My Revolutions

~ ~ ~

Shoeless, I wandered down into Notting Hill. The streets were lined with decaying mansion houses, peeling and sooty, with rubbish piled up in their once-elegant porches. Here and there West Indian men sat out on the steps enjoying the weather, talking or slamming down dominoes. Gangs of wild children ran between the parked cars. On some streets, half the houses were empty, their boarded-up windows like sightless eyes. I sat in a pub for much of that afternoon, listening to the sounds of the street market winding down outside. The public bar was populated by old boys who sat silently smoking and watching their pints fall inch by inch in their glasses. The fruit machine chirruped the fake promise of money. I was backing Britain. We were all backing Britain. The good times were coming our way. If I didn’t leave immediately, I knew I’d end up another lost soul, my arse moistening the leatherette forever.

Out in the world, it was getting late. The light had softened and Portobello Road was carpeted with rotting vegetables. I wandered northward, ignoring the people who called out at me or stared at my bare feet. In side streets, music filtered out of upstairs windows and young white girls talked to black men in smart cars. In a quiet square I found myself outside a disused cinema, a shabby deco façade tacked on to a redbrick building that had probably once been a church meeting hall. The doors were covered with sheets of corrugated iron and a sign warned of dire penalties for trespassers. From the pavement the place

looked deserted. On the unlit marquee, the word FREE had been spelled out in red letters.

Clutching the flyer, I banged on the sheeting. There was no answer. I banged some more. Eventually, a voice on the other side asked who I was.

“My name’s Chris,” I said. “Is there a — a happening here?”

The person on the other side did something with bolts and padlocks. The door opened a crack and I stepped into a darkened foyer smelling of cigarettes and stale beer.

All I could see was a silhouette. Jacket. Curly hair sprouting from the sides of a peaked usher’s cap. “Who do you know?” he asked. “No one, really. This is it, right? Free Pictures?”

He thought for a while, examined me. “You’d better come in. Everyone’s on the roof. Watch your step, there are holes. Also rats.”

Underfoot the carpet was sticky. The usher, who’d completed his outfit with army boots and what looked like an old-fashioned floral skirt, shambled ahead of me into the auditorium, a murky, cryptlike space. The air was tinged with damp. From the ceiling, just visible in the gloom, hung an unlit chandelier, an ominous mass festooned with cobwebs, like a prop from a horror movie. The electricity was obviously borrowed from elsewhere; just above head height sagged runs of cable, looping round sconces, draped over the plaster cherubs on the little balcony. Here and there light fittings had been wired up, bare bulbs hanging down to brighten little circles of moth-eaten red plush. The usher took me behind the screen, where a narrow staircase led into a dusty gallery. From there we climbed a ladder out onto the flat roof.

In the afternoon sunlight, a young woman was reading from a typescript to a crowd of about thirty people, who lounged around on rugs and broken plush seats. She spoke with a seriousness accentuated by her extreme pallor and by her clothes, a shapeless man’s sweater and a headscarf that dragged her hair severely back from her scalp. It was an appearance that suggested a punishing lack of self-regard. “More,” she was saying, “is not the issue. We

have more cars and fridges, more summer holidays in Fascist Spain. In fact, we have more of everything except life and freedom.” She spoke about the pressure to compete, how it was destroying basic social formations. Atomized workers were convenient for capital, free of attachments to each other, to place, even to time.

As she spoke it dawned on me gradually that I recognized her. Eventually I was certain she was the girl I’d seen throwing the stone at Grosvenor Square. She looked haunted, as if she hadn’t slept for days. I thought she was beautiful. She sat down and was immediately succeeded by a guy with a messy Afro and a German accent, who told us it was no good to talk theoretically, or to make a politics on the basis of a theory — any theory whatsoever. That would just mean swapping one set of masters for another. It was time to throw everything up in the air, to live in a radically different way. Out of that would come a politics based on material conditions.

Someone handed me a joint. I found a place to sit where I could rest my back against the parapet wall and check out the girl, who was sitting with a group of friends, nervously jigging one foot up and down and smoking a cigarette. These people were wilder and more ragged-looking than student crowds, where you’d still see sports jackets, combed hair. Most political meetings I’d attended happened against a background of whispering and poorly masked boredom. This had a different atmosphere, intense and anxious. “Freedom begins with the self,” called out a woman from the floor, and the freedom she was speaking about seemed to be present up there on the cinema roof, a fierce astringent energy, a flensing away of the past.

A man got to his feet and started stabbing a finger at the speakers. “Bullshit!” he snarled. “Total bullshit! Everything you said is stupid and naïve. You’re fools if you imagine revolution is going to happen in the way you just described — like some kind of light show. Blobs joining together to make bigger blobs? It’s just crap!”

He was a menacing presence, piratically bearded, listing to starboard, a lit cigarette stuck to his bottom lip. From behind me

someone called out to him not to be insulting. He turned round, spreading his arms. “Why not? If you talk shit you deserve to be insulted. It’s not about the self. The self is reactionary crap. It’s about mass mobilization.” Someone else yelled out in agreement and suddenly the thing was a free-for-all. A bespectacled guy in a sort of shapeless smock was shouted down when he accused everyone else of being repressed. The ascetic young woman told the pirate his mass line was boring. The pirate told her to grow up. Revolution wasn’t going to happen without someone seizing power. It was going to take struggle. It was going to be violent. The woman shook her head vehemently. She was opposed to all forms of violence. It made no sense to her to employ violence to end violence. The pirate, unusually for a pirate, quoted Mao: “We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war. But war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun, it is necessary to take up the gun.” There were cheers. He seemed exasperated. “Just use your heads!” he spat. “As soon as the workers’ state becomes even a distant possibility, they’ll try to crush it. What do you imagine? That they’ll let your amorphous liberated blobs incorporate factories and army barracks?”

The ascetic woman called him a casuist. “Get back in the kitchen!” shouted a male voice. “Leave the revolution to people who understand politics!” That caused a proper row. An avenger threw some sort of liquid over the misogynist, a skinny, shirtless boy who had to be restrained from throwing punches. The fight disturbed the transvestite usher, who disappeared downstairs. Meanwhile the verbal tanks rolled back and forth. Look at the Soviet Union. But that’s not Communism. Immediate union with the working class! War on the nuclear family! Gradually the light failed and people started to slip off, as the hard core wrapped themselves in coats and blankets against the chill.

Seize power, abolish power. Which did I want? I spoke only once, to make some kind of call for immediate action. I don’t remember what I said, just what I felt as I said it. There was an energy up on that roof, an urgency I didn’t understand at the time.

* * *

At God’s desk I fell asleep for an hour or two and dreamed Anna Addison was standing by a window, looking at me. I woke up in freezing darkness and stumbled around disoriented until I remembered where I was. I locked up the shop and drove home in a bizarrely altered state, dazzled by sleet and memory and oncoming headlights. I undressed in the bathroom and crept into bed beside Miranda, who grumbled and shifted over, her naked side hot as a ham against my hand.

The next morning I got up late. Miranda had already left for work. I made myself breakfast and ate it standing up, staring out of the kitchen window. I went for a long walk, which didn’t solve anything. I didn’t call the number on the answering machine.

The day after that, Sam came home from university. I picked her up from the station and was almost overcome by her breezy hug. My eyes watery, I told her I loved her and she patted me complacently on the knee, already deep into a story about someone called Susanna, who had an orange Beetle and wanted to take her horseback riding in Wales. The girl with the neat row of teddies waiting on her bed had acquired a nose stud and a noticeably different accent, a layer of London posh sprinkled over her ordinary voice. She was, she said, a bit disappointed with law. She was thinking of switching to psychology. It was all too much to absorb at once, this sudden fluidity, these changes. She seemed so happy. I was so happy for her.

I dropped her at home and while she unpacked I went out to buy something for lunch. When I got back, I heard voices in the kitchen.

“Hello, Dad. I’ve been hearing all about you.”

I froze in the doorway. It took me a moment to assemble the

scene. Miles at the kitchen table, his black coat draped over the chair-back, a mug of coffee in his hands. He smirked and raised an eyebrow. “Hi, Mike,” he said, emphasizing the name slightly, just enough so I’d pick up on it. “I came by on the off chance.”

“I see.”

Sam laughed. “Miles says he knew you in the old days. He says you weren’t always such a goody-goody.”

“Is that what he says?”

Her tone wouldn’t have been so light if he’d told her anything serious. I put the shopping down. They were, I saw, both smoking cigarettes. I lit one too. Miles sat back in his chair, enjoying himself. Sam adopted a conspiratorial tone. “Miles says you got arrested together. Protesting against the war, man!” She made a peace sign at me, giggling.

“What else does he say?”

“Oh, don’t worry,” drawled Miles. “I haven’t been telling her about the really naughty stuff.” Sam’s grin faltered a little when she saw the look on my face. Miles distracted her by telling a tall story about how he and I had supposedly spent an evening with the Rolling Stones. His anecdote had a rehearsed quality. It was, at least as far as my involvement in it was concerned, a complete fabrication. Miles evidently assumed Sam would be impressed by the mention of the Stones, but she listened with a polite, slightly puzzled expression. It was possible she didn’t know who they were.

How was I going to get him out of my house? I asked whether he’d like to go for a walk. “Pub?” he suggested, then theatrically corrected himself. “Oh, yes, I forgot. You don’t drink.”

“We could go to the pub if you like,” I told him. His smile broadened. He knew I was begging. “It’s a bit cold out,” he said, warming his hands on his coffee cup. “Much more cozy in here.”

Just then I heard the sound of the key in the front door. Miranda smelled the smoke before she even entered the room. “What on earth are you doing?” she asked me angrily, flinging open the back door and letting in a blast of icy air. Then she noticed Sam and Miles. “Hello, darling. And — hello.”

Miles got up from his seat. “Miles Bridgeman. Old friend of Mike’s.”

“Miranda Martin.”

They shook hands and she turned to me in genuine surprise. “You didn’t say you had anyone — I mean—”

Sam stood up and embraced her. “Hello, Mum.”

“Hello, darling. You stink of cigarettes.”

“That’s a nice welcome.”

“Well, you do. It’s disgusting. I’m sorry, Mr. Bridgeman. I don’t like smoking in the house.”

“I’m so sorry. Mike, you should have told me. Now I’ve gone and embarrassed myself. And please, Miranda, call me Miles.”

“Of course. I’m sorry — were we, I mean — I was — was Mike expecting you? I didn’t know. He never tells me anything.”

Miles adopted a raffish expression. “No, I think I came as a surprise. You know, we haven’t seen each other for years. I was visiting friends near here and thought I’d look him up. You have a beautiful house, by the way. I love what you’ve done to this kitchen. So real. What gorgeous flooring. Is it slate?”

“Yes. Welsh slate.”

“Beautiful colors.”

“Exactly.”

Soon Miles was asking her about the old glass medicine bottles and the bunches of herbs drying over the hearth, demonstrating a suspiciously perfect knowledge of the properties of lemon verbena. Miranda chattered to him, so taken with my charming friend that before I knew it she’d invited him to stay for dinner. I sat at the table while she cooked a risotto, and he bared his teeth without mirth, toasting me ironically with his glass of elderflower cordial. “Next time,” he said, “I’ll bring a bottle.”

“So what kind of work do you do, Miles?” asked Miranda, as we sat down to eat.

“Consultancy.”

“What kind?”

“Public affairs. I spend a lot of time at Westminster, doing

strategy work for various people, generally oiling the wheels of democracy.”

“Sounds exciting.”

“It’s very dull.”

“So are you Labour or Tory?” asked Sam.

“Neither. I’m my own man. I like to think of myself as a progressive.”

His own man. Whatever Miles was it wasn’t that. Miles Bridgeman would always be someone’s creature. To Sam and Miranda’s delight, he told more anecdotes about our supposed exploits back in the old days, slaloming in and out of the truth, adding deft little touches, hidden allusions, subtle reminders to me of all the other things he wasn’t telling. I was completely powerless, as removed from the situation as an accident victim, floating above the scene, looking down.

He made a few slipups, such as telling Miranda we’d known each other at university. Unlike Chris Carver, Michael Frame hadn’t gone to university. I improvised. “I was only there for that one term, remember? Then I dropped out.” He was quick to take the hint and I had the disturbing sense that we were now colluding with each other, jointly spinning a yarn. It was a story tailored to its audience, a confection of swinging London and San Francisco flower-power, as phoney as one of those television nostalgia shows where they soundtrack archive footage with old Top 4o hits. Miranda and Sam lapped it up.

“It’s so great you came, Miles,” said Miranda. “Mike never talks about any of this. I had no idea he was so involved in that sixties milieu.” She made it sound remote, historical. Waterloo or the Armada. Miranda’s youth was all punk bands and cider, or whatever they had to drink in Hendon. Sam’s primary reference point was probably Austin Powers. “You know, Mike doesn’t have any photos from back then,” mused Miranda. “He barely mentions it at all. He’s so unsentimental. Actually, I think you’re the first person I’ve met. .” She trailed off.

I knew exactly what she was thinking. Miles was the first person she’d ever met who’d known me for longer than she had. I could

see the starkness of it clouding her mind, an oddity about her life

that she hadn’t noticed before.

“So you haven’t kept in touch with the old gang?” Miles asked

me sweetly. I shook my head. “Not even Anna and Sean?”

“Who are Anna and Sean?” asked Sam.

My mouth was dry. Miles left me on the hook for a while, cocking

his head to one side and examining me with a vaguely scientific

air. Then he answered himself: “Just a couple we knew. Although—

weren’t you and Anna, you know? Didn’t you have a thing for a

while?”

Now Miranda and Sam were all ears.

“She was your girlfriend?”

“You’ve never spoken about any Anna.”

Sam smelled gossip. “What was she like?”

“Go on,” says Miles. “Tell her.”

“She wasn’t my girlfriend. I haven’t heard anything about either

of them.”

Sam frowned at me.

Miles rubbed his chin. “Shame,” he said.

Miranda was frustrated. “I don’t know why you’re being so

tight-lipped, Mike. I’m not going to be jealous of some lover you

had thirty years ago. It’s part of you.” She patted my hand, made

big eyes. How hungry she was for this. How I’d starved her.

“Did you go traveling together?” she asked peevishly, when it

became clear I wasn’t going to say anything voluntarily.

“No. We last saw each other just before I left.”

Miles served himself another scoop of ice cream. “So where did

you go, Mike? India, was it? You never told me at the time.”

“I was in India for a while. I went overland through Asia. I spent

several years in Thailand.”

“How very interesting. Bangkok?”

“For a while.”

Miranda cued up her favorite line. “Mike was in a monastery.”

Miles looked wry. “Really, Mike? That surprises me.”

“Why?” asked Miranda.

“Well, he was never really into the spiritual side of things. He was more of a political animal. So you became a Buddhist, Mike?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re still a Buddhist?”

“No — at least, not in any meaningful way.”

“But you don’t eat meat.”

“Neither of us does,” said Miranda.

“Simplicity. Nonviolence. I admire you.” Again that predatory grin.

It dragged on for hours, but at last Miles looked at his watch and decided it was over. He had, he said, a long drive back to London. He ought to get going. Miranda hugged him and gave him some samples of the new Bountessence men’s line. Sam kissed him on the cheek. He handed me a card. “In case you lost the last one,” he said. I walked him to his car, which was parked on the street outside.

“So, you’ll come and see me.”

I nodded, defeated. “When?”

“I’ll let you know. I’ll phone you. Don’t let me down, Chris. You won’t let me down, will you?”

No, I said, I wouldn’t let him down.

“You’re such a dark horse,” murmured Miranda, as we lay in bed. She snuggled closer to me, eager to explore our new intimacy. Thankfully she wasn’t confident enough to say Anna’s name.

