The Tyranny of Lost Things

by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

  ‘Yeah? I thought that might be why you’re here. Take a walk?’ He gestured to the door, which I eyed a tad nervously.

  ‘Are we er . . . allowed?’

  ‘Why? Were you expecting straitjackets and padded cells? ‘Course we’re allowed, let me just fetch an orderly.’

  He walked away, then returned several moments later with an affable-looking nurse, who introduced himself as Martin and buzzed us outside.

  ‘It’s not Victorian times. They do let me out,’ said Mikey D. ‘He’s just got to be up my arse the whole time in case I go mental.’

  ‘It’s for your own safety,’ grinned Martin. ‘And believe me, Mikey boy, up your hairy arse is the last place I’d want to be.’

  Mikey D lit up a fag and swaggered over to the adjoining public park.

  ‘Plus, it’s been a while since I fed the ducks,’ said Mikey D. ‘Good to get a look at the ugly cunts every now and again.’

  We meandered towards the pond, with Martin lurking at a polite distance.

  ‘How’s your dad?’

  ‘All right, last time I heard. He’s up in Wales, in the mountains.’

  ‘Ah, the great Welsh exodus. How predictable of him, the bloody hippy.’

  I laughed. ‘He’s got a yurt in the back garden if you fancy going up to visit him.’

  ‘Yeah maybe,’ he said, in a way that made it clear he didn’t. ‘So back at Delirium Towers, are we?’

  ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘Just my private name for it. Christ, the things that went on there. It’s a miracle you’re not in an asylum yourself. That nasty business with the girl. So much for peace, love and understanding. Real hippie enclave, though, Quorn Crescent. Haha. The whole thing used to be squatted, you know, not just number 26.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ I said. ‘What nasty business?’

  Mikey looked at me with a raised eyebrow.

  ‘Have you asked Coral?’

  ‘She said she’d tell me, if I visited you.’

  ‘Best leave it to her then. My brain’s all frazzled, innit. I’m all mixed up.’

  I sighed. ‘How long did you live there?’

  ‘Let’s see,’ said Mikey. ‘I moved out in about 1990, not long before I first got sectioned. It was like a time capsule, that place. A fucking TARDIS, hurtling through the decades, nothing changing. Your dad still banging the old hippy drum well after the fact. Nearly twenty years I was there, I think. Yeah, I got sectioned in 1991. Though obviously there’d been times before then when I’d felt pretty fucking peaky. Too many bad trips, man. Too much time spent off my tits. Too much tragedy witnessed. Too many people I loved, gone.’

  His sadness made me glib, and I said, ‘Well, they say that if you remember the sixties then you weren’t there.’

  ‘Oh, I remember it, fuzzy though it may be. How could I forget meeting your old man?’

  ‘I didn’t realise you’d known him that long.’

  Mikey sat down on a bench by the water and toyed with the beads at his wrist.

  ‘1966,’ he said. ‘UFO club, Tottenham Court Road. We were just schoolboys then. We must have been, what? Sixteen? Neither of us had stayed past O-levels; we’d been too busy separately acquainting ourselves with the finest mind-altering substances that the West End had to offer. Then we came together at this magical place and the rest is history.’

  ‘What was UFO club?’ I said, pronouncing it ‘yoo-fo’, as he did.

  ‘It was a hippy paradise, darling. Words do not do it justice. It was in an old Irish dance hall, got adopted by some hippies. Pink Floyd used to hang out there, it was radical. Poetry, music, art. The whole place stank of patchouli, these wide-eyed kids lying around, off their heads most of them, watching the light like falling snow. There was a room in the back you could go if you took too much, but mostly it was pretty friendly, like. This mop-haired geezer, can’t remember his name now, used to live out on some nudist colony near Watford, had this thing he called the trip machine, and would do these light shows using bodily fluids – piss, spunk, you know. The lot. Mixed with food colouring. They looked so beautiful, Harmony. We used to lie there for hours watching the blobs of light move, then crawl over to the macrobiotic food counter for a snack. Not that I could ever abide that shit. Give me some good fried chicken any day.’

  I eyed his bulbous gut then looked away quickly.

