We had indeed arrived during a lull. I didn’t realise how tightly packed the crowd was, or even that it was virtually all men, young and strong, and facing the same way, waiting for somebody important to start speaking at the head of the square. We’d sidestepped ten or fifteen people into the throng before the speaker emerged on the platform. The crowd erupted. It became one pulsing, cacophonous animal with Amelia and me caught in its throat. A surge from behind pulled us apart. I heard her scream, saw her stumbling sideways, her orange top immediately blotted out by a rush of protestors pushing forward. I dived after her, but I was pushing against a current of jumping, shouting people. I glimpsed Amelia’s hair and pale neck swishing between dark heads and yelled out to her, but she either didn’t hear me or couldn’t turn around. Desperately ramming my way against the flow to reach her, I was knocked to one knee by another crowd surge. For a terrifying moment I thought I was about to be trampled, but strong hands gripped me under the armpits and hauled to my feet.

‘Attention!’ yelled the smiling face in front of me, and the hands holding me actually lifted me from the ground. I was bouncing with the crowd, swept along with it. With my second or third jump I caught one last glimpse of Amelia heading the other way, and then she was gone.

40.

The quarter of an hour it took me to fight my way through that crowd felt like forever. Gnawing worry about my parents knotted into panic, not for myself, but for Amelia. The heat and the yelling and the smell of sweat and fumes swelled with the protestors, a moving mesh of limbs and backs and chests. What had I been thinking, leading her into such danger? Despite the kind hands that had stopped me from hitting the ground, the crowd felt unpredictable to the point of menacing, a pent-up force about to blow. She was pretty much the only girl there, and it was all my fault. I’m not religious but I found myself murmuring, ‘Keep her safe, keep her safe …’ in time with the crowd’s chanting, and it felt like a kind of prayer.

When I reached the far side of the square I saw that the protestors were hemmed in by a wall of riot police. Their shields were braced low and their truncheons were either folded across their chests or down at their sides for the most part. Every now and then though, if one of the demonstrators got too close, a policemen might casually poke him back with the end of his baton, or even lash out with it properly. I saw a guy take one of these blows to the side of his head, and another nearer to me already had blood pouring from his mouth.