* * *

Round and round. The sky’s getting lighter. I’m experiencing momentary drop-outs, instants when my mind is completely blank. When I finally turn off the périphérique I have a near-miss as someone unexpectedly pulls out in front of me. Overreacting, I jerk the wheel and scrape the near-side wing against the crash-barrier. That’s it. No more. I need to sleep, or at least close my eyes. I think I’m on the right route now, somewhere in the southeastern sprawl of the Paris suburbs, heading out of the city. I pull into a rest area, where I piss into a dark corner, broken glass crunching under my feet. Leaning out of the passenger door, I splash my face with bottled water, recline the car seat as far back as it will go and lie down. For a while, headlights continue to pass behind my eyelids. Then they stop.

I’m woken by a gloved hand tapping on the window. Daylight. A pair of policemen are peering at me through the steamed-up glass. I sit up with a jolt and open the door, rubbing my eyes. There’s a certain amount of confusion, but the general gist is that they want to see my passport. I dig through my luggage, wondering if they’re going to arrest me. Perhaps I’m on some kind of list. As they check my details, I get out and look around at the desolate place where I’ve spent the night. Above me looms a row of huge housing blocks, slabs of seventies concrete faced with cheerless primary-colored panels. The rest area is a dumping ground for HGV tires and building waste. The policemen ask me to walk up and down, checking, I think, to see if I’m drunk. I see a row of long black scratches on the car’s paintwork where I hit the barrier. So do they, but finally they let me go, repeating the word hôtel, clearly and patiently, as one would to a child.

I drive away, checking in the rearview mirror to see if they’re following me. A few kilometers down the road I stop at a service station to fill the tank. In the brightly lit café I drink a coffee and eat some kind of plastic-wrapped pastry, all sugar and synthetic apple jam. I watch a truck driver flicking through a selection of pornography at the news concession, carefully making his choice. The sugar gives me a rush of clarity. Out of habit, I just paid with my credit card. I’m angry with myself. So stupid, leaving a trail.

Does it really matter? Perhaps not. They’re going to find me, however careful I am. I have no resources. My choices are limited. I want to speak to Anna before they catch up with me. I want to hear how it was for her. I want her to say my name. After that, they can do what they like.

I take a swig of bottled water, start the engine, and swing back out on to the road. Round and round.

As that first afternoon at Free Pictures turned into evening, people started to drift off to their next destinations and the usher was kept busy climbing up and down the ladder to let them out. The girl who threw the stone left with a black man in a leather jacket. I would have followed her, but I was reluctant to leave the roof, knowing that as soon as I stepped on to the street I’d be back on my own, in depressive limbo. The pirate who’d argued with the other speakers also seemed annoyed to see her go. Sprawled next to me, apparently exhausted, he swore under his breath, then propped himself up on his elbows and announced that he was hungry. I said I was too. “So,” he suggested, “let’s go get something to eat.”

Even now it’s hard to talk about Sean Ward without romanticizing him. He was a handsome bastard, with a fine, rather delicate jawline he hid with a full beard, a crooked nose, wavy dark hair, and heavy-lidded brown eyes. His looks were the first thing everyone noticed about him and he knew what to do with them. Red Sean, fucker of the unfuckable, charmer of the barmaid and the arresting officer. To those who just remember him in the early

days, or who take their history from some of the frothier journalism about Anna, the romance is all that survives. I’m almost invisible in those books, a bearded oval in a couple of fuzzy group photos. Sean is omnipresent — but somehow simplified, bleached out into some kind of revolutionary rock star. The pictures (of which there are surprisingly few) tend to show him with rock-star accoutrements, dark glasses, his battered biker jacket. There he is, smoking a cigarette, throwing an arm casually over Anna’s shoulders. There he is, standing on a hillside in Wales, waving a huge flag. As far as the world’s concerned (if it’s concerned at all anymore), he’s just a footnote to Anna’s story, and since she’s been so distorted, it’s as if the real Sean, the Sean who was paranoid and generous and self-denying and confrontational and just vain enough to have liked those rock-star photos, has almost vanished behind a haze of Byronic bullshit.

The other cardboard cut-out of Sean is, of course, the social deviant, a member of the criminal classes led astray by a superficial engagement with politics. The stories about his hard-knock upbringing aren’t exaggerated. He was from a sprawling London-Irish clan that had disintegrated when he was a kid, spitting him into a series of foster homes from which he ran away, then reformatory, from which he couldn’t. He’d stolen a car, or rather many cars, but the one they got him for was a Jag he drove into a lamppost during some kind of police chase, aged fifteen. Even when I knew him, he had a thing about fast cars, the more expensive the better. I think there was an element of revenge, of abusing rich men’s toys. Yes, he had no education in the traditional sense, except what he’d given himself. Yes, he was impatient with theorizing, but it was an earned impatience, one I came to share. When I first met him at Free Pictures, all he wanted to talk about was books. It still makes me angry to see him painted as some kind of noble savage, a thug who didn’t know what he was doing.

Sean had drifted around. He’d done part of a plumbing apprenticeship, which he gave up, he told me, when he realized he wasn’t prepared to spend his life sticking his hand into other people’s

toilets. At one point he’d thought of joining the army. By the time I met him, he’d been in Notting Hill for a couple of years, making a living in a variety of ways — a little carpentry, a little hash dealing, delivering furniture in Rosa, a ten-year-old combi-van he’d painted a sickly shade of flesh-pink. In search of food, he led me through the frosted-glass door of a café on All Saints Road. “Hello, Gloria,” he said cheerfully, striding up to the counter and grinning at the stout black woman behind it. I followed him gingerly, feeling as if I’d stepped into the saloon bar scene in a Western. Men in work clothes or suits and skinny brim hats were hunched over the Formica tables, narrowing their eyes and kissing their teeth at us. The hostility was almost palpable.

“You have to go eat it at home,” Gloria told us. “We very busy tonight.”

“It’s all right, Gloria darling,” wheedled Sean. “We can just take it upstairs.”

She shook her head. “It’s Saturday night. You go upstairs it always upsets some people. I won’t have it, not on a Saturday.”

“But—”

“Not on a Saturday. Anyway, how I know your friend been brought up to mind his business? You tell me that.”

Sean put on a particularly winning smile. “It’s all right. He’s not about to cause any aggravation.” Gloria shook her head definitively. We ordered and hung around, waiting for her to finish shouting at whoever was doing the cooking. Her customers went back to their suppers. At the time I was confused by their resentment. I was, as I thought of it, “on their side.” Having said that, I still remember my shamefully instinctive recoil, my little moment of panic at the sight of all those black faces staring at me.

Gloria started wrapping up our food, but Sean kept hassling her to let us join in with whatever was happening upstairs. It looked as if she was about to relent until she noticed my bare and by now rather dirty feet. After that it was definitely no dice. Sean was told never to bring such a filthy good-for-nothing (her word) into her establishment (also her word) again. We took our supper and left

in a hurry, me rattled, Sean laughing. A month or so later we were finally allowed upstairs, though not on a Saturday night, and I caught a glimpse of another of London’s many undergrounds, Gloria’s miniature shebeen, where in her packed living room grizzled old men bet on cards and young ones smoked reefer out of the window, a scene of minor debauchery acted out to the terrible Jim Reeves records she played on her old Dansette.

We took our goat curry back to Vicky’s flat. On the way, Sean stopped off at a house under the shadow of the half-built flyover, rang the bell and in a brief transaction conducted through a barely cracked front door took possession of a bottle of Wray & Nephew’s rum and a quarter of powerful-smelling weed. After we’d eaten I lounged around on the rug as Sean unsuccessfully mined Vicky’s record collection for rock music. Within an hour or so we were back on the road, several shots into our game and walking with a swagger that, while not yet a stagger, was already showing transitional signs. Just after eleven Sean handed me a tiny barrel-shaped tablet and some time around midnight I came up on my first ever acid trip.

We were back in the flat and I was telling Sean how pathetic it was to be grateful for gammon and boiled potatoes, when I noticed the paint was starting to peel off the wall behind his head. Gammon and potatoes was what Vicky could cook — and had — three times in the previous week. It was better than the food in prison, though that wasn’t saying much. At that point in my life it wouldn’t have occurred to me to make a meal for myself when there was a woman around to do it, and I was presenting myself to Sean as a sailor on the culinary seas of fate, doomed to wander oceans of blandness until I came upon the “islands of curried goat,” a phrase I found unaccountably entertaining — and odd, if I was honest, part of a general sharpening of words and things that I’d just begun to notice. Sean grinned, looking at me with an inscrutable glint in his eye. The paint really was coming off, whole patches of it cracking and bubbling, giving the wall a scaly appearance disturbingly suggestive of giant reptilian life. The light in the room,

and now I came to think of it everything else, my entire evening, seemed to have been refracted through some sort of transforming prism, every object in my field of vision revealing itself with startling exactness, not just visually but in itself, a sort of ontological clarity that led me to look around and think, Yes, this table, this rug, which I’m stroking with my fingertips. I had a sudden sense of the incredible connectedness of things and soon afterward my environment transformed itself into something rich and radically strange.

Other people’s acid stories are always dull, I know. And then I thought, What if we’re all just grains of sand and each grain of sand and so on and so forth. But that trip with Sean accelerated something. Afterward we were close friends, as if we’d known each other forever. It was as if we’d skipped a bit, leaped over a whole period of time.

My memories of the middle section of that night are fragmented. I’ve no sense of the order of things, just a series of random snapshots. Sean dancing dreamily in the back garden, Sean as professor of the Faculty of Better Living, explaining the future with the aid of a diagram drawn on the bubbling white wall. During a period in which I seemed to be naked, apart from some of Vicky’s costume jewelry, I spent a long time looking in her bedroom mirror. How many eyes? Was I sure? Sean brooded in an armchair, his skin an unhealthy yellow.

The light was harsh. We began to fidget and pace. It was ridiculous to be cooped up in a basement, a little hutch carrying the whole weight of a townhouse on its back. It was such a big rich house, so substantial, so groaning with things that I felt it was crushing me beneath its weight. Sean was crying and laughing in short experimental bursts. We got ourselves up in a jumble of weird clothes, including a cloche hat and some sort of big silk scarf scavenged from Vicky’s wardrobe. Sean insisted on taking the sheepskin rug with us, which was how we came to leave it on a bench in Holland Park. Locking up took ages, because the logic of keys was beyond comprehension, but before too long we were

on the march, the night air good in our lungs, stepping between the streetlights, whose spooky cones of phosphorescence looked too bright to risk trespassing into.

The business of getting over the fence into Holland Park was confusing and messy enough for us not to want to go through it again until we were straighter, which meant that we spent several hours wandering through a landscape of ponds, statues, twenty-story boxes of filigreed golden light, flowerbeds and other phenomena. It was quite cold. Sean, who seemed much better than me at doing things, who to my admiration could exhibit sophisticated goal-oriented behavior, saw I was shivering and wrapped the rug round me.

“Always stay in your movie,” he advised.

“I’m in my movie.”

“Don’t fall out of it.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Stay in!”

“Sure. I’m in my movie, you’re in yours. It’s our movie.” “The same movie?”

“The same movie.”

When daylight established itself, we climbed out of the park and walked through the deserted Sunday-morning streets to a greasy spoon in Shepherd’s Bush. We hung around outside, waiting for the owner to open up. Then I watched Sean put away bacon, sausage, egg and beans, several cups of tea, and three cadged cigarettes while I stared at the swamplike mass of disturbing textures on my plate and took tiny sips of collee.

“Food not the thing?” he asked, in a solicitous tone.

I shook my head.

“Can I have yours, then?”

I pushed the plate over to him. I felt like hell. Come-down had firmly nailed the center of things, though the corners were still displaying a tendency to fly away. The call was a place of flickering shadows, loud noises.

“I reckon I should go to bed,” I told Sean.

“You won’t sleep,” he warned.

“All the same.”

I got up to go. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and smiled at me. “OK, well, come over to mine if you get bored.” He gave me the address.

Trudging barefoot down Holland Park Avenue I felt scoured, wiped clean. It was as if my mental scaffolding had been swept away. I could build again from scratch.

Then I saw the state of Vicky’s flat. There was something black crushed into the carpet. Her clothes were everywhere, the dresses she’d carefully hung in the wardrobe tangled up together with shoes and — oh, God — underwear. What had we been doing with her underwear? Where was the rug? A diagram of some kind had been drawn on the wall in what appeared to be red lipstick. It was a complex mess of arrows and little bubbles. I found it hard to say what it represented. I had a dim memory of Sean explaining his plan for a space colony. I’d have to get paint. Paint on a Sunday.

I made my way back to the park and found the rug, dew-soaked and dirty, but otherwise undamaged. Returning elated by this initial success I decided to have a quick lie-down and burrowed under a heap of clothes. I didn’t sleep, as Sean had warned, just spent an indeterminate period in a state of jerky dislocation, chasing thought-rabbits down burrows and failing to follow the million simultaneous skeins of logic offered up by my hyperactive mind. I wished my brain would shut up and knew that soon I’d have to start tidying, but first I needed to rest, so I tried to quell the pointless churn behind my eyes and kept on trying (in a minute) until Vicky came back home.

I think she thought she’d been burgled, because when she came into the bedroom she was carrying the hockey stick she usually kept in the umbrella stand in the hall. Seeing me looking up at her from beneath a pile of her evening dresses she quickly realized some kind of party had taken place. So what the bloody hell had happened, Christopher? There were cigarette burns on the rug, Christopher. She’d trusted me, Christopher. She’d taken me in, Christopher. I

told her to “be cool,” which didn’t go down well. She hustled me to the door and threw my shoes after me. I dressed on the pavement outside the house, feeling like a human shell, a zombie whose voodoo was wearing o,

I didn’t know where to go, so I ended up at Sean’s place, a tall crumbling townhouse on Lansdowne Road with a front garden overgrown by weeds. To my surprise, the door was answered by the Afro-haired German guy Sean had berated so fiercely the previous night. He seemed happy enough to let me in, and I clambered through a forest of bicycles into the sitting room, where I fell straight to sleep on a broken-down chesterfield.

I stayed at Sean’s for several days. It was a place with a floating population. Charlie Collinson, the owner, spent six months of the year in India, where he bought textiles and leather sandals, selling them in London to finance his next trip. At any given time several of the other tenants would be traveling too, subletting their rooms or inviting their friends to stay there. Sean, who lived rent-free, was supposed to act as a sort of house manager, but being philosophically opposed to private property, he was happy for the place to be a crash pad for more or less anyone who didn’t work for the authorities. It was a chaotic arrangement, made more so by the comings and goings of various groups, sects and gangs, mostly political, though it wasn’t unusual for a band to be rehearsing in the basement or stage lighting to be stored in one of the bedrooms. Some people handled the lack of routine better than others. Matthias, who answered the door, had been there for a few months with his girlfriend Helen, a slight, red-haired girl I’d also seen at Free Pictures. For all their earnest talk of dismantling their social conditioning, they were shy and rather private people. Living there was driving them crazy.

Though chaotic, Charlie’s was never the kind of stoner household that had people and their ashtrays frozen into position on the sofas. Life was lived in an atmosphere of frenzied communal preparation. Something was happening in the world and, whatever it was, we were going to be in the middle of it. It was time to get

ready. People got ready by waking up at five A.M. to join picket lines, by writing leaflets, folding leaflets, organizing fund-raisers, getting pushed around by the cops, folding more leaflets, going to court, getting up at two A.M. to write slogans on walls on Golborne Road and talking, above all, talking. One morning I went to sleep in someone’s bed and woke up a few hours later in the middle of a reading group, eight people sitting on the floor picking through Hegel. I was just beginning to get involved in a discussion about the master-slave dialectic when Sean put his head round the door to ask if I wanted to go and “do the food run.” The word food was enough. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gotten it together to eat.

We climbed into Rosa and parked just off Portobello Road. Sean seemed to know most of the stall-holders, and as we made our way through the market, he bantered and wheedled and was told to cut his hair a dozen times, but by the time we got to the far end we were carrying two large boxes filled with fruit and vegetables. There also seemed to be a butcher who had a bag of chops that needed eating up and a Portuguese grocer who owed him a bag of rice. It was an impressive haul. “And that’s just the leavings,” Sean said, a note of disgust in his voice. “Think what we could do if we got organized.”

