Free Crusaders by Richard T. Kelly Page B

grievances, hugger-mugger.
    ‘So who do you fancy for the next Labour loser then, Jonno?’
    ‘The next leader?’
    Susannah’s eyelids popped as to say she meant what she said.
    ‘It’s got to be Kinnock.’
    ‘Ah. It’d be nice for him to have a proper job at last.’
    Get knotted , thought John. He had first heard Neil Kinnock on the radio in the week before the election, addressing a crowd in South Wales, hoarsely and yet with no little rhetorical fire. Kinnock was a miner’s son, and John was sure he heard the plangent cadence of a pulpiteer to boot.
    At Embankment the tumultuous scale of the day became clear amid a mounting din of shouts and whistles. All around were vociferous men, women, children and babies, vividly disparate banners and emblems – AFRICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS, NICARAGUAN SOLIDARITY CAMPAIGN, JAMES CONNOLLY SOCIETY – but above all a multitude of painted doves and rainbows heralding peace. John had never seen so many dark-skinned people in the flesh, and tried not to stare. On the fringes of the teeming congregation were stalls purveying badges and flags, booklets and pamphlets. John was drifting toward the reading matter when a hawkish skinhead in a purple Harrington stepped into his way, waving a wad of newssheets.
    ‘ Socialist Worker , pal?’
    ‘I won’t, if you don’t mind, thanks.’
    ‘Your loss, pal.’
    He came to a fold-out table tended by a girl with sloe eyes, a bolt in one nostril and a sheaf of vermilion hair. He inspected her wares – no doves or rainbows here, just angry splashes of red. Straight Left, Burning Questions . The girl smiled sleepily at him, and so he fished out some coins. On his return Susannah eyed him archly. ‘You’re in there, I think, Jonno.’ She snatched the pamphlet. ‘Tsk. Communist Party nonsense.’
    Paul took an interest. ‘Aye, that’s the Marxist-Leninist faction but. They split, see.’
    Susannah snorted. ‘Over what? Something that happened in 1920?’
    ‘Whey, you sneer all you want, Suzie,’ Paul smiled impishly, to John’s delight. ‘But it’s very important to make the right analysis. You should give it a try yer’sel.’
    From set-off it took the marchers two hours just to step and shuffle halfway along the envisaged route through the city. The slow progress assumed a permanence, yet the vehemence of the crowd had its own momentum, and whenever this flagged there came a rallying cry of sorts – someone with a bullhorn or klaxon, or the first line of a song. As they approached Victoria John espied that sloe-eyed pamphlet vendor stepping hither and thither a short distance ahead, urging Burning Questions onto fellow marchers. He was daring himself to sidle closer to her when the Socialist Worker skinhead hoved into view at her flank, gesturing unpleasantly to the girl and her would-be customers.
    ‘Don’t be swallowin’ anything off of these fucking middle-class Stalinists.’
    ‘Oh yeah,’ she riposted. ‘Says the Trot wanker .’
    The skin seized her arm, she shoved at him, and – to John’s outrage – he shoved her back. John felt his feet taking him forward into the affray. But a second skinhead had come on the scene and was already restraining his bristly friend, seizing him by the chest as his arms flailed the air. Too late John saw a sharp elbow rising to clout him in the nose. Static burst behind his eyes, he staggered and fell to the tarmac.
    Strange hands tugged him to his feet, some grey-bearded bloke and his wife in a blue bobble-hat. Now Susannah had her fingers on his face – ‘Let us see , Jonno’ – and Paul was fending off someone whose apology was unaccepted. ‘Let’s get him offside,’ Paul was urging, then they were levering him apart from the hubbub, the parade passing by. They ducked into a pub, darkened in the late afternoon, strikingly quiet, wainscoted and divided into nooks by partitions of frosted glass. John was plonked in a corner while Susannah purchased drinks, in spite of