My Revolutions, page 13
He ignored the question. “Round here the landlords can charge what they fucking like. The tenants don’t complain because they’re grateful to have anywhere at all. You should hear Gloria tell about what it was like when she first came. No one would rent to her. She won’t have a word said against Rachman, says at least he didn’t care what color you were, long as you paid.”
“So what can we do?”
“Fuck knows. The bastards who own it all now are ten times worse than he ever was.”
That night at Charlie’s, the Free Shop collective discussed the action. Sean saw it as a total failure. The people who’d taken our food could fend for themselves. They ought to fend for themselves or, better still, join with us in helping others. Anna agreed. She said she wasn’t interested in symbolic gestures. The point was to channel resources to people who were in genuine need, not subsidize middle-class parasites. It was the first time I’d heard either of them so bitter. I decided they were right. It wasn’t enough. We had to do better.
While I tried to sort out the problems of the world, I’d been neglecting my own. I was broke and homeless. Since no one had come to see me while I was in prison, I had to assume I couldn’t rely on family or old friends. I went to sign on.
The very architecture of the dole office was humiliating. Hard benches, cubicles made from grubby prefabricated panels. I took a number and sat down opposite a poster promising Good News for Claimants. After an hour or so, I was called for an interview with a man who seemed so beaten down by his work that it was all he could do to lift a pen and fill in my form. We had a desultory conversation, then he flicked through a card index of vacancies. To my relief he decided he didn’t have anything suitable for me at the present time. I should monitor the boards in the office on a daily basis, because things often came up at short notice. I should also consider working on my personal presentation, which was often a surprisingly important factor in employers’ minds.
I looked at him, this bedraggled claims officer with his polyester jacket and his hair plastered over his scalp. I thought I should at least give him a chance. “You ever fantasize about burning this place down?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Carver, I’m not sure I follow you.”
“Burning it down.”
He looked up from his papers. “Is that some kind of threat?”
“No, not me. I’m talking about you. Surely you must think about it once in a while. You know, when you’re on your own, late at night, glass of whisky in your hand.”
“I’m not sure I like your tone. I’ve tried to be as courteous as possible, so I don’t see why you should adopt an aggressive attitude.”
I took that as a no.
Afterward I decided to go to see Vicky. I needed an endearing prop, so I stole some flowers from the park. It was one of Vicky’s volunteering days. I hung around outside the playgroup and caught her when she went for lunch. I told her the truth, which was that I was sorry about her flat and knew she probably didn’t want to see me but I’d needed an address to give to the dole office and, to put it bluntly, I’d used hers. She was furious, but not as furious as when I asked if she’d lend me some money. She wasn’t so much mollified by the flowers as astounded. She stared at them for a moment (they were blue flowers, hyacinths, I think) then got out her purse. I told her I’d pop by every week to get my check.
Tensions between Sean and Saul got worse. Anna fanned the flames by spending the night after the Free Shop action with Sean, while Saul sat up late in the kitchen, drinking despondently with Jay Marks, an artist who was one of the long-term residents. Jay was an openly gay man, an unusual thing for those days. He sometimes worked with a street-theater troupe, performing political plays in tourist spots, all white-face and agit-prop slogans and cardboard planes. He and Saul had developed an uneasy friendship, based on banter about Saul’s discomfort with his homosexuality. As the level in the rum bottle dropped, their sarcastic jokes gradually flagged and Saul started to slump despairingly on Jay’s shoulder. Tentatively, Jay stroked his hair. I decided it was time to go to bed.
Everyone was in a bad mood the next day. Helen and Matthias were threatening to move out unless the door to the toilet was replaced. Jay was locked in his room. Over breakfast Saul called Anna a bitch and Anna called Saul a misogynist. Sean gave a smug lecture on possessiveness, playing to a captive audience in the kitchen, where we were trying to get ready for a demonstration at South Africa House. Anna threw a coffee mug at him, which smashed on the wall by his head. “Don’t you ever fucking act like you own me,” she warned. Anna’s rare displays of temper were shocking, not just because she was normally so controlled but because they didn’t appear to have a limit. When she was angry, it didn’t matter where she was or who was present. Context just disappeared.
