by Kirsty Eyre
I hand Rosie to Bev and head in after them. Sally refuses to budge at first, her haunches backing further into the window display and threatening to knock over a genderless mannequin crouching in corduroy next to a cart of plastic apples. I pull a carrot out of my pocket and wave it at her. She ignores it at first but then, as I bring it nearer, she plods over, allowing me to grab her harness and walk her out.
‘Sorry,’ Kat apologizes to the bemused security guard.
Outside, Rosie pisses all over the cinema entrance, a river of hot yellow urine splashing against paving slabs and flowing down the pedestrianized shopping street. It feels like the longest cow wee in history.
‘Don’t worry, Bilbo!’ Maria says. ‘All publicity is good publicity.’
@MilkforFarmers
It’s Friesian in @DorothyPerkins! #SaveOurDairy
More supporters congregate outside the parade of high-street shops with banners and cow bells. Paul Pickering emerges from the crowd in a #SaveOurDairy waistcoat he’s had made up. He has a team of helpers, each with an award-winning Paddock Poo-Picker, clogs of cow dung removed from the streets with revolutionary efficiency, much to Charlie’s relief.
He mobilizes the crowd behind him, chanting with gusto.
‘Milk! Milk! They’re milking our milk!’
The fog starts to clear as our following swells, the first glimmer of sunlight piercing thick cloud. A pantomime cow trundles along beside me with some very enthusiastic inhabitants, judging by the moos. Our chants get louder, our voices bigger.
‘Milk! Milk! They’re milking our milk!’
We reach the main road, where a dual carriageway of heavy traffic blocks the way to our destination. Grandma attempts to negotiate with a bus, which ploughs through a puddle, spraying her with muddy water. The whole procession comes to a standstill.
‘Hang on!’ Tazzy charges through the masses in her road-safe fluorescent overcoat, lollipop held high. ‘I’m not having anyone die on my watch, whether it’s cows or humans.’ Undeterred by beeping lorries and irate drivers, she plants herself in the centre of the road, a modern-day Moses parting a sea of traffic, and doesn’t leave until every last one of us is over.
Faces peer out of tower blocks. Passengers stare from the top deck of buses. A hen party of girls dressed as Wonder Woman join us, recruiting shoppers and passers-by.
‘Milk! Milk! They’re milking our milk!’
As we reach the Peace Gardens, Rosie bolts towards a balloon seller, a dozen helium-filled silver Tyrannosaurus Rexes floating into the sky.
‘Sorry!’ I shout.
‘You ignorant prick!’ the balloon seller yells, holding a paper cup of tea in one hand and a bunch of inflatable dinosaurs in the other.
‘I’m really sorry,’ I say again, holding onto Rosie for dear life.
‘You will be!’ He launches his cup at me; hot tea drips from my eyelashes and runs down my cheeks. I wipe my face with my elbow, suffused with shock. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing, letting cows shit all over the place?’ He sticks his neck out at me. ‘Hey? Hey?’ he shouts aggressively.
‘That’s enough!’ The pantomime cow next to me rips off its head to reveal none other than Nathan, hair plastered to his forehead, his face red and sweaty. ‘Did you have soy milk in that tea, lad?’ He jabs his finger at the paper cup, which rolls across the pedestrianized street.
The balloon seller stares at him as if he’s speaking a foreign language.
‘Was that soy milk in your tea?’ Nathan persists.
‘It was just normal milk.’
‘Well, if you want to carry on drinking normal milk in your tea, you’d better join in!’ Nathan delves in his pockets and pulls out a ten-pound note. ‘Here, sorry about your balloons,’ he says, handing it to the guy.
‘Milk! Milk! They’re milking our milk!’
The balloon seller takes the money and storms off.
‘You OK?’ Nathan says to me.
I nod, dumbfounded.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘Some of the things I said were unforgivable.’
For me, it’s not what Nathan said, it’s what he didn’t say. If he’s prepared to go all out with paedophilia accusations and tell me to my face that I’m offensive, who knows what deeper, darker homophobia lies beneath the surface. Call it paranoia, but I think I have a healthy wariness. I find myself unable to reply and am about to turn away when he puts his hoof on my arm.
‘I’m ashamed of myself,’ he says.
