Children of the Sun

by Max Schaefer

  The only problem with this position was my right arm. Often, as we slept, the blood would drain from it — raised as it was on pillows — and I would wake to find it dead.

  The Union Tavern

  ‘Blimey,’ says the skinhead. ‘Fuck.’

  He leans against the wall, breathing. Tony runs the tap.

  ‘Clever little fucker. Aren’t you?’

  Tony wipes his wet face on his shoulder, looks up, smiles. He turns off the water and heads for the door.

  ‘Hang about a minute. Where’d you learn all that?’

  Pausing: ‘My gran taught me didn’t she.’

  ‘Yeah very funny. You got a name then?’

  ‘Might have. What’s yours?’

  ‘Dennis. Live around here do you you cocky cunt?’

  ‘I might do.’

  ‘Might have, might do. What are you, fucking James Bond or something? Well if you might live around here, then it might just happen that I might see you about. Mightn’t I?’

  And then it is Wednesday, 9 September 1970, and Tony is late getting home from school, and there is Dennis smoking astride the low wall of a playground and scowling at the toddlers. He knows an empty house that is waiting to be demolished for flats where you can climb in the window.

  And it is Saturday, 12 September. And Monday 14. And Tuesday 15.

  And Dennis says: ‘So do you ever just snog?’

  Dennis says: ‘If you’re going to hang about with me we better do your hair.’

  They go to Roy’s, near the station.

  Tony says, ‘I’ve got no money,’ and Dennis tells him, ‘On me.’

  ‘Who’s your friend?’ asks the girl. She wets Tony’s hair and cuts it close off the back-comb.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ says Tony afterwards. ‘My mum’ll kill me.’

  ‘That’s what they’re there for isn’t it, mums? She can sew your jeans when she’s finished having a go and all.’

  Dennis’s mum is a bit deaf and usually has the television turned up loud, so you can get away with murder or whatever.

  At the market, while the man finds change for Tony’s AirWairs, Dennis sings quietly in his ear:

  ‘Oh soldier, soldier, will you marry me,

  With your musket, fife and drum?

  Oh, how can I marry such a pretty girl as you

  When I have no boots to put on?

  So off to the cobbler she did go

  As fast as she could run.

  She bought him a pair of the best that was there

  And the soldier put them on.’

  The salesman gives them a funny look, but warms up again when they pay extra for oxblood polish. Later Dennis teaches Tony to apply it.

  ‘Right,’ he says, when they’re done. ‘Now you can meet my mates.’

  *

  Dennis’s mates are all skinheads. There are nearly twenty of them. Dennis and Tony find them at the Wilberforce estate, where they usually hang about the courtyard if the evenings are warm enough. They make a bit of noise, whistling at girls and shouting, but there’s not too much bother because a lot of them live there and you don’t shit in your own garden.

  A few of them are Tony’s age. All but a couple are younger than Dennis.

  ‘All right?’ they say to Tony. One of them murmurs to Dennis: ‘Well done mate,’ and Dennis looks halfway between embarrassed and chuffed.

  They have a regular pub where the landlord doesn’t fuss as long as the older boys do the ordering. They usually have enough money for drinks. Sometimes if they’re short they’ll go and roll a Paki. The bigger lads get in his face and give him a bit of aggro, and the short ones sneak into his pockets while he’s distracted. Tony’s too tall for that: it takes the younger boys, the eight- and nine-year-olds.

  Dennis always has a bit of cash on him.

  Most often they let the Paki go after a bit of a bruising, but Dennis tells him about one time when Steve, who is a bit of a psycho sometimes, not to mention a fat bastard, got carried away and lobbed a brick after the running Paki, so it landed smack on his head. He pivoted face-first into the pavement and the lads scarpered in every direction, not stopping until they were out of breath with effort and laughter. The police turned up at some of their houses later but it never came to much.

  Tony says: ‘How do I look?’

  ‘You’ve only fucking asked ten times.’

