The Summer We Turned Green

by William Sutcliffe

  ‘We can try,’ says Sky.

  ‘What should we say?’ I ask.

  ‘You don’t need me to tell you. I couldn’t have done better than you two did on the news yesterday. Just do that again.’

  I look at Sky. She nods.

  ‘OK,’ we both say.

  ‘So shall I set it up?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Great. And remember – think about what you’re going to say, and say it. Don’t let the guy shut you up or change the subject or make it sound like he’s got the better of you. Don’t be patient and don’t waste time trying to be polite, because he’s coming here to try and play you. You have to get in first and beat him at his own game. You might have less than a minute. Say your piece straight away and speak from the heart.’

  We spend the afternoon sketching out our attempt at a speech, pulling in everything we know, putting it down on paper, then trying to refine it and distil it to a few short points. The only disagreement is over who is going to speak. I think it should be Sky because she did so well last time, Sky says it should be me because she isn’t confident with public speaking and thinks she’ll mess it up. We end up agreeing to divide it in two and to memorise our own sections. Getting the precise words is less important, we decide, than following Clyde’s advice to speak from the heart.

  * * *

  Towards the end of the day, a bustle of activity at the foot of the tree lets us know that something is up. An area is cleared in the press of bodies, and a gaggle of photographers and cameramen appears at one edge of the empty space, which now has a branching cluster of microphones in the middle of it.

  I text Clyde to ask what’s going on. He calls back to check that we’re ready, and tells us that the minister is about to arrive. ‘Don’t move till I say though,’ he says. ‘I’ll text you when it’s time. Make him wait. It’s for you to make an entrance.’

  After a while, a large black car surrounded by police on motorbikes becomes visible, inching through the dense crowd, which reluctantly parts to let it through.

  ‘Ready?’ I say to Sky.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘You?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I can’t believe I’ve spent my whole life surrounded by protesters, living with people who have dedicated their lives to shouting from the sidelines, now finally the cameras and microphones are pointing in our direction, and people out there finally want to know what we think, and it’s up to me to speak up. Why me?’

  ‘You’re better qualified than me. Why should it be me?’

  ‘We mustn’t let them down.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My mum. Clyde. Aidan. Everyone.’

  I look into Sky’s eyes and see something I’ve never seen there before: fear.

  ‘You won’t let anyone down,’ I say. ‘You’re good at this. And maybe it’s not a coincidence that it’s you and me people are listening to, because this is our lives. It’s not just theory for us – we’re going to have to live with this. Look at all the people down there. They’re young.’

  The ping of an incoming text message rises from my phone. It’s Clyde, telling us it’s time to come down.

  ‘You want to go first?’ I say.

  She looks at me, and now something different is in her eyes – a steely glint of total concentration and focus.

  ‘OK,’ says Sky, then she slides herself off the edge of the platform and begins to descend the rope ladder. With every step she takes, the cheers from the crowd get louder and louder.

  I reach the ground seconds behind Sky, and the minister is right there in his immaculate suit, waiting for us with a smug grin on his rosy, well-fed face. The only crack in his facade of smarm is a slight twitch of the nostrils as we approach. It’s been a while since we washed.

  The crowd around us hushes, and I can sense them craning in to listen.

  The minister extends an arm to us, offering a handshake, and I’m about to give him my hand when Sky steps ahead of me and says, ‘We don’t want to shake your hand, because shaking hands with someone is a sign of mutual respect, and we feel that you’re only pretending to respect us, and we find that insulting. In fact, we think you’re only pretending to respect our whole generation. We want a future. We want the opportunities that you have had, and if the planet heats up by two degrees, that isn’t going to happen. Every scientist who isn’t a puppet working for oil companies agrees on this, and the only way to achieve this is to stop burning fossil fuels right now. To change everything NOW.’

  No niceties, then. Sky’s clearly not in the mood for chit-chat and has immediately come out with the first chunk of our prepared speech, plus a little no-handshake improvisation.

  The minister is no longer smiling, and he’s momentarily lost for words. Flashbulbs are popping around us, and I feel as if I can hear a shocked but thrilled silence pulsating out of the listening journalists. It’s up to me to say the next bit, and Sky jabs an elbow into me, nudging me into action.

  My tongue feels dry, as if glued to the roof of my mouth, and for a moment I’m worried that I won’t be able to get any words out. My heart is racing as if I’m in the middle of a sprint, but my breath feels strangely slow – out of sync with my galloping pulse. I cough, rub my face to try and force some normal sensation back into it, and push out the first few words. ‘There’s a tipping point coming in ten years,’ I say, weirdly loud, but now I’ve started, I immediately feel a sense of purpose and control descending, a total determination – powered by the horror of the facts Sky has taught me – not to mess up this fleeting, unrepeatable opportunity. ‘When we reach our early twenties, melting permafrost will start to release so much methane that global warming will be irreversible. After that, nothing can be done. Nothing. The reason why there are so many people here today – young people – is because we need changes to be made immediately, but we have no power. You have power. You are in charge. So do something. Don’t just stand here shaking hands with two children and making empty promises. Do something. Use your power to force big business to change its priorities in a way that makes ordinary people change how they live.’

