by Gavin McCrea
Once the remaining lanterns had been distributed amongst the adults, Eva — whose red-painted helmet set her apart and accorded her an air of command — led the whole group out onto the street. The drizzle that had been falling all day had now stopped, but the skies had not cleared, and the breeze carried large drops of water blown off the roof tiles and out of the gutters. In the gloom of this terrace, at this hour of rapidly vanishing colours, the glow from the forty-four lanterns reached as high as the roofs and as far as the road’s end. It was beautiful. Yet, as an image, it was also delicate. If the rain came again the lanterns would be extinguished, and they would have to march in the wet, unlit. They would be miserable. The people would laugh at them.
Eva put the children into formation first, then integrated the adults. Eva herself was to supervise the front, while Sunny, who was taller, was put in charge of the tail. The other adults were to act as marshals, forming a human chain on either side of the column, in order to protect the children and prevent outsiders from joining in. Iris was to go in the middle, flanked on either side by Glen and Eggie, who carried poles joined by a length of wire across which a line of lanterns hung. Keith was assigned a particularly visible place in the front corner. Eva did not dare to allocate Doris a fixed position, so the latter decided to float around near the back. Álvaro stayed outside of the procession, capturing it on his expensive new camera, a gift from Doris.
Having established the column’s composition, Eva walked up and down its length, checking that everyone was happy and prepared, and that they remembered the rules of the march. Then she took her place at the front and rang her bell three times. The bell, taken from the old East Wind prop room, was of the kind that schoolmasters once used to call children in from the yard. Now its effect was to call the local people to their windows. Lights in the surrounding houses went on. Curtains twitched. Faces peered out.
We believe in nothing and everything.
We are human and we are divine.
West and east, and neither, we are Wherehouse.
The procession set off in the direction of St Pancras station. These streets, smelling of coal; this grimed brick and this new concrete; these blocks of buildings: Iris knew them like the back of her hand. During the summer she had spent at The East Wind as a child, she had explored every inch of Somers Town. A fugitive from her parents’ prison, she had wandered down every terrace and alley, making friends with anyone who would have her: the boys. Street football and fighting and marbles and conkers and piseball and tig and running and running, forever running, it seemed, from one gang or another. She had been happy here, amongst these low people, and refused to admit she was different from them, despite her own difference being impossible to hide. They understood her better than she understood herself. Anyone who had been to the museums and the theatres, anyone who knew about Latin irregular verbs and poetry and Shakespeare and soliloquies and scenes and improvisation and mimes, anyone who did not fidget or pick their nose or whisper or slouch, anyone who sat upright and alert and said her lines perfectly, anyone like that was not one of them.
Now, passing by her old haunts, as if acknowledging a holiness in them, the marchers maintained a religious kind of silence; a quiet conveyed by the noise of their footfalls and the bell that Eva rang to set their rhythm. From the children there came none of their usual chatter. Instead, solemnity. Graveness. Actions that appeared to be important because the children had learned to think they were important. Somers Town was their territory. How they appeared here mattered to them. The people in these parts — their families, their neighbours — were among the hardest in Europe. Everybody was tough. Shut off and bravely carrying a burden. And yet, at the sight of the passing children with the lanterns, they, many of them, stopped what they were doing and felt a softness grow inside them which, if it had been acknowledged, might have reduced them to tears.
The procession carried this quietness into the welter of Euston Road. Eva waited for a break in the traffic before leading the parade out. Once evenly spread across all four lanes, they halted to form a human barricade. The adults on either side of the column shook their lanterns and waved as a signal to the oncoming cars to stop. Drivers honked their horns and cursed out their windows, but the marchers did not move. They were waiting for Doris to return.
At the corner of Chalton Street, Doris had broken away from the march and run to the phone kiosk outside St Pancras. She had several calls to make. To her contacts in the television stations and the radio studios and the newspapers, as well as some gallery owners and artists she knew, all of whom had already received cards in the post inviting them to come to the London Carlton to witness the happening. Did you receive our invitation? she was going to say when she rang them now. No, it wasn’t a joke. It’s real, it’s serious, and it’s about to start. We’d like you to be there because we want to tell you about the possibility of peace, of stopping rape and abuse, of not having a tyrannical government, of not being slaves in the money system, of finding other ways to organise our lives. We want to bring that message to you.
Minutes passed. The traffic on Euston Road had come to a standstill. Drivers were getting out of their cars and approaching the blockade, shaking their fists and pointing their fingers and threatening to call the police if they did not move. Pedestrians were stopping where they were going and turning to gawp; some of them had come off the paths and onto the road in the hope of getting involved. The adult marchers held hands to make an external cordon, through which the children calmly peered, as if aware of their own special value, of the necessity of their being kept safe, and of the madness of the world on the other side. Álvaro snapped photos of the confrontations, the public foaming and fuming, the marchers soundless, impervious. At one point, a respectable-looking man, who had left his car running several places back while he took it upon himself to face up personally to the obstructors, looked to be on the verge of violence. The American Maoist Tray stepped in, for he was the largest and had menace; no room for fear in all of that flesh.
