Meredith spent the time glancing upwards at the glint of sunlight as it cut across the glass windows at the top of the hotel directly to their left. At one point a middle-aged man stood in his striped boxer shorts and business shirt looking down at the separated groups. It must be a strange sight from up there, she thought. But at least he could go and watch TV or relax by the pool. Meredith was stuck here, bored, keeping Amy company.
Even as she thought this, the first missile was thrown. It was a beer bottle. She watched it describe a perfect parabolic arc over the police lines and the vans parked behind them and then land somewhere amongst the unionist supporters. A policeman who had been sneaking a cigarette ran back to his lines and the cops visibly straightened their backs in tense expectation.
The reply took a few seconds and came in the form of a fusillade of beer bottles. They exploded all around them. Meredith saw that one was about to hit Amy and she shoved her out of its path and it exploded into splinters at her feet.
Amy looked shaken. ‘Thanks!’
‘No worries, pretty intense, hey!’ Meredith suddenly found that she was enjoying herself. The independentistas strained against the police lines, wanting to push through and get at the unionists.
Edu had disappeared as soon as the first missiles began to land but Ferran was still with them and he pushed forward, camera phone held aloft as he live-Facebooked the experience.
Meredith and Amy found themselves carried by the weight of the mob so they were pressed up against the police lines. Meredith could see the face of the nearest Mossos stormtrooper and she saw he was sweating. This was not unexpected in the heat – but there was something else. He looked anxious and frightened and his armoured fist was clenched tight around his baton as though he couldn’t wait to start swinging it to dissipate the crowd and his fear.
‘I think this could go bad,’ whispered Meredith to Amy. She was excited as she knew violence was now a real possibility.
Occasionally, a protestor would push a stormtrooper and the response would be a swift violent pushback with a gloved fist or shield. Meredith saw a young girl hit in the nose and she started bleeding heavily.
From somewhere in the crowd a beer bottle was thrown at the Mossos policeman who had hit the girl and it shattered against his visor. His colleague next to him swung his baton and brought it down hard on the shoulder of a middle-aged man with a placard. He screamed in agony and sank to the floor.
Meredith waited for what she now thought would be a full-scale riot but instead the protestors dragged the injured man to safety.
She was rammed close to Amy now and could feel her shaking.
Ferran was still filming and had a manic grin – she could see that to him this was sport and he was thoroughly enjoying it. Meredith couldn’t criticise this because, to her surprise, so was she.
They remained like this for a few minutes, pressed up against the police line. Amy began to visibly relax and even managed a weak smile when Meredith said that it was lunchtime soon and there was no way the Catalans would miss a meal to protest. She noticed that Ferran was no longer with them.
But nothing stopped. More missiles were going both ways and then just as she wondered where Ferran had disappeared to, she saw him emerge behind the police lines together with five or six other independentistas. They had taken a back alley and now they were in the middle of the enemy and raring to fight.
Edu, who had rejoined them without explaining where he had been, saw Ferran at the same time. ‘Meredith, Amy, I think you should leave,’ he said, and Meredith saw that he was worried.
Amy turned to Meredith. ‘I think we should go.’
But Meredith was watching now as the unionists reacted to the sudden presence of yellow in their massed red ranks. It was a fast, violent reaction. Fists began to fly and she could see now that Ferran and his group were armed with clubs and they began to swing them. The Mossos ran to the scene but left the lines in front of them thinner and at the same time both sides pressed forward and the police line broke.
The weight of the mob at their backs thrust them forward again and then they were through the police lines. And all around Meredith was pure kinetic force; bones cracked, kicks landed, as the maelstrom whirled around them.
Edu was holding her hand but then she saw a police baton raise and crash against his arm, and he collapsed in a heap. The policeman raised his baton again but Meredith ran at him and pushed him backwards.
