Blue Collar (17 page)

20 The poshos are revolting

‘Er, why’s that?’ I tentatively asked, wary of committing until I’d made sure that Clive wasn’t laying a patio and wondering
if I’d be able to give him ‘a hand’. It wasn’t that, though.

‘It’s just that a bunch of us are going on the World as One march and I just wondered if you wanted to come along too,’ she
told me.

‘What’s the World as One march?’ I asked, suddenly in a patio-laying mood after all.

‘You know, the anti-globalisation rally. It’s been in all the papers all week,’ she pointed out.

This may have been true, it may have been in the papers all week, but not everything that made it into the papers automatically
made it into my brain. Party politics, Euro news, trade negotiations and celebrity sightings all went the same way as the
previous evening’s football reports when it came to my tea-break flick. In fact, few headlines got me turning the page faster
than something like ‘Tessa Jowell Climbs Down over Legislation’, though I would’ve probably given ‘Tessa Jowell Climbs Down
over Ledge’ a look if somebody underneath had snapped off a couple of sneaky pictures. That was around the sort of news I
could just about handle at ten o’clock in the morning.

Anti-globalisation rallies were never going to get me forgetting about my sandwiches.

‘No, sorry, I must’ve missed it. What is it?’ I admitted.

‘It’s a rally against world poverty and the IMF,’ she explained. ‘It starts in Hyde Park and then goes all the way along Oxford
Street and around Whitehall and finishes in Green Park. There are other rallies all over the world too, in America, across
Europe, Australia, Japan and even China. Millions of us are marching on every continent to raise awareness,’ she said, making
me wonder why I needed to miss the Saturday afternoon matinee, then, when they sounded like they pretty much had things covered
without me.

‘Right, yeah, sounds… er, great,’ I told Charley, in two minds over whether or not to ask her if there was going to be a beer
tent or if this was a bring-your-own-booze sort of shindig. In the event, I decided to play it safe and simply ask how much
tickets were.

‘It’s free, you lummox. There aren’t any tickets. It’s a rally,’ Charley told me, a hint of amusement in her voice.

‘Oh yeah, no, I know that. I mean, what about when they bring the buckets around? Do we just chuck in a couple of quid or
something or are they going to want bank details, because I’m a bit skint at the moment what with the old…?’

‘No, Terry, this is a political rally, not a fund-raiser. You won’t be asked to contribute anything, just your voice,’ she
assured me.

‘Oh. Oh, all right, then. Yeah, sure. I mean, if it’s for a good cause,’ I told her. ‘Where shall I meet you, then?’

I’d caught the train to London Bridge, then the Tube up to Bank and then along to Marble Arch, and the closer the train had
got to my stop, the more the carriage had swelled. All along the Central Line the platforms had been mobbed, though at first
I just put this down to it being Saturday afternoon and central London being what it was. But more and more people squeezed
aboard our train until there was barely any room left for air. And that was when I suddenly remembered just how much I hated
central London.

It probably took fifteen minutes to get from platform level at Marble Arch to the surface, though even once out of the station
the whole place was still heaving. It was particularly packed around the entrance of the Tube itself, making me wish I’d chosen
another spot to rendezvous with Charley and her mates. But luck shone on me when a nearby lamp-post became free and I suddenly
had something to lean against… … for the next forty-five minutes.

‘Oh, hello. Hello [kiss kiss]. You haven’t been waiting long, have you?’ Charley said, all in an excited tizz with herself.

‘Grumble grumble fucking grumble,’ I replied, practically biting my tongue in two, though Charley wasn’t really listening.

‘Ooh, where’s Clive and Simone? Are they not here yet?’ she asked.

‘I haven’t seen them,’ I replied. ‘Look, just give them a call in a bit and arrange to meet them somewhere else, like across
the road, or in the park, or in a pub. Anywhere. But let’s just get away from here, can we, please?’ I pleaded, my patience
shaved down to punching point by a never-ending procession of worthies, Worzels and wankers who’d walked straight out of the
Tube station and straight into me without so much as an ‘excuse me, mate’.

‘Hold on, just got to wait for CT and Hugo,’ Charley told me, really topping off my day.

Not Hugo. Not that gooseberry.

Hmm, small-minded, jealous, control freakdom. Not good.

I shook this thought from my mind and passed my hand over to CT.

‘Glad you could make it,’ CT smiled, making do with a simple handshake. ‘Surprised to see you here, to be frank.’

‘Me? No, I love this stuff, I do,’ I told him. ‘What are we burning again today? Books or bras? I brought both with me this
morning just to be on the safe side.’

After a token five minutes waiting for Clive and Simone, we chucked in the towel and upped stakes for Hyde Park across the
road, and once through the gates we were able to fan out and reclaim a little personal space – a luxury I hadn’t known since
Holborn.

‘Look at this, it’s well naughty, innit,’ Hugo reckoned, eyeing all the ‘smash the system’ placards through his new two-hundred-quid
Police sunglasses before taking a shitload of photos on his iPhone and emailing them to himself at home. Unbelievable. Him
and Charley. Unbelievable.

Unlike the crowds I got stuck behind at Palace, the individuals who made up this jumbled jamboree looked a right pick ’n’
mix lot. Student types mingled with pullover-wearers, crusties rubbed shoulders with trendies, and anarchist punks queued
patiently behind dyed-in-the-wool union rabble-rousers to sign petitions handed out by professional protesters. About the
only people not here seemed to be people like me. But then again I guess it was Saturday afternoon, they were all at Palace
or Spurs or QPR or West Ham, cheering on their teams and shouting names at the man in black rather than lobbying to have his
debts cancelled.

