I woke with my nose pressed against the thin fabric of our tent and in that moment of time, barely out of dreaming, I thought we were back in the field again. To my surprise I experienced a surge of pleasure in this idea. I thought, I’m free. But then I turned onto my back and saw shadows moving on the canvas and I remembered. Mikey and I emerged blinking into the morning air to see the whole place alive with moving bodies, making themselves ready. So much excitement in the camp that you could feel it all up and down your arms. We dressed and followed the crowd as it made its way out of camp. We walked in a sea of dreadlocks and braids and misshapen hats.
Mairead had joined Beth near the front and we walked beside the huge bald guy. I was surprised to see him as I had pinned him down as one of the Godheads. We followed the same route as the night before, down the bridge and past the van. I noticed the builders were out working on the church again. They stopped their work to watch us as we passed. We walked up the road, back towards the roundabout Mikey and I had passed on the way there. Every so often a car would come along behind or in front of us and we would all have to step into the grassy ditch that ran beside the road. The cars would pass and the people inside would ogle us.
‘Michael,’ Mairead shouting down the group. ‘Are you needing a sign?’
I looked to Mikey and then realised she was addressing me – in the confusion of the march she’d mixed us up. I explained and she laughed, saying how similar we looked. We were given a large banner to hold between us that read NUCLEAR BOMBS MEANS NO CLEAR FUTURE. Making our way up to the roundabout and the embankment beside the entrance to the naval base, I saw there was a steady stream of traffic turning in.
‘What happens now?’ I asked Baldy.
He pointed at the embankment. ‘We stand there and give them a load of grief.’
He was right. We crowded on the embankment across the roundabout from the base’s entrance and held our signs up and shouted at the workers as they drove in.
‘It’s a bit daft this,’ I whispered to Mikey.
‘I feel daft. Everyone’s looking at us.’
Mairead was at the front, creating energy. ‘What do we want?’ she would shout and then we would tell her what we wanted. No bombs, or whatever.
There was a pile of rubble down the back of the embankment. When no one was looking I stooped down and picked up a small pebble. I threw it towards the queue of cars, disguising the motion as a lavish handclap above my head. The pebble swan dived through the air and for a moment I lost it in the brightness. Then a sound went ching and one of the motors braked. Out of it climbed a man, his sleeves rolled back to reveal blueish arm tattoos. He looked at his motor for a moment before turning to the protest.
I got a worm of excitement in my belly from his visible anger.
‘Excuse me,’ he shouted, gesturing to the tiny crack that shone on his windscreen.
Mairead turned, confused. ‘Sir,’ she called. ‘Please keep driving. This is a peaceful protest.’
The man shivered. ‘Tell that to my fucken window,’ he said, pointing to his motor.
Mairead peered over the road to the man’s motor and the line of cars piled up behind it. All their windows were rolled down so their drivers could ogle the confrontation.
‘That wasn’t us,’ she told him.
‘It fucken was,’ he said. ‘I seen the rock. It came off of you lot.’
‘Piss off,’ I shouted, from deep within the crowd.
The man marched right over to us, blocking the traffic coming the other way too. ‘One of yous is going to pay up,’ he said. ‘Now.’
‘We’re not paying anything,’ said Mairead. ‘This is a peaceful protest.’
‘If I wasn’t a law abiding soul then I would take a great measure of joy in murdering every one of you lot,’ he told us.
Mairead stared at the man for a while. You could see the cogs turning and inside I urged her to be rash. Instead, she faced us, leaving the man out in the cold.
‘What do we want?’ she asked and we told her, some more reluctantly than others.
The man stood in the road, watching us chant. ‘I want a new windshield,’ he shouted after a few runs through of the ditty. ‘Does nobody care about that?’
‘Piss off,’ I shouted again.
That one made him cock his head. He nodded, smiling, and waddled backwards to his motor. I could see him in his car, urging the waiting vehicles to go around, his hand flapping from the open window. When they were past he drove into the base behind them.
We went back to banner waving and I soon grew bored. I left them to it and sat beyond the embankment at the edge of the woods, rolling myself a fag. I lay back against the grass and watched the sun shining through the leaping flags and boards and banners.
I thought back to those long years when Mikey was inside. What had I done? I’d finished school, I’d had odd jobs, signed on a wee bit. I had kept my head down. There was still a lot of what was called the stigma. Everyone knew I’d been with Mikey on the day he’d done it and I was never trusted again, not really. People would look at me funny or even be hostile, on the bus for example. Not that I’d been close with many folk in the first place. I’d had one good friend in primary school who had stuck by me.
