Troublemakers

by Catherine Barter

  I stand in the doorway and wait to be noticed. Nick is on the phone, slouched low in his office chair. On the computer screen in front of him there’s a spreadsheet.

  ‘I appreciate that,’ he’s saying. ‘But we’ve had a very long relationship with this supplier.’ He notices me and nods, holds up a finger to tell me to wait. He’s been back here doing business stuff for hours. His hair is sticking in all directions like he’s been running his hands through it all evening. I don’t know if this is intentional; you can’t always tell with him.

  ‘Teagan thinks Jacob Carlisle is attractive,’ I say, as soon as he hangs up.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Nick says, swivelling on his chair to face me. ‘If you’re attracted to the vacuous and corrupt and ideologically—’

  ‘Anyway, we want to go home.’

  ‘Tough.’

  ‘And you’ve run out of bananas.’

  ‘What do you care if—’

  ‘We can’t have milkshakes.’

  ‘Have something else.’

  ‘We can walk home. We’ll be fine.’

  ‘Nope,’ says Nick. ‘Not at night. Is your friend still here?’

  ‘Teagan?’

  ‘Zahra said you had another friend. A boy.’

  ‘A boy.’

  ‘Yes. A boy.’ His mobile phone starts vibrating on the desk. He picks it up and looks at it.

  ‘Is that Danny?’ I say. ‘I bet I’m psychic and that’s Danny.’

  He puts the phone down and lets it buzz away. ‘And being attractive isn’t a good reason to vote for somebody, OK?’

  ‘Well, I can’t vote so it doesn’t really—’

  ‘If you want to talk about politics, you know, we can talk about politics. I’m not going to tell you what to think.’

  ‘I know that,’ I say. ‘I don’t want to talk about politics. I want a banana milkshake.’

  ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘Bananas are political.’

  He reads the expression on my face and grins. The bananas are political lecture is not one of my favourites. ‘Anyway. Is your other friend still here?’

  ‘No. He had to go home.’

  ‘Does he live nearby?’

  ‘Yes. You could have come and said hello if you’re that interested. It’s just Ollie from school.’

  ‘I didn’t want to embarrass you.’

  ‘You wouldn’t embarrass me.’

  His phone buzzes again, once. Danny has probably left him a message.

  ‘We want to go home,’ I say.

  ‘Twenty minutes, kid,’ he says, turning back to his spreadsheet.

  ‘We can walk on our own.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do you think will happen?’

  He looks serious for a moment. ‘Nothing will happen,’ he says. ‘But just wait for me. This won’t take much longer.’

  ‘What are you doing? Is it boring?’

  ‘It’s extremely boring.’

  ‘OK,’ I say, ‘we’ll wait.’ As if I’m doing him a favour.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says.

  The reason they never want me to walk home from the coffee shop at night is that Nick got hit by a car once, walking home from work. He has a big scar on his head but you can hardly see it under his hair. It goes from his forehead to his ear. And his shoulder got smashed up so bad it’s now full of bits of metal holding it together. Nick’s parents stayed at the flat on the fold-out sofa and I didn’t see Danny for two days. Nick was OK, though.

  He was on the pavement. I think about that sometimes. The things that can happen when you’re just standing on the pavement, how vulnerable a person’s body is. All the different places it can break.

  ELEVEN

  It is weird, I guess, that Danny is so much older than me.

  There’s this one photo that I found in the storage locker last year, that now I’ve got stuck above my desk. In it our mum has big Eighties hair and she’s wearing sunglasses on top of her head, and Danny is a little boy standing next to her in a Scooby-Doo t-shirt and holding her hand.

  They may as well be two people from another planet for all they have to do with my life.

  When I was in primary school, somebody told me that when siblings are born really far apart it meant that one of them was an accident. When I asked Danny which one of us it was, he said it was both of us. He was the first accident, when she was nineteen, and I was the second, when she was thirty-nine. ‘But we don’t say accident,’ he said, dryly. ‘We say surprise.’ Then he changed the subject.

