Catalyst

by Mark Eklid

  CATALYST

  Mark Eklid

  Copyright © 2021 Mark Eklid

  All rights reserved.

  Independently published.

  ISBN: 978-1-8384179-1-8

  To my dad, Alf, and in memory of my mum, Norma.

  Behind me at every step.

  1

  ‘Seriously, these are really good.’

  In case there was any doubt Anna was sincere in her appreciation for the food Martin had laid on for the meeting, she leaned forward and helped herself to another snack-sized piece from the large plate on the table around which the seven of them were gathered.

  Across the table, Diane watched as Anna hungrily took a bite from the green-topped rectangular slice and silently envied her youthful nonchalance when it came to casual food consumption. How nice it must be to be free of the perpetual concerns suffered by the more mature woman and eat how much you like whenever you like. The group had felt the need to attract younger activists for a while and Anna had been a breath of fresh air. Oh, to have such energy again! Oh, to have that metabolism!

  ‘Mmm, what’s this one?’

  Martin tucked his collar-length straight dark hair behind his ears and a broad grin wrinkled the lines of his face behind a straggly beard. He loved seeing people eat his food with such enthusiasm. It was one of his passions. It was his living.

  ‘That’s my toasty tofu. It’s basically spinach leaves, fresh basil and breadcrumbs on a fried tofu slice and finished under the grill to make it crispy. What you had before that was one of my aubergine balls.’

  ‘Delicious,’ Anna concluded, chewing on the last of the slice. ‘And all this is from your café?’

  Martin nodded, his eyes skirting around the cosily snug confines of the Better World café. They were crowded in the booth at the end of the room, furthest away from the front door. The busiest time of the afternoon had passed and only four customers remained: an older couple who often dropped by for a soya latte and a shared cake and two women in their mid-twenties who were cramming in as much catch-up conversation as they could before it was time to pick up the kids from school.

  ‘All made on the premises. Much of it by my own fair hand,’ he replied, proudly.

  ‘I will so have to come here with my house-mates some time,’ said Anna.

  ‘I do ten per cent discount for students and I’m open until seven every day except Sunday. We do gourmet evenings every two weeks, which are extremely popular and tend to be booked up quickly, but if you just want to drop in one day, it’d be great to see you.’

  ‘Anyway,’ interrupted Vivienne, in her best school mistress tone. As chair of the group, she often drew on her experience of how to deal with unruly seven to eleven-year-olds when the focus of the meeting broadened into a wider discussion of policy or an ethical debate. The cause of disruption was not usually the buffet, however.

  ‘Sorry Vivienne,’ whispered Martin, suitably chastised.

  Anna offered nothing as she scanned what remained on the plate, silently debating the important issue of what to try next.

  ‘Are we all clear on our roles for the Climate Emergency rally on the fourteenth?’ asked Vivienne. Slow nods around the table indicated that everyone was, indeed, comfortable with their assignments.

  ‘Good. Any further issues anyone wants to raise?’

  The slow nods turned to slow shakes.

  ‘I think we’re done, then.’ Vivienne gathered the papers in front of her to officially signal the meeting over.

  Anna turned to check the time on the large clock on the wall behind the café counter. She jumped to her feet, draped her colourful knitted scarf around her slim neck and pulled her long dark hair free of it.

  ‘I have to go. I literally have a sociology lecture in quarter of an hour,’ she said, snatching up her canvas shoulder bag and grabbing a chickpea bite before heading for the door with a hasty goodbye wave.

  ‘You’re OK with recruiting other members of the XR Students’ Society to take part in the march?’ called Vivienne after her.

  ‘Totally,’ replied the retreating figure and she was gone.

  The rush of activity left a lull around the table in its wake, like they had just sailed out of a storm and into a pocket of calm.

  Richard, the most senior member of the group, broke the brief silence. ‘I sometimes wonder if she ever eats apart from when she comes to the meetings.’

  ‘I wish we could bring a lot more like her into the group,’ responded David, who was now the youngest of those around the table, despite being in his mid-thirties, and was never slow to scent the opportunity for a confrontation.

  ‘So do I,’ Richard swiftly clarified. He was a veteran of the cause and should have known better. He had seen so many times before how an innocent remark could be construed as offensive if someone like David tried hard enough to see the hidden meaning.

  ‘I just meant she’s so slim. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course.’

  But David’s fervour was now stirred. He shuffled forward in his seat, ready to emphasise his point, and pushed the bridge of his round, red-rimmed glasses further up his nose with his index finger. That meant only one thing. Vivienne laid her papers back down on the table.

