by Geoff Dyer
‘Nostalgia,’ said Steranko. ‘That’s one thing we really know how to manufacture.’
The party was being held in the grounds of an abandoned school, sealed off from the street by high sheets of corrugated iron. The only entrance was through the cab of a lorry which had been driven up alongside a narrow gap in the fencing. Since there was only room for one person at a time to scramble through the cramped cab it served as a very effective turnstyle. A large crowd of people pushed and shoved and spilled back on to the pavement.
Inside there was pandemonium. Here and there the darkness was slashed by swirling lights so bright that it was difficult to see anything except the edges of buildings and the dark shape of a gasometer that loomed huge and solid over the whole scene. As our eyes got used to the combination of dazzle and darkness it became possible to make out angular constructions of scaffolding and industrial metal. Music was throbbing around but it was difficult to say from where. We passed through a gap between two buildings; through the steam-coated windows on each side you could see figures packed together and writhing around in yellow light as thick as mustard. Music thumped on the window panes; faces, lit by a lash of red and then an explosion of orange, appeared at the windows. There seemed to be no way in or out of the building. At the end of this narrow alley we stumbled down dark and slippery steps towards a courtyard enclosed by several buildings. Fires had been started. Planks, bottles and branches were thrown on. Groups of people staggered around and shouted or looked down on the scene from the sloping roofs of the school. A guy with a shaved head and a vodka bottle keeled over into the fire, sending up a great splash of sparks. His friends pulled him out and he lurched off again, smouldering. Someone leant over the bonfire and was sick.
Carlton and I lost sight of Steranko. Around another corner we found the entrance to one of the buildings and tried to get in but there was a huge scrum at the door. A great crush of people were trying to enter and as many were trying to leave. The more eagerly people tried to get out the more frenzied others became in their attempts to get in, like passengers on the Titanic rushing at a cruel mirror.
‘Watch the fucking dog!’ someone shouted. Carlton and I were in the middle, getting crushed from all sides. A foot from my face I saw the huge head of a dog, cradled against someone’s chest, salivating and barking, frightened eyes shining red, tongue lolling. Someone screamed. Further on, in the swirling lights of the hall itself, it was just as crowded. The air was scorching hot. There was no music, only amplified noise echoing and thumping as if it was trying to get free of the hall by burrowing through the walls. I let myself get pushed out and watched as Carlton was spat out behind me, quickly jumping clear of those falling out after him. Fireworks and rockets shot horizontally past, exploding in bonfires and whizzing and cascading over everyone. There were more people on the roof, just standing, watching. Most people on the ground were watching everyone else. A body was carried towards some bushes and dumped there.
A group of punks had forced open the small window of an empty, dark building and were trying to climb in through the gap. The window was about five feet above the ground. Once one of them had got his head and chest through, his friends pushed at his legs until there were only shins and feet sticking out and then these disappeared suddenly and there came a loud crash and laughter from the other side. Then it was someone else’s turn. When they were all in this black, empty room all you could hear was more crashing and shouting. Then one of the other windows of the room exploded like a firework around our heads, big fragments of glass angling through the night and splashing everywhere. A few moments later there was a barrage of broken glass as bottles from inside were hurled out through the windows. We scattered to one side. There was a pause and then, from the roof opposite, two bottles were lobbed gently through the windows of the room. There was a crash and shouts from inside. Two sizzling fireworks were dropped like grenades through the broken windows and went off with a huge kerrumf that echoed round the empty room. Smoke swirled out of the windows. No sounds from inside.
Things were burnt and broken, people ran around in the dark. Two policemen appeared, one of them shaking his head, not quite sure whether it was worth anyone’s while to do anything about whatever it was that was happening here.
By now, like sand slipping through an hour-glass, the level of the gasometer had fallen and a vast cylindrical web of spars was silhouetted against the dim sulphurous sky. I saw Steranko sitting on an upturned crate close to a bonfire, his face bathed in the deep red light of the flames. The burning frame of a chair toppled down the slopes of the fire and rolled, still burning, to the ground. A momentary sense of déjà vu surged through me and vanished as I called Steranko’s name.
