Louder Than Words Page 8

  ‘Me too,’ Josie said.

  ‘I need to stay sober,’ she whispered to me as Jake went to grab our drinks. ‘Too many people here who might say stuff about me and I don’t want to be handling that even a little bit pissed.’

  She steered me through the crowd in the hall into a sitting room without a TV, just lots of bookshelves. From the noise coming from a room opposite, the TV and stereo were in there. In this room, people were lounging around on the sofas, chilling. Rachel was there with her friends and when she saw us she moved up to make space.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, smiling at me. ‘Silas said you were coming. And you must be Josie?’

  ‘Yes.’ I could see Josie waiting for the condemnation to appear in Rachel’s eyes, the sneers, the little comments.

  Rachel grinned at her. ‘Please don’t be offended, but your ex-boyfriend was a real dick! You can do WAY better, girl!’

  Josie looked at her for a moment, astounded, and then burst out laughing. ‘Ain’t that the truth!’ She high-fived Rachel and sat down.

  It was only then we noticed Lara sitting quietly to the side of them. ‘Hi, again,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, hi.’ Josie gave her a guarded smile and I copied. I wasn’t sure what to make of her yet, but if she was hanging out with Rachel and the others then she was probably OK. But then, if she was going out with Toby she maybe wasn’t.

  ‘Oh, have you met?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘Not really,’ Lara said. ‘We’ve bumped into each other a couple of times. I’m going to grab another drink. Anybody want one?’

  When she’d gone, Josie looked around the others. ‘I’ve got to ask,’ she said, ‘so I don’t put my foot in it and offend her. Is she going out with Toby?’

  They all burst out laughing. ‘Hell, no!’ Rachel’s best friend, Clare, answered. ‘But he wishes! No, she’s just got a job in his mother’s shop, and she doesn’t know anyone round here. She only just moved into the area. So Toby has kind of adopted her – but don’t worry, we already warned her.’

  ‘They’d make a funny couple though,’ one of the others said. ‘Kind of like Gwyneth Paltrow dating Beaker from the Muppets.’

  They were still laughing when Lara got back. She looked a question around the group. ‘Toby,’ said Rachel in succinct explanation and Lara laughed and rolled her eyes. They were grey, I noticed, with long black lashes that didn’t seem to have any mascara on them at all. She was dressed in a soft draping black T-shirt and slim-fitting black jeans and boots.

  I wondered if she made the other girls feel overdressed and over-made-up.

  Silas came through, followed by Jake and Toby. I knew the moment he spotted Lara, even though he tried not to show it.

  The boys wandered over and sat down on the floor, Silas effectively outmanoeuvring Toby in getting to sit closest to Lara. Toby wore the kind of sullen expression that told us all he’d been busted and everyone now knew he and Lara were not an item.

  I watched my brother as the conversation round me broke off into small pockets.

  ‘Hi,’ he said to Lara.

  ‘Hi, boy who doesn’t like art,’ she said with a slight and private smile.

  He laughed softly. ‘It’s Silas.’

  ‘I’ll try to remember,’ she said, again with that self-contained smile.

  ‘So if you’re not into art, what are you into?’

  She stared at him. Not like other girls did, not as if she was in any way trying to find an answer that pleased him. ‘Politics,’ she said finally, as if she was throwing down a gauntlet.

  ‘Oh!’ He looked as if that was the last thing he expected her to say. I know it took me by surprise.

  ‘Didn’t you think I had enough brain to be interested in something of importance?’

  He gave her his most melting smile. ‘It’s obvious you have enough brain.’

  But she thawed not even slightly, her only response a raised eyebrow. A challenge back.

  ‘What are your political views then?’

  She tossed her hair back and sat up straighter. ‘You could sum them up as a belief that the state is immoral.’

  Silas frowned. ‘So that means any kind of government is wrong?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I noticed Josie watching them too, with a closed-down expression. Did she genuinely not like Lara or was she jealous? I knew the answer to that before I’d even finished asking myself.

  ‘Isn’t that anarchy?’ Silas said.

