Guy Fawkes Day
Page 88
Chapter 42: Victoria Street: November 1, 11:35 a.m.
The cool, wet westerly gusting along Victoria Street tasted sweet on Sophie's cheeks after the stale air and bright neons of New Scotland Yard.
She checked her watch: just after 11:30. She had been inside less than twelve hours, but it took far less than that to change a life; hers had been shattered then brutally rearranged by clumsy hands.
‘I think I'll just get the bus straight back to Oxford, Mum,’ she said, slipping her shoulder out of Alison Palmer's tutelary clasp.
‘Don't do that, Sophie,’ Alison pleaded. ‘Come back home, at least for tonight. There's so much I want to tell you.’
‘No, Mum. I really don’t want to hear any more right now.’
The emphatic tone was enough to make Alison Palmer back away. Sophie sighed and continued a little less sternly,
‘I'm just not ready for that now, Mum. I need to think things over by myself first and try to get my life back to some semblance of normality.’
‘Please, Sophie, don't let this come between us. We’ve always shared everything.’
‘Tell me, Mum, do you still love him?’ Sophie interrupted.
‘Max?’
‘No. You know who I mean.’
It was her mother's turn to cast her eyes downwards disconsolately.
‘That was twenty years ago and the rest, Sophie. I had always thought Robbie was dead till he turned up out of the blue two nights ago with a letter for you.’
‘You haven't answered the question, Mum.’
Their eyes finally met and Sophie saw in her mother’s the same pain and confusion she was saving for her own private digestion later on.
‘All I know, Sophie, is that the Robbie I used to know and love would never have sought to avenge himself against me, whatever I had done, especially not by taking advantage of my own daughter.’
‘Maybe,’ Sophie shrugged, growing increasingly irritated again. ‘But you still owe him; he let us all go free. So it's up to you to get him out of Parliament alive.’
‘How can I do that?’ Alison protested indignantly.
‘The same way you got me released. Speak to that so-called father of mine. I'd rather not have to do that again myself. Now goodbye, Mum,’ she said, looking curtly at her watch. ‘I'm going to walk down to the coach station and take the bus from there.’
Walking along Victoria Street against a stiff breeze filled Sophie with a strange exhilaration. All the banal ingredients of daily life suddenly assumed a vitality that only an initiate after the grand revelation could understand: the soft drizzle against her forehead; the expressions on the faces of the pedestrians she passed; the flap of a pigeon bathing in a kerbside puddle.
But just before Victoria Bus Station, the shrill drone of whistles and the thump of a loud drumbeat instantly destroyed her meditative calm. The chorus of chants and shouting came next, followed by the sight of long lines of riot police just ahead, their backs blocking access to Victoria Station. Behind the riot shields, a large melee of protesters milled amorphously, brandishing placards and fists into the air.
Sophie instinctively shunned contact with the blue uniforms, turning left instead into Artillery Row. There too, a line of riot police barred her way, but there appeared to be no protesters ahead of them.
‘Where are you heading, Miss?’ a crash-helmeted officer asked gruffly.
‘To the Oxford coaches the other side of the station.’
‘Then if I were you, I would go round the back of the station on the Belgravia side. This lot could turn violent any second.’
The policeman's shield, truncheon and body armour sent Sophie hurrying away. After what she had just been through, it was the police, not the demonstrators, who filled her with panic.
The detour was long, the streets eerily quiet, and when she reached the north side of the station she found herself thrust into the thick of the demonstration.
It was more of a carnival than a confrontation. Young people of her own age, perhaps the majority of them women, were dancing ecstatically to the drummers’ feisty rhythms; whistles added their own roisterous revelry to an ad hoc orchestra of hotchpotch instruments.
The spontaneous joy all around her filled Sophie with an impulsive desire to join the dancers and she soon found herself gyrating wildly with a group of young men and women her own age. A sea of placards bobbed all around, but it was only when Sophie noticed Omar's picture being ecstatically hoisted skywards by almost every other hand that she realized what the demonstration was all about.
Other banners proclaimed November 5th: Save the Planet Day.
For the first time, Omar's messages seemed to make sense, but it was not so much an intellectual conversion as the warnings of her own experience. If the planet really was ruled and controlled by men such as Marcus's father, James McPherson and her new-found biological father, then she wanted to join Omar's crusade. The others could rot in the hell they were bent on creating.