Later that day, Sean suggested we rob the supermarket. Not shoplifting—a commando raid. Empty the place overnight, distribute a meal to every poor household in Notting Hill. Most people wanted to talk about apartheid, because of the demonstration (something to do with cricket, I think), but Sean carried on, expounding his theme as we got on the bus with our placards, carrying on as we walked back through the park. Principle number one: if we wanted to call ourselves revolutionaries, we had to be prepared to break the law. This wasn’t just a gesture, or a bonding ritual. The experience of transgression was part of our formation as revolutionary subjects. It would change us, change our relationship to power. Principle number two: it was our food already. Deep down anyone who argued against stealing was motivated by guilt and fear, all the apparatus that had been installed in us by the ruling class for the purposes of social control. The truth of the situation was the exact opposite of the picture offered by the power structure. That food was the product of ordinary working people’s labor. It belonged to us already. They had stolen it from us.
It was directed at Saul, which worried me. A challenge. A dare. I think I called the idea adventurist. I remember Anna attacked me ferociously. “So that’s how it is? I had hopes of you. You say things like ‘The truly revolutionary line on such and such is such and such.’ But I think when it comes to actual revolution, you’ll hate it. You’ll hate the noise. You’ll hate the people. I think you’re a theorist.”
She’d hit on my weak spot, my secret fear. I don’t really know if Anna convinced me or just wore me down, but a few days later I found myself climbing into the back of Sean’s van. She and Sean were in front. Saul was next to me, nervously chewing his beard but determined not to back down, draft or no draft.
As would so often happen, Anna had taken on one of Sean’s projects, meticulously planning what we were about to do and transforming it from a piece of Errol-Flynnery into something like a military operation. We had a second vehicle, a Luton van usually used by Jay’s theater group. Jay had already gone ahead and was parked across the street from the supermarket. Someone had a friend who’d worked there stacking shelves. Around four, before the early-morning deliveries started, there would apparently be no one in the building. As far as he knew there wasn’t an alarm. We’d climb the fence, force the doors to the loading bay, and drive the Luton van right in.
I’d taken a French blue and the world was pinned down. Sharp edges, hard clean light. I watched the others swarm over the high fence, using a bit of carpet to cross the tangle of barbed wire that ran along the top. Sean went first, carrying the bag of tools. Saul and Anna followed him, dropping down into the darkness of the yard.
It seemed to take them forever to cut the chain on the gates. I sat there with Rosa’s engine running, looking in the wing mirror to see if anyone was coming. At last the gates swung open. Jay backed the Luton van into the yard and reversed it into the loading bay. I followed him in and Sean closed the roller door behind us. The next few minutes were insane. We ran round the building like television prizewinners, pulling stuff off shelves and slinging it into the vans. We’d only brought two flashlights, so several people were always stumbling around in the dark. In the freezer room I grabbed chicken after chicken. Sean and Anna were chucking in sacks of potatoes, jars of coffee, whole pallets of canned vegetables. Soon enough we were back on the road, skidding northward up Ladbroke Grove toward Free Pictures. I was whooping and shouting, laughing like a maniac.
Anna’s true genius showed itself in the setup at Free Pictures. In the dank cinema, Uther, Matthias, Helen, and about ten others were ready with tape and cardboard boxes. We formed a human chain to get the stuff upstairs and by the time it was properly light, people across the area were waking up to find several days’ of groceries on their doorstep. In each box was a slip of paper:
After the revolution there will be enough for all.
