Meltdown (41 page)

‘That’s right, I suppose,’ Jimmy said, although his expression suggested that he wasn’t entirely sure. ‘So I’ll be seeing you around for a while then?’

‘Just a couple of weeks. It’s part of the course,’ David replied. ‘I doubt I’d actually end up teaching here. Not enough facilities.’

There was a pause.

‘Well, see you around then. I’ll call,’ David said.

‘Yeah. Absolutely,’ Jimmy replied, knowing that he wouldn’t.

Taking back what’s theirs

Jimmy could scarcely believe that he was facing the prospect of being forced to file for bankruptcy, a situation that only a year before he would have thought of as a kind of death.

Bankruptcy.

He could remember the word from his youth, when his father would mention it as if it was the plague. He’d pull a dreadful, gloomy face and tell his wife about the awful fate awaiting bank customers who had overstretched themselves and how hard he himself had tried to help them stave it off.

‘When you’re bankrupt,’ Derek Corby had told Jimmy as a boy, ‘you’ve lost all control. Your life is taken out of your hands and it can take years to get it back. Sometimes you never do get it back.’

The funny thing was, Jimmy didn’t really care any more. He’d lost control anyway.

The real problem wasn’t bankruptcy. Bankruptcy he could face.

The real problem was eviction. That was the terror that continued to haunt him and Monica.

The bank could force them from the two floors of their house that they had made home and the council would then place them in a dreaded Bed and Breakfast. This was the appalling prospect which Jimmy’s parents were trying so hard to help them avoid with their monthly standing order, a standing order which, as Derek said, ‘showed willing’, but which did not even scratch the surface of the interest on the
interest
on his debt.

The threat of eviction haunted them. And then one evening, Jimmy hit upon the solution.

‘It’s not going to happen, Mon,’ he said. ‘I won’t let it. We are
never
going into emergency accommodation.’

‘What will you do?’ Monica asked, putting baby bottles into soapy water to soak.

‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ Jimmy replied, as he mashed up boiled carrot and apple and spooned the resulting mush into the compartments of an ice-cube tray ready to be frozen and made to last all week. ‘I’m going to do what I used to do. What I always did do, even before I was rich. I’m going to dodge, I’m going to weave, I’m going to improvise and take my chance.’

‘Yes, but what are you
actually
going to do?’ Monica said, smiling at this reminder of just what a Jack the lad Jimmy could be.

‘I’m going to move us into a house in Webb Street. That’s what I’m going to fucking do.’

‘Don’t swear, Daddy,’ came a sleepy voice from the top of the unlit stairs.

‘Daddy said fudging, darling,’ Monica called out.

‘No he fudging didn’t,’ came the reply.

‘Yes he did, now go to sleep.’ Monica turned back to Jimmy and spoke in a lower voice. ‘Don’t you remember, darling? We don’t own Webb Street any more.’

‘No,’ said Jimmy, ‘and nor do any of the other people who are living there rent-free. They’re squatters. And that’s what we’ll be. We’re going to squat the street we used to own. How’s that for irony?’

Crusty Nimbys

Despite the radical nature of their lifestyle choice, the squatters of Webb Street were beginning to develop some distinctly bourgeois attitudes.

None of them would ever have imagined themselves as Not In My Back Yarders, the kind of people who are all for development and change as long as it doesn’t affect them. After all, as squatters they themselves were usually the targets of Nimbys, folk who could see the logic in the homeless occupying empty properties but didn’t want squatters moving in next door or, worse still, taking up residence in their holiday homes. The problem was that when you came down to it
everyone
had a back yard, even squatters, and in this case it was the other end of Webb Street.

The undeveloped bit. The rotting, neglected, rat- and bug-infested, boarded-up and broken-windowed bit that Jimmy had not got to before the recession hit. But it wasn’t the rotting properties that the efficient and highly organized ‘top end’ squatters objected to, it was Bob the tramp.

