RAINBOW WINDMILLS OF FREEDOM – by Emily Churchill

Today I sat on our university steps for an hour, when I should have been revising, talking to Zaid from my Arabic class about what we’re going to do when we graduate, and imagining what it would be like to have our Arabic lecturer as a dad. The kind of lazy, giggly conversations you only have when you’re meant to be doing something else. We had to do practice oral exams recently in front of the whole class and Zaid made me laugh by acting out how everyone would stare at the desk still as statues when our teacher, Mr Said, asked if there were ‘any volunteers’. “If I don’t move at ALL then I’ll disappear” was the logic, apparently.

A man and a woman were standing opposite us, hugging, really still. “Um… do you think they’re trying to disappear?” I asked Zaid, and we started giggling again, until we realised the woman was crying. They weren’t moving an inch, just standing there in the middle of the courtyard for ages with her head on his shoulder. Eventually I looked up and they actually had disappeared, and I just caught them walking off together towards the main road, his hand in hers, and her being brave.

On the bike ride home I got upset with the bus drivers and the taxi drivers and the pedestrians, who for some reason seem to think that on sunny days they don’t have to look before they cross the road. Everyone has such a sense of bloody entitlement in this city I thought, and tried to think of a good anti-pedestrian facebook status to post when I got home. Then I got to Waterloo Bridge, where I always think of Sarah, Shane and Josh, I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because, riding high above the wide water, it’s hard not to feel like anything is possible, like you’re king of the world or seventeen again. I remember Sarah, on the treadmill next to mine at our sweaty Damascus gym, telling me how at home she’d run round this huge lake near her house, and it was the most serenely beautiful way to keep fit. She missed running outdoors and I missed cycling to school, in Damascus where there weren’t any lakes and girls didn’t ride bikes. And then I was riding over Waterloo Bridge with the wind in my face and Sarah was in prison, probably missing the sweaty running machines at the gym.

When I got into Camberwell I tried to remember everything because I could see it all and Sarah, Shane and Josh couldn’t. I saw funny-shaped buildings I hadn’t noticed before, and how green everything was getting. Outside the bookies four men were hanging around listening to one of them tell a story: “No, the fat guy” – “Yeah, the fat guy” repeated his friend, showing them with his hands what ‘fat’ meant. Then past ‘Crown and Glory’ barber shop and the old men at the bus-stop with heavy plastic bags pulling them closer and closer towards the pavement, and then on the left the wall with the Chinese wave painted on it. I stopped at the shop to get some potatoes for tea and got upset with the shopkeeper, who kept his hand on mine a bit too long as he gave me the change.

But when I got back to my bike I noticed someone had planted a little plastic rainbow windmill in their front garden, the colours whirling round at lightning speed in the wind. It was such a pathetic little thing, this tackily-coloured toy windmill that somehow thought its tiny brightness could cheer up a world where the corner shop man was a pervert and the taxi drivers tried to run you over and Shane and Sarah and Josh had been in prison for nearly a year without having done anything wrong, and with no idea of when they’d be free. And I started crying then, because I could see this stupid windmill and they couldn’t. Because I could imagine actually Sarah would think it was kind of adorable and say something very profound about it to make us all laugh.

I tried to appreciate my freedom today Shane, the freedom to sit on the uni steps and talk about nothing; the freedom to get angry with the world and then come back home and cook potatoes. The freedom to stick a stupid plastic rainbow windmill in your front garden because you think it makes the world a bit brighter.

One day we will have to all go bike riding together, by a lake.