I had a little tiny house but it was mine. I had a kitchen and cups and glasses. People had cups of tea and left them wherever they had drunk their tea, and never returned them to the sink. Same with glasses, which was more unnerving because that is what I wanted to use, since I only drank water. When we had visits we had to search around the house for glasses and cups. I had one of these visits and the house was full of people. At one point I counted five people in the tiny kitchen. Antoine was one of them and I chose to ignore him. I asked the rest where they had seen glasses and bottles. I searched around the house myself and found a reasonably good deal of cups and especially glasses, although they were all different and it was difficult to have an equal cup or glass with some one.
The party as over and we went to a demonstration, it seemed it was in the Westminster area, either outside the abbey or outside the cathedral, although that was kind of irrelevant, there may have been battles with police. Proper battles, with people running against police as if it was an equal battle, not just people running away from police. But that was kind of irrelevant. At one point the police managed to disperse us. They would just run after five or seven of us and walk fast after us or else we would be arrested, just like they did in Westminster the night of the squatters. So I ended up with just one friend.
Suddenly there was a line of about fifty or a hundred people blocking our way but I thought they were not blocking our way because they were not police, they were people in plain clothes who were also demonstrating. but then we walked elsewhere and they were blocking us there too, they were between twenty and fifty here. so we talked to them thinking they were demonstrators like us. then they told us they were religious people and I realised they were far right wing dangerous people. One of them told me in a low voice:
“We are going to kill you.”
I said: “Why?”
He said: “Because in of what you say on your t-shirt.”
I looked down and I realised I was wearing a bright red t-shirt that had an anarchist star on it and a sentence that said more or less “I want freedom”. He said they were going to kill me because I was demanding freedom on my t-shirt. Then I was scared and we ran. But of course they were many more than us.
We ended up in a building that turned up to be their headquarters. They stole some items off us but they did not remove my mobile phone. They put us in a room while they decided how they were going to kill me, or something. I took off my t-shirt and put it inside out, because I was planning to escape and the t-shirt would not help matters. I also texted a few friends telling them that I had been kidnapped and roughly where I was. I thought it was strange these people would allow me to text, and I thought there were some possibilities, that they did not realise I could text, or they did and they were extracting information from my texting. I thought I had to risk it and send the texts anyway.
With my friend, I tried to escape. No one was guarding our cell so it didn’t seem that difficult, until we reached the gate. There was a group of them guarding it, or maybe just hanhing around there chatting. Of course they recognised us and they chased us and caught us. There was a punishment. Separating us in two different cells was part of it and I did not see that friend again. I texted at least one friend again, hoping some one could come to the rescue. But I didn’t wait and tried to escape again. I think this time I did it during the night and in silence, different tactic. I did manage to escape, if they realised, it should have been when they checked on my cell.
I took refuge in Mary’s family house. Her parents were there and they offered me her bed. It was a bed on the floor in between their room and Mary’s room, right in the middle of the doorway between the two rooms. I was allowed to use her computer and things but all I wanted to use was a cable to connect my computer to the internet. There was this single cable that looked like a mouse cable; I connected that to my computer and through that I connected to her computer and through that I connected to the rest of the internet.
Mary’s parents needed to leave the house and because of the respect I felt for Mary’s bed I chose to use their bed instead, when they were away. I familiarised myself with that house. It looked like the house I had had earlier, and it had the same problem with cups and glasses, only not so acute because it was fewer people of us.
While there, I was worried for my friend who was still kidnapped. But my friends whom I had texted had not been able to help, and I did not know how I could help from the outside. So in a way I was just as kidnapped. I used my computer to find out about the prison and what to do, but there was not much we could do. I was afraid of the people who had kidnapped as well, because they probably still wanted to kill me.
The house had two entrances. But no one came to visit, ever. Until some one tried to enter. The building had more flats and a communal garden with a gate, so even though I did not open the gate for him, some one else did. I looked at him from my window, concealing all my face under some window furniture, some flower pots that didn’t have any flowers still. I concealed all my face except my eyes, and shouted out to him: “Look, I do not know you and I do not want visits, so no point in coming any further, I will not open the front door for you.”
He said: “I am a policeman investigating a kidnapping in the Westminster area, we are trying to find your friend.”
So I revealed my face after her proved somehow, maybe with a police batch, that he was saying the truth.
I went to open the door for him and told him I would prepare a sit for him. This door was the back door, and it lead directly to Mary’s parents room. I went to the room next door, which had a sofa that needed something on top to sit down because it was torn. While I was putting something to sit on it he just sat on Mary’s parents bed. I said, no I don’t want to sit there, there is a sofa in this room. So he got up and came to sit on the sofa. I offered him some water and went to the kitchen to get two glasses of water. I had to search through the whole house for two similar glasses, but that was another one, all the glasses were different. when I finally found a pair of different glasses we could use, I had to wash them up. He said it didn’t matter but I thought it was a good occasion, since I planned to talk a lot, to drink water as well, since I had not drunk that much water those days.
So I went back to the sofa and began to talk. He had no idea about my story. He was just trying to find out about my friend, did not seem aware of the existence of anther kidnapped person. I said,
I was kidnapped in that castle as well.
Face of surprise.
I felt like I was stealing the show and did not want to be the protagonist, but also realised that my part of my story was important for him to understand if he wanted to investigate, so I conceded in that and I told him all, from the beginning.
It was a good part your fault.
Face of surprise.
You, police, that day, you dispersed us, and on doing so, you put us all in very vulnerable positions. You had dispersed us, you were not happy with groups of five, six people. I was in one and policemen like you, only in uniform, put me and my friend in the only position that would have made possible our kidnapping.
He maid a point that he had not been one of those policemen, that he was not aware of that so I had no right to make a collective judgement.
I looked at his hat. it was a female Ascot kind of hat.
I said, OK admittedly, those coppers that day did not have a double decker hat like you have today. He thought that I made this remark to accept that he was not a bad cop.
so I proceeded.
You were not happy with groups of seven or eight people, you had to disperse us all, so I ended up being with just this one friend, and these right wingers surrounded us and would not let us go anywhere, like a kettle only they were not uniformed cops; it was two of us and between a hundred and two of them.
The policeman’s face said he did not believe it was that many.
Then one told me they would kill me.
Why.
Because I was demanding freedom on my t-shirt. I was not even aware of that.
So we looked at my t-shirt, which I was wearing the correct way again, and I realised the ‘I want freedom’ phrase was upside down, so now from my head’s position on top of the t-shirt I could read it normally as the letters were for me to read not the rest of the world.
He pointed out that my t-shirt had lots of demands on it.
I related the rest of the story and he said he would write a report for the enquiry, or court case or whatever he was working on.
A few days later I went to a meeting in a squat, but when I arrived there it was empty; they had decided to have the assembly outside, on the street. I met Irau outside and sat with him. There were between one and two hundred people sitting on the floor having an assembly. Irau asked me how I was and I talked about my kidnapping. I had not been able to talk about it at all but since that policeman had interviewed me, something in my brain had been unblocked and I could talk about it.
I thought it was probably safer not to talk about it, but I also thought, if they have invented inquiries, if they have invented the mourning and all those funeral things when some one dies, it is to help people to cope with loss, so, surely it must be a good thing that I am able to talk about it now.
I talked and he was a bit bored. I missed my friend who had been kidnapped with me and had remained in that fortress, so much. I wanted to find out what had happened to her, had they killed her, had she managed to escape. I wanted to know if the police who was investigating was doing that in order to break into that building and rescue my friend.