Hi-Vis

The training was an hour in a room above a pub. A woman called Fatima with a lanyard and a laminated map. "You are not the police. You are not security. You're the person in the yellow vest who knows where the toilets are and which way we're going. That's it. If someone kicks off, you don't get involved. You radio." I'd been on marches. Plenty. This was the first one I'd stewarded, and I'd said yes because they were short and because my friend Lou said it was "basically walking, but with responsibility." Eleven a.m. The assembly point was a square with about eight thousand people in it, which is more than it sounds and less than the organisers would say afterwards. I had a radio, a vest that said STEWARD across the back, and section C, which was a stretch of about two hundred people between a samba band and a group of retired teachers with a banner so long it needed six of them. Here's what you do. You walk backwards, mostly. You face the crowd. You keep the line where it's supposed to be, so the march doesn't spill onto the pavement where the shops are. You say "keep left, please, keep left," about four hundred times. You spot the woman who's gone white and get her to the edge and sit her on a step and radio for the medic. You tell a man with a flag on a pole that the pole needs to be lower under the bridge. He argues. You say "under the bridge" again. He lowers it. Things I did not expect. How many people ask where the toilets are. That's the training being right. The samba band never stops, not once, three hours, and by the second hour you don't hear it any more and by the third you'd miss it if it went. The retired teachers had a flask of something and offered me some and I said I was working and they laughed and one of them said, "So were we, love, for forty years." At the halfway point there was a counter-demonstration. Small. Maybe thirty people behind a line of police on a side street, shouting. The march slowed as it passed, the way a river slows past something. I saw a lad in section C peel off toward them with his face already going, and I got in front of him, not touching, just there in the vest.

"Mate." "Did you hear what they—" "I heard. Keep left." "But—" "Keep left. We're going this way. They're going nowhere." He looked at me, then at them, then at the vest, and something in the vest did it, not me. He went back in. The samba band kept going. A woman behind him patted his shoulder. The end was a park with a stage and speeches I mostly didn't hear, because section C had to be dispersed sensibly and the retired teachers wanted to know about buses. I handed the radio back to Fatima at four. She said "any incidents" and I said "one lad, no contact," and she wrote it down and said, "Good," and that was that. Lou found me on the grass afterwards, eating a sandwich, boots off. "Well?" "It's walking," I said. "But with responsibility." I had an opinion about the whole thing. I'd had it going in and I had it coming out. For five hours in the middle I didn't need it, and I don't know how to describe how that felt, except that it was quiet.