—Stand back, sir, Tray said to the man. I won’t engage with you till you’ve taken two steps back. What’s that you’re saying? If you call me that again, I’ll smash you.
When at last Doris came back, she gave Eva a signal — It’s done — and the procession moved off, clearing Euston Road to the sound of cheers and jeers, and entering Mabledon Place, keeping to the paths now. They went round the crescent at Cartwright Gardens, passing in front of one of the Thurlow hotels, then onto Marchmont Street, before turning left onto Tavistock Place, and proceeding into the wastes of London’s student-land, where the difference of but one street divided the slums from the palaces, and where nobody was a neighbour to anybody. Despite the twists and turns, the column remained unified. Most pedestrians gave way to it; those that refused it flowed around like water, flooding the roads and stopping the traffic once more. People noticed the parade, they could not fail to, but none of them cared enough to wonder what it represented.
Gower Street, Bedford Square, across New Oxford Street and High Holborn, into Covent Garden. At Seven Dials the procession paused, making a circle around the central column, while Iris and Keith relit the lanterns which had blown out.
—The kids are getting tired, Keith whispered.
—I see that, said Iris. They’ll pick up again when we get to the theatre and they see the film cameras.
—Will the media come?
—I hope so.
—So it’s happening, huh? This.
—We won’t get into trouble.
—You mightn’t. People like me pay a higher price.
—I won’t let anything bad happen to you, I promise.
—You can’t promise that.
Although the children rarely saw this part of London and were initially alert to the noises and the faces and the lights, the novelty was wearing off. The streets had become for them nothing but measured distances
to be crossed. The final stretch down Monmouth Street seemed interminable. The children stooped their shoulders and dragged their feet. Because their arms were tired, they no longer held the lanterns high but let them dangle by their sides. On St Martin’s Lane, outside a café of the sort the children’s parents could not afford to enter, a table of queers drinking colourful drinks mocked the parade as it went by. This was the only moment during the hour’s journey when Iris thought she might lose her temper.
Outside the London Carlton two film crews were waiting, along with a photographer and a couple of arts journalists carrying tape recorders. As soon as the procession appeared, the lenses swivelled round and began to record, which, as predicted, gave new life to the children. Their backs straightened. Their strides lengthened. Again their lanterns shot into the air.
The procession funnelled onto the path and occupied the entire front of the theatre, stretching the length of the façade, leaving barely enough space on the pavement for pedestrians to pass in single file; most felt the need to step out onto the road to get round. The cine-cameras prowled around the gathered children. Bulbs flashed in their faces. A saxophone player sitting on the opposite side stopped playing.
The adults in the group unfurled a banner. Sunny held one of the poles and Barbara the other. The message reached across all of their heads.
IT IS RIGHT TO REBEL
The Maoists had originally wanted them to hold up portraits of Mao, but the others shot this idea down. The banner bearing Mao’s saying was the compromise the group came to, and not everyone was happy even with that. Iris was vehement in her opposition to any text being displayed at all, arguing that what had already been said no longer needed saying, that an expression twice used was of no value.
Eva rang the bell and the children made a line under the banner. She rang the bell again, and they turned one towards the other. Again, and they formed groups of threes. Then parallel lines. Then crosses. Then figure eights. Then squares. Then circles. Each child an atom in a process of union and dissolution, pattern and chaos; particles of light exploding and coming back together. The photographers mingled with them. The journalists stuck their tape recorders under their noses and tried to get them to talk. But, beyond their expressions of concentration and the visible pleasure they were taking in this vaguely military display, the children had nothing to say.
One of the film cameras had attached itself to Doris, who was standing a couple of paces in front of the group, using it as a backdrop for an interview, it seemed. Iris was too far away to hear what she was saying.
The other camera was foraging round, looking for anyone who was willing to talk. It found Álvaro.
—What are you? the man behind the camera asked him. What’re you doing here?
—We’re here because Europe is at death’s door, said Álvaro. Europe is dying, and it doesn’t even know it.
—Dying?
—We adore our culture. We’re proud of its opulence. But this opulence is scandalous, me entiendes? Founded on massacre and oppression. We invented slavery only to make ourselves look as great as we do.
—Aren’t you just drop-outs looking for attention?
—No, sir. Listen and you’ll learn what we are. We’re the children of Europe. Sons and daughters of a violent civilisation. No one should be surprised if we choose to be violent. Violence was the bath into which we were born.
The cameraman turned to Iris:
—Is that true? Have you chosen to be violent? Who are you going to hurt?
Iris was checking her watch.
—That’s a good question, she said, looking up. If you’ll follow me, I’ll answer it.
She gave a signal to Tray, who then signalled to Sunny and Rolo. These three joined Iris and Keith at the edge of the group, and together they — the breakaway cell — hotfooted it towards Cecil Court, where the theatre’s stage door was located. The film camera tailed them.
—Where you off to now?
—Just keep the camera rolling, said Iris, and your mouth shut.