Some friends of Carlton’s came over. They were going to another party and asked if we wanted to come with them.
‘What do you think?’ Carlton said.
‘I’m tempted to abandon the evening,’ Steranko said.
‘Yeah, me too. What about you?’
‘I might go along for a while,’ Carlton said. ‘Sure you don’t want to come?’
‘Yeah.’
‘OK, I’ll catch you later.’
‘Yeah, see you next week.’
‘Take care yeah?’ We waved goodbye, another burst of fireworks exploding low overhead.
After clambering through the exit Steranko and I began walking silently to Trafalgar Square to catch a night bus. Halfway there, feeling drained and worn out by this shitty evening, we hailed a cab. We climbed in and shut the door before the driver had time to ask where we were going.
‘Brixton, please.’
The driver grunted and the cab began bumping its way reluctantly south. It was the first time I’d travelled by taxi in about six months. Trees slurred by as clouds slipped past the indifferent moon. The driver tugged back the glass partition. His neck was red through years of vigorous scrubbing.
‘What part of Brixton?’
‘If you go via Stockwell – then we can direct you,’ Steranko said.
‘What’s it like there then?’
‘Where?’
‘Brixton . . .’
‘It’s OK.’
‘No trouble?’
‘Some. Not really.’
‘Yeah?’
‘You know, like everywhere. Most of the time it’s fine.’
‘You don’t mind living there?’
‘Not really. No, it’s fine.’
‘Rather you than me. I wouldn’t fancy it.’
‘No?’
‘Nah. Not me. All those . . .’
‘I tell you what, man,’ Steranko said. ‘You just keep quiet and get us there in one piece and we won’t piss on your seats OK?’
The driver stopped the cab on the spot, brick-walled it then and there.
‘Right! Out!’
‘Forget it.’
‘Get out you filth.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘Out!’ He turned round uncomfortably in the front seat as he said this and opened the door on Steranko’s side.
‘Let’s get out,’ I said.
‘Jesus.’ We got out. The guy wanted the money for the journey so far.
‘One ninety,’ he said. ‘That’s what’s on the clock.’
‘You must be fucking kidding,’ I said.
‘Yeah, fuck you scumbag,’ said Steranko. (We’d seen ‘Mean Streets’ a couple of days previously.) We walked off.
‘Oi!’
We stopped and looked round. He was standing there with a jemmy in one hand. He didn’t need anything in the other. We stood still as the trees shaking slightly in the breeze. In the cab his radio cleared its throat and crackled out into the night.
‘Now you slags give me my money.’
The money was the least of our worries now but handing it over involved getting near him. Steranko gave him two quid at arm’s length. The jemmy remained where it was, carving out a hook of sky over his shoulder.
‘You cunts,’ he said and
walked back to the car, arms at his side.
‘Hey!’ said Steranko as the guy was getting back into the cab . . . ‘Keep the change.’
I was already running.
056
Moving my stuff in to the new flat took less time than the paperwork: signing the lease, filling out a claim for housing benefit, applying for exemption from rates, registering the rent – all the fraying strands of state support had to be twisted, tugged and woven together in a secure financial safety net.
The flat was on the top floor of a five-storey block, protected from the outside world by a security door which was rarely closed – someone had ripped off the self-closing hinges. The area just outside reeked of drains, a damp, heavy smell that made you think of typhoid and cholera epidemics. On the stairways and landings the smell was a mixture of animal shit and piss. On hot days you made your way up and down the stairs through buzzing flags of flies. The flat itself was fine: spacious, light, and smelling like the previous tenant was decomposing beneath the floorboards. The living-room was covered in that slightly faded wallpaper associated with cases of suspected child abuse.
