Angel Hunt (11 page)

They were mostly women and they were outside a fur shop called Naamen's. One of them was dressed in a Bugs Bunny rabbit costume and was handing out leaflets. Two were unrolling a 30-foot banner, which read ‘It takes 53 dumb animals to make this coat but only one to wear it.' You didn't have to be a genius to work out they weren't from the Lord's Day Observance Society.

As we came round on Wigmore one more time, it was clear even from a distance that the situation had flared up drastically. The traffic had jammed up, for one thing, and then we were treated to the sight of the guy in the rabbit costume (it must have been male, women don't run like that) tearing down the street carrying a sledgehammer, hotly pursued by two policemen trying to keep their helmets on.

‘Far out,' breathed Trippy.

‘Run, Roger!' yelled one of the girls.

‘How about “Run Rabbit Run”?' suggested Martin, with a big grin.

I checked out what was happening ahead. The crowd outside Naamen's had spilled into Wigmore Street, stopping oncoming traffic, but the cops were trying to clear our lane. Women of all ages were shouting, and I clearly saw a handbag swung overarm. One policeman tripped over a litter-bin and sat down heavily in the gutter. He had a streak of red paint across the back of his uniform, so one at least had come armed with the essential spray can.

‘Let's do “How Much is that Doggy in the Window”,' I suggested, and took the lead before they could argue.

By the time we got level with the riot, we had quite a crowd of supporters on our side of the street singing along. I reckoned we were doing more damage to Naamen's image than the demonstrators.

Being higher than the policemen on the ground, I could see that most of the action was down to a half-a-dozen women wearing anoraks with the hoods up. They were the ones nipping in and out of the general ruck, tapping ankles, trying to spray-paint out the windows, and one of them even trying to set fire to a bunch of leaflets stuffed through Naamen's letter-box.

Through the window of the shop, I could see two or three salesgirls cowering behind a desk, trapped and frightened. It had been the same at university. I had always argued against sit-ins and ‘direct action' against campus property, as it was always the poor bloody infantry – the cleaners, maintenance men and secretaries – who got the rough end of the pineapple, never the generals in command. All they got was embarrassed.

At the traffic lights, we got into the thick of it. One or two of the demonstrating ladies had sat down on the pavement (they should never have shown
Gandhi
on TV) and were singing ‘The one with the waggerly tail …' with gusto.

About a dozen were still milling around, hurling themselves at the fur shop window, almost certainly bullet proof, the rest were arguing or wrestling with about ten policemen who were too busy to tell us to move on even when the lights changed.

A big, blond sergeant, minus helmet, had gone for the ringleaders in the anoraks and had two of them in headlocks, one under each arm. He was being waltzed around by his captives and he bellowed for help, but his colleagues had their own problems. From the other side of Portman Square, I heard a police siren, which meant that the cavalry was on its way, but with the traffic plugged solid it would take them a while.

A third, small, anoraked figure approached the sergeant from behind where his two captives were kicking their legs like the rear end of a pantomime horse on speed. This one stayed back, unzipped her anorak and from somewhere inside produced a silver metal can.

I got a good look at her, and the can. Mace in an aerosol, and probably not even ozone-friendly.

It sure as hell wasn't intended to be policeman-friendly.

She zipped up her anorak and began to work her way around to the sergeant's face. To do that, she had to step out into the road near the truck.

I stopped playing and tossed my trumpet to Kim, who had been showering our remaining advertising leaflets onto the melee. She was surprised but she caught it.

Then I leaned over the back of the truck, just avoiding a long, rasping glissando from Martin's slide, and grabbed the would-be mace maniac by the shoulders of her anorak.

She wasn't heavy, and although I'm no weight-training freak, I lifted her until her backside was balanced on the tailboard, and then it was just a matter of rolling her into the well of the truck, the back of her head making a satisfying thud as she landed.

‘Trippy,' I shouted breathlessly, ‘go!'

Trippy took his cue and banged the palm of his left hand on the top of the cab, and Ali must have put down his book – or got to a frightening bit – because he set off sharpish, left back towards Oxford Street.

I leaned over the girl, who was squirming like a landed fish trying to get her balance and stand up. She didn't resist when I took the can of mace from her hand and slipped it into my pocket. I doubt she actually noticed.

‘Hello again, Lucy,' I smiled.

 

 

 

 

 

‘I just get so ... so ...
angry
,'
said Lucy with venom, ‘I just don't know what comes over me.'

‘Criminal damage, assaulting a policeman, resisting arrest. Violation of probation orders, remand, young Cleo put in care … That's what could come over you.'

‘Hey! No sermons, see, or I'm outa here!' She was almost shouting, but it was the week before Christmas and we were in the Three Tuns and there were at least six different parties going on, so nobody noticed.

‘I'm sorry,' I said over the background roar.

‘I just don't like being fucking sermonised, okay?'

‘You got it.'

I had taken her to the Three Tuns, and told the others to meet us there, on the basis that it was the second nearest pub to the scene of the demo and the nearest one to Seymour Street police station. The last place the cops would look for her, if they were looking, which I doubted.

I had made Lucy take off her anorak so she looked a bit less like an urban guerrilla, even though the T-shirt she was wearing underneath – ‘Rats Have Rights' – was a bit of a giveaway, or maybe I was just paranoid. We had managed to squash ourselves into a corner table with two pints of strong winter-warmer beer. I'd ordered it because brandy always makes me thirsty (noticed that?) and Lucy because she said she liked ‘well-balanced, high gravity bitters.' Fair enough. I presumed it was politically correct. I mean, there's no meat in beer, is there? Or brandy, or whisky or wine for that matter, so we had common ground there at least. I had a sudden thought about the swimbladders of fish used to fine beer – to take the suspended proteins to the bottom of the cask and clarify the final product. I wondered if that counted. I decided not to mention them, just in case.

