I took in this unwelcome information as he told me his news, which consisted of gossip about various LSE factions, who’d slept
with whose girlfriend, who’d taken what line on the Powellite dockers’ march. As he chattered, I realized he hadn’t the slightest conception of what had happened to me. As soon as I’d disappeared into the police van, he’d more or less forgotten my existence. The last straw was his announcement that he’d “something rather delicate to discuss.” His housemates had told him they’d rather I didn’t stay there. They were worried about police attention, didn’t want to jeopardize their degrees. He was sorry. Naturally he’d argued, but it was a democratic household. He’d been outvoted.
I couldn’t believe my ears. My so-called comrades were washing their hands of me, self-proclaimed revolutionaries so timid that at the first sign of trouble they were running away. Without raising my voice I told Alan he was a coward, a middle-class fraud. He’d been with me on that demo: it could have been him who’d gotten arrested. I’d just spent a month in jail, I had about ten bob in my pocket and he wasn’t even going to let me kip on his couch? He mumbled something about there being hash in the house. But did I need money? My lip curled. Money, of course. The bourgeois solution. I extended my hand. He couldn’t get his wallet out fast enough.
I took the bus into town and went to a steak house just off Leicester Square, where I ordered all the most expensive things on the menu and drank a bottle of red wine. The waiters looked at me uneasily until I actually waved a banknote at them. From a phone booth outside I rang a girl I knew called Vicky, who lived in her parents’ basement in Holland Park. Yes, she said, I could stay with her.
I took a taxi, giving the driver a tip to get rid of the last of Alan’s cash. Vicky seemed excited to see me. Her place was impressive, a self-contained garden flat on a winding side-street of elegant Victorian houses. I found out later that her father was on the board of a mining company with interests in southern Africa. She was riddled with guilt about where her money came from and did all she could to antagonize her family while still living under their roof. I was part of that strategy.
We talked and smoked a joint and she asked all the questions about prison I’d expected from Alan. I told her a little of what had happened, in a series of rambling and elliptical answers, which she broke short by taking me to bed. Later I lay awake and listened to her breathing. We didn’t know each other well and I’d gone round there for the most cynical reasons: I knew she liked me; I knew she had her own place. Still, it felt good to lie beside her in the darkness, even if I couldn’t sleep.
I stayed at Vicky’s for a week or so, smoking her dope and playing her LPs. She had a job volunteering with a playgroup on Portobello Road and left me alone during the day. I spent my time lying on her floor looking at the patterns the light made as it filtered through the branches of the monkey-puzzle tree in the garden. If Vicky minded my lethargy, she didn’t show it. I think she could see how low I was feeling. I only left the flat to go walking in Holland Park, long, aimless afternoon meanderings through the formal gardens, during which I looked at my feet and kept as far away from other people as possible. Elsewhere, Parisians were building barricades. I wandered around and listened to music and ignored the washing-up. On the weekend Vicky told me she was driving to the country and asked if I wanted to come. I said no. Alone in her flat, I spent a day and night completely motionless in a chair, not thinking about anything in particular, just cradling myself inside a sort of glacial depression. I felt as if I was mummified, living inside some kind of membrane that formed a final and definitive barrier to human contact. The bright light outside was a mockery: energy radiating across the whole world, none of it for me.
* * *
I knew Miles wouldn’t leave me alone. Two days after I’d seen him
at the Market Cross, I answered the phone in the kitchen. I’d been
filling the dishwasher, while Miranda sat at the table flicking
through a gardening catalogue. “Hello, Chris,” said the voice at
the other end. Reflexively, I hung up.
“Who was that?” asked Miranda.
“Wrong number.”
The phone rang again. I stood there, paralyzed.
“Aren’t you going to answer it?”
I picked up. I had no choice.
“Listen to me, Chris,” said the voice. I assumed it was Miles. It
didn’t sound like him.
“I think you have the wrong number.”
“Don’t be stupid about this.”
“I told you, you have the wrong number. Don’t call here
again.”
I slammed the phone down, trying to master the tide of adren-
alin rising through my body.
“Who were you talking to?”
“Just some guy. He thinks this is his friend’s place. He sounds
strange.”
“You were very aggressive with him.”
I shrugged noncommittally. Again, the phone rang. Miranda got
up to answer it. “Don’t,” I told her sharply. She put up her hands
in mock surrender. The phone carried on ringing. After a while it
clicked through to the answering machine.
“This is a message for Chris,” said the voice. “Listen, mate, don’t
piss about. You need to phone me. For your own good, you should
phone me.” He left a cell number.
“You’d think people would actually listen to the message,” said Miranda, vaguely. “It says quite clearly ‘Miranda and Michael Frame.’ ”
My throat was dry. I poured a glass of water from the filter pitcher. “Yes,” I said. “You’d think they would.”
After Miranda went to bed, I slipped out and drove over to the shop. God wasn’t there, so I was able to sit for a while in comforting darkness, huddling into my jacket and rubbing my hands as I waited for the gas heater to cut through the cold. I was thinking seriously about leaving. How far would I get if I made a run? If I went straight to the airport, would I be able to board a plane?
I switched on the ancient Anglepoise on the desk and sifted listlessly through a pile of Left Book Club volumes. The dreams of the thirties and forties; Spain and the hunger marches. They were fragile objects, those books, their yellowing pages flaky and brittle, about ten years away from dust. Soon, as I knew I would, I found myself taking another look through the unsorted sixties and seventies box. I opened copies of Socialist Worker to read about Grunwick and Blair Peach, events I’d missed because I was in Thailand. Why had God even bought all that stuff? As far as I knew, he was an old-fashioned Tory. Englishman’s home is his castle, the whole bit. I was about to put the box away when I found a copy of the International Times, which fell open to a collage of a jazz-age figure in a sweater and plus-fours operating a hand-cranked camera. The man’s head had been replaced by a fist. Out of the camera lens spilled a cornucopia of bodies and flowers and abstract forms. Rifles and feathers and halftone dots. Biafran children, Chairman Mao. I knew that image. It had been on a flyer someone had handed me on Portobello Road, the day I finally roused myself and walked out of Vicky’s basement:
FREE PICTURES
No politics but the politics of experience!
Toward a revolutionary reconstruction of society.
Construct zones of liberation, counter- institutions, alternative systems of exchange.