Freddie once said that friends are the difference between being a spectator and a participant and I remembered how, together with another friend who I’d since lost touch with, the three of us had got beaten up by one guy outside a party in Putney. ‘Go on: all three of you rush me,’ he’d said after hitting each of us once. ‘Right,’ he said when we all just stood there, ‘now I’m really going to teach you a lesson,’ and he proceeded to instruct each of us in turn. Eventually we ran off with no real damage done — a fat lip, a black eye, a bloody nose — and soon the whole episode was remembered only as anecdote fodder. This was about the time when — on the basis of having flicked through The Dharma Bums and watched several episodes of ‘Kung Fu’ — Freddie claimed to be a Buddhist. That lasted about six weeks and soon after we dropped our first tabs of acid. I remembered Freddie, notebook in hand, waiting for something to happen. ‘Am turning inside out’ was the only entry he made.
The record came to an end. Freddie had fallen asleep and was breathing heavily through his mouth. I looked at Carlton and we smiled. I made more tea and Carlton put on another record. When that one finished we played another, letting the room grow dark around us, hearing the hiss of the gas fire between songs. Freddie woke about an hour later, unsure where he was or what had happened to him.
‘Where am I?’ He looked at Carlton and me, glad we were still there.
We stayed until nine. We told Freddie we’d phone him tomorrow.
‘Thanks. . for the record and the arnica,’ he said as we left. ‘Take care.’
‘You too.’
Carlton and I walked part of the way home together. Getting done over in some way was just a question of time really. You hoped that when your turn came it wouldn’t be anything too bad, that it would just be young kids who were only after your money, that if you handed it over you’d be free to go, that if you got punched to the ground you wouldn’t get a kicking too, that if they pulled a knife they’d slash and not stab; and you hoped that you would spot the moment when the only chance left was to run — and that if the worst came to the worst, if all else failed, you would have the presence of mind to lash out with whatever came to hand.
025
Later that week Foomie’s flat got burgled. They came in through the bathroom window and took a cassette player and a portable TV. Foomie said it made her feel glad she didn’t own anything.
I was edgy and alert as I walked around. The whole area seemed tense but it was difficult to know whether this was a result of my own contingent experience or of my gauging an aggregate feeling that made itself subtly but palpably felt.
I told people about Freddie and the guy getting done over on the tube. They told me about things that had happened to them, that they had seen or that other people had told them. Ripples of panic and suspicion and worry spread out and intersected.
I went to dinner with some people in Kennington whom I vaguely knew and quite liked. I took beer; everyone else brought wine but wanted to drink beer. When someone asked what I did I said ‘odds and ends, bits and pieces, nothing really’ and felt pointless as a broken bulb.
The food was nice and there was plenty of it. When we’d finished eating and had drunk all of the beer and most of the wine somebody started telling a story about how he’d recently been involved in a car accident. Someone else told of an injury they’d suffered a few years ago. I told the story of how my leg got smashed at the factory. We talked about a programme that had been on TV about self-defence. Someone told of how they’d recently been burgled and after everyone had told their burglary stories we talked about mugging, rape, trouble at parties, stabbings and broken bottle fights in pubs.
These subjects were our currency, the common denominator of our experience; they were subjects of interest to us all, topics on which everyone had something to say.
The dinner came to an end — it was a Monday night and people had to get up for work the next day — and I caught a late bus home. A storm was building up and by the time I got off the bus at Brixton a steady rain was falling. Walking past Freddie’s house I saw a light in his window on the second floor. I stood beneath a street lamp, threads of yellow rain falling around me. I saw a face framed by the window in the warm light of the anglepoise above Freddie’s desk, looking out into the night. Suddenly there was a flash of lightning like a jagged crack in time. A shudder of bleached rain.
I glanced up at the window once more and walked on, the sound of my footsteps lost in a low roll of thunder.
024
I spent the rest of the week in Court. A friend of mine who knew a solicitor asked if I wanted to do some court clerking. All you had to do, he said, was sit with the client and take a few notes to remind the barrister of what was going on. It paid twenty-five quid a day, cash.
‘Oh and don’t forget to wear a suit,’ he said before putting the phone down.
The case was being heard at the Crown Court in Croydon and I was quite looking forward to it as I travelled down there on the train: meeting the defendant, piecing together a story from the unfolding catechism of the court, weighing up the truth and falsehood of witnesses, seeing the judge and lawyers in action. .
I met up easily with the barrister — a puppy-fat Oxbridge graduate — and he introduced me to the client. He was a sad mixed-race kid, an eighteen-year-old no-hoper who wasn’t much good at anything, not even looking sympathetic in Court. He was accused of breaking and entering some offices in Lewes. His story was that he’d gone to look for his friend Trotsky who was living down there. He called in at various bars and asked where Trotsky was but nobody had seen him. In the end he got pissed, missed the last train back and was picked up while trying to find somewhere to crash for the night.
The judge didn’t look at him sternly or savagely; he hardly looked at him at all. The whole thing was conducted like a bored ceremony that had considerable power but which no longer had any meaning. Clarifying points of legal procedure for the benefit of the jury, with a bored impatience he made no attempt to conceal, the judge made it plain that he had no interest in either the judicial or human aspects of the case — the only time he showed any alacrity was in arranging adjournments for lunch. The members of the jury were bored too; they wished they were involved in something more interesting like armed robbery or rape. There was nothing about the kid being tried to threaten the indifference or rouse the interest of anyone in the Court. The proceedings left him with only two options: insolence or submissiveness — and since there was nothing to be gained by either of these he looked bored. The nominal object of the court’s attention, he played a part in its proceedings only to the extent that someone getting stitched up by doctors participates in surgery.
If he got convicted, he told me during one of several adjournments, he’d probably end up back inside. He could handle that if he had to. Maybe he’d get off with a suspended sentence in which case he’d have the summer to look forward to.
The case dragged on. Each day I commuted down to Croydon in my suit. The longer the case went on the more money I earned (I’d already begun to think like a lawyer). Somehow the elaborate indifference of the court proceedings coloured — or rather, they did exactly the opposite, drained all colour from — my feelings for the boy. He became simply ‘the accused’, an abstraction, a legal term. Both his case and the circumstances in which he was being tried were dwarfed by the lofty ethics of justice in whose name they were being carried out. In the praxis of the Court all that remained of the ideal it embodied was the shabby paraphernalia of robes and wigs, the elaborate hierarchical etiquette with which only the officers of the court were familiar.