Freddie got back a couple of days later, just as I was locking up to go round to Steranko’s.
‘I’ll come with you,’ he said. ‘Just give me a couple of minutes.’ He dumped his bags in the hallway, pulled off his shirt and sweater at the same time – something he always did – and tossed them to one side. After putting on a new shirt and blowing his nose on some toilet paper he was ready to leave.
‘How are you feeling?’ I asked as we walked away from the house.
‘Tired. I think I’ve got bus lag.’
‘What was the cottage like?’
‘Damp,’ he said blowing his nose again.
‘You sound like you’ve got a cold.’
‘I have. It rained all the time. I arrived there soaking wet and woke up with a cold the next morning. I spent most of my time snivelling by the pub fire, drinking hot toddies and listening to people talking about their walking boots. It turns out that there’s a lot more to walking boots than meets the eye.’
‘Did you do any writing?’
‘None at all.’
‘Too ill?’
Freddie nodded and smiled. He’d gone to Northumberland to try to make some headway with the book he’d been writing. Off and on he’d been working on it for a couple of years but it didn’t seem to be progressing very fast. He wasn’t exactly a slave to his art but to Freddie this didn’t matter. The important thing at this stage, as far as he was concerned, was to act like a writer. In recent months he’d taken to wearing jackets, cotton work-shirts, baggy trousers and food-stained ties – clothes, as he said, with an element of intellectual pretension – and these, together with the black-framed glasses and hair swept back towards one ear (it wasn’t quite long enough to be swept back over the ear) gave him that air of the young would-be often associated with Paris cafés of the 1920s.
The door of Steranko’s house opened just as we arrived and one of his flatmates stepped outside, engulfed by a wave of hot air that swept out into the street.
‘He’s upstairs,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to rush.’ The hallway was as hot as the underground in a heatwave. A three-bar electric fire stood guard at the foot of the stairs and as we walked up it became even hotter. Steranko’s door was wide open. Like most of the other people in his squat he’d knocked two rooms into one: divided by an assortment of structural props, one half of the room was a kind of sleeping-living area and the other half was a studio which refused to keep to its side of the bargain. There were cans of paint and brushes all over the place. Canvases were stacked up against the wall; smaller drawings and paintings on paper were stuck to the walls with adhesive tape. In a corner was a paint-splattered easel. The most striking thing about the room was the heat. All the windows were open but it was hot as a steel works. Slumped in a chair and swigging water from a bottle, Steranko was dressed for the beach. He was wearing a vest and boxer shorts, his long arms and legs covered in a thin film of sweat. I was sweating too.
‘Oh hi!’ he said, getting up.
‘Why’s it so hot in here?’ Freddie asked.
‘Probably because all these fires are on,’ Steranko said laughing. I looked around: there was an electric-bar fire full on, a radiator that was too hot to touch and a small fan heater that emitted a parched breeze.
‘How come all the fires are on?’
‘The meter is due to be read in a couple of days and we’ve got to use up as many units as possible to get the bill down.’
This made perfect sense to me. I’d been here on the day Steranko had first tried to fix the electricity meter. It was surprisingly easy. All you had to do was insert a copper pin into the meter and it stopped working.
‘Simple as that,’ he’d said, delicately inserting the pin. The meter stopped quietly without even a murmur. Five minutes later it blew up and there was a total power cut.
‘Well that’s one way of keeping bills down,’ I said. The meter itself was blackened and showed obvious signs of having been tampered with. To remedy this Steranko smashed it to pieces with a hammer – he had an approach to home improvement that was utterly his own – and called the electricity board. One of the people doing work on the house, he said, had accidentally knocked the meter with a metal ladder, thus touching off a potentially dangerous short circuit.
Somebody from the Electricity Board came round within the hour but after taking one look at the meter it became obvious that he wasn’t going to have any of this shit about accidentally breaking it with a ladder.
‘Shall I tell you what happened?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Steranko while I looked on.
‘You shoved a copper pin into the meter, the meter bust and so you smashed the meter with a hammer. Am I right?’
‘No you’re not right, Sherlock Holmes. You’re fucking wrong,’ said Steranko. ‘It’s like I told you . . .’
In the end Steranko’s household only narrowly escaped prosecution and were made to pay a huge deposit for a completely impregnable meter. Undeterred, Steranko got in touch with Erroll, a guy with singed eyebrows who, for twenty-five quid, showed him how to disconnect and reverse all the leads so that after running the meter forward for six weeks you could then run it back for another six, thereby cancelling out the units used. The only problem with this technique, Erroll pointed out casually, was that since it involved holding about six thousand volts of raw power in your hands it was an extremely dangerous operation. It was therefore important to get things right and not get anything muddled up. It was advisable to wear Doc Martins but even then, he concluded, they probably wouldn’t do you any good.
What had happened now, Steranko explained to Freddie and I, was that after about six weeks of running it forward he had switched the meter round and run it backwards. Without realising it, though, they’d used up enough units to take the meter back to less than zero, to about 9000 units, close to the maximum.
‘With the clock like that we’d have a bill of about five thousand pounds – probably more than the whole of the street put together so I had to reverse the leads to send the meter back past the other side of zero, zero, zero. The meter man’s due any day now so we’ve got the house on full steam ahead, fires, lights, everything, twenty-four hours a day. Even when we get it into positive figures we’ve still got to nudge it just past the previous reading. It’s dangerous too. The wiring in this house is pretty dodgy. Feel that wall there.’
We touched the wall which felt hot as a potful of tea.
