Central London wasn’t feeling like itself tonight. The narrow roads crammed with five star hotels and overpriced rickshaws resembled the back passages of Old Dhaka; beggars sat at the entrance of the Ritz hotel and drunkards waved half-empty bottles of beer around, stumbling on the pavements like the bacteria that swarmed in the intestines. Cars creeped along at 5 miles an hour, never more than an inch away from each other. The sound of car horns polluted the air.
But gathered like ants were 250,000 people, averaging 4 people per square metre (BBC News) and anger simmered in the air, placards of all shapes and sizes floating above the masses (Sky News). There was the low hum of voices and mute faces everywhere. It was a rippling sea of people. All marching as slowly as the cars towards somewhere; maybe anywhere.
Kulsuma marched with them. She was a Protester today. Jaya had said that Martin Luther... Actually, fuck Jaya, thought Kulsuma, fuck Jaya and her incessant picking away at life, her cumbersome contemplations and her false sense of culture. Fuck her inner monologue and rambling. Tonight Kulsuma was doing something on her own agenda. She had read that Martin Luther King had said ‘A riot is the language of the unheard.’ And Kulsuma was unheard; nobody cared about her; yes, her actions tonight may be cathartic but futile, but who ever cared about the aftermath? Who but fools ever looked to consequences? Confined by history to stand aside, her love of fences bubbled away in her blood. But today, by god, she was going to tear that fence up from its roots and fuck the shit out of it.
Her eyes flickered from side to side; she had read on Facebook the violent rioters from the splinter group would be making their entrance as soon as the crowd got to Oxford Street. She needed a clear path to quickly follow them, tag on the end of their line and Smash Shit Up. At this rate, walking the 400 yards to Oxford Street would probably take an hour.
She looked around; riot police were dotted around, but a clean line of hard-hatted bobbies strode at the front of their crowd, dehumanised, fluorescent jackets punctuated with the clean, dark blue rectangle on their backs: POLICE. She’d generally had only good experiences with the white shirted ones that frequented her road. But these ones; she didn’t need to see their faces; she could predict what they looked like just by looking at their backs. Bastards; sheepish, smug, straight-laced, conformist, egomaniacal bastards. They continued to march in front, back straight, leading this mob of people who could have lynched them in an instant and thrown the country in to chaos. But on they walked, black shoes on the ground; thump, thump, thump. Kulsuma’s heartbeat steadied to the sound of their boots. The silence in between each thump was agonising. She was an Unheard. She was allowed to live in her head, allow it to fuel her, turning her in to a little missile of Anger. The rest of the world may have thought her struggle was stale, that the market had been over saturated with her complaints; they’d hushed her and tried to silence her, telling her she wasn’t fashionable anymore. But they’d only driven her underground and today she was emerging, probably walking with a whole bunch of those people who were sick of hearing the complaints of those like her (but never quite completely her): the inimitable Kulsuma marched today, not like a troop, but a trooper. A dissident, breakaway anarchist.
They approached Oxford street, and as though a switch had been flipped and the historical resonances of Old London was too much to bear, the crowd erupted in to a complete mess.
‘All hell has broken loose!’ A news reporter yelled in to a camera, ‘The crowd has divided in to several groups, each taking a different avenue. The peaceful marchers have gone that way. A younger group are going over there,’ his voice was breaking, panic was in his face, the top buttons of his shirt had suddenly become undone and his sleeves were rolled up, he bent down to keep his face in the lense, ‘oh my goodness the riot police have emerged from the waiting vans and are forming a ring around the protestors. It’s incredible! They’re already starting to kettle the smaller breakaway groups!’ Red bloches appeared on his cheeks and he was swallowed up by the oncoming crowd.
Kulsuma frantically looked around wondering which crowd to go with. She needed to get to the cluster of banks; that’s where they were going to emerge from.
Shit, she thought, no, not this time. I’m not missing my opportunity this time, history. She found several cars which had foolishly parked on the pavement and jumped on to a bonnet, then stepped up to the roof. She scoped the swathes of people. From this viewpoint, everything looked slow; she could see some flurry of activity in small pockets: a young dumpy girl wearing an oversized cardigan puffed away on her cigarette while repeatedly hitting one of the riot police on the head (he remained still, rendered farcical against the gentle tappings on his helmet); a cluster of youth in chequered scarves spray painited the visors and shields of the dark-blue force; another set of older men pushed and shoved their way through the line of the yellow jacketed police and ran towards-
Topshop! There it was! Kulsuma jumped off the car and began running towards the men running away from the police and running towards the gaping doors of the shop through the throngs of the crowd tapping stomping beating their chests and stretching their vocals and pumping their fists and flaring their nostrils and creasing their brows. But bollocks! Everything at ground level was so confusing and overcrowded; there were too many people rubbing against her and stopping her from taking even a step forward; her shoulders were pushed forward and she was almost crushing herself.
