The Enemy Within by Adam Macqueen

Author:Adam Macqueen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eye Books
Published: 2021-12-22T16:57:59+00:00

TWO

Of course there was no sign of him when I got to Hyde Park, just as I knew there wouldn’t be. There seemed to be fewer people than usual all round: a few hundred at most. I spotted Mark Ashton pretty quickly, bossing people around and handing out plastic collecting buckets, but he was the last person I wanted to talk to right now and I turned on my heel and tried to keep as many people between us as I could. If I wasn’t going to march with the Icebreakers lot, I supposed I ought to seek out the Gay and Lesbian Society from the Poly: they must be there somewhere. Or at least I assumed so; it was ages since I’d actually been to one of their meetings. Now I thought about it I’d been neglecting the whole gay side of things of late – time was I used to go to a Campaign for Homosexual Equality meeting every week. But there were only so many hours in the day, and over the past year I’d wasted too many of them on the Labour party instead, not to mention the WRP. And look where that had got me, I thought gloomily.

‘How’d you manage to get away without one of these?’

I turned and saw Paud. He was grinning and holding up one of the plastic buckets: it had a bit of paper with ‘SUPPORT THE MINERS’ Sellotaped to it.

‘I’m not sure. Don’t tell anyone.’ I grinned back queasily and leaned in to hug him and peck him on the cheek.

‘I think we might do quite well, you know. Look, I’ve already got a couple of quid here.’ He raised the bucket and gave it a noisy shake.

‘I think people are quite up for it,’ I agreed. A lot of people who’d been on the fence about the strike before seemed to have really come on side after they’d seen what had happened at Orgreave: the face-off had gone on for weeks, with more and more people turning up on either side until eventually it had erupted into a full-scale battle like something from medieval times, with thousands of police all tooled up with shields and batons, charging into the lines of miners on horseback and chasing them down through the surrounding fields. The News at Ten had shown a policeman beating a picket who was lying on the ground – hitting him so hard that his baton actually broke in half. There were pictures of miners with blood pouring from their heads, and Scargill himself had been knocked unconscious in the middle of it all. Needless to say, no one from the police was facing any sort of charges at all.

‘No Liam today?’

He meant the question perfectly innocently, but it cut through me like a knife. ‘No,’ I stuttered. ‘No, I’ve…I’ve not seen him for a week or so.’ It was eight days exactly. And it was three weeks exactly since the pair of us had walked together through that same park and I’d felt like we might have a real chance of being together forever.

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