We went back to Charlie’s and handed the food over to a couple of women from a Cuban Solidarity group, who happened to be chatting near the door. They headed into the kitchen and we sprawled on the sofas in the living room, listening to the peevish rattle of pans.

“Primitive Communism,” explained Sean, skinning up. “You hunt, you gather. You work for the group.”

“There’s more food than we can eat. There’s only about six of us in at the moment.”

“More will turn up. We could invite more.”

“You think they’re OK in the kitchen?”

“Sure, mate, they’re fine.”

Some time later, about twelve people sat down to eat and Sean

and I told them about the plan we’d just formulated to run a free shop. It would be an event, a one-day action. Systematic collection— go early to all the markets: Billingsgate, the Borough, Covent Garden. Box it up, then just give the stuff away outside Free Pictures. People could hand out literature. We’d feed a few people and make a political point: it would be an example of practical redistribution, a condemnation of consumer society.

We stayed up late, smoking cigarettes and making a list of people who might help out. I say we, but I knew nobody. Sean, on the other hand, seemed to know everyone in Wii. By the time we went to sleep we had dozens of names — people who worked on legal or housing issues, members of Big Flame and the IMG, some Spanish Black Cross anarchists who lived above our local betting shop. He had friends who worked at Release and the BIT information service. There was someone who wrote regularly for the underground press and a household of self-styled Diggers, who’d declared themselves the Albion Free State. The BIT people had an office round the corner. They’d probably let us use their phone.

The next morning I woke up on the sitting-room floor to find myself staring at a pair of long, tanned, female legs, which culminated in sandaled feet with chipped black varnish on the toenails.

“Anyone in there?”

I looked up to see the stone-throwing girl. From the floor she looked startlingly tall and slender, beautiful enough to make me feel conscious of being naked inside the sleeping bag. She had high, almost Slavic cheekbones, green eyes and straight brown hair that fell round her face like a curtain as she stared down at me. She wore denim shorts and a sleeveless black vest, no jewelry, no adornment at all except a black and white keffiyeh thrown round her shoulders. “Is Sean around?” she asked abruptly.

“No idea. He was here last night.”

“I need to talk to him.”

I noticed that she was with someone. A thick-set, handsome man with curly dark hair and a flourishing, almost biblical beard

was leaning on the back of one of the sofas. He looked like a boxer or a rock climber, someone used to physical endurance, an impression emphasized by a number of fresh cuts on his face.

“I don’t know where Sean is,” I told the woman. “I was asleep.”

“I suppose you think you’re living here.”

I disliked her tone. “What’s it to you?”

“I actually do live here.”

“I see. And you are?”

“God, what the fuck is your problem?” asked the man. He had an American accent.

I noticed they’d dumped backpacks on the floor, amid the remains of last night’s planning session, a jumble of papers and dinner plates used as ashtrays. I propped myself against the wall and rubbed my eyes. “I don’t like being hassled when I’m half asleep. That’s my problem. If you want to leave a message for Sean, I’ll give it to him. He’s probably gone to Free Pictures. What time is it?”

“It’s eleven,” said the woman, her tone softening slightly. “I’m going to make tea. Is there milk?”

“Yeah, probably.”

“Do you want a cup?”

“OK. Thanks.”

“How do you take it?”

And so I ended up sitting round the kitchen table listening to Anna Addison and Saul Kleeman talk about Paris. For three weeks we’d been reading about the strikes, the students fighting the police in the Latin Quarter, but the reports were so confused and partisan that it was impossible to make out what was happening. They’d actually been there. Their stories were incredible. Groups of people who’d never met each other forming chains to build barricades. The CRS launching tear-gas grenades, then charging the protesters. They’d met in the doorway of an apartment building, desperately ringing doorbells, trying to get someone to let them in after the CRS overran the rue Gay-Lussac. With the cops tramping up and down the stairs outside, a girl had hidden twenty of them in her

place overnight. The next morning, a friendly workman had driven them through the police cordon, hidden in his camionette. There had been mass arrests, terrible violence. They’d seen a police squad corner two Algerians, leaving them both for dead.

It was obvious they were lovers. As they told their tale, Saul draped an arm over the back of Anna’s chair and played with her hair. The cuts were souvenirs of a beating he’d taken on a demo outside the Renault factory. He’d narrowly escaped getting arrested and deported, which, since he’d fled the States after drawing a low number in the draft lottery, would have meant either prison or Vietnam. He was going to apply to stay in Sweden, unless “something serious” happened in London, in which case he thought he might hang around. I couldn’t tell whether he meant something serious politically, or with Anna.

I heard the front door slam upstairs, then Sean came bounding down into the kitchen. “Anna,” he shouted, gathering her up into his arms and kissing her full on the mouth. I noticed she responded. So did Saul. He didn’t look pleased.

That night, as people were sorting out where they’d sleep, Anna asked Sean casually whether a particular room was free. He said it was. “See you in the morning, then,” she told him, taking Saul’s hand and leading him upstairs. Sean watched them inscrutably, then unhooked his jacket from the back of his chair and left the house.

So much has been written about Anna, almost all of it wrong. She’s been reduced to the woman in the Copenhagen photo, with her fist raised out of the embassy window. It’s impossible, I suppose, to separate who she became from who she was in 1968, but that masked figure is as much of a cartoon as Byronic Sean Ward. The Copenhagen woman stands for death, death to the pig state, death to the hostages. If I say I think Anna was motivated by love, it sounds banal, an old hippie talking. Or an old lover, blinded by sentiment.

We had so many questions about Paris. Why were the unions asking their members to go back to work? Why was it all falling

apart? The next day at Free Pictures, Anna ran a question-and-answer session for an audience of almost a hundred people, drawn from every niche in the feral ecology of the London underground. Pure word of mouth, as far as I could tell. Bush telegraph. Sean pointed out a who’s who of local activists. The Black Power crowd, the neatly dressed Leninists from the orthodox Communist Party. Anna was an eloquent speaker. She’d arrived in time to participate in the enormous street demonstrations of early May and “both personally and politically” the previous six weeks had “felt like a lifetime.” The situation was now very uncertain. De Gaulle had called an election. Yes, some of the immediate revolutionary potential had dissipated.

As she spoke I peered at her. Under the bare bulb her head was a collection of angles, futurist splinters of cheek and brow. Her voice was made to sway a crowd. As she talked she leaned on a chair, using its back as a lectern and sweeping the darkened room with one hand, gathering us all up into her intensity. I thought that gesture was the most graceful, truthful thing I’d ever seen. When she smiled, which she did often, I wanted her so much I could have cried.

* * *

The area around Notting Hill was a crappy part of town in those days, a couple of square miles of rotten ghetto housing cut through by a half-built flyover, but it supported a ramshackle counterculture made up of hundreds of cliques and groups and communes, little magazines, support groups, co-ops, bands. By finding my way to Free Pictures I’d fallen straight into the middle of a place with its own geography, an anti-city of bed-sitters and bookshops, rehearsal rooms and cramped offices.

I’d also stumbled into the middle of an elliptical game that Sean and Anna were playing with each other. For the rest of that summer everything happening in the world, however big — Czechoslovakia, Bobby Kennedy’s assassination — was, if not exactly subordinate, then wrapped up with what was taking place between them. Like a fool I became willingly, even eagerly entangled. Poor Saul Kleeman was in as deep as me: we’d both fallen out of our own movies into theirs.

Sean and Anna had been together before she went away, but monogamy was never part of their arrangement. This was both a personal and a political decision. Like many of us, they were moving toward the view that the building blocks of the oppression we all felt, the molecules that made up the vast body of the capitalist state, were psychological ones. A revolutionary transformation of society would require a transformation of social life, a transmutation of ourselves. Everything about my own family confirmed this. If I was to be free, I had to be free of them. But I also had to recognize that they were prisoners too. It wouldn’t be enough to kill Daddy and marry Mummy. We had to kill the engine that generated all the daddies and mummies, throw a clog into the big machine.

In the meantime, Sean and Saul were going to compete for Anna. I think she set it up: a lesson or an experiment. Of all of us, she was the only one who had real experience of the world. She was in her late twenties. At one time she’d been married to a photographer, running around in Chelsea wearing fake eyelashes and A-line dresses. The marriage had lasted only eighteen months but remained with her as a kind of hinterland, an intolerance of certain things and people, an address book filled with scribbled-out names. “It’s OK being put on a pedestal,” she once told me, “until it’s built so high they start to feel afraid of you. Then they hate you and after that it’s all they really want to do, the hating.” One of the many striking things about Anna was her indifference to her own happiness and comfort, even her personal safety. I think she came increasingly to consider herself unimportant, except as a vehicle for the revolution. The rest of us tried to cultivate the same selflessness, the same erasure of personal preference, but Anna could always go further, could always get closer to absolute zero.

If Anna was self-negating, Sean was fiercely present. He wanted Anna. He didn’t want Saul to have her. But Sean wanted a lot of things. Did he love her? That depends, I suppose, on what one means by love. Sean would use the word in a way that made it seem like a kind of freedom, a moral energy he intended to project through the world by sheer force of will. Love was freedom, so love had to be free. It was all walls and bars and cages with Sean. It was all breaking things open, smashing them apart.

If you believe in free love — not in the sense of promiscuity, but in its true sense — as the release of libidinal energies from any restraint, any check whatsoever, the barrier between desire and action becomes terrifyingly thin and permeable. I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires. How many of us could actually live like that? Is it even possible? We all tried, and both Sean and Anna got closer than I did. I can say that about them. At least I can say that. So yes, love. Love firing off in all directions.

Saul never stood a chance. If I fared better, it was only because it was a long time before I even admitted I was in the game.

Sean’s first tactic in his offensive against the invader was blitzkrieg household disruption. The next day he rousted Anna and Saul out of bed so he could replaster a section of bedroom wall that, until then, he’d been perfectly happy to leave to crumble behind the paper. In subsequent days he took up floorboards, moved people and furniture in and out of the house, creating a sort of permanent domestic revolution, a constant flux designed to unsettle everyone as much as possible. Once he’d filled the place to bursting, he took the door off the toilet and started forcing people to share rooms, accusing anyone who argued with him of bourgeois individualism. There was to be no privacy. Helen and Matthias had to sleep alongside two anti-apartheid activists from Birmingham. I spent a night wide awake on a mattress in a corner of the largest bedroom, watching Saul and Anna fuck in the orange glow of the streetlight outside the window. Once or twice her eyes caught mine.

Initially, Saul was happy enough to put up with Sean’s dislike of him, even to take a little pleasure in the chaos he was causing, as long as he had Anna. On the surface, he and Sean were quite friendly with each other. Then one weekend Sean held an impromptu party that started on Friday afternoon with three friends and a bottle of Dexedrine and ended thirty-six hours later with half the transient population of Ladbroke Grove inside the house. By the end of the first day Sean was higher than I’d ever seen him before, a ragged ringmaster goading people on to perilous heights of excess. Someone had rigged up a PA in the kitchen, which played a mixture of ska and R & B and acid rock, depending on which faction had seized control.

The first most of us knew about the raid was when the police pulled the plug, shorting the electrics and plunging the place into darkness. I was upstairs, arguing about something or other with Matthias, when everything went black. There were sounds of panic from the hall and someone called out, “Pigs! Pigs!” which cued general swearing, hiding of stashes, tripping over and crashing around. A minute or two later a flashlight was shone in my face.

I was told to leave the premises immediately and not to cause any trouble while I was about it.

Several people were arrested, all of them black. Saul had a close call: he was one of a dozen or so partygoers who escaped over the back fence and were chased by police through neighboring gardens. Earlier in the evening, Sean had been feeding him whole handfuls of drugs. When the raid happened, Saul couldn’t understand what was going on. The police were already in the room when he worked out what the blue uniforms were all about. He spent the rest of the night hiding in a flowerbed. Afterward, sleep-deprived and paranoid, he accused Sean of engineering the bust. “You wanted me put away, you bastard! Don’t deny it! You wanted those motherfuckers to get me.” Sean sneered at him, needling him with a mocking cowboy mime, blowing on six-gun fingers and adjusting an imaginary hat.

They were squaring up to each other when Anna arrived back from the phone booth. A friend had been charged with possession. She’d been trying to get him a lawyer. Saul and Sean both switched gears and started to outline competing schemes for dealing with the situation. She seemed angry with both of them. Turning her back on Sean, she asked me what I thought. I told her the truth— I didn’t know. At that moment I didn’t care. I was sick of everyone and wanted to be alone. Anna looked over at me, smiling curiously. I felt I was being assessed. I went to the pub and sat out Sunday evening with the old men, staring into my pint and trying to ignore unwanted flashes of her naked torso rocking backward and forward under orange light.

* * *

In my opinion, the Free Shop was a success. About twenty people foraged through London markets, from Billingsgate to Covent Garden, bringing back piles of food that we laid out on a stall outside Free Pictures. Anna wrote a leaflet explaining the action, giving definitions of “waste,” “redistribution,” and “socialism.” I provided some ideas, a few words and phrases, a little historical context about English civil war radicals. It was the first time the two of us worked together, sitting round the big wooden table at Charlie’s, scribbling in a notebook. I asked her where she’d learned so much political theory. “Secretarial college,” she told me tartly.

Along with our material, the Free Shop displayed handouts from a dozen organizations, promoting everything from veganism to a united Ireland. The shambolic usher from Free Pictures, who gloried in the name of Uther Pendragon, changed the lettering on the marquee to read: FREE ALL PEOPLE ALL FREE. Customers flocked to the stall. Most, I saw, were young, long-haired, and fashionably dressed. I noticed Sean staring coldly at a pair of couture hippies as they picked fastidiously through a box of bananas. Later, a few of us walked round the streets with baskets, offering food to anyone who passed by. Most people were suspicious. “What have you done to it?” was the most common question. Though younger ones took the food willingly, older ones seemed to think there was something shameful about it. One or two women poked and sniffed at the produce, then furtively slipped things into their bags, hurrying off as if they’d transacted a drug deal.

Late in the afternoon, Sean and I divided up what was left into boxes and drove Rosa to the top end of the Grove, where we parked and started knocking on doors near Harrow Road. We had them slammed in our face a couple of times. A stern-faced West Indian

church lady got really angry. How dare we offer her charity? How dare we come round there with our filthy clothes and nappy hair and act like we were better than her?

We were invited in by a young Irish couple, who were living in two rooms on the top floor of a rotting townhouse. The place should have been condemned. Damp was streaming down the walls. The toilet was on the landing, and the shared bathroom all the way downstairs. The wife, who had a persistent cough, attended to a baby while we drank tea with the husband, trying to get him to stop apologizing for not offering us a biscuit. They’d been in London just under a year. He was making a little money from building work, but the rent was high and at the end of the month, there wasn’t always enough. We left promising we’d be back.

“That was the kind of place my mum had in Hammersmith,” said Sean, as we went downstairs. “Trying to cook our tea on the landing while everyone else was waiting their turn on the hob.”

“Is she still there, your mum?”

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 mARES 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?”

“That’s right, she’s not political.”

“So you’re just fucking her?”

“Why are you here, Anna? I thought Jeremy was supposed to be a pig.”

“Jeremy is a pig. Look, I know people, OK? Just because you’re the tortured introvert. Besides, I needed to be out of the house.”

She didn’t have to say anymore. Sean and Saul had been at each other’s throats all day. The pretext was some abstruse point about workers’ councils.

She took a drag on her cigarette. “The sooner he goes to Sweden the better.”

“If you think that, why don’t you just tell him?”

“Because it’s nothing to do with me.”

“Oh, come on, it’s everything to do with you.”

“Not really. If it wasn’t me it would be someone else. Something else. Something.”

