Late in the afternoon, Sean and I divided up what was left into boxes and drove Rosa to the top end of the Grove, where we parked and started knocking on doors near Harrow Road. We had them slammed in our face a couple of times. A stern-faced West Indian
church lady got really angry. How dare we offer her charity? How dare we come round there with our filthy clothes and nappy hair and act like we were better than her?
We were invited in by a young Irish couple, who were living in two rooms on the top floor of a rotting townhouse. The place should have been condemned. Damp was streaming down the walls. The toilet was on the landing, and the shared bathroom all the way downstairs. The wife, who had a persistent cough, attended to a baby while we drank tea with the husband, trying to get him to stop apologizing for not offering us a biscuit. They’d been in London just under a year. He was making a little money from building work, but the rent was high and at the end of the month, there wasn’t always enough. We left promising we’d be back.
“That was the kind of place my mum had in Hammersmith,” said Sean, as we went downstairs. “Trying to cook our tea on the landing while everyone else was waiting their turn on the hob.”
“Is she still there, your mum?”
He ignored the question. “Round here the landlords can charge what they fucking like. The tenants don’t complain because they’re grateful to have anywhere at all. You should hear Gloria tell about what it was like when she first came. No one would rent to her. She won’t have a word said against Rachman, says at least he didn’t care what color you were, long as you paid.”
“So what can we do?”
“Fuck knows. The bastards who own it all now are ten times worse than he ever was.”
That night at Charlie’s, the Free Shop collective discussed the action. Sean saw it as a total failure. The people who’d taken our food could fend for themselves. They ought to fend for themselves or, better still, join with us in helping others. Anna agreed. She said she wasn’t interested in symbolic gestures. The point was to channel resources to people who were in genuine need, not subsidize middle-class parasites. It was the first time I’d heard either of them so bitter. I decided they were right. It wasn’t enough. We had to do better.
While I tried to sort out the problems of the world, I’d been neglecting my own. I was broke and homeless. Since no one had come to see me while I was in prison, I had to assume I couldn’t rely on family or old friends. I went to sign on.
The very architecture of the dole office was humiliating. Hard benches, cubicles made from grubby prefabricated panels. I took a number and sat down opposite a poster promising Good News for Claimants. After an hour or so, I was called for an interview with a man who seemed so beaten down by his work that it was all he could do to lift a pen and fill in my form. We had a desultory conversation, then he flicked through a card index of vacancies. To my relief he decided he didn’t have anything suitable for me at the present time. I should monitor the boards in the office on a daily basis, because things often came up at short notice. I should also consider working on my personal presentation, which was often a surprisingly important factor in employers’ minds.
I looked at him, this bedraggled claims officer with his polyester jacket and his hair plastered over his scalp. I thought I should at least give him a chance. “You ever fantasize about burning this place down?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Carver, I’m not sure I follow you.”
“Burning it down.”
He looked up from his papers. “Is that some kind of threat?”
“No, not me. I’m talking about you. Surely you must think about it once in a while. You know, when you’re on your own, late at night, glass of whisky in your hand.”
“I’m not sure I like your tone. I’ve tried to be as courteous as possible, so I don’t see why you should adopt an aggressive attitude.”
I took that as a no.
Afterward I decided to go to see Vicky. I needed an endearing prop, so I stole some flowers from the park. It was one of Vicky’s volunteering days. I hung around outside the playgroup and caught her when she went for lunch. I told her the truth, which was that I was sorry about her flat and knew she probably didn’t want to
see me but I’d needed an address to give to the dole office and, to put it bluntly, I’d used hers. She was furious, but not as furious as when I asked if she’d lend me some money. She wasn’t so much mollified by the flowers as astounded. She stared at them for a moment (they were blue flowers, hyacinths, I think) then got out her purse. I told her I’d pop by every week to get my check.
Tensions between Sean and Saul got worse. Anna fanned the flames by spending the night after the Free Shop action with Sean, while Saul sat up late in the kitchen, drinking despondently with Jay Marks, an artist who was one of the long-term residents. Jay was an openly gay man, an unusual thing for those days. He sometimes worked with a street-theater troupe, performing political plays in tourist spots, all white-face and agit-prop slogans and cardboard planes. He and Saul had developed an uneasy friendship, based on banter about Saul’s discomfort with his homosexuality. As the level in the rum bottle dropped, their sarcastic jokes gradually flagged and Saul started to slump despairingly on Jay’s shoulder. Tentatively, Jay stroked his hair. I decided it was time to go to bed.
Everyone was in a bad mood the next day. Helen and Matthias were threatening to move out unless the door to the toilet was replaced. Jay was locked in his room. Over breakfast Saul called Anna a bitch and Anna called Saul a misogynist. Sean gave a smug lecture on possessiveness, playing to a captive audience in the kitchen, where we were trying to get ready for a demonstration at South Africa House. Anna threw a coffee mug at him, which smashed on the wall by his head. “Don’t you ever fucking act like you own me,” she warned. Anna’s rare displays of temper were shocking, not just because she was normally so controlled but because they didn’t appear to have a limit. When she was angry, it didn’t matter where she was or who was present. Context just disappeared.
Later that day, Sean suggested we rob the supermarket. Not shoplifting — a commando raid. Empty the place overnight, distribute a meal to every poor household in Notting Hill. Most people wanted to talk about apartheid, because of the demonstration (something
to do with cricket, I think), but Sean carried on, expounding his theme as we got on the bus with our placards, carrying on as we walked back through the park. Principle number one: if we wanted to call ourselves revolutionaries, we had to be prepared to break the law. This wasn’t just a gesture, or a bonding ritual. The experience of transgression was part of our formation as revolutionary subjects. It would change us, change our relationship to power. Principle number two: it was our food already. Deep down anyone who argued against stealing was motivated by guilt and fear, all the apparatus that had been installed in us by the ruling class for the purposes of social control. The truth of the situation was the exact opposite of the picture offered by the power structure. That food was the product of ordinary working people’s labor. It belonged to us already. They had stolen it from us.