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.’