Middle England

by Jonathan Coe

  What next? She did not want to stay here, stuck inside all afternoon. She wanted to get out and see her friends and find out what she had been missing during those three monotonous weeks under the Tuscan sun. There was no need to tell her parents what she was doing. Her father had already gone to his study and was working on a piece about the riots, and her mother was in the downstairs sitting room, looking through the mail. Marisol, their Filipina housekeeper, was upstairs doing the unpacking and sorting the washing, and none of them would be looking at any of the video monitors on the security system. Within a few minutes Coriander was outside, through the garden gateway and walking down Flood Street towards the shops and the crowds. She took out her BlackBerry and, without slowing down, without looking around to see where she was going, she tapped out a quick message to her friend Grace: ‘See you at Starbucks in 5?’ But Grace came straight back with ‘Soz am in Turkey’ – which was news to Coriander, as she had been messaging with her only the day before (but then Grace’s family often took foreign trips on a sudden whim). So she went to the coffee shop by herself and ordered a frappuccino and sat at a table for a while, messaging some of her other friends. Two of them were just up the road, shopping in Brandy Melville, and they suggested meeting for frozen yoghurt in the new place up by Sloane Square, but Coriander was bored by the idea. For some time, in fact, she had been bored to death with this part of London and the crappy social possibilities it offered. Sometimes – not so often these days, it was true – her father tried to persuade her that she was lucky to be living next to the King’s Road. He would tell her stories of the bands who used to hang out here in the 1960s, the writers, beatniks and hippies who used to drink in the Chelsea Potter, the coming of punk and the opening of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s shop SEX at number 430. Coriander had heard these stories from Doug a hundred times and she had come to the conclusion that they meant as little to him as they did to her. He hated Chelsea too, was angry with himself for ending up living there, and repeated these consoling fables simply to rationalize his own bad choices and compromises. For his daughter, they made no difference to the fact that nowadays this was a terminally uncool place to live, a hangout for spoiled little rich girls, and hideously monocultural to boot: you might hear a few different languages being spoken, as the billionaire Eurotrash swanned about from designer outlet to designer outlet, but there was no real diversity here, no variation in skin colour. Not like Hackney, not like Islington, not like North London. (Because that was one of the things that had made Coriander love Amy Winehouse so much. She was the voice of North London. Rowdy, seedy, cheap, cool, multicultural North London, home of Camden Market and Air Studios and Dingwalls Dancehall and the Hackney Empire and every other worthwhile thing that had ever come out of this overrated, self-satisfied city.)

  Sucking on her frappuccino, she flicked through a few dozen earlier messages until she found the one that had come through yesterday afternoon. Shit, if only they had been home by then, instead of dozing around the swimming pool like a bunch of zombies. It sounded like it would have been amazing. The message was from AJ, a young and handsome black boy she’d met at a club in Hackney a few weeks earlier. Not that he’d written it himself. He was forwarding it from somewhere. It said:

  Everyone from all sides of London meet up at the heart of London (central) OXFORD CIRCUS!!, Bare SHOPS are gonna get smashed up so come get some (free stuff!!!) fuck the feds we will send them back with OUR riot! >:O

  Dead the ends and colour war for now so if you see a brother … SALUT! if you see a fed … SHOOT!

  We need more MAN than feds so Everyone run wild, all of london and others are invited! Pure terror and havoc & Free stuff … just smash shop windows and cart out da stuff u want! Oxford Circus!!!!! 9pm, we don’t need pussyhole feds to run the streets and put our brothers in jail so tool up, its a free world so have fun running wild shopping ;)

  Oxford Circus 9pm if u see a fed stopping a brother JUMP IN!!! EVERYONE JUMP IN niggers will be lurking about, all blacked out we strike at 9:15pm-9:30pm, make sure ur there see you there. REMEMBA DA LOCATION!!! OXFORD CIRCUS!!!

  MUST REBROADCAST TO ALL CONTACTS!!!

  ‘Pure terror and havoc.’ Coriander liked the sound of that, very much indeed.

