We stayed up late, smoking cigarettes and making a list of people who might help out. I say we, but I knew nobody. Sean, on the other hand, seemed to know everyone in Wii. By the time we went to sleep we had dozens of names — people who worked on legal or housing issues, members of Big Flame and the IMG, some Spanish Black Cross anarchists who lived above our local betting shop. He had friends who worked at Release and the BIT information service. There was someone who wrote regularly for the underground press and a household of self-styled Diggers, who’d declared themselves the Albion Free State. The BIT people had an office round the corner. They’d probably let us use their phone.
The next morning I woke up on the sitting-room floor to find myself staring at a pair of long, tanned, female legs, which culminated in sandaled feet with chipped black varnish on the toenails.
“Anyone in there?”
I looked up to see the stone-throwing girl. From the floor she looked startlingly tall and slender, beautiful enough to make me feel conscious of being naked inside the sleeping bag. She had high, almost Slavic cheekbones, green eyes and straight brown hair that fell round her face like a curtain as she stared down at me. She wore denim shorts and a sleeveless black vest, no jewelry, no adornment at all except a black and white keffiyeh thrown round her shoulders. “Is Sean around?” she asked abruptly.
“No idea. He was here last night.”
“I need to talk to him.”
I noticed that she was with someone. A thick-set, handsome man with curly dark hair and a flourishing, almost biblical beard
was leaning on the back of one of the sofas. He looked like a boxer or a rock climber, someone used to physical endurance, an impression emphasized by a number of fresh cuts on his face.
“I don’t know where Sean is,” I told the woman. “I was asleep.”
“I suppose you think you’re living here.”
I disliked her tone. “What’s it to you?”
“I actually do live here.”
“I see. And you are?”
“God, what the fuck is your problem?” asked the man. He had an American accent.
I noticed they’d dumped backpacks on the floor, amid the remains of last night’s planning session, a jumble of papers and dinner plates used as ashtrays. I propped myself against the wall and rubbed my eyes. “I don’t like being hassled when I’m half asleep. That’s my problem. If you want to leave a message for Sean, I’ll give it to him. He’s probably gone to Free Pictures. What time is it?”
“It’s eleven,” said the woman, her tone softening slightly. “I’m going to make tea. Is there milk?”
“Yeah, probably.”
“Do you want a cup?”
“OK. Thanks.”
“How do you take it?”
And so I ended up sitting round the kitchen table listening to Anna Addison and Saul Kleeman talk about Paris. For three weeks we’d been reading about the strikes, the students fighting the police in the Latin Quarter, but the reports were so confused and partisan that it was impossible to make out what was happening. They’d actually been there. Their stories were incredible. Groups of people who’d never met each other forming chains to build barricades. The CRS launching tear-gas grenades, then charging the protesters. They’d met in the doorway of an apartment building, desperately ringing doorbells, trying to get someone to let them in after the CRS overran the rue Gay-Lussac. With the cops tramping up and down the stairs outside, a girl had hidden twenty of them in her
place overnight. The next morning, a friendly workman had driven them through the police cordon, hidden in his camionette. There had been mass arrests, terrible violence. They’d seen a police squad corner two Algerians, leaving them both for dead.
It was obvious they were lovers. As they told their tale, Saul draped an arm over the back of Anna’s chair and played with her hair. The cuts were souvenirs of a beating he’d taken on a demo outside the Renault factory. He’d narrowly escaped getting arrested and deported, which, since he’d fled the States after drawing a low number in the draft lottery, would have meant either prison or Vietnam. He was going to apply to stay in Sweden, unless “something serious” happened in London, in which case he thought he might hang around. I couldn’t tell whether he meant something serious politically, or with Anna.
I heard the front door slam upstairs, then Sean came bounding down into the kitchen. “Anna,” he shouted, gathering her up into his arms and kissing her full on the mouth. I noticed she responded. So did Saul. He didn’t look pleased.
That night, as people were sorting out where they’d sleep, Anna asked Sean casually whether a particular room was free. He said it was. “See you in the morning, then,” she told him, taking Saul’s hand and leading him upstairs. Sean watched them inscrutably, then unhooked his jacket from the back of his chair and left the house.
So much has been written about Anna, almost all of it wrong. She’s been reduced to the woman in the Copenhagen photo, with her fist raised out of the embassy window. It’s impossible, I suppose, to separate who she became from who she was in 1968, but that masked figure is as much of a cartoon as Byronic Sean Ward. The Copenhagen woman stands for death, death to the pig state, death to the hostages. If I say I think Anna was motivated by love, it sounds banal, an old hippie talking. Or an old lover, blinded by sentiment.
We had so many questions about Paris. Why were the unions asking their members to go back to work? Why was it all falling
apart? The next day at Free Pictures, Anna ran a question-and-answer session for an audience of almost a hundred people, drawn from every niche in the feral ecology of the London underground. Pure word of mouth, as far as I could tell. Bush telegraph. Sean pointed out a who’s who of local activists. The Black Power crowd, the neatly dressed Leninists from the orthodox Communist Party. Anna was an eloquent speaker. She’d arrived in time to participate in the enormous street demonstrations of early May and “both personally and politically” the previous six weeks had “felt like a lifetime.” The situation was now very uncertain. De Gaulle had called an election. Yes, some of the immediate revolutionary potential had dissipated.
As she spoke I peered at her. Under the bare bulb her head was a collection of angles, futurist splinters of cheek and brow. Her voice was made to sway a crowd. As she talked she leaned on a chair, using its back as a lectern and sweeping the darkened room with one hand, gathering us all up into her intensity. I thought that gesture was the most graceful, truthful thing I’d ever seen. When she smiled, which she did often, I wanted her so much I could have cried.
* * *
The area around Notting Hill was a crappy part of town in those days, a couple of square miles of rotten ghetto housing cut through by a half-built flyover, but it supported a ramshackle counterculture made up of hundreds of cliques and groups and communes, little magazines, support groups, co-ops, bands. By finding my way to Free Pictures I’d fallen straight into the middle of a place with its own geography, an anti-city of bed-sitters and bookshops, rehearsal rooms and cramped offices.
I’d also stumbled into the middle of an elliptical game that Sean and Anna were playing with each other. For the rest of that summer everything happening in the world, however big — Czechoslovakia, Bobby Kennedy’s assassination — was, if not exactly subordinate, then wrapped up with what was taking place between them. Like a fool I became willingly, even eagerly entangled. Poor Saul Kleeman was in as deep as me: we’d both fallen out of our own movies into theirs.