Acid Dungeness & Arrestee Support
“I COULD HEAR YOU SCREAMING ‘I LOVE YOU’ THROUGH THE BODYCAM FOOTAGE”
“I COULD HEAR YOU SCREAMING ‘I LOVE YOU’ THROUGH THE BODYCAM FOOTAGE”
When the uprising hit London it took a sec to orient how best to be useful, between the death droplets and the pigs. I’m the only person I know with a car so we loaded it up with snacks, an obscene amount of hand sanitiser and took on some arrestee support shifts for Green and Black Cross, who have provided some version of this type of help for decades. This is how I ended up breaking down outside Pimlico Cop Shop at 5am because we ran down the car battery warming our feet. In June. The task at hand was a confounding game of cat and mouse where the stations obviously won’t tell us who they are holding, so piecing together how many kids (because they are nearly all kids) are being held and at which stations across all four corners of the city means untangling relayed info from legal observers who may have witnessed the arrest and concerned mates who’ve contacted GBC. Locked out, we build up to intercom-ing the custody desk as a treat, treading the line with our ever more spurious cover stories. For each arrestee we meet, our only tools are the WhatsApp groups, protein bars, and ferocious kindness.
It’s mid-Monday afternoon after a heavy weekend of violence. We saw a familiar policing tactic wheeled out during these protests: minimal interference all day for the benefit of AP reports, then a strategic switch at dusk to sudden provocation, kettling and absolute carnage, which is almost without-fail then reported as ‘violent clashes.’ A nurse who has been on duty inside leaves the station. As she walks by, one of our number, M, who’s been on her own arrestee support shift since 5am, meets her gaze, asking casually how many they still have left to process. She asks, too, if the nurse had been able to assess the mental health of a distressed child they had released earlier. Speaking to him we’d found out he was homeless, released from a mental health facility two days before his arrest at the protest, nowhere to go. The nurse flips out, returns to the station threatening to have M ‘arrested for intimidation.’ Suddenly four male cops appear from the station, circle M and begin a perfectly choreo’d patronising tag team performance, ‘suggesting’ she be less aggressive and more polite, how ‘they can handle it but not everyone can’ how they’re all just doing their jobs and haven’t had a break in twelve hours, to be more considerate of how our presence on the curb opposite (silent, snacking) might be intimidating the staff. My filming hand shakes a bit. Nurse watches on, smirking. Of course I know in my bones ‘n’ brain that the police lie, that its always women of colour painted as ‘aggressive,’ yet this meta-realtime playout still catches my gut. I remind myself of the full meaning of the freshness of my outrage. I notice how it rises like an unfamiliar splinter from my squeezed white thumb. Sated in her dangerous playground antics having watched on grinning at this ‘dressing down’, the nurse turns to go. Just then, a taxi pulls up, producing two young women. They are anxious and teary-eyed. One is sixteenish in a BLM shirt, doesn’t look like she’s slept, the other my age, kente headwrap and matching mask, deep concern. Spotting the shirt, the nurse switches back to face them. She points. “The public is fed up of you lot and what you’re doing,” she spits. Before anyone can react, she’s gone and the metal doors we’ve been staring at for six hours open. Out limps a battered kid, dazed but overjoyed to see the new arrivals. Gangly in a sized-down sports bra, he huddles on the curb between cars as we piece together the events of the day before and help them fill out our forms to access further support and a solicitor. He scrawls down this name: Astrophel. It transpires these two teen lovers are from another city, travelling for hours down to London to participate. They lost each other in the mélee, phones dead or seized. She: housed by kind strangers met at the protest overnight, he: locked up and charged with violent disorder and …inciting racial hatred. Astrophel frets about how he’ll afford to get home, how he’ll get back to London for court when school begins again. His whole body is sore. Everything they experienced tetrises into why they came but now they have bruises. Analyses aflame, spirits slowly coming back with each minute of their reunion, their voices rise in the piecing together of event, until older sister gently scolds, reminding them, and I, where we are. His gf recounts how she screamed at the two riot cops who brutalised her sweetheart. She recalls the batons still raining down as one sternly pauses in total seriousness to correct the other as they barked their demands to the tangle of limbs they had grabbed. “Oh, I think this one identifies as a boy, so it’s ‘he’ pronouns…” before carrying on beating them both. I think about the calls for diversity training as a solution being thrown around online that week and feel the bile rising in my throat. I think about part in that work, that system. She notices she cannot stop shaking, so I ‘Mum’ my way through some techniques for reset for when she gets home. We hand Astro folded cash from the fund to make the long journey away from London. It feels at once ordinary and sacred. With hugs and laughter we order them a cab to the station. ‘Thanks. You lot are sick.’
Weeks later I look up the name that’s been rolling around my head since. Astrophel, means Starlover. Astrophel and Stella: a series of Pretrarchan sonnets of starcrossed young lovers, written in 1598 by Sir Philip Sidney. Beyond that is only a single hit news report gut-punch. Apparently, someone posted a video online where a person who the police allege is Astrophel is visible holding a lighter near the flag of the Cenotaph. His charge has been upgraded to include arson and his trial is in November.
