Chapter XV Cosima
XV.
Cosima
THE brITISH MUSEUM ACTION HAD been a disaster.
Cosima hadn’t known her parents were going to be there.
She’d clocked them as soon as the group stormed the exhibition, the two of them standing by a glass cabinet, her father with one hand resting lightly in the dip of her mother’s silken back. She had grabbed Meadow’s arm.
‘Shit.’
‘What is it?’ Meadow hissed, shaking her off.
‘My parents,’ Cosima said. ‘My fucking parents are here.’
Through the balaclava slit, she could see the surprise register in Meadow’s eyes.
‘That guy?’ Meadow said. ‘The politician?’ Her voice rose. ‘Your dad’s the fucking Energy Secretary? What the fuck, Pineapple?’
Cosima had no time to explain. Peatbog was now standing at the front, about to give his usual rousing speech.
Cosima glanced around her. She was standing to the left of an emergency exit.
She calculated that it would take three steps to reach it and if she waited until they set the fire extinguisher off, she’d be able to press down on the bar to push the door open and make her escape without anyone noticing.
She took one sideways step, just to try it out.
Then another. Then Meadow gripped her wrist. Cosima felt the pressure of her fingers like a handcuff.
‘Don’t you even think about it,’ Meadow said.
She was angrier; angrier than Cosima had ever seen her.
After River had been unmasked as an undercover police officer, the group had been jittery.
They’d had lengthy conversations about the betrayal and ‘how best to process their resentment’.
Cosima had stayed put during these impromptu group therapy sessions.
She, alone, didn’t feel let down by River, not after what he’d risked for her.
The files he’d passed on to her, containing all the terrible details of her aunt’s rape and subsequent suicide are safely saved in the drafts folder of a Gmail account to which only she, River and now Martin Gilmour have access.
Reading the details of Fliss’s last weeks had been difficult and, at several points, Cosima had to take a break, fearing she might faint or throw up or punch a wall or all three at once.
But she forced herself to read every single word, and when she was done, instead of the fury she expected, she experienced razor-sharp focus.
She knew exactly what to do in order to stop Andrew Jarvis abusing any other women.
And if it blew open the truth of her father’s collusion, then so be it.
She was disgusted with them all. If her dad could betray his own sister to protect his reputation, and if he could place loyalty to Jarvis above love of his family, then he was capable of anything.
It was kill or be killed, she thought darkly.
That’s when she’d remembered Martin Gilmour.
‘You’re not going anywhere,’ Meadow said. ‘You’re doing this with us. OK?’
Cosima stayed silent. Around them, the crowd was becoming restless. Their initial fear had turned into irritation at the inconvenience. This often happened with posher people who treated protesters like obstinate members of staff rather than just calling them cunts.
‘OK?’ Meadow said again, her nails pressing into Cosima’s skin.
‘Yes.’
She’d stayed. Her father had spotted her before they’d even sprayed the orange paint.
She could see the disappointed set of his face and although she tried to hate him, she found her eyes were wet.
She wiped the tears away, hoping no one else had seen.
Her father tried to lead her mother out, pushing other museum-goers out of the way.
But then her mum had turned back, just for a moment, and Cosima could see the recognition hit her face like a slap.
Was it absurd that, in the middle of the chaos, Cosima had had time to register that, despite the balaclava and the anonymising black clothes she was wearing, her parents had still known it was her?
Was it stupid to admit that this was the closest she had come in many years to understanding they did actually love her? That they cared?
After they’d sprayed the orange paint, there was commotion.
Broccoli and Peatbog handcuffed themselves to the bronze statue.
Meadow was pushed aside by a security guard.
In the kerfuffle of shouting and shoving that followed, Cosima was able to run out of the emergency exit unnoticed.
No member of the group was ever meant to leave an action without prior planning.
The group moved as one or not at all. It was one of their key principles.
She knew that by running away now, she was also leaving them forever.
But, in that moment, she was more scared of her parents than of her fellow activists.
Her dad would be raging and her mum wouldn’t stand up to him. Not in the way Cosima would need.
She sprinted down the stairs, removing her balaclava as she went.
She unzipped her black hoodie to reveal a faded red T-shirt, unlaced her boots and slid out of her tracksuit bottoms as quickly as she could.
She retrieved a pair of blue jeans from her backpack and put them on.
Then she bundled up the black, paint-spattered clothes, stuffed them into the backpack and pushed through another fire safety door into the vast, soaring calm of the Great Court, with its webbed glass ceiling panels.
She walked as naturally as she could towards the exit.
She wondered if her parents were waiting for her outside and what she would do if they were.
But they weren’t there – of course they weren’t, she thought bitterly – and when she emerged into the early-evening light of Great Russell Street, her only thought was to get away from London as quickly as possible.
She went to King’s Cross station and bought a train ticket to Cambridge.
When she gets to Cambridge, it’s still light.
She has nowhere to stay and doesn’t know the city, other than from a weekend trip with her parents when she was seven and was dragged around the various sites of her father’s student glory.
She remembers the name of his college – Queens’ (‘Apostrophe after the s,’ her father said, ‘because there were two of them’) – and because she has no other plans she begins to make her way there by following the Maps app on her phone.
She walks down a busy stretch of road towards a war memorial, depicting a soldier striding out towards the horizon.
The soldier is young and bare-headed. He holds his helmet in one arm, which swings forward, leading the way.
His other hand rests on the butt of his rifle, which is slung over his shoulder.
A wreath hangs from the barrel. He has a backpack the same size as Cosima’s but squarer in shape with a rolled-up blanket on top.
She is struck by the lifelike nature of the statue: the creases in the soldier’s uniform depict the exact angle of his movement.
He seems – there is no other word for it – hopeful.
