Peace, Love & Petrol Bombs. D. D. Johnston

       1

      The way I tell it, I almost die. The train has a metal cow catcher and it’s mushrooming steam and it’s blasting a fuck-off-angry klaxon and I’m on the tracks and at the last second—when the light’s gone bright, when my life’s flashed before me—I am pulled to safety.

      She says it wasn’t like that. She says the train was hardly in view, that it was almost stationary, that we could have sat down and eaten a picnic before it reached us. I like to think she’s too modest. I know that she was wrapped in black clothes—black hoodie, black combats—shouting “Allez quoi!” through a black bandana. “Come on! Putain! Viens!” A hundred metres away, beyond the police vans and motorcycles, the black bloc trickled out of view, leaving the pavement rubbled with cobblestones. I remember that she ran into the woodland that banked the road and I followed. She gestured for silence, as if the crack of twigs could be heard above the rattling helicopter, the sirens, the echoing detonations. “Merde. Sprechen sie Deutsch?”

      “What?”

      “Italiano?”

      “No, Scottish.”

      “Scottish? I tell you to fuckeeng move! Now we are alone to be beaten and raped.” She crouched in a rhododendron bush, still wearing her swimming goggles. “Stupide.”

      “Sorry,” I said, considering taking my chances with the police. “You want a cigarette?”

      “I have my own. Do you have the fire?” The lighter shook in my hand as I lit her cigarette. When I pulled down my bandanna, she laughed. “You are white as a ghost!”

      “We don’t get much sun in Scotland.”

      “You are how old, Petit Fantôme?”

      “Twenty.”

      “Non! I thought you are fifteen! Anarchiste?”

      “Kind of.”

      She pulled her swimming goggles over her head, and her brown eyes spread out like melted chocolate. When she removed her hat, her fringe spiked with sweat. The rest of her hair was clipper short. On her left cheekbone, an inch-long scar curved neat and white, like the scars they paint on the cheeks of Action Men and GI Joes. She smiled and blinked and stuffed her gear into her backpack. All these things were heroic.

      After two minutes, she said “On y va” and crawled through the bush, tip-toeing onto the road. “Bon. We find the comrades. We follow the smoke and the helicopter, yes?”

      And I thought: We stoned the police; we set them on fire; the people they catch are fucked. So I shrugged as nonchalantly as I could and pointed up the street. “You know, I was just after getting something to eat?”

      She looked at me and laughed. “You want to stop for lunch? You are sure you are not from France?”