I find him in the doorway of a solicitor’s office up on Church Road, his blanket drawn up over his head. He snores like a foghorn, steering the early commuters away from the chipped concrete steps. I nudge him with the toe of my trainer. He splutters but doesn’t wake.
‘Sage?’ I hiss.
He is a notoriously heavy sleeper. I left him once, in the daytime, in Preston Park, and returned to find him sprawled out across a bench with a gaggle of gathered teenagers sticking chewing gum into the bristles of his beard. I stayed back, unconvinced of my ability to chase them off, and waited for them to tire. The only thing that woke Sage was one of the teenagers trying to stuff a wad of gum up his nostril. He rose then, his face decorated with more baubles than a Christmas tree, and flailed his arms until the teenagers scattered.
‘Wake up!’ I try again.
‘Rab?’ The voice is thick with catarrh, but he hawks it up and a phlegm-missile flies out from beneath the blanket to land on the solicitor’s door and dribble down the paintwork. It is still early so there are no suits. He sits up and peers at me over the top of the blanket. ‘Well?’ he says.
‘Morning,’ I say.
‘Is that all?’ He fixes me with his stare. ‘Do I not get the speech? Do I not even get the bloody speech? I know thee not, old man, was what I was expecting, make less thy body hence and more thy grace. Fall to thy fucking prayers, I was expecting – ’
‘Sorry about last night,’ I say.
‘Ah, so there is an apology, is there?’ He clears his throat again. ‘I’ve not been banished, then? Well, thank fuck for that, Rab. After all, what the fuck would I do without you, eh?’
I’m too hungover to unpick his sentences. Instead, I hold out my peace offering: a bottle of half-full ‘blended’ wine. This morning I traipsed around the debris of the party, pouring dregs and sediment into one bottle. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s four parts red wine, two parts white, one part vodka, and one part expired cough medicine that I found in the bathroom cabinet.
‘Sorry,’ I repeat. ‘I ended up crashing on a sofa afterwards.’
‘We were supposed to meet down on Brunswick Terrace.’
‘I know, sorry.’
‘Instead I had to deal with those Rough Sleeper people for an hour, trying to convince me that they could help, that they had the answers…’
This is bad news. Sage despises the Rough Sleeper folk, a team of well-meaning workers who walk the streets and chat to those who’re sleeping rough. They found a family of four in a tent on the beach last year and rehoused them, and they often put up temporary hostel beds for the runaways, but they can offer little more than advice and the occasional meal to the likes of Sage. I get on OK with them – they’re pleasant enough. For Sage, though, they’re the Jehovah’s Witnesses on the doorstep or the sales call when you’re making the dinner.
‘At least they weren’t the Churchies, eh?’ I say, trying to lighten the mood.
‘I waited, Rab,’ he says, twisting the cap from the bottle.
‘I know. Like I say, I’m sorry.’
He swallows half of the liquid away in one draught, then grimaces. ‘First opportunity you get, Rab, you forget about old Sage. First opportunity.’
‘I didn’t forget. I just couldn’t…’
Last night I had a gig, with Luke, at a bar just off West Street. Quiet venue, with complimentary bottles of beer and folded notes as payment. The walls were decorated with beermats and there was graffiti on the stairs down to the toilet, so it wasn’t the kind of place where they’d sneer at the stain on the left shin of the trousers I found in the bins round the back of Churchill Square. The perfect gig to get me started again, to get a feel for it.
Afterwards, Luke invited me back to his mate’s student flat up in Elm Grove. I’d been nervous about that, thinking that they’d all be sitting around sipping sherry and discussing Nietzsche. Not a bit of it. It was a glorious hovel: someone had smeared ‘Welcome to Hell’ on the front window with ketchup, the cooker was so encased with grease that the gas could no longer be lit, and fruit flies were so omnipresent that each and every person there was clapping out a constant flamenco rhythm.
