Plastic
I want to tell you how the church bell echoes through every brick of the forgotten little town, and how the mid-autumn leaves line the pavements like a thick fur coat. I could tell you that the sky is a churning tapestry of every sort of grey, or that the decaying Georgian brickwork haunts the post-industrial, post-rejuvenation high street. How the people flow from one shop to the next in murmuring flocks, how every shout and holler adds a piece to the town’s identity, or that in even the dirtiest alleyway lies a story significant on a cosmic level.
But I don’t know any of that.
My head is hunched downwards, counting the cracks in the pavement from the varicose tree roots. I can smell cold wind, pasties, and rubbish bins. The sky is just grey, and I’m just trying to make my train on time.
It’s one o’clock. The braying from the local ‘spoons is coming up on my right. I don’t dare to make eye contact for fear I’ll be labelled a ‘train-getter’, a ‘purpose-haver’. The chorus swells and fades, carried on beer-soaked breath. I focus on the gutter. Plastic coffee lids, cigarette stubs, the occasional browning leaf.
When I get on the train, I’ll think of something to write. The editor is waiting for me at the other end, and my home town places me in a creative rut. The town that I once saw as colourful in my youth has been lost to two decades of refurbishment, neglect, and finally, Starbucks.
There’s a rhythm building as I walk further up the high street. A pulse. A single drummer doing their best to damage my eardrums. It’s the rally, always supporting, or protesting, something far away, or close to home. They shout the usual keywords: ‘Freedom… Rights… Slaughter… Power…’, the usual array of issues. I remember when it was a handful of kids skiving off sixth form. Now they’re attracting decent numbers, as well as a swarm of high-vis jackets patrolling the perimeter, in case the seventeen-year-old girl on stage exercises too much of her right to free speech.
Beneath the formulaic demands of the protestors, I can hear my train creaking into the station.
A gust of wind tires to send me back, but I press on into the town’s mid-day crowds. A man preaches feedback-laden hellfire into my left ear, while a warbled love song from across the street is strained into my right. A heated argument ahead of me catches my attention. Something about the bank? A man and a woman emerge from the World War One memorial garden, the man redoing his suit trousers as he hurries back to the council building, the woman looking in the opposite direction as she joins the protestors. Someone tries to sell me a mixtape, which I avoid at point-blank range. I’ve bought three over the past decade. They’re always blank.
My steps start to fall in line with the protestor’s drumming. The high-vis brigade begins to eye me up. Suppose there’s acid in my coffee cup, or a machete in my bag. On my way to commit an atrocity on the one-sixteen to Manchester, am I? I ignore their looks, and eventually, they ignore me.
The voices of the busker and the preacher blend together into an out-of-time gospel song for a brief moment, before sliding back into feedback. The train will be opening its doors now and the driver having his cig. I have about seven minutes. I walk a bit faster.
The grey buildings and grey sky wash over me as I hurry along. The argument from before sounds angrier now. The steep buildings on either side amplify their voices, but the figures remain dwarfed.
One’s a homeless man, his bulbous nose poking out of a scraggly nest of hair, clutching a disintegrating sleeping bag. The other is a squat PCSO, a high-vis, broken off from crowd control duty to pursue his vigilante aspirations. He’s citing reasons why the homeless man isn’t allowed to sleep outside of the Barclay’s, but the man claims he’s lived there for years (which is true). The high-vis tells him he has the right to remove him. Whose right, asks the man. My own right, the PCSO responds. Show me some proof, the man says, and it goes like that for as long as I’m walking up to them.
Like everyone else, I can’t help but stare like it’s a piece of outdoor theatre: the outlaw versus the state. Almost a Greek Tragedy, with their mouths waggling in incomprehensible local tongues. It’s the most inspiring thing I’ve witnessed since taking refuge on my old street. I slow my pace to take in their features, reaching for my pen and notebook to paint out their expressions, scribble down the words that fly from their mouths. Such realised characters flow onto the page, fully formed. The homeless man, the underdog, staring down the law, or a poor facsimile of it at least. And the PCSO, a plastic policeman, so preoccupied with his own version of justice, he’s missed that the crowd is on the move.
I’ve almost stopped walking, creeping around the two men. I’m trying to think of how to describe the PCSO’s eyes; how the pale afternoon sun catches his beetle-black pupils, failing to notice where they are now pointed.
“Should you be staring there, son?” He says, cheese and onion wafting off of his tongue. We’re probably the same age. The homeless man is walking away.
I tell him I’m just walking.
