Sean and Anna had been together before she went away, but monogamy was never part of their arrangement. This was both a personal and a political decision. Like many of us, they were moving toward the view that the building blocks of the oppression we all felt, the molecules that made up the vast body of the capitalist state, were psychological ones. A revolutionary transformation of society would require a transformation of social life, a transmutation of ourselves. Everything about my own family confirmed this. If I was to be free, I had to be free of them. But I also had to recognize that they were prisoners too. It wouldn’t be enough to kill Daddy and marry Mummy. We had to kill the engine that generated all the daddies and mummies, throw a clog into the big machine.
In the meantime, Sean and Saul were going to compete for Anna. I think she set it up: a lesson or an experiment. Of all of us, she was the only one who had real experience of the world. She was in her late twenties. At one time she’d been married to a photographer, running around in Chelsea wearing fake eyelashes and A-line dresses. The marriage had lasted only eighteen months but remained with her as a kind of hinterland, an intolerance of certain things and people, an address book filled with scribbled-out names. “It’s OK being put on a pedestal,” she once told me, “until it’s built so high they start to feel afraid of you. Then they hate you and after that it’s all they really want to do, the hating.” One of the many striking things about Anna was her indifference to her own happiness and comfort, even her personal safety. I think she came increasingly to consider herself unimportant, except as a vehicle for the revolution. The rest of us tried to cultivate the same selflessness, the same erasure of personal preference, but Anna could always go further, could always get closer to absolute zero.
If Anna was self-negating, Sean was fiercely present. He wanted Anna. He didn’t want Saul to have her. But Sean wanted a lot of things. Did he love her? That depends, I suppose, on what one means by love. Sean would use the word in a way that made it seem like a kind of freedom, a moral energy he intended to project through the world by sheer force of will. Love was freedom, so love had to be free. It was all walls and bars and cages with Sean. It was all breaking things open, smashing them apart.
If you believe in free love — not in the sense of promiscuity, but in its true sense — as the release of libidinal energies from any restraint, any check whatsoever, the barrier between desire and action becomes terrifyingly thin and permeable. I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires. How many of us could actually live like that? Is it even possible? We all tried, and both Sean and Anna got closer than I did. I can say that about them. At least I can say that. So yes, love. Love firing off in all directions.
Saul never stood a chance. If I fared better, it was only because it was a long time before I even admitted I was in the game.
Sean’s first tactic in his offensive against the invader was blitzkrieg household disruption. The next day he rousted Anna and Saul out of bed so he could replaster a section of bedroom wall that, until then, he’d been perfectly happy to leave to crumble behind the paper. In subsequent days he took up floorboards, moved people and furniture in and out of the house, creating a sort of permanent domestic revolution, a constant flux designed to unsettle everyone as much as possible. Once he’d filled the place to bursting, he took the door off the toilet and started forcing people to share rooms, accusing anyone who argued with him of bourgeois individualism. There was to be no privacy. Helen and Matthias had to sleep alongside two anti-apartheid activists from Birmingham. I spent a night wide awake on a mattress in a corner of the largest bedroom, watching Saul and Anna fuck in the orange glow of the streetlight outside the window. Once or twice her eyes caught mine.
Initially, Saul was happy enough to put up with Sean’s dislike of him, even to take a little pleasure in the chaos he was causing, as long as he had Anna. On the surface, he and Sean were quite friendly with each other. Then one weekend Sean held an impromptu party that started on Friday afternoon with three friends and a bottle of Dexedrine and ended thirty-six hours later with half the transient population of Ladbroke Grove inside the house. By the end of the first day Sean was higher than I’d ever seen him before, a ragged ringmaster goading people on to perilous heights of excess. Someone had rigged up a PA in the kitchen, which played a mixture of ska and R & B and acid rock, depending on which faction had seized control.
The first most of us knew about the raid was when the police pulled the plug, shorting the electrics and plunging the place into darkness. I was upstairs, arguing about something or other with Matthias, when everything went black. There were sounds of panic from the hall and someone called out, “Pigs! Pigs!” which cued general swearing, hiding of stashes, tripping over and crashing around. A minute or two later a flashlight was shone in my face.
I was told to leave the premises immediately and not to cause any trouble while I was about it.
Several people were arrested, all of them black. Saul had a close calclass="underline" he was one of a dozen or so partygoers who escaped over the back fence and were chased by police through neighboring gardens. Earlier in the evening, Sean had been feeding him whole handfuls of drugs. When the raid happened, Saul couldn’t understand what was going on. The police were already in the room when he worked out what the blue uniforms were all about. He spent the rest of the night hiding in a flowerbed. Afterward, sleep-deprived and paranoid, he accused Sean of engineering the bust. “You wanted me put away, you bastard! Don’t deny it! You wanted those motherfuckers to get me.” Sean sneered at him, needling him with a mocking cowboy mime, blowing on six-gun fingers and adjusting an imaginary hat.
They were squaring up to each other when Anna arrived back from the phone booth. A friend had been charged with possession. She’d been trying to get him a lawyer. Saul and Sean both switched gears and started to outline competing schemes for dealing with the situation. She seemed angry with both of them. Turning her back on Sean, she asked me what I thought. I told her the truth— I didn’t know. At that moment I didn’t care. I was sick of everyone and wanted to be alone. Anna looked over at me, smiling curiously. I felt I was being assessed. I went to the pub and sat out Sunday evening with the old men, staring into my pint and trying to ignore unwanted flashes of her naked torso rocking backward and forward under orange light.
* * *
In my opinion, the Free Shop was a success. About twenty people foraged through London markets, from Billingsgate to Covent Garden, bringing back piles of food that we laid out on a stall outside Free Pictures. Anna wrote a leaflet explaining the action, giving definitions of “waste,” “redistribution,” and “socialism.” I provided some ideas, a few words and phrases, a little historical context about English civil war radicals. It was the first time the two of us worked together, sitting round the big wooden table at Charlie’s, scribbling in a notebook. I asked her where she’d learned so much political theory. “Secretarial college,” she told me tartly.
Along with our material, the Free Shop displayed handouts from a dozen organizations, promoting everything from veganism to a united Ireland. The shambolic usher from Free Pictures, who gloried in the name of Uther Pendragon, changed the lettering on the marquee to read: FREE ALL PEOPLE ALL FREE. Customers flocked to the stall. Most, I saw, were young, long-haired, and fashionably dressed. I noticed Sean staring coldly at a pair of couture hippies as they picked fastidiously through a box of bananas. Later, a few of us walked round the streets with baskets, offering food to anyone who passed by. Most people were suspicious. “What have you done to it?” was the most common question. Though younger ones took the food willingly, older ones seemed to think there was something shameful about it. One or two women poked and sniffed at the produce, then furtively slipped things into their bags, hurrying off as if they’d transacted a drug deal.