  It is Saturday, 24 October 1970. It is mid-morning, and they are standing on Victoria Embankment. The wind coming off the river flicks the sleeves of Tony’s new Ben Sherman about his thin upper arms. He has goosebumps, although it’s not really cold. Dennis says, ‘You look good.’

  Dennis is smoking. Tony puts his hands in his pockets and jumps up and down a little. He says: ‘So you met him in a pub?’

  ‘You’re a fucking broken record this morning.’

  ‘He just come up to you?’

  ‘You can go home if you want.’

  ‘Which pub was it?’

  ‘Jesus. I can’t fucking remember. Down the West End somewhere.’

  ‘And he just come up to you and all that?’

  Dennis takes a final drag on his cigarette and throws it over the wall on to the roof of a moored barge. They watch it land. He says, ‘Anyway.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He frowns at Tony, then abruptly swings his leg round to kick him up the arse. It lands round the side, ineffectually.

  ‘What was that for?’

  ‘So you’ll shut up.’

  ‘But I shut up already.’

  ‘So you’ll stay shut up then.’

  There is a loud honk and they turn. A convertible, a Peugeot 404, has pulled up on the other side of the road. It is emerald green, newly washed, throbbing by the kerb like a fat, sated slug. A man leans out of the driver’s window and calls, ‘Come on then!’ He has a voice like off the television.

  They cross the road without looking at the traffic, daring it to hit them. Tony opens the door. In the front passenger seat is another skinhead Tony hasn’t seen before: Dennis’s age, with ginger hair and a long-sleeved, checked shirt rolled above the elbow. He gets out and says: ‘All right Dennis?’

  The driver pushes forward the vacated seat. He says: ‘Christ, Dennis, he’s a bit young, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Tony, climbing in, ‘well you’re a bit fucking old aren’t you?’

  From behind, all you can see of the man is a thick cowl of shoulder-length yellow hair, run through with frizz as if it has been scrunched up and released. A dull grey is pencilled in towards the scalp. He steers the car with his left hand and holds a cigarette in his right.

  Dennis says, ‘I thought you said it was OK.’

  ‘It’s cool,’ says the driver. ‘But I mean, you know. Fucking hell.’

  Through the rear-view mirror, the other skinhead asks Dennis: ‘How’ve you been doing, all right?’

  ‘Yeah not bad.’

  They curve through sparse traffic around Blackfriars.

  ‘My name’s Nigel,’ calls the driver over his shoulder as he pulls tight round a corner. ‘As Dennis isn’t polite enough to introduce us.’

  ‘Fuck off Nigel,’says Dennis.

  ‘Tony,’ says Tony.

  ‘Ryan,’ says the other skinhead. ‘You all right?’

  ‘Where are we heading anyway?’ Dennis asks.

  ‘Thought we’d start in the City. Classical architecture. Nice bit of contrast.’

  Nigel pulls up by the Bank of England. He fetches his camera from the boot and arranges the three skins before the Royal Exchange. Dennis leans against a column and Ryan sits on the steps, his legs lying flat across their corners. From behind his lens Nigel says, ‘Try to slouch a bit more. That’s it. Tony, you’re practically smiling. Look at the camera like you hate it.’

  Tony yells at him:‘Fuck off. Cunt.’

  ‘Perfect!’

  Nigel’s camera is strapped around his neck. He moves round them in an arc, snapping rhythmically. He phot
ographs them leaning on the railings around the tube entrance, crossing the empty street like the Abbey Road cover. When he has to stop and change film he asks, ‘So, how would you spend an average evening?’ .

  Ryan says: ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘How do you spend your time? When you’re not, you know, down the West End. What do you do with your mates?’

  They look at each other. Dennis says, ‘Well we hang about don’t we? Round the estate. Have a laugh and that.’

  ‘What about facilities? Are there youth clubs you can use?’

  Tony says: ‘One or two.’

  Dennis says: ‘But they’re shit really. All these rules. Like you can’t drink or smoke.’

