‘What were you sacked for?’
‘Oh it was a whole load of things: attitude, skiving. I don’t know what it is about me and work. As soon as anyone pays me to do anything I devote all my energies to skiving. A lot of the time skiving’s even more boring and tiring than doing the work but the urge to attempt it is irresistible.’
‘That’s why people work,’ said Freddie. ‘Employment is a prerequisite for the truly fulfilling task of skiving, of feeling that you’re screwing your employer. Even heart surgeons probably try to find some way of leaving out a few valves and the odd stitch so they can knock off half an hour early. Homo skiver: man the skiver. Man must work to provide himself with opportunities for skiving.’
‘But the good news — the news so great that I hardly care about losing my job — is that I’ve got somewhere to live.’
As I finished telling him about my new flat the phone rang. Steranko went to answer it and after a moment shouted upstairs to ask if we wanted to go to a party with Carlton.
‘Where is it?’ Freddie shouted back.
‘Near Euston. We’ve got to meet him in a pub in Stockwell if we want to go.’
‘When?’
‘Now.’
I said I’d go; Freddie said he might be along later which was the nearest he ever got to saying no.
The pub was one of those grim boozers where people go to quench their misery rather than their thirst. The bar was full of red light and air so thick you felt insubstantial, as if at any moment you might fade away. Steranko and I waited to get served. Two bar-stools along a man with arms the colour of raw sausage was telling an anecdote.
‘So I got the cunt by the lapels and whump! Straight in with the head.’ His companion nodded, a gesture that echoed softly the action being described. ‘Then one in the side of the fucking head. .’ He smacked a fist into his palm for emphasis. Yelps and flashes from the fruit-machine were the only other signs of life.
The barman came over. He had an old linoleum face — years ago someone had cut it up with a Stanley knife and then walked all over it, now it didn’t fit properly. I ordered two pints of Gutmaster and tried to imagine a pub where no one talked about fighting. Carlton arrived and put his hands on Steranko’s and my shoulders. We shook hands as the barman trudged off to the beer pump.
‘D’you want a drink Carlton?’
‘No I’m OK. . So you got somewhere to live yeah?’
‘I move in next week.’
‘Nice.’ The barman dumped our drinks in front of us, glancing at Carlton as he did so. I handed him some money and we moved further along the bar.
‘Some pub isn’t it?’ said Steranko.
‘It was the only place I could think of round here. You know my brother-in-law’s been in hospital, yeah? So I been at my sister’s place helping her out. She lives on the top floor of this tower block a couple of minutes walk away. Incredible place: you see everything — rainbows, lightning, shafts of sunlight bursting through the clouds, amazing sunsets. And the noise, man. Traffic, music, sirens all night and then at seven in the morning the pneumatic drills start. I couldn’t work out where they were coming from. It sounded like it was coming from up above so I went up in my dressing-gown and that’s where they all were, about ten geezers from the council digging up the roof. It was like they were going to build a road across the roof.’
Steranko took a gulp of beer and grimaced.
‘It tastes like it’s been wrung out of a bar towel.’ I took a small sip from my glass and asked the barman to change them for two new pints. He said there was nothing wrong with the ones we had.
‘Nothing wrong with them? There’s nothing right with them,’ Steranko said. In a dark corner someone with a double barrel gut sucked at his pint like a dinosaur cooling its head in a mug of mud.
‘It’s not cloudy, it’s within the sell-by date. And everyone else is drinking it,’ the barman said. The expression on his face was as dead as a creature floating in a jar of alcohol.
He didn’t bother looking at us and we didn’t bother slamming the door when we left.
We walked to Stockwell tube, moaning about what a piss-bin country this was, and how crazy we were to still live in it. We picked up some drink from a store by the underground station where the video security camera was backed up by a uniformed guard and an alsatian dog with bad teeth. Most of the customers had dogs too.
There was a long wait for the tube. We watched two men and two women about our age, dressed up to go dancing, not drunk but already having a good time. We took the tube north, yelling at each other above the clatter of the train. Sitting opposite us was a bap-faced guy who stank of mayonnaise.
Suddenly a middle-aged man a couple of seats down erupted in a fountain of sick. Then he just sat there while the tube hurtled on through the tunnel. Two stops later we got out. He continued sitting their stoically, drenched and stinking.
The party took some finding. After a quarter of an hour we were still walking through an area of abandoned factories, rubble-strewn yards and rusting metal lying in puddles. A little further on there was a new-style post-industrial estate with small freshly-painted corrugated metal manufacturing units making hi-tech software for video games. A few moments later we were back in the derelict landscape of empty factories with broken windows and black chimneys silhouetted against the blue-streaked night sky. It was difficult not to feel a loyal affection for these ugly smoke-blackened buildings when faced with their modern counterparts, the clean, lightweight computerised factories.
‘Nostalgia,’ said Steranko. ‘That’s one thing we really know how to manufacture.’
The party was being held in the grounds of an abandoned school, sealed off from the street by high sheets of corrugated iron. The only entrance was through the cab of a lorry which had been driven up alongside a narrow gap in the fencing. Since there was only room for one person at a time to scramble through the cramped cab it served as a very effective turnstyle. A large crowd of people pushed and shoved and spilled back on to the pavement.
Inside there was pandemonium. Here and there the darkness was slashed by swirling lights so bright that it was difficult to see anything except the edges of buildings and the dark shape of a gasometer that loomed huge and solid over the whole scene. As our eyes got used to the combination of dazzle and darkness it became possible to make out angular constructions of scaffolding and industrial metal. Music was throbbing around but it was difficult to say from where. We passed through a gap between two buildings; through the steam-coated windows on each side you could see figures packed together and writhing around in yellow light as thick as mustard. Music thumped on the window panes; faces, lit by a lash of red and then an explosion of orange, appeared at the windows. There seemed to be no way in or out of the building. At the end of this narrow alley we stumbled down dark and slippery steps towards a courtyard enclosed by several buildings. Fires had been started. Planks, bottles and branches were thrown on. Groups of people staggered around and shouted or looked down on the scene from the sloping roofs of the school. A guy with a shaved head and a vodka bottle keeled over into the fire, sending up a great splash of sparks. His friends pulled him out and he lurched off again, smouldering. Someone leant over the bonfire and was sick.
Carlton and I lost sight of Steranko. Around another corner we found the entrance to one of the buildings and tried to get in but there was a huge scrum at the door. A great crush of people were trying to enter and as many were trying to leave. The more eagerly people tried to get out the more frenzied others became in their attempts to get in, like passengers on the Titanic rushing at a cruel mirror.