In the midst of it all, her poetry gloriously riffing off the drum and bass that pulsed through the flat, was Flick. I shrank back when I first saw her, thinking that the months since I’d last seen her had not been kind to me, but she raised a hand and smiled and her lyrics trailed off…
‘Rab!’ she called. ‘Fuck me, how are you? You’ve lost your clean edges.’
‘Um, thanks.’
‘What brings you here?’
‘I had a gig, in town.’
‘You look great…’ She leant in and hugged me, and my first thought was that the natural end to her sentence would be ‘and you smell… well… ripe’. Instead, though, she gripped me by the shoulder and looked me in the eye. ‘You look great.’
‘Thanks, you do too.’
‘What are you doing with yourself these days?’
‘Well, I’ve gone… freelance.’
She smiled and reached over to the counter for her beer. ‘Tell me all about it.’
That’s how I ended up missing the meet-up with Sage. It wasn’t malicious, or even forgetful. It was just that I’d not seen Flick since my second visit to the Occupy camp at St Paul’s, the disastrous stay a month before the album launch, and it felt good to rebuild bridges. Besides, it had been so long since I’d had the opportunity to sit with a beer and a beautiful girl and feel the hopeful rush of telling (white) lies in anticipation of feeling a more powerful rush later in the evening.
I told her about the split from the label. The outline of the story was right, but I shaded it all a bit differently. Like when a child is given a colouring book and they make the grass pink and the sun purple – still recognisable, but not quite right. Artistic differences, I said, because they tried to change my sound, my look, my message. I made it sound as if the grass was pinker on the other side – this side – of the fence.
Sage doesn’t care about all that, though. He’ll not listen if I tell him how we shared a joint or two and drank our way through the beers in the bag at our feet. There’ll be no sympathy from him if I tell him that I got strung out and then I struck out; that Flick departed at five in the morning to get an early train up to London and left me to sleep alone on the sofa for long enough to entice a hangover but not long enough to feel rested.
‘Did you get paid?’ Sage asks. He sips his marvellous medicine. ‘How much?’
I reach into my pocket. It rustles reassuringly. ‘Twenty quid.’
‘Is that all?’
I nod. The actual amount was thirty-five, but I’d bought myself a chilli-burger after the gig and then chipped in with Luke for some booze and a bit of dope. Still, twenty isn’t bad. There was a time when it would have all been spent.
‘It’s enough, anyway,’ Sage says. He is leaning back against the paintwork, his shoulder against the spit from earlier. It will add another shaded stain, another crusted covering, to his blanket. ‘It should be just about enough.’
‘For what?’ I ask.
‘I’ve been thinking…’ He leans forward and his fingers pinch the air in front of his mouth, as if shaping his words as they’re spoken. ‘Last night, when you abandoned me, I got to thinking. The problem is this.’ He knocks his knuckles against the step. ‘The city is made of concrete; it’s hard and unyielding. It’s unnatural. We need to return to nature, to the very root of things.’
You’re havering, I want to say. Complete gibberish. Instead, I nod.
‘Ideally,’ Sage continues, ‘we would have a bit more by way of seed money – no pun intended – but the principle remains the same. It’s a simple existence: foraging, cooking roadkill, picking berries and mushrooms, whatever.’
‘Sage,’ I say, gently, ‘you’ll need to spell it out for me.’
‘We don’t need the city.’ He reaches forward and grasps me by the wrist. ‘We’re outside it anyway, metaphorically speaking. We don’t use the houses, or the shops, or the banks. So why not return to nature, eh? Live hand-to-mouth the way we were built for.’
‘You mean leave Brighton?’
He nods. ‘I mean going out to the South Downs. We use the money to buy a tent – you can get a simple one for fifteen quid – and the rest to buy basic provisions. Then we live off the land.’
‘It’s nearly the end of September.’ I frown at him. ‘We’ll be frozen.’