  That’s the end of our speech. We stare at the minster, giving him the evils, and he looks back at us, bewildered, like an actor who’s walked on stage and found himself in the wrong play. This is clearly not how he expected our conversation to go.

  ‘Well … those are very interesting points, and … you make them very powerfully. This is an important debate,’ he says.

  ‘It’s not a debate. That’s the whole point,’ says Sky. ‘There’s nothing more to discuss. Something has to be done.’

  ‘Yes. Quite. We are working as hard as we can towards our commitments …’

  ‘It’s not enough. How long do you think we’ve got?’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘The human race – if we carry on doing nothing to save ourselves. Fifty years? Eighty?’

  ‘I don’t think we can put a number on it.’

  ‘I think you should. And I think you should ask yourself if you’re happy with that number. And with what happens when that year arrives. Which it will.’

  Sensing that the minister is on the brink of making a run for it, I decide that I should speak up and make a final point. ‘Only one generation has the chance to stop this catastrophe, and it’s not ours. It’s yours. If you do nothing, for us it will be too late.’

  ‘Well, er … thank you for your time,’ he says, ‘and … it’s wonderful to have you back on terra firma, so to speak, and, good luck with … er … thank you.’

  Within seconds, he’s surrounded by his team of suit-wearing handlers and is swiftly ushered to the waiting car.

  He and his team drive away, and the next thing I know, the street has erupted in cheers, and I’m being hugged by Mum and Dad and Rose, and after that by a stream of people I’ve never even met.

  After my tranquil, quiet days up in the treehouse, this heady whirl of raucous congratulation soon feels like too much. Nobody se
ems to notice when I slip away, head home and run myself a deep hot bath.

  For a moment I wonder if this makes me a hypocrite, using all this hot water straight after making that speech, but … well, you have to wash. And I really do need a bath.

  I climb in, and through the half-open window I hear the now familiar sound of a crowd walking the line between anger and celebration.

  Even with my head underwater, I can still hear it.

  Two Years Later

  If you are asking people to change everything, maybe you are asking too much. Maybe that’s an impossible request, even when it’s our only hope. We got people’s attention for a short while – which is as long a time anyone’s attention seems to settle on anything, however important – then things carried on as before. Or seemed to, for a few months.

  But then, the following year, everything did change, though not in a way anyone wanted or expected. Of course, you all know that story – the virus, the lockdowns, the strange aftermath.

  Building work stopped on the airport expansion when everything else stopped, but when the world began to go back to normal, construction didn’t restart. Months crept by, and the bulldozers at the site stood there, unused, then were eventually taken away. Nobody seemed to know what was happening.

  Then, a year and a half after the protest ended, it was quietly announced that in the light of changed economic circumstances and shrinkage of the aviation industry, the project had been cancelled.

  This didn’t exactly feel like a victory, but we had won. The first objective of the protest was to stop construction of a runway, and even though the commune had been smashed, its goal was now achieved.

  The other objective – making more people think and care about climate breakdown – had its moment and was pretty successful in its way, but the world moves on, and I had to move on too.

  After our confrontation with the government minister at the foot of our tree, which was watched hundreds of thousands of times all over the world, Rose handed over the treehouse protest Instagram account to me and Sky. We had a huge number of followers, but Sky wasn’t interested in that side of things. I kept it going for a while, but participating in that whole world made me feel like a fake, as if I was claiming to be some kind of hero, which I know I’m not, so even though I continued to look at it, I stopped posting.

  People from the commune were now scattered all over, most of them still in protest camps, keeping up the fight. Clyde was living up a tree in Germany, in the path of a planned autobahn.

  Sky had moved down to Devon with her mum, who after the end of the protest decided to settle in one place and train as a nurse. Sky began going to school, which she was initially ecstatic about, but school is still school, and by the sound of her messages the ecstasy did fade after a while.

  We kept in touch by text, but over the months the gaps between messages got longer and longer. The last I heard from her was on my birthday. I don’t know how she knew the date, but on the day itself a parcel arrived containing her drawing of the view from the treehouse, mounted and framed, with no message or card, just ‘S xxx’ written on the back.

  It went straight up on my wall, positioned where I can see it when I’m lying in bed. And it’s still there today.

  Just when it’s beginning to feel as if those crazy few weeks didn’t really happen, one evening, as we’re clearing away dinner, Mum’s phone rings. It’s Clyde. She puts him on speaker, and he congratulates us on the good news about the airport, then goes on to propose a street party to mark the success of the campaign, timed for the second anniversary of the day it all came to a head, inviting everyone who was involved. ‘Even if we’re still a long way from winning the war,’ he says, ‘it’s important to remember that we have won a few battles. Sometimes you have to celebrate.’

  ‘I’m in,’ replies Mum immediately. ‘A hundred per cent.’

  ‘Me too,’ adds Rose, who’s home for the whole summer, working various jobs to try and keep her student loan down.

