The business of getting over the fence into Holland Park was confusing and messy enough for us not to want to go through it again until we were straighter, which meant that we spent several hours wandering through a landscape of ponds, statues, twenty-story boxes of filigreed golden light, flowerbeds and other phenomena. It was quite cold. Sean, who seemed much better than me at doing things, who to my admiration could exhibit sophisticated goal-oriented behavior, saw I was shivering and wrapped the rug round me.
“Always stay in your movie,” he advised.
“I’m in my movie.”
“Don’t fall out of it.”
“Don’t worry.”
“Stay in!”
“Sure. I’m in my movie, you’re in yours. It’s our movie.” “The same movie?”
“The same movie.”
When daylight established itself, we climbed out of the park and walked through the deserted Sunday-morning streets to a greasy spoon in Shepherd’s Bush. We hung around outside, waiting for the owner to open up. Then I watched Sean put away bacon, sausage, egg and beans, several cups of tea, and three cadged cigarettes while I stared at the swamplike mass of disturbing textures on my plate and took tiny sips of collee.
“Food not the thing?” he asked, in a solicitous tone.
I shook my head.
“Can I have yours, then?”
I pushed the plate over to him. I felt like hell. Come-down had firmly nailed the center of things, though the corners were still displaying a tendency to fly away. The call was a place of flickering shadows, loud noises.
“I reckon I should go to bed,” I told Sean.
“You won’t sleep,” he warned.
“All the same.”
I got up to go. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and smiled at me. “OK, well, come over to mine if you get bored.” He gave me the address.
Trudging barefoot down Holland Park Avenue I felt scoured, wiped clean. It was as if my mental scaffolding had been swept away. I could build again from scratch.
Then I saw the state of Vicky’s flat. There was something black crushed into the carpet. Her clothes were everywhere, the dresses she’d carefully hung in the wardrobe tangled up together with shoes and — oh, God — underwear. What had we been doing with her underwear? Where was the rug? A diagram of some kind had been drawn on the wall in what appeared to be red lipstick. It was a complex mess of arrows and little bubbles. I found it hard to say what it represented. I had a dim memory of Sean explaining his plan for a space colony. I’d have to get paint. Paint on a Sunday.
I made my way back to the park and found the rug, dew-soaked and dirty, but otherwise undamaged. Returning elated by this initial success I decided to have a quick lie-down and burrowed under a heap of clothes. I didn’t sleep, as Sean had warned, just spent an indeterminate period in a state of jerky dislocation, chasing thought-rabbits down burrows and failing to follow the million simultaneous skeins of logic offered up by my hyperactive mind. I wished my brain would shut up and knew that soon I’d have to start tidying, but first I needed to rest, so I tried to quell the pointless churn behind my eyes and kept on trying (in a minute) until Vicky came back home.
I think she thought she’d been burgled, because when she came into the bedroom she was carrying the hockey stick she usually kept in the umbrella stand in the hall. Seeing me looking up at her from beneath a pile of her evening dresses she quickly realized some kind of party had taken place. So what the bloody hell had happened, Christopher? There were cigarette burns on the rug, Christopher. She’d trusted me, Christopher. She’d taken me in, Christopher. I
told her to “be cool,” which didn’t go down well. She hustled me to the door and threw my shoes after me. I dressed on the pavement outside the house, feeling like a human shell, a zombie whose voodoo was wearing o,
I didn’t know where to go, so I ended up at Sean’s place, a tall crumbling townhouse on Lansdowne Road with a front garden overgrown by weeds. To my surprise, the door was answered by the Afro-haired German guy Sean had berated so fiercely the previous night. He seemed happy enough to let me in, and I clambered through a forest of bicycles into the sitting room, where I fell straight to sleep on a broken-down chesterfield.
I stayed at Sean’s for several days. It was a place with a floating population. Charlie Collinson, the owner, spent six months of the year in India, where he bought textiles and leather sandals, selling them in London to finance his next trip. At any given time several of the other tenants would be traveling too, subletting their rooms or inviting their friends to stay there. Sean, who lived rent-free, was supposed to act as a sort of house manager, but being philosophically opposed to private property, he was happy for the place to be a crash pad for more or less anyone who didn’t work for the authorities. It was a chaotic arrangement, made more so by the comings and goings of various groups, sects and gangs, mostly political, though it wasn’t unusual for a band to be rehearsing in the basement or stage lighting to be stored in one of the bedrooms. Some people handled the lack of routine better than others. Matthias, who answered the door, had been there for a few months with his girlfriend Helen, a slight, red-haired girl I’d also seen at Free Pictures. For all their earnest talk of dismantling their social conditioning, they were shy and rather private people. Living there was driving them crazy.
Though chaotic, Charlie’s was never the kind of stoner household that had people and their ashtrays frozen into position on the sofas. Life was lived in an atmosphere of frenzied communal preparation. Something was happening in the world and, whatever it was, we were going to be in the middle of it. It was time to get
ready. People got ready by waking up at five A.M. to join picket lines, by writing leaflets, folding leaflets, organizing fund-raisers, getting pushed around by the cops, folding more leaflets, going to court, getting up at two A.M. to write slogans on walls on Golborne Road and talking, above all, talking. One morning I went to sleep in someone’s bed and woke up a few hours later in the middle of a reading group, eight people sitting on the floor picking through Hegel. I was just beginning to get involved in a discussion about the master-slave dialectic when Sean put his head round the door to ask if I wanted to go and “do the food run.” The word food was enough. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gotten it together to eat.
We climbed into Rosa and parked just off Portobello Road. Sean seemed to know most of the stall-holders, and as we made our way through the market, he bantered and wheedled and was told to cut his hair a dozen times, but by the time we got to the far end we were carrying two large boxes filled with fruit and vegetables. There also seemed to be a butcher who had a bag of chops that needed eating up and a Portuguese grocer who owed him a bag of rice. It was an impressive haul. “And that’s just the leavings,” Sean said, a note of disgust in his voice. “Think what we could do if we got organized.”
We went back to Charlie’s and handed the food over to a couple of women from a Cuban Solidarity group, who happened to be chatting near the door. They headed into the kitchen and we sprawled on the sofas in the living room, listening to the peevish rattle of pans.
“Primitive Communism,” explained Sean, skinning up. “You hunt, you gather. You work for the group.”
“There’s more food than we can eat. There’s only about six of us in at the moment.”
“More will turn up. We could invite more.”
“You think they’re OK in the kitchen?”
“Sure, mate, they’re fine.”
Some time later, about twelve people sat down to eat and Sean
and I told them about the plan we’d just formulated to run a free shop. It would be an event, a one-day action. Systematic collection— go early to all the markets: Billingsgate, the Borough, Covent Garden. Box it up, then just give the stuff away outside Free Pictures. People could hand out literature. We’d feed a few people and make a political point: it would be an example of practical redistribution, a condemnation of consumer society.