He fell to the floor and Meredith knelt and picked up a smashed beer bottle. She held it firmly around the neck of the bottle and realised that she could plunge it into the area where the policeman’s chest armour had ridden up as he fell. She could murder him right here and in this chaos she might even get away with it. Why shouldn’t I just do it? she thought.
Maybe he saw something in her eyes but he started to scramble backwards using his elbows. Meredith stepped forward but then a young independentista with rat-tail hair tripped over the policeman and they both started to scuffle.
‘Meredith!’ It was Edu.
Meredith knelt next to him. ‘Are you okay?’
He looked shaken but otherwise not seriously hurt. ‘I’ll be fine. What were you going to do to that policeman?’
She grinned at him. ‘Nothing, I was just saving you.’
‘Nancy!’
Meredith looked back and saw Amy was on her knees with her hands over her ears and she was screaming. All around her people were fighting, forming one big roiling mass of violence.
‘Come on,’ she said to Edu, and she ran back to Amy.
‘Amy, it’s me.’
Amy opened her eyes which she had squeezed tightly shut. ‘Make it stop! Why are they doing this?’
A unionist with a cut so deep in his temple that a flap of skin hung down over his eye stumbled past them, blood dripping onto them both.
‘We have to go, Amy. Can you walk?’
Her skin looked pale and was clammy to the touch even in the concrete heat of the battle and Meredith knew that Amy was panicking. This was not in her playbook at all. This should have sealed Amy’s integration into a new world and not terrified her.
Amy stood up.
Edu was wrestling with another unionist, a fat man with a skinhead and mottled face, but he looked like he had the better of it.
‘Follow me,’ she said to Amy and, ducking and weaving through the brawl, crunching broken glass underfoot, she led Amy by the hand out of the riot.
It was surreal. One metre took them from a full-scale riot with broken bones, armoured police and weapons and into a street that was empty – save for the hundreds of tourists, some eating ice creams, but nearly all with phones pointed at the rioting groups as though this were a stop on the regular Barcelona tourist trail.
‘All good?’
Amy seemed to be physically fine but she was shaking a little. She nodded.
‘We need a drink,’ said Meredith, ‘I know a place near here. Let’s leave them to it.’
They walked across the patch of empty road and into the throng of tourists who parted and let them through, but took plenty of pictures of them as they did so.
Twenty more yards and it was as though there wasn’t a riot taking place just down the road even though they could still hear the screams and shouting.
Amy stopped walking and hugged Meredith. ‘That was awful. I never imagined it would be like that. Did you see that man’s face? It was all torn up. People could die.’ She burst into tears and hugged Meredith tighter. ‘It was so horrible. I hated it.’
Meredith hugged her back. ‘Oh I know. It was the worst.’ But she was lying: she had loved every moment.
17
Olivia had said she had some errands to run so had not joined the rest of The Squad for the afternoon’s activities.
Meredith was pleased about this as she had felt that Olivia’s new air of courteousness was concealing something else. She told herself that this was probably just paranoia but she couldn’t help but fe
el that Olivia was watching her, and the Instagram comment from Steel had spooked her.
She had gone online and looked up Steel, but apart from the Instagram profile there was no information, and the profile itself carried no pictures of the user nor did the feed show the identity. Meredith had a good idea who it could be based on the pictures that were on there. There were not many images, and no comments or likes, just pictures of a strip of stores, Douglas firs, redwoods surrounding the remains of a campfire and a bunch of trailer homes all from a small town on the North Pacific Coast that Meredith recognised well.
It didn’t matter though: so what if they thought they recognised her? It meant nothing, signified nothing and they couldn’t do her any harm. But it annoyed her that someone could reach out, over thousands of miles and from many years in the past, and place a cold finger of doubt on her.
She consoled herself by looking out at the magnificent view from Sant Jeroni, the peak of the mountain of Montserrat. They had taken an early morning train from Barcelona to the abbey and then climbed up the trails to the highest point which gave unrivalled views across the plain, back towards Barcelona and the Mediterranean. Adam had wanted a place to shoot some images outside the city and Meredith had known he would love the otherworldly atmosphere of the saw-backed mountain. Once you were up here amongst the towering granite formations and ancient hermitages and caves of long dead monks it was easy to see why many had thought it was the resting place of the Holy Grail.
