by Geoff Dyer
Freddie took off his glasses and in the bright sunlight I could see the harm done to his face. One side was swollen out around the cheekbone and badly discoloured; the other was livid and bright-looking. There were small cuts on his forehead and cheek. One eye was swollen shut and purple; the other was bloodshot but basically OK. His lips and nose were swollen. Both nostrils were filled with hard black blood. His voice came out thick and bubbly because the inside of his mouth was smashed and swollen. He looked so bad it was difficult to imagine his face ever healing again.
We walked to his room and Freddie lay on the bed, propped up on pillows.
‘I’m so sorry Freddie.’
‘Me too.’
‘Are you going to be OK?’
‘Yeah.’
It didn’t matter that this was all we said. It didn’t matter that we didn’t hold each other and sob, that words adequate to the situation were not there. Tenderness is a matter of inflection, not vocabulary.
‘I’ve brought you a record,’ I said. ‘I thought getting something for nothing might cheer you up.’
‘That was kind of you . . .’
‘How d’you feel?’
‘I’ve felt better. My head aches, I get dizzy when I stand up, my nose hurts, my mouth is sore. My ribs hurt . . .’
‘What happened at the hospital?’
‘I spent the whole morning there. I was sitting next to a bloke with a big bloody bandage round his foot, tucking into a bag of McDonald’s burgers. Have you been to a hospital recently?’
‘No . . .’
‘It was like a DHSS waiting-room. The same atmosphere: people driven there as a last resort. Everything old and worn out and not even clean-looking. All the doctors and nurses looking like they were going to drop dead from exhaustion at any moment. I tell you, I’m going to join BUPA.’
‘What did they say?’
‘They took a whole load of X-rays. Basically I’m alright. My teeth are still all there, my nose and jaw aren’t broken. My eyes don’t seem to be damaged . . .’
There was a loud knock at the door.
‘That’ll be Carlton,’ said Freddie. I let Carlton in and made some tea while he went in to Freddie.
When I returned with the tray Carlton was very gently dabbing Freddie’s face with something.
‘It’s arnica,’ he said. ‘It brings the swelling down and soothes everything. How’s that feel Freddie?’
‘OK. Nice.’
Carlton continued very gently putting this thin cream on Freddie’s face. Again my eyes nettled with tears. I poured the tea while Freddie – he couldn’t drink, his mouth was too bad – told us what happened. He’d just come out of a party when a young guy asked him the time. Freddie said he didn’t have a watch and next thing the guy was hitting him all over the place. He didn’t even take any money.
‘I don’t remember much else,’ Freddie concluded. ‘Except that just after I’d fallen on the floor he kicked me in the chest but I had a book in my coat pocket and that took the brunt of it.’
‘What was the book?’
‘Rilke poems funnily enough. It’s made me regard him in a whole new light.’
A few moments later Carlton said, ‘Did you get a look at the geezer?’
‘Not really. I hardly saw him. Just a young black guy, short hair, leather jacket. About twenty I suppose. Younger maybe.’
‘Would you recognise him again?’
‘No. You know, he was just some guy who was so pissed off he wanted to beat somebody’s shit in so he’d feel a bit better,’ said Freddie. ‘It could’ve been a lot worse. I wasn’t stabbed. Nothing’s broken . . . Once in six years, you know? It happens.’
We stopped speaking and listened to Art Pepper. It was a recording of a gig he played a couple of years before he died, the music of someone who’d learnt to cherish what he did. Pepper was an alcoholic and a junkie; he served time in San Quentin, but he didn’t squander his ability by getting as fucked up as he did. He had to waste his talent in order for it finally to flourish. As an artist his weakness was essential to him; in his playing it became a source of strength.
The room filled up with hurt pity and the tenderness of scarred hands. The music cried out but there was no appeal in it; it had to find its own consolation.