The police line had reformed at the front and the riot police were protecting the sides. She felt the need to break something, quickly, before it gave way to the inevitable feeling of futility.
Then a collective jeering ensued to the left of her; a man had fallen in to the springy arms of the crowds; she saw the police truncheon withdraw just in time and there, a tiny window of opportunity presented itself, as the officer’s back was still bent over the injured protestor; three seconds and he’d snap back up. She needed to ride that bent back.
Her ankle jolted her body forward and she leaped over the injured man, landed just to the side of his head, and saw the gap closing between the bent officer and the rest of the upright line. It was just big enough for her to squeeze through. She made the final leap and sailed through the air, arms flayed, legs targeted at the tiny space, hair flying behind her, and landed on the other side with a thud, the road coming to meet her. She rolled over a couple of times, slapped her palms on the ground and snapped upright; and with a quick look over her shoulder she caught a flash of yellow coming after her. But she was gone! She ran fast and hard, pounding the pavement and running as fast as her joints could snap in and out of place; the sound of the hooves of the huntsman scuffling across the ground followed her for all of 30 seconds, but they gave up quickly. She could hear him talk in to the radio, before he went to rejoin the official line.
She slowed to a walk, her lungs violently pumping air any which way. She could see the entrance to Topshop. It was silent here. The area hadn’t been pentrated by anyone else but the men that broke away. She could hear the shouts of the crowd, only just, above the blood coarsing through her body. It seemed something had been awoken from its slumber.
She smiled; one corner of her lips curled up, and she scoped the few roads ahead of her. Where the hell was the cluster of banks? Shit was she going the wrong way?
She had read they would emerge here where it was the quietest because the police would be protecting this zone. Hai Muhammad, what was she doing? Did she have any idea what she was doing?
Then she heard it. A quiet, creeping crackling sound around one of the many corners, bits of wood scraping along the floor, the blub-blub of cardboard.
‘Hello?’ She said, stopping.
A face with a balaclava on popped around the corner. They stared at each other for a few seconds. It disappeared.
She cautiously followed. A yelp from someone from the baying crowds let her know they were moving closer to the centre.
‘Who are you?’ A male voice demanded. Another masked man suddenly approached he
r, moving so close to her face that she couldn’t see behind him.
‘I wanted to join the Anarchists. I read about you guys on the internet.
The man looked behind him, and after a few seconds stepped aside. There were four people, all wearing black balaclavas, tattered jeans and cotton t-shirts. One was bent over a pile of broken placards, neatening up the pile, while another doused pink liquid over it from a jerry can.
The one bent over looked her up and down, then looked at the man standing in front of her and nodded.
‘Here’s a mask. Put it on.’ He threw her a black balaclava. ‘Who you with?’
‘Just me.’
He scoffed. ‘No, which party?’
‘I’m working for myself.’
The men all laughed, and one beckoned her to the pile. She pulled on the balaclava and everything changed. In that way that change creeps up or just slips in neatly like a pair of test lenses in the dentists chair, everything changed. From the view of Kulsuma’s height, to the perception of the precisely sculpted white arches on Oxford Street, to her retrospective -usually bitter- look back at her history and its comatose inability to do shag all about its surrounding events, filled with the stories of filthy beggars riding in on the wheels of somebody else’s success; this balaclava changed all that. She had on a skin darker than her own, as faceless as her own, as unidentifiable as she had always felt. They’d created political correctness for the likes of her, and from it had burgeoned the weeds of discrimination, pushing up from under the ground, budding and blossoming and spraying its pollutants all over her. So here she was, reclaiming her dark skin and her facelessness, reclined so deep in to her own ugliness that it had turned in to a beast.
Here’s to you, Jaya, you fucking bitch, and she took the box of matches from the bent over man, lit one, and threw it with venom and force on to the soggy pile of wood and cardboard. The flame surged high, high! above them all, towered in a bright glowing triangle, crackling and seething and spewing chunks in to the surrounding air. She’d just committed arson.
‘There’s a line of bins outside HSBC and Natwest. We’re going to dislodge those and throw them in to the windows. Once that’s done, its each to their own. We need to run. Now.’
They didn’t so much run as glide. The buildings were a blur as they passed them. A line of five. She even pretended her arms were wings and put them out to the side of her for a little while. They arrived at the line of bins. The windows of the banks were big, huge, gaping, like they were asking to be bashed in. She felt the anger surge inside her like the frustration when Jaya would talk about something and it mingled with lust and craving and the feeling of distance coupled with the idea of never being allowed to touch something and now it gushed forth like bile. One of the men pushed a flame in to her palm and without needing any promts, she chucked it in to the nearing crowds (Mona Begum had thrown a candle in to a pile of clothes belonging to her housemaster, Colonel Dickinson after he had banned open air meetings between Muslims, which stopped her from meeting her distantly beloved Charun). It landed in a ring of police men who momentarily stepped back from it, then turned around and spotted Kulsuma and the masked men. Five riot police and four yellow police began ranning towards them quickly covering the 200 yards between them.