  ‘Apparently the light shows had first been designed for patients at mental hospitals. Ironic eh? Considering getting off my box and looking at that stuff is what got me here in the end. Amazing your dad made it really, considering the amount he was putting away. Anyway, so that’s how we became trip buddies, lying in this club listening to whole albums until 6am, wearing bloody face paint and kaftans, looking like total ponces, listening to some fuckwit mime artist accompany a poetry reading. Embarrassing, really, but God, we had a blast. They were all there, all the beautiful people. Townshend, Hendrix, McCartney. Yoko doing some film where she got everyone to bare their arses. And don’t even get me started on the pussy – no offence intended, girl.’

  ‘Bryn met all those people?’

  ‘You didn’t really “meet” in the traditional sense,’ said Mikey. ‘You just . . . absorbed. Me and your dad, we were sort of in our own world, doing all this wild stuff. One time, we went to this event at Ally Pally called the 14-hour Technicolour Dream . . . ’

  ‘I think I’ve heard of that.’

  ‘Yeah, it was pretty intense. ’67 I think it was. The start of the Summer of Love. There was this big helter-skelter right in the middle, and all this mad stuff going on, as well as the music. Folk music and tarot cards, and circus performers. Some cat in a headdress that was on fire. We were off our nuts, because there was this guy there who always gave away his first 400 trips for free. There were thousands of people there, and some of them had climbed up the scaffolding near the big organ and were swinging by their arms. It was the middle of summer. I can just remember lying out on the grass thinking I could feel every single blade of it. It was all so clear to me. The sun coming up, miles and miles of rooftops, the people. And your dad was there living it all with me. What a summer it was.’

  ‘What was he like?’ My father, this man I barely knew.

  ‘He was a vision in paisley,’ said Mikey, chucking his fag butt at a duck and missing. ‘Hair like George Harrison on the cover of Sgt Pepper – that was the soundtrack to the summer, by the way. And that quiet confidence that people would often mistake for arrogance. You have it a bit, actually, though you look more like Stella. And he was always going off on one about something. Clever bloke, your dad. Foucault, or R. D. Laing, or Eastern philosophy, usually after a shit ton of Nepalese temple ball. And he always had at least a few girls on the go, sometimes older women, even though he was just a teenager then.’

  I tried to imagine Bryn as Mikey described him, strutting down Carnaby Street, a joint flopping between his lips.

  ‘So when did you move into Longhope?’

  ‘Oh, that wasn’t for a good few years yet. Summer of ’67 we embarked on various experiments in communal living, as was then the fashion. Usually chosen according to the number of willing girls in residence. We were near Dalston for a bit, in this house full of cats. The place was a dump. Then we moved to Islington Park Street for a couple of weeks, but your dad had a bust up about anarchism with one of the regulars so after that we were somewhere near the Ladbroke Grove. There were so many empty houses at the time, not like now. But we were constantly getting moved on by the busies. Your dad had gone out. I went to the pub. When they left we just nailed the windows up again.’

  ‘And I suppose this was all during the free love period . . . ’

  Mikey laughed. ‘Oh yeah. In a lot of the places couples were banned. They’d put all the mattresses in one room, and you couldn’t close your door or anything. You had to share everything. We had a chest of pooled clothes and you just picked out what you wore that day . . . ’

  It was ironic, considering the l
ast time I had seen Bryn he’d been living a thing-filled existence that saw him almost buried beneath piles of clutter.

  ‘Can you imagine me in a dress, walking down Holloway Road like a moving target? Shared our bodies, too. Proper, ideologically-driven fucking. I think that’s where your dad got all his ideas. You couldn’t sleep with the same person for more than one night. It was fun for a while, until I got the clap off some girl in one of the Notting Hill places. Think she was a member of something called Tribe of the Sacred Mushroom, if you can fucking believe it. You’d come home from the shops or something and there’d just be some couple banging in the living room, as everyone else was sat around watching, out of their minds. Or else drumming. There was a lot of drumming. And chanting.’

  ‘It all just seems like such a cliché,’ I said.

