by Geoff Dyer
‘What do you think that was?’
‘I don’t know.’ It was impossible to say. My eyes were still recovering from the green glare.
We walked across Westminster Bridge. The river was oily, dark and full of harm.
‘Crossing a bridge is always romantic,’ said Belinda. ‘I wonder why?’
‘Whistler,’ said Freddie.
‘Sometimes when I walk over a bridge I have this fear that I’m going to throw all my money over the edge,’ I said. ‘I get it on boats too when I’m standing at the back, watching the seagulls and all the litter bobbing around in the wake.’ I felt a certain pride in formulating this statement. Big Ben struck two. We were all standing close together and looked back at the huge silvery-white clockface.
‘You always know where you are when you can see Big Ben,’ said Foomie.
‘That’s right. Where are we again?’
The Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey were slightly hazy in the mist. Except for the river nothing was moving. A jagged crack of lightning flashed over Westminster. The sky flinched and then was still again.
038
The weeks went by quickly. I did some decorating with Carlton and even got a week’s work doing visual research for a film. At first it seemed a nice job – sitting in libraries and browsing through catalogues – but the novelty soon wore off. Even when the novelty had worn off it was still quite nice. If I wasn’t working I spent the afternoons playing squash and in the evenings I got drunk at parties. It was a good time of the year. Pubs and buses were full.
One night I came out of the Recreation Centre at about five o’clock. Beneath the cool night sky a train rushed over the railway bridge. Through each window I could see the imploring faces of commuters heading south. The market traders were packing up their stalls, loading unsold items and produce into their vans.
Christmas lights hung across Brixton High Street: stars, lanterns, candles, holly shapes, the smiling outline of a yellow moon. The tree outside the Ritzy was swathed in blue and red bulbs. A group of smartly-dressed men, women and children were singing gospel in front of the library.
A single star was hanging in the sky. I mention it only because it was there.
037
Just outside my block was a van selling hamburgers; it looked like a belch in 3D and inside it was a guy toiling away in a tropical drizzle of grease and onions. Walking away from it a lard-faced man threw his empty carton on to the grass in front of the flats.
‘Oi! Don’t you live on this fucking planet?’ I shouted. He turned round, mouth working like the back of a garbage truck, ketchup smeared down his chin.
‘No,’ he said through a mouthful of half-chewed animal.
Leaving him to it, I walked to the centre of Brixton and spent an hour trawling for Christmas presents before settling down to the sedate and steadily unrewarding activity of reading jazz sleeve notes at the record stall. Holding his styrofoam cup at an angle reminiscent of Lester Young the guy running the stall sucked hot soup through a straw. People were walking quickly along, rolls of wrapping paper protruding from their carrier bags. Some of the market stalls were also draped with coloured bulbs and tinsel. I saw Luther shuffling around with his coffee jar, a piece of tinsel draped festively around it. A police van parked by the entrance to the market played screechy recordings of Christmas carols and reminded shoppers that pickpockets were operating in the area.
Someone called my name. Steranko and Foomie, arm-in-arm, both wearing overcoats and smiling, made their way through the crowd. We stopped and talked about Christmas shopping while people bustled past, our breath forming momentary tangles of sculpture. A hand came down hard on my shoulder.
‘Drug squad,’ said a voice near my ear. I jumped and looked around.
‘I wish you wouldn’t do that Carlton,’ I said.
‘You spook easy, man,’ he said, laughing. He too was carrying a big bag of shopping. We were all pleased to see each other.
‘What time is it?’ Steranko asked.
‘One fifty seven,’ said Foomie.
‘How d’you know that?’
As she gestured towards the town hall clock it occurred to me that none of my friends owned a watch.
‘In that case,’ said Steranko, ‘I decree that we abandon our attempts to buy Freddie a Christmas present and spend the money on ourselves in the boozer instead.’