‘This is official-’, his words catch in his throat, ‘This is police business!” He pulls his plastic stab vest tighter around his barrel-chested torso. His red face pokes out of the middle like an angry tortoise. The thin blue line union jack is about to burst loose of its staples. His shoes are shining with polish. They’re also made of plastic. “I have every right to place you under a citizen’s arrest!”
That’s true. It’s also true for the preacher, the busker, everyone in and outside the Wetherspoons, and everyone in the crowd he was supposed to be controlling.
I explain that I have a train to catch.
“Right, young man,” he says.
I explain I’m thirty-six. The whole street is watching.
“This is a direct warning. If you do not stop walking I’ll have to call for backup!”
I would have just kept walking. My train is boarding, and I could make it fine if I pick up into a shuffle run. Instead, I inform him that anyone here can call the police.
He marches up to me, pad in hand, little red face exploding with steam. My toes are getting itchy.
“Loitering in a crowded area!” The zone around us has cleared. The drums encircle us. A ring of faces watches from a distance, some gormless, some hyper-invested. But the support officer ignores them to focus solely on his prey. “Name and address!”
I can hear the hoots of the train and the gaggle of my co-commuters from up the street. But the red and yellow man has made it his mission to confiscate my name and address, sidestepping my every attempt to leave. My continued defiance whips the crowd into a frenzy. They politicise my every move as if I am some revolutionary martyr. Or their messiah.
‘Arrest the fucker! You don’t have the power! There is no power but the people! Terrorists! Fascist! Marxist! Punks! Cops! Killers!’
They’re shouting and screaming for me to act, to guide them. A real police officer is walking the perimeter. I decide I’m just going to run for it, but a clumsy hand slams itself around my bicep.
‘I’m taking you…’ he says, hissing as he finds the words, ‘…in.’
The crowd is taking sides. The anti-capitalists, the climate nihilists, the anti-statists, the pro-antis. Protesters, counter-protestors, busker, preacher, one ‘o’clock drinkers, the counterfeit rapper, the man who lives outside the Barclays, and the random street dwellers who fill in the gaps. All up to something, all potential terrorists. But I am the one that the PCSO is determined to bring to justice.
Our battle has become rather biblical. Without realising it, I’ve found myself in a story. Another drop of life squeezed from my provincial hometown. I’m thinking of what to do next, to keep the momentum. Incident, conflict, tension-
I pull my arm free, the PCSO immediately swipes at it to grab me again, but as he’s flailing I’ve swung down my arm to the gutter, grappled through the lids and filter tips, and locked my fingers around a jagged, dusty brick. The PCSO flaps his mouth in unintelligible language. This excites the crowd, the officers at the back have noticed.
‘Throw it!’ ‘Drop it!’ ‘Coward!’ ‘Poser!’ ‘Arrest him!’ ‘Smash his head in!’
I have no plan. The second I have the brick in my and, raised slightly behind my head, the world stops. The faces of the crowd pause; angry, salivating, ecstatic. Raised eyebrows, wide mouths, some grins, some yells. The PCSO is throwing his hands to his face, the real officers are putting their hands on their hats as they run towards us.
It’s a heavy piece of brick, about the size of two fists. As I stroke it and dust comes away on my thumb. The Barclay’s is made of the same colour brick. I imagine the piece I’m holding falling to the street one day, narrowly missing a random passerby. Or clattering onto the street in the night, inaudible against the sirens and the rain.
The old bank, refurbished into a Barclay’s, still missing a piece. I pull back my arm, aiming squarely at the window, and I throw.
Reactions travel around the circle like a shockwave, some horrified, some laughing, exhaling the tension, crying for me to stop, egging me on, chanting, whooping, punching the air. The PCSO is still waving his arms, eyes, mouth, and ears wide open with stress, disbelieving I would do anything. The real officers have broken into the crowd now, some in dispersal mode, two charging at me.
I hear a wobbly bang as I turn to face them; bulldogs in yellow windbreakers ready to tackle me. But I never see it happen.
Something hits my skull with a precision I could never have mustered purposefully. It hit the fleshy button at the top of my spine. The bit that feels like a design flaw, a mistake to be patched over later.
I’d like to tell you as I fell to the ground how I saw the crowd’s expressions reversing in on themselves as they were dispersed along with their moment of revolution. I could tell you how the panic-stricken PCSO wailed our story to the police officers, and the speed at which random onlookers lost interest and meandered back into their lives. I’d like to point out the dramatic irony of the brick bouncing from the plastic Barclay’s window and instantly killing me.
But I don’t know any of that.
My last thoughts were in the gutter. The sky remained an apathetic grey, the train creaked away without me.
