need for a more meaningful world. There was scarcely a human activity that was not the target of a concerned group ready to spend its weekends picketing laboratories, merchant banks and nuclear-fuel depots, trudging up muddy lanes to defend a badger sett, lying across a motorway to halt the reviled race enemy of all demonstrators, the internal combustion engine.
Far from being on the fringe, these groups were now part of the country’s civic traditions, along with the Lord Mayor’s parade, Ascot week and Henley Regatta. At times, as I joined a demonstration against animal experiments or Third-World debt, I sensed that a primitive religion was being born, a faith in search of a god to worship. Congregations roamed the streets, hungry for a charismatic figure who would emerge sooner or later from the wilderness of a suburban shopping mall and scent a promising wind of passion and credulity.
Sally was my field researcher, scanning the net for advance news of obscure protest rallies, and only too keen to help. Both of us had been shaken by Laura’s death, Sally more than I expected. Using her sticks again, she moved around the house with the same wristy determination she had shown in the physiotherapy unit at St Mary’s where I had first courted her. She was returning to the period of wounded time when she was obsessed with Frida Kahlo and their shared tram accidents. If only for Sally’s sake, I needed to crack the conundrum of Laura’s death.
From the backs of halls, and behind the barricades at protest meetings, I searched the rows of determined faces for a genuinely disturbed mind, some deranged loner eager to live out a dream of violence. But in fact almost all the demonstrators were good-humoured members of the middle class – level-headed students and health-care professionals, doctors’ widows and grandmothers working on Open University degree courses. Some prick of conscience, some long-dormant commitment to principle, brought them out into the cold and rain.
The only frightening people I met were the police and television crews. The police were morose and unpredictable, paranoid about any challenge to their authority. The television reporters were little more than agents provocateurs, forever trying to propel the peaceful protests into violent action. Neutrality was the most confrontational stance of all, while the nearest I came to an exponent of political violence was Angela, the Kingston housewife and cat lover.
As I sat on the steps of the mansion block, she produced antiseptic spray and surgical lint from her jacket. She cleaned my wounds and sprayed the stinging vapour over the weals. All the while she kept a baleful eye on the policewoman, now threatening to arrest two cyclists who had stopped to observe the demo.
‘Feel better?’ Angela flexed my knee. ‘I’d visit your doctor pronto.’
‘I’m fine. I ought to bring a complaint, but I didn’t see her move.’
‘You never do.’
I pointed to the medical kit. ‘You were expecting trouble?’
‘Of course. People feel very strongly.’
‘For the cats?’
‘They’re political prisoners. Start experimenting on animals and human beings will be next.’ She smiled with surprising sweetness and kissed my forehead, a field decoration for a valiant trooper. With a wave, she left me to look after myself.
Touched by her warmth, I watched the protesters regroup and make a second attempt to block the exhibition hall’s entrance foyer and ticket office. Placards rose into the air, and a pole carried a small cage occupied by a stuffed marmalade cat, paws handcuffed through the bars. A stream of yellow plastic confetti struck the policewoman, dribbling across her uniform jacket. Brushing the sticky threads from her chin, she stepped into the group of demonstrators and tried to seize the aerosol can from a young man in a tiger mask.
An ugly struggle broke out, blocking the traffic in Hammersmith Road, a series of running scuffles that left half a dozen middle-aged protesters sitting stunned beside the wheels of stalled taxis. But I was watching Angela as she crossed the road, hands deep in the pockets of her jacket. She ignored the demonstrators wrestling with the police, and held the arm of a ponytailed man who stepped from the pavement to join her.
I stood up and made my way towards the exhibition hall, walking through the startled tourists and curious passers-by who were milling about in the centre of the road. Angela and her ponytailed companion moved through the entrance foyer, arms around each other’s waists, like lovers immersed in their own world.
I was following them past the ticket office when I heard a thunderflash explode in the exhibition hall. Startled by the harsh air burst, and the re-echo of slammed doors, the visitors around me flinched and ducked behind each other. A second thunderflash detonated in the overhead gallery, lighting up the mirrors in the antique lifts. An elderly couple in front of me stumbled into a pyramid of jewelled flea collars, throwing it to the floor in a gaudy sprawl.
A violent struggle was taking place among the cages on the main floor. Angela and the ponytailed man forced their way through the confused breeders and wrenched the doors off the display hutches. I guessed that a group of infiltrators had been waiting for the police to be distracted by the commotion in Hammersmith Road, giving them time to carry out their action.
I limped after Angela, aware that she would be no match for the outraged breeders. A police sergeant and two constables overtook me through the crowd, ducking their heads as a third thunderflash exploded inside a sales pavilion filled with quilted baskets.
A large cat, a sleekly groomed Maine Coon, streaked towards us, paused to get its bearings in the forest floor of human legs, and darted between the sergeant’s boots. The sight of this liberated creature sent a spasm of rage through the onlookers. One of the constables blundered into me, pushed me aside and ran after Angela. Her ponytailed companion brandished a can of tear gas, holding back a circle of breeders while Angela snapped the cage locks with a pair of cutters.
The sergeant hurled Angela’s colleague aside, struck the cutters from her hands and seized her shoulders from behind. He lifted her into the air like a child and threw her at his feet among the sawdust and scattered rosettes. As he lifted her again, ready to hurl this small and stunned woman to the cement floor, I ran forward and gripped his arm.
Less than a minute later I was lying on the floor, my face in the sawdust, hands cuffed behind me. I had been viciously kicked by the angry breeders, shouting down my pleas that I was defending a Kingston housewife, cat lover and mother of two.
I rolled onto my back, as the sirens sounded in Hammersmith Road and the Olympia loudspeakers urged visitors to remain calm. The protest had ended and the last cordite vapour from the thunderflashes drifted under the ceiling lights. Breeders straightened their cages and comforted their ruffled pets, and a saleswoman rebuilt the pyramid of flea collars. Angela and the ponytailed man had slipped away, but the police bundled several handcuffed demonstrators towards the exit.
Two police officers lifted me to my feet. The younger, a black constable baffled by the huge menagerie of cats and the attention lavished on them, dusted the straw from my jacket. He waited as I tried to breathe through my bruised ribs.
‘You have something against cats?’ he asked.
‘Just against cages.’
‘Too bad. You’re going into one.’
I inhaled deeply, looking at the overhead lights. I realized that a second odour had replaced the tang of cordite. As the thunderflashes exploded, a thousand terrified creatures had joined in a collective act of panic, and the exhibition hall was filled with the potent stench of feline urine.
A LESS BRACING scent, the odour of the guilty and unwashed, hung over the magistrates’ court in Hammersmith Grove. I waited in the back row of the public seats, trying to hear the bench’s verdict on a mother of three accused of soliciting outside Queen’s Tennis Club. She was a depressed woman in her early forties, barely literate and in desperate need of remedial care. Her mumbled plea was drowned by the ceaseless activity in the court