So there I am, in the middle of the march, surfing that fine line I’m quite familiar with now; the line between sweep-it-under-the-carpet, ‘let’s forget about it, it’s all in the past now’ forgiveness and allowing the conversation to breathe, as painful as it is, and make sure everything is properly dealt with and it’s not going to rear its ugly head again.
‘Where did the change of heart come from?’ I say, acknowledging Grandma’s Are you OK? look with one saying, Yeah, I’m fine.
‘Rachel,’ he says.
‘Hi!’ Her head appears from the back of their costume. ‘I don’t know how you did an assault course in this thing. I can hardly breathe!’
‘You’ve been in the back of that all this way?’ I say.
She looks at Nathan just as we arrive at the gardens next to Sheffield’s town hall. ‘I didn’t want to be seen with Dad!’
Nathan shuffles me over to a bed of begonias and clears his throat. ‘I’m sorry. Rachel gave me a good talking-to after that last committee meeting. Said I had to get with the “real world” and accept people for who they are.’
‘Right,’ I say as the crowd sweeps past us.
‘He is sorry.’ Rachel grabs my arm. ‘He knows he’s been a dick, don’t you, Dad?’
Nathan mumbles something incoherent as the town hall’s clock tower clangs to strike the hour.
I turn to him. ‘Look, it’s not that I’m terribly uninterested, it’s just that we’re in the middle of the biggest dairy farming march in history.’
‘Sure,’ he says. ‘I just … I’m sorry. I’m going to be a better person. Not just for Rachel, but for you, because you didn’t deserve that.’
‘Apology noted,’ I breathe. ‘Now, I’ve really got to go.’
Nathan shrugs his shoulders and smiles.
‘Milk! Milk! They’re milking our milk!’
I catch sight of Dad through the crowds; he’s flagging. His march has become a shuffle and he’s stopping at every other lamppost to catch his breath. I reach him. His face looks a translucent white.
‘Can’t you sit down for a bit?’ I say, gesturing to the wheelchair Grandma is pushing.
‘No!’ he says with fervent determination and stomps on.
@MilkforFarmers
Never *herd* of us? Check out our moooovement
#SaveOurDairy
Dad is just about done for by the time we’ve pushed our way to the front. He sits down heavily on a bench next to a lady surrounded by shopping bags and takes a swig of Lucozade. There are now thousands of us spilling out into the town hall’s Peace Gardens. Children point and giggle from their fathers’ shoulders as Friesians lap from water fountains. I look around for someone who might look like a journalist, but it’s impossible to tell who’s who, what with all the different groups congregating. Cows grunt. Farmers chant. Picket board slogans bob up and down in the air. Keep calm and hug a heifer. Milk a cow, not a farmer. Talk is cheap, milk shouldn’t be. Keep Britain farming.
‘Here!’ Maria digs her hand into her satchel and holds up a cow-print bikini. ‘Outfits for the photoshoot! I’ve got mine on already.’ She twangs the black elastic around her neck.
‘What on earth’s that?’ Grandma squints.
‘It’s a bikini,’ Maria says.
Grandma holds it up. ‘Where in God’s name do you put your chest?’
‘In the triangles, Grandma.’ I demonstrate with a fist.
‘We need to draw maximum attention,’ Maria says, reaching into her bag and
pulling out another three.
‘You’ll be doing more than that,’ Grandma says gruffly. ‘You’ll have someone’s eye out!’
I look at the bikinis and then at the crowd. ‘I think that might draw the wrong sort of attention, Maz.’
Maria looks at me. ‘What was I saying earlier? All publicity’s good publicity.’
We all look at each other.
‘Nobody wants to see me in a bikini.’ Bev plants her hands in her pockets.
‘I do,’ Kat protests.
‘Bilbo?’ Maria flings a bikini at me.
The only place I would wear a bikini is on the beach and, even then, I wouldn’t be comfortable. I shove it in my pocket as Maria points out the arrival of the press. Several newspapers have sent photographers as well as reporters. They set up just out of reach of the spray of the fountains.
I weave my way through the crowd to Dad just as someone from BBC Look North is thrusting a microphone in front of him, a cameraman hovering. He’s back on his feet and surrounded by farmers and friends of all shapes and sizes – young, trim men in designer jeans, girls who could just as easily be off the perfume counter at John Lewis, and those who fulfil the farmer stereotype in wax jackets and wellies.