I was still at that age when you do not form friendships but are formed by them, when there is no difference between having good friends and being a good friend. I’d known Freddie for a long time, six or seven years, twice as long at least as I’d known any of my other friends. I hardly ever kept in touch with people for more than three years – Freddie was the only exception I could think of. After about three years of knowing a group of people your identity becomes fixed by their expectations, you become trapped by your shared history; your range of responses becomes more and more limited. After a certain point there’s no room for anything but the most gradual alteration in your identity. The past suffocates and restricts and the only way you can breathe and move again is with completely new circumstances, new people. With Freddie it was different. My affection for him exerted no pressure. I mean the kind of pressure where liking someone makes you want to be like them – this was exactly how I felt about Steranko – and then, after a while, that turns into its opposite: you begin to dislike them for not being enough like you. I say ‘you’; I mean ‘I’.
Freddie once said that friends are the difference between being a spectator and a participant and I remembered how, together with another friend who I’d since lost touch with, the three of us had got beaten up by one guy outside a party in Putney. ‘Go on: all three of you rush me,’ he’d said after hitting each of us once. ‘Right,’ he said when we all just stood there, ‘now I’m really going to teach you a lesson,’ and he proceeded to instruct each of us in turn. Eventually we ran off with no real damage done – a fat lip, a black eye, a bloody nose – and soon the whole episode was remembered only as anecdote fodder. This was about the time when – on the basis of having flicked through The Dharma Bums and watched several episodes of ‘Kung Fu’ – Freddie claimed to be a Buddhist. That lasted about six weeks and soon after we dropped our first tabs of acid. I remembered Freddie, notebook in hand, waiting for something to happen. ‘Am turning inside out’ was the only entry he made.
The record came to an end. Freddie had fallen asleep and was breathing heavily through his mouth. I looked at Carlton and we smiled. I made more tea and Carlton put on another record. When that one finished we played another, letting the room grow dark around us, hearing the hiss of the gas fire between songs. Freddie woke about an hour later, unsure where he was or what had happened to him.
‘Where am I?’ He looked at Carlton and me, glad we were still there.
We stayed until nine. We told Freddie we’d phone him tomorrow.
‘Thanks . . . for the record and the arnica,’ he said as we left. ‘Take care.’
‘You too.’
Carlton and I walked part of the way home together. Getting done over in some way was just a question of time really. You hoped that when your turn came it wouldn’t be anything too bad, that it would just be young kids who were only after your money, that if you handed it over you’d be free to go, that if you got punched to the ground you wouldn’t get a kicking too, that if they pulled a knife they’d slash and not stab; and you hoped that you would spot the moment when the only chance left was to run – and that if the worst came to the worst, if all else failed, you would have the presence of mind to lash out with whatever came to hand.
025
Later that week Foomie’s flat got burgled. They came in through the bathroom window and took a cassette player and a portable TV. Foomie said it made her feel glad she didn’t own anything.
I was edgy and alert as I walked around. The whole area seemed tense but it was difficult to know whether this was a result of my own contingent experience or of my gauging an aggregate feeling that made itself subtly but palpably felt.
I told people about Fr
eddie and the guy getting done over on the tube. They told me about things that had happened to them, that they had seen or that other people had told them. Ripples of panic and suspicion and worry spread out and intersected.
I went to dinner with some people in Kennington whom I vaguely knew and quite liked. I took beer; everyone else brought wine but wanted to drink beer. When someone asked what I did I said ‘odds and ends, bits and pieces, nothing really’ and felt pointless as a broken bulb.
The food was nice and there was plenty of it. When we’d finished eating and had drunk all of the beer and most of the wine somebody started telling a story about how he’d recently been involved in a car accident. Someone else told of an injury they’d suffered a few years ago. I told the story of how my leg got smashed at the factory. We talked about a programme that had been on TV about self-defence. Someone told of how they’d recently been burgled and after everyone had told their burglary stories we talked about mugging, rape, trouble at parties, stabbings and broken bottle fights in pubs.
