Fruit Flies Like a Banana

Three walks.

With Valerie down the country paths. Rus in urbe. Not the end of Newcastle but the beginning of Northumberland.

Four walks.

With Valerie by night. To Valerie’s, alone, on Ladies’ Day. The crowd at the Three Mile Inn, like a wedding, but who has that big a family, that many friends? The women getting off the bus in gowns and dresses, a clown car commercial for fake tan, depilatory cream, streak-free deodorant.

From Valerie’s at 4am. The strange sight of a city that works.

And out with Valerie, walking to town, looking for monsters.

We’d left Rob on the sofa, sleeping off the booze. We had battery packs for our phones, we had cables. Valerie had access to a website claiming to have access to the servers for the game. She said rarer creatures could be found in the University grounds. I said okay then, let’s walk there. I know a route we can use. I wasn’t psyched about rare creatures: I was psyched for any of them, a week later to this game than Valerie and the others, the same amour-propre that made me decide that as a 38-year-old woman I should start eating sorbet and drinking V and slimline instead of beer and Ben & Jerry’s telling me I shouldn’t waste my time looking for computer-generated manga-style fauna. More fool me.

I took Valerie on my usual route here from town, but in reverse. Up Matthew Bank, down Friday Fields Lane, past the Church of the Holy Name, through Jesmond, where the Tories glared and I stood briefly at a cashpoint between two young things treating their life like a scripted reality, which indeed it was, scripted for them by parental wealth:

‘I can’t believe you spent four hundred pounds on a coat!’

‘I know! The daft thing is, I’ll barely wear it!’

We did not warm to Jesmond’s people, but Valerie loved the architecture: the big, cathedral like parish church at the end of Osborne Road, the flowery design on the lodge by the Gosforth Rackets Club, the Jesmond Lawn Tennis club gate with its plaque commemorating Muriel Robb, even an electricity substation whose blocky construction and salmon-pink paintwork she found enchanting. Valerie stopped to photograph many of these things and although I feared, particularly by the substation, that we might be challenged as potential subversives, no hand gripped either of our shoulders and we proceeded on our way.

That we were regarded as subversives, at large in this new England, we knew from the reactions of those we passed: the motorist who shouted QUEERS at us as he drove past us on Matthew Bank, Doppler-shifting away towards the pub outside of which I’d clashed with Rob’s promoter; the truck-driver stopped in traffic by the Mansion House who made increasingly incoherent noises at us as we deprived him of the attention he desired; the stares.

Outside of an American-style barbecue joint I got into a virtual altercation with a sort of bird that refused to be caught. I spent almost a whole minute swiping my hand up the screen and muttering, until in the end it disappeared in a puff of smoke. Frustrated, we continued on, through the concrete subway that passes under the motorway to the Robinson, where Emma and I had mused about being included in female aggression. We caught a new digital beast by the Hancock, where I showed Valerie the rhino statue with its wonderfully Dadaist warning sign, PLEASE / DO NOT CLIMB ON THE / RHINOCEROS

Rob had informed me, during the brief space of time he was lucid, about a bad experience he’d had with a mutual acquaintance of ours, a cis woman, the night before. I was inclined to believe him, the woman in question being one of the few people I’d ever been threatened by online who’d genuinely scared me.

‘Man, I’ve been through some fucked-up shit,’ I sighed, as Valerie and I passed the Armstrong Monument and the concealed entrance to the Victoria Tunnel.  

‘Tell me about it. I am never walking through there again.’

‘Same.’ I wiped my hand across my forehead. ‘Are you hot? I feel like I could do with a chance to sit down and grab something.’

Valerie nodded.

‘Actually, do you know what I feel like? A milkshake.’  I continued.

‘Hmmmm.’ Valerie pondered. ‘There’s a Mark Toney’s up on the right.’

‘Huh.’

‘What?’

I looked at her, gothed up against the weather in her hat, her black top and waistcoat, the pleated skirt she’d bought from Oxfam just a day or so before. ‘I don’t know…’

‘What?’

‘There’s just something about the way you say Mark Toney’s. It’s hard to explain. Hearing it in an American accent…’ I saw her smile. ‘…it’s like me saying Walgreen’s or Duane Reade, or something, you know? Slightly off.’

‘Well, yanno, that’s the way it is for me with most of the stuff around here. Even your Wal-Marts are called something different.’

‘Yeah, I dunno…maybe it’s that Mark Toney’s is specifically a North East thing? So it’s like me saying something specific to Kansas City.’

‘Or like you saying sore bay and my mom saying sherbert.’

‘Yeah, exactly.’

‘Two nations divided.’

‘Oscar Wilde, yeah.’

‘You want a fucking milkshake?’

‘I drink your milkshake.’

‘You drink your milkshake, I’m getting a Pepsi. And maybe a waffle. And a sandwich.’

‘Holy shit you’re ravenous.’

‘Well yanno I couldn’t really eat with all the noises your friend makes in his sleep.’

‘Yeah, he’s, ah, he doesn’t sleep lightly in any sense of the…’

‘He’s shitfaced is what he is. Jesus, Ruby! The guy was passed out on your couch!’

‘I know but…’

‘What?’

I shook my head. ‘He wasn’t always like this, y’know? It’s…kind of sad. I worry, especially with Fringe coming up.’

Valerie got to the counter first, and gave her order. I waited in line. ‘Do you think bubblegum’s a good milkshake flavour to ask for?’

Later, seated, I leaned in to Valerie and whispered: ‘It’s also kind of like the way you say cunt.’

‘What is?’ she said aloud.

I looked around and whispered again. ‘The way you say Mark Toney’s. It has different connotations, like it does when you say the word cunt. It’s hard to explain.’

‘Or like when I say the word wench?’ Her eyes sparkled with mischief.

‘Well,’ I demurred, ‘that’s more specific to me I guess…’

She smiled. ‘You’re a little excited now, aren’t you?’

I looked down at the table as my milkshake arrived, smiled at the waitress then turned back to Valerie and mouthed the words fuck you. She laughed.

‘So anyway,’ she said. ‘Article.’

‘Article?’

‘I got an idea for one. I’ve been thinking about something you said, and I want to write an article about it.’

‘And you want me to help?’

‘I’d like you to look at it, yeah.’

I put my milkshake to one side and rooted through my backpack, finding and pulling out the spare power pack for my phone.

‘Yeah, sure, I’ll give it a once-over. What’s it about?’

‘Well, I only really have the title so far…’ She slid her phone across the table to me. ‘What do you think?’

I looked down at the screen of Valerie’s phone, took another sip of my blue milkshake, and passed the phone back.

‘That is brilliant. Have you ran into any yet?’

‘No, but apparently the St Mary’s Lighthouse area’s known for it. And there are monsters there you can’t find anywhere else. Sooner or later, it’s going to happen.’

I chuckled. ‘Man, I wish I could be there when it does.’

