She was asleep when the vigilantes came. It was a few nights later, time at Greenham already a blur of campfire and cold, tea and tactics. It was a game and it was a war and she had become part of it. No school, no homework, no helping her mum with the shopping, now it was Bridget who chopped vegetables and handed out bowls of soup. It was her friends who planned actions, military manoeuvres by an anarchist army instead of her dad going on about Russia. She hadn’t washed her face in days. She hadn’t cleaned her teeth since she’d arrived.
She’d been dreaming of Paul’s cat curled up on her pillow, his purring a gentle lullaby. But the purring got louder until it woke her, a rumbling growl that came with flashing lights swinging across the tarpaulin of her home and a shouting that sounded like a Roman army out of one of her history textbooks as if Boadicea met Caesar and they didn’t know who was going to win. Dawn and Cerise were already awake when she scrambled out, she could hear them roaring at the motorbikes which roared towards them; Bridget saw Dawn fall but something wet hit her face as she was running to help and she lost track of where Dawn was, and whatever it was, was in her eyes and mouth and she couldn’t stop the edge of another tent being picked up and ripped by a weapon in the man’s hand.
There was screaming and shouting, women running like rats, the lights of the base lit them fondly while torch lights sent hard arcs across the sky. There was crawling on her skin, dripping down her face, a smooth sludge in her hair, she looked for the campfire but the fire was gone, the comfort slashed to smoke by boots outstretched.
Dawn was beside her. “They’ve cut Maureen’s tent.” Their work done the motorbikes revved away, their headlamps picking up the trees, the road. Bridget tripped over a bucket, the taste in her mouth made her retch, she looked for water.
“They kicked the barrels over.” Cerise, a torch in her hand, she wasn’t blonde anymore, her face, her hair had become red.
“They’re not doing anything,” cried Bridget. She was talking about the police who stood idly by, their chatting swinging over the chaos and shouts, their casual huddle not moving.
“Grow up,” said Dawn.
“Get used to it,” said Cerise.
At Maureen’s tent they found her standing by the ruins. A machete had torn through it. It had missed her head by an inch.
“But that’s their job,” said Bridget.
“Not here, it isn’t,” said Dawn. She wiped her face with her t-shirt. “The first time I went to London I was walking down the street holding my girlfriend’s hand and this businessman in a suit with his wife all dolled up beside him spat at me and I shouted to this copper who was standing across the road, Did you see that, you saw that? and he said, Yeah, idiot missed your whore.”
But Bridget didn’t know where to put this information. She’d never been on the wrong side of anything except the rules of the playground and the girls who sniggered behind her back and the boys who ignored her. Her dad had always told her to trust men in uniform but the squaddies watched and the police watched and Bridget learnt that night what Dawn had tried to teach her at the shit pits, that state protection was favouritism and she wasn’t their favourite anymore.
It was maggots they’d thrown at her, she didn’t get to wash them till they got Maureen to find her car keys and drive them round to the standpipe where they washed in the dark that was never completely dark at Greenham, and Cerise’s hair became blonde and her face became clean once she washed off the blood and guts they’d thrown at her. Dawn’s blood was her own from getting smashed in the face by a hammer that had sent her to her knees while the man on the motorbike roared on. And the maggots took ages to wash off while not taking off all her clothes and some of the blood in Cerise’s hair got encrusted till she could take a proper shower days later at a place in Newbury, the home of a woman who supported what they did, and the bruises on Dawn’s face didn’t fade till the snowdrops were up.
They set up night watch after that night, there’d always be someone awake, they’d not catch them sleeping again, and Maureen moved her bed into her car and Bridget almost called her mum, almost walked into town to a phone box and said, I want to come home, but then they turned up anyway, her mum and dad and Paul, and tried to get her home for Christmas.
*
They took her to the Rokeby Arms and promised her a slap-up meal. They’d never said a thing about her missing the last week of school but for Christmas they played the Granny Reynolds card.
“This might be your grandmother’s last Christmas, Bridge,” said her dad, shovelling scampi.
“You cut your hair,” said her mum, reaching for an earlobe.
Bridget shrugged her off. “It’s always her last Christmas.”
“You want to get some disinfectant on that, love.”
“It’s fine.”
Paul sat opened mouthed, staring at his sister. He hadn’t closed it since seeing the camp.
Her mum dropped her hand to her lap. “Tell her, Ray. She can’t just waltz off.”
Bridget felt sorry she’d made her mum look so old, not as old as her dad, but older than she’d looked before. Her face was all dry and lined and she only ate a bit of Paul’s burger and sat there fiddling with the lid of her Rothmans cigarettes.
“You’re fifteen, Bridget. You’re under-age. We could be done by social services.”
“Then don’t tell them.” She didn’t know where her mouthiness had come from.
“You’ve got to finish school,” said her mum.
“I’m not going to.”
“But there’s your exams to think about.”
“How many O-Levels did you get, mum?”
“That’s the point,” said her dad. “Do you want to end up like your mum?”
“It was my A-Levels I missed out on,” said Janet.
“You’ve got to get your exams,” said her dad.
“Promise me you’ll not do anything dangerous,” said her mum.
“Like what?” said Paul.
“You’re not going through that fence,” said her mum.
“What if I do.”
“You’ll do as you’re told,” said her dad.
“Who says?” said Bridget.
“The law says,” said both her parents together.
“Fuck the law,” said Bridget and challenged them to call social services on her but they didn’t.
'“That’s the point,” said her dad. “Do you want to end up like your mum?”'
The scampi-shovelling father shows his true colours.
“Do you want to end up like your mum?” Ray?!!!
Aw the truths we’re blind to and then not. And the implications that remain out of our sight when the truth surfaces.
Love these characters, Eleanor. Fabulously flawed. Can’t wait to see what they do next