Demons (10 page)

With the people in the house—all students—I started gravitating back to the stuff
I’d been into before; politics, I mean. I started hanging around Trades Hall, the
New International Bookshop, going to meetings, demos. I bought myself a Lenin cap
(it covered up my bald patch) and got back into theatre, amateur stuff mostly, not
very good, but I loved the camaraderie of it. And at least what we were doing had
an edge, at least it was
about something
. That’s what I told myself, anyway. The
beginning of 2000. A good time. Actually, everything felt good.

Aiden got off his stool. He asked did I want another and came back this time with
a jug. Why not? he said.

Well, the next part, said Aiden, raising his beer, starts with an image I can’t get
out of my head: my Lenin cap lying in a puddle in a lane behind the Crown Casino
on the twelfth of September 2000. The World Economic Forum. A cop had just punched
me in the head. I’d been hanging around all day with my housemates—a pretty ineffectual
bunch, really—when I thought I might wander off and see what was going on elsewhere.
I’ve always been doing that, wandering off. I walked all the way around the blockade
and back out onto the Spencer Street Bridge where I saw a group pointing and shouting.
A police barge was ferrying delegates up the river from the hotel on the other side.
Someone yelled:
Down here!
and everyone started running towards the voice. Without
thinking, I ran down there too.

The lane below the bridge was empty.
Buses here! Buses here!
someone yelled. In the
loading dock behind the hotel were three big touring buses with a queue of men in
suits getting onto the first. They were going to try and break the line.
Stop the
buses! Stop the buses!
Everyone ran to the front of the first bus, and, spontaneously—magically,
I remember thinking—twenty or so people formed a chain and blocked the door.

The queue of delegates had split when they saw us coming; some ran back to the loading
dock with their security guards following, the others madly scrambled up the steps
while the driver closed the door. I ended up dead centre, under the front window.
There was a young guy, straight-looking, on one side of me and a girl, younger, hippie-looking,
on the other. It all happened so quick. I remember the way we smiled at each other
when I raised my elbows so they could link arms in mine, as if the three of us were
about to set off on a
do-si-do
.

Hold the line! Hold the line!
Then everything went quiet—and that’s when the weirdness
came down. Twenty-odd people, different ages, male and female, all types,
citizens
,
standing around a big touring bus in an ugly city laneway, while there above us,
inside, sat about thirty men in suits, citizens too, clutching their briefcases,
terror in their eyes, wondering how on earth this had happened. And so it went on,
for what felt like an hour but was more likely a couple of minutes. The chanting
stopped, then the murmuring started.
Hold the line
—
Arms linked
—
Don’t be scared
—
You
have the right to protest
—
Look at their badges, get their names
—
Don’t speak without
a lawyer
—
Are you okay up front?
—
Is everybody ready
?—
All right, hold the line
. I turned
to look at the girl next to me and saw how her eyes had glazed over. Don’t be scared,
I said. She smiled, a half-smile, squeezed out through the fear. A beautiful smile,
I’ll never forget it. Thanks, she said. We looked straight ahead again and I could
feel her link her arm in mine a little tighter.

Then we heard it.

It was a phalanx of cops in riot gear: dark-blue boiler suits, pants tucked into
knee-high boots, helmets, batons. They weren’t trotting, they were running. It took
them a while to assemble into a solid line and start the dance-chant that had been
going on everywhere in the streets that morning.
Move! Move!
they shouted (it sounded
like they were saying
Moo!
) and in rhythm with the chanting they stomped forward,
step by step. They started the dance about ten or fifteen metres away—me, the guy
to my left, the girl to my right, the only ones facing them directly, we all stiffened.
Then with each chant, they moved closer. Chant, shuffle, chant. The protesters behind
us started chanting back, trying to drown them out:
The whole world’s watching! The
whole world’s watching!
The cops upped the volume:
Move! Move! Move!
It took a while
for us to see the whites of their eyes. The cop directly in front of me had locked
on: I was his target, little old me, with my cute little Lenin cap. I could sense
the fear running through the girl’s arm into mine. So this is what it’s like, we
were thinking, to put your ideals on the line. We want a better world, this one’s
fucked, but all that cop there wants to do is bash the living crap out of us and
tell his mates about it after.

