Centre.”
Jeff clamped a hand over his forehead; he couldn’t believe what she was saying. “Listen, Alison, if you’ve got any influence over him at all, get him to go home. Please. I can see them from our window. It’s really not pretty down here.”
“I’ll tell him, but I don’t suppose it’ll do much good. You know what he’s like.”
“Yeah.”
Jeff gave his PCglasses a long look. “I’m going to call Tim,” he said.
49. TALKING ABOUT A REVOLUTION
TIM WAS SURPRISED by the reception at Kings Cross. As soon as he and Vanessa got off the train the police marshaled them along the platform, a busy line of people all treading on one another’s heels. It was the start of the pushing that he’d have to endure most of the day.
“Are you with this lot?” a policeman shouted at him as they got to the end of the platform. The man’s voice was muffled by his helmet filters; he was jabbing a gauntlet toward the yelling, chanting protestors packed into the concourse.
Vanessa pulled herself tighter against Tim, her face anxious as she took in the huge mass of bodies.
“No,” Tim yelled back. “We’re here to visit some friends.”
“Wrong day,” the policeman said. “Get out over there. This lot are all going to Docklands. You don’t want any part of that.”
The two closest protestors screamed obscene abuse at him. Tim shoved his way through the throng toward the side exit the policeman had indicated, keeping a close hold on Vanessa. They finally made it outside to the deserted taxi rank. Tim took a deep breath. Vanessa was shaking.
“I didn’t think it was going to be like that,” she said in a small voice. There was no traffic on the Euston Road; the crowds outside Kings Cross and St. Pancras had spilled over the tarmac as they waited for their march to Docklands to begin. Stewards had long since given up trying to shepherd them along their designated route. Every arriving train seemed to bring hundreds more.
Tim put his PCglasses on and called Colin.
“Where the hell are you?” Colin asked.
“Just got in. Where are you?”
“Halfway to Docklands, I think. Simon and Rachel are here. We’re in the middle of a march. Nobody knows what’s happening. There aren’t any stewards. We’re just following along.”
“Can you get out? We should meet up.”
“Yeah, right. Hang on, my GPS says we’re on Whitechapel. We’ll try and get across to Bethnal Green tube station. Can you get there?”
“I think so.” Tim’s PCglasses showed him a London street map. “We’ll walk up to Angel and catch a tube. It might take a while.”
He was right. They had to take a long detour to Upper Street, where the tube station was. Traffic had backed up into a solid gridlock to make way for the various marches. Everywhere they went, tempers were fragile.
The tube trains were crammed with unhappy passengers. As always, the only air below ground was hot and stale. They had to switch lines twice, waiting a long time for each connection on platforms that became dangerously crowded. This part of the network was nothing like the efficient, modern central zone that Tim normally used when he came down to the city.
An hour and a half after arriving at Kings Cross they finally met up with their friends outside Bethnal Green station. Tim was relieved to see them. Somehow he found comfort in numbers.
“What now?” Colin asked.
“I guess we walk,” Simon said.
Tim and Vanessa exchanged a look. “You still want to do this?” Tim asked.
“Sure.” Simon gestured around. The road they were on seemed normal enough, with open shops, pedestrians, and plenty of bus traffic. “This is history, you know. There’s never been a protest this big before. We have to be part of it.”
“I’m not going with any more marchers,” Rachel said firmly. “Half of them were looking for trouble.”
“No problem,” Simon said. His PCglasses were throwing up a map. “We’ll just head east, then cut south when we’re above the summit.”
The five of them started off along Roman Road, with a visible lack of enthusiasm. Tim could hear emergency vehicle sirens in the distance; the sound was near constant in London today.
“Hey, Tim,” Colin asked. “Is your dad still taking part in the summit?”
“Yeah,” Tim said glumly.
BY TWO O’CLOCK they’d reached East Ham, and were heading down toward Beckton. They’d all been accessing the news streams, seeing the protest based around the university campus grow and grow. Any eagerness among them had all but vanished.
Participants in the Million Citizen Voices were all around them on the street, everybody striding out to join the main protest. They weren’t quite what Tim and his friends were expecting. It was as if they were caught up with a bunch of soccer supporters straight out of the tabloid news streams, the ones that featured tribes and organized violence. For a start, most of them were carrying bottles or cans, from which they were swigging heavily. Ordinary pedestrians were thinning out rapidly, intimidated off the streets. Shops were bringing down their metal roller blinds.
“Where have they all come from?” Vanessa asked. There was a nervous edge to her voice, which she was trying to disguise. The voices and shouts around them were mostly foreign, with German and Spanish in the majority.
“Same places as the delegates, I guess,” Colin said.
Rachel was staying close to Simon. “I wonder why they’re really here,” she muttered disapprovingly.
“Come on,” Tim said generously. “Everybody’s here for the same thing.”
“You reckon?” Simon said.
Over on the other side of the street a middle-aged Asian woman with a scruffy tartan-print shopping cart was trying to avoid a group of drunk young men who had their arms around one another, chanting and jiving as they hurried along the pavement. One of the cart wheels got stuck on a cracked slab, and the woman struggled to free it. The next second she was sprawling on the tarmac, and the men were screaming and jeering in Italian as they jostled on past.
Tim rushed over to help, the others following right behind him. When he reached the woman he was horrified at the way she cowered from him. “I’m helping you,” he protested. At the back of his mind he realized that nobody else had hurried to lend a hand. The protestors surged past, either ignoring the teenagers or sneering.
Oranges and tins of beans had spilled out of the woman’s cart to roll along the gutter. Rachel and Colin scampered after them, picking them up. Tim took one of her arms, and Simon the other. They gingerly lifted the woman to her feet. “Thank you, dear,” she said uncertainly. Blood was oozing from a graze on her wrist; she dabbed a handkerchief at it.
“You should go home,” Vanessa said.
“I was trying to,” the woman said, close to tears. “Thirty years I’ve lived here. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Not even on Cup Final day.”
“It probably won’t happen again,” Tim said. “I don’t think I’ll be bothering to support them next time round.”
“Support who?”
Rachel was stuffing battered tins back into the woman’s cart. “The Million Citizen Voices, down at Docklands. It’s a big political rally.”
“Oh, I don’t pay attention to any of that stuff,” the woman said. “Politicians, they’re all as bad as each