I spent my first morning there doing a bit of home improvement. I woke up early, full of anticipated achievement and in such good spirits that I gromphed down a breakfast at. Goya’s, the faded fry-up cafe on Acre Lane. On the way back I bumped into Freddie and asked if he wanted to help.
‘I’d love to but you know how I am with things like that. I get toolbox envy, the fear that your toolbox is much smaller than other men’s. It’s quite a common worry apparently – more men than you might think suffer from it – Fear of DIYing.’
‘I know what you mean. I’m not that well equipped myself,’ I said. A few petrified paintbrushes sculpted in a jar of turps, a roller you could make pastry with and an assortment of screwdrivers, bent nails, and inappropriate hammers were all I had in that department.
Steranko, on the other hand, had all sorts of tools and accessories scattered around his studio and I dropped in to borrow his drill and anything else that looked as if it might come in useful. Back home half an hour later I realised that the drill wouldn’t reach from the socket without an extension lead so I headed back to Steranko’s, slightly frustrated but still looking forward to the labour ahead.
Extension lead in hand, I stopped off at the DIY shop. I hovered around waiting for my turn and then realised that the guy behind the counter – a big white bloke with a triple chin – had been waiting for me to say what I wanted. He didn’t say ‘next please’ or ‘can I help’; he just leant forward, both hands on the counter, jutting out that gut of a chin a fraction of an inch and raising his eyebrows as if to say ‘yeah? Fancy your chances do you?’ His face was clean-shaven, red and sore-looking as if he used a sandpaper flannel and Ajax aftershave.
I made him even more sore by not knowing what I wanted. I knew what I wanted but I didn’t know what it was called in the hermetic argot of the building trade and as far as he was concerned that meant I was wasting his time. He assisted reluctantly, all the time making me feel like a piece of china in a bull ring. He threw screws from his hand into a bag, trudged around the shop heavily and yanked stuff out from dark recesses as if I was making him late for the heart attack that he’d planned on having for elevenses. When I’d got everything I wanted he did the eyebrows and chin bit again and stood his ground like a nightclub bouncer.
‘That’s the lot,’ I said.
He took the pencil from behind his ear and added everything up. It came to a small fortune. Then he slapped VAT on top and the total took another leap upwards. I handed over the money and the guy said ‘thankyou’, pronouncing it so that it sounded like rhyming slang for ‘wanker’.
Back home – Jesus, I seemed to have been in and out of the flat about ten times already – I set about reinforcing the door. At the old house we’d been burgled so many times that by the end of our stay we’d turned cut-price home security into a science. Other people knew about parquet floors, loft conversions and double glazing; what I knew about was low-budget impregnability. With a top-floor flat like this it was no problem: most of the kids who broke into places resorted to the simple expedient of kicking the door down and that was easily remedied. I fixed a long metal strip up the entire length of the door-frame with three inch screws every six inches so that the frame wouldn’t give way. Once that was done the problem was that the lock itself could get kicked through the door so I fixed two large metal plates around the lock. That left the other side of the door as the weak point and I screwed two heavy right-angled brackets into the wall so that they rested against the hinges. Finally there was the door itself which I reinforced with a thick metal strip down its entire length.
The whole business took close on two hours and by the time I stepped back to admire my handiwork my arm was aching and I’d lost a good deal of my earlier enthusiasm. It didn’t look pretty – with all those rusty metal strips and protruding screws it looked like nothing else so much as a medieval dungeon – but it certainly was secure. A bit too secure I discovered a few moments later when I tried to open the door and couldn’t. I’d screwed the brackets so close to the hinges that they wouldn’t rotate so the door could only open a couple of inches.
Rectifying things took another hour and by that time both arms were numb with fatigue; all that remained of my earlier enthusiasm was the spreading sweat patch on my shirt. Shelving my plans to put up shelves I put on a clean shirt and went round to see Carlton instead.
