‘Poppy!’ Darnell yelled. The girl turned around and looked his police badge up and down. Her eyes widened and she hurried off in the opposite direction. The detective ran after her, raising his voice each time he called her name.
Her hurried shuffle picked up in pace, but the heaviness of her New Rocks weighed her ankles down. The leather boots had metal chains from her knee down to the laces. A wheezing escaped her lips and her legs gave in. She bent over and clutched onto the stitch which had formed in her waist.
‘What do you want?’ Poppy asked between gasping breaths.
‘Poppy Shipman! I wanted to talk to you about Abraham Lincoln.’
‘Jesus Christ! What about him?’ She stood up and leaned back against a row of black railings, clinging onto a stone wall for support.
‘There’s been a number of memorials associated with him which have been vandalised and I believe you might have had something to do with it.’
‘What has this got to do with me?’
‘I know all about your previous protests in San Francisco. And I know you’re on a final warning with your college regarding the defacement of a George Bush picture. The vandalism of a Lincoln Memorial would be exactly the sort of thing you’d be involved with.’
‘Professor King told you about that George Bush picture?’ Poppy replied, remembering where she’d last seen the detective; he’d been in her lecture. ‘Jesus Christ. That’s personal information. I didn’t commit a crime.’
‘Professor King did no such thing. Your fellow students didn’t keep so quiet though. You have quite the reputation. Not least for your complex views on Lincoln himself.’
‘You think because a few disgruntled classmates spread rumours about me that’s enough for you to question me over some petty vandalism. You don’t have shit on me, detective.’
Darnell smiled and lifted out his file on her, showcasing her dissertation and a few print-screens from her social media accounts. ‘I know all about you, Poppy.’
‘Oh go jerk off!’ Poppy snatched the papers out of his hand and stormed off down the road. Darnell followed in her path.
‘Why would you run off if you have nothing to hide?’
Poppy stopped and turned around, gritting her teeth like a cheetah facing its lunch. She thrust the papers at him, which rained around him. He tried to catch the evidence, before the wind cast it away.
‘This is why I run from jerks like you. You’re a bully and a stalker. Because I dress differently or have opinions which you might not agree with, you feel like you can treat me like some shit on your shoe? I’ve had enough. This is exactly why people like me protest so men like you can’t hurt anyone who doesn’t conform to your vision of the world. My God, no wonder people don’t respect the police anymore.’
Poppy turned away and began to pace up the road. Darnell once again was on her tail. She picked up speed but she suddenly felt the weight of a hand on her arm pull her down. She fell back onto the stone ground, felt a sharp pain in her back and smacked her head. The detective’s mass weighed heavily on her.
‘I just want to talk to you,’ Darnell said as he tried to control her shuffling arms.
‘Get off me!’ Poppy screamed. She whipped up a mouthful of phlegm and spat it in the detective’s face. Darnell made a disgusted yelp before rolling off his suspect and wiped away the bubbly moisture from his face. Poppy shuffled across the floor, attempting to stand up, but felt her arms being yanked behind her. The sound of a click confirmed they were locked in place.
‘Poppy Shipman, I’m arresting you for assaulting a police officer! You do not have to say anything…’
But his voice drowned out. She felt her body lift up and flung through a car door onto a row of seats. As she reclaimed her breath, she sat up and saw the back of Darnell’s head in the driver’s seat, clicking the child-locks on to prevent her from escaping.
‘You can’t do this to me!’ Poppy screamed, kicking the back of the detective’s seat.
Darnell took a glance at the thesis sitting on top of his pile of paperwork on the front passenger seat. ‘We’ll see about that, Miss Shipman!’
Chapter 17
Vanessa got little sleep that night. Her poorly chosen words circled her mind for hours, causing her to clench up every time she heard her own voice. The hypnotic sounds of the ocean on her iPod worked a little but just as she began to relax and dream of a peaceful beach, it struck her like a lightning bolt.
That word.
That awful, weighty word which had followed all who carried its association for centuries. The word had destroyed the careers of respected comedians and now she faced losing her own career over it.
It wasn’t a word she said loosely, or even remembered saying before. She’d said a horrendously similar slur when she was a teenager but she didn’t know what it meant; she’d just heard it on a movie and like a parrot repeated it all day. She soon realised the power behind that word when her father threatened to wash her mouth out.
But since, she’d proudly been an inclusive person who despised discrimination in all its forms. She was sure, like most people, she had some bias knocking around in her complex and often fickle brain, but who didn’t? If it was there, it was unconscious.
The word had been in every book which she had consumed over the previous days, every memorial site, dissertation synopsis, information stand and even on a couple of