‘What do I make of it or from it?’ Dad says crossly. ‘Not enough, and that’s the problem. British dairy farmers are running at a loss. As things are, it’s unsustainable, unethical and unworkable.’
‘Hear, hear!’ Paul puts down his Poo-Picker and twists the buttons on his waistcoat.
I look around and I’m surrounded by so many familiar faces from the village. Tazzy, Doreen, Marjorie and Graham. Hamish Eccles from Ladybower. Roger Craggs from Birchover Hall Farm. Rachel, Nathan. The locksmith, the blacksmith, the co-operative staff.
‘We’re not asking for a lot. We just want enough,’ Dad says into the microphone. ‘Enough.’ He autopilots like a battery-operated toy jammed on the wrong setting. ‘Enough.’ Bewilderment spreads across his face. He looks like a cat in water, panicked and bedraggled.
I take hold of his arm. ‘Dad?’
‘Enough,’ he repeats as I twist my way into his armpit.
‘He’s not well,’ I say to the BBC Look North guy, whilst propping Dad up.
‘Sorry,’ Dad says. ‘It’s taken it out of me.’
I’m not sure what to do. Or what I’m supposed to say. A sharp pain jabs at my chest. I should never have started this. I should have made Dad sit down earlier. Another sharp jab. I look down and realize Mum’s ladybird brooch is stabbing me with its pin.
I grab the microphone. ‘We need Premier Milk to stop dropping milk prices. We need the supermarkets to stock our Milk for Farmers brand and we need the people of Great Britain to buy it,’ I tell the microphone. ‘Not next year, not next month, but today! Five British farmers quit every week. Five! In the last ten years, a quarter of British dairy farms have vanished. We’re an endangered species under threat of extinction.’ Project from your stomach. Two mirrored hands. ‘This is my dad. He’s been a dairy farmer all his life.’ This is not a use-case. This is a real story. I think of Professor Williams and my failed PhD pitch. Me, blathering on about Mum dying. Tell us what your father lost. Tell us how it happened and what we need to do to make sure it doesn’t happen to anybody else. ‘He’s sixty-three and, like so many other farmers, can’t afford to retire. He’s been working fifteen-hour days most of his life, seven days a week. He’s lost equity. He’s lost profits. He’s lost a lot of the herd. And most recently he lost his health.’
‘Go, Bilbo!’ Maria shouts.
‘Hear, hear!’ Hamish Eccles shouts, which encourages swathes of people to grunt in solidarity.
Applause ripples across the Peace Gardens and I feel a huge surge of pride.
‘People can help by buying Milk for Farmers branded milk. Look out for the “Fair for Farmers” guarantee label. For the sake of a few pence—’
‘Thank you, Miss, erm …’
‘Billie. Billie Oliver and my dad, John Oliver.’ I look up at Dad, who is gazing into the distance.
‘Thank you, Billie and Oliver. Back to you in the studio, Gary.’
As soon as the cameraman cuts, I help Dad into the wheelchair. He’s already asleep by the time Rachel has worked out how to put the brakes on.
‘Here, young man?’ Beatrice nudges a photographer from the Sheffield Telegraph. ‘Will we make the front page?’
‘Page twenty-eight under the horoscope’s more likely,’ he says, turning to see what all the whooping and squealing over by the fountains is about.
‘Come on, girls!’ Maria yells, dancing through arcs of water in her cow-print bikini. ‘I thought we were in this together?’
‘To think of everything the suffragettes did for women’s rights!’ Beatrice scoffs.
‘There are more of you?’ The photographer loads a new memory card into his camera.
‘You bloody bet!’ Maria shouts. ‘Billie?’
The photographer looks at us. ‘Three of you dressed like that and I can’t see how you wouldn’t make the front page!’
‘Hear, hear!’ Charlie mutters.
‘Billie! Billie!’ the girls chant, as the cowpat-splattered earth fails to swallow me up. The angel and devil dance in my head, both of them wearing cow-print bikinis, neither of them distinguishable from each other. What would Billie Jean King do at a time like this? Would she compromise her feminist values for a headline-grabbing bikini shot? I feel like a groom on a stag do being forced into drinking a pint of vodka, tequila and rum: it will hurt both now and in the sober light of tomorrow when the photos are unleashed.