Pungo Henderson was his name, the one good friend. Me and Pungo had fought viciously when we were in the primary school over something now lost to history. He ended up with a chip in his incisor and then after that we were mates. I couldn’t remember me and Pungo ever really talking to each other in the way you saw other lads do. We would do stuff together and go places together and we would comment on the things we saw but it was all very, look at that, and, aye, I know, it’s mental.
That’s not to say there wasn’t a connection between Pungo and me. There was, but it was unspoken. We didn’t need to discuss where we would wander to after school because our feet would take us there. One time we finished ourselves off together, facing over a steep hill, the wind blowing cold against the ends of our cocks.
When I told Pungo about the whole Mikey thing he gawked at me though his thick spectacles. Not out of horror, that was just how Pungo looked. He asked me what would happen to Mikey and I told him he’d probably get the jail. His top lip had curled back and he’d gurgled. That was how Pungo laughed. He wasn’t laughing at me, just at the madness of the situation.
I couldn’t remember what happened to Pungo. For a long time after we’d finished at the school he had worked nights at the supermarket, pushing cages of frozen food in the early hours under fluorescents. There were times when I couldn’t sleep and I would go out for one my night walks, popping in to say hello. His glasses would be completely white from the lights and the cold mist from the freezers. He would ask me if there was any info on Mikey and I’d tell him about the latest parole news, all that kind of stuff.
A little while after that Pungo went away. There was a hassle about him walking into the woman’s toilets when a customer was in there and I never really got the full story because I never spoke to him again. He moved away because of the backlash. I didn’t remember if I ever missed Pungo once he was gone. In fact it was a relief, of sorts, because looking at Pungo made me remember the silly childish stuff we used to get up to, like the finishing ourselves off over the steep hill thing, and other stuff too.
Once, before Mikey did what he did, Pungo and I were messing about at the school in the evening. We must have been fourteen, maybe younger. We were sitting on the stairs leading to the school entrance, in near silence. Pungo was probably doing his deep breathing and I was probably looking at this and that, thinking about things. Maybe complaining about my stepdad. I had a hard time with him.
See, the thing about my stepdad was that he was Mikey’s actual dad, which made us half-brothers or stepbrothers maybe. That distinction was always made clear even though it had all happened when I was wee, back before I could remember. My own dad had been a trucker who had trucked away before I came along. Our stepdad had long hair and he wore the T-shirts of the heavy metal bands he liked. That was where Mikey and I picked up the habit, the long hair thing.
So I was probably complaining to Pungo about my stepdad favouring Mikey in some way. Maybe how Mikey had got a bigger portion at tea the night before or he was getting to go to SeaWorld and I wasn’t. I probably told Pungo about a lot of that stuff while he breathed deeply.
And then this wee kid shows up in the playground. Just a normal wee kid and me and Pungo spy him and go, Aha, here’s a likely target. We ask the wee boy what he’s up to and he tells us he’s just messing about. Ooh, we go, like he’s in trouble. You’re not allowed up here, Pungo Henderson tells the wee boy and the wee boy gets all defensive. I’m allowed wherever I like, he tells us.
Pungo doesn’t take kindly to wee the boy’s cheek. He tells the wee boy if he’s not careful he’ll end up getting his head kicked in. We go down the stairs and stand up close to the wee boy, not letting him get past when he wants to leave. We box him into a corner, between the school itself and a wall. He’s struggling and trying to get away from us and he seems especially creeped out by Pungo but we won’t let him get away and we’re saying he’s going to be in so much trouble. So much trouble.
Eventually he got away by slipping between Pungo’s clasping hands. He took off like a rocket, dodging across the playground away from us. We shouted after him. I noticed that Pungo’s face was shining and his top lip was curling back and he was gurgling, enjoying himself.
But that was just boys being boys. That wasn’t anything like what Mikey did.
I finished my fag and threw it into the trees behind me. The protest was still ongoing. Mikey looked over his shoulder, giving me a pleading look.
‘Paul,’ he shouted over the din they were making. Again, ‘Paul!’
I heaved myself up. I shrugged.
‘Come and see,’ he said.
I hopped up the back of the embankment and peered over Baldy’s twisting shoulder. There was a line of white cars pulling up in front of the protest. Their doors opened and men in suits clambered out, all of them paunchy and many of them moustached. One of them pulled a notebook from the chest pocket of his mackintosh. He held it in front of him as he approached the front of the group.
‘I was wonderin if I could ask a coupla questions,’ he said.
He watched the front row of the protest with a dry smirk, waiting for someone to talk. Was he police? Was he CID or whatever?