Around us the alcohol level was peaking. Voices were raised. Rhetoric flew messily around the kitchen. A woman I recognized from some late-night discussion program on the BBC was holding forth to a little group by the sink. “If you mean that by honoring my feminine side, I’m honoring the divine within myself and elevating nonmaterial values over the consumer culture, then I’d have to say you’re substantially correct.”

“That’s just crap, Maria.”

“But why is it crap?” The woman camped up her incomprehension. “Just tell me why.”

I never knew much about what it was like for Anna when she was married to Jeremy Wilson. East End chancers and aristocratic junkies; everyone up for a free ride. She was only twenty, divorced by twenty-two. I looked at the television woman, at her careful makeup and amber jewelry. In other circumstances, could Anna have turned into her?

We drifted into the main room where the host was fiddling with an expensive hi-fi. Ursula was dancing with a good-looking young man.

“He’s an actor,” Anna told me. “He’s in something somewhere and he’s a great success.”

Ursula looked sulkily over. I was obviously being punished. The actor eyed me warily. “So,” asked Anna, “are you going to do something about it?”

“Like what?”

“I thought you were with that girl. Look at where his hands are.”

“I don’t care. She’s a free person. We’re all free people.”

“You mean you don’t care, or you’re afraid?”

“I’m not afraid of him.”

She laughed, and appraised me. “Yes, you are. Maybe not of him in particular, but of this.”

“Anna. I don’t give a damn. She’s pissing me off anyway.”

“Oh, is she? Poor you. But you’re not taking my point.”

“I don’t know what your point is.”

“I’m saying you respect it too much. This party. These people. These sophisticated people.”

“I’ve got no respect for them at all. They’re smug. They’re bourgeois.”

“You’re lying, Chris. You want them to love you. You follow all their rules. Politeness, acceptable behavior. My mother would adore you.”

“What rules? And I still don’t understand what your problem is. We’re both at this party. We’ve both chosen to come here. It’s just a party.”

“The difference is that you couldn’t step outside it, if you chose. Look at these people. Look at them, Chris. They’re blind. They’re happy to ignore everything around them, just pleased to be having a good time. And, as far as I’m concerned, that makes them culpable. It makes them complicit in everything they’re ignoring. Vietnam, the lot. It makes them pigs.”

“So what? You want to leave? I agree. Let’s get out of here.” “Run away?”

“Christ, Anna! Run away from what?”

“Why not confront them? If they’re pigs, why not tell them to their faces?”

“If they piss you off so much, why don’t you?”

Without a word, Anna went over to a middle-aged man in a velvet jacket, who was talking to the host. As she approached, he smiled reflexively, wondering if he knew her. She leaned forward and tightened his tie until it started to constrict his neck. Then, as he scrabbled ineffectually at his collar, she dashed the wineglass out of his hand and screamed at him, “You pig! You fucking baby-killing pig!” The music was quite loud and not everyone could hear, but the room was instantly energized.

People stared. The man cowered, his hands up, ready to ward off another attack.

Anna turned to me and inclined her head. The blood was pumping in my ears. I felt sick, as if there was a physical weight on my chest. She was right. I was scared of those people. I valued their good opinion. I envied their confidence, their social position.

I took a step forward. Then another. In front of me was the BBC woman. I batted a bowl out of her hand, spraying rice salad over the people around her. I screamed at her, “Pig! Fucking pig!” Anna went up to another woman, spilling wine onto her blouse. I pushed the actor who was dancing with Ursula. For the next few minutes we shouldered through the party performing small acts of transgression, breaking things, screaming obscenities and feeling people up, until the place was in a state of uproar. People shouted at us. One man slapped Anna’s face, the macho movie hero dealing with the hysteric.

I remember Miles’s horrified expression as we were pushed out of the door.

On the street, taxis streamed past, carrying people back to the suburbs. The host was apparently calling the police. We ran off toward the tube station.

When we clattered down the stairs, we found the platform was deserted, and since she was laughing and I was on a high, I pushed her against a pillar and put my face close to hers. I could feel her back, slick with perspiration under her thin T-shirt. She didn’t pull away. When I kissed her, she responded passionately, or so it seemed to me, until I tried to slip my hand between her thighs, at which point she pushed me off and held me at arm’s length, smiling and shaking her head. “Fuck off, Chris,” she panted. “You don’t get to drag me back to your cave. I’m not your reward, your gold star.” Then, while I tried to digest what had just happened, she playfully slapped my cheek and hopped onto a train, waving to me as the carriage doors closed. I watched her take a seat and fish a book out of her jacket pocket as it pulled away.

Was that party the turning point, the most important moment

of my summer? Or was it when Jay came to find me in the pub? I remember he’d acquired a large fedora hat from somewhere. It made him look like a theatrical villain, off for a touch of opium and some white slavery, then home in time for tea.

“There’s a guy in the living room,” he whispered ominously. “You’ve got to come and deal with him. He’s fucking awful, mate. Harshing the vibe. Says he’s your brother.”

By the time I arrived, Brian had been there almost an hour. He’d refused tea. He’d refused to sit down. Fear of contamination? It was hard to say why. Maybe he thought he’d get spiked, believe he could fly. I found him standing at attention by the living room door, like a furious standard lamp.

“Where the hell have you been?” was his greeting. It was months since we’d seen each other.

It wasn’t merely that I hadn’t thought about Brian for a while. I’d blocked him out. But there he was, a presence from another life, a scowling, sandy-haired man whose meaty back and shoulders were hunched inside a shiny gray suit jacket, a tie knotted under his jowl like a big floral noose. My brother. Make the sounds with your mouth and see if they conjure up a feeling.

“Hello, Brian.”

“Christ almighty, it’s taken me three days to track you down.” “I see.”

“What are you doing here? This house is revolting.”

I’d already had enough. “You spent three days looking for me just to tell me you don’t like where I live? If you can’t be friendly, just go, OK?”

“Don’t give me any of your lip. Of course I didn’t come for that.”

“You’re sure, Brian? You always had strong opinions about décor.”

I heard Jay snicker behind me. Among other things, Brian lacked a sense of humor and, like most humorless people, he was always watching out beadily for perceived slights, the jokes he knew he wasn’t getting.

“Don’t talk to me that way. I’m your elder brother.”

“Fuck off, Brian. I didn’t ask you to come here.”

“Is there somewhere private we can talk?” He gestured at Jay, who was hovering in the doorway. Matthias was in the background, wrapped in a blanket. I think he was hoping Brian would leave so he could go back to sleep. My brother adopted an air of high seriousness. “I don’t want to discuss family business in front of people like that.”

“Like what?” asked Jay, mock-innocently.

“You know exactly what,” growled Brian.

“Right,” I told him. “Get out. I don’t know why you came here, but now I want you to piss off back to your office. Haven’t you got customers to rob or something?”

I didn’t think it was possible for his color to deepen any further. “You’re so bloody arrogant,” he spat. “Look at yourself. Got up in those wretched clothes, hair all over the place.”

“Don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl,” tutted Jay. Brian turned on him. “Just helping you with your lines,” Jay offered.

At that point Brian almost lost control. I had to step between them. “Don’t you dare.”

“Get that — creature out of here.”

“Jay, I’m sorry. Leave it to me. I’ll get rid of him.”

Brian put his face very close to mine. “I don’t know what Dad’s going to say when he sees you.”

“I don’t give a damn what he says. And I don’t give a damn what you say either. Fuck off, Brian. Fuck off and leave me in peace.” “So you’re going to force me to do this in public?”

“Force you? What the hell are you on about? What are you doing here?”

“Mum’s dead.”

Brian’s little triumph. You could see the poorly concealed pleasure on his face. Living the scene as if it were some ghastly Victorian genre painting. The prodigal brother chastised. The extent of his self-righteousness rolled out in front of me like a carpet. I was furious. The way he’d come: unasked, wreathed in sanctimony.

I bet he’d spent three days looking for me, the sick bastard. I bet it was worth it to him.

“How?” I asked, making my voice as flat as I could.

“The hospital says she had a stroke. I thought maybe you still cared enough to want to come to the funeral.”

I fought back my anger. I had no room, really, to think about Mum. It was all Brian.

* * *

At the crematorium, no one spoke to me. My father saw my jeans and refused to shake my hand. Of course I’d done it on purpose. The battered leather flying jacket with the tear in the back. The unwashed hair. The building was neutral and discreet. A few middle-aged people in sober clothes had come to pay their respects, filling the pews so that later on someone would fill the pews for them. There was a representative from the hospital, a couple of neighbors. It was just another transaction to most of them, conducted in the same detached manner as one might renew a passport or open a savings account. Hats for most of the women. Cigarettes smoked outside, at a discreet distance from the hearse. None of them had really cared about her. How could I not hate it? How could I not hate myself for being part of it?

Brian hadn’t trusted me to make it on my own. He was right: if he hadn’t sent his friend to pick me up, I wouldn’t have gone. The friend was called Bob or Dave or Phil. He looked just like Brian: sideburns, drinker’s red chops. “Are you coming like that?” he’d asked, winding down the window of his Cortina.

When he saw me Brian hissed at Bob-Dave-Phil, who blocked his way with a raised arm. Go on, I thought. Take a swing. You want to so much, but it wouldn’t do. Decorum. Disrespectful to Mum.

The curtain was operated by some kind of automated pulley system. To the sound of a crackly recording of organ music, it jerked its arthritic way along a brass rail, concealing the coffin from view. As an attempt to shield us from the finality of death it was ineffective. When it was over I tried to speak to Dad. One last chance for us. I touched him on the shoulder.

“You did this,” he told me. He meant Mum.

His petty, vicious tone still transmits clearly to me today. I didn’t

answer, “What about you, Dad?” or any of the other things it has since occurred to me I could have said. And because I couldn’t find any words, I walked away. I suppose it goes without saying that I never saw him again. Or Brian. After that, there was just me.

Collectivity. That’s what Saul called for in his speech to the VSC activists. That’s what he said the British lacked. A couple of days later he was gone, his bedroll and kit bag packed and shifted, his argumentative bulk absent from the kitchen. But he left that point of view behind him. No one had wanted to hear it. I listened to a cacophony of voices, all shouting that their particular project, their thing was a genuine example of community, throwing a lot of jargon at Saul to prove that he was wrong and, anyway, they were cleverer than he was. I thought he had it about right. Perhaps it wasn’t our fault. We were in a church hall and somehow that made everything we were doing absurd, just a bunch of people pushing each other around, like a Scout troop. How could we even think of making something new for ourselves when there were metal-framed chairs stacked at the sides of the room and a piano under a canvas cover in the corner? In England the power structure had fastened its roots right down to the bedrock; every inch of land, every object on which you rested your eyes spoke about the past, about how many people had gone before you and how insignificant their individual efforts had proved. It was all designed to stop us from coming together. All of it. And that meant it couldn’t be rejected partially. If it was going to be changed, it would have to be changed beyond all recognition.

That October, I decided I wasn’t going back to university and would dedicate myself full time to political work. A second large antiwar demonstration was planned. After my arrest in the spring I wasn’t sure I wanted to attend, but my friends persuaded me that it was important. Displaying solidarity on the streets was a way to make our politics visible to the masses. Every day, how many thousands of pounds of bombs? How much napalm? How many burned children? How many villages destroyed? They said I shouldn’t allow myself to be intimidated.

At a planning meeting there was a bad-tempered argument about the proposed route. The organizers insisted that a repeat of the violence in March would be counterproductive so it was moved that we’d walk along the Embankment to Whitehall, staying well away from Grosvenor Square and the U.S. embassy. A lot of us weren’t happy about that. Surely the point wasn’t to lobby the British government but to send a message to the Americans, to show that even in a country that was supposedly their ally, the people supported a Vietnamese victory. Wrong, said others. A riot would dominate the news coverage at the expense of the issues. Personally, I thought the papers would be against us whatever we did. There were already hysterical articles running almost every day, building up the march as a full-scale insurrection. Despite my militancy, I was privately pessimistic. I didn’t believe that a protest, violent or not, would change anything. British men weren’t getting drafted, let alone fighting for their freedom. People seemed half asleep. My sense of futility was deepened by the group of neatly dressed men sitting at the back of the meeting, taking notes. They were obviously from the police or secret service. What was the point of making plans that would be immediately relayed to the authorities?

On the day of the march my mood oscillated wildly. The Lansdowne Road group took a vote and decided as a bloc that if there was a move to divert to Grosvenor Square we’d go along. We put on heavy shoes, extra layers of clothes, padding our bodies in case there was a fight. Sean filled his pockets with marbles. “For the horses,” he said. For a while, as we walked along Fleet Street, I felt OK. The crowd stretched away as far as the eye could see and the chants of “U.S. out!” reverberated in the enclosed space. The newspapers had taken their own dire warnings seriously: we passed rows of boarded-up office windows. I looked around at Anna and Sean and the others and felt I was part of something, that perhaps together we could make a difference. At Trafalgar Square, as the stewards shepherded the march in the direction of Whitehall (“Turn left! Turn left!”), thousands of us broke away, running

through the streets, shouting and letting off firecrackers. At Grosvenor Square the police were waiting. As we reached it we saw an enormous cordon in front of the embassy. Various groups had decided to leave the main march: there were anarchists, Maoists, nonsectarian people we knew from Notting Hill. Together we linked arms and charged the police line, but time and again they repelled us. Just as we’d become more disciplined, so had they. In the end we forced them back through sheer weight of numbers. After that, as I’d feared, it degenerated. They started using their truncheons. They charged us with horses. It became a repeat of the March demonstration, with one significant difference: this time my friends stayed with me. Everyone from Charlie’s — a group of about twenty of us — kept as closely together as we could. We ran together. We stood together. And we fought. We threw stones and distress flares and marbles. When a policeman tried to grab Anna, we rushed in and tore her free.

Afterward, back at Lansdowne Road, bruised and crushingly tired, we watched ourselves on television, soundtracked by a disapproving commentary. The home secretary came on to praise the Whitehall protesters for their “self-control.” “I doubt,” he said, “if this kind of demonstration could have taken place so peacefully anywhere else in the world.”

“Can someone tell me what the hell the point of today was?” I asked. No one replied.

* * *

After Miles came to dinner, I couldn’t sleep. I got up and made a cup of chamomile tea, which I held as I sat awake in the study, looking out at the lawn, the skeletal branches of the pear tree silhouetted against the sky. On the second night it was the same. On the third night, as I lay rigid in bed, imagining the phone call that hadn’t come, Miranda noticed and solicitously dropped lavender oil on my pillow, offering me a tincture of valerian to drink, a sample of a new Bountessence product she was thinking of calling “Lethe Water.”

Ever since then — four months now — when I haven’t been able to sleep I’ve sneaked out and let myself into the shop, where I spend the night sifting through old books and papers, only coming home as the dawn breaks to “wake up” in bed next to Miranda. I do that two, maybe three times a week. The other nights I drink. There’s not too much of a smell with vodka. I keep it in a filing cabinet in the study. I hadn’t drunk alcohol since Thailand. It works well enough as a sedative, but it scares me, because it reminds me that what I’d really like to do is score. What I’d like to do is sit at night in the study and fix up and look at the pear tree, wrapped in total indifference: mine to the world, its to me.

At first I thought I’d find something in God’s books. Perhaps a clue to what Miles wanted. It wasn’t logical. I was like the drunk who loses his keys on the way home from the pub and looks for them under the streetlight, because that’s where it’s easiest to see.

In the glass case where God keeps his more valuable stock is a folio of Jeremy Wilson pictures. Complete, Modern People has become a collector’s item, its black-and-white photographs of musicians, artists, and other taste-makers of mid-sixties London reproduced in numerous books and magazines. God’s copy has

John Lennon missing, but is still worth a couple of hundred quid. Looking through it one night I spotted Anna, in the background of a shot of a famous gallerist. She was leaning against a pillar in a white-walled studio peopled by serious-looking hipsters holding dramatic props — an ear-trumpet, a classical bust. In her shiny plastic raincoat and heavy makeup she was barely recognizable as the woman I knew a few years later. Exactly ten years separated that and the second photo, the figure leaning out of the embassy window in Copenhagen. She’d moved so quickly to the end of her journey.