  ‘It was a cliché, girl. That’s the thing, and the media jumped on it. But that wasn’t really the sixties, you know. For us it was everything they said it was. Not for most people. The sixties happened to a couple of hundred people in London, and passed everyone else in the country by. While we were all experimenting with drugs and sex and general debauchery they were all sitting in their poky, dark living rooms watching The Good Old Days and mourning Churchill, ironing their doilies and popping in their diaphragms for a half-hour of socially-mandated how’s-your-father. No wonder so many of their kids used to come down to the squats in town on the weekends. Weekend ravers, we used to call them.’

  ‘So then you came up this way, after that?’ Interesting as I was finding Mikey’s reminiscences, I was keen to hurry through the next couple of decades to my own childhood. We hadn’t yet reached the seventies, even, and there was a manic edge to his voice that, perhaps I imagined, meant a more watchful stare from the lurking Martin.

  ‘Nah, then we went to 144 Piccadilly. That was famous, that one, because it was a mansion right on Hyde Park Corner. There was this group of homeless hippies around the statue of Eros that we used to call the “Dilly Dossers”, who survived off fallen fruit in Covent Garden Market and the kindness of strangers. I think they started it by occupying the place. We used to drop with them sometimes. ’69 this was, I remember because there were a bunch of Frenchies fresh from the ‘68 riots who turned up with a projector and showed us the footage. Anyway, so the main doors that faced the park were nailed shut, and we had this plywood drawbridge thing that we used to get in. It was massive in there, and there was no electricity or anything. Used a camping stove to eat, or else we liberated bread and milk from nearby doorsteps.

  ‘We were only there for three weeks, before the dibble got us out, but it was great. One of the guys was in King Mob, I seem to remember . . . ’

  ‘King Mob?’

  ‘Anarchist group. They did this amazing graffiti in the early seventies, along the tube line from Westbourne Park. Famous it was. “SLEEP – TUBE – WORK – HOW MUCH MORE CAN YOU TAKE?” Something like that.’

  ‘Oh yeah I think I’ve seen a photo of that.’

  ‘We made loads of mates there, before the police tricked their way in by telling some kids standing guard there was a pregnant woman inside, giving birth. Fuckers. There was a media circus. They said we were spongers. Really it was a housing crisis, just like you kids have now. They were razing habitable buildings to the ground.’

  Mikey lit another cigarette and I shivered as the sun slinked behind a cloud. I risked a quick glance at my phone for the time.

  ‘Boring you am I? All right we’ll wrap it up shall we? Need my meds anyway. You’ll come again, though, yeah? Then I’ll tell you the rest. That pretty much brings us up to Longhope Crescent, though I think there was another one, Prince of Wales Crescent, in Kentish Town, before then. That was a good one – had a treehouse and a paddling pool, and all. Not to mention one of the first ever health food shops. Mix your own muesli at Community Foods. There were three hundred of us squatting there, before they knocked it down. Council estate now.’

  ‘Well it’s been very informative,’ I said. ‘And I really hope you feel better soon.’

  ‘Strange one, you are, girl.’ Mikey did a smile that was almost a grimace. ‘I’ll be all right. I always am. Just need a few extended stays in the nuthouse, that’s all. Tame the voices.’

  ‘That must be tough,’ I said, shifting on my feet and burying my fists in the front two pockets of my sundress. I nodded quickly and started to turn.

  ‘Hold on a sec. Brought something for you.’ Mikey delved into the pocket of his leather jacket and produced a round, green plastic ball. He handed it to me.

  ‘A ball?’

  ‘A boule,’ he said, exaggerating the French. ‘It’s from 144 Piccadilly. There was a whole room of them, weirdly. In boxes. We used to use them to pelt the skinheads with when they tried to come in. It sounds stupid but it’s always been a good luck thing for me. I mean, I’ve taken it everywhere. I want you to have it.’

  ‘Why?’

  Mikey tipped the peak of his hat at me and gestured to Martin that it was time to go. ‘I feel like you need it more than me, babe.’

  It was not a statement I took as a compliment.

  Book

  1 x copy ‘The Water Babies – as told to the children’ (Charles Kingsley & Amy Steadman), London and New York: T. C. and E. C. Jack, and E. P. Dutton (1905). 150 x 120 mm. 8 colour plates after Katherine Cameron. (Light spotting on the edges of the plates, several leaves torn.) Original cloth, gilt border and lettering.