The inscription on the plinth pays tribute to the men of Cambridge and of the university who served in the Great War. All that hope, Cosima thinks, and they died anyway.
She has to stop and check the map three more times before she reaches Queens’ College.
She recognises it because of the wooden bridge that arcs over the river – the Mathematical Bridge, her father had told her, supposedly designed by Sir Isaac Newton himself to bear its own weight without a single bolt.
Except now, she sees, it is in fact bolted together. Another lie.
She stands on the other side of the street and watches.
The entrance to the college is through a porter’s lodge with an automatic glass door, accessed with an electronic key card.
A group of students arrives in flapping black academic gowns, clutching bottles of wine.
She crosses the street just as one of the students swipes his card on the reader and follows the group in, unobserved by the porters.
‘To the bar!’ a girl shouts.
The rest of them cheer. And Cosima, with nothing better to do, trails them through the porter’s lodge, past the bicycle racks and then into a modern courtyard, ringed by a grey concrete building with open staircases.
The bar is on the ground floor, halfway round the central square.
Another electronic glass door swishes open at her approach.
The bar resembles a 1970s holiday chalet – dark wood and an overextended conservatory.
Tamping down her nerves, she orders a gin and tonic.
The barman doesn’t question her or insist on seeing her (fake) ID.
He simply asks if she wants to make it a double.
Cosima nods. He passes her a plastic tumbler and asks for ￡3.
50. Subsidised prices, she thinks. Nice little perk for the educational elite.
She finds a spot in the corner and wedges her backpack between two cushions.
She sits and takes out her phone. It’s on the last sliver of battery.
She scrolls through her news apps to see if the British Museum action has made the headlines.
There it is, the third story on the BBC: ‘Eco-protestors storm exhibition opening’.
No mention of her by name, thankfully. No mention of her parents.
Her shoulders relax. Then her phone shuts down.
She takes a sip of her drink and then another, placing it carefully back on the low table so that it makes the least amount of noise possible.
For now, her primary concern is to remain unobtrusive.
Perhaps she could spend the night in one of the open staircases?
She has a thin sleeping bag with her – River taught them always to take a sleeping bag, torch and battery pack on night-time actions, and while the British Museum wasn’t exactly wild territory, you could never be too careful.
She fishes out the battery pack and plugs her phone in.
After a few moments, the screen flashes back to life.
The thought of River makes her sad. She misses him.
At the same time, she questions if she ever really knew him and it’s difficult to know where to put those feelings.
Lately, it feels as though everyone close to her has been engaged in a lifelong pretence, like the masked players in one of those Shakespearean plays she’s had to study for A-level English.
And now the masks are dropping, one by one.
‘This free?’
A male voice. She glances up. Messy brown hair, a likeable face. He’s wearing a Nirvana hoodie and low-slung jeans.
‘Sure. I mean, yes.’
She moves her backpack onto the tiled floor.
‘Thanks,’ he says, slumping down on the banquette with a loud groan and opening a packet of peanuts in one swift movement. ‘Help yourself,’ he says, charitably. ‘So I haven’t seen you about, have I? I’m Alfie.’
He is so friendly and Labrador-like that Cosima can’t help but reply.
‘I’m Cosima. Cozzie.’
‘Well, Cosima-Cozzie, nice to meet you.’
He extends a hand to shake, the fingers gritty with peanut salt.
‘What are you up to tonight?’
‘I guess … looking for somewhere to stay, if I’m honest.’
She drinks more of the gin, feeling the strength of it soothe her.
‘You’re not a student here?’
‘No,’ she says, then, worried, adds: ‘I mean, my dad was.’
‘Oh, right,’ Alfie says, accepting it. ‘OK.’
But somewhere between the third and fourth gulp of gin and the second helping of Alfie’s peanuts, she realises she has a plan. The solution has been sitting there in her subconscious all along and now it slots perfectly into her frontal cortex like a Tetris brick.
‘Actually, I’m trying to find an old friend of my dad’s. I know he lectures here.’
‘Have you tried looking on a quaint little information system we call Google in these here parts?’ Alfie says, grinning.
‘I had to wait for my phone to charge, genius,’ Cosima says.
Alfie sweeps his hair to one side and starts tapping into the search engine on his phone. ‘What’s this geezer’s name?’
‘Martin Gilmour.’
He types with such rapid dexterity that she wonders if he’s studying computer science. You can always tell a coder by the way they use their thumbs.
‘Found him.’
‘That was quick.’
‘Oh dear.’ Alfie hangs his head. ‘Oh Christ. I’m not sure how to tell you this …’
Fear rises in her chest.
‘What? What is it?’
‘He’s not actually a lecturer at Cambridge Cambridge,’ Alfie says, modulating his voice as if to impart terrible news. ‘He’s at … fuck, how to say this?’ He whispers melodramatically, ‘He’s at the other place. The University of Southern Anglia.’
He laughs.
‘Oh my God, your face!’ he says. ‘You’ve gone all pale! I’m sorry, it was just a joke.’
She stands, too quickly, and grabs her bag with such force it knocks over what remains of the gin.
‘That’s not funny.’
‘Hey, hey,’ Alfie says, hands outstretched as if fanning a fire. ‘I didn’t mean to—’
‘I’ve got to go.’
‘Sorry.’
Alfie looks crestfallen. He reaches into his jeans pocket and fishes out another packet of peanuts.
‘For the journey,’ he says. ‘You might need sustenance.’
She takes the nuts.
‘Thank you.’ She doesn’t say sorry.
‘Bye, Cosima-Cozzie.’
‘Bye, wanker,’ she says but not unkindly. He blushes as she leaves.
Outside, she looks up the University of Southern Anglia on her phone and starts the long walk back across town.