‘I’ll do it if you will!’ a voice shouts.
The crowd parts to reveal Lorna Parsons, who stands before me in a trilby hat, a #SaveOurDairy T-shirt, cut-off denim shorts and cowboy boots. She offers me her hand.
I’m struck by a warm fuzzy sensation.
‘I didn’t even know you were here!’ I say.
‘Come on,’ she says, friendly but reserved.
She tucks her long, mousy-blonde hair behind one ear, grabs a bikini from Maria and takes my arm. ‘I know this is your idea of hell, Billie, and trust me, it’s not my idea of fun either.’ She marches me across the gardens. ‘But it clearly works.’
I find her presence comforting, in spite of the tense atmosphere. This is the first time I’ve seen her since our kiss and here we are, standing at the foot of the town hall steps, pretending nothing ever happened. I feel utterly confused. On the one hand, I’ve known her for decades and shared part of my childhood with her. Tree houses, holly-bush dens, French skipping, farm worker picnics, bull sperm. On the other hand, I don’t know her at all.
I look at her. ‘I’ve been wondering how you were.’
‘We haven’t got time for all that now.’ She marches up the steps, eyes firmly on the big wooden door to the town hall.
I try to slow her down. ‘Don’t we need to talk about—’
‘I think it’s better that we don’t,’ she says, holding the door open.
Inside, wedding guests are tumbling out of a wood-panelled room.
‘From memory, the toilets are down here,’ she says, leading me down a corridor and, true to her word, depositing us at the Ladies’.
I follow her in, expecting it to be a washroom with a few cubicles, but it’s just the one toilet.
‘Sorry,’ I say, backing out.
She grabs my arm and pulls me back inside. ‘There’s no time for you to wait.’
She locks the door, turns her back to me and starts fastening her bikini under her T-shirt. Next thing I know, she’s whipping off her bra and shimmying out of her jeans. I’m still playing catch-up. The last time we saw each other, we had our hands on each other’s breasts and our tongues in each other’s mouths and now we’re to undress in front of each other and pretend the whole thing never happened?
‘Come on, this might just get us on the front page.’ She pulls on the bikini bottoms and removes her T-shirt. ‘Wel
l?’ she says, hurling my bikini at me. ‘What are you waiting for?’
‘I …’ She looks so fucking hot it’s ridiculous.
‘It’s up to you, Billie!’ she says. ‘You can either die on the sword for your principles and we’re some postage-stamp-sized entry on page thirty-seven of some shitty newspaper nobody ever reads, or you can swallow your pride and go for the front page of the broadsheets.’
Aside from Grandma, nobody has spoken to me like this since my Home Economics teacher at secondary school.
‘I …’ Are we going to pretend that we never kissed?
She stands, arms folded, leaning against the wall, one leg cocked, and I want to kiss her. I want to put my hands around her waist. I want to feel the heat of her skin. I want all of these things, but she clearly doesn’t. I exhale heavily and reluctantly pull on the bikini, deciding that Billie Jean King probably would do it. She did, after all, agree to be carried into Houston Astrodome on a gold throne by a bunch of bare-chested hunky men in the name of feminism.
We make our way over the grass in bikinis and raincoats, back to the photographers. All I can think about is kissing Lorna in the cowshed. Her hot skin. Her groin pressed against mine. Our eyes having a conversation of their own.
The crowd has got bigger since we got changed and the demonstration is now under the surveillance of the mounted police, whose horses are being admired by a huge man in a cream linen suit that only serves to accentuate his girth, creases forming where the material strains over each bulge: the Wolf.
I throw a ‘Hi’ in his direction, but he ignores me. His thick neck turns towards a photographer from the Yorkshire Post. ‘Where do you want me?’ he says gruffly.
‘Not you, her!’ The photographer nods at me. ‘The Cow Girl.’
His words hang in the air like bunting, celebratory and proud. Cow Girl. They buffet in the breeze, gathering force and momentum like a kite. Cow Girl. It makes me sound like some kind of Jane Austen heroine of the hills, which I’m clearly not, but it certainly has a ring to it. I try the name on for size, and whilst I’m dogged by imposter syndrome, I can’t deny that it feels good.
‘I can get the cows in as a backdrop if you two ladies join your friend in the fountains.’ He gestures to Maria, who is dancing under the spray of a water feature.