Saved! Saved! I thought to myself and for the next half an hour I paced around Freddie’s flat, clutching the letter in my fist like a prisoner’s news of reprieve.
057
Freddie got back a couple of days later, just as I was locking up to go round to Steranko’s.
‘I’ll come with you,’ he said. ‘Just give me a couple of minutes.’ He dumped his bags in the hallway, pulled off his shirt and sweater at the same time — something he always did — and tossed them to one side. After putting on a new shirt and blowing his nose on some toilet paper he was ready to leave.
‘How are you feeling?’ I asked as we walked away from the house.
‘Tired. I think I’ve got bus lag.’
‘What was the cottage like?’
‘Damp,’ he said blowing his nose again.
‘You sound like you’ve got a cold.’
‘I have. It rained all the time. I arrived there soaking wet and woke up with a cold the next morning. I spent most of my time snivelling by the pub fire, drinking hot toddies and listening to people talking about their walking boots. It turns out that there’s a lot more to walking boots than meets the eye.’
‘Did you do any writing?’
‘None at all.’
‘Too ill?’
Freddie nodded and smiled. He’d gone to Northumberland to try to make some headway with the book he’d been writing. Off and on he’d been working on it for a couple of years but it didn’t seem to be progressing very fast. He wasn’t exactly a slave to his art but to Freddie this didn’t matter. The important thing at this stage, as far as he was concerned, was to act like a writer. In recent months he’d taken to wearing jackets, cotton work-shirts, baggy trousers and food-stained ties — clothes, as he said, with an element of intellectual pretension — and these, together with the black-framed glasses and hair swept back towards one ear (it wasn’t quite long enough to be swept back over the ear) gave him that air of the young would-be often associated with Paris cafés of the 1920s.
The door of Steranko’s house opened just as we arrived and one of his flatmates stepped outside, engulfed by a wave of hot air that swept out into the street.
‘He’s upstairs,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to rush.’ The hallway was as hot as the underground in a heatwave. A three-bar electric fire stood guard at the foot of the stairs and as we walked up it became even hotter. Steranko’s door was wide open. Like most of the other people in his squat he’d knocked two rooms into one: divided by an assortment of structural props, one half of the room was a kind of sleeping-living area and the other half was a studio which refused to keep to its side of the bargain. There were cans of paint and brushes all over the place. Canvases were stacked up against the wall; smaller drawings and paintings on paper were stuck to the walls with adhesive tape. In a corner was a paint-splattered easel. The most striking thing about the room was the heat. All the windows were open but it was hot as a steel works. Slumped in a chair and swigging water from a bottle, Steranko was dressed for the beach. He was wearing a vest and boxer shorts, his long arms and legs covered in a thin film of sweat. I was sweating too.
‘Oh hi!’ he said, getting up.
‘Why’s it so hot in here?’ Freddie asked.
‘Probably because all these fires are on,’ Steranko said laughing. I looked around: there was an electric-bar fire full on, a radiator that was too hot to touch and a small fan heater that emitted a parched breeze.
‘How come all the fires are on?’
‘The meter is due to be read in a couple of days and we’ve got to use up as many units as possible to get the bill down.’
This made perfect sense to me. I’d been here on the day Steranko had first tried to fix the electricity meter. It was surprisingly easy. All you had to do was insert a copper pin into the meter and it stopped working.
‘Simple as that,’ he’d said, delicately inserting the pin. The meter stopped quietly without even a murmur. Five minutes later it blew up and there was a total power cut.
‘Well that’s one way of keeping bills down,’ I said. The meter itself was blackened and showed obvious signs of having been tampered with. To remedy this Steranko smashed it to pieces with a hammer — he had an approach to home improvement that was utterly his own — and called the electricity board. One of the people doing work on the house, he said, had accidentally knocked the meter with a metal ladder, thus touching off a potentially dangerous short circuit.
Somebody from the Electricity Board came round within the hour but after taking one look at the meter it became obvious that he wasn’t going to have any of this shit about accidentally breaking it with a ladder.
‘Shall I tell you what happened?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Steranko while I looked on.
‘You shoved a copper pin into the meter, the meter bust and so you smashed the meter with a hammer. Am I right?’
‘No you’re not right, Sherlock Holmes. You’re fucking wrong,’ said Steranko. ‘It’s like I told you. .’
In the end Steranko’s household only narrowly escaped prosecution and were made to pay a huge deposit for a completely impregnable meter. Undeterred, Steranko got in touch with Erroll, a guy with singed eyebrows who, for twenty-five quid, showed him how to disconnect and reverse all the leads so that after running the meter forward for six weeks you could then run it back for another six, thereby cancelling out the units used. The only problem with this technique, Erroll pointed out casually, was that since it involved holding about six thousand volts of raw power in your hands it was an extremely dangerous operation. It was therefore important to get things right and not get anything muddled up. It was advisable to wear Doc Martins but even then, he concluded, they probably wouldn’t do you any good.
What had happened now, Steranko explained to Freddie and I, was that after about six weeks of running it forward he had switched the meter round and run it backwards. Without realising it, though, they’d used up enough units to take the meter back to less than zero, to about 9000 units, close to the maximum.
‘With the clock like that we’d have a bill of about five thousand pounds — probably more than the whole of the street put together so I had to reverse the leads to send the meter back past the other side of zero, zero, zero. The meter man’s due any day now so we’ve got the house on full steam ahead, fires, lights, everything, twenty-four hours a day. Even when we get it into positive figures we’ve still got to nudge it just past the previous reading. It’s dangerous too. The wiring in this house is pretty dodgy. Feel that wall there.’
We touched the wall which felt hot as a potful of tea.
‘Jesus,’ said Freddie. ‘I think you’re getting close to meltdown.’
We sat sweltering for a few minutes and then Steranko — unusually, I’d not seen him for a week — asked what had been happening to me.
‘My life plummeted to an all-time low,’ I said. ‘I was on the edge of the abyss.’
‘You should have looked over the edge,’ said Freddie. ‘You’d have seen me lying at the bottom of it. You could have dropped in for tea.’
‘I got fired from my job,’ I said.
‘You’re kidding,’ said Steranko, laughing. What was it about my getting sacked that everyone found so funny? There had been some amazement when I’d been offered a job in the first place and even more when I accepted it. It was as though getting a job was a temporary illness from which I had now recovered.