The other cardboard cut-out of Sean is, of course, the social deviant, a member of the criminal classes led astray by a superficial engagement with politics. The stories about his hard-knock upbringing aren’t exaggerated. He was from a sprawling London-Irish clan that had disintegrated when he was a kid, spitting him into a series of foster homes from which he ran away, then reformatory, from which he couldn’t. He’d stolen a car, or rather many cars, but the one they got him for was a Jag he drove into a lamppost during some kind of police chase, aged fifteen. Even when I knew him, he had a thing about fast cars, the more expensive the better. I think there was an element of revenge, of abusing rich men’s toys. Yes, he had no education in the traditional sense, except what he’d given himself. Yes, he was impatient with theorizing, but it was an earned impatience, one I came to share. When I first met him at Free Pictures, all he wanted to talk about was books. It still makes me angry to see him painted as some kind of noble savage, a thug who didn’t know what he was doing.
Sean had drifted around. He’d done part of a plumbing apprenticeship, which he gave up, he told me, when he realized he wasn’t prepared to spend his life sticking his hand into other people’s
toilets. At one point he’d thought of joining the army. By the time I met him, he’d been in Notting Hill for a couple of years, making a living in a variety of ways — a little carpentry, a little hash dealing, delivering furniture in Rosa, a ten-year-old combi-van he’d painted a sickly shade of flesh-pink. In search of food, he led me through the frosted-glass door of a café on All Saints Road. “Hello, Gloria,” he said cheerfully, striding up to the counter and grinning at the stout black woman behind it. I followed him gingerly, feeling as if I’d stepped into the saloon bar scene in a Western. Men in work clothes or suits and skinny brim hats were hunched over the Formica tables, narrowing their eyes and kissing their teeth at us. The hostility was almost palpable.
“You have to go eat it at home,” Gloria told us. “We very busy tonight.”
“It’s all right, Gloria darling,” wheedled Sean. “We can just take it upstairs.”
She shook her head. “It’s Saturday night. You go upstairs it always upsets some people. I won’t have it, not on a Saturday.”
“But—”
“Not on a Saturday. Anyway, how I know your friend been brought up to mind his business? You tell me that.”
Sean put on a particularly winning smile. “It’s all right. He’s not about to cause any aggravation.” Gloria shook her head definitively. We ordered and hung around, waiting for her to finish shouting at whoever was doing the cooking. Her customers went back to their suppers. At the time I was confused by their resentment. I was, as I thought of it, “on their side.” Having said that, I still remember my shamefully instinctive recoil, my little moment of panic at the sight of all those black faces staring at me.
Gloria started wrapping up our food, but Sean kept hassling her to let us join in with whatever was happening upstairs. It looked as if she was about to relent until she noticed my bare and by now rather dirty feet. After that it was definitely no dice. Sean was told never to bring such a filthy good-for-nothing (her word) into her establishment (also her word) again. We took our supper and left
in a hurry, me rattled, Sean laughing. A month or so later we were finally allowed upstairs, though not on a Saturday night, and I caught a glimpse of another of London’s many undergrounds, Gloria’s miniature shebeen, where in her packed living room grizzled old men bet on cards and young ones smoked reefer out of the window, a scene of minor debauchery acted out to the terrible Jim Reeves records she played on her old Dansette.
We took our goat curry back to Vicky’s flat. On the way, Sean stopped off at a house under the shadow of the half-built flyover, rang the bell and in a brief transaction conducted through a barely cracked front door took possession of a bottle of Wray & Nephew’s rum and a quarter of powerful-smelling weed. After we’d eaten I lounged around on the rug as Sean unsuccessfully mined Vicky’s record collection for rock music. Within an hour or so we were back on the road, several shots into our game and walking with a swagger that, while not yet a stagger, was already showing transitional signs. Just after eleven Sean handed me a tiny barrel-shaped tablet and some time around midnight I came up on my first ever acid trip.
We were back in the flat and I was telling Sean how pathetic it was to be grateful for gammon and boiled potatoes, when I noticed the paint was starting to peel off the wall behind his head. Gammon and potatoes was what Vicky could cook — and had — three times in the previous week. It was better than the food in prison, though that wasn’t saying much. At that point in my life it wouldn’t have occurred to me to make a meal for myself when there was a woman around to do it, and I was presenting myself to Sean as a sailor on the culinary seas of fate, doomed to wander oceans of blandness until I came upon the “islands of curried goat,” a phrase I found unaccountably entertaining — and odd, if I was honest, part of a general sharpening of words and things that I’d just begun to notice. Sean grinned, looking at me with an inscrutable glint in his eye. The paint really was coming off, whole patches of it cracking and bubbling, giving the wall a scaly appearance disturbingly suggestive of giant reptilian life. The light in the room,
and now I came to think of it everything else, my entire evening, seemed to have been refracted through some sort of transforming prism, every object in my field of vision revealing itself with startling exactness, not just visually but in itself, a sort of ontological clarity that led me to look around and think, Yes, this table, this rug, which I’m stroking with my fingertips. I had a sudden sense of the incredible connectedness of things and soon afterward my environment transformed itself into something rich and radically strange.
Other people’s acid stories are always dull, I know. And then I thought, What if we’re all just grains of sand and each grain of sand and so on and so forth. But that trip with Sean accelerated something. Afterward we were close friends, as if we’d known each other forever. It was as if we’d skipped a bit, leaped over a whole period of time.
My memories of the middle section of that night are fragmented. I’ve no sense of the order of things, just a series of random snapshots. Sean dancing dreamily in the back garden, Sean as professor of the Faculty of Better Living, explaining the future with the aid of a diagram drawn on the bubbling white wall. During a period in which I seemed to be naked, apart from some of Vicky’s costume jewelry, I spent a long time looking in her bedroom mirror. How many eyes? Was I sure? Sean brooded in an armchair, his skin an unhealthy yellow.
The light was harsh. We began to fidget and pace. It was ridiculous to be cooped up in a basement, a little hutch carrying the whole weight of a townhouse on its back. It was such a big rich house, so substantial, so groaning with things that I felt it was crushing me beneath its weight. Sean was crying and laughing in short experimental bursts. We got ourselves up in a jumble of weird clothes, including a cloche hat and some sort of big silk scarf scavenged from Vicky’s wardrobe. Sean insisted on taking the sheepskin rug with us, which was how we came to leave it on a bench in Holland Park. Locking up took ages, because the logic of keys was beyond comprehension, but before too long we were
on the march, the night air good in our lungs, stepping between the streetlights, whose spooky cones of phosphorescence looked too bright to risk trespassing into.