  Lara put her head on one side and looked at my brother with surprise. ‘Yes, it’s anarchy.’

  Just then Toby leaned across my brother, shoving him to one side. ‘What are you talking about that’s so serious? Is he boring you, babe?’

  ‘Ow, Toby, get off my foot!’ Clare yelled as Toby tried to move over next to Lara. ‘Clumsy idiot!’

  ‘Oh, and I’ve got a big bone to pick with you, Si,’ Toby growled. ‘Me and Jake.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Silas said, shifting his arm from under a drunken Toby’s shoulder.

  ‘That thing with Lloyd, revenging on him – that was you, right? Come on, you can’t hide it now. Not with her here.’ He pointed at Josie.

  Silas shrugged.

  ‘What thing?’ Lara asked as the girls all gasped in realisation.

  ‘Josie’s ex put porno shots – OW!’ He stopped as Rachel slapped him. ‘What was that for?’

  ‘Toby, you are such a moron sometimes!’

  ‘What? Well, he did. He put pictures of her all over the internet. Only Silas here went nuclear on his ass online and did this revenge thing on him. It was massive! People are still talking about it on the Codes of War forum. He hacked loads of people’s machines and . . .’ Toby paused as Lara was looking blank. ‘Basically he did some very heavy stuff to him. And he pretended the whole time he didn’t know a thing about it.’ He reached over and punched Silas, not quite light enough for it to be entirely friendly. ‘So me and Jake were freaking out about our machines being in this botnet and he didn’t let on.’

  ‘I cleaned them up for you, didn’t I?’ Silas asked, with ultimate unconcern.

  ‘You could have told us!’ Toby made another swing for him, which Silas held off easily.

  Jake got up and grabbed Toby. ‘Steady, tiger. Come on, let’s get some air and calm down.’

  ‘Was it really you?’ Rachel asked as Toby was dragged away by Jake, muttering about ‘that shit muscling in on his woman’ which everyone pretended they hadn’t heard.

  Silas gave a non-committal shrug again. ‘The guy needed stopping,’ was all he said.

  It was then I noticed Lara looking at Silas a little less coldly than before.

  Silas was right. The party never did get wild. Toby threw up in the bushes outside and that was as bad as it got. Rachel and Josie got talking a bit about how the girls in Josie’s school had reacted to Lloyd’s stunt. Rachel wasn’t impressed. ‘I hate how some women behave towards each other,’ she said. ‘It’s like they get a buzz from putting each other down, when there are enough guys queuing up to do that. We should be standing up for each other, not helping them keep us down.’

  Lara nodded her agreement and I felt Josie warm to her a little. ‘Like yesterday,’ she said, ‘I saw these two things in the news. One was about how this girl had been brutally murdered by a bunch of guys in South Africa and the other was about a woman getting bitched at online because her thighs met in the middle. So there’s no comments on this first news article, but on the thigh gap thing – so many women lining up to slag her off about how fat she is. What the hell is that about?’

  ‘Yes!’ said Rachel, finally finding a kindred spirit. ‘That is exactly what I mean!’

  Silas leaned back and watched the two of them launch into a debate with a smile on his face.

  CHAPTER 16

  ‘So you still haven’t talked to Josie either,’ Silas said in a cross voice as we waited for the school bus.

  I pulled a face at him.

  ‘You know what I mean! And you know I
wanted you to tell her what was upsetting you so much last week.’

  I ignored him.

  ‘Rafi, have you ever thought about getting some help with this? I know the counsellors you saw as a kid were worse than useless, but you’re older now and it’s not going away, sis. Don’t you want it to stop?’

  Silas practically never discussed this with me, mostly because it used to make me so upset when he tried to. Yes, the counsellors had been useless because how can you talk about not talking?

  And the whole point was I didn’t want to tell people, especially someone who was going to psychoanalyse everything I did. Imagine being married to one of those – you wouldn’t be able to do anything without them scrutinising your every move and thought. Urgh! Creepy or what?

  I gave him a half-hearted nod.