  ‘When are we going to drag this group into the new age?’ David demanded. ‘I mean, we’ve been going for nearly two decades and people have never been more aware of the climate emergency the world is now in and yet Anna is the first new face we’ve had around this table for months – years even. How long will it be until she realises we’ve become nothing but a gathering of blustering old farts who don’t actually do anything? I mean, we talk, we make placards, we wave them from the town hall steps and we go home, deluding ourselves into thinking that we’ve made a difference. People sign our petitions to feel good about themselves, but they still drive their big cars, eat mountains of red meat and fly abroad for their fortnight in Spain. They don’t realise or don’t care that they’re part of the problem. Meanwhile, the people in power make a few sympathetic noises and then ignore us. That’s what we are. We’re ignored. It’s too easy for them to disregard us. What we have to do is make ourselves impossible to ignore. We need to disrupt. We need to occupy buildings and public spaces. We need to draw attention to ourselves by locking ourselves to railings, gluing ourselves to doors, staging a naked protest if we have to.’

  Diane shot him a look of silent horror at the prospect of being required to glue herself naked to a public building.

  ‘We have to make the media notice us – and I’m not talking about a small picture on page 50 of the local rag. We have to do something spectacular to make them acknowledge us and shock the public into realising that these are drastic measures because we are in the middle of a drastic situation. We have to wake them up from their complacent, comfortable lives and make them realise that it’s everybody’s responsibility to bring about change – now!’

  David thumped his fist down on the table, startling the older couple close to the door.

  The final word reverberated around the room long after the crockery on the table had settled and the two young mums had picked up the flow of their conversation. Vivienne composed herself, ready to lead the response to David’s outburst.

  ‘With respect, David,’ she began, ‘there are people around this table who have been promoting the cause of climate change awareness for a long time and have achieved many successes and concessions over the years by lobbying and educating and –‘

  ‘Besides,’ interrupted Richard, whose sense of irritation had been steadily growing through his younger colleague’s tirade, ‘the general public – not to mention the people in authority – don’t respond well to the kind of disruption you’re talking about. Supergluing yourself to a building, stopping
people going about their normal business – all that does is turn people against us, makes it possible for them to regard us as fanatics, extremists. The sort of action you’re talking about harms the cause.’

  ‘Can you not see?’ David held his head in his hands, an edge of despair in his voice. ‘What we’ve been doing for years has not worked. The world is slipping deeper and deeper towards oblivion and that demands more than nice words and gentle protest. What we need is non-violent direct action. That’s the only solution. That’s the only way we’re going to bring about real change. How many more years do you think there would have been gross inequality if the civil rights movement had limited its activities to handing out leaflets? How much longer would there have been atrocities committed in Middle East if the Stop the War Coalition had just written strongly-worded letters to The Times?’

  He raised his head. ‘Look at us. Why do you think it is that we can’t attract dynamic, young activists? Where’s our diversity? We’re white, middle-aged and middle class. If people saw us gathered and didn’t read the placards, they’d think we were on our way to a Trump rally.’

  The accusation stirred a wave of indignation around the table.

  ‘Steady on,’ said Frank, whose contributions to the gatherings were rare.

  ‘The debate has moved on. We either change our focus to start actually doing something or we’re going to become irrelevant.’

  David stared intently at the faces around him. Richard and Vivienne met his eye. The rest could not. David shot to his feet.

  ‘You know what? Forget it. If you can’t see it, maybe you’re all irrelevant already. I’m going to join another group. One that isn’t afraid to take action.’

  Pausing only to mutter ‘excuse me’ to Rachel as she edged back her chair to allow him to get past, he stormed out of the café.

  ‘Prick,’ said Richard.

  Several of the others gave him reproachful glances.

  ‘Sorry, but he is. Always has been. We’re better off without him. Anyhow, I’ve got to go. See you all soon.’

  Richard pulled on his jacket and stood to leave, bubbling with umbrage. The rest of the group also gathered their belongings along with their bruised sensitivities and wandered away, until only Vivienne and Martin remained.

  ‘He was out of order,’ offered Martin as she pushed her papers into a bag.

  ‘But he was also right,’ Vivienne replied. ‘The cause has moved on. The mass of the population has stopped listening – I mean, really listening. We’ve done a lot of great work over the years to raise awareness, but awareness only gets you so far. The small concessions we win aren’t enough anymore because the situation is getting worse and the people with the power to change that aren’t being put under enough pressure to force them to take meaningful steps towards halting the slide. Our form of protest has become the faint noise in the background they can block out. They need to be made to listen. Disruption and direct action might truly be the only way forward.’

  Martin was stunned into silence.

  Vivienne sighed and rolled her eyes in resignation, then walked quietly, ruefully, out of the café.

  2

  The bike seemed slightly too big for him, like it had been bought for a child with a view to his growing into it one day.

  But Martin was well beyond the age where he might be expected to get any taller. People in their mid-forties rarely experience growth spurts. It wasn’t the bike that was oversized; he had always been undersized.

  When people occasionally, insensitively, asked him exactly how tall he was, he would tell them he was five foot one. He couldn’t recall having been measured since he was very young when his parents, who were both a little above average height, were concerned that their son might have some sort of disorder and so had taken him to see people. Specialists. Five foot one seemed about right as an estimate now, though, and satisfied the curiosity of those who asked. It was rarely an issue for him. Not these days. Not since school, really. There were more important matters in the world.