★
2021 Update: Astro avoided jailtime. The presiding judge told him as he passed a sentence “It’s a shame that you chose to get so worked up about a flag.”
MODERN NATURE
I’ve spent the pandemic so far learning to dose my brain. A little like untangling your slinky coil toy after it gets thrown down the stairs and seeing with some delight it still has all its basic features, I felt ready to reappraise its capacity. My rapacious interest in the possibilities for oblivion medicine now threatens to blot out whatever is left of my personality. In August we spent a weekend at Derek Jarman’s place. Driving my sweet-friends out to this fabled place on the edge of Fucked Island, I am reminded of what I loosely knew from one brief visit, there is nowhere quite like Dungeness. They call it the UK’s only desert which is visually (if apparently not geologically) true. We watch as normal roads give way to a tonally..odd nature reserve, a vast eerie flatness which gives way to miles of muddy sand and then finally at low tide, to the tiniest sliver of horizon sea. The big flatness is dotted with improvised homes that now highly sought-after, and a dizzying array of freak structures. These include two lighthouses, huge way-finding devices for lost Victorian fishermen, built legacies of technologies obsolete—giant concrete sound mirrors built pre-radar in WWI—and less so—radio was invented here! Two hulking great nuclear power stations stake out the edge of the coastline (where the icy sea water acts as reactor coollant) one still operational, the other sulkily silent at being decommissioned. We traipse across miles of pebbles under the strangest light. As we approach, the bright yellow and black paint of Prospect Cottage is already almost unbearably vivid to look at. Then the acid kicks in fully as a sudden raincloud passes and there’s no choice but to transgress the boundaries of this pilgrimage site for heritage gays and rust fans, and shelter briefly under Derek’s awning. And then, the giggles.
Drying off nearer the sea, we roll down giant mounds of gravel in the shadow of the power station, covered in apocalyptic playground dust. Our bags start to fill, heavy with tiny floor finds: radiant green moss clumps, purple flowers, dark blue shells. S points out how we are continuing the tradition of getting lost in colour here, agape across the same huge place where Derek’s final book Chroma – A book of Colour (1993) was written, just as he lost his sight due to complications from HIV-AIDs that would kill him soon after.
Some hours later we’re so ‘in it’ that we’re shouting at the sky in disbelief. I stop to sob real quick alone for a min (standard) and remember two things I used to believe and decide to believe them again. One: Your most important connection is between you and you. Two: making things is the most sure-fire way to cheat death. Pledging in the long grass to start again, the first thing I make is a colour spectrum assemblage of all my floor finds in every colour on the floor of our chalet. Sea glass, sea plastic, sea shells. E makes an alphabet out of fishing nets for a new language. I can’t read it but I know they’ll teach me. Everything we have is impossibly beautiful now and the next day it’s not but that’s okay because we preserve them in sandwich bags with the meaning we made out of them and take them all home to treasure anyway.
By the time we leave I’ve been awake for two days and all my senses are aching. We exit the moonscape via roads that criss-cross over wet marshlands shimmering either side of us, infinite chromed lakes in the weak light. In the wild low scrub growing in and out of the water I’m reminded of the drive across water bridges into New Orleans. Without a word S grabs the aux and puts on Special Interest - The Passion Of. My eyes are suddenly full at our wordless sync but I don’t say anything. I’d been on my way to play with S/I in a Laundromat, two years and another reality ago. A more recent memory flashes: it’s March, it’s 5am, I am in Tottenham. Sliding through a morass of glistening wet furry manchests, their hair and mine hair catching on harness buckles, not my sexy but so sexy still, and come upon three of S/I on the dance floor. Euphoria unmatched. My beat keepers. Tongues and strobe. Life and limbs. Then as now: the substance is the scaffold but the feeling? The feeling is very real. We could never have know this was the last rave in history. Unencumbered by all that would come. We danced like it was with none of the fear. Reflecting on Alli’s vocoder throat (G. Numan could never) asking “Would you batt an eye waiting for war machines to pass you by?” I will resolve that if they have to be the last band I ever see, then I guess that’s okay. I realise, too, my error: of course, the cyborg has always had a direction.
As I shepherd my precious friends across the last of the shingle, I think about how humanity persists in placing life and death side by side, half-begging for something terrible to happen. How maybe we constantly test nature because we’ve believed since Eden we don’t deserve it. How we constantly test love for the same reasons. The very last of the water is a mirror for the soft white bellies of swallows flying by. They flit in and out of the overhead power lines, connecting the reactor to the world beyond.
END NOTES
1. Imagine: Terror Danjah vs. Terre Thaemlitz
2. Cro Mags
3. Hunger for a Way Out
4. What if we kissed on Greenham Common?
Issue Two soon, inc: Umm Kulthum, Chunkz vs Filly, being Arthur Russell’s boyfriend, Phillip Glass on pingers.
Love you!