These subjects were our currency, the common denominator of our experience; they were subjects of interest to us all, topics on which everyone had something to say.
The dinner came to an end – it was a Monday night and people had to get up for work the next day – and I caught a late bus home. A storm was building up and by the time I got off the bus at Brixton a steady rain was falling. Walking past Freddie’s house I saw a light in his window on the second floor. I stood beneath a street lamp, threads of yellow rain falling around me. I saw a face framed by the window in the warm light of the anglepoise above Freddie’s desk, looking out into the night. Suddenly there was a flash of lightning like a jagged crack in time. A shudder of bleached rain.
I glanced up at the window once more and walked on, the sound of my footsteps lost in a low roll of thunder.
024
I spent the rest of the week in Court. A friend of mine who knew a solicitor asked if I wanted to do some court clerking. All you had to do, he said, was sit with the client and take a few notes to remind the barrister of what was going on. It paid twenty-five quid a day, cash.
‘Oh and don’t forget to wear a suit,’ he said before putting the phone down.
The case was being heard at the Crown Court in Croydon and I was quite looking forward to it as I travelled down there on the train: meeting the defendant, piecing together a story from the unfolding catechism of the court, weighing up the truth and falsehood of witnesses, seeing the judge and lawyers in action . . .
I met up easily with the barrister – a puppy-fat Oxbridge graduate – and he introduced me to the client. He was a sad mixed-race kid, an eighteen-year-old no-hoper who wasn’t much good at anything, not even looking sympathetic in Court. He was accused of breaking and entering some offices in Lewes. His story was that he’d gone to look for his friend Trotsky who was living down there. He called in at various bars and asked where Trotsky was but nobody had seen him. In the end he got pissed, missed the last train back and was picked up while trying to find somewhere to crash for the night.
The judge didn’t look at him sternly or savagely; he hardly looked at him at all. The whole thing was conducted like a bored ceremony that had considerable power but which no longer had any meaning. Clarifying points of legal procedure for the benefit of the jury, with a bored impatience he made no attempt to conceal, the judge made it plain that he had no interest in either the judicial or human aspects of the case – the only time he showed any alacrity was in arranging adjournments for lunch. The members of the jury were bored too; they wished they were involved in something more interesting like armed robbery or rape. There was nothing about the kid being tried to threaten the indifference or rouse the interest of anyone in the Court. The proceedings left him with only two options: insolence or submissiveness – and since there was nothing to be gained by either of these he looked bored. The nominal object of the court’s attention, he played a part in its proceedings only to the extent that someone getting stitched up by doctors participates in surgery.
If he got convicted, he told me during one of several adjournments, he’d probably end up back inside. He could handle that if he had to. Maybe he’d get off with a suspended sentence in which case he’d have the summer to look forward to.
The case dragged on. Each day I commuted down to Croydon in my suit. The longer the case went on the more money I earned (I’d already begun to think like a lawyer). Somehow the elaborate indifference of the court proceedings coloured – or rather, they did exactly the opposite, drained all colour from – my feelings for the boy. He became simply ‘the accused’, an abstraction, a legal term. Both his case and the circumstances in which he was being tried were dwarfed by the lofty ethics of justice in whose name they were being carried out. In the praxis of the Court all that remained of the ideal it embodied was the shabby paraphernalia of robes and wigs, the elaborate hierarchical etiquette with which only the officers of the court were familiar.
After a brief adjournment the jury proudly delivered their verdict of guilty. It was as if by announcing his guilt they had negatively affirmed their own freedom from civic wrongdoing, demonstrated to the Court their own harmlessness. The judge looked gravely over his glasses and handed out a suspended sentence, pointing out to this sad eighteen-year-old (the accused, the defendant, the client – or did he have some new title now that his guilt had been established and proved beyond reasonable doubt?) that the suspended prison term would be there, hanging over his head like the sword of Damocles. Unimpressed by the classical reference the defendant didn’t even blink. I walked with him back to the station. He borrowed a pound for the train fare to London and bought a pack of cigarettes. That was the last I saw of him. I called in at the solicitor’s office, claimed half a day more than I’d actually worked and multiplied my claim for travelling expenses by improbable complications of route. They didn’t seem bothered one way or the other.