We stayed in the pub until three o’clock. Outside the afternoon reeled into us. After a sleep and some food we returned to the Effra in the evening. It was crowded, people were standing several deep at the bar. Gold streamers, silver balls and coloured balloons caught the warm light of the pub and bounced it around the bar. The large ceiling fan rotated quickly overhead. I squeezed in between Belinda and Freddie. All around us people were drinking and talking. I knew most of them by sight. From the other bar came cheers from people playing darts. Every twenty minutes or so Carlton and Steranko would get called into the pool table in the other bar. Before he went to play Carlton pulled on a pair of wire rimmed spectacles that made him look about fourteen years old.
‘How come you’re wearing glasses Carlton?’ I said.
Belinda laughed.
‘You tell him Lin,’ Carlton said.
‘He stayed at my place last night but didn’t have his contact lens case with him so he put them in a glass of water by the bed but he didn’t say anything to me. In the morning they were gone. I drank them in the night,’ Belinda said.
‘Women man,’ said Carlton while everyone else laughed.
‘What about you Freddie, has anyone ever drunk your contact lenses?’
‘No but someone I was going out with did hit me in the face and break my glasses once. I don’t suppose that counts though.’
Someone called Steranko and Carlton again and they made their way to the other bar.
‘Did you see the news the other night?’ said Foomie.
‘Maybe.’
‘They had this thing about Halley’s comet. You know it’s only meant to come round once in a lifetime or something. Well apparently it’s due quite soon. I thought it had actually come round last year or the year before.’
‘Yes, I’m sure I remember something about it,’ said Belinda.
‘It seems to be around all the time these days.’
‘Maybe what we remember is all the anticipation about it coming.’
‘The more I think about it the less sure I am one way or the other,’ said Foomie.
‘Me too,’ I said, wondering if it was possible that the prolonged build-up to the actual arrival of the comet could create a sense of expectation so intense as to make you think it had already taken place.
‘Did you see the thing last night about the ghost of Karl Marx?’ said Belinda. ‘Several people claim to have seen him wandering around Highgate cemetery trying to ponce cigarettes off passers-by.’
‘I thought there was a ghost in my flat the other day,’ said Foomie. ‘I was in the living-room when I suddenly heard a voice say “Do you want a piece of bread and butter?” Then I realised it was the junkies next door preparing their evening meal.’
Steranko had come back from playing pool – Carlton had thrashed him in about three minutes – and was talking to Freddie and someone I didn’t know. ‘I tell you,’ Steranko was saying. ‘Anyone who can watch a film of Pele dummying the goalkeeper in the Mexico World Cup or Muhammad Ali beating Foreman in Zaire or see Said Aouita breaking the world record for the ten thousand metres or whatever it was – anyone who can watch those things without tears in their eyes, without being moved in the same way as they are by a work of art is a philistine – there’s no other word for them.’
‘That’s right,’ said Freddie.
‘Bigot-speak,’ said Foomie.
‘The voice of reason,’ said Belinda and both of them laughed.
‘The problem with football though,’ said Steranko, ‘is that it’s its own worst enemy. It’s like when England got knocked out of the Wo
rld Cup by Argentina. If instead of complaining about Maradona’s handball Bobby Robson had just come out and said “so we lost the game – big deal. The important thing is that we played our part in staging the greatest goal that has ever been seen” – if he’d said something like that then football might get near to the condition of art.’
This was fairly typical Steranko. His method of arguing was both forceful and feeble. Everything he had to say was compressed into the first couple of sentences, something like: ‘I thought that film was utter dogshit. I only stayed five minutes.’ That was it. If someone raised an objection he would listen attentively and then say ‘yeah, maybe. I wasn’t so keen on it.’ Either that or he would attempt to marshal some kind of reply but he was a hopeless arguer, really. Easy to outmanoeuvre and catch in contradictions of his own making, he was like a boxer who only has one punch: if he failed to get a knockout with that and bring the conversation to a quick conclusion he was done for. This suited me. I’d never had the patience for elaborate debate either.
In the meantime there was some discussion as to whether or not it was Freddie’s round.