We sidestepped our way farther and farther into the park, towards a big raised stage and the ever-thickening crowds, until
we could go no farther. Smelly, dirty eco types and chubby little fat student birds hemmed us in on all sides so that it was
like being back on the Tube all over again, despite the fact that we were stood in the middle of three hundred and fifty acres
of open parkland.

‘Do we have to be this close?’ I asked. ‘They have got microphones, you know. We’ll hear them from back there too.’

‘But I want to get a picture of Annie Lennox,’ Hugo argued, keen to show his commitment to the cause. ‘I heard she’s going
to speak.’

‘Well, as long as she doesn’t fucking sing,’ I replied, scoring a turn of the head and an angry glare from some frumpy little
tub of pent-up frustration in front of me.

Annie wasn’t the only celebrity on show either. More than a dozen actors, pop stars and politicians pencilled themselves in
to thump the poor and needy’s drum for them this afternoon, and my mind couldn’t help but drift back to the last big celebrity
showcase that was supposed to have made a difference – Live 8. I didn’t go to it or nothing, I just saw it on the telly, but
I specifically remembered it because act after act came out onstage and gave themselves, the crowd and everyone who’d tuned
in a big collective pat on the back for making history and changing the world. Hallelujah, and aren’t we the bee’s bollocks?

Yet here we were all over again. The same old faces, the same old placards, the same old poverty and the same old rallying
cries. The only things that had changed were the T-shirts.

So what had happened?

I care. My dad cares. The lads on the site care. How can you not when there are children starving in the world?

But there’s a world of difference between caring and being seen to care.

A good proportion of the people at this rally, I reckoned, were more interested in having a cause to get in a strop about
at parties and a nice little collection of wrist bands than actually changing the world. And I mean genuinely, seriously changing
the world. All the students, the crusties, the trendies and the punks, the pullover-wearers, the rabble-rousers, the eating
disorders and the activists; they looked on the surface like a wide and diverse cross-section of society, but to me they all
looked like they’d probably grown up in the nicest houses in the leafiest suburbs and arrived here via three years of Student
Union sit-ins.

Of course, this could just be me generalising and I’ll be the first to hold up my hands and admit that I can’t see into other
people’s souls, but this is how it seemed to me after six months on the Islington dinner party circuit. It was so often about
image for so many of them.

Of course it doesn’t. How could it? Marching in a big circle around London, stopping the traffic and closing Oxford Street
for the afternoon. How was that going to feed one starving orphan, African or otherwise? I couldn’t figure it out, but like
I say, I’m not really all that clued up about these things.

All I did know was that Charley, Hugo and CT – oh, and Clive and Simone, who’d just caught up with us – got paid about a quarter
of a million pounds between them for flogging us ketchup, publicising celebrities, managing unit trusts, laminating pinboards
and filming me eating my sandwiches, yet here they all were rallying against the unnecessary excesses of Western capitalism.

I’d heard Charley herself one night moan on and on and on about the Kyoto Treaty (that’s the international treaty against
carbon emissions and climate control, etc.), slamming America for not signing up to it and bashing Brown for not agreeing
to stricter targets, yet when we got back to her place I found every light in her flat burning away and the heating on.

‘Are you growing orchids or something?’ I’d asked her at the time, to which Charley apologised and explained that she’d forgot.
But this wasn’t the only time Charley forgot about that planet she had a sticker of on her rucksack. Newspapers, bottles,
jars and tins all regularly went in the bin rather than the recycling, the curtains usually stayed open at night while the
heating was on, the taps stayed on while her teeth were being brushed and the telly, stereo and computer all ticked over quietly
on stand-by whenever she wasn’t around to use them. What’s more, she had more shoes than some African countries and she never
holidayed in Europe, let alone Britain, which meant costly plane rides and cubic tons of CO2, according to Big John at work.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not exactly a saint myself. I only close the curtains, turn off taps and lights, switch off the telly
and head to Spain or Devon for my holidays simply because I can’t afford to throw away good money after bad lighting and heating
the street and seeing what the beaches in Bali look like compared to those on the Costa. If I’d had Charley’s sort of money,
maybe I wouldn’t care if my heating bill was triple what it was or ever wear the same pair of socks twice or something, like
millionaires are supposed not to. Maybe I’d live the comfortable, spendthrift life that financial security brings and look
to other people on other continents for my worries. Then again, who knows? Too late to second guess how I might’ve turned
out if I’d been born to money, so what difference did it make one way or the other?

She was who she was and I was who I was.

And we just had to make the best of it.

‘Here, let’s get a picture of you two together,’ Hugo insisted, backing away a step and snapping off a shot of Charley and
possibly me if there was enough room in the frame.

He pressed a few buttons and called the image up on screen, then giggled at it hysterically and told us it was wicked.

‘Look at Terry’s face!’ He laughed, showing it all around and then to me, though I couldn’t see what the problem was. It was
just my face. The same one I’d had on all day. ‘Here, now take a picture of me and Charley,’ he ordered me, thrusting his
iPhone into my hands and wrapping his arms around Charley’s shoulders in a way that almost won him two hands wrapped around
the throat. ‘Make sure you get the stage and all the banners in.’