  *

  She may have missed out on the Oxford Circus experience, but all was not lost. ‘Things are starting to kick off on Mare Street,’ AJ now told her via BBM. She jumped on the tube and by the time she reached Hackney and hooked up with him, about forty-five minutes later, she could see what he meant. There was a big white lorry stuck at the junction of Mare Street and another road, blocking traffic. A crowd, mainly young people, mainly black, was beginning to gather but it was a shapeless, disorganized mass of people compared to the row of police that was ranged up against it, riot shields at the ready. At the periphery of the crowd there were passers-by and spectators, circling around the edges, some of them trying to get to the shops or to get home, many of them using their phones and cameras to take videos of the building confrontation. Nothing much was happening yet, apart from isolated scuffles between the front-line policemen and a handful of guys who were stepping forward to argue with them, but the air was buzzing with the possibility of violence. To Coriander it was thrilling but at the same time she was scared and she kept close to AJ, clinging on to him and taking comfort in the muscular tautness of his upper arm through the soft texture of his hoodie.

  Soon things began to get more lively. Someone forced open the doors of the lorry and discovered that it was carrying a load of wood. People started to grab the wood – planks, broomsticks, old window-frames, all sorts of stuff – and then they were passing it out through the crowd. Coriander took one and realized that what she had been handed was a makeshift weapon. Seconds later, she heard the sound of breaking glass behind her and looked round to see that a couple of men were smashing up the windows of the bus which had been parked and abandoned when the traffic came to a halt. The sound sent a rush of adrenalin through her and the next thing she knew – without stopping to think about it – she was running over to the bus as well, and starting to hammer on the bodywork with her little stick, which was about the size of a child’s cricket bat. She was mortified when it barely dented the bodywork and she could hear people laughing at her.

  ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ AJ said, catching up with her and grabbing her by the arm. ‘Do you want to get arrested or something?’ When she didn’t answer, he said, ‘Come on, let’s back off. If we’re going to watch this we need to find somewhere a bit safer.’

  They withdrew to a side street and stood on the corner with the main road, watching the scuffles and taking videos. Coriander had discreetly dropped her stick, but she noticed that someone else walking past her had strapped the blade of a Stanley knife to his.

  ‘Fuck,’ she said, ‘look at that.’

  AJ said, ‘There’s some dangerous people here.’

  Coriander said: ‘Do you know him?’

  AJ said, ‘No. I thought some of my friends were coming but I can’t see them yet. We’ll be fine. Just watch yourself.’

  Behind them in the street, an argument was breaking out. Two Rastas were trying to get down the street back to their flat but the police weren’t letting them through. The police had Alsatians on chains and the dogs were lunging at the two men. There was a chaos of noises: the shouts of the policemen telling the guys to back off, the shouts of the Rastas in protest, the incessant, deafening barking of the dogs, the scream of sirens going past in the background and the confused sounds of struggle from Mare Street, where the bulk of the crowd was now being pushed back down the road by the rows of riot police. AJ and Coriander joined the group of people watching the stand-off between the police and the Rastas. A white journalist was filming the argument on his video camera. One of the men was shouting that a dog had been set on him and had bitten him while his hands were in the air, another was shouting at a police officer that ‘We are all equ
al – tell me to move, then tell the white man to move.’ The dog was straining and yapping at him while he shouted, ‘You hit my friend with a truncheon, man, you hit him with a fucking truncheon.’ Finally the policemen let them through but the one who’d been bitten kept saying to anyone who would listen: ‘I’m not violent, right? But that’s how they’re dealing with us down here. They come out on our streets and tell us what to do. What do they fucking expect? Half the people round here have got a story to tell about the fucking police …’

  And so it went on. They ducked back on to Mare Street and found that as well as the wood from the lorry, protestors had now armed themselves with bottles looted from the local Tesco. ‘Grab some missiles, bro, just grab some missiles!’ a man shouted at them. A white guy pushed his way to the front of the crowd, stood in front of the line of police, then turned his back, bent over and mooned at them. Coriander could see the cleft of his white buttocks reflected in one of the riot shields. The crowd laughed and cheered and applauded, and the gesture seemed to embolden them to start throwing their missiles. In return, the police surged forward, pushing them further back down the street. As they began to retreat, they started to pick up rubbish bins from the pavement and either hurl them back at the police or set them on fire. Coriander found herself being pushed and jostled, squashed between strangers, staggering, almost tripping and falling. Soon they were in another street and this one contained a designer outlet called Carhartt and its alarm system was blaring madly and people seemed to be running into it and running out again with whatever they could grab – Battle Parkas and bomber jackets and pullovers and trench coats. Coriander ran in with the others and in a frenzy, without thinking about it, she grabbed two Newton vest liners in rover green, but when she got out into the street again AJ was waiting for her and he just said, ‘Put those back,’ so she went back inside and chucked them on the floor and then ran back out to follow him.