Valerie laughed. ‘I know, right? When Pokemon meets dogging. Like, how the fuck is that gonna oh hey –’

She looked at me in silence for a moment while the waitress put her sandwich down before her.

‘How the fuck is that going to go down?’ she whispered. 

Val 'n' Rube

'So.'
'So.'
'If you could fuck any superhero, who would you fuck?'
'That's easy. Jenny...Century?'
'Who?'
'From the Authority? British woman who had electricity powers?'
'Oh, you mean Jenny, whatserbucket, sparks!'
'Yes, that's it!'
'Why her, though?'
'Think about it. Jenny Sparks controls electricity...?'
'So?'
'...our nerve endings run on electricity.'
'...'
'Fucking Jenny Sparks would be like fucking a violet wand.'
'Oh. Damn...'

Ruby's Drive: A Second Coming (2016)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twelvescore years of mission creep

Were hexed in primetime by a Shepard’s fable:

What rowdy zeitgeist, des Zeit nun gekommen

Kreucht, um geboren zu werden, Bethlehem zu?

Saturday Session #2: Outside of Pride

And welcome again to IoT's regular Saturday Session, in which we peel back the dignified facade of narrative and I talk directly at you about something rather than obliquely through the voices of our characters. The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed we didn't have a Saturday Session last week - this is because last week was Newcastle Pride, and that's sort of what I want to talk about here.

Obviously enough, given the subtitle, the cast of IoT are, basically, a bunch of queers. Many of them are both queer and trans; the only cis character we've heard from so far is Kizz, a lesbian weed dealer (whose name is not meant to be a bad misreading of 'cis', which I've only just noticed). So it feels relevant to this blog to talk about the fact that I was both at and not at Pride this year.

I was at Pride because I took part in the parade, which is my favourite thing about Pride most years. Pride is a march, Stonewall was a riot, we don't win our rights by being nice and quiet. One thing I share with Ruby in IoT is a belief that taking to the streets is important, the physical space you can take up and hold is an expression of your commitment to queer liberation. So getting to do the Pride parade, getting to hold up traffic in town on a Saturday at the height of summer, that is an important expression of power and intent. This year, in the wake of Orlando and the Referendum, it seemed even more important. Racists have felt more free to utter their hateful bollocks since the Leave side's narrow victory, but I think I've noticed more homophobia and transphobia too. The kind of people who complain about 'political correctness' feel as if they've won (I think their victory will be rather Phyrric once they realise they've fucked the country into a shit-can, but for now they're riding high). I sensed a little hostility from some of the people we passed, and if you know anything about me, you know that only convinced me all the more of why we needed this parade.

But the parade is only part of Pride. The other half is the 'festival', and I use quotation marks because Newcastle Pride is one of the most tacky, rubbish, disappointing excuses for a festival I've ever been to. Full disclosure: I have performed at Pride in the past, once in the women's tent and twice in the trans tent, partly because I was asked to (I'm polite; if you ask me to do something, there's a good chance I will), and partly because the women's tent and the trans tent were the only places at Newcastle Pride where you wouldn't hear shit music. I mean you might still hear shit music from outside the tent, but inside it would be gravy. I don't know why getting a sufficiently high number of cisgender gay men together causes their aesthetic appreciation of music to drop to a level so low that the phrase 'Headliners - the VengaBoyz!' becomes a tenable proposition, all I know is that women and trans folks seem to be immune to it. Admittedly there was a little too much earnest acoustic guitar emoting in the women's tent at times, but at least it was fucking live.

You'll notice I'm using the past tense to describe both the women's and trans tents at Newcastle Pride, and the reason for that is that Northern Pride Events Limited, the private corporation which runs the event, decided they were going to have neither a trans nor a women's tent this year. Which meant that anyone going would only be able to experience the main festival.

Newcastle Pride likes to bill itself as the UK's largest free pride, and you get what you pay for. Which means indigestion-inducing food, overpriced drinks (I like fresh fruit as much as the next fat bitch, but if I'm paying five quid for a can of Pimm's decanted into a plastic glass the fruit should only be a fucking garnish, not half the receptacle), the kind of fairground rides you usually see set up on wasteground at the end of an industrial estate, corporate stalls selling all kinds of rainbow tat because smaller, more interesting and, let's be honest, queerer groups are priced out, and z-list pop stars interspersed with the cream - or, to put it more honestly, the putrefying, stale yoghurt - of Newcastle's unbelievably dull, conservative, lowest common denominator drag scene.

Yeah. I'm not a fan.

Tara Stone goes into a lot more detail about the problems with Newcastle Pride here. Perhaps the biggest issue is transphobia - 22 transphobic incidents were reported during the 2015 event, and I have no doubt the figure for this year will be higher. One friend of mine actually had to deal with transphobic harassment from one of the security guards at this year's shindig. So it's little wonder that this year's event saw the first Newcastle Alt-Pride, a volunteer-organised collective picnic outside the main site for anyone too trans, too bi, too female or just too queer to consider hanging around a shitshow like the main festival. That's where I hung out on the day, and its where my characters would hang out too.

There is a reason this blog is subtitled Living Queer in Times of Crisis. This blog isn't aimed at the kind of cisgender gay dudes and straight tourists who think the tepid, embarrassing corporate mess that is Newcastle Pride stands for anything other than ripping off enough dehydrated Geordies to make a dent in its debt-to-capital ratio. This is for the kids outside. It always will be. Because it was the outsiders who made Pride possible, and it's the outsiders who are truer to what Pride should be about than a private corporation running an employment scheme for bad comedians who went into drag because it was that or joining Ukip as far as last scoundrel refuges went.

And if you're from Northern Pride, and you're reading this, and you're thinking what a bitch - I thought you liked bitches, hun? Or is that only when the bitch in question is a cis man dressed as a misogynist caricature?

So yeah, that's what I think about Northern Pride. If you have an alternative opinion, or a tale of being excluded from Big Cisgay Party Time of your own, or you just want to know when Ruby and Valerie/Emma/Kizz/that crazy racist chick from the anti-EDL protest are going to make out, or whatever, either comment on the posts - if you must - or email me at TrespassSaturdays@gmx.co.uk so I have something to put in next week's Saturday Session instead of just having another big ol' rant.

Keep trespassing,
AJ

Ruby on silicone

'Okay, so, look, this is the thing about silicone dicks. 

They don’t ejaculate, don’t get soft. Putting your lips around one

will not make it change its shape. But: this means 

they have no function but to dominate. When a lover shoves a 

dildo down my throat they do it purely to put me in my place, 

to say which one of us stays 

on her knees, 

to make me gulp, to make me gag, to make me gasp for breath: 

I love that. It’s the purest topping possible.'