He waves away my objection. ‘We can build a fire. There’s firewood everywhere; there’s open land. All we need is the tent for cover when it rains. That’s all we need.’
‘Sage.’ I say it softly, sympathetically. ‘I don’t want to.’
He snorts, then smiles. ‘Lad, you’ve only been conditioned to think that you need all these things.’ He points out at the empty street, at the shuttered shops and the flats with drawn curtains above them. ‘It’s only marketing and indoctrination that tell you that you need all this bullshit: a credit card, a car, a commute. All you really need, Rab, is food and shelter – ’
‘And company,’ I cut him off.
He reels backwards, as if I’d taken a swing. ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s not the city itself I’d miss,’ I say, ‘but the people in it.’
‘Am I not people?’
‘Not plural, no.’
‘Am I not the only one you talk to? Properly, I mean. Day-to-day.’
I stay silent.
‘Let me tell you a story…’ he begins.
I sit myself down on the step next to him and tune him out. I’m thinking of Luke and the gig the night before, with the sound of conversation and clinking glasses coming from the tables in front of us. Then the party, with all those folk sitting around discussing music and politics and not a single one of them clearing their tacky throat to say, ‘Let me tell you a story.’ And Flick, who sat on the sofa next to me and listened as I told her about the last days of the singer-songwriter dream, her face crumpled with concern as she chewed the polish from her nails with her yellow-edged teeth. Finally, I think of the shower I took this morning in the flat. No need to ask, we’re all mates. Hot water, shampoo, even lotion for after, to quell that itch I’ve been getting in my arse-crack.
Sage’s story is one I’ve heard before. It’s about the old penguin pool at London Zoo – how they built this concrete Modernist building for them. Functional. It was an experiment that would eventually lead to improved social housing for humans as well – clean lines and open space. But the penguins got sunstroke from the glare off the concrete and their joints ached from walking on the hard surfaces. The point being, as Sage tells it, that the structures of the city are an unnatural habitat: they confine and restrict us. Chaos is our natural state.
‘I know you think society’s broken, Sage,’ I say. ‘And it may well be. But that doesn’t mean people are broken too. Society is only the framework; you can’t go turning your back on everyone within it, surely.’
‘The idealism of youth,’ Sage sighs.
‘Besides,’ I say, ‘where would you get drink out there in the wilds?’
‘There’ll be shops, Rab. I’m not saying we should be going to the Arctic Circle or the surface of the moon. We stay in touch with civilisation, certainly, but without relying on all this shit.’ Again he waves a hand at the street. A bus swishes past. ‘We get ourselves a space of our own.’
The night before, over the first beer, Luke had leant forward and placed a hand on my arm. ‘I’m not being funny,’ he said, ‘but one morning you’ll wake up and that old faggot’ll be trying to bugger you. He’ll be using his fingers to stuff his floppy prick into your hole, mate, and, with the weight of him on top of you, you’ll just have to lie there and take it.’ He laughed afterwards, but when I tried to duck away from the party to go and meet up with Sage, he said, ‘Away to get buggered by the blubber, are you?’
And it isn’t that I’m frightened of Sage, definitely not, but more that he might misinterpret the companionship for something else. Especially given the circumstances in which we first met. All this talk of rural living unsettles me, causes wee ripples of anxiety, because it’s when two people are in isolation, when they’re detached from the world, that…
‘Actually, what I was thinking,’ I say, ‘is that we could maybe try our hand at squatting. Now that the weather’s turning colder.’
Sage squints across. ‘You mean breaking and entering?’
‘You’ve been reading the bog-roll again, haven’t you?’
There’s a running joke, between the two of us, that whenever we find a copy of the Daily Mail we set it aside for use as toilet paper. Any other newspaper or magazine is fair game for reading material, or even for supplementary warmth in the night, but the Mail is only for the wiping of the arse.