Except it wasn’t the end. I’d seen her. I’d seen her swinging her arms, smoking a cigarette. Little by little I identified what I felt: jealousy, a slow, viscous panic seeping out of my bones. She was alive. She’d been alive all the time. Without my knowledge we’d swapped places. I was the dead one, the old photograph, frozen in time, my blacks turning brown, my whites yellowing with age. And what about Miles? From the start he’d been deader than I could ever be and now he was walking abroad with his rictus grin, lumbering through the tissue-paper screen of my life with Miranda. Miles was after Anna. Surely that was it. The Michael Frame identity was blown and must have been blown for some time, but there was no urgency in the way I was being approached. I was being coaxed, handled. If I’d been important in my own right, armed police would have been at my door: the house surrounded, four in the morning when the body is at its lowest. After so many years, it felt strange to find out I mattered so little.

Whatever Miles needed me for, it seemed to be worth taking care over. Meanwhile he left me entirely alone. I drank in secret; I jumped every time I heard the phone. Otherwise, strange to say, it was a good Christmas. Sam, Miranda, and I did the things people do, ate too much, sat in our pajamas watching It’s a Wonderful Life on television. It was as if we had an understanding, a pact not to shatter the sugar-glass of our holiday. Over the years, the pagan solstice Miranda was celebrating when I first knew her, an awkward personal substitute for her parents’ Judaism, had gradually been sprinkled in style-magazine Scandinavian kitsch. In the front room

stood an enormous tree decorated with rustic straw ornaments she’d bought in London. Every surface twinkled with tea lights. Sam, queen of pester-power, had always craved the Christmas advertised on television, the big family party shot in golden soft focus, the turkey and the plastic snow. So it was amusing to see her roll her eyes at her mother’s “commercialism.” Miranda was confused, wrong-footed by her daughter. I could see her wondering how Sam had changed so effortlessly in two short months away from us.

“She’s growing up,” I whispered, as we picked at leftovers in the kitchen. “That’s all.”

Miranda shook her head, annoyed. “Do you see how she’s dressed? She’s plaited beads into her hair.”

“Listen to you.”

“I don’t mean that, Mike. It’s just she was always so conservative.”

“If she thinks we’re talking about her, she’ll be furious.”

We hugged. Guiltily I kneaded her shoulders, ran my fingers down the ridge of her spine. Perhaps there’s a finite amount of reality in the world, only so much energy flowing round in the circuit. The more I’d thought about Anna, about Sean and Lansdowne Road and all the rest of it, the less real Miranda had come to seem. Despite her physical presence, her body pressed against mine as we stood there in the kitchen, for weeks she’d been most clearly present to me in her traces, the plume of blood in the toilet when she had her period, the underwear puddled on her side of the bed. I tried to suppress the urgency I felt as I held her, the need for greater contact. I was afraid she’d pick up on it and ask questions.

New Year’s Eve was hard. Miranda had invited friends to dinner. Oliver and Rose ran a specialized organic farm and had a vdlkisch rude health about them that I’d always found slightly sinister. As an antidote to Rose’s braying laugh and Oliver’s fatuous opinions about the world beyond his orchard walls, I invited God, telling Miranda that otherwise he’d be on his own (which was true) and

would feel lonely (which I very much doubted). The others were all settled with drinks and snacks when he shambled in, bundled up in a thick overcoat and carrying his customary burden — twin plastic carrier bags stuffed with mysterious papers. Reluctantly he let Miranda prise them from his hands and store them in the hall closet, along with his coat, which she held as if it was potentially infectious. Collapsing into an armchair, he accepted a whisky and looked at me with heartfelt gratitude when I discreetly put the bottle next to him on the side table.

Sam went off to a house party with Kenny and some other friends, kissing everyone good night and wishing them a happy new year. During dinner I savored God’s table talk, intemperate monologues featuring the local council, people who phoned up to sell office supplies, and the makers of television game shows, against whom he nurtured a particular animus. He told us frankly that he despised vegetarians, then without missing a beat complimented Miranda on the risotto. He used the word “cunt” in a variety of inventive contexts. Oliver and Rose were cowed into submissive silence, exchanging panicked glances whenever God’s language became more than averagely degenerate. They took their revenge over coffee by instituting a game of charades. Miranda was already furious with me, so saying no was not an option. As God pretended to doze on the sofa, I found myself trying to mime the title of some American romantic comedy I’d never heard of, while Rose giggled behind her hand with moronic glee.

At midnight we sang a self-conscious verse of “Auld Lang Syne.” The party broke up soon afterward; Miranda stalked off to bed and I drove God home. Much later I was woken by Sam, who’d had a minor disaster, a flat battery, which meant she was stranded at her house party. I pulled some clothes over my pajamas and drove out to pick her up. The music was still booming, and through the door I had a brief glimpse of celebratory carnage, bodies and ashtrays and beer cans. She came running out to meet me, leaving some boy on the doorstep. As we drove home, scattering rabbits on the narrow country lanes, she told me she loved me and I told her I

loved her too and felt sick because it was yet another reminder of what was broken and couldn’t be fixed. Sure enough, when the phone rang the next day it was Miles. I was to meet him in London the following week. It would be an overnight visit; I should dress smartly. He made it sound like a job interview.

I spent the next few days craving heroin in a way I hadn’t for many years. The weather was atrocious. Rain beat down on the garden, leaving pools of water on the terrace. Three nights in a row I drank and watched daylight assemble itself behind the pear tree. New Year’s Eve had broken my truce with Miranda, and after Sam had taken the train back to Bristol we collapsed into the atmosphere of sullen hostility that had prevailed before she came home. On the morning of my trip, I watched Miranda standing at the kitchen counter eating a bowl of cereal and talking on the phone, trapping the handset between shoulder and jaw as she discussed packaging. If she noticed my combed hair or the jacket I’d retrieved from the back of the closet, she didn’t comment.

“You’re not wearing a tie,” Miles pointed out, when he met me at Victoria.

I shrugged. “I don’t think I own one.”

“You’re just saying that to annoy me. Still, you’ll have to do, I suppose.” We got into a taxi and he gave the address of a conference center just off Parliament Square.

“Are you going to tell me what we’re doing?” I asked.

“Patience is a virtue, Chris.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

It was a short journey, passed in silence. Outside the conference center Miles paid the driver and walked me through the foyer into a room set up for a press event. It was already half full of journalists and political staffers. Photographers were pacing about, talking into cell phones. TV crews hefted cameras onto tripods. Miles steered me toward the reserved seating in the front row. We were directly in front of the podium, where a long table was set up in front of a screen bearing the logo of the Home Office.

My nerves were on edge. I fidgeted in my seat and played with

the cuff buttons on my jacket. Just when I thought I couldn’t stand it anymore, the buzz of conversation died down.

A lot can change in thirty years. People who sat around at Lansdowne Road preaching revolution can start to speak the language of choice and competition. They can come to take an interest in efficiency, in productivity, in getting things done. The Right Honourable Patricia Ellis MP, Minister of State for Police and Security, was apparently here to make an announcement about crime figures. The overall trend was positive, thanks in large sum to measures she’d instituted, giving the cops greater resources and discretion and something else, to which I didn’t pay any attention because I was too busy looking at her, taking in all the ways she’d changed, the lines around her eyes, the crisp suit, the sensible middle-aged perm. What, I wondered, does Miles want with you, Patty Ellis? And how long is it, with all your rhetoric about cracking down and hitting targets and the challenges of the imminent new century, since you thought about the past, about the changes in a face you’d never expected to see again?

She scanned the room, making professional, impersonal eye contact, modulating her voice and illustrating her various successes with emphatic chopping hand gestures, like a martial artist breaking roof tiles. The people alongside her, civil servants, a ministerial junior, looked on with the requisite expressions of bovine admiration. Miles had positioned me so I was directly in her line of vision. Once, twice, she looked directly at me, but there was no flicker of recognition.

OCCUPATION OF CHATSWORTH MANSIONS: HOUSE THE HOMELESS!

Nowhere to live? Come to Chatsworth Mansions: 120 luxury flats built three years ago are lying empty while thousands in this country are homeless or live in slums.

1868: The Workhouse

1968: Local Government Hostels

Some things never change unless you force them.

Across Britain speculators are keeping buildings empty to make vast profits. We say this is wrong.

We have occupied this building to protest at a system which deprives some of shelter while others wallow in money. Though it is a symbolic gesture and we will leave after 24 hours our anger is real.

HOUSE THE HOMELESS! HOUSE THE HOMELESS! HOUSE THE HOMELESS!

Patty and I stood on the roof of the block and looked down at the crowd. A couple of police cars had arrived and a man with the pinched look of a local news photographer was perched on a wall, trying to take our picture.

* * *

“He’ll need a longer lens,” she noted drily. “He’ll never get anywhere with that.”

“Do you think there’s enough of a crowd?” I asked.

“Not yet.” She peered over the parapet. “I don’t see many press people.”

I blew on my hands. It was a freezing November morning. We’d been up there for two hours. There were about fifty of us. Hats and gloves, Thermos flasks, red noses. We were waiting for something to happen, poking the city’s corpse a little to see if it moved. In front of us, east London stretched away into the distance, the gray expanse of Hackney Marshes pocked with chimneys and skeletal Victorian gas towers. The block had been built with a flat roof, and we’d draped a banner across the façade.

HOMELESS? COME HERE!

As I watched, another couple of cars drew up.

“Might as well drop some more leaflets.” Patty reached into the box, took a handful and threw them over the side, where they fluttered down into the street. Behind us, Anna paced up and down, her hands clasped behind her back, like a general.

Chatsworth Mansions was part of a battle with abstraction. We’d been talking for weeks about our disillusionment with the antiwar movement and our feeling that the only political way forward was through practical action: building the new world, not marching for it. The Free Food had encouraged us, but the task seemed too difficult. Housing was an area in which we knew we could make a difference. As the warmth faded from the air, so did the atmosphere of playfulness that had cocooned our little group. London felt tenuous, poised. I couldn’t tell what was making me so edgy— the sense that things were about to change or the fear that they wouldn’t. If there wasn’t a transformation, what would I do? I brushed the idea aside. We were living through a historic upheaval, a time of chance.

Patty and her husband, Gavin, were newly qualified lawyers,

volunteering at an advice center in the East End. They were a pleasant couple, serious about their work, politically committed in the way a lot of — what do estate agents call them? — young professionals were back then. I liked Patty. She worked hard for her clients. We’d met at some talk or other and soon the two of them were coming over regularly to Lansdowne Road. They were, by temperament, less intense than our group, more rooted in the world as it was than the one they said they wanted to see. Compared to us, they lived a conventional life, paying rent, going to the office. I remember them as people who knew how things functioned. They talked about using the system for progressive ends. In retrospect, I think their politics were entirely fluid, their professed radicalism a product of the time and place, rather than any deep dissatisfaction with the order of things. Anna, I remember, never found them convincing. At the time, I thought she was just jealous, because Patty and Gavin were devoted to each other, while Sean had met a young Irishwoman called Claire, whom he’d moved into Lansdowne Road and was pushing as a full member of the collective.

I thought reflexively of Anna and Sean as a couple though, looking back, my story about jealousy seems wildly off the mark. They slept together sometimes. Otherwise they didn’t behave like a couple at all. Nevertheless it was obvious they shared some kind of past, some experience that gave them rights over each other. I found out Sean had helped Anna tunnel her way out of Chelsea; if you believed his version, she’d more or less got onto the back of his bike one day and left her husband. If anyone was jealous it was me, acutely conscious of the electricity in Sean and Anna’s detachment from each other.

Claire, Sean’s new chick, was a pale, rather sepulchral blonde with long hands and an oval face that made her resemble a figure in an early medieval painting. It was a look she emphasized with shawls and long, flowing dresses. Anna quickly went to war against her, criticizing her for various social and political faults in the long and often bruising group arguments that were becoming a regular

Lansdowne Road ritual. To my surprise, Claire didn’t buckle, but often gave as good as she got. She cut her hair and started to wear work clothes. Anna backed down. Anna’s own hair was now very short, almost shaved to her scalp. I’d watched her do it, rolling myself a joint at the kitchen table as she leaned over some sheets of newspaper and hacked away with a pair of scissors. Now she looked like one of the mod girls you saw down in Shepherd’s Bush, smoking cigarettes and waiting for their boyfriends.

Everyone from Lansdowne Road was up on that roof, lying on their stomachs and looking over the parapet. There were people from Pat Ellis’s committee, whatever it was called, from three or four east London communes and activist groups. Miles was there with his camera, showing off to one of his teenage Guineveres. Uther, the usher from Free Pictures, was there too, waving a wand at Hackney Marshes, trying to chant the gas towers down. It’s amazing to think Pat Ellis could ever have been part of the same enterprise as Uther Pendragon.

For the site of our next action we chose a boarded-up terraced house near the overpass in Ladbroke Grove, one of a row that had been forcibly purchased by the council when the street was cut in two to build the road. Connections were growing. Our nameless Lansdowne Road group was now part of a spidery network. A lot of people seemed to be thinking as we did.

We worked on the house like maniacs. In the approach to Christmas Eve we spent more than a week replacing rotten floorboards, painting walls, and reconnecting the water and electricity. I wired up lights. A plumber friend installed a bath and toilet salvaged from a bombsite near Free Pictures. With Anna I traveled round in Rosa, skip-raiding and picking up donated furniture. By the time we’d finished, the house looked great. Not luxurious, but spick and span. A home for a homeless family.

Once we had the renovation under way, the big question was who should live there. We wanted to do something that was practical as well as symbolic and for that we needed a family that was indisputably in need. At the time local-government hostels were

more like barracks than homes. They were run along the lines of Victorian poor houses and the people staying in them were treated like morally dubious dirt. They were grim, overcrowded and overregulated. Many only admitted women and children, husbands having to fend for themselves. Families who complained or “misbehaved” would be summarily evicted, at which point social workers would often take the children into care. They were cruel and coercive. We saw them as a tool the state used to discipline the poor.

We found a couple called the Castles, who’d been in a shelter for a year. They had three young children, the oldest of whom was seven. Bill Castle had been laid off from a bed factory; he was a sallow Brummie with a persistent cough and an air of utter defeat. His wife, Ivy, was visibly the stronger of the two. Anna took me to meet her in a caff somewhere up near Wormwood Scrubs. As she talked, her two little boys played with the salt and pepper, opening sugar packets and tugging at her coat as she tried to manage the baby and concentrate on what we were asking her to do. As far as she was concerned, she told us warily, anything would be better than where they were.

I got to know the Castles much better when the occupation started. Early in the morning on Christmas Eve, we picked up Ivy and the kids from the hostel, bursting through the front door past the warden and the woman from the welfare office. We were deliberately confrontational, swarming through the building and making lots of noise, trying to break down the oppressive air of the place. The warden was furious, telephoning his bosses as soon as we were inside. One or two of the staff tried to block our way. Nevertheless, I remember the action as a festive affair. Jay was dressed as Santa Claus. I gave sweets out to the kids. It was like a kidnap in reverse. The two little Castle boys had a great time, chattering and making pow-pow fingers out of the window.

We calculated that if we raised enough fuss, the council would be shamed into rehousing the Castles. Even if they didn’t, we were determined to occupy the place at least until the new year. Since

we weren’t certain how the authorities would react, we kept the boards on the downstairs windows and barricaded the front door. We draped a banner across the front, Pat Ellis rang the press, and by lunchtime we had a crowd of supporters on the street outside, singing carols and waving banners and giving interviews to newspaper hacks while photographers snapped pictures of masked protesters waving from the upstairs windows. We’d written a statement informing people that we’d housed a homeless family in protest at the council’s policy of keeping usable buildings empty, their inaction on social problems and the inhumanity of government hostels. We demanded that the Castles should either be immediately rehoused or allowed to remain in the place we’d found for them.