Adam had loved it but this initial enthusiasm had begun to pale when he was forced to walk up the steep paths that led from the monastery to this vantage point. As Dylan and Richard raced ahead, she had accompanied him and been subject to his smoker wheeze as they climbed.
She had used the opportunity to broach the subject of her future with The Squad and the possibility of being paid, not just for finding Amy, but for her work with them.
He had paused and lit up a cigarette in the same way that a mountaineer might reach for an oxygen tank and it had seemed to alleviate his immediate breathing difficulties. ‘I hear you, I really do. And your posts, well, you know they’ve been amazing. Great results and, fuck me, that last one, through the fucking roof. But I’ve been good, yeah. That hotel room doesn’t come free, you know.’
She had declined to say that he had already paid for it for Amy.
He continued, accompanying each point with a little jab of his cigarette. ‘But here’s the thing. The Squad has been successful so far and most of that is down to Amy. We need her back. If it was up to me, I’d say yeah, it’s a no-brainer, and I like you, I really do, darling. You get her back and then we talk, yeah? And it will be Amy’s decision ultimately as she is the creative, you know, the talent. If she thinks it’s a good idea then let’s do it. But first, let’s get her back, yeah?’
Meredith had agreed. What else could she do? And although she had spent the rest of the climb chatting with Adam about the mountain she had been thinking about Amy. After the riot, they had retired to a bar and had a couple of glasses of wine to relax, but the riot had disturbed Amy. She had settled after the second glass of wine but she had told Meredith that she had never expected it to be like that – blood, broken bones and cracked heads.
She was also mad at Ferran. He hadn’t made sure she was okay and had remained in the maelstrom of the riot. They had later learned that he had been arrested and released, a fairly common experience for the independentistas. But the fact that he had stayed to ‘enjoy the fighting’, in Amy’s words, hadn’t boded well for the survival of their relationship. Not that Meredith had been under any illusion as to the expected longevity of Ferran and Amy’s relationship, but she had thought it had some more time to run. She had hoped to use that time to consolidate her position within The Squad. But she suspected Amy would be returning sooner rather than later and Adam had made it clear that it was Amy who would call the shots. She would need to speak to her.
Meredith thought she had bonded well enough with Amy and she was thinking that Amy may welcome a counterweight to Olivia. Perhaps that was the way to proceed: to convince Amy that Olivia had been plotting against her. She busied herself with such thoughts as they slowly followed Dylan and Richard up the mountain.
Eventually, the path narrowed and steepened as it left the trees and wound over the crests of huge outcrops of rock that gave views to the horizon in every direction.
‘Fuck me, this is amazing,’ said Adam in between crusty-sounding breaths.
At the very top, a bored-looking Dylan was sitting on a plinth and texting. He didn’t look up as they arrived.
Richard was doing press-ups and grinned at Meredith. ‘Wow, this is something else. It’s like being on another planet. We will get some amazing shots up here.’
Adam lit another cigarette and began to unload his camera gear.
‘You, my little cockfoster, are not wrong. Dylan, put that phone away!’ It was a cardinal rule of Adam’s that a phone should never appear in their pictures. “The medium must appear separate from the messenger” was his motto.
Dylan rolled his eyes but put the phone in his pocket and then quickly pushed himself up into a handstand on the plinth.
‘You are a natural, son!’ Adam began to take shots of Dylan performing his handstand with the sublime beauty of the plain that swept thousands of feet below them, all the way to Barcelona thirty miles away.
Meredith and Richard hung back by the railings and watched as Dylan struck more acrobatic poses and then at Adam’s suggestion removed his T-shirt to get the same shots but with more flesh on show.
‘He is brilliant, you know.’
Meredith wasn’t sure whether Richard meant Dylan or Adam. ‘Adam?’