  A sign that I was feeling anxious, in those days, was when I took to searching for things. Looking back, I can see it was a kind of mania. My searching would take on an obsessional quality that made it difficult for me to eat, or leave the house, or do much of anything, really, except look. This time, I knew it was a bad patch because the nightmares became more frequent: there I would be as usual, wandering from room to room, as elsewhere in the house a telephone rang incessantly, unanswered. A tiny child standing in the cavernous hallway, looking up, up, up through the spirals of the staircase to the corniced plaster above, with its ceiling rose sculpted like ice cream from a van, a van whose eerie, tinkling melody could then be heard through illuminated open windows, a nursery song undulating on a breeze that caused the chandelier to swing back and forth, back and forth with a hoarse creak, as I stared up at it. And then, the sensation of running, but without my moving at all. I would feel a desperate urge to escape the house’s darkened interior, a potent, numbing dread just at the point where I would wake as though suffocating, feeling every inch of my irritated ribcage as I gulped air into my lungs with tears in my eyes.

  This time, the lost object in question was an early twentieth-century copy of the fairy tale The Water Babies, about six inches tall and cloth-bound, with beautiful coloured plates that when I was small I spent hours gazing at, running my fingers over their glossy surface. My favourite, on the inner facing page, showed a naked child kneeling next to a river bank, hands clasped together as though praying to a dragonfly. ‘Oh! Come back, come back you beautiful creature,’ read the inscription, ‘I have no one to play with and I’m so lonely here.’

  The book was one of the few things that I had been able to salvage from my childhood. It had belonged to my maternal grandmother, a kind, principled woman who, while not particularly warm, saw it as her responsibility to ensure I didn’t end up completely feral. She read it to me every night before bed over warm cocoa and crackers, during those lengthy spells when I found myself palmed off, as Stella recuperated in San Francisco, Goa, or the Tuscan Buddhist community she had taken up with. When I had moved in I had had it with me, I was sure, a small box of childhood effects, now missing. The thought that I may have lost such a valued possession filled me with a feeling not unlike heartbreak, and I spent the daytimes before my night shifts ambling from room to room, searching in a desultory way for the sight of the familiar disintegrating spine.

  This crisis was not helped by the fact that, as the summer progressed and our torpor increased, the flat had descended
into complete chaos. The humidity of the conditions meant that the moths flourished and were rising from the carpets in a flittering mass. As I tried to sleep I lay in bed listening to the sweeping of their dusty wings against the woodchip; the next day the evidence of their midnight snacks would be taken from my wardrobe and examined. Silk slip after silk slip pockmarked with holes. As the weeks passed and we drank more and cared less, the flat became a dumping ground for sticky mismatched crystal glasses and discarded takeaways; full ashtrays and light cotton garments shed like skin across sofas and chairs. Objects were witnesses to our disarray.

  But despite this I looked, and looked. And when I did not find what I was looking for I looked again.

  I was turning over the living room one morning when Lucia came in and flopped down onto the sofa. As was typical of Lou, she did not ask me what I was looking for nor remark on the piles of objects I had built during my systematic but frenzied hunting. Instead, she examined the beds of her nails and waited for me to stop what I was doing and turn around to look at her.

  I turned around and looked at her.

  ‘My mother has come to town,’ said Lou, in a voice that implied these were not good tidings. She sighed. ‘I’m to meet her in the Fumoir, at Claridge’s. Will you come with me?’

  ‘Why?’ My nose ring was itching and I had the impulse to fiddle with it. ‘I’m not very Claridge’s, Lou.’

  Lou did not disagree, saying simply, ‘But I can’t face her alone.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll go and get dressed.’

  As I searched for something to wear, I reflected on how my brief years at university had taught me that it wasn’t especially difficult to appear richer than you were, at least until you opened your mouth. As long as you didn’t look as though you were trying too hard, like some keen out-of-towner down for a show, then people would usually fall for it. My mother had taught me that. While those who barely knew her were taken in by her professed egalitarianism, as her daughter I was aware of her bourgeois snobbishness. Hence her saying things like, ‘Don’t chew gum, it’s common,’ and ‘Your Aunt Valerie married beneath her’. She was neither one lot nor the other, so looked down on the lower and privately aspired to the upper. She would never admit this.