After lunch a pair of council officials turned up, along with a vanload of workmen from the housing department and about a dozen police constables, who positioned themselves on the far side of the road and did a little shuffling dance in the cold. The council officials demanded that we let them in. We refused. They threatened us with legal consequences. We asked them whether they were ashamed of what they did for a living. In the middle of this, Ivy Castle leaned out of the bedroom window and gave them a piece of her mind. It was, in the end, Ivy’s towering rage that carried the day. She told them she’d had enough. She told them she wasn’t going to put up with it anymore. The men from the council couldn’t take the pressure for very long. They got back into their van and left.

On Christmas morning we celebrated with the Castle children. Someone had donated a tree. Ivy cried and hugged people indiscriminately. The standoff continued into the new year. While her husband retreated into the background, smoking roll-ups and moaning that the house was cold, Ivy found a vocation. Everyone who stood in front of her, whether journalist, councillor, or pompous local MP, received the same full-in-the-face torrent of indignation. Sometimes we had to restrain her, nervous that years of pent-up frustration were leading the stabbing cigarette too close

to an official face, or tempting the right hand into an administrative slap. I saw in 1969 in the boarded-up living room. Three days later someone pushed a rent book through the letterbox. The Castles could stay put. We’d won.

Late that night, after a riotous victory party, Anna dragged me into the deserted street outside the Castles’ house. We were drunk. The overpass loomed above us. Her normal reserve had dissolved completely, replaced with a fierce libidinal intensity. “Come on, Chrissy-boy,” she told me. “Now’s your chance.” Pressed into a doorway like a couple of teenagers, we mashed our faces together and fumbled at each other’s clothes, icy fingers digging under coats and sweaters, our breath misting in the freezing night air.

That night we slept together on her mattress at Lansdowne Road, in the room she’d painted white and emptied of every possession but a battered metal trunk of clothes and books. The room was cold and we were high and sometimes I’d briefly hallucinate that we were statues or corpses, an instant of lost time before I was jolted back to the slick panting tangle of our fucking, her mouth on my cock, my tongue lapping and sucking at her breasts, her cunt. It was these words she wanted to say and for me to say to her, cunt, spunk, asshole, as if to scrape the act bare, purify it of sentiment.

It felt like a coronation, such a violent release from the frustration of wanting her. Afterward she lay in my arms and I felt, narcissistically, that we’d sealed some kind of bargain.

Early the next morning I woke up to find Sean sitting at the end of the bed, shirtless, smoking a roach he’d fished out of last night’s overflowing ashtray. Anna was asleep next to me, one arm thrown over my chest. He was examining us, a curious look on his face. In the gray half-light the blurred tattoo on his chest was an amorphous stain, a Rorschach blot. I asked him where he’d left Claire and he grinned humorlessly. After that something changed between the two of us. I was no longer an observer of the game he was playing with Anna. I’d earned full participant status. Being Sean’s rival (the term seems archaic, with its overtones of chivalry,

and somehow coy, evasive) committed me to something. To the group. To whatever it was we were all daring one another to do. I’d thought of leaving once or twice, of going traveling or just finding somewhere else to live. Now I put those ideas from my mind.

A month or so later, as we were planning our next action, Charlie Collinson turned up. He was making one of his periodic visits back home to sell the rugs and jewelry (and the charras) he’d picked up in India. It was the first time I’d met the owner of the Lansdowne Road house. With his long, matted hair, his beads and mirror-work waistcoats, he was an alien presence in our increasingly puritanical group. By early 1969, Lands End, as we’d started to call it, had more or less become a formal commune, with an exclusive and fairly stable membership, a habit of collective decision making and a grueling schedule of meetings at which personal and political issues were debated with a sort of Möbius-strip logic that made them indistinguishable from one another. Charlie was a lotus-eater, rich and not particularly bright. He was unselfconscious about his status as landlord, moving his things back into “his” room and expecting the people staying there to make themselves scarce. He was obviously used to having his banalities about love and peace taken seriously and was shocked when Anna called him a “neocolonialist parasite” as he was showing off a batch of silver necklaces he’d bought in Ladakh. The atmosphere of round-the-clock revolutionary preparation freaked him out. He’d left behind a scene of genteel Bohemianism, but things had moved on, fast.

Above all, Charlie wanted the printing press gone. Sean and Jay had moved an ancient offset machine into the sitting room, a monstrous thing that was kept working by a mixture of improvisation and brute force; at most times of the day or night someone was tending it, doing repairs or running off leaflets. Stakhanovite slogans were painted on the wall behind it. The floorboards were stained with ink. Charlie wanted it out. He also wanted at least half the residents out. He wanted the women’s group to stop using the place for teach-ins. “It’s my own fucking house,” I overheard

him complain to someone on the phone, “and these dykes want me to leave whenever they’re hanging about in the kitchen.”

One day, Sean called a meeting. Charlie had indicated that he wasn’t happy. How were we going to accommodate ourselves to his wishes? Should we move the press, ask the women to meet somewhere else? We decided that to make any concessions would be objectively Imperialist. The fault lay with Charlie, not us. He was politically backward. He needed re-education. When he came home he was told that if he wanted to participate in the household he would be welcome to do so, but he had to commit, as we were committed, to the project of forming a disciplined vanguard, to being one of an exemplary group of people who could credibly go out to the workers, raise consciousness through agitation and propaganda, and grow the movement to the point where overthrow of the capitalist state would become feasible. He was told he fell short in several ways. There was the whole area of individualism. There was the implicit racism of his business activities.

“A pig?” he shouted. “You’re in my house and you’re calling me a pig?”

“You never let anyone forget that you own the house. That’s one of the things that makes you a pig. You think you deserve more respect because you’re a property owner.”

“It’s my fucking house.”

“Why should that give you a greater say than any other resident?”

“It’s not — for Christ’s sake, you’re not even paying me rent. I don’t even know most of you people.”

I have to say I never expected Charlie to call the police. He didn’t even tell us. The first we knew about it was when a patrol car pulled up outside. Sean was so livid that he punched Charlie in the face. People were scaling the back fence. Sitting on the kitchen floor clutching his jaw, Charlie suddenly remembered the five pounds of hash stashed in his room, sewn up in leather cushion covers. He spent the next twenty minutes on the doorstep trying to get them to go away again.

After that, for obvious reasons, we had to leave.

For the next couple of months the group was forcibly split up. I drifted around, sleeping on floors and sofas, sometimes with Anna, but often not, which upset me more than I let on. Without even telling me, she went to Ireland for a week with Sean. For a few days I stayed with Pat and Gavin Ellis up in north London. I remember Pat cooking pasta, working on papers at the kitchen table. I stayed at Free Pictures for a while, trying to look after Uther. Free Pictures was a good place to sulk.

In addition to being the guardian of Free Pictures, Uther was the local shaman. Pretty much everyone had their Uther story. He was our talisman, the guy who once painted himself red with household gloss because he was thinking about color. As the most visible freak in the area, he acted as a lightning rod for neighborhood feelings about hippies. He was regularly beaten up; teenagers would follow him around, imitating his complicated, bustling walk. He collected junk, pulling it back on a homemade trailer he’d welded to his bicycle; when it was stolen, he roamed the locality day and night, hairy and tragic, like a despondent wolfhound. The police loathed him. One night, when I wasn’t there, they broke down the cinema door and arrested him. They held him for twenty-four hours and asked him a lot of questions, then released him without charge. Uther swore he’d been cooking and the detectives had tipped the contents of his pan into a bag “for use as evidence.”

After the raid, the doors to Free Pictures were left hanging open. Kids got in and broke the place up. They smashed all the toilet bowls, ripped most of the seats to pieces. Within days the place had been taken over by a group of Italian junkies, who sat squabbling round a fire on the roof. Stinking rubbish silted up in the corners and there was a scorched patch on the floor where someone had started a fire. Uther refused to move out, more or less living behind the screen in the auditorium, wrapped in a blanket and surrounded by the box files containing his most precious possession, an enormous collection of postcards he liked to arrange in

occult sequences on the floor. I tried to chase the junkies off, and I managed it for a while, but Uther was slipping into a state of full-blown paranoia. When he was dancing on the roof of Chatsworth Mansions, he’d already begun to hint at a vast conspiracy, involving the Queen, the Labour Party, and the makers of a particular brand of breakfast cereal whose packet was illustrated with a picture of a glowing child. Later he started to spot threats in newspaper headlines and the license plates of parked cars. His garbled explanations would go on for hours, always arriving at the same conclusion — that he was at risk from some elusive but diabolical force.

One afternoon a friend dropped in to tell me he’d seen Uther being picked up by the police. At one in the afternoon, with hundreds of people walking by, he’d decided to share with the world the genius of William Blake by painting THE ROAD OF EXCESS LEADS TO THE PALACE OF WISDOM in foot-high letters on the side of a building just off the Harrow Road. He’d got as far as Leads.

What bothers me is that we lost track of him. He disappeared into the system and never resurfaced. As soon as we heard of his arrest we tried to bail him out, but before we could get a lawyer to the police station he was sectioned and taken to a hospital out in the north London suburbs. I hated the idea of Uther on a locked ward, but after Mum I had such a horror of mental institutions that it was almost a month before I steeled myself to visit him. I found him morose and suspicious, sitting in front of the television in the common room, watching the news through a haze of medication. After a few minutes of awkward conversation he accused me of being an agent of the Queen and refused to speak anymore.

I told myself that sooner or later Uther would come back, happy and cured. Instead they moved him to another hospital, then another, out of London. There was so much else happening, so many battles to fight, that Uther was left along the way. I’d like to imagine he got out and found a better, easier place for himself, that even now he’s on a beach, gnarly and wrinkled, standing on

his head and spooking backpackers. All I know is, without him things got cold. Cold and hard.

Finally our homeless commune found the Victorian sweatshop that became Workshop Thirteen, a name that (as Anna pointed out) was almost as bad as the “Imperial War Museum” in its combination of negative associations. Thirteen was an old light-industrial unit in Hackney, on a back street near a forlorn patch of park, a place that had once been a garment factory in a row of other garment factories, crammed with Jewish tailors sewing cheap shirts and trousers for the market stalls of the East End. By the time we found it, it had been empty for years. The machines were long gone and the building was just a thin skin of bricks and rotting floorboards, so bowed and warped with age that the whole structure appeared to twist on its axis and the floor sloped in a sharp diagonal from one corner to another. It was drafty in winter and baking in summer. The upper story had been roosted by generations of pigeons; we found it caked with an acrid white carpet of their shit.

The name started as a sort of shorthand. It had none of the complicated meanings I’ve heard ascribed to it. The address was B Moreno Street and on the brick façade was painted some kind of advertisement, which had faded so much over the years that only the single word workshop was still legible. Thirteen was cheap. As in free, once we’d broken the lock and put on our own. No one ever turned up claiming to be the landlord; there were no immediate neighbors. For a long time I don’t think anyone even knew we were there. At first the place saw a rapid turnover of people who used it as a crash pad, staying for a night or two, or a week, or a month. All that had to stop when security became an issue, but for a while Thirteen was a bizarre mix of encounter session, politburo meeting and house party. We cleaned and scrubbed upstairs and pushed mattresses together to make a large soft area, piled with blankets and sleeping bags. If people wanted to go to bed they just grabbed a space. You got used to falling asleep with people fucking right next to you, or rolling onto

sleeping people as you fucked. Downstairs we built kitchen units and a long refectory table and partitioned a bathroom with sheets of plasterboard. We pulled desks and chairs out of skips, rigged lights and switched the water back on, heating it in a tank we ripped out of a house someone had been squatting in Bow. Finally we screwed a thick reinforcing sheet of scrap iron to the door and moved in the printing press, which had been moldering in Charlie’s garden, making Thirteen a propaganda center as well as a living space, a laboratory (or so we intended) for the new society.

The question of violence had started to raise its head. We wanted change. We felt it was part of our duty to sharpen contradictions, to make the difference between the rulers and the ruled glaring and unambiguous, impossible to ignore. This meant confrontation. At meetings or demos we adopted a deliberately aggressive attitude, trying to provoke people and intensify whatever was going on. Our behavior often brought us up against other activists. If they criticized us, we were sarcastic and patronizing; we’d question their courage, the extent of their commitment to the revolution. We began to judge ourselves by our willingness to take risks. I was arrested on a demonstration in Brixton after a young West Indian died in custody. Anna and Helen were wrestled to the floor in a department store when they smashed up a lingerie display. After any action, we’d meet up at Thirteen for what we’d started to call Criticism-Self-Criticism, each of us pointing out moments when we felt we’d failed, when we’d been too conciliatory or someone else’s behavior had fallen short of our increasingly high standards.

There was an anarchist bookshop in Whitechapel where we’d sometimes go to listen to foreign speakers, anti-Franco Spaniards, Greeks on the run from the Colonels. Half of Europe was still Fascist and secretly our own government was collaborating with them, sharing information with their police forces. I heard about things that weren’t reported in the papers — bombs in airline offices, assassination attempts against European leftists. In the East End we had our own Nazi problem. I can’t remember if we were already

calling them skinheads. They were crop-haired mods out of Hoxton or Bethnal Green, kids who beat up immigrants, put lighted rags through their letterboxes. The police didn’t do much because many of them were sympathetic to the attackers. I’d started to do odd jobs to make money, casual work on building sites. I’d hear the same thing everywhere, how the Pakis were moving in, breeding like flies. Historically they’d always stayed farther south, near the Thames in an area the Spitalfields boys called Brown Town, but now the council was redeveloping it and suddenly little knots of dark-skinned men were standing on street corners they had no business to stand on, corners that had always belonged to white people.

Though much of the violence was random, some of it was organized. There was a pub in Cheshire Street, which over the years had become a kind of Fascist shrine, a place where Nazi splinter groups went to form new parties or sniff Eva Braun’s knickers or whatever it was they got up to when they weren’t marching around saluting the Union Jack. I heard about it from Leo Ring, the leader of a group who were living in one of the semiderelict squares in Stepney. Leo, at twenty-four, was tall and dark, with a head of curly black hair and a past as a member of the Firm, a gang of Barking mods who’d once terrorized every blues and R&B club in London. Leo’s friends had gotten into acid, then the revolution. They talked about “street politics,” about “keeping it low to the ground.” The idea that a cabal of Mosleyites could hold meetings in the saloon bar of their local was an affront and they wanted to do something about it.

At Workshop Thirteen I reported Leo’s plan to the others. Should we get involved? Some of us were very much against it. A suggestion was made (by Sean, I think) to exclude the women, but was rejected as chauvinist. We were in or out as a group. I said we should be in. Anna agreed. Sean asked me whether I had the stomach for it. Secretly, I wasn’t sure, but of course I said yes. The logic of confrontation started to do its work. I cycled over to Leo’s to give him the news.

It’s a strange thing to walk out of your front door on your way to a fight. There’s something disconnected about it, something about the collision of routine with its opposite that renders the world temporarily unreal. For some people, violence is easy, even familiar. For a few, it’s actively pleasurable. For most of us at Thirteen it meant overcoming almost insurmountable barriers, mental and physical. We were afraid. Everything about our backgrounds, our conditioning, the ideals we professed in our politics screamed at us not to go through with it. As we prepared to meet Leo, I watched Helen throw up into the toilet. Matthias was holding her head. “I don’t think I can,” she was saying. “I just don’t think I can.” Helen was tiny, barely five feet tall. Until we’d brow-beaten her into abandoning her position, she’d always considered herself a pacifist. She’d been pushed around in marches, but that was all. She was a sociology graduate, a doctor’s daughter.

