Seven years.
‘David, come over here! Food’s ready!’ Sofia waves at me, grin on her face, wheat-blonde hair hanging low over her shoulders. I’ve been staring out over the encampment, smoking. I love her voice, that small hint of the middle-class art school weathered by golden sun and cold rain. David loves her. Heat beats down hard on the field. Buttercups radiate gold. Sparrows trill and skitter through trees and bushes. In seven years I’ve learned so much. I know the names of things now, a world so much complicated than plant, bird and tree. Deep down inside, there’s a yawning fissure, a crack I can’t fix.
David is a dead boy who went under the wheels of a Dover lorry back in ’87, age six. David Oldfield, an only son. I am Steven Hunter.
Last time I checked in, some of the lads at the station, the few who knew who David, they asked if I fucked her good and proper, did she have hairy armpits, do the crusty birds smell as bad as the men, what’s it like nailing Mother Earth on musty sheets? Lice in her fanny, tofu blowjobs. I smiled, leered a bit, went along with it. Steven laughed, David’s stomach curdled. My superiors know about the child.
Today is a day where we do something. Shaky with nerves and excitement, even after these seven years. Do the others feel this anxiety, this panic? I sit with Sofia who bounces our daughter Heather on her knee. Heather gurgles and sucks on a rusk. Bolt-cutters lie at my feet and I idly roll a cigarette. My fingers are yellow-orange with nicotine. Before all this, I never smoked. We sit in a rough half-circle with the others, my friends, I suppose. There’s Biscuit, a space cadet from Bristol with his theories of astral projection and the redemptive power of super-strength skunk. He expounds on plans for the action. Helena, an eager girl from South London, one of Sofia’s close friends, in a baggy and threadbare white shirt, headscarf, DMs. Sofia is from the home counties, Niall’s from the Severn Valley and Euan’s from County Kilburn. The plurality of the British Isles represented in Earth Now! We profile them and say they are a type. A category. I’m a chameleon. I fit types and tick boxes. I’m drug-dealer, father, husband, activist, lover, law-man. I’m all of these and I’m nothing. I must look right. If things had been different… I’m more like them than the society I protect, that distant world that shimmers with unreality.
I fear climate change is real. That’s irrelevant, it’s not my concern. I have a job to do. My wife, my mum and dad, the kids back home in Brighton, they wouldn’t understand. The papers, the TV, they mock them. They mock us. Swampy up a tree. Tie-dye shirts. Laugh, discredit. I see how the police, the public (am I the public?) look at me. I’ve been told to get a job, cut my fucking hair, take a bath. If only they knew. Would they thank me or would they spit in my face? These questions run laps round my skull at night. In darkness, Sofia sleeping softly, Heather in bed with us, I stare at our nicotine-stained ceiling and think of the little boy, David Oldfield, smeared across tarmac back in ‘87. I’m David and I’m haunted, a ghoul, a doppelgänger. I fucked her good and proper, they could do with a wash but they ride it ’til it snaps off, laughs Steven in the station. Much more free and open minded, if you catch my drift. There’s always laughter at this. Envy, perhaps.
We talk tactics. I often volunteer to lead the action, I’ve taken a beating and welcomed broken bones from the bobbies to authenticate myself. The looks on their faces as boots hit shinbone, as batons cracked my skull. Real joy. I am them, they are me.
The French have a term, agent provocateur. I know enough, have read enough, have been trained enough, to know we’ve been doing this a long time. Infiltrating anarchists who tried to blow up Greenwich Observatory. They say, in America, it was a provocateur who threw the bomb on Haymarket Square. My old man, he would always tell us that we had French ancestry somewhere. Weavers, protestant refugees who now lie in the Huguenot cemetery in Canterbury.
I rub a hand over my beard. It’s in need of a trim, a bit greasy today as I sweat in the June sun. I look at the tattoos that swarm down my arm, a mess of Celtic, Nordic, pagan signs and symbols I chose at random if I’m honest. If I ever go back, I’m scarred with the marks of this life. Yellow fingers and arms fading to blue-green as I age.
They’ll break my teeth, smash my wrists if they ever find out. Will I have to leave the country? Perhaps flee to France, over the Channel on a ferry from Dover, pay homage to David Oldfield, make Dad happy and do a bit of family research. They’ll not see it that way, but I love this country. I love England and the English, the Welsh, Scots, even the Irish. When the inevitable happens will I ever see Heather again? She’s beautiful but she’s David’s. The wound I must one day inflict on Sofia weighs me down.
My boots are scuffed and worn. My hair is long. It never occurred to me men could get split-ends. I wear a T-shirt emblazoned with crossed hammer and wrench. I look the part. I hate people like myself. I am them and I’m here to disrupt them, sabotage. I love Sofia, David loves Sofia. I am Steven Hunter.
Seven years. I’ve touched base camp a few times with a wife and two boys who seem opaque and out of focus, colleagues who I laugh with and disrespect the woman and child I say I love (do love), but it’s seven years and that’s how long I’ve been an idea, a character sketch made flesh.
Climate change. I fear it’s real. Why would people face arrest, beatings, mockery, sleeping in fields and muddied with earth, if they didn’t think it real. Why put yourself at such risk for the sake of an animal. They believe, just as I believe. I have orders, I’ve got a job to do. There must be dignity in that. What I’m doing is right, for the benefit of my home, the country I love. There are other ways, legal ways, to make your voices heard. We live in a proud democracy, terrorism is not the answer. None of my colleagues are terrorists. I follow my own moral compass and this has to be right.
There are others like me – predecessors, contemporaries – and there will be successors. Rumours of trying to discredit black families in London, relatives of that lad killed by bootboys down Croydon way fifteen years back. The whale lovers. Leaflet-handers outside franchised fast food restaurants. The hunt sabs. I don’t know their faces, their names. They must be there.
I cannot be alone.