Aiden stopped for a moment and stared behind me into the street. He let a thought
pass through him.

They were only a few metres away now, he said, and you could feel the line tightening.
Then a cop in a different uniform appeared—maybe he’d been hiding behind the others
all along? He stepped back into the empty space and put a megaphone to his mouth.
Move away from the bus—Move away from the bus—Move away from the bus and you won’t
get hurt
—
Move away from the bus.
Some of us started chanting again:
Hold the line!
Hold the line!
The guy with the megaphone started to yell:
This is your last
—but
then, from the top of the lane, behind him, there was the sound of running and shouting.
It was the same shout as before:
Buses
here! Buses here!
The cop lowered his megaphone,
the others glanced around: a mob of protesters was coming round the corner from the
direction of the blockade, led by the anarchists in their boiler suits and masks.

Charge!
I heard someone say.
Cops here!
said someone else.
Hold the line!
a protester
screamed. Then my cop, the cop with my name written on him, was on top of me. He
ripped my arm away from the girl’s, twisted it behind my back and whacked me hard
a couple of times across the head. Then he threw me aside. As I went down I saw him
hoe into the guy next to me, then help another cop pull protesters away from the
door.

In a few seconds they had broken the chain but now the second lot of protesters was
at their backs fingering the air.
Whose streets?—Our streets!—Whose streets?—Our
streets!
The cops turned and it was game on. They charged the front-line, of anarchists
mostly. (There’d been stories earlier that these guys were throwing paper bags of
shit at the cops near the King Street entrance: this was revenge.) The cops beat
a wedge through the anarchists but soon found themselves surrounded.
The world is
watching! The world is watching!
I got to my feet and made it to the footpath, away
from the action. My head was throbbing, I’d bitten my tongue, I’d lost my hat somewhere
in the scuffle. I saw it lying in a puddle in the middle of the road—but then I heard
the hooves.

Time slowed down and sped up. The crowd scattered, the mounted police cleared a path
to the bus and behind them came more reinforcements on foot. The lane was cleared,
everyone was pushed back to the footpath and beyond. Protesters were running down
laneways, cowering in doorways, falling back towards the river. People were bleeding,
screaming. The cops on horses ringed the bus while a cordon on foot ushered the delegates
out. I remember one businessman shouting over their heads at us:
You fucking scum!

The bus started up, the cordon tightened, and with the delegates looking out at us—safari
tourists inspecting the animals—it drove off down the lane. The cops closed in and
swallowed it up and the whole circus moved off to Spencer Street and from there,
presumably, towards the main blockade.

I hung around in the lane for a while; most of the others had chased the cops and
the bus. Someone who’d seen me get punched asked was I all right and did I need medical
attention or want to sign a statement. I said no, I was fine, thanks. The few who
were left started drifting away. Then I remembered my hat, lying in the puddle. But
it was gone. I heard the girl’s voice behind me, the girl whose arm had been linked
in mine. I picked it up, she said, but I couldn’t find you. She held it out; I took
it from her.

Are you okay? I asked. She nodded. And you? Yeah, I said. She had a friend with her,
older than her but younger than me, soft-faced, good-looking, a real sincerity about
him. She told him who I was, what had happened. I’m Jordan, he said, and he shook
my hand. And I’m Rani, she said. She looked at me, then her eyes clouded over. Is
it worth it? she said. Yes, I said, I think so, yes.

Well, continued Aiden, of course I felt like a hero. Why not? I was jumpy, I remember,
I couldn’t settle down. I stayed around the blockade the rest of that day and came
back again the next. No-one was getting in or out. Then, before dawn on Monday morning,
everything changed again. The riot guys arrived, batons flailing, and attacked the
least-protected Queen Street entrance. The protesters, still half-asleep, didn’t
stand a chance. The cops came in over the top like sheepdogs, bashing as they went.
The horses followed behind. After that came the buses, with the faces inside. It
was all over in minutes.