It was Flick who raised the idea of squatting. She’s living in an office space in London, along with seven others. Quite a few of the folk from the Occupy movement have taken to communal living. You’re golden, she said, as long as there’s one person in the squat at all times and providing you display a notice-thingy on the door so that visitors know that you’re aware of your rights. They’ve just changed the law so that it’s illegal to squat residential properties, but if you look hard you can still find a commercial property to live in. She was even willing to lend a hand, she said, with sourcing somewhere. And she said it all with this smile that lit a flickering hope that there might be a future for the two of us, at some stage down the line.
‘I’m not sure I’d advocate that,’ Sage says, trying his best to sound superior in spite of the trail of mucus that bubbles out from his nose. He sniffs it back in and tries again. ‘Every time I’ve been in a squat it’s always been rat-shit and used needles. Most of the time it’s bleaker than sleeping rough, Rab. At least outside there’s fresh air.’
His history of squat-living is news to me. I’ve heard his stories of horror hostels and brutal B&Bs, but he’s never mentioned these squalid squats before. Although, from what Flick said, he’s right about the state of most of the buildings. You need to get in before the place has been pissed in, shat in, set alight or opened to the elements. Most of all, you need to get in before the owner’s had the chance to sabotage it. There are squats with electrical wires left exposed, broken glass scattered on lino floors, trip wires stretched across doorways, concrete poured in toilet bowls. Friends of hers have had fish guts pushed in the letterbox, tiles stripped from the roof. They’ve been literally smoked out with cardboard stuffed into the chimneys.
It doesn’t have to be like that, though. It can be respectful, mutually beneficial. We can be caretakers.
‘It would just be us, though, Sage,’ I say.
‘Just the two of us?’
I nod. ‘In a disused office or shop space or something.’
‘In theory,’ he says, slowly, clacking his teeth together afterwards, ‘I’m not against it.’
‘It would only be temporary,’ I say. ‘We’d be ready to move on as and when.’
I’m enthusiastic about the idea because I’m thinking that, once we’re settled, I can maybe invite Flick to switch squats, to re-situate her protest to the seaside. And maybe, if I had somewhere to store it, Luke would lend me the guitar I played on last night – the acoustic – so that I can start songwriting again.
‘We could even hold public lectures,’ Sage murmurs to himself. ‘Marx, Žižek, Chomsky.’
The last two names mean nothing to me, but I nod eagerly.
‘Here’s the solution,’ Sage says. ‘We still use some of the money to buy ourselves a tent, but then we find ourselves a suitable squat and pitch the tent inside. That way, we’re not using the building so much as the space inside. We’re self-sufficient and ready to move on at a moment’s notice.’
‘Is that not a – ’ I stop myself before I say the word ‘compromise’. It’s true that ninety per cent of what Sage comes out with is contradiction, but the other ten per cent is stubborn refusal to acknowledge it, so it’s best just to keep the peace and combine squatting and camping. ‘Sounds like a good idea.’
‘Excellent,’ he says. ‘Now, then, do you not think you owe me breakfast after last night?’
‘Are we not saving for this tent, though?’
‘I think you can stretch to a celebratory bacon sandwich, Rab. Don’t be stingy – share the wealth. After all, not all of us had the luxury of sleeping where you slept last night.’
As he rises, the Nirvana cover of Lead Belly’s ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’ starts to repeat in my head. An earworm. For the first time in weeks I could answer the lyrics with ‘under a roof’, ‘on a cushion’, ‘out of the wind’, ‘in the warm’, rather than the usual ‘in the corner of the covered car park’ or ‘under the arches, on a stack of cardboard’. Yet Sage – fucking Sage – is making me feel guilty for that one spell of sofa-surfing, that one night where the sleeping wasn’t so rough.
We begin walking. Sage lets out these sighs and groans as he lumbers along, as if his joints are creaking-cracking hinges that need oiling. Partly to drown him out, partly to draw out the earworm, I start whistling the tune. Then I sing the opening lines softly, under my breath, thinking first of Flick and then, more sharply, of Maddie.