Mad Dogs and Englishwomen

Woke up at 4am stuck to the leather couch in Valerie’s sitting room by a combination of my own sweat and the sofa’s weird adhesive properties. Once I’d peeled myself away I found I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I decided to head out. I began to get my stuff together. Pulled my t-shirt, the sleeping owl, part of the first woman’s pyjama set my parents bought me, late last year, away from my body and over my head. Rolled a white cotton sports bra down over the sunburn on my shoulder from Saturday’s Pride parade and around my breasts, which have grown since I started doubling up on my oestrogen dose. Areolae for days, now. Dr Way says they need to ask the endocrinologist about officially upping my dose but I’m pretty confident they will. And when they have I’ll no longer find myself coveting the 1mg sachets Brianna leaves lying around in her room.

Every trans person has thought, at some point, even if only for a moment, about stealing another girl’s hormones. It’s a shitty thing to do, an impulse I’ve never acted on, but I understand the temptation to do it. The rationing out of this shit is oppressive. In conditions of scarcity even the most upright will contemplate theft, and trans people always operate in conditions of scarcity as far as hormones are concerned. The clinics give us just enough to keep us on our leashes, it seems sometimes.

Bev has been a good doctor though, I guess, much better than that Tory bitch back at the start. Of course you’ll have to lose some weight to pass and I thought bitch I live in Scotswood, I’ll walk out of my door and find you a dozen cis women with at least ten pounds on me but I was trying to be good then. Following the ridiculous advice on my ‘speech therapy’ leaflet: smile more. Practise walking with decorum. Ladies never put their hands in pockets thinking none of this sounds much like speech therapy to me.

I go to the kitchen and pour myself a small glass of milk. Valerie and Brianna like the full fat kind, being Americans. I’ll have it on cereal but since my diet last year I prefer fully skimmed. I’m only drinking it now because of the heat, and because I realise I haven’t taken my Lisipronil in a while. I push two tablets out of each blister, 10 and 20mg, swallow them down with the milk. Then I go next door.

‘Oh, hey.’ Valerie is up, lying naked on her mattress and looking at her phone. ‘You having trouble sleeping too?’

‘Yeah,’ I find my jeans in the chaos of Valerie’s floor and pull them on. Black jeans in this heat, a stupid idea but it was night when I came. Finding my trainers I press my bare feet inside them. ‘Thinking I might walk back to my flat. I feel like I wanna move before it gets too hot.’ Mad dogs and Englishmen, I think.

‘I haven’t slept yet.’

‘Wow. Holy shit, that’s, um, wow.’

‘Yeah. Heat’s messing with me too.’

‘Hmm. Do you want Laura today?’ I point to a pendant on Valerie’s desk.

‘Hmmmmmaybe? Haven’t decided what I’m wearing today. You haven’t worn her in a while though.’

‘Yeah, but I know you’re stressed at work.’ Valerie recently started a job at Timeslip Books ‘n’ Coffee, the comics/sci-fi/gamer food paradise which functions as a kind of unofficial day centre for Newcastle geeks. She’s the Assistant Manager. This is the most responsibility she’s ever had to deal with on a day-to-day basis and, like me, she’s perpetually worried she’s fucking it up. I suspect that, again like me, she’s actually probably doing way better than she thinks but I know getting her to see that will be a job and a half. Again, like me.

‘Hmmm. I dunno. Do you think Laura Palmer is a, uh…’

‘An appropriate totem? Yeah, maybe not, unless you want to wind up being killed by some sort of um, otherworldly…’

‘Some dude who needs to spell out his name. Ooh! Do you think maybe in the new season we’ll get to find out the rest of Bob’s name?’

‘Ha! Yeah.’ My memory of Twin Peaks is fuzzy, and I much prefer the film to the show. There are still bits of season two I haven’t seen yet, and my memory of bits of season one isn’t great either. There was something about Bob’s name?

This happens a lot with me and Valerie. She mentions some geek nugget I don’t fully get and I nod and go along with it, not because I’m trying to be smarter than I am but because I don’t want to interrupt her flow. Valerie does a sort of nerd version of the thing Waugh describes Sebastian and his posho chums doing in Brideshead, not doing you the discourtesy of imagining you aren’t entirely familiar with what she’s talking about, though with Val it’s more likely to be the history of the Carol Danvers Captain Marvel than The Waste Land or who Anthony Blanche blew last weekend.

I pick up the pendant by the layered chain and look at Sheryl Lee’s smiling face. ‘I’ll leave her here then. Give you the option.’

‘Thanks. Hey, could you maybe spot a sister a li’l bit of weed?’

‘Sure,’ I reply, ‘find the bag and take what you need.’

‘Okay. See ya.’ Valerie grins and pulls the whole baggy out from under the blanket balled up at the foot of her mattress.

‘Fuck you, bitch,’ I smile.

‘Nah, I wouldn’t do that to ya. Just a scoash.’ She busies herself pulling buds from the clear plastic and I check to see I didn’t leave anything else in her room. Then I head back to the living room, briefly, to put my sweaty t-shirt back on (much as I’d love to not bother with it I think the people of Gosforth will take a dim view of me walking home with my bra on show, especially this rather grotty sports number, bought before my boobs began to grow).

Satisfied I have everything, I go back through to Valerie’s room and pick up the last thing I need. ‘Sure you took enough?’ I ask.

‘Well you know me, I’ll always want more but I’m not gonna deprive ya.’

‘You’re a pal. I’m off now. I hope you get at least some sleep before work.’

‘This’ll help,’ she says, packing the ground buds into her vape. ‘See ya!’

The door to Brianna’s room is open throughout this entire exchange, but neither of us is all that worried about waking her. Brianna is a heavy sleeper. I once put up with listening to an entire episode of some American Gordon Ramsay gubbins blaring out of her laptop before I realised she’d fallen asleep in front of it.

I hate the way Americans always call him ‘Chef Ramsay’. To me, that seems way too respectful to the bad-tempered, abusive, bullying cunt but Brianna loves these macho cooking shows. I can’t really complain while she copies the recipes though, that woman is a damn good cook. And anyway, at least she doesn’t snore.

I close the door behind me and oh my God it’s so much cooler. Val and Brianna’s living room is like a sauna in this heat. It’s double-glazed, it gets the sun, and the bottom windows can’t be thrown open in case Hiro wanders out. A perfect storm.

So many houses on Valerie’s road have every front window thrown open, probably their back windows too. The English don’t cope well with such extremes of heat. A window left open all night brings the risk of moths and burglars but, in this weather, must be done.

I follow the road up to the Asda, buy a couple of pink Lucozades from the kiosk at the front and pay for them at the robot tills, trying as hard as I can not to get under the feet of the staff prepping the store for the morning rush. Twenty-four hour shopping is a godsend if you don’t work in a shop. But I don’t want to make the walk home without something to cool me down and keep my sugars up. I put one bottle on its side in my satchel, and keep the other out. Realistically the one in the bag will probably get a little shook up, but it shouldn’t take me long to make it home. One bottle ought to do it.