Me, I had the metallic taste in my mouth that always came before I did anything dangerous. I wasn’t like Helen. Neither was Sean. He and I were buzzing on the drama we’d created for ourselves, eager to be off. I could see something in Anna’s eyes too. Not avidity, exactly. Clarity. She spoke to Helen with exaggerated gentleness. “What are you afraid of?” she asked. “It doesn’t matter, honey. Getting hurt doesn’t matter. Nothing that happens to any one of us matters, because what we’re doing is right.” I watched her, gaunt and tender, a crash helmet on the floor beside her, like a figure from a medieval altarpiece.

We had spanners, pipes, bats. We wore bandannas and hard hats. We met up in a park near the pub. There were perhaps fifty of us: Leo’s people, others who’d come from south or west London. There wasn’t much talking. Just before closing time, one of Leo’s friends stuck his head round the door to confirm that the pub was full and some kind of meeting was going on upstairs.

We started jogging down the narrow cobbled street toward the pub. Someone blew a whistle. Leo had a sailor’s distress flare, which he lit and threw through the front door. We aimed bricks and dug-up cobbles at the windows. Soon orange smoke was billowing out

of the pub and choking men were staggering out to be met by a rain of blows. Most were thoroughly disoriented. One or two fought back. I swung the plank I was carrying, felt it connect once, twice. It was a hit-and-run action, all over in five minutes. Beside me, Anna was battering someone with an iron bar. We attacked anyone who came out. Bodies staggering, crawling, lying still on the ground. As arranged, when the whistle was blown a second time we ran off into the side streets, helping anyone who couldn’t walk unaided.

One of Leo’s friends had been stabbed. I drove him to the hospital, along with another boy who had a broken arm. No one from Thirteen was seriously hurt. That night we held a party; in an atmosphere of borderline hysteria, most of us drank ourselves senseless while a few, like Helen, sat around in a state of mute shock.

Two days later a car stopped beside Jay and Matthias as they walked up Bethnal Green Road. Four men got out and beat them so badly that both had to go to the hospital. I spent the evening driving around in Sean’s van, looking for the people who had done it. The next night, someone fire-bombed a Sylheti-owned shop on Brick Lane. We responded in kind, by burning out three black cabs at a railway-arch garage owned by Gordon Webster, self-appointed “commissioner” of the British Patriots League. By the beginning of July a small unreported war had started in the East End, one that was still going on ten, even fifteen years later, long after we’d all gone.

Leo and several of his friends started living at Thirteen. We now had a reputation in the underground, a notoriety that was making us nervous. People we didn’t know were starting to turn up, expecting to stay. There were always too many strangers in the building, people we didn’t recognize, who didn’t quite fit. One night in a pub, a long-haired man approached me and Sean and told us he’d heard we wanted to buy a gun. We said we didn’t know what he was talking about and walked home, looking behind us all the way to see if we were being followed. We were sure Thirteen was

either going to get busted or attacked by the Nazis. We decided to shut it down, at least temporarily, and join an occupation that was in progress a few miles away in Leyton.

Sylvan Close was an ironically named spot, a melancholy cul-de-sac of boarded-up terraced houses on the site of a proposed new road. When I first went there we broke a hole and climbed through it to take a look around. Two rows of five and a couple more at the end, windows and doorways blocked by sheets of corrugated iron. The occupation was centered around Alex Hill, a tall, rake-thin man with thick corrective glasses and a lugubrious manner that concealed a sly sense of humor. He was of indeterminate age and always wore the same rather grubby black trench coat, which made him look like an out-of-work film noir detective. His plan for the derelict houses was nothing if not ambitious. It involved secretly renovating the whole street, replacing rotten floorboards and missing windows, reconnecting plumbing and electricity, then moving in a whole population of homeless people from various local hostels. Eventually he assembled a committee, including Pat and Gavin Ellis, who arranged things with military precision. Building materials were stored in someone’s garden. Everything from printing to fund-raising was deputized to separate work groups. Somehow the secret was kept. The job got done.

At Thirteen we initially dismissed Hill’s plan as impractical. We were involved in what we euphemistically called our “community-defense work” and were debating whether to move to Dagenham and take jobs in the Ford factory, in order to organize the car workers. Still, we helped the Sylvan Close lot in peripheral ways and when, on the appointed day, the fence at the front was torn down and it was officially reopened we attended their street party. They had balloons, paper hats, cake, the whole thing. Someone had even managed to scrape together a ramshackle brass band, which farted its way through a few military marches until the bandsmen were distracted by the keg of beer donated by a local pub. It was the end of June, high summer, and the sun beat down

optimistically as the police arrived and were officially informed of the situation.

I remember it as one of those days when the future didn’t seem to require such an effort of will to imagine. It was right in front of us, an autonomous terrace of houses, organizing its own affairs. A little community. I remember sitting with Sean and Anna in the middle of the street, lounging on canvas deckchairs and surveying our undiscovered country while a gang of children with clownlike smears of orange juice round their mouths played a rough-and-tumble game in and out of the houses. The things we could do! Knock some walls together to make a library. Open a space up as a crèche. We could convert one area into a communal laundry, another into a bake house. Helen joined us and collectivized our imaginary gardens, planting vegetables and fruit trees, planning a compost heap, a pool, glasshouses, swings. It would be a life of luxury. We’d have saunas and windmills, solar panels, looms.

In the real world what we got was Keith Mallory. Mallory’s firm, New City Investigations, had a frightening reputation in east London. Some of Leo’s friends had been on the receiving end of a New City eviction in Stepney, which had left one of them with a fractured skull. Within a couple of days Mallory’s men were banging on doors in Sylvan Close, trying to wheedle their way inside. They shouted threats through letterboxes. They parked their van so it blocked the end of the street. For some reason the press wasn’t paying much attention and the papers that covered the story were just reproducing the council’s hysterical denunciations. The occupiers were delinquents, criminals, social deviants perversely helping people jump the housing queue.

The occupiers got increasingly panicky about eviction. There were several predawn false alarms. Sleep deprived, tempers started to fray. Groups had formed around different houses; some wanted to strengthen their fortifications in case of an eviction attempt; others thought this would create a bad impression. As a result, when Mallory’s men did attack, some places were much better barricaded than others. There were more than a hundred bailiffs.

Only three houses held out; by the time we heard about it, the families occupying the others were already back in their hostels.

The occupiers were terrified. One by one, over the next two days, the remaining homeless families dropped out. After that very few of the activists were prepared to carry on. The moderate faction, led by the Ellises, felt that without the families, it had become meaningless. This was when the Thirteen collective decided to move to Sylvan Close. We announced that we intended to hold the last three houses, whatever happened. We would make Sylvan Close the site of an open confrontation with the State.

If I say that for me the moon landing didn’t happen, I don’t mean I believe the conspiracy theories — the studio in Burbank, the misaligned shadows, or the unaccountably waving flags — just that the spasm of technocratic pride that apparently shuddered through the television-watching world didn’t penetrate the walls of the barricaded terraced house where I spent most of that month. As Neil Armstrong fumbled his prescripted line, I was on guard duty, blearily watching the street.

Mallory’s thugs left us alone for more than a week. Early one morning I was asleep upstairs in number thirty when I heard noise outside. I poked my head out of the window and saw men in army-surplus tin hats smashing windows and pushing ladders up against walls. In the middle of the street was Mallory, a stocky man in a sheepskin coat directing operations like a general at a siege. At the end of the road stood half a dozen policemen, observing.

The house was barricaded downstairs with heavy wooden beams. We’d installed a trapdoor, which allowed us to block off the first floor. As we watched, two bailiffs started to swing a battering ram against the front door, while two more tried to get a ladder up to the bedroom window. We emptied buckets of water and cans of paint over them, pushing the ladder away with sticks and metal scaffolding poles. Angry and keyed up, they started to scrabble around for missiles to throw at us. Milk bottles and bricks came flying up. The police did nothing.

I watched the bailiffs force their way into the house next door. Leo, Alex Hill, and some others were inside. Mallory’s coat got spattered with paint and he flew into a rage, producing a cosh from his coat pocket and laying into a young guy called Milo, who must have been dragged onto the street straight out of his sleeping bag. Wearing nothing but a pair of underpants he crouched on the ground, trying to protect his head with his arms. We shouted at the police, pointing out what was happening. They ignored Mallory and arrested the other people who were being pushed or dragged out.

When our front door gave way, we scrambled upstairs and dragged weights over the trapdoor. For a while the bailiffs tried to batter their way through, without success. Then they stopped. We couldn’t understand why until we noticed little plumes of smoke rising up through the gaps in the floorboards and realized they’d lit a fire downstairs. There were eight of us trapped up there. They were shouting at us from the street, daring us to jump out of the window. We had a couple of jerry-cans full of drinking water, so we soaked rags and tied them round our faces. Pushing open the hatch to the attic, we were lifting Sean up so he could smash an escape hole in the roof when the police finally intervened. I think it was because some reporters had arrived. The fire was put out and Mallory’s thugs were forced to leave. As they got back into their bus we sang the “Bandiera Rossa.” “Avanti, popolo! Alla riscossa. .”

We’d held two of the three houses. As soon as the bailiffs left we split into teams. People were sent for building materials, others for food and water, to organize lawyers for the people who’d been arrested.

Surrounded by the debris of battle, Anna and I smoked cigarettes and brewed tea on a Primus stove.

“What do you think?” she asked me.

“I think it’s like the Alamo.”

July was a heavy, muggy month. As we waited to be attacked, it was impossible to stay inside the stuffy little houses. Anna and I

made a kind of den in one of the unoccupied buildings, a roofless upstairs room, which we swept and furnished with a mattress and some rugs. It was open to the air but completely private, a secret place where we sunbathed and smoked dope and at night, by candlelight, acted out a series of increasingly confrontational and fetishistic sexual encounters. Anna gave orders. Hit me. Come on my face. I had the sense that my levers were being pulled, that I was the subject of one of her personal experiments: an analysis of the pathways between violence and sexual arousal in the white male.

I slapped her and she thanked me. I was disturbed to discover how angry I was with her, with women, with the world. Disturbed and turned on, just as she wanted. Sex for Anna was always an assault — on comfort, on the thing in herself she was trying to eradicate. Me, I wanted to smash myself up, to get rid of structure altogether.

One evening I was standing over her as she knelt, naked, on the floor, when we noticed Claire watching us from the doorway, open-mouthed with shock. Anna’s reaction was instant. “Get out!” she screamed. As Claire fled, she hurriedly got dressed. For the first time since I’d known her, she seemed ashamed, humiliated. Claire lost no time in calling a meeting to spread the news of Anna’s hypocrisy. Oh, yes, the woman who’d forced her to cut her hair, who’d reduced her to tears by calling her a slave to patriarchy, had been groveling on her knees to a man. Organization sex. Capitalist perversion.

For me it was a disaster. It spelled the end not just of our private meetings but of all intimacy between us. It was as if Anna slammed a door shut. I’d had a glimpse of something I shouldn’t. Now she would eradicate her deviation, without interference. I felt confused, bereft.

The morning after Claire’s denunciation I went out to the end of the street in search of fresh air and time to think. To my astonishment, I found Miles Bridgeman filming the houses. “I’ve come to join up,” he told me, indicating his camera. “I’ve brought my truth machine.”

I was surprisingly glad to see him. Just then it would have been good to see anyone from the world outside Sylvan Close. Miles’s urbanity and his silly surface Chelsea cool were exactly what I needed.

He told me he wanted to document the occupation. It was, he said pompously, a historic confrontation. He asked a lot of questions. Who’d been around? Who was in favor of the new hard line? I was happy enough to chat. Besides, he’d brought a bottle of Scotch and some blues and I’d been subsisting for days on adrenalin and watery vegetable stew. As ever, Miles’s studiedly casual clothes, like his studiedly revolutionary attitude, betrayed a hint of flash that made him stand out against his surroundings. When he asked if there was enough hot water for him to take a bath, it was my pleasure to reveal there wasn’t even a functioning toilet.

The first sour note came from Sean. “Who let the spiv in?” he asked sarcastically. I told him the spiv was with me, which calmed him down until Miles took out his camera. Sean immediately threatened to smash it. “We don’t want any pig reporters in here,” he said. “No fucking observers. Are you here to take part or just watch?”

I told Miles to ignore him. The two of us sat up late, sharing his whisky and talking about what had happened in the months since we’d last seen each other. He’d been in California, filming for the BBC. He’d picked up a lot of new jargon about Gestalts and Rolfing. Ursula had been sleeping with a German bass player, but was now with a guy who worked at the zoo. The last thing I remembered was the light streaming through the window as Miles described an orgy he’d attended at some hot springs.

When the fight broke out I was asleep. I had a splitting headache and the mid-morning light was making me nauseous, so it took a while before I could make sense of the shouting in the street. It seemed Claire had woken up to find Miles going through her things. She’d alerted some of the others and they’d thrown him out. Miles was still talking, trying to get back into the house, but Sean and Claire were blocking his way. Sean was throwing punches. I leaned

out of the window and Miles shouted up, pleading with me: “Chris, it was a misunderstanding. I thought it was my bag.” He wanted his camera, which he’d left upstairs. Eventually I threw the thing to him and watched him jog off down the street, casting little nervous glances behind him.

Why did I vouch for Miles? Because I wanted to. Because I didn’t believe there was anything sinister about him. Claire said she’d found him looking through her address book. Though I told her she was being paranoid, I didn’t really know what to think. I didn’t have much time or mental space for Miles. Sylvan Close was obviously going to end badly. We were down to ten people and there seemed to be very little support for our cause. No press, no demonstrations. We retreated into one house and spent the next twenty-four hours working continuously, building a wall of breeze-blocks downstairs, filling buckets with sand and water, constructing an escape route across the roofs. We decided there was no point in everyone getting arrested. Six people should go back and reopen Workshop Thirteen. The others should stay. Sean, Claire, Anna, and I volunteered.

As we waited for the final assault, the Apollo ii crew landed on the moon. Tranquility base. Up there the crew-cut astronauts could see the whole world as a blue-green disc. Down below, we were in our bunker. We stayed awake for forty-eight straight hours before the attack came. A massive battalion of police blocked the end of the street, guarding vanloads of council workmen. There was no sign of Mallory: it was obviously going to be a completely different operation. As a small group of supporters shouted slogans from behind a cordon, an inspector with a sergeant-major’s penetrating tone told us through a bullhorn that we had twenty minutes to get out. We refused and they moved forward, forming a ring that closed in through the backyards until number thirty-four was surrounded by a triple row of uniformed officers. We had a huge red and black flag, which we waved out of the window as the workmen swarmed into the empty houses around us with crowbars and sledgehammers.

Within half an hour most of Sylvan Close had been rendered uninhabitable. Floors were torn up, toilets smashed, pipes and cables pulled out of walls. The council was evidently determined that, whatever else happened, we weren’t going to be able to move back in. Watching the ruin of the rest of the street was somehow more frightening than listening to the bailiffs breaking down our barricade. They weren’t just smashing up our crude repair work but all the things we’d imagined: the long refectory table, the kindergarten, the workshops. When they finally broke through the wall we retreated to the roof. My lasting memory of that day is the shudder of the bricks under my hands as I clung to the chimney, watching the black slates tremble and spray upward as the council workmen battered their way through.

* * *

Sylvan Close was on Miles’s mind too as Pat Ellis left the room after her press conference. I craned my neck to watch her leave, followed by a train of advisers and assistants. Miles studied my perspiring face. “She did legal work for you after Leyton, didn’t she?”

“That’s right.” I felt like a lab animal, skull shaved for the probe. “So now you’ve performed your little experiment, you can tell me the results.”

“What?”

“Stop baiting me and tell me what you want. What have I got to do with Pat Ellis? I haven’t seen her since — for longer than I haven’t seen you. You know she had nothing to do with anything. Whatever you’re involved with, I won’t be part of it. It’s not my business. I just want to be left alone.”