‘Jesus,’ said Freddie. ‘I think you’re getting close to meltdown.’
We sat sweltering for a few minutes and then Steranko – unusually, I’d not seen him for a week – asked what had been happening to me.
‘My life plummeted to an all-time low,’ I said. ‘I was on the edge of the abyss.’
‘You should have looked over the edge,’ said Freddie. ‘You’d have seen me lying at the bottom of it. You could have dropped in for tea.’
‘I got fired from my job,’ I said.
‘You’re kidding,’ said Steranko, laughing. What was it about my getting sacked that everyone found so funny? There had been some amazement when I’d been offered a job in the first place and even more when I accepted it. It was as though getting a job was a temporary illness from which I had now recovered.
‘What were you sacked for?’
‘Oh it was a whole load of things: attitude, skiving. I don’t know what it is about me and work. As soon as anyone pays me to do anything I devote all my energies to skiving. A lot of the time skiving’s even more boring and tiring than doing the work but the urge to attempt it is irresistible.’
‘That’s why people work,’ said Freddie. ‘Employment is a prerequisite for the truly fulfilling task of skiving, of feeling that you’re screwing your employer. Even heart surgeons probably try to find some way of leaving out a few valves and the odd stitch so they can knock off half an hour early. Homo skiver: man the skiver. Man must work to provide himself with opportunities for skiving.’
‘But the good news – the news so great that I hardly care about losing my job – is that I’ve got somewhere to live.’
As I finished telling him about my new flat the phone rang. Steranko went to answer it and after a moment shouted upstairs to ask if we wanted to go to a party with Carlton.
‘Where is it?’ Freddie shouted back.
‘Near Euston. We’ve got to meet him in a pub in Stockwell if we want to go.’
‘When?’
‘Now.’
I said I’d go; Freddie said he might be along later which was the nearest he ever got to saying no.
The pub was one of those grim boozers where people go to quench their misery rather than their thirst. The bar was full of red light and air so thick you felt insubstantial, as if at any moment you might fade away. Steranko and I waited to get served. Two bar-stools along a man with arms the colour of raw sausage was telling an anecdote.
‘So I got the cunt by the lapels and whump! Straight in with the head.’ His companion nodded, a gesture that echoed softly the action being described. ‘Then one in the side of the fucking head . . .’ He smacked a fist into his palm for emphasis. Yelps and flashes from the fruit-machine were the only other signs of life.
The barman came over. He had an old linoleum face – years ago someone had cut it up with a Stanley knife and then walked all over it, now it didn’t fit properly. I ordered two pints of Gutmaster and tried to imagine a pub where no one talked about fighting. Carlton arrived and put his hands on Steranko’s and my shoulders. We shook hands as the barman trudged off to the beer pump.
‘D’you want a drink Carlton?’
‘No I’m OK . . . So you got somewhere to live yeah?’
‘I move in next week.’
‘Nice.’ The barman dumped our drinks in front of us, glancing at Carlton as he did so. I handed him some money and we moved further along the bar.
‘Some pub isn’t it?’ said Steranko.
‘It was the only place I could think of round here. You know my brother-in-law’s been in hospital, yeah? So I been at my sister’s place helping her out. She lives on the top floor of this tower block a couple of minutes walk away. Incredible place: you see everything – rainbows, lightning, shafts of sunlight bursting through the clouds, amazing sunsets. And the noise, man. Traffic, music, sirens all night and then at seven in the morning the pneumatic drills start. I couldn’t work out where they were coming from. It sounded like it was coming from up above so I went up in my dressing-gown and that’s where they all were, about ten geezers from the council digging up the roof. It was like they were going to build a road across the roof.’
Steranko took a gulp of beer and grimaced.
‘It tastes like it’s been wrung out of a bar towel.’ I took a small sip from my glass and asked the barman to change them for two new pints. He said there was nothing wrong with the ones we had.
‘Nothing wrong with them? There’s nothing right with them,’ Steranko said. In a dark corner someone with a double barrel gut sucked at his pint like a dinosaur cooling its head in a mug of mud.
‘It’s not cloudy, it’s within the sell-by date. And everyone else is drinking it,’ the barman said. The expression on his face was as dead as a creature floating in a jar of alcohol.
He didn’t bother looking at us and we didn’t bother slamming the door when we left.
We walked to Stockwell tube, moaning about what a piss-bin country this was, and how crazy we were to still live in it. We picked up some drink from a store by the underground station where the video security camera was backed up by a uniformed guard and an alsatian dog with bad teeth. Most of the customers had dogs too.
There was a long wait for the tube. We watched two men and two women about our age, dressed up to go dancing, not drunk but already having a good time. We took the tube north, yelling at each other above the clatter of the train. Sitting opposite us was a bap-faced guy who stank of mayonnaise.
Suddenly a middle-aged man a couple of seats down erupted in a fountain of sick. Then he just sat there while the tube hurtled on through the tunnel. Two stops later we got out. He continued sitting their stoically, drenched and stinking.
The party took some finding. After a quarter of an hour we were still walking through an area of abandoned factories, rubble-strewn yards and rusting metal lying in puddles. A little further on there was a new-style post-industrial estate with small freshly-painted corrugated metal manufacturing units making hi-tech software for video games. A few moments later we were back in the derelict landscape of empty factories with broken windows and black chimneys silhouetted against the blue-streaked night sky. It was difficult not to feel a loyal affection for these ugly smoke-blackened buildings when faced with their modern counterparts, the clean, lightweight computerised factories.
‘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.