He just
so
brought down the tone of the street. Of course the various activists, eco warriors, cycle dispatch riders and trapeze artists who had squatted the top-end houses would not have put it that way themselves. They didn’t hold with snobbery or elitism in any shape or form. The world and all the houses on it were, as far as they were concerned, common property.

It was just that Bob was so utterly revolting.

Stinking as he did, and caked in blood from whatever it was he was coughing up, he hung around, shambling up and down the street, begging at their doors. This was not what proper squatting was about. Proper squatting wasn’t about screwed-up substance abusers. That was what small-minded fascists
thought
squatting was about.

Proper squatting was organized, politicized. It was a legitimate and responsible lifestyle choice taken by legitimate and responsible people. Bob was giving the wrong impression altogether. When journalists came down to write about their new and radical initiative in sustainable urban management taking place in Webb Street, those responsible for the initiative wanted their efforts to be reported in the righteous and glowing manner that they believed to be appropriate.

And they didn’t want a pustulous petrol head screwing up the photo opportunity.

These squatters thought of themselves as custodians of a precious human resource. Better tenants in every way than any absentee landlord. Caring for the houses they occupied, improving them, bringing them to life.
Property for People, not Profits
was their mantra. They were not scroungers, they were not freeloaders, they were not ne’er-do-wells. They were in fact the future. And it worked.

Bob didn’t fit into that mould at all. Bob was just a plain old-fashioned tramp and his presence was a constant reminder to the happy house occupiers of the fact that they themselves were only one eviction from the street. That much as they liked to see themselves as legitimate custodians of urban resources, to the rest of society they were just Bob with a college education and rings through their lips. Bob’s presence connected them with everything that the public feared most about the radicalized homeless, all the clichés that they fought so hard to dispel with their careful property management and their commitment to supporting the council’s recycling policies.

And besides, on a purely hygienic and aesthetic level, the squatters of Webb Street did not much like living next door to a festering, stinking, disease-ridden tramp who was beginning to attract more of his ilk.

They wished he would just fuck off.

Unfortunately he didn’t seem to have any intention of doing so. Instead he continued to live in several of the houses at the bottom end of the street, the end to which Jimmy was forced to go in his search for an empty property.

It was not a little frustrating for Jimmy to walk down Webb Street from the top end, past all the nearly completed and beautifully renovated houses. Had he thought of it sooner he might have squatted one himself, but he hadn’t and now every single decent property had long since been grabbed.

There were slogans and posters in most of the windows:

Property might be theft, Jimmy thought to himself, but that hadn’t stopped the new tenants from fixing locks on all the doors and windows in order to secure their occupation. But he was not one to waste time in pointless regret. He would simply have to find the least worst property at the other end of the street and get on with it.

Once Jimmy had made a decision he was usually pretty energetic about following it through and the idea of making a family squat in Webb Street was no exception. The morning after he had had his idea and for many days afterwards he made the long trip to Webb Street by bicycle and worked hard at making one of the houses he used to own habitable.

‘All the good houses have already gone,’ he told Monica. ‘The whole street’s crammed with super-cool, beardy, dreadlocky anarchist types with bald, pierced, tattooed girlfriends who work in circuses or sell falafel at markets. But up at the other end, where we never even got round to starting the conversions, hardly anybody’s bothered at all. That old tramp I told you about still hangs around. He’s going to be our neighbour if he doesn’t die first.’

‘Lovely,’ Monica replied without enthusiasm.

‘Anything is better than a council Bed and Breakfast, Mon.’

‘But how will we get Toby back to Notting Hill for school each morning? He’s really settled in, we can’t make him move again.’

‘We’ve still got our bikes. We’ll cycle like I’ve been doing. It takes about an hour.’

‘An hour’s cycle ride to school,’ Monica protested, ‘then an hour back? He’ll be shattered.’

Jimmy could see from Monica’s face that she was about to list the incredible danger that such a mammoth daily journey would involve. She was no doubt picturing her first-born wrapped round the bull bars of some speeding Humvee driven by a mad nanny who was late for her Pilates class.

