Free Resolution Way by Carl Neville Page B

don’t know what else I can do.
    I know, Paula said. I know. That’s how it is, we are all caught up, compromised, trying to balance demands, live the right way even as we figure out what that might be.
    And as to compromise, well, people say that she should just accept what has happened to Lee. That her pursuit of justice is fruitless, will only bring more strain, stress, and pressure down upon her, calumny, despair. To bring a case against the Police is madness, futile, but she will pursue this futile action it seems beyond any appeal to health or sanity. The need for justice is savage, uncompromising, all consuming, as basic as hunger or thirst. She knows she is on some database somewhere, some set of blacklists, that her calls and movements will be monitored, that any preferences she might have as to where she will be relocated or transferred within work are sure to be ignored. Perhaps they should just up and leave of their own accord rather than hang around, contesting every package, refusing every offer.
    If she dropped the whole thing, maybe life would be easier.
    Maybe they could go to Wales. She remembers that day they drove down from Manchester to the Brecon Beacons for the big outdoor rave in ’94. What a beautiful day that was. How dazzled they were by the light and space, the clearness and openness of the sky. She was in love with Vernon of course, but with her friends too, with everyone in that field and with the times, the future. Coming up on the pill that Rob gave her she thought she might not stop, that they all might suddenly burst through their skins and atomise, a vast, misted dome of intermingled, multi-coloured drops. She cried out, hands above her head, feet pounding, and Vernon took off his sunglasses and leaned in to grab and hold her as the bass drop sucked all the air out of the world and catapulted them up, spiralling skyward through wave after wave of pleasure and release until night fell, a beautiful band of deepening purple filtering up from the earth, the stars, the air warm, the heat of bodies, the mountains, the sense that they would somehow, through sheer force of love, stop time and live there forever. The next afternoon, coming down in the back of the van, up after a few hours sleep and smoking a spliff, Rob cracking open a can of Special Brew and splitting it, watered down with lemonade, someone outside with a boombox was playing a tune that went, never lose that feeling, never lose that feeling .
    How could they have had so much energy then, get by on so little sleep? After that it really started to fall apart. She remembers Vernon and Rob made a track sometime later where they took a sample of Queen’s Too Much Love Will Kill You and wove it in and out of a series of dark keyboard stabs and off centre, over-cranked percussion and she felt that was right, they had all understood, too much will kill you.
    But then, so will too little.
    Putting her health at risk, that’s what they say. Well, how different then is she in that respect from Vernon after all? At least she has people pulling her back, urging her to relent whereas with Vernon, Rob actively encouraged him in it, even when he began to self harm, though they didn’t exactly have a term for it back then. Rob was a bad influence, they had that competitive bravado she sees too often in young men, this pushing each other beyond all reasonable limits, the glee in each others’ destruction. She can’t forgive Rob for that, when she thinks back she sees something malicious in it that at the time, instinctively, she was uncomfortable with but which all their polemic and theorising swept away. She began to doubt her own judgments.
    Why was she so stupid? Why didn’t she take a stand against it, especially when Vernon started turning up with his arms covered in burns?
    Well, she was young, they all were, and she was under-confident in some ways. Rob was always antagonistic too, sexist, thought of her as a mere girl, not hardcore