After they had turned onto the lane, Iris heard Doris calling her name behind her. She stopped and turned round, then had to take a step backwards because both cameras were rearing into her face, their spotlights blinding her.
Doris positioned herself in front of Iris, leaving enough space between them that her gestures should be visible to the cameras.
—I want to give you something, she said.
—Everything has been timed, Iris said. We shouldn’t delay.
Doris unzipped her boiler suit, and from somewhere on her body, produced an object wrapped in a square of canvas.
—Hold out your hands.
Iris looked at the others, who had formed a loose semi-circle to one side, their faces moving in and out of shadow as the lanterns hanging from poles rocked in the breeze. The men were glancing around nervously, from the cameras to the stage door and back the way they came, expecting the Bill to arrive any moment, and to be pounced on, even though they had not broken any laws yet.
Seeing their impatience, Iris obeyed Doris by raising her open palms. Doris placed the object into them. As soon as she felt its shape, its heaviness, Iris knew what it was. She did not need Doris to use her index finger and thumb to carefully unfold the canvas wrapping to reveal it.
In the early sixties, Doris’s name had begun appearing in the cultural press as part of a loose band of emerging artists whose work explored the body and extreme behaviour as a means for art. By the middle of the decade, DORIS LEVER was shorthand for the genre of live performance that encompassed activities such as pissing, spitting, cutting, bleeding, hitting, whipping, hanging, screaming. Eventually she would come to reject the art of defecating in public and nailing oneself to things, as one critic called it, in favour of a more ascetic aesthetic, but, for as long as she had been a part of that movement, she was recognised as residing on its far edge. She was known for being able to endure acute physical exertion and unusually high levels of pain.
Her breakthrough came with Sugar Keeps Your Energy Up and Your Appetite Down. Presented in the summer of sixty-five in a gallery close to the wall in West Berlin, it involved her sitting at a table in the centre of a room with her legs encased in plastic Perspex boxes filled with flies. Onto the skin of her legs honey had been rubbed, which the flies obediently gorged on. As her skin was being eaten away, bite by tiny bite, she invited spectators to sit in the empty chairs around the table, have tea and converse with her. The recordings of these conversations — subsequently released on vinyl and cassette as Sugar Can Be the Willpower You Need to Undereat — revealed that a wide variety of subjects were discussed, from the philosophical to the mundane. Copies of the recording now sold in auctions for hundreds of pounds.
But the work that would make her famous would be Johanna’s Got a Gun. First shown in London in late sixty-eight, Johanna would be Doris’s first piece in which she did not appear in person, signalling her move away from the medium of live performance towards video and multimedia. It would consist of a series of cine-recordings and photographs documenting a violent happening carried out by the Wherehouse radical performance collective, in which Doris herself participated. The work would occupy several rooms of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, but its centrepiece would cause most of the controversy: a looped film of Doris handing a gun to one of the collective’s leaders. This gun, which Doris had procured illegally (a crime for which she was charged and fined) was the one used by the collective to gain access to the London Carlton theatre during a performance, and to attack the cast and terrorise the audience. Another contentious feature of the exhibition would be a video of Doris loading the gun with bullets. There would also be real bullet holes in the gallery ceiling, replica guns scattered around the floor, and a wall covered with Chairman Mao’s sayings about guns:
POLITICAL POWER GROWS FROM THE BARREL OF A GUN
ONL
Y WITH GUNS CAN THE WHOLE WORLD BE TRANSFORMED
IN ORDER TO GET RID OF THE GUN, IT IS NECESSARY TO TAKE UP THE GUN
I was the gun, Doris would say in an essay published in the accompanying catalogue. I wasn’t present in the theatre except as the gun. I gave them that gun, and in doing so, I made them responsible for me, and me for them. Their morality became my morality, and vice versa. If they killed someone, it would’ve been on my conscience as much as theirs. With a gun in the house, death is always a possibility. In the end, no one died, but everything else they did with the gun were actions I partook in. I was the bullets that struck the ceiling. I was the noise. I was the screams. I was there, creating and destroying, even though my body was quite a distance away.
Iris did not dare to touch the gun with her bare skin. But neither did she drop it or throw it away. She kept it resting in her open palms, positive that if she did not move someone would take it from her.
—This is real, she said. Where did you get it?
—Where don’t matter, said Doris. What matters is you have it. The happening weren’t going to work without it.
—Simon? Did you get it from him? One of his contacts?
—I said, it don’t matter where it came from.
—That fucking dipshit. Is it loaded?
—I hope you won’t have to find out.
—Is it or not?
—You’s free to take out the magazine and check.
—I wouldn’t know how.
—D’you plan to use it?
—Are you loose up top or what?
—So why d’you need to know if it’s loaded or not? Carrying a weapon is not the same as using one.
—How d’you make that out?
—If it’s kept in the hand, and not fired, it functions as a tool of persuasion only. You won’t get far with those toy guns. I’s got some experience in this game. Only the real thing will produce results.
—Why didn’t you bring this up before. Why spring this on us at the last minute?