Steranko leafed through the grimy pages of the book, folded it back on itself and passed it to me without speaking. Half his face was in shadow. In the vacancy left by the music, in the silence that craved the lone voice of the woman, I read:
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’
The words broke over me. I stared into the dark sky above and around us. The night remembered the voice. The night remembered how the voice had needed the night. There were no stars, only the red and white blink of a plane, the steady flicker of the hurricane lamp.
049
Something about that evening made me think of a day several years ago when I hardly knew Steranko. I was sitting in the Arizona, a cafe near the house on Water Lane where we spent a lot of time, reading the papers, chewing bacon sandwiches and ordering tea. Stan, who ran it, thought we were students who’d squatted a place nearby. To him that made us the lowest form of life imaginable, exactly the kind of people, in other words, that his establishment took pride in catering for. When we started going there builders from a nearby site would come in at about eleven thirty and start wading into cardiac-sized plates of eggs, chips, beans and fried ketchup. Gradually the reputation of Stan’s cafe spread like the smell of eggs and soon its clientèle was made up entirely of squatters, students, anarchists and hopeful intellectuals looking for authentic proletarian experience. The builders drifted away; lorry drivers came from miles around to avoid the place. It got more and more crowded. One day the restaurant critic from Time Out showed up and selected it as one of the best vegetarian restaurants south of the river. It soon became the kind of place in which a working knowledge of the novels of Jack Kerouac was preferred if not actually required.
It was a freezing January afternoon when Steranko came round. He’d called at the house and been directed over to Stan’s by our next door neighbour who said some of us were sure to be there. We shook hands and he ordered a plateful of everything.
At that time Steranko was living in a house near Vauxhall. He suggested we spend the rest of the afternoon over there. I had nothing else to do so we paid and left.
Outside the wind cut through our clothes and crashed into our nostrils. As soon as you set foot outside what you most wanted to do was get back inside. Even the wind wanted to be indoors. It howled and twisted round blocks of flats, trying to squeeze through windows and force its way in through a few inches of open door. The sky was a charcoal smudge of clouds. A couple of blown-out umbrellas rolled around. What I thought was some new kind of bird — square, black, shiny — turned out to be a piece of black polythene kicked around by the wind. The restless sound of empty cans.
We saw a couple of buses coming and started to run for the stop. Two 3s and then, a little way behind them, another, hurtled past in convoy, half-empty.
‘Three 3s.’
‘That’s the best combination of buses you can get,’ Steranko said, breathing hard. ‘It beats anything.’
‘There won’t be any more buses for a couple of days now,’ I said peering at the timetable. It was all pearled up with frost, impossible to read.
‘Fuck it. Let’s walk,’ said Steranko.
We walked quickly, both wearing the same dark grey overcoats that were several sizes too big and weighed so much that you slouched under them. Mine had no buttons left; I kept it together with a massive old belt my grandfather had used to strap my father. We had our collars turned up against the wind; our breath clouded and disappeared quickly. The pavement felt hard, cold and brittle beneath our feet. Our shoulders bumped together. Steranko sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. Heavy with grit, the wind skated across the adventure playground and chiselled away at our faces.
‘I wish I had my gloves,’ I said. ‘I left them at home.’
‘At least you don’t have to worry about losing them,’ said Steranko.
We took a short-cut to Stockwell across the railway bridge which was covered in a caged hoop of wire netting, either to stop people throwing themselves under trains or to stop kids throwing bricks through the driver’s window: both probably. A small boy trundled past us on one of those bikes that all the kids have. A white guy walked past looking desperate behind thick glasses.
The wind swept down on us like a slide as we made our way towards the tundra wastes of Vauxhall. By now we were feeling warm from the walk. The wind blew back Steranko’s hair. His face looked hard and white, his lips pale. The sky was sooty with rain, full of all the misery of the city. It began to grow dark quickly. Bus windows became moving squares of light framing ghastly faces. Lights appeared in windows, brake lights left a ghost trail of red above the road.
At Vauxhall, where the streets widen and routes converge until there is nothing but roadway, the streetlights glowed red and then yellow. The wind, damp with spray from the river, stung our faces. I pulled the lapels of my coat together again, trying to seal in the warmth generated by the walk. My nose was running. I sniffed and my breath rippled and fanned out into the air like fog. The neon lights of a garage stood out brightly against the dark blue sky and the darker grey of the clouds. Cars hurtled past each other, across the river and down under the railway bridge.
Standing there, waiting for the lights to change, I felt a strong sense of converging definition. It was one of those moments which, even as experienced, is obscurely touched by the significance with which it will be invested by the future, by memory: this is how I was, this is how we were; this is how we spent our time, wasting whole afternoons and not caring because it was winter and there were so many afternoons still ahead.
Steranko touched my sleeve: ‘Let’s cross,’ he said and we stepped out into the road, weaving our way between the red and white lights and the steaming breath of cars.
‘Look,’ said Steranko suddenly as we walked down a narrow street. A toy parachute was tangled up in some phone lines overhead. Lit by the yellow glow of a street-lamp the tattered parachute flapped quietly; hanging from damp strings a grey plastic soldier swayed stiffly in the wind.
As we walked the last few hundred yards to Steranko’s house we passed the gas works. There were two gasometers, both full to the brim with gas and looking like huge, rusting drums.
By the time I walked home later that night, one of them had become a skeleton frame of metal spars that held only the empty sky. The tattered parachute still hung from the phone lines.
048
Carlton, Steranko and I called for Freddie on our way to play football. His room was full of books and bits of paper; a record was playing so loudly on his new stereo — bought with the money from his inflated insurance claim after the break-in — that we all had to shout. Steranko had his football boots tied around his neck; Freddie was on his hands and knees, looking for his.