  When Mum hangs up from Clyde, Rose whoops with delight and begins to rattle off the names of all the people she’s most excited about seeing again. She doesn’t mention Space.

  So I do.

  ‘Ughh! Don’t remind me. What was I thinking? Just the sound of his name makes me feel clammy.’

  ‘Ah, first love!’ says Mum.

  ‘Not all it’s cracked up to be,’ replies Rose.

  ‘Even with a maestro of the drums?’ I say.

  ‘Specially with a maestro of the drums,’ she replies, tossing a soggy dishcloth at my face.

  Mum leaves it to me to invite Dad, but instead of calling him I wait till it’s one of my weekends at his flat. At first I didn’t like going there. It felt strange – boxy and empty – with hardly any furniture and a slightly eerie atmosphere of false cheerfulness. Whenever I walked in, the place always smelt like it had just been sprayed with nostril-burning quantities of air freshener, and the chemical smell of fake lemons somehow reminded me of his mood: plastic happy masking something bad.

  After the protest ended and he lost his job, he was edgy and off-kilter for quite a long time, constantly trying to prove to me that everything was now better than it used to be, even though it obviously wasn’t. After a while he got a new job, bought some furniture for his flat and, more importantly, stopped pretending that everything was always great. He began to seem like a new person – a hybrid of the old downbeat him combined with a few elements of the crazy commune version. I can’t say I exactly prefer this new Dad, but at least it feels real, and it’s certainly better than the I’M-REALLY-HAPPY personality that took over when he first moved into his weird flat.

  These days, my weekends with Dad aren’t so bad. I wish he still lived with us, but you can’t have everything, and if I’m ever feeling hard done by I remind myself of Sky never even meeting her father, and how things could be a whole lot tougher.

  Dad and I still visit Grandpa together, which is always a reassuring reminder that even when life changes so fast that it feels impossible to keep up, some things never change at all. Grandpa and I have almost the same conversation every fortnight, and still play the same card games, and he and Dad go through their familiar repertoire of old arguments as if it’s a playlist of favourite songs.

  When I tell Dad about the party he’s ridiculously pleased.

  ‘So you’ll come?’ I say.

  ‘Of course! Wouldn’t miss it for the world. And … Mum’s happy for me to be there?’

  ‘She told me to invite you, so …’

  ‘That’s good. That’s good.’

  ‘And Rose will be there,’ I add.

  ‘So, all of us in one place, then,’ he says wistfully.

  ‘Plus fifty or so other people, yeah.’

  On the day of the party, Rose sets up a sound system to blast out of her bedroom window on to the street, while Mum and I, along with Helena, Callum, Laurence, the Guptas and a couple of other families, set out a row of tables along the pavement and load them up with sandwiches, crisps, cakes, biscuits and drinks.

  It feels odd that Callum joins in with the party preparations. He’s never once mentioned to me his failed attempt to climb the rope ladder, or his role in the scheme to get food up to the treehouse. He pretends the whole thing never happened, but when we bump into each other on the street, he is a shade more polite than he used to be. You might almost say he talks to me as an equal.

  It’s one of those scorching summer days when you know there’s no chance of even a single cloud, and everyone seems to be in a good mood. With nobody in particular hosting the party, and nothing resembling an actual invitation ever having been written, no one knows who will be coming, or when, or how long they’ll stay, which Helena seems particularly irritated by, but she also manages to appear relatively cheerful at the same time, in her own tense way.

  Mid-afternoon, the first guest arrives. It’s Space. I look around, but there’s no sign of Rose. Whether or not she’s seen him coming and
has run away, I’m not sure.

  He greets me with a ‘Yo!’ and a complicated handshake, which I get wrong.

  ‘It’s Mr Hero-of-the-Hour,’ he says, maybe sarcastically, maybe not. Or perhaps he just can’t remember my name.

  ‘The drum master himself,’ I reply, aiming to match his 50/50 sarcasm.

  ‘Didn’t bring it today, unfortunately,’ he says.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ I reply, pushing up the sarcasm to around 80/20, but he doesn’t appear to notice.

  ‘Rose around?’ he asks.

  ‘Yeah, somewhere,’ I say. ‘Back in a minute, I expect.’

  He drifts away to make an early start on the snacks, and I immediately text Rose a warning. She doesn’t make an appearance for another half hour, by which time there are enough other arrivals for her to melt into the background.

  Everyone greets me fondly, even people who I don’t think I’ve ever seen before in my life, but the only one who sticks around to talk to me is Clyde. He’s keen to know how I settled back into school after my moment of fame. I tell him it was exciting at first, then awkward for a while when some people turned against me, as if I needed cutting down to size for some reason, and eventually everything just went back to normal.

  He tells me he’s pleased to see me looking so well, then leans in, places a hand on my arm, gives me one of his intense stares, and says he’s proud of what I did. Proud and impressed. ‘You made a difference,’ he says.

  I know I ought to thank him, but I feel momentarily lost for words, so I just look at him, and he looks at me, and I realise I don’t need to say it. My thanks, and my gratitude for the way he inspired and guided me, are right there in the air between us, and nothing needs to be said.