  ‘How about bother? Do you get into fights?’

  ‘Well I mean. You have the occasional fight don’t you?’

  ‘What about girls?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Like fucking?’

  He says the word with deliberate rough assertion, but it comes out sounding awkward and stupid, quarantined by the consequent silence. Dennis mutters, ‘Piss off Nigel.’

  They drive over to Hoxton for some different backgrounds. On the way Tony asks, ‘What’s this for anyway, the papers?’

  Nigel tosses his cigarette. ‘No, it’s for a magazine. Quite a new publication, I run it with some friends of mine.’

  ‘What sort of magazine?’

  ‘A sort of cultural survey, really. Galleries, photographs, opinion pieces, the odd short story. Film reviews. That kind of thing.’

  ‘Will we see it when it’s done?’

  ‘It’s not easy to find in the shops. I’ll pass a copy to Dennis if you want.’

  By four o’clock they are finished. Nigel distributes £4 each and asks, ‘Right. Who wants a drink?’, but Dennis says, ‘We need to be off.’

  Nigel says, ‘All right then, sweetheart, take the money and run. I’ll see you soon, I’m sure. Very nice to meet you, Tony.’ Ryan leans out of the passenger window. ‘See you then Dennis.’

  ‘All right sweetheart?’ asks Tony.

  It is a few minutes later and they are waiting for the bus. ‘Oh leave it out mate I’m not in the mood.’

  ‘What’s he calling you that for?’

  ‘He’s just like that isn’t he?

  ‘He was a fucking ugly old bastard and all.’

  ‘You didn’t have to come. I thought you could do with the cash.’

  ‘Well I could.’

  ‘Pay for your own gear for once.’

  One day Dennis tells Tony: ‘We’re going dancing.’ They meet the rest of the mob at Mile End tube and run through the gate, yelling, ‘You bloody kids!’ at the ticket collector as they pass. On the train Tony swings from the straps, and a few lads sing. After Queensway someone says, ‘Next stop the Congo!’

  The club is in a basement flat on Talbot Road. As they approach they feel the thud of an amplified beat, and Dennis grins at Tony. ‘Told you,’ he says. ‘If you want the good tunes you’ve got to follow the spades.’ They cough up 3 shillings each to a black man in a mafia suit (‘Surcharge,’ he winks at them) and clamber down the stone stairs. Inside it is hot and loud, and there’s a smell of strange food, overlaid with another Tony suspects is marijuana. There are no other whites in sight and he’s glad they’re in such a big group.

  Dennis leads him through a swaying thicket of blacks — men in their twenties and thirties in suits dancing with decked-out women, kids with short hair and pork-pie hats, crooking their arms as if about to break into the Lambeth Walk. At the back of the room they’ve dragged a table across a doorway to make a bar. A tall, limber teenager is selling beers, the beat rippling along his spine. He sees Dennis and grins.

  ‘Going to get us raided for serving kiddies.’

  ‘You should be bloody raided and all. His name’s Tony. First time here. This big bastard’s called Marcus,’ he tells Tony.

  ‘Welcome to you down there. What do you want then, two beers?’

  He hands a can over the table. Reaching for it, Tony looks up at him and says, ‘Ya raas.’

  Marcus laughs. ‘Pickney tink im nyega nuh.’

  ‘What are you going on about?’ says Dennis over the music while he pays. ‘You forgotten how to speak fucking English or something?’

  Marcus’s response is impenetrable.

  ‘Don’t try it on with me mate, you were born in fucking Lambeth.’

  ‘Lambeth is a fucking dive, man. You take me out of Africa.’

  ‘You been at the ganja again? I haven’t fucking taken you anywhere.’

  ‘Your grandaddy take my grandaddy. Make him a slave.’

  ‘You’re having a fucking laugh mate. My grandad couldn’t afford a pot to piss in, where’s he going to start buying slaves from? It’s Edward fucking Heath’s fucking grandad you want to have words with.’

  ‘White man all the damn same, man.’