  ‘Then you need to try. If you won’t talk to a professional, you should be talking to your friends. Hell, Rafi, you should be making more friends. I’m pleased you’ve got Josie, but you need more. Not speaking doesn’t mean you can’t have friends. That’s why I wanted you to come to the party. And you had fun, didn’t you?’

  I nodded sullenly. Yes, it had been good really, but I’d had Josie there, and him. And I knew everyone, except Lara of course.

  ‘It’s time to start talking, Rafi. I know you can do it. What I don’t know is why you ever stopped, but I’m guessing if you could tell someone that you’d find it a lot easier to speak again.’ He put his hands to his face and formed a bridge over his nose and blew out heavily. ‘Please, please try to communicate with someone. I thought it’d be me you opened up to one day, but I was wrong. I dunno . . . you need a girl to talk to, not your dumb brother.’

  But what I could never tell Silas was that he was part of the problem.

  He looked hard at my shuttered face and then sighed. ‘OK, I’ll drop it. For now. But I want you to hang out with people more. Look, some of us are going to this meeting on Thursday night. Do you want to come? It’s me and Rachel and Clare and Lara.’

  Oh?

  ‘Lara told Rachel about it at the party. It’s some political thing. She thinks we might find it interesting. I don’t think it’ll be Josie’s thing, but you might like it.’

  I made a garland for her head,

  And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;

  She look’d at me as she did love,

  And made sweet moan.

  (John Keats – ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’)

  CHAPTER 17

  As it happened, Josie had a thing on with her dad on Thursday so couldn’t make it anyway – some charity event for the families of police killed in action that she’d agreed to help at, looking after some of the little kids with party games and stuff.

  Silas spent ages deciding what to wear to the meeting. My brother, who normally threw on whatever he felt like. In the end he dragged me in to give the seal of approval to jeans, some well-worn boots and a long-sleeved blue T-shirt. I understood the look he was going for: studenty and not trying too hard to impress. But I also understood that he’d picked that T-shirt because the colour suited him, and those jeans because he knew the shape made him look good.

  We travelled into the city by train with Rachel and Clare and met Lara by the station. She wore what I was coming to recognise as her usual black and her face was clear of make-up again.

  ‘Hi,’ Silas said. ‘Good week since I last saw you?’

  ‘Fine. You?’

  ‘Yes.’ He hesitated. ‘I’ve been looking forward to this.’

  ‘Yeah, me too. This guy who’s going to be speaking is excellent.’

  I didn’t think that was what he meant and I had a strong suspicion she knew that too, but Silas smiled and nodded. ‘Hope so.’

  ‘Let’s go, this thing could get packed.’

  She led us to a backstreet and a door painted black and red. We went in and up some stairs which opened out into a large room filled with chairs facing a lectern. The chairs were old and battered and the room smelt faintly of damp, but the seats were already filling with intense-faced twenty-somethings. I felt a growing sense of anticipation in the room as more and more people came in.

  ‘Do you mind sitting at the front or does it make you feel like one of the nerdy kids at school?’ Lara said with a laugh.

  ‘The front is fine.’ Rachel grinned at her.

  She breezed through the people milling round and we followed her to our seats.

  ‘So who is the speaker?’ Rachel said as we sat down. Silas managed to wangle sitting next to Lara which did not go unnoticed by the girls, who exchanged meaningful, amused glances.

  ‘He’s an activist and a practising anarchist. Been campaigning for years, since he was a kid, mainly about the corruption of successive governments and he believes in direct action by the people for the people.’

  That sounded suspiciously like running riot and breaking stuff up, but perhaps there was more to it. Rachel and Clare nodded and then tactfully began fiddling with their phones while Silas talked to Lara. Not quite sure what to do as I was sitting on his other side, I got my phone out too.

  ‘I’ve never been to a meeting like this before,’ he said.

  ‘Have you never been involved in any kind of public protest?’

  He shook his head.

  She gave a little laugh, but it wasn’t too unkind. ‘Demo virgin! Yeah, we all have a first time. The important thing is to have a first time and not spend your life on the fence.’