“For God’s sake, Chris. Let’s at least get out of the building. Stop raising your voice and we’ll go and find something to eat. Eat, then we’ll talk, I promise.” He gripped my elbow and steered me outside. On the street he hailed a taxi, giving the driver the address of a members’ club in Soho.

All four of us pleaded not guilty. Hoping to turn our trial toward some political purpose, we disrupted the proceedings, shouted at the bailiffs and policemen who were giving evidence. Sean and I were given short prison sentences. Claire and Anna were fined; I think the judge was feeling chivalrous. While I was locked up in Brixton there were riots in Northern Ireland and British troops were sent over to keep the peace. I heard later the soldiers were welcomed by the Catholics, who thought they were going to protect them against a police force staffed and controlled by their Protestant neighbors. To the Thirteen collective it looked like one

thing only: the British state was beginning to make war on its own people. Tanks on working-class streets. Soldiers taking aim behind garden hedges. Our boys, the Fascist regime. The Prince of Wales’s Own went in on August 14, 1969. It became a kind of shorthand for us, August 14, proof that the logic of confrontation was being followed by the other side too.

Miles’s club was in a Georgian townhouse. We climbed a flight of narrow stairs and Miles signed us in, flirting with the young woman at the front desk. Heavily, deliberately, I wrote Michael Frame in the register. We sat on broken-down leather armchairs and I squirmed agitatedly around, trying to brace myself against sinking. The room projected an artful air of shabby comfort. Discreet waiting staff, discreet touch screens to process your order. It wasn’t one of those places where they make you wear a tie; if Miles had taken me somewhere like that I’d have been less disoriented.

“Would you like something to eat, Chris?”

“What exactly is it you do, Miles? I’ve never known what you do.” “You wouldn’t like to see the menu?”

“Not really. I want to know who you work for.”

“Christ, Chris, you might as well get lunch out of it. I’m not going to pretend this is all fun and games for you. I know what’s at stake.”

“You’re a consultant. That’s what you said. A political consultant. So who are your clients?”

“Like I said, I know what’s at stake. You’ve got a nice niche down there in Sussex. I can understand you want to hang on to it. And if you want this done with the minimum fuss, you need to get it into your head that I’m not going to answer all or even most of your questions, so you might as well calm the fuck down and order some lunch. Everybody needs to eat. I certainly need to eat.”

He realized the waitress was hovering, nervously. “Oh, hi. Let’s get two large gin and tonics and then I’ll have the fish pie. Glass of sauvignon with the pie.”

She turned to me.

“You have a vegetarian option? Fine. I’ll take that.”

The waitress left. Miles nodded gnomically. “OK,” he said. “Now

we’ve actually taken a breath, maybe we can do this in a civilized

fashion. In answer to your question, I work for myself.”

“You’re lying already.”

“I own and run a public-affairs consultancy, which has a number

of clients, some of whom you no doubt disapprove of. I’ve worked

for multinationals. I’ve worked for various special interest groups.

Trade associations, that kind of thing. I help them get what they

want from the political system. In the seventies I spent some time

working in the media. You remember I was interested in film-

making?”

“I remember that.”

“I ended up in television for a while. Current affairs.”

“You were a journalist?”

“Briefly. Mostly management. I had contacts. I got to know how

things work.”

“And now?”

“Now I want to know what you thought of Patricia Ellis.”

“She’s doing very well.” I shrugged. “She seemed to have a lot

of flunkeys.”

“She used to be a real firebrand, remember?”

“Did she?”

“Oh, come on. What about during all that Leyton business?

Quoting Mao in meetings. Talking about expropriating this and

smashing that.”

“I don’t remember you being at any meetings, Miles. I remember

you turning up one day out of the blue and asking a lot of ques-

tions. I remember you getting thrown out. I remember Sean Ward

punching you. Do you remember all that?”

“It was a misunderstanding.”

“Of course. And is this a misunderstanding too?”

“This is lunch, Chris.”

“At least call me Mike.”

The waitress came with our drinks. Without thinking, I gulped

my gin and tonic. Miles looked at me, his lopsided smile creeping across his face. “Well that seemed to go down easily. I knew your whole teetotal Buddhist thing was a con.”

I felt I’d tripped up. “It’s not a con. At least it wasn’t, not at the time. I don’t consider myself a Buddhist now, but I was. I’d be dead otherwise.”

“What happened to you?”

“When?”

“After you left.”

“I couldn’t deal with — anything. What had happened, anything. I drifted around in Asia, did too many drugs. It got very bad. Someone scraped me off the street in Bangkok and took me to a monastery. The monks used to treat addicts.”

“And they cured you.”

“That’s right.”

“They cured you and along the way they made you into a believer. So God got you in the end!” He did a little trumpet call, trilling his fingers in front of his face. “After all that!”

“Buddhists don’t believe in God.”

“But a believer, nonetheless.”

I had no comeback to that. First the revolution, then the Four Noble Truths. A compulsive believer, always mistaking my ideas for the world. “Wisdom is not scholarship,” said the monks. How I’d studied that saying!

The waitress returned with our food. I watched Miles fork fish pie into his mouth. It was frightening to hear my life tossed about in trite phrases, a joke to be capped with a punchline. It made me feel temporary, disposable.

His long jaw, masticating and grinding.

At Wat Tham Nok we stayed in huts, a wretched, emaciated crew, our jaundiced skins crossed with track marks and blackened by tattoos. We pottered about in our red pajamas, Thais and bird-shit foreigners together, looking at the floor, racked by withdrawal. The village of the damned. “Drink, drink.” Every morning, kneeling before a bucket, we downed a beaker of the mixture and waited

for the spasms to come. The acid reek of my vomit. The sounds of the men beside me, groaning and cursing. “Drink, drink.” The monks paced up and down behind us like drill instructors. The whole bucket of water was to be ingested, then spewed into the trough. Hard men, the monks. In their quarters they had pictures of accident victims, syphilitics, horribly mutilated corpses. Aids to contemplation.

“You know,” Miles was saying, “I’ve thought about you quite a lot over the years. I always felt you got caught up in something you had no control over. You didn’t seem like the others. You didn’t seem like an extremist.”

I had to smile at that. Miles was still the same, untroubled by doubt or hope and incapable of understanding it in others. He could live in the world as it is, which (depending on your point of view) is either pragmatism, coarseness, or a particular kind of heroism. Whatever it is, I’ve never been able to do it. The world has always seemed unbearable to me.

He called over the waitress to ask for a second glass of wine. “Sentiment aside,” he said abruptly, “you’ve made a mess of your life. You had brains and a certain amount of talent, unlike — let’s just take an example at random — the Minister for Police and Security, who’s generally considered around Westminster to be a dull biddy whose main talent is for worming her way up the greasy pole.”

“I don’t really follow politics, these days.”

“Is that so? You must admit it’s strange. To think about what she once believed and the job she does now.”

“She’s not the only one to have changed, is she?”

“We’ve all changed, but she’s the one in charge of a major Home Office portfolio. And when her boss is forced to drink hemlock, which can surely be no more than a few months away, she’s odds-on favorite to become Home Secretary. I mean, for Christ’s sake, be as zen as you like, but you have to see that’s some career trajectory. She was a self-proclaimed revolutionary. She was plotting the violent overthrow of the State.”

“No, she wasn’t. She was a voguish liberal who went with the

flow. She was following fashion.”

“I’m sorry to say not everyone shares your sanguine view.” “Meaning?”

“Meaning there’s a public-interest question.”

“Speak English, Miles.”

“It’s the Home Office, not Culture, Media, and Sport. There’s a feeling that someone with her background isn’t suitable for the job. A former revolutionary in charge of the security services? That’s a little too much baggage, don’t you think? She’s not a safe pair of hands.”

“So she’s not a safe pair of hands. What of it?”

“It’s a widely shared opinion.”

“She must have been security-vetted. Isn’t that what you do?”

“Oh, absolutely, but vetting committees can make mistakes. They found no connection between her and the fourteenth of August actions, for example. Completely in the clear. But there were dissenting voices. Some people don’t think the checks were thorough enough.”

“I’m telling you, she had nothing to do with fourteenth August.”

“Let’s take it by stages. When did you last meet her? You saw her after you got out of prison, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Did she come to your squat?”

“I suppose she must have done. I have a picture of her at the women’s group, but that might have been earlier on.”

They picked me up outside the prison. Leo, Anna, and Claire. I was expecting Sean’s old van. Instead they were driving a big blue Rover, an expensive car.

Anna kissed me on the mouth. “We got rid of Rosa,” she explained.

It was about time. Back in Notting Hill the van’s loud exhaust and distinctive pink paint job had become a liability. By the time we moved out of Charlie’s we were spending half our time by the side of the road, watching sour-faced constables kick her tires and

poke around under the seats. Eventually we’d taken her to a friend’s garage in Shepherd’s Bush and had her sprayed white, but it was a sloppy job. You could always see a faint pink sheen on the hood and the back doors.

“Where did you get this from?” I asked, running my hands over the car’s creamy upholstery.

“Somewhere in Belgravia,” said Anna.

“I thought Sean was still in prison.”

“He is.”

“Anna and Claire took it,” muttered Leo.

“Leo says it’s too flashy, but really he hates it because stealing cars is man’s work.”

“You should bloody get rid of it.”

“Oh, calm down.”

We parked the car in the yard behind Workshop Thirteen and covered it with a tarpaulin. I found the place full of people I barely knew. Two or three agit-prop friends of Jay’s were lounging around, bumming cigarettes and waiting for someone to cook. A young black woman was running off leaflets on the printing press.

In the Brixton prison rec room there had been a television. The news pictures seemed to tell a simple, chilling story. Glass on the streets of the Bogside. Blazing cars. “We have to fight back,” I told Leo that night. It was late and we were whispering. Everyone around us on the mattresses was asleep, bundled in blankets and sleeping bags. Nearby Anna spooned closer to Shirley, the young black woman. I was expecting to be with Anna on my first night of freedom. Either her or Claire. I was angry. Leo was too, though for different reasons.

“They’re ganging up on me,” he hissed, “calling me a misogynist. Anna said I was unable to distinguish rape from ordinary sexual relations. Fucking bitch.”

There was always a lot of tension at Thirteen. I think that was partly because so many things weren’t said. I wanted to talk privately, not least with Anna, but it was impossible. With Sean still away in prison, Anna had exerted control over the collective.

She’d become the advocate of a policy of absolute openness. The individual was a politically suspect category; privacy was just another name for isolation; the atomized worker was subject to feelings of depression and alienation that could only be cured by participation in an authentically communal experience. It was as if she subsumed herself entirely into Thirteen. Everything she did, whether it was washing herself or going to the toilet, she did in the presence, at least potentially, of someone else. And somehow she succeeded in placing herself entirely on the surface. Her nakedness became meaningless, even to me. It was as if she had no inner life at all. But that totalitarian sharing became the rule for every one of us that winter, not just Anna, and in most of us it bred furtiveness. It was easier not to speak about your feelings to anyone than be forced to offer them up to everyone, yet another sacrifice on the bonfire of openness.

Soon after I got out of prison, there was an argument among the women involving Leo’s traditionally minded girlfriend Cynthia, who rolled his joints, did his laundry, and looked at him with big eyes when he spoke at our meetings. Cynthia was told she was politically backward. She was informed that she was no longer welcome. Leo was furious at her expulsion and moved out with her to stay in a huge unruly commune that had been set up in an empty mansion in Piccadilly. When I went to visit I found more than a hundred people crashing in high-ceilinged reception rooms, climbing on the roof and shouting down from the windows at a besieging crowd of police and hostile gawpers. You had to get in and out using a makeshift drawbridge. After a couple of weeks, the place was stormed. Leo came back. Cynthia didn’t. Was Pat Ellis there when they expelled Cynthia? I think she was. I remember her face, twisted, shouting. I was upstairs, dozing on the mattresses. I went down to watch. Pat was listing Cynthia’s faults. Other women were joining in. Cynthia was whimpering. “You just aren’t human, you people. What’s so bloody revolutionary about being cruel?”

That would have been just after we burned down the first army recruitment office.

The noise of chatter in Miles’s Soho club was increasing, forcing us to raise our voices. “Are you telling me,” he said, draining his second glass of wine, “that Pat was completely unaware of what you were doing?”

“We weren’t exactly advertising it.”

“Not at first.”

“She was part of the women’s group. Most of them split off and set up some kind of commune in Tufnell Park.”

“She didn’t go, though.”

“She was married.”

“But she didn’t go. She wanted to be in the action faction, not the sisterhood.”

“Where did you get that? You sound like someone’s uncle trying to talk jive. She wasn’t part of either. The feminists thought she was soft because she wasn’t prepared to leave her husband. We thought she was just another bourgeoise. She was useful because she was a lawyer, but we didn’t trust her.”

“Regardless. She must have known.”

“Known? Why? She hardly ever came to Thirteen.”

“I’m not sure you’re remembering correctly.”

How is my memory? When Leo showed me the crate of petrol bombs it made sense. I didn’t discuss it. I didn’t really stop to think very much at all. Milk bottles filled with four-star and engine oil, ballasted with sand, stoppered with wadding. We drove the Rover down to a recruitment office in Blackheath where the two of us broke a window and threw a couple of our crude devices through the hole. As we drove away all I could think about was Kavanagh the junk man, me and Brian setting fire to his garage as kids.

When Anna found out, she was furious. We hadn’t consulted the group, meaning we hadn’t consulted her. “How could we?” I hissed. As we argued, Shirley was lounging nearby on the mattresses, pretending to read Régis Debray. The place was full of people I didn’t know and didn’t trust. That evening, we told the various interlopers and sexual partners and hangers-on that they needed

to find somewhere else to sleep. We shuttered the doors and held a closed meeting.

Q: Why have you done this?

We felt it was the only adequate response to the presence of the army on British streets.

Q: What political purpose does this serve?

It reminds people the system isn’t invulnerable. It has a small practical effect on the machinery of the military.

Q: Shouldn’t it have been a group decision?

It was spontaneous. Besides, all action seems equally meaningless in our alienated state. Why focus on this in particular? What’s special about it?

Q: How do you justify putting the collective at risk?

It was a provocation. We want to force you, our comrades, to think.

Q: What are we to think about? Your quietism.

Your continuing collaboration with Imperialism.

Q: Can you promise you won’t take such unilateral action again?

No. Why should we promise? Why would you want to extract such a promise? Is that you setting a limit, or the voice of some power that has a hold over you?

Q: Your gesture is infantile. The revolution will be led by the working class. A terrorist is just a liberal with a bomb, arrogantly presuming to lead the way.

Rubbish. You’re covering up your cowardice with quotations. Change is imminent. It’s happening around the world. The slightest pressure will tip the balance in our favor.

One spark, a thousand fires burning.

We were so impatient. We wanted the time to be now. Of the core group, only Matthias and Helen remained seriously troubled by what we’d done. We were supposed to be protesting against war. Surely a peaceful gesture would have been better? I accused them of fetishizing nonviolence, telling them they’d just internalized the state’s distinction between legitimate protest and

criminality. Leo and I were censured for our individualism, but the logic of confrontation did its work. By the end of the meeting, everyone was in agreement. We would go further.

That night I slid into bed beside Anna and asked her why she was ignoring me. I told her she was beautiful, and she asked how I’d feel if someone threw acid on her face. Then I pushed too hard and said I loved her, which made her pull my hair and hiss at me, tears of rage and frustration in her eyes. How could I be such a pig-thick bourgeois? Why didn’t I get it? Unless we were prepared to do something, we were just another part of it, more dead weight on the shoulders of the world’s poor. Our precious individuality was oppressive precisely because we found ourselves so special. To give ourselves pleasure, we’d countenance all sorts of horror, as long as it happened far away. So why didn’t I get it? Why didn’t I get that my stupid narcissistic idea of love made her sick?

The night after that, we drove to Chelmsford, then Colchester, setting fire to a recruitment office and a Territorial Army storage depot. At each site we scattered leaflets.

FOR QUEEN AND COUNTRY