  Martin comfortably pedalled his bike up the gentle incline of Marlborough Road, between the rows of solidly majestic gabled stone houses set behind old stone walls that ran, broken only by the gaps for driveways, along the length of the long, straight road. It was a bright, warm March day and this was one of his favourite roads to cycle along, away from the fumes and fury of the major arteries, but something troubled Martin as he rode it this time.

  It wasn’t so much what David said. David was always a bit of a hothead who much preferred the sound of his own voice to listening to anyone with a contrary opinion and had often been the cause of too much unnecessary tension in meetings. They wouldn’t miss him if David, this time, was to carry out his threat to quit so he could impose his rigid, uncompromising views on some other unsuspecting group.

  No. What bothered Martin was Vivienne’s reaction. She had practically agreed with him. Vivienne never allowed anyone to get under her skin. That was why the group had elected her chair. Vivienne was strong, unwavering, unflappable. Vivienne was totally committed to what they were striving to achieve.

  He and Vivienne had been with the group from the start. They had never doubted that their cause was fundamentally right, even when their views were very much in the minority. They had stayed resolute, celebrated small victories when they could and looked on with relieved satisfaction as gradually, across the world, the voices of the doubters had grown quieter. The cause for which they had lain themselves open to vilification was now in the mainstream. It was cool to be a climate activist.

  It was only right that the younger generation should take up the fight to halt the crisis. They were the ones who would inherit the mess created by previous generations, after all. Sure, their methods could be different, more challenging, but perhaps that was a good thing. The situation is escalating. Time is running out. It’s good that greater immediacy is being injected into the fight to save the planet and the younger generation, with the global reach advantage given to them by social media, is adding plenty to the cause. Perhaps direct action is the answer. Perhaps the less committed – the lip-service sympathisers and the complacent policy-makers – do need shaking up.

  But that doesn’t mean groups like Sheffield Environmental Action Network, with their more moderate methods, should step aside and leave them to it. They had been promoting the cause since Greta Thunberg was in biodegradable nappies and had the experience to help everybody achieve their goals.

  We still have a voice. We can still achieve. We are still relevant.

  Martin still believed that. So did Vivienne, he was sure. She had just been caught in a bad moment by David’s outburst. Everybody struggles with their frustrations occasionally.

  He turned at the end of the street and rose in the saddle to take on Northumberland Road. Inconsiderate motorists and inadequate cycle lane provision were not the only problems faced by cyclists in the city. Regularly getting around Sheffield by bike tested your fitness and Martin’s short, strong legs handled the hill easily.

  He stopped at the crossroads at the top and peered warily to his left before attempting the right turn. It was not a great junction. The view to the left was always obstructed by parked cars and a high-sided van on his side of the road was not helping today. Nothing was coming from the two other directions and so Martin set off. He had reached the far side of the road when he was startled by the blast of a horn as a silver car closed down on him. It was going far too fast. The car missed him by inches but the disturbance of the air as it whooshed so close and the shock of the blaring horn caused Martin to lose his balance.

  He wobbled, his left foot slipping off the pedal, and the front wheel hit the kerb. Though he had barely built up any forward momentum out of the junction, the contact with the kerb was enough to make him topple on to the hard pavement, narrowly missing a black and white bollard.

  He lay still for a second, disorientated; stunned by the suddenness of the incident and winded by the f
all. His bike lay, its front wheel pointing skywards, on his leg and he sat up to lift the handlebars and ease himself free of it. Martin was aware he had hit his head against the pavement as he landed but the helmet appeared to have done its job. However, he was in pain from his left hip and his left elbow. He inspected his arm. His new bright yellow safety jacket was torn.

  ‘Why don’t you watch where you’re fucking going?’

  The driver of the silver car, an angry-faced younger man with sunglasses perched on his close-cropped head, had climbed from his seat but stayed by the side of his vehicle. He did not appear to have any intention of walking over to see if Martin was all right.

  Martin was still dazed and there was a moment’s time delay as he processed the insensitivity of the driver’s rebuke.

  He’s saying it was my fault?

  ‘You were going too fast. This is a thirty zone,’ he called back, almost despairingly.

  ‘Fucking cyclists. You’re a fucking menace.’ The driver spat out his words with venom.

  Martin felt his indignation rise. ‘I’ve as much right to be on the road as you have.’

  The driver pulled a disparaging face and began to lower himself back into the car but only after delivering his final shot.

  ‘Tell me that when you start paying road tax.’

  With a heavy step on the accelerator pedal, he sped away, leaving Martin to gingerly climb to his feet and brush himself down. He picked up the bike to see if it was damaged and winced at the scrape across the blue paint of the frame where it had caught the kerb.

  He looked up to where the silver car had long since disappeared from view and regretted not having noted the registration number so he could make a complaint. It had happened too fast to think of such a detail.

  The rest of the bike appeared undamaged, but Martin decided to push it the rest of the way to his home. It was only a five-minute walk. He took hold of the handlebars for support and limped away, a sorry figure. His left hip hurt a lot.