SAVE THE WHALES

On the day of the big march, Rebecca got arrested. The Japanese prime minister was visiting Auckland. What he was doing there, Tane wasn’t sure. Some trade summit or international congress of some kind; he didn’t really know or care.

The protest march was set to start at the same time as the prime minister’s flight arrived at the airport, which was mid-morning on Saturday. It would wend its way up through the central city, arriving at the prime minister’s hotel just about the same time he would be.

Tane gripped his placard with both hands and held it high. Just to show his support for the cause. The cause was something to do with whales and saving them from Japanese whaling boats, but it was actually more complicated than that and had something to do with fishing quotas and scientific whaling and all sorts of other things that he was sure were worth fighting for, or against. Whichever it was.

Rebecca certainly believed so, and Tane couldn’t let her march by herself. He hadn’t let her march by herself on the anti-nuclear march or the anti-GE (genetic engineering) march, although he’d had the flu on the day of the climate-change march, so she had done that one by herself.

There had probably been a time when Rebecca didn’t feel strongly enough about some issue to want to march in protest about it, but that was probably when she was in preschool, and Tane couldn’t remember it.

He thought most people in the difficult situation that Rebecca now found herself in would have lost interest in protest marches. It was she who needed saving at the moment, not the whales. It could have been another excuse to take her mind off her problems, but Tane thought it was rather more than that. He’d known Rebecca a long time, and he knew that when she committed to something, she always saw it through.

Which was why they were both there at the very front of the marchers. On the front line of the battle, as it were.

A long swelling chant began at the back of the line of marchers: “Ichi, ni, san, shi…don’t kill whales, leave them be. Ichi, ni, san, shi…”

“What’s this itchy knee business?” he asked Rebecca in a quiet moment between chants.

She rolled her eyes. “It’s ‘one, two, three, four’ in Japanese. It’s because the—”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it now,” Tane said as the chant began again.

“Ichi, ni, san, shi…don’t kill whales, leave them be!”

“Thanks for coming, Tane,” Rebecca said after a while.

“Gotta save those whales!” Tane said enthusiastically, waving the banner around and accidentally clouting a large man with a shaved head who was wearing a leather jacket and marching next to them.

“Sorry,” Tane said.

The man grinned and nodded to show that no harm was done.

It was an officially sanctioned, organized march, which meant that the road was blocked off by police cars with flashing lights at each intersection along the route.

Another police car preceded them, rolling slowly forward just a few yards in front of Tane and Rebecca.

Along the way, early morning shoppers either raised their arms in the air and shouted in solidarity or just stared curiously at the throng, which was wide enough to completely cover the roadway and stretched away behind them. There had to be a thousand marchers, Tane thought, although he wasn’t much good at estimating the size of crowds.

The march started down on the Auckland waterfront and proceeded straight up Albert Street to the huge Sky City casino complex, with its massive three-hundred-sixty-yard-high Skytower.

They turned right just before the casino onto Victoria Street, then stopped at the entrance to Federal Street, where the Japanese delegation’s hotel was.

Wooden barricades prevented the marchers from entering the street, so they had to wait, milling and chanting, completely blocking the road.

It didn’t take long for the prime minister’s motorcade to arrive. First came a police car, then a large black van that had to be filled with security guards. Then a long black Mercedes limousine.

The chanting rose to a crescendo as a line of police officers formed a human barricade behind the wooden one. Behind the blue line of police, Tane could see the slender figure of the Japanese prime minister emerge as a large man in a dark suit opened the door of the limousine and stood to attention.

Several New Zealand dignitaries that Tane didn’t recognize stood in front of the hotel, waiting to greet the man.

And that might have been the relatively peaceful end of it, if it hadn’t been for the prime minister stopping as he got out of the car, turning to the protestors, and waving cheerily.

Maybe he was just being friendly. Maybe he was waving to someone he knew. But it was the worst thing to do to a crowd that had been winding itself up, chanting and shouting over the past twenty minutes while marching. It was like pouring gasoline onto a barbecue.

There was an angry roar from the crowd, like that of a wounded animal; then suddenly the wooden barricades were down, toppling under an onrush of protestors. The police linked arms and stepped forward to meet the onslaught. Behind them, more police officers drew batons and waited.

The Japanese prime minister and the other dignitaries scurried toward the hotel, all thoughts of ceremony vanishing in the face of the wild beast that lunged toward them.

Tane tried to push himself backward, but it was impossible with the press of the crowd behind him, and he found himself crushed up against a huge policeman with a beard and bad breath. The air squeezed out of his lungs with the pressure from behind, and an overwhelming feeling of claustrophobia enveloped him.

The thin blue line held, though, the storm of protestors safely contained on the outside. All except one, Tane saw through a thin gap in the blue uniforms. A small, quick shape, a blur of movement, and Rebecca was halfway toward the Japanese delegation, dodging around the larger, slower policemen like a rugby player evading tacklers.

She almost made it, shouting and screaming something about whales and murder, when one of the large, dark-suited men grabbed her by the arms, pinning her and forcing her to the ground.

At that point, the line fractured and split apart in a dozen places, the fury of the crowd intensifying as one of their own was attacked. Suddenly there were protestors running everywhere, some battling police batons with their makeshift placards.

The bearded policeman whirled away from Tane, and he managed to fight his way sideways, unable to see Rebecca, unable to do anything but try to claw breath back into his lungs and get out of the running, crushing crowd.

He found a small oasis amongst the huge concrete pillars at the base of the Skytower and slumped to the ground, exhausted.

In the end, they had to call in the riot police to clear Federal Street. Over a hundred people were arrested, but most were released without charge after being processed at the Auckland Central police station, just a few blocks away.

Tane waited outside for four hours until Rebecca finally emerged, bruised and disheveled but defiant.

“That was awful,” she said. “They photographed us, took our fingerprints, and jammed us all into these tiny cells while someone decided what to do with us.”

“I tried to get to you,” Tane said, which wasn’t really true but seemed like the right thing to say.

“You couldn’t have done anything,” Rebecca said. “They had me into the police van in three seconds flat. In handcuffs!”

She rubbed her wrists, and Tane could see red marks where the cuffs had been.

“It’s so unfair,” she raged quietly. “They’re the criminals, killing whales and calling it research, but we’re the ones who end up with a criminal record!”

“Don’t worry about it,” Tane said. “You’re still a kid. They have to erase all record of the arrest the day you turn eighteen. I read that somewhere.”

She was silent.

“Really,” he insisted, trying to make her feel better. “It’s nothing. It won’t matter at all.”

He was wrong, though—as it turned out, Rebecca getting arrested mattered quite a lot.