It was a weird, apocalyptic summer. Things seemed to be collapsing: tower blocks, foreign governments. Sean and I went to a meeting of something called the London Irish Civil Rights Solidarity Campaign, where I heard new and ominous words: Bogside, Orangemen, B-Specials. Hoping for Paris, we traipsed up to Hornsey, where there was a sit-in at the art school. We found a lot of students discussing the meaning of design, eating in the canteen under a banner that read bureaucracy makes parasites of us all. Other things were more fun. We disrupted property auctions by making false bids. A group of our friends dressed up in animal costumes and broke into the private gardens in the square opposite Free Pictures, opening them up as a playground for the local children. Just before he left for Sweden, Saul ran a training session at a local Vietnam Solidarity Campaign meeting. He’d been at the big Washington demos, the ones we’d seen pictures of, with people putting flowers in the barrels of guns and trying to levitate the Pentagon. He showed us various physical tactics, how to make yourself difficult to dislodge, how to “unarrest” someone without getting arrested yourself. He kept emphasizing the need for collective action. Nothing would work unless it was practiced by disciplined groups of people, who were aware of each other’s strengths and weaknesses, the level of risk they were individually prepared to take.
One night we got caught up in a violent bust at a basement bar off Westbourne Grove called the Island Breeze. We’d gone there to meet activists from a group called the African Liberation Caucus, a fancy name for a group of young men who gave out political leaflets outside the tube station and faced down the local mods. The ALC wanted to talk to us about the police. The Notting Hill force had always had a bad reputation, but now they seemed to be running amok. Black people were finding it impossible to drive a car down Ladbroke Grove after dark without getting pulled over. They were being beaten up in custody. Everyone agreed there was a problem; the trouble was that some of the ALC didn’t like involving whites in the issue. There was an ugly row, some name calling; we were about to leave when the police came charging down the stairs. No one resisted, but they smashed up the chairs and tables anyway, broke all the bottles behind the bar. Sean and I were held overnight, then released without charge. Everyone else had to go to court. A rumor went round that a white informant had told them about the meeting. An edge of paranoia was creeping in.
Though much of our energy was directed at local issues, we had connections to the wider political world. In the messy aftermath of Paris we went to a rally at the LSE, where student leaders from around Europe had been invited to speak. French friends of Anna were there. Matthias knew delegates from the German SDS. The occasion was the foundation of something called the Revolutionary Socialist Students’ Federation. It was the first time I’d been back at the LSE since March; the place felt like a relic of a past life. The rally was a fiasco. For all the rhetorical imperatives—the urgent need to constitute an extraparliamentary opposition, the urgent need to form red bases and commit as a bloc to all anti-Imperialist and anti-Fascist struggles around the world—it was just another sectarian talking shop. Crop-haired delegates from the Socialist Labour League sprayed invective at their rivals. Some fool got up to explain why the thoughts of Chairman Mao were essentially revisionist in character and had to be seen as contrary to the strict principles of Marxist-Leninism.
“So much for the new vanguard,” scoffed Anna. We were bored and disgusted. Eventually we started throwing things at the platform and shouting abuse at the speakers until some of the stewards tried to remove us from the hall. Among them was my old friend Alan. As we pushed and shoved, I jeered at him. He was dressed in a Chinese tunic, the height of revolutionary chic. “No more Carnaby Street shirts, Alan? Worker-peasant now, are we?” Around us people laughed.
“What happened to you?” he snarled.
“I went to prison, remember, comrade.”
Eventually we were frogmarched toward the doors. And that was when I met Miles Bridgeman for the second time, perched on a chair at the back of the hall, panning an 8 mm camera across the crowd. As we were hustled past he called out to me. Beside him, sitting on the floor in the aisle, was a pale young girl in a big floppy straw hat, smoking a cigarette and staring abstractedly at the ceiling. He followed us on to the street with his camera and filmed us continuing our argument with the stewards. Various groups had set up tables outside the hall to hawk literature and solicit donations. Some onlookers joined in on our side and eventually Alan and the others, most of whom I knew, retreated back indoors. The rest of us went to the pub.
I introduced Miles to the others, only to find some of them already knew him. He introduced me to his friend, whose name was Ursula. She asked me what star sign I was and seemed very put out when Anna told her all mysticism was inherently Fascist. Miles kept filming us as we walked, until he irritated Sean by putting the camera in his face, for which he almost got it knocked onto the pavement. I asked how he’d gotten on after Grosvenor Square.
