Cosima
IT’S COLD AS THEY WAITfor the minibus to pick them up. With each exhale, they make white cumulous patterns against the night sky. Cosima is wearing two T-shirts, leggings, jeans, her school jumper and one of her dad’s old Patagonia jackets. Even so, her teeth are chattering. She wishes she’d remembered her gloves, but she’d been in a rush to sneak out of the boarding house in time to get the 9.30 p.m. train. It had been drummed into her that lateness was not just an act of rudeness but that it would endanger the safety of the rest of her team. She got there two minutes after the allotted time and all of them had been waiting for her by the roadside. River, who had never trusted her, made a great show of looking at his watch.
‘Sorry, sorry – train was delayed.’
River turned away. She knew he thought she was a spoiled little rich girl playing at activism. ‘A lipstick Marxist’ was how he’d put it a few weeks earlier in a meeting room above a Soho pub. At the roadside, Cosima pretended not to care.
‘You’re here now, love,’ Meadow said, hugging her briefly. Meadow was a mum of two in her forties from Bristol. She came on protests when she could get childcare. ‘That’s the important thing, right?’
Meadow stared at River, who nodded curtly and gathered everyone into a circle. Cosima took Meadow’s hand in hers as they all recited: ‘I trust myself, I trust you, I trust the group. I trust myself, I trust you, I trust the group.’
Next to her, Meadow had closed her eyes and was swaying gentlywith each rhythmic syllable. At first, Cosima had thought the mantra was naff and showy. It felt like the bit at the end of a yoga class where the instructor makes you sing ‘om shanti’. But the more actions she’d been on, the more Cosima understood the point of it. The repetitive nature of their trust chant was soothing. It reassured them that they operated as a unit, not as individuals, and that, whatever happened, they would have each other’s backs. The nervous adrenalin was unlike anything else Cosima had ever experienced. The chant helped them breathe. It reminded them that they were not alone in their fear. After it, Cosima felt calmer.
But now, waiting for the minibus, her heart rate begins to spike again. The plan has been mapped out in painstaking detail over the previous months. They have been through the chronology more times than she cares to remember, poring over crumpled bits of paper on pub tables littered with cheese and onion crisp packets. They are the ‘site-take team’ and their role is to block all transit in and out of the St Regis oil terminal in Essex by scaling the tankers. It’s illegal to drive a tanker with a person sitting on top of it. The idea is to cause logistical chaos, create petrol and diesel shortages throughout the South East and draw media attention to their cause. Simple. But also kind of terrifying.
‘You OK, Pineapple?’ Meadow looks at her with raised eyebrows only just visible beneath the peak of her grey baseball cap.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Cosima mumbles. ‘Thanks. Just … hoping it goes OK, y’know?’
‘It’ll be fine. What’s the worst that can happen?’ Meadow chuckles drily. They both know the answer to that. Meadow has been arrested sixteen times. She served half a three-month jail term for supergluing herself to a Giotto in the National Gallery. Her sister had to look after Meadow’s kids while she was away and still hasn’t forgiven her.
Cosima – codename Pineapple – has only taken part in one protest before now: a sit-in on a campus in East Anglia shortly after authorities had accepted money from a Texas oil magnate to build a new lecture hall. Conveniently, it had been over a weekend, which meantshe could easily convince her school she was going back home. In truth, she had hung out with her fellow Oblivion Oil protestors in bedsits on the outskirts of town, smoking weed, pretending to be nonchalant and trying not to catch River’s eye. She’d been careful to hide her identity and even though the protest had been reported at length in her dad’s preferred Sunday newspaper, he hadn’t clocked his daughter in any of the photographs either. She needn’t have bothered wrapping most of her face in a Palestinian scarf, purchased for under a tenner off Amazon. He never noticed her. As for her mum? At seventeen, Cosima is the eldest and often forgotten about. Her mother is unhealthily obsessed with eight-year-old Bear, clinging on to him like a baby so that she can convince herself she’s still young. She’d probably breastfeed him if Dad let her get away with it. No, Cosima never has to worry about her mother knowing what she’s up to.
But this action is more of a challenge than the previous one. It’s a Friday night in the middle of nowhere and she has to be at her grandmother’s home for her aunt’s funeral first thing tomorrow morning. She decides to believe Meadow’s assurances that it’s all going to be fine and River knows she can only do a five-hour shift.
Her school had been relaxed about her skipping double maths. They were pretty lax in general. The headmistress, a pale-haired woman with a hippy-ish vibe, talked a lot about ‘the need for self-expression’ and insisted the students call her ‘Mags’.
‘There he is,’ Meadow says, pointing at the outline of a minibus on the crest of the hill. ‘Fucking finally.’
When the bus parks up, the driver insists he needs to take a piss.
‘You’re already late,’ River says.
‘Tell that to my bladder,’ the driver replies, limping over to the side of the road and unzipping his flies.
They file onto the minibus accompanied by the driver’s heavy sighs of relief. Anxiety seeps into the atmosphere. Cosima finds herself squashed up against Broccoli, a bespectacled medical student who smells of antiseptic. He slips off his rucksack and rests it on his lap next to her. He opens a side compartment and takes out a KitKat.
‘Want a finger?’ he offers.
‘Oi oi!’ Meadow shouts from the seat behind them.
‘Thanks,’ Cosima says, taking one of the bars as the minibus starts to move.
They eat their chocolate without talking. After about half an hour, they pull up at the side of the road. Outside, the sky is black as tar. In the distance, a dim string of lights marks the entrance to the oil terminal. River stands at the front of the bus.
‘Everyone knows what they’re doing, yeah?’
They murmur their assent.
‘Broccoli, you’re going to be the de-escalator for tonight.’
Broccoli nods. De-escalating involves talking to the police and the drivers and trying to make people aware of Oblivion Oil’s commitment to non-violent protest. It’s a pretty thankless task.
‘Remember, no smoking – for obvious reasons.’
A few groans. Peatbog, who at seventy-two is one of the oldest protestors, reluctantly hands over his tobacco pipe. Cosima smiles at him and Peatbog grins ruefully back at her. In real life, his name is Jeremy and he’s a retired civil servant. His phone screensaver is a picture of his Labrador.
They get off the bus and start scrambling westwards through the undergrowth. They use their hands to push away the scrubby bushes and soon Cosima’s fingers start to tingle, then go numb. Her eyes water. Above them, the sky is studded with stars. She looks up, briefly hypnotised by the beauty of it, then Meadow presses a hand against her back and Cosima continues striding over rocks and pushing through branches that seem to snap out of nowhere. Her nose streams. She almost loses her footing. Her ankle twists and she has to swallow the cry of pain. She pushes on, ignoring the tenderness as she places weight back on her right foot. She’s glad she had a glimpse of the stars. As a child, she’d always been told by her father to look up when she felt sad.
