Daughter of the Revolution

by Louis F

On a cold afternoon in March, some thirty years before today, a young woman left the underground at Highbury & Islington. At a nervous pace she made her way down towards Angel, and then, glancing at a scruffy map, turned up a narrow side street lined with terraced houses, the noise of the traffic behind her fading to a quiet hum. Under the clear March sky, the little street - which might have looked dull a few weeks prior - took on a quiet charm. Pink blossoms were just beginning to show on the cherry trees that lined the road and patches of fresh greenery were emerging, here and there, along the narrow front gardens of the terraces.

None of this was noticed by the young woman. Since she had left her flat that morning, she had been plagued by the vague sense that she was being followed.

At first grateful to have escaped the chaotic motion of the main road, she soon found that the quiet of the side street gave rise to a new unease. Folding her map into her pocket she became aware that she was, for the first time that day, alone. Scanning the windows of the houses for signs of movement, she found none. It seemed like every curtain and blind on the street must be shut. The apparent emptiness of the houses only made her feel more exposed— if she was being followed, who would come out from behind these locked doors to help her?

Suddenly, she thought she caught the familiar smell of cigarette smoke. Panic rose up from her stomach as she imagined some shadowy figure, smoking cigarettes as he followed close behind her. Turning quickly, she saw the street was empty—except for a small black bird, watching her from one of the low brick walls dividing the terrace gardens.

Placing one hand on the little gold cross that hung around her neck, she took a moment to collect herself.

‘Devil, keep your eye off me.’

The Devil, it seemed, took notice, and the young woman’s unease retreated a little. She was working herself up over nothing. There was no reason for anyone to be following her.

Continuing her way down the street, she began to reflect on why she was making this journey. A few months earlier she had begun volunteering at a free kitchen close to her house, having met one of the organisers at an event held by a local charity, where refugees told their stories to a rapt crowd of students. There she had encountered a young, serious man called Mark who was, by his own telling, an enthusiastic member of the London activist scene. She hadn’t liked Mark initially. He listened too eagerly to her and watched her too closely. But she had been lonely since moving to London, and when he invited her to join the kitchen group she had agreed.

The choice had ultimately been a good one she felt. The members of the group were generally friendly, and she had warmed up to Mark as she got to know him better. True he was a little intense, but he was kind to her and she couldn’t help but feel flattered by the consistency of his interest. It turned out that Mark lived on the other side of the park next to her flat, and the two would often walk back from the kitchen together in the afternoon. They had become close enough friends that they would meet for coffee in the little café in the centre of the park every few weeks. It was Mark, during one of their trips to the cafe, who had invited her to the protest which she was now on her way to.

“Protest is probably too strong a word for it”, he had told her, taking a drag from one of the thin American cigarettes he liked to smoke.

“More like a walking tour with flags.”

Still, he had insisted it would be good for her to come, as a sort of introduction to political action. The young woman struggled to think of anything she would less like to do than ‘political action’, but she felt that at this moment of her life she needed all the friends she could get. So, she had tried to be diplomatic when she refused.

‘I’d like to, but I don’t want to get in trouble. And, anyway, I don’t like crowds.’

Mark had laughed and told her not to worry

‘It’s normal to be nervous, but everyone will make you feel welcome. Trust me.’

She had resisted a little longer but, sensing that he would not let the issue lie, she had eventually agreed to come. Today, she felt this had probably been a mistake. The thought of being caught in a throng of protesters surrounded, she imagined, by a tight ring of police made her stomach tighten. But she was on her way now, and Mark would doubtless be disappointed if she backed out so late.

The sound of footsteps approaching from behind pulled the young woman away from her thoughts. And there it was again, the unmistakable smell of cigarette smoke. Somebody really was following her up the street, someone who must have hidden in one of the gardens when she turned to look for them. She glanced into the wing-mirror of one of the cars parked along the edge of the narrow pavement, hoping to catch sight of her pursuer.

Seeing no one, she turned.

On the other side of the road, not far behind her, a woman in a long, black abaya was pushing a pram. She was not, as far as the young woman could tell, smoking. But the smell had now disappeared. Finding her hand back on the little cross around her neck, the young woman realised with some embarrassment that she must have imagined it after all. Reassured - but still preferring not to have anyone behind her - she stopped for a moment and waited for the woman to pass, taking back out and pretending to consult the battered map she had purchased as she had wandered, lost, around Gatwick airport on her arrival in the country about a year prior.

She would need to get a new one soon; it was starting to tear along the folds, and the red crosses with which she had marked out locations in the city had begun to obscure the details. Her gaze drifted towards the little plastic watch around her wrist, and she realised just how late she was running.

Her sleep last night had been disturbed by strange dreams. She’d been lost in the crowd of protesters, looking for Mark but unable to find him. Instead, she had found her father - sitting outside one of the little street cafés they used to visit after work, drinking coffee and smoking black-market cigarettes with her uncle. He had smiled at her and invited her to join them but, remembering her grandmother’s advice never to accept hospitality from ghosts, she had fled back into the crowd. By the time she had woken up the sun was already streaming in through the thin blinds that covered her bedroom window. Cursing at the bathroom tap that was never able to splutter out more than a little water, she had washed as best she could and rushed out of the flat without stopping to eat.

Judging that the woman with the abaya was now far enough ahead of her, the young woman continued her way along the street, just slowly enough to avoid catching up. She noticed that the black bird had flown ahead of her; and was now watching from atop the wooden gate of one of the gardens. As she drew closer it darted off, retreating into the slender branches of a young magnolia tree that was set further back from the street.

She found her thoughts drifting back towards her father.

He had grown up poor but, as her mother had put it, he had made the world for himself. As a child, he had sold salt with his father in the town market. As a young man, after his father had been killed in a road accident, he had become the sole provider for his mother and younger siblings. Needing a quicker way to make money, he had moved on to selling things that were more difficult to buy: chocolate, fuel, foreign cigarettes. Finally, once he had saved up enough money, he and her uncle had begun buying up the small plots of farmland that lay unused on the outskirts of town.

There they had built small modern houses, complete with all the western trimmings they could reasonably acquire; generator powered lights, modern doors, and working indoor toilets. When she was not on the market with her mother, the young woman had grown up on building sites with her father. As he and the small team of men he had hired from town broke for lunch, she would sneak off to play in the pits that had been dug out for the houses’ foundations. If she was lucky, they would be deep enough to expose the red clay that seemed to run beneath the whole town, maybe the whole country. It was so smooth and rich to the touch that she felt she could have eaten it.

At the end of the day, her father would take her to the café in the centre of town, where he and her uncle would sit and talk as they smoked. Mostly, she remembered, they would complain about the government, which was bent on crushing the self-made man and his family.

“It can’t last” she had heard her father say once “We have a question, and one day they will have to answer it.”