It took 60 yards for the four masks to dislodge the bins.
It took 1 yard for one of the bins to roll to Kulsuma’s feet.
It took 10 yards for her to pick up the bin and hoist it above her head.
And it took 1,012 years and three months for a member of Kulsuma Begum’s blood line to forever embed itself in any kind of history.
The black and gold barrel flew from her hands, as though helped by the thousands of forces loitering around her shoulders: the angels Kiraman Katibeen and the discontent souls of all the unheard women of her past, recorded and done –respectively- all witnessed this surge of activity by a faceless young girl in jeans and a chequered shirt and a pair of pumps with illegal love pumping through her capillaries. Like the battles where the guardians of God helped those on the battlefield, killing the opposers before the soldiers of the Good had even touched them, it seemed the glass shattered in to thousands of pieces before the bin had even impacted it. She had a second to contemplate what she had done, before turning her face to the left and seeing a helmet and visor just inches away from her nose.
She jumped to the side and he stumbled right past her. She grinned.
‘Come on you crazy bitch!’ One of the men yelled.
One of the yellow police men made a grab for her but she was already far gone, physically and spiritually, rolling through the back alleys of Oxford Street and towards the open air of Carnaby Square, where a few photographers were gathered.
And for the last time in her short life, she leaped over one final obstacle before she disappeared in the Underground: it was a black ball, that came up to her knee, made of marble, and placed there for presumably artistic reasons. It had no relation to anything around it; it was smooth, and finite, sitting there in the middle of Carnaby Square, perhaps a passing fancy of somebody somewhere. It could have been stepped around, walked around, not touched, but certainly noticed. Just for fun’s sake, she jumped over it, and at the peak of her air-arch, she splayed out her arms and legs and smiled for the cameras. Flash flash flash.
For a long time afterwards, people looked at this picture of a smiling masked anarchist, where strangely enough, only the area in front of her was blurred, while behind her, the world lay crisp and cleared.
Jaya was messaging Eleven:
JC: Poop?
11: Yep?
JC: Why do I love you so much?
11: Because I’m your sitar.
JC: O yea *hug*
11: You’re in love with the idea of me, not me actually. That’s why.
11: …
11: *shocked face* this means you’re in love with your mind!!!
JC: *shocked face* Busted!!!!! *slaps forehead*
11: Truly busted mrs!
JC: hehe. No. I *heart icon* you for you.
JC: Nothing in my mind could have dreamed up something as perfect as you.
11: *shy face*blush*shy face*
11: Baby?
JC: Mmmm?..
11: Please don’t love me so much *sad face*
JC: *sad face*
11: Because its scary and its hard.
JC: I understand why you’d want that, but I can’t help it.
11: If you love me too much, how are we supposed to break away from each other? I really don’t know.
JC: Maybe we don’t have to break away from each other.
JC: I was talking to an imam yesterday
11: *shocked face* whoa! You were actually speaking to an imam? Wow!!
JC: lol yea
JC: But I asked him: if two same sex couples love each other, and are physically attracted to each other, and they hang out a lot, is it a sin?
JC: And he said:
JC: No, not at all. It’s the physical acts of homosexuality that are condemned by Allah. So long as they never have sex, they’re fine. But he did say that hanging around with someone you’re attracted to can lead to sex, so they have to make sure that that doesn’t happen.
JC: Simply feeling love isn’t a sin.
JC: Do you understand why I asked that?
11: Why?
JC: Think.
11: Because you were trying to find a way for you and I to stay together forever without it being a sin.
JC: Lol, yea, exactly. So technically when we’re married we can still hang out *party face*
11: hehehe
JC: *smiley face* Does that make you happy?
11: That would be awkward and hard.
JC: Yea I don’t know how feasible it is cuz we’d be sleeping with another guy
11: But I’m willing to give it a go *smiley face*
JC: Yea. We’ll see.
11: I don’t think my jealousy would remain silent on the day I hear
you’ve slept with him for the first time.
JC: Well you can deal with it.
11: brb…
11: Ok, I got so horny at the fact that I couldn’t have sex with you, that I just masturbated over us breaking the rules…
11: And no, I don’t regret it because my climax was lovely!
JC: *shocked face* *shocked face*
JC: You were masturbating over breaking the rules when we were talking about having no sex!!
11: *shy face* sorry. I’m sorry. Please don’t hate me.
JC: lol
11: It was a physical act with myself, so it wasn’t a sin.
11: I didn’t break the rules.
JC: *hug*
11: …
11: I climaxed twice btw.
JC: *slap*