“They didn’t have anything on me,” he said. “They let me go.”
I told him he was lucky. They hadn’t had anything on me either.
For whatever reason, the others peeled off and I ended up spending the rest of the day drifting around Covent Garden with Miles and Ursula. Miles told me about his latest project, documenting the lifestyles of revolutionary youth around the world. He was planning to go to Cuba. By early evening, we were lying around on mattresses at the Arts Lab watching a film of people’s faces as they had orgasms. Ursula told me I had a muddy aura. She rolled joints and passed them to Miles to light.
After that Miles always seemed to be around. He’d drop into Lansdowne Road and Free Pictures and hang about with his camera. Not everyone was pleased to see him. Sean never liked him, despite Miles’s sycophantic efforts to get on his good side. Chelsea poseur, he called him. Super-hippie.
I always felt a bit awkward about Miles, as if I was responsible for him. He’d irritate me, then do something generous, something that made it hard to get rid of him. I remember he always seemed to have drugs, even when no one else was holding.
One night he took me to a party in a flat on Cromwell Road, a high-ceilinged place decorated with big brass Buddhas and cane furniture. It belonged to a theater director and was full of expensively dressed people drinking white wine and eating macrobiotic snacks out of delicate Chinese bowls. I was sitting against the wall with Ursula, whom, for reasons no longer clear to me, I’d started sleeping with. Ursula’s conversation was mostly about her past incarnations, which included an iron-age priestess, Charlotte Brontë, and a peasant girl who’d died in a workhouse. She had a rage for systems, the more complex the better. Every time I saw her she’d half learned another chunk of tarot or the I Ching. I put up with it because she never wore any knickers under her beaded twenties dresses. We’d done it in a rowing-boat, on a bench on the Embankment. “It’s about your brain blood volume,” she was telling me. “Animals hold their necks horizontally. We’ve evolved into an upright position, but there are real disadvantages in that, from the consciousness point of view. Your level of consciousness is entirely related to brain blood volume. Once your cranium hardens, there’s no room for your brain to breathe. So you drill a small hole. It’s the most ancient surgical procedure known to man.”
I wasn’t really listening, occupied with watching the other guests. They were people on whom the Age of Aquarius was sitting uncomfortably, the men all polo-necks and half grown-out hair, the women caught between matronly respectability and tentative essays at hippiedom. Looming over us as we sat was a group of academic-looking men. While two of them made loud and rather ostentatious conversation about the Kama Sutra, the third was staring fixedly at a point somewhere between Ursula’s legs.
I went to find Miles, to ask if he was ready to leave. To my surprise I found him in the kitchen with Anna. I had no idea she’d be there. She was dressed with deliberate sloppiness, in tennis shoes and a pair of old paint-spattered jeans. Nevertheless she seemed to be at home, dangling a wineglass in her fingers and making some conversational point to Miles, who was vigorously shaking his head. When she saw me, she frowned. “What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same thing.”
She shrugged. I thought uncomfortably about Ursula. I hadn’t mentioned to Anna I was seeing her. Actually, we almost always stayed at hers—the one time she’d slept over at Lansdowne Road, I’d more or less sneaked her in and out of the house. Just then she came into the kitchen and draped herself possessively round me. Anna raised an eyebrow. Embarrassed, I shook Ursula off and she angrily flounced into the other room, followed by Miles. I watched him skillfully steering her toward a group of actors; she was soon happily reading someone’s palm.
“I hope for your sake she’s a good fuck,” said Anna.
I must have blushed, because she laughed heartily, spilling a little wine out of her glass. I tried to cover my annoyance. “How come you’re here?” I asked. “I thought you despised the decadent pastimes of the bourgeoisie.”
“I thought you did too.”
“I came with Miles.”
“Good for you.”
“You seem to know him.”
“He’s a friend of my ex-husband. Jeremy will probably be here himself, unless he’s found somewhere with more fashion models. You know, it’s odd to see Miles at Charlie’s. I never thought of him as the slightest bit political. Not like your little friend, eh, Chris?”
