stuck down me knicks. — Mumsie didn’t return until late that night, and she went to every other evening of Anglo-Soviet Friendship Week. On the last one she brought home a young lad couldn’t’ve been more than eighteen . . who’d sleepy slanted eggshell eyes and the whitest of blond hair. Mumsie said his name was Vaseline, and he sat in the Chesterfield chair shitting ’imself . . despite all the tots they’d taken from the bottle of vodka they’d brought back with them. Shitting himself because he was probably a well-brought-up boy, terrified of getting into trouble with the KGB goons they must’ve had with them, or, if he were KGB himself, probably still more terrified, what with her knucks on his plump young thigh, and her Strangelove-making slurred in his beet-red ear, Do not deny me your essence. . — When she comes! — Genie twists in the seat so she can screw the bitch right out: Gruber don’t look like me at all — neither do you. You’re both small and dark like fucking gnomes — so’re Debbie and Hughie, but I’m big and naturally blonde. . Mumsie’s fist slow-motion uppercuts, its four gold knucks — purloined signet ring, cheesy half-sovereign, dumb Claddagh and fraudulent wedding band — fiery in the dark grotto Genie’s anger has hacked from the coach’s beige vinyl and check plush. Genie smells Lucozade burped from behind — sees the Lucozade Building. All at once she’s dismayed: her anger’s great wave is buckling and breaking beneath her, there’s nothing she can do but soldier on. Wotcher gonna do, then, Moira, she taunts, beat me up in front of all these nice pacifist women? Or — her fluency emboldens her — are you gonna try and manipulate me like you always do? Thing is, though, Rod — the singsong stops, heads are turning towards them — I’m not your fucking Emu puppet, so DON’T TRY STICKING YOUR FUCKING MITT UP ME! — The tinny p.a. coughs and the driver splutters, I don’t give a monkey’s if you’re cocks or hens, if there’s any aggro back there I’ll have you all out on the hard shoulder before you can say mutually-assured-bloody-destruction. — Tina’s ferrety face lunges between them. He means it, y’know, she says as the coach grumbles on along the Chiswick flyover, and, switching to her reserve tank of dignity, Mumsie hauls the bottle of vodka from her handbag, unscrews the cap and says to no one in particular, I think I’ll have a little drinky-poohs. When she’s taken a ladylike sip, she passes the bottle to Genie, who ostentatiously wipes the mouth with the hem of her T-shirt before taking a mannish slug. She offers it to Tina, who rears away to the back seat, where, to prove what a responsible and jolly steward she is, she tries to start the singing again: The people’s flag is deepest red! but she doesn’t have any. . fellow travellers. Mumsie says, thick-tongued with pomposity, There’s a time and a place, Jeanie, and this is neither. She turns the eye of the ti-gerrrr on her daughter, and Genie’s so shocked by its dewiness. . she can’t be fillin’ up, can she?. . she looks away to the unplace beyond the window: the scrubby brown fields planted with telegraph poles and pylons, a heap of car bones in a wrecker’s yard, a slip-road to. . nowhere and fucking nothing. — The two of them sit outside of time for the remainder of the journey, passing the Vladivar between them. When at last the coach squeezes through the constipated streets of Newbury and gets bunged up in a long queue of other coaches in a deep lane between a racetrack and a sewage farm, Genie takes the final mouthful, swallows and says, From Varrington, I zink! They both cackle. Mumsie says, This nag ain’t going nowhere — let’s vamoose. So they gather their stuff and shoulder their way past the other women, who are havering in the aisle as they chorus, I’m gonna talk with the Prince of Peace, I ain’t gonna study war no more! Shouldn’t that be Princess, Mumsie says, then Tina detains them: We need to meet up with our affinity group, everyone’s been allotted their own section of the fence. . She digs her gnawed nails into Genie’s arm. . And you’ve gotta write down the legal aid number. Lissen up, sisters! Write this number on your arm with a biro or a marker, Newbury — that’s N-E-W-B-U-R-Y — 3-5-1-0-8. Don’t write it on a bit of paper and put it in your bag or your pocket — the pigs’ll do anything to protect their warmongering Yank mates. Women protesting here have been roughed up, hauled away, strip-searched and — she pauses for eff ect — worse. Genie stage-whispers, She wishes, and Mumsie laughs her naughty laugh. — They’re clambering down from the coach when Tina calls after her, What about your tombstone, Genie? You can ’ave it! Genie calls back. But don’t gobble it right up like you do all those other ones you blag! That, Genie thinks, was inspired . . Tina’s face goes. . redder than her politics, which is paranoid of her, because no one else will know that tombstone is slang for the Tenuate Dospan diet pills she gets Mummy and Daddy’s private doctor to prescribe for her. The driver bats his hairy caterpillar eyebrows at Mumsie and offers her his arm — then recoils as she honks Vladivar in his face together with, Cunting lovely to meet you, fatso. — Every step they take away from the coach is a liberation. Mumsie says, They were a po-faced fucking lot, those Trots, as arm in arm they march up the lane, weaving between the other women, who’ve spilled out from the stalled vehicles. There are genteel ladies in green wellies and waxed cotton coats — and young student-types with Rasta-style woolly hats. There are fearsome lezzers in leather — some with open cans of McEwen’s in their fat, finger-fucking fists . . Genie’s cheered by the presence of a few punky chicks, their pink Mohican plumage wobbling as they hobble along — and narked some other women have brought their male children, presumably on the grounds that. . their pricks ain’t big enough for patriarchy — yet . . Mostly she’s simply overwhelmed by the great surge of statically charged hair and bright, waterproofed nylon that crackles along the lane, its placards clattering. It hardly matters the day’s turned out crap as-fucking-per, with the earth’s bad breath fouling the hedges. — Mumsie is prattling on:. . that bloke Allason who was the MP for Berko, I remember him giving a speech all about a missile that could be fired to bring down a nuclear missile — that’d be immediately before or just after the Cuban crisis. Either way, you were very little and Hughie only a baby, and Gregor had had one of his turns and ended up in Claybury — though I said to our Debbie at the time, it ought to’ve been Broadmoor, which was nearer. . Besides, Gregor could be a violent sod when it was on ’im. . Jee-sus, rabbit-fucking-rabbit . . Charitable view’d be it was the temper of the times got to him — I mean, you imagine they’re gonna blow the world to buggery now, back then, for a few weeks at least, I was absolutely bloody certain of it. Had it all planned: I was going to drown Hughie in the bath, the rest of us were gonna have to take our chances with Seconal. .