Jesus Christ, the woman had balls. Great big balls, and an ego to match.

So, what did this mean for him? He checked his email; no, he hadn’t been copied into the mass suicide note. She had decided to communicate with him privately. Send one thing out to the world, and a last, tiny hope, stretched out to him and him alone.

Remember me well. Please.

It was as though he heard music swelling behind him.

The Pool, February 2018

The Long Read:

Clio Campbell, Brexit and the Genoa G8 | 7min

In the wake of Clio Campbell’s shocking suicide, novelist and cultural commentator Jess Blake-Hewson looks back at her old comrade-in-arms

We took the children to Genoa last summer. A family holiday used to heal old wounds; in part a pilgrimage. We meandered around ice-cream-coloured clusters of houses, watched girls in off-the-shoulder ruffles direct their boyfriends to Instagram them outside the cathedral and on the Porto Antico rocks at sunset, stuffed our faces with pizza from the street carts and sat on the harbour front with our legs dangling into the water, tanned and happy.

It didn’t seem to be the same place. I didn’t remember it at all. Was that saffron-coloured wall up an alley the one we were corralled against for hours, maybe a hundred of us hemmed in by police dogs and guns at either end, barely able to move from the pressure of terrified bodies all around? Or was it just another cute little lane with some overpriced tourist shops?

I’d last been there sixteen years earlier, twenty-one years old, unsure about how to maintain my still-new dreadlocks, with a week’s worth of clothing stuffed into a lightweight rucksack. Someone from a group at uni had heard there were places going on a bus; we couldn’t fly because they’d be watching for us at the gates, the bastards, he said, and we all nodded. We were there to protest the presence of the G8, who had chosen that pleasant old tourist town for their conference. We were anti-globalization, devoted to Naomi Klein. Us and 200,000 others. That protest is now legendary – it was the first time the world media really paid attention to the anti-globalization movement, because the images of police brutality against protesters were so extreme that they couldn’t be ignored, and because of the death of 23-year-old protester Carlo Giuliani, shot in the street then reversed over by a police Land Rover, just to make sure.

On the second night we were there, before the marches began, before our muscles learned to tense for flight at the smallest noise, we attended a gig at the Genoa Social Forum, the centre of the protest for those of us in the Red and Pink Blocks, who advocated peaceful, non-violent resistance. It was a warm evening; the air was still. I was pushing back through the crowd, pockets loaded with cans of cheap Italian lager from a stall, when a new act came on to the stage. It caught my attention because it was the first song in English I’d heard all evening; I then realized I dimly remembered it from my childhood. She was young, red-headed and her voice soared out across the crowd.