  They ran past a Mazda MX5 which had been set on fire. There was an amazing energy in the air and what Coriander could taste at the back of her throat was not the smoke from the burning car but the sharp, invigorating taste of anger. The rioters were angry at the killing of Mark Duggan four days before and the years of unfair treatment from the police, and the police were angry at the lawlessness of the protest and the violence they were being threatened with. Years of anger, years of bitter, rancorous, resentful coexistence were rising up and coming to the boil. It was fantastic. ‘It’s not about the protesting side of it,’ AJ’s friend Jackson would tell her later as they recovered in London Fields, drinking Strongbow and smoking weed. ‘It’s about showing the five O that they can’t run around taking the piss out of the young man and get away with it. So we’re going to smash up the area and let them know the next time they do that kind of shit this is what’s going to happen. Fuck 2012 and the Olympic Games. If this is what it boils down to then we’ll fuck that up too. You can’t go around hunting the young man like that. I walk down the street, all the police tell them how they’ve got drugs on them, this that and the other. We are going to search you. If we don’t search you now we’re going to take you down to the station and strip-search you. They take the piss. So this is what’s going to happen and I’m glad it’s happened. I’m not glad for the youth that got killed. But the police have to get what is coming to them because they take the piss. Liberties.’

  *

  It was after ten o’clock that night when Coriander came home. Her mother was already in bed and her brother was playing some game on his Xbox but she felt like talking to someone so she went to find her dad. Doug was at his desk, still working on his article.

  ‘Hey, Dad,’ she said.

  ‘Hey there,’ he said, leaning back in his swivel chair, putting his hands behind his head and stretching.

  ‘What are you writing about?’

  ‘I’m trying to do a think piece about the riots. It’s not really working.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I suppose I don’t really know what I think.’

  ‘Can I have a read?’

  ‘Sure.’

  He went to make himself a coffee while Coriander sat at his desk and scrolled through the piece. When he came back, mug in hand, he asked:

  ‘So, what do you think?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ she said.

  ‘Fine?’

  ‘It’s just …’ She tossed out the words with the carelessness that only a fourteen-year-old girl could muster. ‘Well, I suppose it’s just the sort of piece you’d expect, from someone who lives the life you do.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said, horrified.

  Coriander was already on her way out of the room. She paused in the doorway just long enough to say: ‘You need to get out more.’

  Shit, he thought: even my daughter can see it. He stood there for a few seconds, absorbing the hammer blow, while Coriander started climbing the two flights of stairs up to her bedroom. Then he called after her, ‘Where have you been all day, anyway?’ but there was no answer. Soon ‘Some Unholy War’ was pounding out of her speakers again, at top volume.

  10.

  The riots continued for several more days, and spread to other cities, including Birmingham.

  On Wednesday afternoon, with reports of a massive police presence on the streets, crowds of rioters in the city centre and random, more isolated groups of looters at loose on the outskirts, Ian was advised to cut short his afternoon class and send everyone home.

  Leaving the building on Colmore Row a few minutes later, he could immediately see that something unusual was happening. Hundreds of youths were out on the streets, many of them wearing hoodies and with their faces covered. They were matched by an equal or even greater number of police, wearing high-vis jackets and carrying riot shields. Although there were some white rioters and some black policemen, the impression of a racial confrontation was overwhelming. Ian’s route back to the flat lay a few minutes to the west but, drawn by a natural curiosity, he decided to stay there for a while, to wander among the crowd in an atmosphere which at the moment seemed to be more bored and aimless than incendiary.