023
Suddenly, like a submarine breaking the surface of the ocean after long months beneath the waves, it was summer. From open windows, radio chat tinkled to the street. Carlton and I walked round the market, ostensibly to buy vegetables but really just for the pleasure of seeing bare arms and legs, women in dresses, sunglasses, the sun on people’s faces. The market was clogged up with smiling people. Coins glinted in the sun as they were handed over. The stallholders had something to say to everybody. No one wanted potatoes or turnips. It was oranges that compelled attention, piled on top of each other, two halves cut open and glistening freshly at the bottom of each stack. Apples, lemons, grapefruits, tomatoes swelling redly in the heat. Next to the fruit-seller the man who ran the china stall pinned up a notice – ‘Please don’t stand in front of my stall. It’s not a waiting-room for the fruit-stall’ – and was happy to let the sun polish his wares. Winding through the noise was the sound of an ice-cream van; today was the first day of the year he was selling more ice-creams than hotdogs. I bought a can of coke that tasted like being hit in the teeth gradually. A group of young guys, heads almost shaved and wearing Raybans, trainers and black leather jackets moved fast through the crowd. Heavy women were clinging to their shopping and laughing with their friends. There was the smell of coconut oil in hair, glistening. Music from shop doorways mingled and remixed in the open air. Splotches of ice-cream on the pavement. A car went by, trailing a loud exhaust of hip-hop.
‘Greenpeace,’ said Luther shaking his coffee jar suggestively in front of an American tourist with a camera and wide-angle check trousers. A mad guy with locks and a walking-stick was shouting ‘let me out! let me out’ as if he was locked up inside himself. A tall rasta in a blue tracksuit strode past taking no notice of anything except where he was going. At the Recreation Centre a BBC news team were stopping representative-looking people and asking how Brixton had changed since the riots. Other representative-looking people shrugged through the heavy doors, struggling under a bulk of muscle which, until they got to the weights roo
m, looked awkward and inessential as a diver’s tanks.
‘I’d give my right arm for biceps like that,’ I said to Carlton.
We made our way along the crowded pavement, the elderly moved cautiously along in jackets and ties, in cardigans and coats. I saw Freddie’s bike, locked up to a lamp-post by the tube station. A young punk with grey arms and eyes so pinned you wondered how any light got in asked Carlton for money.
‘I’m always giving you money, man.’
‘I’m always skint.’
Carlton handed him some coins. We crossed the High Street where the traffic was hardly moving. Bus drivers, shirt sleeves rolled up to their elbows, sat it out; conductors hung from the back platforms of their buses. From somewhere in the congealing traffic a police car wailed pointlessly.
We stopped off at the Trinity and sat outside, our beer warming quickly in the sun. It was like a little bit of Islington, estate agents said of this square, with its pub and restaurant. The small forecourt of the pub was packed with people who looked like they worked for the council, arguing departmental politics, getting a few down them and loosening their ties. I felt sleepy drunk after one pint but still only just resisted the temptation to have a couple more.
‘It’s riot weather this, perfect riot weather,’ said a shiny-faced white guy, holding his beer up to the sun as if reading the future in the dregs.
Slowly, dragging our bags of produce, we walked along the High Street past the smearily opaqued front of a large shop that was being refitted. This often happened: a shop selling mass-produced beds and furniture started up with an opening sale that lasted for a couple of months. Then there was a closing-down sale and as soon as that finished the windows were whited over and signs saying ‘New Shop Opening Soon’ appeared. Then a new shop – called Price Slasher, or Cost Buster – opened on the old premises, selling exactly the same thing.
‘That must be the worst shop in London,’ said Carlton. ‘The only decent thing you can buy in there is a black bin-liner.’