‘Mon,’ Jim said firmly, ‘kids used to walk miles to school, it was the
norm
. One of the reasons they’re all getting so fat is that they don’t do that any more. What’s wrong with an hour’s bike ride? It’s a good thing, surely. We used to spend nearly that long in the Discovery some mornings and there’s cycle lanes almost all the way. Anyway, don’t you see? There’s nothing else we can do. Your parents live on a boat. Mine are in a one-bedroom flat in Reading. It’s up to us to find somewhere to live and Webb Street is perfect. We have a head start there. We know all the service providers. There’s any amount of cement and tiles and paint and all sorts of stuff still locked up in the houses from when the building work stopped and, most important of all, there’s a whole squatting community already set up. We can join it. We won’t be alone. They know all the legal stuff. They even have lawyers. My dad said the most important thing in a crisis was to have a plan, right? Well, either we wait until we get thrown out and are at the mercy of the council or we take control like thousands of other Londoners have done and prepare a squat.’

Monica did not look completely convinced, but she didn’t protest further. Slowly they were all learning to put their previous attitudes behind them.

Jimmy selected his house. First he discreetly replaced the broken locks on the front door with two of the four Chubbs that had been fitted so beautifully to his Notting Hill front door by the talented Romanian carpenter. Then he began work in earnest.

Astonishingly the water was still on and the gas only needed reconnecting. There was no electricity for the time being but Jimmy had a good set of cordless power tools that he was able to charge at home and take with him to work. One of the super-cool squatters had explained to Jimmy that once he moved his family in they could easily get the leccy reconnected as the various power companies did not care who owned the houses they supplied as long as the bills were paid.

Jim worked every single day. Preparing the surfaces was a massive task as the premises were so dilapidated. He found, however, that by asset-stripping the floors he didn’t intend to occupy he could forage enough sound timber and plasterboard to service the ones that he did.

He balked at nothing: no cockroach, no bug infestation, no nightmare mystery stains worried him in the slightest. He worked with a light heart for he had once again found a sense of purpose to his day, a purpose which was far more satisfying than any work he had done in his past life. He was coming to see that being rich and working simply to get richer could be in many ways a soul-destroying business. Particularly if the work you were doing had long since become routine. But being poor and working to survive, working to keep your wife and children from sinking into an abyss of poverty,
that
was a thrill. Jimmy was painting and decorating for his family, for his kids. He was working to put a roof over their heads. No goal could have lent more vigour to every blow of his hammer and every stroke of his brush.

The process wasn’t costing him anything either, in fact he was spoilt for choice when it came to fitting out the kitchen and bathroom. After all, he had five en suites gathering dust above his head in Notting Hill, all beautifully equipped with the most splendid baths, bidets, basins and shower units.

In the end, however, he took all his stuff from the en suite in the attic nanny flat, Jodie’s being the only bathroom furniture that would fit into the stripped-out room he had prepared at Number 23 Webb Street. In fact Jimmy thought he could probably have fitted that room into the massive free-standing cast-iron tugboat of a bath that he and Monica had once shared. Jodie’s bath and basin also had the advantage of being the only ones in the whole Notting Hill house featuring taps that were not so smoothly designed that you couldn’t turn them off with a wet hand.

Next Jimmy stripped out Jodie’s kitchenette. He removed the work surface, the fitted cooker, fridge and microwave and the lovely chrome power points, planning to reassemble it all carefully in Webb Street. He was able to shift the whole lot with the help of an anarchist with a van, who did the job for a pink bidet from Monica’s old bathroom and a still-boxed-up juicer that Derek and Nora Corby had given them one Christmas.

Jimmy made tremendous progress and after six weeks of fourteen-hour days he had his chosen floors cleaned and sanded, all the walls prepared for decoration, half the wiring done and he’d made a start on the plumbing. In fact he reckoned that he was no more than a month away from being able to move the family in if the bank suddenly snapped the thread on the sword of Damocles they had hanging over him and chucked them out of Notting Hill.