For days the airwaves were filled with suggestions about what to do with us scum
now that we’d been vanquished—stick our heads on pikes at the city gates, and worse.
We melted back into what we’d been doing, which, true, in a fair few cases, probably
wasn’t much. But I’m sure everyone felt the same, that something had started and
was gathering momentum, not just here but everywhere; that it was not just a handful
of ferals screaming for change but all kinds of people, like on the blockade, like
those who linked arms around the bus, people who had never got off their arses before
now getting out and being seen. They’d been name-called and demeaned so many times
over the years, by politicians, shock jocks, the patriotic plebs, and now they were
standing up. It’s one of the bravest things you can do as a human being, isn’t it?
Refuse to be belittled.

There were more protests that year and into the next: Prague, Davos, Salzburg, Genoa.
I got even more heavily involved with all this underground political stuff. I was
on a high, I won’t deny it. I helped out with websites, wrote press releases, distributed
flyers, went to meetings two or three times a week, all the time still washing dishes,
cleaning offices, packing boxes or whatever. I spent my spare time online, sharing
information and strategies with the other disillusioned around the world, or in
the lounge room with my cask wine and juice-bottle bong watching news and current
affairs. My housemates joined me in a rotating parade—I think they liked having the
crazy older guy around. I read every analysis I could find about the present state
of mainstream politics and the more I did the more helpless I felt. The drawbridges
had gone up, the ranks had closed; democracy was an impenetrable fortress. You couldn’t
get at it, it wouldn’t let you in. Politicians had become actors, their performances
cool steel.

Then one afternoon I rang Lil, to see how she was getting on. It was months since
we’d spoken and she sounded estranged. I said again how sorry I was but, please,
all the same, could I have a quick word with the kids? She said no. Then I heard
a male voice, telling her to tell me to fuck off. Put him on, Lil, please, I said.
No, Aiden, she said, you’ve got no right. I pleaded with her, said I was sorting
things out, that I would come through this in the end for sure. Lil listened, then
in a voice so cold it almost froze my ear, she said: Aiden, I’m with Niall now.

He was a diplomat’s son, same stock as her—a few months later I was back in Canberra
for the divorce. What a strange place. Niall was there, of course, but they wouldn’t
let me near him. My God, Aiden, said Lil, when she saw me: what’s happened? It was
a long and drawn out bitch fight, naturally, but in the end they gave me half the
house if I agreed to stay away from the kids.

Things went off the rails a bit after that. I started drinking more and smoking way
too much weed. Most of the settlement money I squirrelled into a high-yield investment
account but the rest I started giving away—for good causes, let me say, nothing but
good causes. I even helped sponsor a John Pilger tour. Then one evening in early
2001 I was coming out of a meeting in one of the rooms upstairs at Trades Hall when
I passed a doorway and saw Jordan inside. Jordan from the demo. He was giving a speech,
a politico-philosophical speech. It took me a while to realise he was speaking not
as himself but as an actor in a play. There were other actors there too; listening,
gesturing, rhubarbing.
They call themselves intelligentsia
, Jordan was saying,
but
they’re rude to servants, they treat peasants like animals, they are poor students,
they read
nothing seriously, they don’t do a thing
. In the corner a young musician
was bending and distorting the notes on an electric guitar. Rani was in there too.
Jordan finished speaking and an older guy—shoulder-length hair, three-day growth—started
giving him notes. Aiden! said Jordan, when he saw me. They all turned around. Everyone,
said Jordan, this is Aiden, the guy who was with Rani at the front of the bus.

It was a rehearsal, they were preparing a show, and instantly all those good feelings
I had making student theatre came back. There was something about the smell in the
room, the tape on the floor, the props in the corner, the old table with tea and
coffee on it, the loose clothes of the actors. Dane, the director, called a break
and explained what they were doing. It was
The Cherry Orchard
, in a new mash-up version.
I told him I’d done Chekhov at uni. The winds of change are coming, said Dane, theatrically,
just the same now as then, and again the self-satisfied bourgeoisie have stopped
up their ears and cannot hear it:
as if up in the sky
,
the sound of a broken string
.
He had his hand up, fingers curled, as if about to grab hold of the string.