‘Look I’d love to buy all you people a drink but the thing is it’s my wallet: there’s a time lock on it.’
‘You’re not kidding. I remember the last time you bought a round: I kept the bottle as a souvenir.’
‘I think it’s Carlton’s round,’ Steranko said, seeing him walk back towards the table.
‘I’m skint,’ he said, turning his pockets inside out and looking, for a moment, as if he might turn into a snooker table – it must have been the green shirt that did it.
‘It’s supposed to be Christmas.’
‘Have you been to his house recently?’ Belinda said. ‘He’s so mean he’s installed a Durex machine in his bedroom.’
‘Jesus Lin!’
‘No I’m only joking,’ she said reaching for Carlton’s hand. ‘Condoms make him impotent!’
‘Me too,’ said Steranko.
‘He makes nice porridge though,’ said Foomie.
‘What about you Freddie?’
‘Oh, it takes very little to make me impotent. Generally the merest thought of sex is enough to do that.’ Everyone laughed.
‘Come on, whose round is it?’
‘Honestly,’ said Belinda, getting up to go to the bar. ‘The four Scrooges. What does everyone want?’
By this time the pub was even more crowded. Various other people had joined our table and I began the arduous business of making my way to the toilet. By the time I got back Steranko was standing by the bar talking to Ed, the depressed manic-depressive.
‘I’ll give you one reason why it makes no difference who you vote for,’ Steranko was saying. ‘You go on the tube tomorrow and when you get off at the other end there’ll be some poor guy – or woman – waiting to take your ticket. And he’ll have been doing that all day, all week, all year, and he’ll probably be doing it for a good part of his life. I tell you when I see some young guy about twenty doing that it breaks my heart. And those guys about forty or fifty you see who’ve probably been doing that job since they came over to this piss-bin country thirty years ago. If I had a son I’d tell him to sign on and spend his days down at Brixton Rec or dealing dope rather than do that. Unemployment’s not the problem, it’s employment.’
Ed rolled a cigarette and grunted that he couldn’t believe how naive Steranko was, that he wasn’t living in the real world, that he had no involvement in politics.
‘That’s junk,’ said Steranko. ‘I’m up to my neck in politics.’
‘Bollocks.’
‘Listen, I’ll tell you how I’m involved in politics: I never eat at McDonald’s, I never play electronic games, I’ve not seen five minutes of soap opera on television or any of the other shit they put out. I try not to listen to pop music, I never listen to Radio 1; I don’t read the review pages of Sunday papers. I don’t buy any South African goods, I don’t own a car and generally I don’t spend any money on the kind of crap shops are full of. I’ve no interest in getting a proper job and I don’t care if I never own my own house – when people talk about house prices I don’t listen. I don’t know any bankers or any people who work in advertising – I’ve only even been to the City once. If somebody is reading a tabloid newspaper I try to make sure I don’t see it. OK? Now we come to the really important things: I spend quite a lot of time painting and thinking about art. In other words I try not to go blind. I don’t read shit books and I never go to shit films. I play as much sport as I can and I listen to Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Lester Bowie, Beethoven and Shostakovitch – in other words I try not to let myself go deaf. You get the picture? I’m engaged in some of the most important political battles of our time.’
I laughed but it was difficult to tell whether Steranko was serious or not. Ed wasn’t having it either way.
‘You’re the most arrogant fucking wanker I’ve ever met,’ he said and trudged off to the other bar.
‘I do talk some shit sometimes,’ Steranko said.
‘You’re just a garret radical,’ I said laughing, as everyone made room for us back at the table. Freddie was telling Belinda about his book.
‘It’s all autobiographical,’ he said. ‘The narrator is an influential jazz critic who sleeps with lots of trendy women.’
‘No, what’s it like really? Is there a plot?’
‘Oh no there’s no plot. I hate plots. Plots are what get people killed. Generally the plots are the worst thing about books. It’s such a bore the way that in chapter eleven or whatever somebody always has to get hold of a gun. Plots are what you get on television: there’s no need for them these days.’
