later today - or have her secretary do it anyway – that sound good?’
‘Yeah man, sounds great. Thanks for sorting this thing out for me.’
‘Don’t worry about it; next time we head out, the drinks are on you though, yeah?’
I told him that sounded good; it did sound good – we hadn’t gone for a drink, a real drink – the kind of drink where we bot woke up in a stranger’s flat the next morning - in a long time. We chatted as we finished the meal and it was only after the last piece of toast vanished into his mouth, and he was washing it down with the dregs of his tea, that I asked him about the election – he’d been expecting it for some time, I could tell. I asked him who he was going to be voting for, and his nostrils flared.
‘Labour, of course! Who else is there to vote for?’
‘Britannica’ll probably get a lot of support around here – I sometimes think it’s nothing to do with anyone being pro-Labour, it’s just we’re all anti-Tory.’
‘You’re not wrong. I heard someone mention Thatcher’s name the other day and everything went dead silent. It was in Manchester too, I thought they might have grown a little more lenient towards her, now that it’s the glitterin’ capi’al o’ t’ North.’ He broke into a guttural northern accent, so different from the slight twang of his voice, but the transition was fluid, natural, and it took me a moment to realise he was joking. I smiled, but I could easily picture him with coal dust on his face, a flat cap arranged at a jaunty angle atop his head and a smile breaking through the dirt.
He left with the same enthusiasm as he had entered, and the room immediately felt too large. I looked around and the walls seemed to extend outwards, ever-moving, like the antithesis of claustrophobia.
‘Bernard is a good man,’ I told the empty room, finished my drink and walked out of the door.
II
The protest was still going on, still separated by the lines of police officers, and the Britannica had gathered outside the abandoned bookkeepers and the weed-smelling chain pub which sat beside it. There weren’t as many of them, any more, but those that were still gathered there were now holding cans and plastic pints of beer above their heads. I could smell them as much as I could see them, hear them – I could practically taste them on the weak breeze. I could smell their sweat, their spilled beer, their cigarettes and e-cigarettes and their weed; I could smell their desperation and their ignorance and their unexplainable hate. I could see their fists around their beer, their teeth champing at the air and the tongue twisting like pink ribbons caught in the wind.
I could hear their cries, hear their ‘Rule Britannica’, hear one lone voice singing the national anthem. I could taste the rot in their mouths, the stains around their fingertips, their arousal – there weren’t just men amongst their number either; women with tight ponytails to strain out their grease held hands to the air and howled, howled like Ginsberg howled, obscene to the nth degree. They lifted their children up to see the crowd that had gathered around them, the crowd that shared their beliefs, and to see those small, pointed, hungry faces twisting with vicious hatred made me shiver in rage myself.
It was a belief system, for these people, who defined themselves by hatred. Sure, they might walk back to their homes and be loving children, neighbours, parents, grandparents, they might be the friends that were called on when all else went to shit, but they kept their hatred like a tattoo on their breast.
As I watched, a short man emerged from the white, bald-headed throng and mounted the old steps to the bookkeeper’s front door– he was emaciated by drugs, with harsh cheekbones and jawbones beneath eyes that seemed to flash with sick, joyous hatred as he gazed over the beer and the bottled and sunlight reflecting from shiny domes, towards the line of his opposition.
He wore an old track-suit that seemed to shine with sequins, but it was all dust, dust which caught the sunlight and seemed to be on fire and he accepted a megaphone from an outstretched hand and raised it to his fat lips, so out of place amongst the jagged peaks of his features. I heard him say ‘freedom’, I heard him say ‘defend’, I heard him say ‘our land’, I heard him threaten and cajole in a distorted accent – it was a speech as old as nationality; it wasn’t us against them, it was them against us and we had to react. I heard him say we didn’t understand, that we weren’t brave enough, that we hadn’t seen what immigrants could do, would do, had done – that we were the greatest nation in the world, with a history of peace, and we would fight to protect what was ours and we’d never taken anyone else’s land or property; that we hadn’t built the foundations of our empire on empty skulls. That they were coming to take our jobs, our livelihoods, live off the sweat of our work, that our schools were filled, that our streets cannot take the weight of more feet, that they are raising the prices of property, that our doctors and nurses were overworked and can’t treat them anyway, that they can’t even speak English, that they are willing to work for less and big businesses will only employ illegals, that we already have millions of unemployed, that the British people are becoming swamped on our own lands, that there were wars brewing and our cobblestones would soon be running red, that immigrants are criminals, that refugees need to sort their own country out instead of running away, that they send money back to their home country – that our home is bursting and we were being pushed into the sea. I heard him shout Alfred the Great’s name, and his free hand turned into a talon that he ran over his bald head and dug into his chest and he spoke of reason and logic and hurled out obscene numbers across the street, and was met by sneers and middle-fingers and cries of ‘fascist’.
His own group seemed inspired by this speech, and raised their cans of imported beer like they were toasting some great victory. I saw a few of them waving bottles, held upside down by the neck like they were preparing to throw them. The officers didn’t seem to have noticed them, as none were actually looking towards the Britannica group. Instead, the twin lines focused on the other side of the street, and the mass of people whom had congregated there.
They were a strange army, an army of the mad; old men and women in their finest clothes stood beside young, wild-haired people that looked like students and a few men and women who were just enjoying the town. The host was, for the most part, a mixture of the young and the old - those who remembered the War. The finest generation who gave birth to rotten generations and left nothing left. The younger men and women wanted to fight that fight, they so desperately wanted an enemy that they were prepared to hate with all the passions of true liberals – they believed in liberalism, not necessarily equality. Though I looked, I couldn’t see any black skin – though I listened, I couldn’t hear any accent but the spinning cement growl of the north-west; a few scousers, maybe, scattered amongst either side of the battle.
Very few of them held in anything in their hands besides mobile phones, which they held horizontally and regularly turned about them – I watched one guy, not much younger then myself, making certain that he turned the camera to himself ever few moments. He wore a red and black chequered shirt above black jeans which choked his ankles and stylish black shoes with white soles and laces and trimming. He had a silver, glittering watch on one hand, a pierced ear and tightly-tied back hair above a long goatee. As I watched, he spun the phone around, catching the outstretched arms, the grim line of the police, the mob across the road, the people behind him and in front of him, and he lowered the phone to his face to say something, shout something with a smile on lips that were twisted with anger.
From the middle of Britannica’s ranks, someone raised a British flag, which he waves back and forth in the weak breeze – he didn’t have much of a choice; if he hadn’t swung it with such ferocity then it would have hung against itself, limp, lank; like the beheaded corpse of a despotic king. Almost as if in retaliation, the counter-protest immediately raised a rainbow banner – rather than relying on the wind, this flag was stretched between two poles, which were held by two people some feet away from each other; at
that, Britannica jeered and the counter protesters roared and the cops shifted uneasily between them.
The spokesman raised his voice through the megaphone again, and I heard it then, skulking at the edge of his tone, cowering behind his words like some broken, tortured thing, beaten to within an inch of life by hate – it was fear, fear, fear; a great fear; the great fear; he was terrified of everything and fought it with his hate and his fear was nourished by the people he spoke to, the words he read, the smiling suits he saw on television – all of it, his fear whimpered, all of it was threatened, all of it was cardboard, wet with the tears of generations, and these immigrants, these Poles and these Niggers and these fuckin’ Asian refugees, they were the fist that was going to smash straight through it and revolve on its wrist and put a middle finger right in his face and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it but hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.
It was strange, but everyone who approached that mess immediately took a side – some, a few, flocked the great racist mass with a swagger whilst others, a much larger group, joined the counter protest. There was no middle ground, the space