Carlton lived in a large, bare flat in a house near Brixton prison. The front of the house was white except for a band of about two feet just below the roof, which had been painted red. Before the paint had dried it had bled down into the white in deep arterial drips along the entire length of the house.
‘Welcome to the House that Dripped Blood,’ said Carlton in a creaky hinges voice as he opened the door. ‘The landlord’s trying to do the place up.’
‘Nightmare on Jebb Avenue. You busy?’
‘I’ve got to go out in a minute but come in. We’ve got time for a coffee or something . . . What you been doing?’ Carlton said as I hurried up the stairs after him.
‘Trying to sort my flat out. What a headache. Somebody ought to come out with one of those magazines: Yoga and DIY in fifty weekly parts building up into a complete encyclopedia of how to remain calm in the face of mounting chaos and runaway expense.’
Music was playing quietly in Carlton’s flat. I finished making the coffee and picked up some small barbells while Carlton searched for a pair of socks. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt that looked dazzling white against his dark arms. There was a mattress on the floor, a stereo, some open drawers, a rail of clothes; nothing on the walls.
‘What’s the record?’ I said, pouring coffee into large white mugs. ‘You have about five sugars don’t you?’
‘Roland Kirk,’ said Carlton tying his shoes and tossing me the album cover. ‘Three. I’ve cut down. You know about Roland Kirk?’
‘No.’ I picked up the cover which showed him in profile, playing about four saxophones at once.
‘He went blind soon after he was born,’ called Carlton from the bathroom. ‘When he was in his late thirties he had a stroke that paralysed one side of his body. Even after that he kept playing. He died when he was forty-one. You could start a religion with a life like that.’
The music twisted and writhed and breathed, searching for a way out of itself.
‘There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you Carlton,’ I said. ‘And this seems as good a time as any.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘How come there’s never any dust in your flat? How come your clothes never smell? How come your cups and everything are so clean? Are you a closet cleansomaniac?’
‘It’s my insomnia. I tidy up my flat when I can’t sleep and I’m too tired to do anything else.’
‘How often d’you have trouble sleeping?’
‘Every night virtually. I tell you, a s
queal of brakes or a shout from the street at the vital moment make all the difference between about four hours sleep and none at all.’
‘Sleep is something I have no trouble with – I can do it with my eyes shut. Sometimes I think I only get up to get tired enough to go back to bed again.’
‘I only go to bed to get restless enough to get up again. Even when I’m asleep I sometimes think I’m awake.’
‘D’you dream?’
‘I haven’t had one for a while – not a new one anyway. They’re all repeats. I know them off by heart. Sometimes I nod off in the middle of them, they’re so boring.’ As he spoke, Carlton – like me – was lifting a mug to his lips with one hand and a barbell to his shoulder with the other. It was as if we were in an advert for strong coffee.
‘I got these homoeopathic tablets from the hippy shop. They had three kinds. I went for the ones that sounded like wholewheat Mogadon. They didn’t do anything at all. Rubbish.’
‘What d’you think about when you can’t sleep?’
‘My flat.’
‘What about it?’ The doorbell rang.
‘I wonder if it’s clean enough,’ he said, going to answer the door. I heard voices on the stairs and then Belinda followed Carlton into the room. She wore glasses and used foul language and after five minutes in her company you felt as relaxed as if she’d seen you pee your pants in infants’ school. She had beautiful manners. We said hello and smiled.
‘Are those new trousers Lin?’ Carlton asked.
Belinda stepped back and twirled round. She was wearing a pair of blue silky trousers with a low gusset, very loose around the hips and legs and tied tight at the ankles.
‘You like them?’ she said, smiling.
‘Very nice,’ I said.
‘Thank you.’
‘They make it look like you’ve got a turd hanging out your bum,’ Carlton said. Belinda’s laugh was like gold coins pouring from a fruit-machine.
‘No, I’m only joking Lin. They’re terrific.’ Belinda and I talked for a few moments while Carlton opened and closed drawers and cleared stuff away.