  ‘That’s two really big surprises,’ I said to Nick once while he was making dinner. It’s best to target Nick with this kind of stuff, and even better if you do it while he’s thinking about something else.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, looking up from chopping vegetables. ‘I think she could be a bit – disorganised.’

  By then I already knew that Danny’s father was some guy called Michael Sloane, who was nineteen as well, and when my mum was pregnant he pretended that he wasn’t the father, and then moved away, and no, Danny isn’t interested in trying to find him because he obviously didn’t care and so why should Danny. And my mum wouldn’t tell anybody, not even Danny, who it was when she got pregnant with me. Some random bloke. He probably didn’t care, either.

  It’s obvious that Nick really liked her. He says she was funny and she used to write letters to the newspaper. She worked in a university library and students used to send her thank-you cards at the end of the year. If it wasn’t for Danny I think Nick would talk about her a lot.

  ‘Did she ever come to the coffee shop?’ I asked him.

  ‘I didn’t have the coffee shop then,’ he said. ‘She’d have liked it, though. I think she’d have liked it a lot.’

  What do I know, but I think she’d have liked it as well.

  The next morning Ollie is standing in front of my locker with his headphones round his neck and when he sees me he says, ‘Teagan sent me a playlist of all this classical music.’ He is very pale and he looks exhausted and half-wired, scuffing his canvas shoes back and forth against the hall floor, tapping his fingers against his leg.

  Since yesterday somebody has put a bunch of police posters up and down the walls, all about what to do if you see something suspicious. Half of them have been defaced already. JUST RUN FOR IT, somebody has written on the poster nearest my locker, with a picture of a screaming face.

  I have an armful of textbooks but he’s blocking my locker so I just have to stand there clutching them all against my chest. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘She does that.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘She likes classical music. That’s her thing.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Have you listened to it?’

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  I gently shove him out of the way and fumble for my locker key, stack my books inside and then force it shut again with my shoulder, and as I’m doing this, Ollie says, ‘Hey, did you know there’s a video of your mum on the Internet?’

  I think I’ve misheard him. ‘What?’

  ‘There’s a video of your mum. On the Internet. Have you seen it?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I think it’s her. I dunno. It’s at that Greenham Common thing. I found it by accident. I mean, not by accident, but—’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I didn’t know if you knew about it,’ says Ollie. ‘I thought. You know, in case you didn’t. If you’re into family history or anything. It’s a video of a bunch of women at Greenham Common and one of them’s this lady with a baby and she says her name is Heather Kennedy.’

  The postcard from Greenham Common is black and white and for some reason even though I know the Eighties weren’t really all that long ago, in my head it’s still some long-lost historical time where they wouldn’t have had video cameras – and so what Ollie’s saying seems weird and impossible and also, also, I’ve never seen a video of my mother. Ever. Don’t know what her voice sounds like. So what he’s saying is
impossible.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I say. ‘How did you find it?’

  ‘On the Internet. I looked up your mum’s name but there wasn’t anything, and then I was just – I mean, I’m not trying to be weird or anything, I just got interested after you showed me that postcard – because I’ve been doing this project about Vietnam protests so I was thinking about – I mean, I know it’s not the same thing, but I was just interested—’

  ‘You can’t look her up on the Internet. There’s thousands of Heather Kennedys. There’s like, Heather Kennedy the porn star, Heather Kennedy the murder victim, the lawyer, the hairdresser.’

  ‘Yeah. I found the porn star as well.’

  ‘So how did you find—’

  ‘I looked up that other woman. Lynn Wallace. And I found loads about her – you have to use her full name, it’s Lynn Keller Wallace – and there’s a bunch of stuff, like recent stuff, but there’s also this old video of her from the Greenham thing, and then after I watched that, you know, like it suggests other videos to watch and so I was watching them and then on one of them—’

  ‘Ollie. That is weird.’

  He stops. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘It probably is. Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t you have any weird family stuff of your own to look up?’

