by Joe Layburn
“Girls,” I said, “I feel sorry for you that you’re not able to share in my happiness. Actually, I think I’ll look stunning in a bridesmaid’s outfit!”
Miss de Souza and the rest of the class burst out laughing, but not at me – it was with me this time. I could tell they were on my side. Leona, Kodi and Simone just opened and closed their mouths like three goldfish because they couldn’t think of anything to say back.
It wasn’t a line I’d got from Fatima, but it was the kind of thing I could imagine her saying – all calm and confident. I suppose it also showed how much my social skills had improved, because in the past I’d have pushed over their table, grabbed one of Leona’s stupid girly pigtails and tried to rip it off her head.
GEORGIE
After the car bomb attack I heard other voices, children’s voices, whispering to me day and night. They were not as strong and clear as Fatima’s and sometimes they were hard to understand. But they were insistent, like fluttering sounds made by the wings of small birds.
Can you hear me? My name is Chesley. I’m glad you’re all right, man.
This is Aamina. Fatima told me what happened. It sounded terrible. I mean, you could have been killed.
I’m John. You don’t know me, but I’m thinking about you . . . you know, wishing you well. There are lots of us, Georgie. We want to help you.
And then I’d hear Fatima herself.
You must stay strong, Georgie. You must believe in yourself. Sometimes flowers grow in stony places. Never forget that.
To my family, I seemed lost in daydreams. Albion soon got bored of me. Mum stared blankly and said it would take a long while for us all to “heal emotionally”. She spent most of the day watching TV and popping pills the doctor had given her. They kept her as placid as a tranquilized sheep.
And Dad? Dad was angry. The more zombie-like Mum became, the more animated he got. He just wouldn’t rest. His anger blazed behind his eyes and spewed from his mouth in curses and complaints. And he stoked that anger. He poured fuel on it. He fanned the flames until it seemed they would flare up and consume us all. Part of me was angry too, but I couldn’t help thinking that Dad had brought this upon us.
We’d heard from the anti-terrorism police that a group of Islamic extremists had claimed responsibility for the car bomb attack. In a statement on a website, they’d warned they would try again.
Dad didn’t seem concerned.
“Bring it on. Let’s see them flush themselves out. I’d love the chance to get at them. I’d just love it.”
All the time he was formulating plans. He’d be on the phone to Brian and others whose voices I recognised. But he also spent hours talking to shadowy figures I’d never heard of, men who were cagey about giving their names when I happened to take their calls.
Dad wanted to hit back at the terrorists, frighten them like they’d frightened us, see them dead if he could. But even that wouldn’t bring an end to his anger. Dad also wanted to make a statement to every Muslim in the country.
Finally he announced what he planned to do and it made me shudder. That’s because I knew it was all my fault. If it hadn’t been for me and Adam Rosen’s booklet, I doubt he’d ever have thought of it.
“October the Fourth, Georgie – what’s important about that date?”
I was toying with some scrambled eggs Mum had made for me, pushing the pale yellow gloop around my plate with a fork.
“Is it Grandad’s birthday?”
“That’s on the twelfth.”
“Something to do with World War Two – the Battle of Stalingrad or something.”
“You’re getting warmer. It is to do with a battle, but much closer to home. The Battle of Cable Street.”
I could sense the excitement in his voice, but I didn’t guess where he was going with this.
“On October the Fourth, 1936, Sir Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists tried to march down Cable Street, but they were stopped. On October the Fourth this year I’m going to finish the job – do it properly.”
I put the fork down and glanced up at him. He looked re-energised. He’d combed his hair and had a shave, after days of shambling around the house like a tramp in a dressing-gown.
“Why would you want to do that? I thought the Jews had gone from that part of London.”
“Indeed they have, Georgie boy, but the Muslims have moved in. Cable Street is crawling with them. And it’s time they tasted a bit of fear – time they looked out their windows and saw hundreds of Fascists marching by, reclaiming the streets for the white man.”
