Jordan and Cat walked hand in hand along the centre of Blackstock Road, in the middle of the crowd. They were not the only ones carrying weapons, and in other ways, too, their appearance was inconspicuous. It was a safe bet that no one here had ever seen Jordan on cable television. The people around them were Beulah City inhabitants: a very different section of the population from those who had come in at the northern border. They were machine-minders, waiters and waitresses, domestic servants, vehicle mechanics, drivers, warehousemen, storekeepers, street-cleaners, porters, nurses…Jordan had never realized before how vast and diverse was the invisible army of men and women whose labour was too cheap or too complicated to automate, but which made the kind of work he was familiar with possible.
‘That’s why the offices were empty,’ Cat said. ‘They were the ones who were on strike!’
They were probably all Christians. They carried signs hand-lettered with biblical texts, the lines about oppression and liberty and the poor and the rich and the weak and the powerful that BC’s preachers glossed over. They sang the discomfiting, awkward hymns and psalms seldom selected for the congregations.
‘Bash out de brains of de babies of Babylon,’ Cat hummed, gleefully paraphrasing, until Jordan nudged her to stop.
The thought that there were thousands of people in Beulah City who felt suffocated under the tutelage of the Elders, cheated in their dealings with their employers by the master-servant regulations, tormented by guilt and frustration, sceptical about the interpretations of scripture foisted on them (as if the interpretations themselves were anything but the opinions of men), angered at how conveniently God was on the dominant side of every relationship…Jordan found it almost unbearably exciting.
And also shaming, because it had never occurred to him at all.
‘It feels strange to be marching along like this,’ Cat said. Jordan smiled at her shining eyes.
‘I thought you’d been on a lot of demonstrations.’
‘Oh, sure, but first I used to be selling papers, later I’d be running up and down, walking backwards with a loud-hailer, covering the side-streets with a gun.’ She laughed. ‘Come to think of it, I’ve never just been part of the masses before.’
‘Perhaps we shouldn’t be just marching along,’ Jordan worried aloud. ‘Maybe we should be doing these things.’
Cat hissed quietly. When he glanced at her she flicked her gaze from side to side. He started looking out of the corners of his eyes himself, and noticed that, every ten metres or so along the sides of the march, sharp-eyed, hard-faced kids were walking. They’d vary their pace, faster or slower than the crowd, sometimes walking backwards, craning their necks; counting heads, meeting eyes. The Reds, the kids, the cadres.
‘This is organized?’ he said. The horizon all around was joined to the sky by loose black threads. Every few seconds another distant explosion shook the air. Small-arms fire crackled on the edge of hearing. ‘Whose idea was it, walking into a war zone?’
‘It’ll work,’ Cat said. ‘The fighting’s concentrated.’
‘For now.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Cat said. Her tone belied her advice.
Past Highbury Fields, down Upper Street. As they passed on their left the large, old pillared building which the Elders used as administrative offices the songs trailed off and people started shouting. The discordant yells were suddenly swamped by all the kids, the cadres, calling out at once.
‘Settle for what? DEMOCRACY! Restore it when? NOW!’
They varied it with FREE – DOM! and EQUAL RIGHTS! After a minute it caught on, leaving some of the cadres free to argue desperately with those in the crowd who were pushing out, trying to start a charge up the steps. Jordan saw them pointing at the doorways and balconies, and noticed with a shock the black muzzles pointing back.
‘Time to move up,’ Cat said. She tugged his hand. He followed as she expertly threaded her way through the march. Her high, clear voice floated back snatches of whatever the group they happened to be moving through was singing. ‘“So is our soul set free”…’scuse me ma’am…“thus escapèd we”…come on, Jordan.’
At the end of Islington High Street (the couple of hundred metres of office blocks at the foot of Upper Street) was the southern boundary of Beulah City, known derisively from the other side of it as Angel Gate. The checkpoint barriers were down, and a score of Warriors were spaced out across the road. They held tear-gas launchers pointing upwards and had submachine-guns slung on their shoulders. Jordan, by now in the front rank, couldn’t see any of the cadres – in fact, the front rank were almost all women. Cat squeezed his hand.
The crowd stopped about forty metres short of the cops. One of them stepped forward with a loud-hailer.
‘THEECE EECE EN EELLEEGAL GETHEREENG—’
The loud-hailer had not the volume to match the shout of fury and disgust from the crowd. Jordan rolled his eyes upward. Thank you, God. They couldn’t have made a worse choice. Exiles from South Africa were popular with the Warriors, and with nobody else.
Another officer hastily took the mike and continued.
‘I MUST ASK YOU TO DISPERSE! RETURN TO YOUR HOMES!’
‘Go home, ya bums, go home,’ the women sang back at them. Thousands of voices behind took up the chant with enthusiasm. Jordan wondered wildly where they could have heard it before, until he remembered that one of Beulah City’s preaching stadia had once been a football ground.
‘THIS IS A NATIONAL EMERGENCY!’
‘We shall not, we shall not, we shall not be moved!’
‘The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!’ Oh, so there were cadres up here: female cadres. That chant didn’t get taken up, probably because nobody could believe it.
Jordan heard distant, rhythmic shouting from the other side of the boundary. Behind the Warriors’ heads he saw the banners, red flags and tricolours of another demonstration passing along City Road, swinging down into Pentonville Road.
He climbed on to a telecom box and stared. The crowds were less than a hundred metres apart; he could make out faces turning to look and then turning away. The shouts he heard didn’t sound friendly. Baffled, Jordan looked back over the crowd he was with and saw it as if from the outside: a forest of weird black-lettered slogans on white sheets and placards, crosses waving here and there. Like a mob of religious nutcases. He caught the eye of a woman who seemed to know what was going on, and mimed a walkie-talkie. She shook her head and spread her hands.
‘The workers! United! Shall never be defeated!’
That one too fizzled out, and certainly couldn’t have carried across the barrier. The Warrior boomed on about REBELS and COMMUNISTS. Jordan looked down at Cat. She reached out for something that was being passed from hand to hand, and passed it up to him. A loud-hailer, as if this were what he wanted.
‘Weren’t the cadres ready for this?’ he asked. Cat shook her head.
‘Expected the Warriors to be busy somewhere else. Drop didn’t come off. Comms are going haywire.’
‘Oh, shit! There’s got to be something—’ He squatted down, one eye on the wavering crowd, and said, ‘Cat! Think! Is there some slogan or song or something that sounds religious enough for this lot but, you know, would let the others know we’re on their side?’
Cat frowned up at him and then broke into a huge smile. She held out a hand to him and he tried to haul her up, but she tugged and he jumped down. ‘Hold the hailer high,’ she said, and took the mike. ‘Don’t look back.’ She began to walk backwards, step by deliberate step, beckoning with one hand to the women at the front of the crowd. Jordan walked beside her, holding the hailing horn over his head.
‘Here goes nothing,’ she said, and switched on the mike.