Leaving the car park I decide to go left instead of right, to follow Hollywood Avenue instead of making for the High Street. If I’m right, I’ll come out by the footbridge over the Metro line, just down from the depot. Not far to home from there. But first, a walk through Garden Village, built for the workers on a precursor to the Metro, yesterday’s utopia. Past the cemetery which, like pretty much every graveyard in the last ten years, now sports a solemn Commonwealth War Graves sign on its gate. Past the allotments, and the tiny bridge over what Brianna always calls the creek.

I photograph a few things on the way: the slogan on the back of a fishmonger’s van, which I send to Valerie; a sign for Gosforth Depot with the old Metro logo on it, or was it Tyne and Wear Transport and not Metro? That wavy sigil, the chance meeting between a pound sign and a portcullis. Haven’t seen it in years. You’d think they’d get new signage, for the depot. Though maybe not: no passengers will see it. Just the men in hi-viz gilets who let themselves in the gates by the side of the track. Mounting the footbridge I find a gate with tiny concrete pyramids in front of it, the better to put off the casual track invader. For a moment I think that the gate only opens with a simple bolt and I could get onto the track I think, but then I see the padlock. A relief.

Protect me from what I want.

Not far to go now. Coming up on 5am. I pause on the bridge for a moment, looking out towards the depot. Haven’t been up here since the morning after Valerie told me she wouldn’t date me, chain-smoking Marlboros for the first time in a decade. What a day that was.

Turning my gaze toward the never-occupied Northern Rock building by Regent Centre, I find myself happily surprised by a Metro appearing seemingly from behind the building, bound for Pelaw or South Hylton. Something about the whole arrangement, the millennial office block, the moving train, the redbrick depot in the morning light, the snaking lines, it all seems wonderfully busy for a moment. For the duration of this pause the city seems as if it’s working. Newcastle, I think, will never match the tourist bits of London, but at times like this it makes a passable stab at being Deptford or New Cross, the parts of the city where people still live and lights don’t burn in empty speculative buildings. For a moment, I’m glad to be here.

I take a swig of Lucozade, then turn away. There aren’t miles to go, exactly, and I’m not all that sure I’ll sleep when I get home, but I need to keep going. I shoulder my satchel, I hitch up my jeans. I start walking again.

Nice

They’re telling us one Brit is injured. Old joke. Not the Nine O’Clock News. Pretty much the Clown’s first act as Foreign Secretary has been to confirm it. He says he thinks there will be ministerial meetings.

A bank did a series of adverts a while back. The patronising kind. Social responsibility, citizenship, all that crap, skills gap. They got some actor playing a former jobseeker to go on about how you shouldn’t say ‘um’ in an interview. The key thing is to seem definite. I’ve worked sales jobs where they tell you that. Be definite. Don’t equivocate, even at the cost of being exposed in a lie. Say you will do it even if it’s not procedure, even if it isn’t really possible. Take ownership.

The Clown says he thinks there will be ministerial meetings. He thinks.

I mean evidence he thinks at all’s in short supply, God knows. But one law for them, eh? He thinks.

Give Blair and Livingstone their dues, they’d get out in front of this. Blair would use it to justify bombing Iraq or, let’s not be so two-thousand-and-late, Syria. But at least they’d not say might, at least not in the sense of contingent. Even the Pigfucker wouldn’t.

The Clown. The Nanny. The Pigfucker. Politics as a Guy Ritchie movie. Tragedy, then farce. 

A truck. Like in Glasgow. The Clown says they can’t confirm it’s terrorism. We all know what that means. No-one’s worked out what colour the driver is. If he’s white then it’s just mental illness. We all know how that goes. They killed a man with a robot in Dallas but they say terrorism’s brown. 

The live feed updates. The truck driver lives in Les Abbatoirs. Grim detail. I sense halal gags forming in certain sub-editors’ minds. There’ll be jokes this lunchtime in a certain kind of pub, a certain kind of well-off white man being told by his colleagues he’s wicked, indulgently. Lovely.

I went to a bar in Soho with my ex once. This was maybe ten years ago? Even then, Soho was dying, turning into a Big Gay Dick Disneyland. We were in an okay place, bit gastropubby, not a bit authentic but they had a beer we liked. A few tables away from us there was a bunch of Young Things and one of them said, in the kind of voice that immediately let you know he was an actor (and not a very good one), ‘Oh, he’s a fucking CUNT!’ and the gang around him laughed. I looked at Rachel, and just said ‘Some cunts don’t know how to swear.’ He was using the word like a tourist. Probably never grew up with people who used it for real.

When did I grow up? When did I become who I am now? These past weeks, this past month specifically, I feel my age like a physical thing. I don’t mean just that things are harder, although God knows they are. I mean that I feel like I’ve seen enough. I feel like I know how this goes. I’ve been through two Clintons and I’ve been through Bush and Blair. I’ve seen third party candidates get talked up: Perot, Nader, Jill Stein. I’ve lain on a lumpy bed in a shitty Parisian guest house room listening to American students alternately fucking and raging against a Bush victory.

I remember when rumours spread in the office, about New York and planes. 

I was trying to teach a class when we found out about the Tube and Russell Square. I had a gig in the evening. I remember sitting in the Cluny reading a Metro or a Chronicle from earlier that day in which the bombs were written up as gas explosions. It was possible then to be wrong for as much as an hour. No such comfort today.

The Cluny, the Metro. Around for so long now. Has the Metro lasted longer than Today did? It seems like it has. Imagine telling kids today there was a time when a full colour newspaper was big fucking news.

It’s kind of worth thinking about. Why do you need colour photos? Newspapers aren’t the television news. Maybe monochrome pics would add gravitas. And they’d keep down printing costs. Assuming that market forces haven’t actually made it more expensive to do monochrome newsprint, which wouldn’t surprise me. I never took much notice of that aspect of the business. Copy’s everything to writers. I still hate having to find my own photos, having to work out the copyrights. Searching Getty. But it stands to reason, black and white is cheaper than full colour, right? Some things still have to be true.

Inadequate Responses to the Crisis, #94: launch a hipster newspaper.

They’d go mad for it in cereal cafés.

The Whale Tooth at Whitby. The Esplanade. Where do they come from? Old paths. Concrete submarines, that walk in Plymouth by the sea. A hotel out of Lovecraft. A café and bookshop in Bournemouth. A man struggling to reel a tiny fish on Boscombe Pier. Do memories have weight? And why arrive unbidden?

The driver has been identified as a thirty-one year old French Tunisian.

It’s terrorism, then. 

An American died. Two. A dad and his son. The networks will be all over this now, for definite. Trump will say something. The Guaranteed Outrage Machine will spin up once again. There’ll be so many hot takes. I’m sick of this world.

I’m tired, increasingly. Sometimes I think I’m dying. Sometimes I wish I was.

The country of Albert Camus.

I wonder what the LRB will say. The dainty left, with books and cake, a nuanced take on Corbyn. History’s still happening, whatever Francis said. And history sucks.

One damn thing after another. One foot in front of the other. One word typed after another. The feed updates. The ticker tape rolls on. There is now only ellipsis and catastrophe. And endless shots of doors. And speculation. In all senses of the world.