“No one’s going to let you do that. Don’t you need permission to have a march?”
He let out a rasping laugh.
“No one’s going to tell me where I can and can’t go in my own country. We won’t ask anybody’s permission. We’ll just turn up. It’ll be a surprise for them. We’ll show them they’re not wanted here, just like Mosley tried to show the Jews. And another thing – I want my family with me. I want those Muslims to see a proud white family at the front of the march.”
It was my turn to laugh.
“There’s no way Mum and Albion will go with you. Anyway, it’s probably going to get violent. Do you really want them there if it all kicks off?”
He rubbed his newly-smooth chin with his fingers.
“Maybe not. I’ll think about it. But what about you, Georgie? Will you come? I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important to me. You’re my son, after all. My son and heir.”
His blue eyes were sparkling, not dead as they’d been the night he hit me. What could I do? I half expected to hear Fatima’s voice breathing words of wisdom, advising me what to say, but there was nothing.
“All right,” I said finally. “I’ll go.”
Almost immediately, I found myself fretting about Fatima. I don’t know why, but the thought popped into my head that she might live near Cable Street. The idea scared me. I felt embarrassed, too. I didn’t want her to watch me march past with hundreds of stone-faced Fascists. Of course, I’d never seen Fatima’s eyes but I imagined how sad and disappointed they would look to see me in such company. If only I could send my thoughts back to her, warn her about Dad’s nasty surprise for the Muslims of East London.
I concentrated hard:
Fatima, this is Georgie. Can you hear me? Stay away from Cable Street. The Fascists are planning to march there again.
Nothing.
Fatima, please, you’ve got to listen to me. They want to frighten you. They want to drive you away.
I tried again and again, but there was no response. It seemed as if I was sending radio signals to a dead planet. Fatima sent nothing back, nor did any of the other children whose voices I’d been hearing.
I suddenly felt abandoned by them, as if they’d deliberately tuned me out. It seemed I was no longer part of their network.
MELISSA
Mr Millington was always late for our History lessons. He’d arrive red-faced and sweaty, whatever the weather, with his shirt untucked, carrying a coffee he’d brought from the staff room in a “World’s Greatest Teacher” mug. I’d told him once that he must have paid for it himself because none of us kids would have given it to him as a present. But that was the old me. I realise now that those kinds of put-downs are hurtful and unhelpful, even though Mr Millington was a pig and sort of deserved them. Anyway, he was late, which meant I had at least five minutes to talk to the class about Fatima.
Without a teacher there, everyone was messing around. Artsem and Mikhail were shouting in Russian and flicking bits of wet paper at the windows. Kele was spinning his battered old basketball on one finger. Some of the girls were practising this dumb dance they wanted to do in assembly; they always wanted to do a dance in assembly.
I needed to get everyone’s attention, so I just covered my ears with my hands and screamed really loudly. Straightaway the room went silent. Everyone stared at me, waiting to see what I would do next. I knew people had seen a big change in me recentl
y, but they still shut up and took notice whenever I screamed at them.
“Thank you,” I said, smiling my sweetest smile. “Sorry about that.”
One of Kele’s eyebrows arched upwards as though it was on a string yanked by a puppeteer.
“That was loud, Melissa,” he said.
“Yeah, sorry, but what it is, is that I need to aks you all a big favour.”
Leona and Kodi started smirking. They hid their pouty little mouths behind their hands when I glared at them.
“There’s this man,” I said, “like a really bad man. He’s a Fascist and he’s coming with a lot of other Fascists to march through Tower Hamlets tomorrow. He wants to frighten everyone – kids like me and all of you who have different coloured skin, or religions, or whatever. He wants us to leave this country and go somewhere else, even if we was born here. I have this friend called Fatima and she says we’ve got to join together and stop him.”
Simone smiled, but not a friendly smile.
“Why don’t you just scream at him, Melissa, until he goes away?”