  ‘Yeah piss off. Come on,’ he tells Tony, ‘let’s do some dancing.’

  ‘Ya raas.’

  The other lads have colonized a corner of the room near the entrance, where they’re moving much like the blacks, except more fiercely, with harsh, disjointed gestures. There’s a small moat of floor between the groups, but it may just be a safety margin around Steve, who is pumping his clenched fists up and down wildly as he stomps, like an accelerated King Kong.

  Dennis has shown Tony how to skank in private and he starts now, following Dennis’s lead. It’s easy really, the casual emphatic downbeat pulling one shoulder after another into a rolling shrug, heavy boots clumping on the stone floor of the basement, hand gestures endlessly deferring each imagined interruption. He dips his head forward into the music, tilting it left and right, and rolls his eyes up, engaging the room in moody surveillance. The music’s all the same really, each track the same phrase repeated again and again with some bloke rambling over it, but then that’s the point: after a while you just stop thinking. Everyone’s doing some version of these moves, Dennis almost lightly, betraying an easy pleasure, sneaking a quick grin at Tony as their glances briefly align, Steve still a comic raging toddler, and all the dolled-up coons like a kaleidoscope view, one endless repeated mass filling his vision and the rhythm cascading through it like dominoes, this way and that. At least you can fucking do what you like here, not like at home, none of them care anyway, just keep treading and shrugging and it all washes over you.

  Another track starts now, with a piano line that’s vaguely familiar, and then the voices kick in and yes, it’s a song he’s heard before, a hit from a few months ago, and here’s the beat starting up, just more of the same. His body is picking up where it left off when he hears Dennis say, ‘Oh fucking not this again’ and the chorus repeats, crisply enunciated,‘Young, gifted and black’, which is of course the name of the song, some bollocks the blacks are actually responding to, there are more smiles now and he can see some eye-catching and a few singing along to the phrase ‘open your heart to what I mean’, Jesus Christ they’re as wet as hippies. The lads are acting up at this, jeering among themselves, and over the other end of the room he sees that Marcus cock an imaginary gun at him and winking pull the trigger, so he sticks two fingers back, and as the chorus returns Steve leads them in roaring over the top — ‘Young gifted and white!’ — and some nigger bitch starts yelling back at them, so they holler it again even though it’s not in time this time, and most of the blacks are shouting at them now. Dennis decides, ‘I’ve had enough of this shit,’ and he strides to the nearest speaker, a massive crate-sized thing balanced on a table, and ‘There’s a great truth you shou—’ yanks the cable out of the back and bolts, and now they’re all fucking worked up and it’s time to head up the stairs, Tony chucking his beer can in the blacks’ midst as they pursue the lads into the road, hurling bottles and kicking the stragglers. The man who took their money at the door yells, ‘Touch my fucking system,’ as they scramble through the gate and down the street.

  ‘Thought you w
ere going to wake my mum.’

  ‘I should go in a minute.’

  It is Monday, 2 November 1970.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Find that towel.’

  ‘Leave it. Come here.’

  ‘Bollocks it’s cold.’

  ‘Look at that. Little animal.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Little animal. Aren’t you?’ .

  ‘No.’

  ‘I did that. Didn’t I? Look at all this.’

  ‘Don’t do that.’

  ‘You go all funny afterwards.’

  ‘Get off.’

  ‘Stay still will you?’ . .

  ‘I’m ticklish. Come back here.’

  ‘All right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Better?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Outside, two cats fight. The yawn of a passing car.

  ‘Tony boy.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That Nigel geezer. You know how I know him don’t you?’

  ‘You said you met him in a pub.’

  ‘But you know what I meant don’t you?’

  Tony says nothing.

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘I need some extra cash sometimes. Furniture trade don’t stretch to Levi’s.’

  ‘Not six pairs anyway.’

  ‘I haven’t got six pairs.’

  ‘I’ve lost track.’

  ‘You know how many pairs. I’ve got two pairs.’