One of the hippies down the front said, ‘Well…’ but was immediately silenced by the man in the mac. He plunged his fist through his upheld notebook and into the face of the hippie who had spoken. Quick glances flew around the roadside like gunfire. Had he really just done that? Where were these fuckers from?
Then the scuffle broke out.
The paunchy men laid into us with gusto. They had the sleeves of their mackintoshes and suits and donkey jackets rolled up as they cuffed us and knocked us and pushed us. I dodged through the melee, doing my best to avoid any violence directed at me while maintaining a presence in the group. I saw Baldy being rolled down the embankment. I saw Mairead batter away a man wearing Cuban heels and a handlebar moustache with the stick of her sign.
Where was Mikey?
The men in suits were shouting orders to each other, telling their colleagues to restrain us. They weren’t having much luck. Like me, the protestors were slippery, resisting but never assaulting their attackers.
Then I saw him.
He was cowering behind the tallest policeman. As the copper ran and hustled and tried to pin down the hippies, Mikey shadowed him, ducking and dodging to remain unseen.
‘Mikey, you clown,’ I shouted over the noise.
He stopped and looked up. The tall policeman’s elbow went back and caught Mikey on the cheekbone. My blood started kicking in from the noise and from Mikey getting hit. I pranced through the bodies and kicked the tall policeman in the back of the knee. He went down on the ground. I got Mikey and off we went into the trees behind the road. The rest of them could deal with the palaver they’d started. The land above the road was steep. We scrambled up it on our hands, away from the shouts and roars behind us. We hoisted ourselves up by the bare roots spilling from the hillside and managed to hide in a dense copse, halfway up.
‘Shite,’ I whispered, over and over again, peering out, seeing nothing.
Mikey continuing to gulp and to shiver.
They’ve found us, I thought. They’ve fucken tracked us down. The police were probably holding down the protestors, showing them a photograph, saying, Have you seen this man? We’ve had reports that he’s in the area. See, he was put away for doing in a bairn years and years ago and now he’s gone missing, not been present for his parole meeting. Yes indeed, a very suspicious figure. Not only that but we’ve got two missing persons on our hands now and we’re very concerned that they may be linked. I put my arm around my brother, feeling his ribs jitter. His hand went up to clear off the gore from his face.
‘Leave it,’ I said. ‘They won’t recognise you all fucked up like that.’
‘But it feels horrible,’ he whispered.
‘Just leave it,’ I whispered back. ‘It’s better.’
His voice was bloated with frustration. He said, ‘I want to take it off.’
I held him closer than ever. I gripped his bones. I said, ‘Listen to me. Just leave it, all right?’
He wriggled himself free a little and made a noise of protest.
My blood was moving through me like music. ‘I swear to fucken God…’ I spat.
‘Fine,’ he said.
We waited up there, in the wet vegetation, until the bodies below thinned away, until we stopped seeing the blue lights sift through trunks. Then we slid down the hillside on our arses, back to the road. It was empty.
‘Oh,’ I shouted, the air rushing from me. My blood coming back down again was like emerging from beneath water. ‘Oh thank fuck!’
Mikey was less enthusiastic than I was. He lurked at the roadside, nursing his injuries and keeping his eye trained on me.
I laughed. ‘We were this close,’ I said, showing him the space between my fingertips. ‘Who knows what you might have told them.’
He nodded.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘I’m starving.’
I went off down the road but didn’t get far before I realised he wasn’t following. I turned back. ‘Well?’
‘It was you that chucked the stone at the bloke’s motor, wasn’t it?’ he asked. His face was squeezed with anger.
‘Was it fuck. It was probably one of them hippies. They were dying for it all to kick off.’
‘I seen you, man,’ he said, a tiny crack in his voice. ‘I seen you throw it. Why’ve you got to be like that?’
‘You’ve lost it,’ I told him. ‘You’ve only been here a day and already you’ve gone loopy. You’re going to be easy pickings.’
‘I haven’t lost it. You chucked the stone. I saw it. Why’ve you got to be like that when…’ He couldn’t go on and his chin was dimpling with emotion.
‘You fucken baby,’ I called him.
‘Why do you keep doing this to me?’ he asked. ‘I’m supposed to be your brother.’
‘Keep doing what?’
‘Keep getting me into… into…’ he looked around himself.
I nodded, getting what he was going for. ‘You get yourself into trouble, mate.’
‘Do I?’
‘Aye. You do,’ I said.
‘I don’t think I do get myself in trouble. I think it’s you,’ he pointed towards me, his arm straight as a rod, ‘that gets me in trouble.’