We all feel we’re sick of this game, but there’s no time to learn another. Anyway, we’ve played this game before. It’s called Chicken. The truck comes toward you. You stand.

The truck comes toward you. You stand.

The truck comes toward you. You stand.

The truck comes toward you. You stand.

The truck comes toward you. You think maybe it won’t stop. You start to move.

But it’s too late. 

Tufta

Diary

They’re playing the Marsellaise on the radio, for Bastille Day. So that’s what Mum was on about. I talked to her last night. A brief chat on the phone. She was having her tea. She was just out of hospital. Not cancer. A weight off my mind. 

Light

Ruby writes a kind of hope

Stop being good. Start being you.

Forget what they say you should do:

the future’s what you want to do.

Stop being good. Start being you.

Stop thinking about what you need:

say what you want and you are free

to want it. This is liberty:

more by far and all that you will need.

Stop being ruled by must and should,

outdated notions of the good,

encouraged by the blue of blood:

they shouldn’t have it all. You should.

Stop doing what they tell you to.

They haven’t time to punish you.

With crisis as your cloak, pass through:

help yourself, if you want to.

Forget the old world and its rules,

its beggars and its monied fools,

the Master’s house, the Master’s tools:

it’s your world now. Your world, your rules. 

Saturday Session #1: Good Morning Crisis

In all likelihood it will not be morning when you read this but it is still morning as I type, so good morning to you. If you’ve been reading Incidents of Trespass already this will hopefully feel quite unlike the posts we’ve seen so far; if you’ve only started reading IoT today (possibly after my linking it on my main blog), then hi! It’s my intention that every Saturday entry on the blog will be a direct address from me to you, rather than an element of the story that’s unfolding in the other entries. I don’t want this project to be like an ordinary blog all the time, but one thing I want the project to have is something like the feel of the old Vertigo comics I read back in the nineties, and one aspect of what made those so cool was that the wrters of the comic usually wrote the answers in the lettercolumns too, so you got a sense of the writer’s own voice. You felt included. I suppose in a sense that was an early approximation of the ease with which it’s possible to get in touch with creators today. These days, when people can (and do) tweet their every butthurt, gripe, and tale of hurt fee-fees to writers and artists at the stroke of a thumb on a haptic screen, it’s hard to convey a sense of just how special it felt when, say, Grant Morrison decided to publish a letter of yours about The Filth on his website. Or how fun it felt to get to the end of an issue of Transmetropolitan or Preacher and know you were in for a pure prose dose of Ellis or Ennis respectively. You just don’t get the same feeling from a comments section.

So that’s the feeling I hope the Saturday Sessions on this blog will help to create. So to that end, a bit of housekeeping: while there’s nothing to stop you commenting directly on entries themselves, I’d prefer it if you sent any questions, comments or inquiries to the Incidents of Trespass email inbox at TrespassSaturdays@gmx.co.uk , and I’ll answer the most interesting (even if all I can really say is ‘thanks!’) during next week’s Saturday Session. And now, to what I imagine will be more pressing matters for you.

What the fuck is this?

Incidents of Trespass is a number of things. Partially it’s a response to Brexit, and the increasing feeling I, and many others, have that England (I won’t say the UK because as we know two very important parts of the UK, Scotland and Northern Ireland, voted Remain) is becoming – or perhaps is simply revealed to be – a much nastier country than we thought it was back in the nineties. Partially it’s a response to the fact that, as a queer trans woman living in a country with hate crimes multiplying, in the aftermath of Orlando, and with the prospect that the leaders of the soi-disant ‘free world’ might, by the end of this year, be two cartoonish supervillains, I feel under siege. And partly it’s in response to a more personal crisis.

To understand Incidents of Trespass, you need to know two things.

One, since August last year I’ve been dealing with pretty bad PTSD as a result of finally admitting that something which happened to me a long time ago was an actual sexual assault – I’m not going to rehash that in detail, but you can read about it here.

And, two, that about a month ago, as a result of having had to deal with that PTSD since last August, I tried to kill myself.

Putting yourself back together after something like that is tricky. I’m not back together yet. I’m getting there. One of the things that has helped has been getting back into the practice of writing morning pages – three pages of writing, on anything, first thing in the morning, or as close to that as one can get. And after a while, I noticed that my morning pages weren’t coming out the way they usually do. I noticed that they were telling a story – a story which is partially mine, but also partially someone else’s. Someone whose story is one of trying to recover from a personal crisis at a time of national or even global crisis. I’ve joked to friends that at times I feel like a character in a novel whose author is trying to draw a heavy-handed parallel between my personal disintegration and that of the country – so if that’s what’s happening, why not write that novel myself? And so, this.

Incidents of Trespass is not exactly a novel, and not exactly a blog. Like a novel, it has a setting, a cast of characters, and a theme it intends to explore – the theme of crisis, from a queer perspective. Like a blog, it updates regularly, and it responds to events as they happen, but from a somewhat more oblique angle than the usual quick-response clickbait. My aim in IoT is not to tell people directly how to respond to their crises, whether political or personal, but simply to provoke, to question and to open up a space to think, which will hopefully lead to you finding your own solutions. On which note…

AJ’s Interests

This is not what this section of the Saturday Sessions is going to be called regularly – ideally I’d like one of you to suggest a snazzier name – but one of the things I really liked about those old lettercolumns was the way authors would recommend stuff to the readers. This led me to finding all sorts of fascinating stuff outside of comics, and helped to make me a more well-rounded, cultured person. For example, if it hadn’t been for reading Warren Ellis’s recommendations I’d never have heard Ute Lemper’s Punishing Kiss, which is one of my favourite albums.

So I’m going to end each Saturday session by pointing you in the direction of Things What I Have Found Interesting This Week. Our inaugural recommendations both relate to the architectural writer Owen Hatherley, whose books I urge you to check out, but I’m actually going to link here to two YouTube videos featuring the man. The first is this video in which Hatherley discusses the issue of class with the novelist and quondam Shooting Stars team captain Will Self: what fascinates me about this video is the discussion Hatherley and Self have about the large and baffling constituency of working class Tories, which seems incredibly relevant in the wake of Brexit. The other is this video of a talk given by Hatherley at the RCA which, while still interesting in itself, I choose to recommend to you because of the short film which precedes it, Dream City: More, Better, Sooner  by Alice May Williams, a film which I think provides an interesting visual and poetic take on our current moment. Both of these are long clips, one of which is audio only, but if you don’t have two hours to spare for both I urge you to at least check out Dream City, ideas from which will probably start to crop up in Ruby’s entries as Incidents of Trespass develops.

So, yeah, check those out, keep reading this blog, send your thoughts to TrespassSaturdays@gmx.co.uk  and join us next week for another Saturday Session, in which we will almost certainly not even try to look at topics like: is Kizz aware Ruby is trans? What’s the deal with Valerie’s relationship set-up? Will Ruby take Val up on her offer about that glass dildo and, perhaps most importantly, will Ruby ever not be smoking weed in one of her entries? Join us next week and, until then, remember – it isn’t really trespassing if you have to be there.