‘I know what you're thinking,' she said, before I'd had a chance to say anything. (Rule of Life No 72: when a woman says she knows what you're thinking, make your mind a blank and recite the 12 times table, or the
Book of Genesis
or the Hong Kong telephone book if you know it, just in case.)

‘It's just a bunch of crazy women making a spectacle of themselves when they should be home minding the kids.'

‘No, I really don't think that,' I said, but I couldn't tell if she believed me. It happened to be true, though. I knew lots of males who were two bricks short of a wall who enjoyed making spectacles of themselves, and I'd certainly never trust them to mind kids.

She took a huge pull on her beer.

‘Why did you pull me out of the protest?' she asked, steely-eyed. I wondered if this was the 64,000-dollar question.

‘Somebody had to,' I shrugged, ducking it.

‘You were just passing, eh?'

‘As a matter of fact, I must have passed you three or four times without seeing you. Why, did you think I was following you?' She cocked her head in a ‘maybe' sort of way. ‘Then I was, if that's what you want to think. I had this brilliant idea to blend into the scenery just so I could keep an eye on you. I got half a dozen drunks and three women dressed as Mother Christmas and put them on a truck, and we drove round the West End on the busiest shopping day of the year playing loud jazz and bunging up the traffic. Naturally, nobody gave us a second look, and I had the traffic lights co-ordinated by computer so that we stopped near you just as Sergeant Plod, with perfect timing, gave you an excuse to mace him. Okay?'

She didn't say anything to that, just drank more beer and then came back with: ‘So why the interest? Why the care and concern, why the drink and sociability?'

I wondered if she was talking to me for a minute. Down the bar, someone was trying to start a darts match, despite there being a mass of people between them and the board. It could end up like the Little Big Horn. Behind Lucy's head, an office party, obviously continued from lunchtime, was getting slowly and inevitably out of hand, and at least one guy from the Accounts Department (why is it always Accounts?) was not waving, but drowning in the typing pool. The Tuns was a good pub, but hardly a counselling centre.

‘Yesterday, when I asked you about animal rights, you said you were out of it and clammed up good and proper. Today, you're ripping up the cobblestones and storming the Bastille to stop the fur trade. I was curious.'

She eyeballed me some more, then finished her beer in one gulp. ‘Another?' I asked quickly, and walked off with her glass before she could reply.

I wanted to give her time to think over what harm it would do to tell me the truth. There was no way she'd respond to a third degree, so I was hoping she'd decide I was harmless. In fact, I gave her more thinking time than I'd bargained for, as the crush at the bar was worse than when we'd arrived. Somebody was muttering about a bomb scare at Marks and Spencer, which accounted for the influx. Most of the new customers were M & S staff.

I got Lucy another pint of the lethal winter ale, and for myself, a pint of Smithwick's alcohol-free beer, which looks and smells good enough to fool anyone. She was still sitting where I left her; that was a good sign.

‘I didn't lie,' she said, cupping her hands around her glass. ‘I was helping out some old friends from my women's group today, that was all. There's one hell of a difference between our protest here and the heavier stuff.'

‘So explain,' I said, hoping she wouldn't ask why.

She looked down into her beer.

‘I've grown up a lot in the last two years,' she said quietly, and I silently agreed with her. Jumping probation and knowing where to get mace canisters – yeah, I knew people who had graduated from that particular school of life. Some of them were still on the streets. ‘Sometimes your beliefs have to take a back seat in your life, otherwise they become obsessions to the exclusion of all else.'

It sounded as though she'd rehearsed that.

‘You mean now you've got Cleo to think about …?'

She paused just long enough for me to realise that that was not what she had in mind at all. She'd been thinking about something, or somebody, else.

‘Yes, yeah … exactly,' she said, unsurely. ‘I couldn't let – wouldn't let – the cause take over my life.'

‘The animal cause?'

She nodded, sipping more beer. She had a head on her, I'll give her that. Two pints of winter headbanger is usually enough to stun an armadillo.

‘So why today?'

‘Like I said, to help out. The way to stop the fur trade is to alienate the customer. No market for furs equals no shops like that one, equals no fur trade, no species extinction. It's one of the longest-running fights we have, and we thought we were winning and we got lazy.'

‘I don't follow,' I said, meaning it.

‘We successfully politicised a generation of women – those now in their thirties.' She leaned forward as she became more enthusiastic. ‘But it's a younger generation – the Yuppies, the Sloane Rangers, the rich whizzkids, women my age – who are seeing fur as a status symbol again. Money is God, fur means money. It's a women's problem and women have to solve it. We can't rely on television pictures of baby seals being clubbed to death; we've got to be there on the streets where the things are sold.'

‘A lot of the stuff in that shop was labelled farmed fur, you know, and fake fur isn't the turn-off it once was, if it's marketed right.'

‘Utter bollocks,' she said nastily. Fair enough, I can take the honest cut and thrust of intellectual debate.

‘It's
never
okay to wear fake fur; it simply encourages aspirations to the real thing and creates a class division of real and fake. And some fakes are no better than wild species. Have you seen any cats in north Germany recently? Do you know how much a cat pelt is worth in some parts of Europe?'

I hadn't and I didn't And I didn't give it a moment's real consideration. Honest, Springsteen.

‘And even if they really are fakes – synthetic fur –' she was on a roll now ‘– it's made from petrochemicals, and they're non-biodegradable and therefore damaging to the environment.'