  It was a hot August afternoon and, in the midst of all the unrest, many people were still trying to shop or simply get from one part of the city to another. Again, they were mainly young people, but there were also some elderly shoppers and some children out for the afternoon with their parents. Police with megaphones were shouting at everyone to clear the area, to make way, to get home for their own safety. Ian pushed through the meandering crowd and made his way down Cherry Street towards Corporation Street. Most of the policemen, he thought, looked young and nervous. He wondered whether his friend Simon Bishop was there somewhere. He and Simon had grown up together in Kernel Magna, and Simon was now a Level Two officer in the West Mercia police force’s Territorial Support Group. He was based in Wolverhampton and spent a lot of his time these days working behind a desk, but Ian knew that he had volunteered for enhanced riot training a couple of years earlier and there was a good chance that he would be deployed on the street on a day like this. Every copper in the West Midlands must have been brought into central Birmingham today, if the numbers were anything to go by.

  He stopped outside McDonald’s and spoke briefly to a young woman who was lingering uncertainly there with her teenage daughter.

  ‘I want to get down to New Street Station,’ she was saying, ‘but they’ve blocked it off.’

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a word with them. They’ve got to let us through.’

  He set off downhill, down Corporation Street towards New Street, easing his way through the crowds and stopping every so often to make sure that the woman and her daughter were able to keep up with him. Most people parted to let them through but there were some groups of young men (kids, really) who were uncompromisingly hostile, refusing to budge or even closing ranks to block their way. But the closest of the closed ranks, Ian found, was the line of policemen blocking their access to New Street.

>   ‘Sorry, nobody gets past this point,’ said a constable, holding his riot shield up in a threatening way to stop them from passing. ‘You want to get to the station, you walk the long way round. It’s for your own safety.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Ian. ‘There’s nothing happening.’

  ‘There will be soon, mate.’

  ‘Look – thank you,’ said the woman, taking her daughter’s hand and starting to lead her in the other direction, up towards the Town Hall, where the crowds were much thinner. ‘We’ll take our chances up this way, I think. Stay safe!’

  ‘You too,’ Ian called after them.

  As he raised his hand in a small gesture of farewell, a tall, muscular guy in grey hoodie and baggy trousers crashed into him, and when Ian shouted out ‘Oy!’ in protest, he turned and seemed to be on the point of saying something in reply, but then took stock of Ian’s height and build and thought better of it. As they sized each other up momentarily, Ian noticed that something was sticking out of the man’s pocket. It looked to him like the handle of an oversized hammer. The guy turned and started walking back up Corporation Street and instinctively Ian followed him. He kept him in his sights as they pushed through the increasingly restive crowds. Halfway up the street, the man stopped and joined up with a group of his friends. There were five or six of them. Ian stopped about ten yards away, keeping an eye on them but trying not to make it too obvious that he was watching. They didn’t seem to be up to much, just standing there chatting and laughing. From the bottom end of the street, down by the lines of policemen, he could hear chanting: some kind of anti-police slogan – he couldn’t make out the words – and then there was shouting, it sounded like a scuffle was breaking out. He craned his neck in that direction to see what was going on. The atmosphere on the streets was definitely changing now, he didn’t like the feel of it. The buried threat of violence was rising to the surface, and for the first time he was aware of the sound of a police helicopter circling overhead. Maybe the sensible thing to do would be to head home as quickly as possible. But just as he was thinking this, there was the sound of a loud, deadening thud and the smashing of glass. He turned back towards the sound and saw that the man he’d been following had taken out his hammer and was using it to smash the window of a sweet shop. The other men with him also had hammers or big pieces of wood, apart from one of them who had wrenched a rubbish bin away from its fixture on the pavement and was repeatedly hurling it at the window. The glass was strong and they hadn’t managed to smash through it yet. Afterwards, Ian would think, Why a sweet shop? Why a sweet shop of all things? – but for now, he didn’t stop to reflect. Something kicked in – not unrelated to some slow-burning anger at the way the guy had pushed passed him a few minutes earlier, maybe – and he forced his way through the circle of people who were standing and watching the mayhem – either enjoying it and cheering it on or rooted to the spot in silent horror – and he seized the guy by the arm and said something to him – something stupid like, ‘What the hell are you doing? This is just a sweet shop, for fuck’s sake’ – and that was the last thing he remembered for about two days.