Free Snarl by Celina Grace Page A

much it would be a black-tie affair.
    They drove for about twenty minutes, Stuart crouched uncomfortably in the back of the rattling, clanking van , with boxes of leaflets sliding into him as they drove around corners. He wiped some of the dirt off the back window to see if he could see where they were going. James was following the dual carriageway out of the town, heading for the outskirts on the north side, where the village of Armford had long been swallowed up by the creeping boundaries of Abbeyford. Stuart pushed a box away from him and noted the road sign that flashed past. They were driving into a housing estate built around the nineteen thirties, by the look of the houses, travelling along progressively narrower roads until they drew into a cul-de-sac where the gardens of the houses backed onto a scrubby piece of woodland. The van stopped with a jerk. Stuart opened the back doors and clambered out, wincing at the bruises on his thighs inflicted by the sliding boxes.
    It was about six o’clock, not yet quite dark. They had parked outside a run-down detached house, the front garden paved with concrete. Stuart followed James through the open door of the house and was immediately met by a wall of heat and a fug of cigarette and spliff smoke so thick it felt like a physical barrier. Trying not to inhale, he followed James’s denim-clad back through to what turned out to be the kitchen, although Stuart was fucked if he would dare eat anything produced in the fetid little room. There wasn’t any food anyway, merely a sink full of beer and a table crowded with wine bottles and cans. People were everywhere; smoking, talking, shouting, waving to one another. Most were young, most were clearly activists – there were a lot of piercings and tattoos and interesting hairstyles. Stuart had tied his dreadlocks back this evening. One thing he was looking forward to, after this assignment finished, was getting the whole bloody lot cut off. That would be first on his list of things to do once he was back in the real world.
    He , James and Rosie grabbed beers and made their way out through the crowds to the garden beyond the kitchen door. It was just a square of lawn and a tumbledown fence, but the evening air was beautiful; soft and warm in a way that English spring nights so rarely were. There was an outside light which, despite the dingy shade, had attracted a fluttering cloud of moths and insects forming a moving corona.
    “Whose house is this?” asked Stuart.
    “Dunno who it belongs to,” said James, “But we know a few of the guys who live here. It’s a squat.”
    Stuart should have guessed. He thought longingly for a second of his own flat back in London; minim al furniture, many gadgets. “Who’s that, then?”
    Rosie was crouched awkwardly on a low brick wall that ran partway along the length of the garden boundary, rolling a joint. She gave the papers a final, expert twist.
    “Angie lives here, doesn’t she?” she asked, of no one in particular. “And Rizzo. I don’t know really, people just seem to drift in and out. I stayed here for a bit myself, when I first came down.”
    “Before you met me,” said James.
    “Right.”
    She lit the joint, took a deep drag and handed it to Stuart. He lifted it to his lips. As he could spend the evening seemingly doing so me serious drinking while actually remaining as sober as a teetotal judge, he could also do a credible impression of a man toking hard without actually doing so. The Bill Clinton Method, he thought, with an inner grin.
    Quickly as he decently could, he passed the joint on to James. He needed to know more about the loosely knit group he’d infiltrated, and this party was the perfect opportunity to do some tentative preparatory digging. He’d tried, subtly, to find out a little more about James and Rosie’s immediate friends and fellow activists but, for people single minded about a certain cause, they were frustratingly vague about their colleagues and