‘How much have you written?’
‘Not much at all. You don’t fancy taking a stab at it do you?’
Steranko had his arm around Foomie’s shoulders; Carlton was talking to someone I didn’t know. The pub was full of the noise of laughing and chinking glasses and the ringing of the till. There was hardly room to move. People bought each other drinks and no one wanted to fight. Freddie bought a huge round and I realised that I loved piss-ups even more than I did a year ago. I looked up at the Christmas streamers and the balloons, the tinsel lanterns and the brightly coloured balls. The hubbub of the pub was all around me and again I had the odd sense that I’d had on the football pitch, of time standing still for a fraction of a second. Looking up I saw the ceiling fan slow and stop, the blur of movement replaced by the sharp image of its four stationary blades – a spider’s web strung taut as a net between them.
036
In the post was a summons to the Magistrates’ Court for non-payment of rates I’d already been assured I didn’t owe. Four months ago they’d written to confirm that I wouldn’t have to pay any rates. Then they asked me for five hundred quid. I wrote back explaining that they’d already told me I didn’t owe any rates. Another demand arrived. I wrote again. They sent another demand. I wrote again. None of these letters of mine were acknowledged – as though the place sending the demands didn’t actually exist.
When the summons arrived I phoned the rates office but there was no answer. I went down to the office but as soon as I began speaking a man in uniform waved his hand to silence me and pointed to a notice explaining that no enquiries could be dealt with because of an industrial dispute. I sat down in the corridor, wrote another letter and dumped it in a rubbish bin marked ‘Post’.
Back home I ate a dismal plate of beans on toast and drank a mug of tea. Under the prison glare of the bare lightbulb, tiny bubbles of grease floated on the brown surface of the liquid.
On the news there was an item about anti-hunt demonstrators somewhere in the home counties. The huntsmen were all decked out sedately in their red riding gear, the hounds all yapping and panting while the demonstrators tried to get in the way and make a nuisance of themselves. In close-up one of the demonstrators was yelling ‘Scab! Scab!’
In recent years the word had become an all-purpose term of abuse
for any situation in which one group of people wanted to move while another group wished them to remain stationary. So frequently had the word been used that it no longer carried any pejorative weight as far as the scabs were concerned. Its moral edge had been blunted and now it sounded like an aggressive greeting that was also an exclamation of pain, defeat and humiliation on the behalf of the person uttering it. It was something you shouted when the lorries or strike-breakers had already driven past under police escort. There was almost something elegiac about it, a nostalgic appeal to the word’s own lost moral and political authority, like a fading echo on a cold day, trying to call its way back to the lost warmth of the mouth.
035
On Christmas Eve Steranko invited everyone over to his house for a turkey dinner. We all sat around the kitchen table which he had dismantled, hauled up the stairs and then reassembled in his room. A fire was burning in the grate and more wood was piled up on either side of the fireplace. All the usual clutter of his room had been cleared away and thrown on his bed or shoved into corners: notebooks, sketch pads, paperback novels. As always the walls were covered with unfinished drawings; canvases were stacked up in a corner. Apart from the fire the only light in the room was from candles on the table and on the mantelpiece. He had even bought some cheap Christmas crackers. Everyone had brought booze and grass and we were all drunk and stoned by the time Steranko emerged from the kitchen bearing the turkey ceremoniously before him like a crown on a cushion. The roast potatoes and turkey had been cooked a deep golden brown. There was gravy, broccoli, peas and boiled potatoes. We ate like pigs and swilled back more glasses of red wine. When we had finished the turkey we pulled the crackers and all put the coloured paper hats on our heads. Freddie announced that the other day he’d met someone who was commissioning editor at a place where they did the mottoes for Christmas crackers and he reckoned he’d be pushing some work his way. Everyone laughed and we all compared the pointless trinkets that dropped out of the crackers: a gondola, a chandelier, a parachutist, a bicycle, a saxophone.