone.
Darkness fell on the square, and only a few beams of light from the helicopters and floodlights roamed among us. There weren’t many people left. You could see the square paved with bodies, limbs akimbo, lying with one leg completely crooked, lying on their stomachs, lying on their backs staring at the sky, half-lying half-sitting, coughing, waving their arms, screaming hoarsely, screaming silently. Bodies crawled on all four, a bluish light shone on a policeman clad in black lying next to a young woman in a gray dress covered with dark stains, her eyes torn wide as she screamed for help in the scorched silence of the square.
You wanted to look for someone, you remembered that something had happened to him, but you did not dare move among the bodies convulsing on the ground, or worse—the motionless ones. Everything grew blurred, the familiar voice that always made decisions and whispered instructions, right or left, move or stay still, talk or be silent: that voice was inaudible. Your body reeked of charred flesh, or perhaps you were imagining that, and just when you were convinced there was nothing left to make you move, your mind lit up the different streets, the places you remembered—perhaps you’d been in them or perhaps not—and a breeze carried smells of grass and trees, of gasoline, of fish and chips, of winding lanes. That was where you had to go.
We’d agreed to meet at the flat afterwards, assuming we’d get separated. All night long, people trickled back. The first was Conal, who had a slight head injury. After an hour Elizabeth turned up; she’d broken her right arm. Two hours later it was Justine, uninjured. At seven a.m. Julian arrived, bleeding all over. A while later Alberto made it: he’d dislocated his shoulder and had deep gashes in his head. Violet was the last one. By evening, we knew everything: Samuel was being held in a detainee camp outside town. White Tyson had been transferred to the hospital at Wandsworth Prison. David was in hospital, unconscious, after a baton had cracked his head open, and no one expected him to recover. Clementine had been killed, along with twenty-one others in London and 350 more around the world.
We saw the last pictures of Clementine in a video someone uploaded to YouTube. She puts her arms around a policeman’s helmet, and then you see two quick movements: she pushes the helmet down toward the ground and lifts her knee—in black trousers—up at it. Then she vanishes into the rioting masses.
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* Like hell he had. He dropped out of school and he’d been unemployed for the past five years, apart from two part-time jobs, a nursery-school teaching gig, and advising Chinese businessmen who bet on horse races. But that didn’t stop them from interviewing an English teacher who said Christopher had written “a wonderful essay about The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” Of course he did. It’s a wonder they didn’t claim he read it in Russian.