Catherine Steadman - Something in the Water - A Novel

I’m standing before the impulse reaches any decision-making area of my brain. The buzzer blast thunders around the room. Then the clunk of bolts, the magnets releasing.

She steps into the room, interviewee number one, all five feet three inches of her. Holli Byford is twenty-three and painfully thin. Her long hair messily piled high on top of her head, her blue prison tracksuit loose and heavy on her tiny frame. Cheekbones sharp. She looks like a child. They say you know when you’re really getting old because everyone around you starts to look impossibly young. I’m only thirty. Holli Byford looks about sixteen to me.

The door buzzes shut behind her. Amal clears his throat. I’m glad Amal’s staying. The prison called yesterday; although Holli’s progressing they’re not entirely happy for her to be unsupervised just yet. Holli continues to stand there, unselfconsciously, halfway into the room. Her eyes play lazily across the furniture, the camera. They skip over me. She hasn’t acknowledged me yet. And then her eyes alight on my face. My body tenses. I brace myself. The gaze is hard. It hits me. It’s solid. It makes her seem far more substantial than her slight frame.

“You Erin then?” she asks.

I nod. “It’s nice to finally meet you in person, Holli,” I reply.

Over the past three months our telephone conversations have been brief. Mainly consisting of me talking, explaining the project, and silences occasionally peppered by her distracted “yeah’s” and “no’s.” But now that I can see her, I understand that those silences, which sounded empty over the phone, were actually very full. I just couldn’t see before what they were full of.

“Would you like to sit down?” I offer.

“Not really.” She holds her ground by the door.

A standoff.

“Sit down please, Holli, or we’ll take you back to your cell,” Amal fires into the heavy silence.

She drags the chair across from me slowly out from under the table and sits demurely, small hands in her lap. She looks up to the frosted window high on the holding room wall. I flick a look over to Amal. He gives me a reassuring nod. Go ahead .

“So, Holli. I’ll just dive in with the questions, just like we discussed over the phone. Don’t worry about the camera, just talk to me the way you normally would.”

She’s not looking at me at all, her eyes still lingering on the square of light above. I wonder if she’s thinking of the outside. The sky? The wind? I suddenly imagine Mark in a taxi on his way home, a file box of his belongings on his lap, trapped in his own mess. What is he thinking right now as he glides through the City with nowhere to go? Now I look up to the skylight too. Above us two gulls swoop in the open blue. I take a deep breath of bleached prison air and drop my gaze back down to my notes. I need to stay focused. I push Mark to the back of my mind and look up into Holli’s sharp face.

“Okay, Holli? Is that clear?”

She lets her eyes flop back down onto me.

“What?” She asks it as if I’d been talking gibberish.

Okay. I need to get this back on track. Plan B. Let’s just get this done.

“Holli, can you tell me your name, age, sentence length, and conviction, please.” It’s an instruction plain and simple. My tone has slipped into that of Amal’s. We don’t have time for whatever game this is.

She sits up slightly in her chair. For better or worse, this dynamic she understands.

“Holli Byford, twenty-three, five years for arson in the London riots,” she answers briskly, by rote.

She was one of the thousands of arrests over the five days of rioting across London in August 2011. The riots began when a peaceful protest at the unlawful shooting of Mark Duggan swiftly escalated into something else entirely. Opportunists, fueled by a sense of self-righteousness, quickly took advantage of the mayhem, and Tottenham descended into chaos. Police were attacked, shops burnt, property destroyed, and shopping malls looted. The chaos spread across London over the next few days and nights. Rioters and looters, realizing they were one step ahead of the police, started to coordinate their attacks via social media platforms. Looters gathered, united, and raided stores, then posted trophy shots of their hauls online. Stores closed, people stayed away, terrified of being attacked or worse.

I remember at the time watching the grainy camera-phone footage of people smashing into JD Sports, desperate for sneakers, desperate for sports socks.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not belittling it. You can only taunt people with the things that they can’t have for so long. You can only push people so far. Until, for better or worse, they push back.

London was in free fall during those five days in August 2011.

Of the 4,600 arrests made over those days, a record 2,250 of them went to court. The sentencing was rapid and it was harsh. The authorities feared that if examples weren’t made of the young people involved, then troubling precedents would be set. Half of those charged, tried, and sentenced were under twenty-one. One of them was Holli.

She sits across the table from me, her gaze once again on the window above.

“And what did you do in the riots, Holli? Talk us through that night, as you remember it.”

She stifles a laugh, her eyes flashing across to Amal, looking for an ally, then slowly traveling over to me, her face hardening again.

“As I remember it ”—she smirks—“it was the weekend they shot Mark Duggan. I look on Facebook and everyone’s doing this crazy stuff—they’d broke into this retail park thing and they’ve got all this stuff, like clothes and that, and the police don’t even care, and they’re not even going there to stop anyone.” She adjusts her messy bun slightly. Tightening the knot. “My mate’s brother said he was going to drive us up there to get some stuff but then he got worried about his license plates coming up, so he didn’t.” She stops and looks again at Amal. He’s looking blankly ahead. She’s free to say what she likes.

“Anyway, on Sunday it all kicked off for real everywhere. I got a text from my mate Ash saying they were about to do the Whitgift Centre. It’s like the main shopping center in Croydon. Ash says we’ve gotta wear hoodies, cover our faces, for the CCTV. So we go down there and there’s loads of us. There’s crumbled glass all over the ground in the street and everyone is just standing around. So Ash starts smashing into the electric doors of Whitgift. The alarm starts going then, so we all join in together ’cos we think there’s not gonna be much time till the police come. But no one goes through; we just stand there. Then this guy who’s running past just pushes straight through the crowd and he’s like, ‘What you fucking waiting for, you Muppets,’ and he goes straight in. So then we push in too.

“I get some clothes and some nice stuff. Is this what you’re after?” She breaks off. Her dead-eyed stare on me, again, hard.

“Yes, Holli, it’s exactly what we’re after. Keep going, please.” I nod her on, trying to stay blank, impassive; I don’t want this thrown off track.

She smirks again and shifts in her seat. She continues.

“Then we get hungry and wander back along the main street. People are throwing stuff— those newspaper dispensers, bricks, bottles on fire. Blocking off the road with those big bins. Anyway, Ash joins in and then when we see the police we run for it, Ash and me and his mate, back toward the bus station. It’s quiet round there, no police, and there’s this bus stopped right in the middle of the road, lights on with some people still on it. We wanna get safe for a bit, so we try and get on the bus too but the driver won’t open up the doors. The driver starts having a fucking meltdown, shouting and waving his arms around. Then someone opens up the end door and the people on the bus start pouring out the other end ’cos they’re scared we’re gonna jump ’em or something. The driver’s shitting himself ’cos now the door’s open he’s not so brave anymore. Then he runs for it too and we’ve got the bus to ourselves.”