loved her too and felt sick because it was yet another reminder of what was broken and couldn’t be fixed. Sure enough, when the phone rang the next day it was Miles. I was to meet him in London the following week. It would be an overnight visit; I should dress smartly. He made it sound like a job interview.
I spent the next few days craving heroin in a way I hadn’t for many years. The weather was atrocious. Rain beat down on the garden, leaving pools of water on the terrace. Three nights in a row I drank and watched daylight assemble itself behind the pear tree. New Year’s Eve had broken my truce with Miranda, and after Sam had taken the train back to Bristol we collapsed into the atmosphere of sullen hostility that had prevailed before she came home. On the morning of my trip, I watched Miranda standing at the kitchen counter eating a bowl of cereal and talking on the phone, trapping the handset between shoulder and jaw as she discussed packaging. If she noticed my combed hair or the jacket I’d retrieved from the back of the closet, she didn’t comment.
“You’re not wearing a tie,” Miles pointed out, when he met me at Victoria.
I shrugged. “I don’t think I own one.”
“You’re just saying that to annoy me. Still, you’ll have to do, I suppose.” We got into a taxi and he gave the address of a conference center just off Parliament Square.
“Are you going to tell me what we’re doing?” I asked.
“Patience is a virtue, Chris.”
“Oh, fuck off.”
It was a short journey, passed in silence. Outside the conference center Miles paid the driver and walked me through the foyer into a room set up for a press event. It was already half full of journalists and political staffers. Photographers were pacing about, talking into cell phones. TV crews hefted cameras onto tripods. Miles steered me toward the reserved seating in the front row. We were directly in front of the podium, where a long table was set up in front of a screen bearing the logo of the Home Office.
My nerves were on edge. I fidgeted in my seat and played with
the cuff buttons on my jacket. Just when I thought I couldn’t stand it anymore, the buzz of conversation died down.
A lot can change in thirty years. People who sat around at Lansdowne Road preaching revolution can start to speak the language of choice and competition. They can come to take an interest in efficiency, in productivity, in getting things done. The Right Honourable Patricia Ellis MP, Minister of State for Police and Security, was apparently here to make an announcement about crime figures. The overall trend was positive, thanks in large sum to measures she’d instituted, giving the cops greater resources and discretion and something else, to which I didn’t pay any attention because I was too busy looking at her, taking in all the ways she’d changed, the lines around her eyes, the crisp suit, the sensible middle-aged perm. What, I wondered, does Miles want with you, Patty Ellis? And how long is it, with all your rhetoric about cracking down and hitting targets and the challenges of the imminent new century, since you thought about the past, about the changes in a face you’d never expected to see again?
She scanned the room, making professional, impersonal eye contact, modulating her voice and illustrating her various successes with emphatic chopping hand gestures, like a martial artist breaking roof tiles. The people alongside her, civil servants, a ministerial junior, looked on with the requisite expressions of bovine admiration. Miles had positioned me so I was directly in her line of vision. Once, twice, she looked directly at me, but there was no flicker of recognition.
OCCUPATION OF CHATSWORTH MANSIONS: HOUSE THE HOMELESS!
Nowhere to live? Come to Chatsworth Mansions: 120 luxury flats built three years ago are lying empty while thousands in this country are homeless or live in slums.
1868: The Workhouse
1968: Local Government Hostels
Some things never change unless you force them.
Across Britain speculators are keeping buildings empty to make vast profits. We say this is wrong.
We have occupied this building to protest at a system which deprives some of shelter while others wallow in money. Though it is a symbolic gesture and we will leave after 24 hours our anger is real.
HOUSE THE HOMELESS! HOUSE THE HOMELESS! HOUSE THE HOMELESS!
Patty and I stood on the roof of the block and looked down at the crowd. A couple of police cars had arrived and a man with the pinched look of a local news photographer was perched on a wall, trying to take our picture.
* * *
“He’ll need a longer lens,” she noted drily. “He’ll never get anywhere with that.”
“Do you think there’s enough of a crowd?” I asked.
“Not yet.” She peered over the parapet. “I don’t see many press people.”
I blew on my hands. It was a freezing November morning. We’d been up there for two hours. There were about fifty of us. Hats and gloves, Thermos flasks, red noses. We were waiting for something to happen, poking the city’s corpse a little to see if it moved. In front of us, east London stretched away into the distance, the gray expanse of Hackney Marshes pocked with chimneys and skeletal Victorian gas towers. The block had been built with a flat roof, and we’d draped a banner across the façade.
HOMELESS? COME HERE!
As I watched, another couple of cars drew up.
“Might as well drop some more leaflets.” Patty reached into the box, took a handful and threw them over the side, where they fluttered down into the street. Behind us, Anna paced up and down, her hands clasped behind her back, like a general.
Chatsworth Mansions was part of a battle with abstraction. We’d been talking for weeks about our disillusionment with the antiwar movement and our feeling that the only political way forward was through practical action: building the new world, not marching for it. The Free Food had encouraged us, but the task seemed too difficult. Housing was an area in which we knew we could make a difference. As the warmth faded from the air, so did the atmosphere of playfulness that had cocooned our little group. London felt tenuous, poised. I couldn’t tell what was making me so edgy— the sense that things were about to change or the fear that they wouldn’t. If there wasn’t a transformation, what would I do? I brushed the idea aside. We were living through a historic upheaval, a time of chance.
Patty and her husband, Gavin, were newly qualified lawyers,
volunteering at an advice center in the East End. They were a pleasant couple, serious about their work, politically committed in the way a lot of — what do estate agents call them? — young professionals were back then. I liked Patty. She worked hard for her clients. We’d met at some talk or other and soon the two of them were coming over regularly to Lansdowne Road. They were, by temperament, less intense than our group, more rooted in the world as it was than the one they said they wanted to see. Compared to us, they lived a conventional life, paying rent, going to the office. I remember them as people who knew how things functioned. They talked about using the system for progressive ends. In retrospect, I think their politics were entirely fluid, their professed radicalism a product of the time and place, rather than any deep dissatisfaction with the order of things. Anna, I remember, never found them convincing. At the time, I thought she was just jealous, because Patty and Gavin were devoted to each other, while Sean had met a young Irishwoman called Claire, whom he’d moved into Lansdowne Road and was pushing as a full member of the collective.
I thought reflexively of Anna and Sean as a couple though, looking back, my story about jealousy seems wildly off the mark. They slept together sometimes. Otherwise they didn’t behave like a couple at all. Nevertheless it was obvious they shared some kind of past, some experience that gave them rights over each other. I found out Sean had helped Anna tunnel her way out of Chelsea; if you believed his version, she’d more or less got onto the back of his bike one day and left her husband. If anyone was jealous it was me, acutely conscious of the electricity in Sean and Anna’s detachment from each other.