  He shakes his head. ‘No. I keep trying to find my brother but I don’t think he really – I’ve sent him all these emails but – anyway, though.’

  It’s a weird tangent and it distracts me for a moment. The last I heard Ollie’s brother left home and nobody knows where he is. The school told the police after they busted him for dealing at school. He didn’t go to jail but he never came back.

  Everyone remembers him. This was all last summer, just before the end of term. He was really skinny and had a tattoo on his neck, and I never saw him speak to anyone, not even Ollie.

  Nick’s mum would say that he was a bad egg. I would agree. He was awful. It’s weird how people can be so different from their siblings when they’ve supposedly grown up in the exact same environment.

  This doesn’t count for me and Danny. We did not.

  Ollie takes his headphones from round his neck and starts to fiddle with them. They’re the kind that look expensive from a distance but up close you can see they’re really cheap. ‘I’m not trying to be weird,’ he says. ‘I just thought it was interesting. I thought you’d be interested. I just like looking stuff up. I like research. I’m not trying to be weird.’ Looking properly worried now, he says, ‘Sorry, Alena.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘You look pissed off.’

  ‘I’m not.’ I am, kind of, but I don’t know why.

  ‘So do you want to see the video?’

  I don’t answer.

  ‘Here.’ He holds his hand out. ‘Give me your phone. I’ll find it.’

  I pause, and then I dig my phone out of the front pocket of my bag and hand it to him. It’s second-hand, Nick’s brother’s old work phone, and the screen is cracked, but other than that it’s good. Ollie taps at the screen for a few seconds and then hands it back, with a video paused, ready to play. The title of the video is USAF Greenham, Women’s Peace Camp, ITN December 1982.

  ‘It’s only short,’ he says.

  I look at the screen. ‘Oh, this,’ I hear myself say. ‘I’ve seen this.’ It’s a lie and I don’t know why I say it but I see his shoulders drop a little bit. ‘I’ve seen this already,’ I say again. ‘I forgot.’

  ‘Oh.’ He nods and there’s a short, awkward pause. ‘She seems cool,’ he says, and I nod, a weird lump in my throat, wanting to press play but not wanting to do it with him there.

  ‘I have to go, Ollie. I’ve got maths.’ I put my phone in my pocket, but keep my hand wrapped round it.

  ‘OK,’ he says. ‘Yeah. OK. See you at lunch, maybe? And Teagan?’

  I nod, feeling bad for lying to him. ‘You should listen to her playlist,’ I tell him. ‘It’ll make her happy.’

  He nods, and looks like he’s about to say something else, but then I turn abruptly and walk away.

  I walk to the maths block but instead of going into the classroom, I go up to the second-floor toilets that no one ever uses, go into a stall and lock the door. I dig my headphones out of my bag and plug them into my phone and put them in my ears and lean against the stall door with my phone in my hand, and press play.

  The video is old and there’s a woman reporter with a plummy voice and an Eighties haircut, standing in mud. There’s a voiceover – ‘The protest continues and as Christmas approaches, some have left the camp to be with their families. Others remain and morale, they say, is still high—’ and there are shots of women with pots and pans and cooking stoves, and flags and banners planted in muddy grass. There’s blue skies and it looks freezing, bright and bitter.

  Then there’s a couple of interviews, where the reporter asks women their names and why they’re still there, and they all say good and smart and angry-sounding things, and then there’s a woman – frizzy hair and a big fringe and younger than the others, not that much older than me. And she’s holding a little kid: just a baby, really, a little boy who’s all wrapped up in knitwear. She’s wearing a green anorak and she’s saying, in a proper south London accent that I never knew she had, ‘My name’s Heather, my name’s Heather Kennedy,’ and she’s smiling, radiant.

  Plummy reporter says, ‘And what do you say to people who say it’s irresponsible to bring a child into an environment like this?’

  And my mother says, ‘I think they’re right, aren’t they, but I’m not the one populating this earth with weapons so you tell me who’s irresponsible, you tell me who’s putting children in danger.’