Cheers,

AJ

I N B O X E S

Node

Kizz

I know her via text messages and snatches of conversation.

I know her when she leaves her flat. When she comes to the front door.

I know the way her fingers brush mine when she hands over the cash and takes her stuff.

I know she does too much.

I know she says she sometimes buys for Valerie.

I know she’s lying. And I know why.

Because she’s a nice girl.

This is how it happens, when nice girls get addicted. When something happens and they turn to weed to cope. I don’t know what happened to Ruby exactly, but I can guess. Hands where they’re not supposed to be, a no turned by force into a whimpered yes, whatever. She isn’t the first one. She won’t be the last.

Way I see it, I’m an unofficial part of the National Health. A public servant. There are waiting lists for counselling, and docs will only prescribe benzos for so long. So who fills the gap between the referral and the first appointment? Me. My stuff’s medicinal. The way I see it.

That’s why I mainly deal to women. Men, boys, I’m not saying always but often enough it’s just fun for them. Dude let’s get high, dude let’s watch a fucking Kevin Smith movie, dude let’s spend a whole night talking in catchphrases…They’re not the ones who need it.

Half the time they’re the reason my girls need it.

Fucking men. 

P O E M

Almost

‘Jesus, this thing goes through weed fast, doesn’t it?’ Emma peers into the ash-flecked bowl of the Bud Bomb, screws it back on, then hands it back to me.

‘Worst thing about it,’ I say, returning it to the pocket of my jeans. We’re walking past the Civic Centre, through the garden by the war memorial. It feels a little good to be smoking dope so close to the seat of local civic power. A little good, and, on a day like today, a little scary. A little like Weimar.

We’re relaxing, our guard is down. We’re heading for Jesmond Metro station, which will take us past the Robinson Library. The only fascists we’re likely to find up here are grammar Nazis.

‘Jesus,’ Emma says, ‘that fucking woman.’

'The blonde in the white shirt? I know, right?’

‘Better teeth than I thought she’d have.’

‘Well, y’know, they say kebabs…no actually, that’s not fair.’

Emma looks at me. ‘Are you worried about being mean to a racist?’

‘Well, no, but…I don’t think we should mock them for class reasons, that’s all. Y’know, all that stuff about them being dregs and from slums and stuff. That girl at the end had a point.’

‘What? Little Miss Male Aggression?’

‘Well yeah, that’s bollocks. But like…’

‘Especially given what that woman did! Bloody male aggression, that was the most aggressive act of the protest and it was a bloody cis woman doing it! Male aggression.’

‘Well yeah, yeah, obviously she…whoa.’

I come to a halt by the cool bridge/tunnel thing that connects the Robinson to the rest of the Newcastle campus.

‘You okay, sweets?’

I nod. ‘Yeah, I’m fine, I just…female aggression…’

‘Easy tiger, society hasn’t broken down to the extent that you can fap openly in public yet.’

I punch her on the shoulder.

‘It’s not that! It’s just…think about it. There were a bunch of them, guys and a girl…’

‘So…?’

‘So it was the girl who tried to fight us.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yeah. Oh.’

We stand in silence by the mostly-empty library. For want of anything better to do I get into the lee of the bridge and start refilling the Bomb.

‘Damn,’ says Emma, looking off into the distance. ‘Damn. I feel almost complimented.’

Moments in Calamity

Valerie Bathing

Ruby messages me and asks if I want to hang out later. Of course I wanna hang out with her, duh. That’s Ruby. Slow on the uptake. Paranoid about all the wrong things. Paranoid about people leaving her, people trying to fuck her, people wanting to do any damn thing to her. I’ve seen the way she walks in the street, in Metro stations. It doesn’t take much to make her miss a step, to make her shift her hands in front of her body. I guess she thinks she’s protecting herself. She makes herself more vulnerable, not less.

Like at the parties her old flatmates used to throw, when she would take ecstasy, before they put her on SSRIs and she had to stop rolling, there would always be a point where she would stand up, leave the room, and go to bed. I would follow after a while, go in and sit on the end of her bed and talk to her. It helps that we’re both comic book geeks. I would sit there and talk to her about She-Hulk or Squirrel Girl and she’d listen, sip water, and laugh.

When Ruby laughs, it’s the best thing in the world. She has a big, high laugh, like what you’ve just said to her is the funniest thing that she’s heard. Which, in that moment, just might be true. I’ve watched really bad comedies with that bitch.

I’ve watched films that aren’t comedies with her. That bitch will laugh at the weirdest shit. Like that Nic Cage movie about the end of the world? Not the one based on those Bible books, the one where the sun explodes at the end or whatever. Nic Cage  discovers this is going to happen because he notices people keep writing shit with patterns of numbers in which predict how many people are going to die in various disasters. For some reason, I can’t remember why, he goes to some fuckin shack in the middle of nowhere and he finds some more of these fuckin calculations, like who knows what this shit actually says, it’s probably the chemical formula for the McRib or something, but he finds a bunch of these calculations carved into the back of a door because that’s how I show my working, I don’t know about you, and at the end of the calculations it just says EVERYONE.

Ruby laughed her head off at that bit. She saw it in the cinema, before I came over here. She says she laughed her head off and then she realised she was the only one laughing.

Ruby thinks that she looks ugly when she smiles. In her selfies she does a little half-smile, something to make her lips look good, to widen her eyes, but she thinks when she actually breaks out into a big goofy grin she looks ugly.

Ruby’s as stupid as fuck. I love making her laugh. I love making her smile.
I love scaring her. Does that sound mean? Just jump-scares, you know. Leaping out from behind a door and saying boo. Pretending to kick her, or punch her. That does sound kind of mean, I guess, but it’s hard to explain. She laughs afterward. She smiles, she looks relieved. It’s our thing. We flirt by fighting.

One time, I was sitting on the mattress with Jean and Ruby was eating a cake or something, she had a small plate she was eating it off. She put it down on the desk and I told her to put it in the kitchen. She said make me. So I stood up and I grabbed her hair and I marched her to the kitchen and I said listen, wench, when I tell you to do something you fucking do it when I say. She was glowing for the rest of the night. Hardly said a word. But you could tell she liked it by how much she was smiling. She was smiling from the inside. She looked beautiful.

She’s not over until five. That gives me time to shower.

I have a waterproof case for my phone, so I always take it with me. Ruby thinks this is weird. She says it shows that for all the fact there’s only six years between us, we’re like different generations. I say that’s bullshit, I just spent my teens figuring out how to do shit with computers instead of listening to fucking Elgar and writing bad poetry but she insists it’s ‘cause she’s older. I think she has a thing about that. She’s haunted by the fact that she’s the same age now as her first girlfriend was, back when she was still pretending to be a dude. She keeps talking about people wanting her to be their Mrs Robinson, and how she’s not sure how she feels about that. I say go with it. MILFs are hot.

