They’d stared at each other, Bridget and her dad, the TV whirring, the screen blank, and then he'd turned off the lights as if he hadn’t seen her, he’d walked away, left her in the dark, she’d heard the back door bang.
The next day it was as if nothing had happened.
At breakfast she’d said to him, “I watched the Tube.”
He’d replied, “Did you, love?”
“I saw you come in.”
He’d rubbed his bad eye and gone off to his shed. He’d locked himself in there all morning till her mum had come home and said lunch was on the table. He’d lied to her, so what did she care.
She went over to the tarpaulin tent that was strung with lights, leaving her torch by the fire. Inside was a heaven of fabrics and pens, like the art room only colder and without any high ceiling or rules. She took a large pair of scissors and cut a length of red velvet. There were plastic tubs of buttons and glitter and badges that already had the Greenham logos printed on them, Greenham Women Everywhere and Peace and We Say No To Cruise. She pinned, Protest & Survive to her coat and picked, Take The Toys Away From The Boys to pin to her banner. She’d been singing it all afternoon.
“You can take anything.” It was the blonde spiked pierced woman she’d stood next to at the fence, whose hand she’d squeezed, sending the embrace around the nine-mile perimeter. “Here,” she came round to Bridget’s side of the table and showed her the calico they used for backing. “If you pin this on it gives you a base and then you can sow it on at the end. It makes it last longer.” She had an accent too. Not English. Something else. She was almost too cool to talk to.
Bridget took the red velvet, it warmed her just looking at it. She sliced the calico and spread it out and laid her velvet the colour of blood on top and pinned it down. A thin yellow fabric would do for lettering. Using black magic marker, she drew a fat oblong rounded at the ends like a cake that had been squashed. They’d stolen common land and put a fence around it, the men, and they’d never asked the people if they could do that. They’d shut the common people out and taken it for themselves and put missiles there that nobody but Thatcher and Reagan wanted and now they weren’t listening when thousands of women said no. She drew the big amoeba squashed cake stolen land airbase and inside it she made marks where the missiles would go and where the watchtower sat watching over them as if protecting the missiles was more important than protecting the people. And above it she wrote in big fat letters arching over the rounded top, We Don’t Want Your Cruise and underneath like a smile she wrote, Embrace The Base and as an afterthought she added, Dec ’82 in case her banner made it onto the news, and she became part of history. She said that to the spikey blonde woman who came and stood beside her.
The woman said “Herstory. Not His. Hers.”
Bridget liked that.
The fire had been built up and it was crowded and warm by the time Bridget emerged with Cerise whose accent was Spanish. The riot at the fence had stopped, the fence was still up and tea and soup were being passed around. Bridget found a log to sit on. She pulled her sleeping bag out of her satchel and wrapped it about her shoulders. Cerise sat beside her. Bridget watched her roll a cigarette. The paper was brown. When Cerise licked it Bridget caught the flash of firelight on a stud in her tongue. Cerise put the cigarette between her lips, searched in the pockets of her coat for a light, couldn’t find one and picked a burning stick out from the fire.
“You want some?” She exhaled and held the roll up to Bridget.
Bridget didn’t smoke but she didn’t see why she shouldn’t start. Everyone else was doing it. She took the cigarette and dragged on it like she’d seen her mum do a thousand times only her mum’s cigarettes were straight and white and this one was crumpled and soggy and tasted of Liquorice All Sorts and Cerise had dirty fingers and Bridget wanted her to like her more than anything she’d ever wanted in her life.
“Do you live here?” It stained her lips with bitterness and sweet. She handed it back. She wasn’t sure if she’d done it right.
“I have a bender.” Cerise pointed towards the woods.
Bridget was pretty sure she didn’t mean she had a gay man in the woods, but that word she’d only ever heard shouted in the playground as an insult so she said, just be safe and to not get it wrong, “I’ll probably stay up all night.”
“No,” Cerise shook her head. “It gets cold. You share with me. I’ll show you.”
Bridget was too scared to say anything else in case the coolest woman she’d ever met, cooler even than Muriel Gray, changed her mind. She followed her away from the fire into the woods. Cerise held her arm so she didn’t trip. At a dome like a half egg dropped on the ground, big enough to crawl into with white plastic over it that flapped, Cerise bent low and crawled in, turned around, sat down and kicked off her boots. She lit a candle and the inside appeared like magic, a nest of sleeping bags and clothes in a heap for a pillow, a tin mug pushed up against the woollen walls, sticks rising from the ground, meeting in arches over their heads.
“Come,” she beckoned Bridget to do the same, arrange herself without getting mud inside. Bridget dropped to her knees and twisted and sat in the doorway, the tarpaulin flap held up by Cerise. She kicked off her trainers which were wet with mud, and shuffled in to the musty, warm space that already she wanted to curl up in, lie down in, where she’d be happy to sleep for the rest of her life and never watch TV again.
“It’s because of the bent sticks,” said Cerise, though Bridget hadn’t asked, and she was beautiful, and her piercings glistened in the candlelight. She got into her own sleeping bag, fully clothed apart from her boots, she had her feet to the door but Bridget wanted to keep the tarpaulin open, lie with her head to the sharp night air, look out into the dark and listen to the voices that flowed in sharps and flats from the campfire across the way. She got into her own sleeping bag, fully clothed too, because why would you take your clothes off here, put on pyjamas like at home, clean your teeth, get asked by your mum have you brushed your hair, there was no way. No sound of her parents moving about below, of the TV going off, of their footsteps on the stairs, her dad’s teeth brushing routine, their murmuring voices muffled through the wall. No orange glow of streetlights through a window and the occasional car. Only starlight and cold, the forest and the trail of smoke from Cerise’s cigarette as she smoked the last of it and threw it past Bridget’s head, the flicker and die of an ember on muddy ground, the wind that made the tarpaulin flap, the wild of being outside and feet passing by she didn’t know, other women going to bed and beyond it all, beyond the fire a flicker of the lights that never went off, the white and shouting lights of the base through a darkness that deserved better, a squaddie marching the fence, the bark of a dog, banners shaking on chain link and the swinging beam of a headlight turning over the camp. Bridget had almost dozed off when it woke her, a beam of light across her face as a car swung into a parking space, an engine whining, one headlight shining and cut, a slam of a door, and a voice she knew.
"Only starlight and cold, the forest and the trail of smoke from Cerise’s cigarette as she smoked the last of it and threw it past Bridget’s head, the flicker and die of an ember on muddy ground, the wind that made the tarpaulin flap, the wild of being outside and feet passing by she didn’t know, other women going to bed and beyond it all, beyond the fire a flicker of the lights that never went off... " This whole sentence is just exquisite, Eleanor. What's also wonderful ls the way it is indicating a shift in Bridget's soul as the influence of the camp and Cerise take hold.
The way you ramp up tension in fiction always gets me!