Under Construction @ Keele 2018 Vol. IV (II) | Page 28

20
Numbers
It is estimated that 1,500 members 17 of the EDL marched on that Saturday in 2010. Despite
the presence of those people, their uncountable faces, I remember only one. A man slumped
on the windowpane of McDonalds. He wore a Union Flag woolly hat, a green walking jacket
and dirty, blue jeans with white trainers. His eyes had rolled to the back of his head and the
blood from his nose had spilled into his mouth. He was the ghostly apparition of the crowd.
The zombie of the EDL apocalypse. The first of the ‘accidental’ dead. Since then I have tried
to find him, and myself, on footage of the march, on YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion and even
the EDL’s own division forums. I have never found him or I. He remains a slumped, folded
man leaning against a wall of double-glazed glass. He is a conduit of the dreadful fascination
of that day, where he lies eternally as a dreamed fatality of the EDL marched; as a vampire’s
thrall drained of blood; as a curious bystander beaten cold; as a fractious poltergeist haunting
the dishwashers and deep fat fryers in McDonalds; as a man who I saw, covered in blood,
who I never saw again.
Now, from my position on one of these awkward marble benches, I can see the spot
where he lay. I am aware, from some irrational sense, that spot could be the spot where he
died. It would have been reported, sensationalised, memorialised, but that does little to shake
the thought. Right now, in the same place, a woman smokes and drinks coffee from a paper
cup. At one time a man lay there unconscious. Now, a woman digs her heel into the spot
where his hip may have been. She drops her cigarette and crushes its orange eye with her
shoe. It disappears as she presses, and in that moment when she does not lift her foot back
up the cigarette no longer exists. I imagine it vanishing in the now and pressing itself into the
man’s leg eight years ago. Maybe it was that cigarette burning through his jeans that woke up
him, made him wipe his nose and walk away from the baying crowd.
I take the image’s advice and walk away from Parliament Row, away from the Old Bus
Station, the spectre of the crowd and the undead man. I do not turn to see the woman lift her
foot.
17 “Trouble at Stoke-on-Trent English Defence League rally," BBC News Channel, January 24, 2010,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/staffordshire/8476873.stm