I pick up my phone and I’m about to hit the shower when I remember we bought new poppers yesterday, the strong ones from the sex shop in the village. I get them out of the fridge, grab a towel and get into the shower.

Yeah, I’m naked. It’s my flat. I like to stay unclothed for as much of the day as I can.
Ruby does not get this. The only place that bitch is ever naked is the shower. She’s a minimiser, a dick-ignorer. She told me once she will go to a lot of trouble to make sure she doesn’t see her dick, even when she jerks off, because if she sees it, instant shrinkage. She mimed the way she jerks off for me once: she lies on her back and she treats it as much like a clit as she can.

If Ruby wasn’t so fat she would have had her bits done already, I think. I don’t care about mine. If anything it’s a selling point. Guys like it. You know how many dudes are secretly praying for a woman who can blast them in the ass. But then I like dick in general. Ruby’s more particular. She’ll suck flesh but she much prefers plastic.

We went to a hotel in town once and I offered to let her use my glass piece in the shower. I don’t think she did. It probably felt weird to her, sharing a dildo when we’re not exactly girlfriends. I don’t mind, really. She invited me.

I stand outside the shower while I turn the water on. I hate being under it at first, when it’s still cold. I hold my hand under the stream ‘til it starts turning hot and I get in. God it feels so good, the water on my naked skin.

 I’m high right now. I didn’t say, but you should assume I’m high at all times unless otherwise informed. Not massively so – just a bit of a buzz – but I’m maybe a little higher than normal right now because I like to be high in the shower. I like to be blazed while I get wet. It feels so good, the stream, the pressure, the air and steam around me. I pull up Spotify on my phone and then look at my tumblr. Captain Marvel. She-Hulk. Girls’ butts, girls twerking, cocks, guys fucking. The music is some kind of dance track, a nice groove, good squashy bass and oh God I am so high right now and this

This
Feels
So
Good

and  I slide down and sit cross-legged on the floor, my right knee nudging the door to the shower ajar. The lino will get wet but hey, we’re on the ground floor, nothing’s dripping through. It’s fine.

This woman doing bodypainting cosplay keeps showing up in my tumblr. She looks amazing and she does it so well and she has such. A. Cute. Butt it’s fantastic. I want to paint her, like the girl in The Pillow Book. Naked Ewan McGregor, naked Vivian Wu, naked Chinese and Japanese men, that fat naked American, that creepy old dude, the feel of my pen drawing lines on Jean and Ruby’s skin, your skin is not good paper, and I’m hard right now, feeling the warmth of my dick in my hand and oh, oh, oh the water feels so good and I reach for the poppers and I open them and breathe them in, first one nostril then the other, take a big hit and ah, ah, oh here it





comes and my stomach falls through the basement while my frontal lobes take to the sky and oh it’s like an explosion and I feel so relaxed, so high, and I do it again and

then I reach for the glass piece, decide which way to put it round, the end with the spirals I think and I lap at the edge of my butt with it, tickling myself, teasing myself, before I push up and my ass swallows it, puckers around the glass, still a little bit cold now but warming up, wet, and I pump it in and out with one hand while rubbing my left tit with the other, my tits, Jean’s tits, Ruby’s tits, this girl on tumblr’s tits and oh God I want to suck somebody’s tits, I want to lick somebody’s pussy, want to suck somebody’s cock, I want to take someone inside of me, I want to be inside, I want to be both, get you a man, get you a tran who can do both HA yes a tran who can do both both both both both and ah, and my right hand moving down now, both hands down, one pumping, one pulling, and I’m hard, still hard, and I think I’ll stay hard even if I move my hand away and

reach
for the poppers
again and

AAAAAAAAH yes so good and both my hands go back, pumping, pulling, pushing oh God I can feel it
coming and oh God I’m going to
going to
going to
oh God his butt her cock her tits her costume painted on his tits her cock her smile
her laugh
fucking wench aaaaaaah
oh
my
God

So good. So good. So good.

And it fades and oh the water on my skin and I’m so fucking high and yes. Yes. Yes. So good. So good.

I take a moment. For myself.

My phone says it’s three forty-three. She’ll be over at five.

Moscow Rules

Not War Exactly

I feel like choosing to self-medicate my personal trauma with weed might have been a poor decision, because now that the country’s falling apart I’ll be forced to upgrade to heroin as a reality-dampening agent. The results came in yesterday morning: turkeys voted, Christmas won. By a hair. And in a way that’s more scary because now nothing’s certain. A clear vote one way or the other, even if we lost…I don’t want to think about that.  I can’t. I don’t have time. I have to be at Monument before eleven.

Valerie left for work fifteen minutes ago, but I still need to get my make-up on before I can deal with this. This isn’t a trip to the Sainsbury’s, this is, not war exactly. Something close though. The racists have been planning a march for three months, and after yesterday’s result they’ll feel emboldened. It’s vital people get down to the Monument and stop them plotting up there with their horrible Rapefugees Welcome posters and their flags. Newcastle went the opposite way to the country, by a similarly narrow margin, but with the national vote skewing the other way almost everywhere else, the racists will call this a victory. It’s tactically vital to stop them.

And personally, I just want to wipe the smug smiles off their evil whitebread faces. I want to batter them and send them home with their tails between their legs. I’m not exactly a shrinking violet, but I’m no streetfighter. But right now all I want to do is hit someone. All I want is someone hitting me. All I want’s a fight.

I draw my brows on thin and low. The glasses usually conceal them anyway. I shove a waterproof in my backpack and then head out the door for the first time since Friday morning. It feels like it did after Orlando, only worse. That reminded us that people hate us enough to kill us en masse, that we weren’t safe even in our own clubs anymore, but even after Orlando we could tell ourselves those people were in a minority. Now…

You’re walking down the street. A white, cis, straight-looking person is approaching. How does it feel to look at them knowing that your chances of them not secretly wanting to put you in a fucking camp are on a 48-52 split? What’s the most you’ve ever bet on a coin toss?

I get to the Monument a little while before the counter-protest starts. People are assembling with banners and stuff, but I recognise no-one I know. I grab a quick coffee and wander around, checking out the blokes who are obviously spotting this for the EDL, and the RedWatch types taking photos. The fascists are taking a while. Maybe they couldn’t get enough people to come and they’ll sack it off in favour of the pub. It wouldn’t be the first time.

I wander up Northumberland Street, which the fascists plan to walk down, to see if there’s any sign of them. The street heaves from side to side with the usual Saturday crowd: I see a thicket of England flags outside the JD Sports shop and think for a moment that I’ve spotted the enemy camp, but it turns out to be the guy with the gazebo who sells tat. I walk further up, to Haymarket. At the Junction, a pub sandwiched between Haymarket Metro and Bus Stations, which started out as a branch of the tacky Old Orleans chain and went downhill from there, I find the fascists plotted up outside. Maybe two dozen of them, if that. A few big flags. They see me and jeer. I take a photograph. Stare back.