I could feel myself getting stressed and I dug my fingernails into the palms of my hands.
“I ain’t never seen you with no one called Fatima,” Kodi added, her eyes narrowing.
“Look, I really need your help. Fatima says if we all meet at this place called Cable Street, we might be able to stop him. She says sometimes you just have to stand up for yourself. It’s like not letting bullies push you around. And that’s what these fascists are, they’re bullies.”
“I can’t help you,” Leona said. “I’ve got to go shopping with my mum and my sister, then we’re going McDonalds.”
This wasn’t working out how I’d imagined. I scanned their faces to see if I was getting through to any of them.
“So will there be like a massive ruck?” Mikhail asked. “You’re going to need a lot of kids if you’re planning to fight against grown-ups.”
“You’re going to need guns too, man,” his mate Artsem said. “AK 47s!”
Artsem was small and skinny with mousy brown hair. I felt like I could have crushed his tiny skull between my finger and thumb.
Suddenly I heard Fatima’s soothing voice whispering to me.
If enough of us come, they’ll turn back. We don’t need to bring weapons, just ourselves.
I cleared my throat.
“We won’t need guns, Artsem. If enough of us show up tomorrow, we can block off Cable Street and they won’t be able to get through.”
Leona, Kodi and Simone started tittering.
“At the moment, Melissa,” Leona said, “it’s just you who’s going. But I suppose you could always block the street on your own.”
I looked down at my huge hands.
“You calling me fat?” I asked quietly.
Leona blinked.
“I know I’m fat, but I’d prefer it if you called me that word Miss de Souza looked up. What was it? Statuesque – yeah, like a big, beautiful statue.”
Leona gave me something close to a proper smile this time.
“OK, Melissa, you’re a big beautiful statue, but I still can’t see anyone’s going to go with you tomorrow.”
“Actually, I’ll be going,” said a voice from over by the store cupboard.
I just stared at Kele. He was holding his basketball on one hip and jutting out his chin.
“Yeah, I figure the Nigerians should be represented there, innit Melissa?”
I couldn’t speak, I felt my eyes getting watery. I just nodded, and as I did, the tears threatened to flow down my cheeks.
“Thank you, Kel,” I said.
That’s when Mr Millington arrived. He tried to nudge the door open with his shoulder, but it bounced back off a chair wedged behind it and jolted his coffee mug. Leona and her girlfriends laughed. Mr Millington glowered at them, then stared angrily at the watery brown stains on his light grey trousers and the small puddle that was spreading across the carpet between his feet.
“Don’t just stand there gawping, Kele. Put that blessed ball down and get a cloth,” he snapped.
Once Mr Millington had made a space for his half-empty mug on the desk, it seemed to occur to him that he hadn’t walked in on the usual riot in our classroom.
“Thank you for waiting so, er, patiently,” he said. “What have you been talking about? Not History, I assume.”
He grinned, but to himself, not to us.
Kele stopped scrubbing the carpet and looked up at him.
“We were talking about Cable Street, sir.” Mr Millington frowned.
“What, the Battle of Cable Street? Seriously?”
Artsem and Mikhail glanced at each other. Presumably they had visions of machine guns and tanks in their heads again.
I was confused. I’d understood that Fatima only spoke to other children. I couldn’t imagine her sending out her thought-waves to someone like Mr Millington.
“What do you mean by the Battle of Cable Street?” I asked him.
“It was some time in the 1930s – 1936, I think. The Fascists tried to march through the East End to intimidate the Jews who lived there. But they were stopped by a big army of local people. If you look at the photographs, you can see many of the locals were carrying banners that said, ‘They shall not pass’. And, amazingly, the Fascists were turned back. If you go to Cable Street now, there’s a big mural – you know, a painting on a wall that shows it all. It’s really rather good.”
“So it’s happened already?” Artsem said, looking disappointed. “The Fascists aren’t going to try it again? Like tomorrow?”