‘Yeah, not Dylan, Christ, no offence’ – he dropped his voice to a whisper – ‘he is eminently replaceable and I’m not being too bitchy when I tell you that before Dylan, we had a Troy before Amy got bored of him. Do you think she will be bringing this Frank on board?’
‘Ferran, it’s a Catalan name. And no, I don’t she will be bringing him on board. I think Dylan’s place is safe.’
Richard arched an eyebrow. ‘For now. And maybe, we will have a new member anyway.’
Meredith did her shucks face and tried to look coy. ‘What would you think about that?’
Richard waved his hand airily. ‘Well, it’s not up to me but if you do want my opinion, I think you would be an excellent addition to The Squad.’
Meredith gave him her smile and then he hugged her.
‘What about Olivia? I get the feeling she doesn’t really like me.’
‘Olivia is just protective of The Squad, that’s all. She knows how quickly we can lose all of this.’ He held his arms up to indicate their job.
The best job in the world, thought Meredith, living in luxury and being paid to do so.
Richard continued, ‘And she gets a little too protective sometimes.’
Meredith thought about Olivia’s absence and Steel83’s comments and she came to a decision she had been pondering on the climb up. ‘Adam, guys, can I have a word?’
Back at Soho House, after they had showered and changed, The Squad met for an early evening sundowner around the pool.
Meredith loved it up here. The sun was just beginning to dip behind Montjuïc. The old fortress atop the mountain, a place of many deaths and torture during the civil war, became suffused with blood-red light and dark shadows. For a moment her many worries were extinguished as she gazed out at its dark beauty.
Adam appeared at her side holding two impossibly large globes of gin and tonic.
She took one and they clinked glasses.
‘Today was a fucking good day,’ he said.
He showed them the pictures on the train back to the city and they were some of the best she had seen him do. The ones without Dylan performing gymnastics or the guys clowning around, a cut above his usual fare because they captured the essence of Montserrat. She had been impressed and told him so. ‘You have real
talent, Adam.’
‘I always wanted to shoot for the National Geographic, you know, but it doesn’t pay the bills.’
For a moment they looked out over the harbour and the Colom where hordes of tourists were making their way to the restaurants over at Maremagnum.
‘Beauty doesn’t pay. Look down there. What pays is other people, and the trick is making sure you are the payee,’ she said.
Adam snorted. ‘Cynical but true, I’m afraid. Come and join us. We’ve got a table and Olivia says she has some good news.’
The rest of The Squad were at a table and Richard and Dylan were busy ordering food from one of the waiters. Olivia was sat, cool and elegant, swiping at her phone.
The waiter, an overqualified engineer who had told Meredith he couldn’t get a job so had been forced to serve tables, asked Meredith in perfect English whether she would like to order some food. She asked for tuna tartar and some bread.
Olivia smiled sweetly at Meredith as she took a seat next to Richard. ‘I saw the photos from today, they are simply wonderful, some of your best, Adam,’ she said.
‘I try, you know.’
‘Don’t be so modest. Didn’t you think they were wonderful, Nancy?’ Olivia placed additional emphasis on ‘Nancy’ and Meredith began to get a sick feeling in her stomach.
She took a large gulp from her gin and tonic. ‘Yeah, I just told Adam I thought they were fantastic. How was your day?’
Olivia’s eyes sparkled with delight and she clapped her hands. ‘I am so glad you asked. I had such an interesting day. I had to talk to Adidas and they want us to drop their new city Gazelle range in a series of urban shoots. The shoes are being delivered tomorrow. I had all your sizes apart from yours, Nancy, but I guessed that you are a five, same as Amy. Anyway, the other piece of good news: well you may not be needing them, Nancy, because Amy has texted me today and I get the feeling that she may be rejoining us tomorrow.’
Dylan punched the air. ‘Yes!’
Richard reached across the table and high-fived Olivia.
How to Kill Your Friends Page 13