On Friday I had to go to town and see Heather. I’d arranged to meet her in the café at the end of Pink Lane, the one where I met the German wrestling guy. This was a rather poor choice of venue, being right next to Gotham Town and Rafferty’s, two of the favourite hangouts for Newcastle fash. I was already angry when I was walking towards the place: when I heard the sound of four white boys cackling and slinging slurs I just got angrier. I turned the corner and found Heather sat outside, on a bench, with these four goons in overalls giving her shit. I hugged her, said hi, then turned and stared back at the bastards. Stared and stared, until the last of them stopped smiling and slinked off.

When I was a teenager I thought being able to do that was a fucking superpower. I’ve always had trouble with eye contact anyway, so the idea of having eyes that were almost a weapon appealed to me. Clint Eastwood, Amanda Waller, Batman. Young Bruce Wayne, staring up into the eyes of Joe Chill, his parents’ killer. ‘Stop lookin’ at me that way, kid!’ The evil eye.

The thousand yard stare exists, it turns out. All you have to do to unlock it is have the shit kicked out of you so bad that you don’t fear it anymore. And I am there.

By the time I get back to the Monument four fash have turned up as an advance party. I get behind them, snap a few photographs, then climb up onto the Monument with the rest of the counter-protestors. I’m glad we’ll still outnumber the fash, even when their reinforcements arrive. Glad, and a little disappointed. Fash are bullies, and outnumbered like this they’ll posture and get lairy but be too scared to really go for it.

A shouting battle then.

‘Hello!’
A soft Glasgow accent. Emma.
‘It’s so good to see you here!’ she smiles. ‘How’ve you been?’

‘Well…’ I shrug. Emma knows about the suicide attempt. ‘Things have been, y’know. And this…’ I gesture at the scene around us.
She nods. ‘I know what you mean. If I’m honest I came here out of spite, almost. They’ll all be thinking they’ve won. I want to tell them all to fuck right off.’
‘Same.’

The fascist vanguard is refreshed with the bald, the badly dressed, the beer-bellied, as we speak. A rotating team of rabble-rousers get the chants going, ours drowning theirs out. Emma and I join in with the chants, occasionally picking particular fascists out of the opposing line and directing a string of ad-libbed jeers and gestures at them. We soon find targets we can troll. An old man with a beard, a ponytail, a white t-shirt two sizes too tight and the sort of baseball cap white men only resort to when they’re in denial about their hair is trying to lead the EDL in their haranguing. We can’t hear him, and tell him as much, theatrically holding our hands to our ears, Hulk Hogan-style. He glares at me. I hold the stare. He fumbles with a megaphone. We still can’t hear. Emma and I start stage-laughing at him, actually laughing but exaggerating it so he can see. He gets more and more wound up. Someone turns up with an amp and a mic and he tries using that but he still can’t make himself heard. If I wrote for the Guardian I could weave an article from that – blah blah blah white working class blah blah Metropolitan consensus blah blah overlooked and ignored herp derp sack Jeremy Corbyn. But I don’t so, fuck that. You don’t beat fash by hearing their concerns, you beat them in the streets by smashing their morale. A riot’s not a safe space. Don’t behave. You gave up being good when you declared a state of war.

Ponytail walks off to another end of the line, and one of the guys on our mic starts giving him shit. Emma and I find new targets: a thin, rigid boy, an Elliott Rogers in utero, trying to look tough in a pea-coat and a skull bandana; a horse-faced racist wearing a Union Flag like a hijab against the rain; a man who loses his shit and tries to charge our line when I reapply my lipstick, blow him a kiss, then start a who are ya chant. A blonde woman with tattoos who keeps pointing and mouthing stuff at Emma.

This reminds me of Pride. It reminds me of performing. I like an antagonistic audience. I love walking rooms. It gives me licence to be wild. To be aggressive. I’m making up disses on the fly, almost freestyling at times, singing, clowning – this is the best I’ve felt in ages. There are twenty of them and maybe a hundred or more of us and people with shopping are standing beside us while the fascists are strung along a ragged line kept apart from us by police. We may have lost the referendum and these guys may have felt like they could act the cock this morning but now they’re just a bunch of piss-wet racists in the rain. And all the while the chants go on around us:

BLACK AND WHITE UNITE AND FIGHT
SMASH THE EDL
NAZI SCUM OFF OUR STREETS
YOUR ENGLAND FLAG IS MADE IN CHINA
EDL, BRUSH YOUR TEETH
WHOSE STREETS
OUR STREETS
WHOSE STREETS
OUR STREETS
WHOSE STREETS
OUR STREETS

‘Let’s show them these are our streets!’ Shouts the guy on the mic. ‘Everyone, step off the Monument! Show them theses streets are ours!’

We step down dutifully, and I’m a little disappointed now because I don’t get to see any of their faces,  all I can see is the backs of the people in front of me, the helmets of the police, the England flags. Down here I feel more vulnerable. Should have stuck to higher ground.

A riot is a living thing; panic in a crowd is not spontaneous to those within, as much as it may be to those without. The first sign that things are going wrong is confusion. People shift, people glance, people move through the line, you hear whispers.
I turn around and see the blonde woman heading for Emma. Her hair is bleached and her tattoos are shonky but her EDL polo shirt is prison white. She dressed for the occasion. She goes for Emma’s dreads, tries to get her hair, to ragdoll her around. I shove back, try to get myself between the two of them. This woman is angry, she has eyes like a Doberman, she’s screaming, so, yeah, I’m scared, but fuck her, fuck this bitch if she thinks she can start some shit with my friends…

A Chinese guy with a camera pushes in alongside us, the woman in front turns around, there’s a flash of a yellow jacket; between us and the police we bundle her back behind her line.

‘One of theirs!’
‘She’s trying to sneak through!
‘Divven’t kick me! How! Divven’t ye kick me!’
‘What? I didn’t!’
‘Like fuck did she kick you you bitch, you’re just making shit up and acting the victim like you fuckers always do, fuck off!’

Yeah, that was me. I’m fuming. For the rest of the protest, whenever I catch sight of the blonde woman I lock eyes with her. I hold her gaze. She pretends to laugh, she smiles, she tries to get a rise. I just keep looking.

Eventually the fascists pack their flags up and fuck off. The student activists turn up toward the end with the Refugee March and start an open mic. I think about getting on it and spitting my anti-EDL number at their repeating backs, but my throat is hoarse from shouting for three hours. I find Emma again, and ask if she’s alright. A student girl gets on the mic and condemns what she calls the male aggression on both sides.

‘Come on,’ I say to Emma, flashing her a glimpse of the Bud Bomb in the pocket of my jeans. ‘Let’s go find somewhere to sit and get stoned.’
‘Good idea,’ she says. ‘Maybe it’ll calm our male aggression.’