There was a shout and a scream and the two men disappeared from Callie’s view, although from the movement of the men around the place where she had last seen them, they were kicking at something on the ground, and she suspected it was Morris rather than Claybourne.
As she pushed her way through the crowd, trying to reach the fighting men, Dixon quietened down, trying to see what was going on. Callie saw him signal to the last two men who were behind him, and in response, they began to make their way towards the disturbance, talking into their lapels, calling their colleagues to leave the generally non-violent anti-fascists and come and help with the real fight, no doubt.
“Looks like we’ve got some troublemakers here tonight, trying to give us a bad name. Don’t let them ruin our celebrations.” Dixon tried to stop things from escalating, but he was too late. Others among his supporters seemed to take the disturbance as a signal to turn on the protestors and scuffles seemed to break out everywhere.
Callie was getting close to Morris and Claybourne, or at least the spot where she had last seen them but she kept being shoved back by the people around her. She felt a prodigious shove in her back and she fell. Instinct made her curl up into a ball and shield her head from the flailing feet all around her. She tried to stand again, but the movement of the crowd made it impossible. There was more shouting and screaming and then: “Police! Let me through.”
Callie was pushed back down, and she feared she was going to be crushed as people ran in all directions. Finally, the area around her began to clear a little and she was able to stand up, with a little help from Lisa Furnow.
“Thank you,” she managed to say before the woman disappeared again.
Slowly, painfully, counting the bruises as she did so, she tried to walk and was satisfied that nothing had been broken. There were blue flashing lights appearing from all directions as police vans drove into the Stade area, each disgorging half a dozen uniformed policemen. They must have been waiting a short distance away to have got here so quickly and Callie couldn’t have been happier to see them.
The crowd was dissipating fast at that point, and Callie saw Dixon being bundled off the pallet stage by his minder and pulled away to a waiting car. Going in the opposite direction to the majority of people, Callie still had difficulty pushing her way through and was almost carried along by the mass movement. With the judicious use of elbows and sheer force of will she finally made it through but by the time she got to Morris, he was unconscious on the ground, blood pouring from a wound to his head and Claybourne was nowhere in sight.
She knelt beside him as two policemen, helped by Jeffries who she was surprised to see, shielded her from the flow of people rapidly leaving the area.
Callie felt for obvious injuries to Morris’s neck. Finding none, and concerned for his breathing, she rolled him gently into the recovery position, supporting his head as she did so.
“Ambulance is on its way, Doc,” Jeffries informed her. “You okay?” He was looking at her chest.
She looked down and realised there was blood on her white shirt. She felt her head and quickly found a small cut and pressed a tissue to it. The bleeding seemed to have almost stopped, she was pleased to see.
“Fine,” she reassured him. “It’s nothing.” She turned her attention back to the unconscious man, making sure he was breathing okay and slowly checking him for other injuries.
* * *
By the time Morris had been packed off to the hospital in the back of an ambulance, the cut on Callie’s head had stopped bleeding completely and she had managed to clean herself up a bit with the help of some antiseptic wipes from the paramedic. She sat on the kerb and rolled her shoulders. She longed for a hot bath to ease the bruises that she knew she was going to have in the morning, but she had been told by the police officer who had taken her statement to wait, so that’s what she did.
Most of the people had left the area once Dixon had been driven away by his minders. The police had detained one or two men but it seemed unlikely that anyone would be charged with anything. Callie’s own statement said that Morris had thrown the first punch at Claybourne, and Callie didn’t think that she would be able to identify any of the men who she was pretty sure had been kicking him once he was down on the ground. She couldn’t even say for certain that they had been putting the boot in at all, she told the officer.
She took a long deep breath and closed her eyes. She would not be able to sleep, she was still slightly shaky