Mr Millington shook his head. It was as bald as Kele’s basketball.
“No. No way. They’d never get permission. It would be really threatening to the local people who live there now, because most of them are Muslims from Bangladesh. The Fascists would never be allowed to march down Cable Street again.”
I was almost too scared to glance across at Kele. Surely he wouldn’t come with me now. And since everyone else respected him, they wouldn’t come along either. But when I finally did catch Kele’s eye, he just shrugged his shoulders and gave me this look that said, “What does that idiot Mr Millington know about anything?”
“So you’ll be there?” I mouthed at him.
“Yeah,” he mouthed back. “Of course.”
GEORGIE
When Dad and I arrived at the City end of Cable Street, hundreds of his supporters were already milling around under the railway arches. Dad was wearing a dark suit and a light brown cashmere overcoat: Mr Respectable. But many of his followers looked like most people’s idea of thugs in their green bomber jackets and laced-up boots. Brian, Dad’s super-sized bodyguard, was there to meet our taxi.
“All right, George?” He nodded at Dad and gave me a cold look as if I was an insect that had landed on him. I’d known Brian for as long as I could remember and he’d never looked at me that way before. He seemed almost disgusted by me.
“All right, Georgie boy?” he said finally. “How are you feeling today? Don’t want any more soppy behaviour from you, do we?”
Dad frowned at him.
“Shut it, Brian, will you? Georgie’s fine. Never better.”
“I was just. . .” Brian’s deep bass voice trailed off.
“Like I said, just shut it,” Dad repeated.
I saw a sign high on a wall that read ‘Cable Street, E1’, but there didn’t seem to be any homes or even any people at this end of it. Above our heads, a train from the Docklands Light Railway clattered past. We began to march away from the City of London with all its wealth towards the poverty of the East End. I tried to count the bodies pressing around me but soon gave up. There must have been at least five hundred of us walking in the footsteps of Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts. Usually at Dad’s rallies there were songs and chants, but today we were silent apart from the tramping of boots. Dad had predicted it wouldn’t take long for the police to get wind of our illegal gathering and start arriving in their vans and
squad cars. Maybe they’d even send out a helicopter and shout at us through loudhailers to turn back. But by then it would be too late. George Smith and his fascist followers would have marched down Cable Street in a show of strength. George Smith would have done what Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts failed to do.
I couldn’t see above the heads of the marchers in front of me and, being short, neither could Dad. I assumed that once we’d gone a bit further, Dad would want to lead the march, but for the moment he seemed happy to be in amongst his people. Cable Street is about a mile long and I guessed we’d need fifteen minutes or so to walk the whole length of it. I’d given myself over to the rhythm of our marching, when suddenly an electric charge of tension passed through our ranks and the row of people in front of me stopped dead. Dad and I bumped into their backs and came to a halt; then the people behind us did the same until we were all jammed up close.
“What’s going on?” Dad called out.
He sounded confident, still in control.
It was Mart’s voice that carried back to him over the rows of heads.
“Boss, I think you should come up here and see this.”
Dad took hold of my sleeve and began pushing his way to the front of our lines. It wasn’t easy and our progress was slow.
“Is it the Old Bill?” Dad shouted.
I knew the one thing that had bothered him all along was that the police would turn up too quickly and spoil his big moment.
“No,” Mart called back. “There’s no sign of them.”
Finally the bodies in front of us had parted enough for me to see what lay ahead. A cold wind was whipping our faces, but suddenly I felt my cheeks flush. My whole body tingled.
We’d reached the first part of the St George’s housing estate, its grey tower blocks looming over the right side of the street. It was home to many of the Muslims who Dad planned to terrorise. When I’d looked at the estate on a map, I’d half imagined that this was where Fatima lived. Now, spilling out from the far end of it and onto the road was a massive crowd. I couldn’t guess their number, but it was many more than we had brought to Cable Street. This crowd was huge and it was blocking our way.