  And then for just a second she glances right at the camera, the way you’re not supposed to when you’re being interviewed, right down the lens and through all the years and right at me—

  And then it cuts to another woman, who says, ‘We’ll be staying here as long as it takes,’ and then it’s the end of the video.

  Outside in the corridor I can hear the bell ringing for the start of first period.

  Feeling weird and spacey and kind of like I’ve just seen a ghost, I tuck my phone and my headphones into my bag and make my way out and down the stairs and into the maths room, where I get a seat right at the back and stare blankly at the whiteboard where the numbers don’t make any sense.

  And I’m so busy thinking, my mum, my mum, my mum that it’s a while before I even think about the actual child that she was carrying and then of course I remember it and I realise that it was 1982 and the child is Danny.

  TWELVE

  That night after dinner I’m supposed to be learning about weight and mass and gravity for a physics test. Danny and Nick have been drinking wine and they’re both in a good mood; I can hear them laughing next door while they do the washing up. It’s the first time they’ve stopped sniping at each other in days. Danny’s supposed to start his job tomorrow, and Nick has obviously got sick of arguing about it and given up.

  I’m flipping through A Guide to Disobedience. It’s even more battered now that I’ve been carrying it around for days with highlighters and notebooks and everything else I keep in my bag, the pages all soft and dusty, a few of them loose. Always question authority, and never stand for hypocrisy, it says at the top of one page. Taking action against injustice is our responsibility to future generations. Somebody has underlined this with a green pencil, and drawn a little exclamation mark in the margin.

  There’s a couple of old receipts tucked inside the book – one for cigarettes and one for milk and coffee. There’s a cinema ticket stub, but you can’t see what the film was. I’ve left these where I found them, pressed flat between the pages where they’ve been for years ever since someone – ever since she – took the ticket stub back from the cinema attendant, tucked it absentmindedly into the book she was carrying around, went and watched the film.

  Maybe I was with her. Maybe it was one of those showing
s where you can take babies in with you and nobody’s allowed to complain if they cry. Just the two of us, one afternoon. She never mentioned it to anybody. That might have happened. I will never know.

  In the kitchen, I can hear Nick talking.

  ‘—just wanted a cup of steamed milk, basically,’ he’s saying, ‘but she’s still happy to pay, like, three quid for it, so I said, Fine, you know, if that’s what you want, no problem.’

  Danny says, ‘I know, she’s crazy.’

  ‘And she keeps calling me Nico,’ Nick says. ‘Like she thinks I’m her personal Italian barista. Ciao, Nico, I’ll just have my usual this morning – I want to say to her, Look, I’m from Essex, you know?’

  Danny is laughing. They are both laughing.

  This makes me feel brave.

  Danny flicks a wet tea towel in my direction when he sees me. ‘What’s up, kid?’ he says. ‘How’s physics?’

  Nick is washing glasses and Danny is just standing around doing nothing. I hesitate for a minute, on the other side of the kitchen counter, looking at them. I’m still wearing my school uniform, but with an old charity shop cardigan over the top, which I wrap round myself like I’m cold.

  ‘What’s up?’ Danny says again. ‘You OK?’

  ‘Danny,’ I say.

  ‘I know a physics joke. You want to hear it?’

  ‘You know when you were a baby.’

  ‘This is it. Why can you never trust an atom?’

  ‘Danny.’

  He folds his arms. ‘Do I know when I was a baby? I don’t understand the question.’

  ‘You never told me that our mum took you to Greenham Common. To the protest camp. You were there. When you were like, a little tiny kid.’

  Nick turns off the tap and shakes water from his hands, then starts to dry them slowly on a dishtowel.

  ‘What?’ says Danny.

  Nick hangs the dishtowel on the hook. He turns to face me. He looks like he’s about to say something, but then thinks better of it. Danny is staring at me. There’s a long silence. I say, ‘When you were little. She took you to Greenham Common.’