  ‘Getting splinters up your arse,’ he added.

  She laughed again, but this time with genuine amusement. ‘I went on my first protest march when I was fourteen. I hopped on a bus and went down to London. They were all lined up on the Embankment with banners and whistles. I felt as if I came alive out there.’

  ‘What was it about?’

  ‘Student tuition fees.’

  ‘I saw that on the news. It got nasty.’

  She laughed. ‘Yeah, it got a bit charged. The police got all heavy and tried to kettle us to keep control. So people got heavy back. They asked for it.’

  ‘Were you in that part of the protest?’

  She nodded, shifting closer to him as someone took the seat on the other side of her. ‘I’d hooked up with some others while we were on the embankment. They saw I was on my own and took me under their wing. They were old hands at it so once it all kicked off, I was right in the middle with them. They looked after me.’

  ‘You went down there on your own at fourteen and you didn’t know anyone, and you’d never done it before.’ He shook his head in amazement. ‘That’s kind of brave. I don’t know any girls who would do that.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess. But you have to believe in something, you know. Otherwise what is the point of you? You’re just a sheep.’

  ‘So that’s what you believe in – the tuition fees issue?’

  ‘That was just the start. That’s what got me into politics. I was naive – I saw something that impacted directly on me and I reacted. It was only later when I got more savvy that I realised everything the establishment does impacts on me directly.’ She gave a huff of disgust. ‘It’s like the government are always blathering on about how they want more young people involved in politics. Yeah, right! Their narrow, well-groomed little branch of “blinker the people” politics. They want us agreeing with them, not thinking for ourselves. They don’t want me –’ she waved her hand at the surrounding room ‘– they don’t want these guys. They want us like the TV shows us to be: obsessed with drinking, drugs, getting laid. All about the party! And practically every dumb-ass kid out there falls for it and buys into that because they walk round with a blindfold over their eyes. Don’t want to see the truth because they might have to use their little brain cells to think.’

  ‘You’re not like other girls,’ Silas said. ‘You’re not like anyone I’ve ever met.’

  ‘Yeah, well, you can keep those girls. The pink, frilly ones. Too busy with their make-up and hair straighteners and obsessing over losing a
few kilos so they can get to size zero like some brain-rotted celebrity. Too busy with all that stuff to open their eyes and face that life isn’t so pretty for most of this planet. The majority of women out there wake up worrying about how to get enough food so their children don’t starve, and then there’s the ones praying the soldiers or the rebel forces – doesn’t matter which because they’ll rape and kill just the same – that they don’t come to their village. How the hell can you think about who some bimbo reality TV star is dating with that going on in your world, huh?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Silas said quietly.

  She eyed him. ‘I guess I ranted.’

  ‘Maybe. But I liked listening to it.’

  A movement at the front of the hall caught her eye.

  ‘Yeah, well, we’re not here to listen to me. We’re here to listen to him.’ She pointed to a man walking towards the lectern. He raised a hand to acknowledge the rush of applause that started as people saw him and then stood behind the lectern looking out on his audience.

  Lara leaned over Silas to us and grinned. ‘This’ll be good. Promise!’

  I have not loved the world, nor the world me;

  I have not flatter’d its rank breath, nor bow’d

  To its idolatries a patient knee –

  (Lord Byron)

  CHAPTER 18

  The guy who stood behind the lectern was much younger than I’d expected, somewhere between twenty and twenty-three. He had a narrow face made narrower by a goatee beard and a mane of wavy muddy blond hair that fell to his shoulders. He looked more like a surfer dude than a political activist.

  The applause stopped as he held up a hand to silence the audience.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said quietly and I was surprised at how softly spoken he was, with a vague Cornish burr to his voice. So that was where the surfer look came from.

  ‘It’s good to see so many of you here tonight,’ he began and the audience listened all the harder because he didn’t raise his voice. It was clear, and audible to everyone there, as long as you concentrated. I couldn’t work out if it was a ruse of his or his natural tone. ‘I want to talk to you about lies.’