Free The Drowners by Jennie Finch

asked. Sue glanced up in surprise and Alex frowned at her and shook her head impatiently. Sue shrugged and went back to her book, wriggling furtherinto her armchair as she tried to look as if she was not listening.
    ‘Hector of course. He and your father have been quite – well, I thought at least you would be a bit more understanding …’ Her voice trailed off, the disappointment echoing down the empty phone line.
    Alex tried not to grit her teeth as she strove to match her mother’s calm tones.
    ‘Perhaps if you explained a bit more – what were you doing there in the first place. Did you just get caught up in it all and ended up arrested by mistake?’
    She couldn’t quite erase the hopeful tone to her voice. Please let it all be a silly misunderstanding, she thought. Please don’t let my mother be turning into a hooligan at this time of life.
    ‘It is just so heartless,’ her mother said. ‘Those poor farm animals, crammed together in horrible, smelly trucks, piled on top of one another. You can hear them as they drive by you know, crying and calling out. I think it’s disgraceful, the way they are treated and I don’t see why we should carry on doing it just to please the
French
!’
    Alex struggled to keep a straight face at the scorn pouring forth from the last sentence. ‘So – you were …?’ she said hopefully.
    ‘Really Alex, don’t you follow the news? Some young people turned up a few weeks ago, just to highlight this horrible trade and the police were quite heavy handed, rounding them up and pushing them around for no reason. Well, that just made things worse once they’d dragged them into court – and what a waste of time and money that was too. Honestly, I despair of this country sometimes, I really do.’
    Alex was rapidly becoming overwhelmed by this flood of information from her usually reserved mother, especially as none of it seemed to make much sense, let alone answer her question. She tried again. ‘And you were there because …?’
    ‘Well, I was walking past the court building on Thursday – you know how your father likes to shop at the marketduring the week – and there was a group of them coming down the steps. I was going to just carry on past but then I heard someone call out, “Hello Brown Owl!” and it was Rebecca. Rebecca White, who was one of my little brownies from the village. She seemed so pleased to see me after all these years and I got talking to some of them. They are such nice young people and really committed, despite the way they’ve been treated.’
    There was a pause and Alex tried to frame her next question, but it was answered before she could find the right words.
    ‘Of course, I sent your father off on his own to do the shopping. I didn’t think he’d be interested.’
    Despite her concern, Alex felt her admiration for her mother growing by the minute.
    ‘So you went along because of Rebecca?’ she asked.
    ‘Well, yes at first. But you should have seen the way the police behaved. I was horrified – they were quite brutal and I’m sure they were acting unlawfully. After all, everyone was on the pavement, it is a public highway and no-one from the town was complaining. They seem to hate all these trucks roaring past every hour of the day and night just as much as we do.’
    Alex reflected on the implications surrounding the use of ‘we’ for a moment.
    ‘Anyway,’ her mother finished, ‘I was only asking one of the officers what right they had to stop ordinary citizens from travelling along the road. We hadn’t even got to the main protest because they had put out barricades and things. He got quite nasty and pushed me to one side before telling me to go home. The cheek of it, a cocky young lad with no manners behaving like that! I wish I had had him in
my
class. I would soon have taught him some basic politeness. The next thing I knew he’d called some of his friends and I found I’d been arrested.’
    Alex took a deep breath and cut