Why bother?

Plumstead station, summer 2021. It’s around 1am and a full moon has just cleared the next door rooves. We’ve been here for two hours, waiting to be processed. We lean or squat or sit against the low station wall, each of us facing our Arresting Officer. Every twenty minutes or so we all shuffle a few feet closer to the wire grille cage around the station’s metal door.

As the hours crawl past some of us have fallen into guarded small talk. We’ve been warned not to but it’s ordinary stuff, everyone careful to stay on safe ground. The woman next to me seems to have built a closer rapport with her AO than I have. Mostly I’m glad not to speak, and begin drifting into something close to sleeping on my feet. Then a young policewoman wanders over from the van where she and three or four others have been waiting out a boring shift. They’re all around my kids’ age, mid-twenties maybe. It’s the only time that any of these people bother to heckle us. Among many much better conversations from this long August day, this is the one that stays with me.

She seems to want something. I don’t think she knows what yet. Why do we bother? We’re wasting our time. Damaging our life-prospects. Draining police resources. And for what? Nothing’s going to change. Money rules the world and it always will. What you lot want to see is never going to happen. Get over it. 

It’s a familiar script. She’s hectoring the woman next to me now, a mother of five who’s worked in community housing projects for 25 years. What about China, India, the six billion who’ll never accept change? As she reaches for the usual cod stats she’s beginning to get out of her depth.

So we bandy a few figures back and forth, but we all know this has nowhere to go. A set routine with no-one up for changing their mind. I’m starting to miss the quiet now, and take a risk. I tell this policewoman what I hear: that what she’s saying isn’t about numbers: that she’s voicing another kind of truth: hers. The whole thing’s too overwhelmingly fucked to even go there, isn’t it? I tell her that we get despair too, it’s just we’ve found somewhere better to put our despair than cynicism.

If that was meant to raise the temperature, it worked. I’ve overstepped and she comes back at me, harder-edged and back in role. Did I know there was a 12-year-old kid locked-on under the truck blocking Garrick Street? The utter irresponsibility of involving a child in an action like that.

I didn’t know this, though I was sitting only a few yards away from that truck all day. I’m interested enough by this news to miss what comes only hours later, lying on the cell’s plastic sleeping mat. The thing I’d like to have said: that she may be worrying about the wrong 12-year-old. That she might spare some concern for another – for the millions of others – scrolling a runaway death project without anyone who can hear what this information’s doing to them, and not turn away.

What stays with me is her resignation. She’s young, hasn’t given it much thought maybe, but the way the rest of her team have fallen silent, it feels like she’s speaking for all of them. There’s no pretence here that things are going to somehow work out OK. As far as I can tell, none of them even think we’re exaggerating. What we’re doing is unacceptable, but not because it’s disruptive or because we’ve taken things too far. It’s unacceptable because it’s pointless. It’s pointless because it won’t succeed.

*

a blue plastic mat

outside this windowless room

the bright August moon