The Weight of Numbers (16 page)

My parents believed, as no generation since has been able to believe, in the overwhelming moral power of financial generosity. Having lavished so much on me, they took my gratitude as a done deal. Their psychological incompetence was extraordinary. At the end of my first term at university my father sent me a cheque, bailing me out of a debt I'd run up at Heffers bookshop. He signed his accompanying letter, ‘Yours sincerely, your Father.'

‘Why's he writing “yours sincerely”?' Noah Hayden asked me, when I showed this letter to him. ‘That cap “F” is very good, by the way.'

‘Because I am known to him,' I replied. ‘If I was not known to him he would have written “Yours faithfully”.'

I had to tell someone. I had to turn it into a joke. I didn't think I could
bear it otherwise. For these first, difficult months Noah Hayden was my lifeline, and he never let on that he knew.

‘And what about you?'

He told me the New Left Reading Group had fallen apart not long after I dropped out, stifled by its own inertia. Hayden took his finals, but claimed not to know whether he had even got his degree. ‘I'm not bloody going back there again,' he said. His scowl was extraordinary. It was ludicrous. It was pasted on – the worst sort of bad acting.

‘St John's?' I said, not really understanding him. ‘Cambridge?'

He waved his hand, dismissively. ‘Any of that shit.'

For all the fierceness of his political rhetoric and his increasing obsession with the situationists, I had never had Hayden down for a drop-out. But how else was I to interpret his words? Or his clothes? The longer we talked, the more it seemed that Hayden had fallen out the bottom of his political convictions into some hyper-theatrical space of his own.

‘Are you coming on the march?' he asked me.

There was a big demonstration planned in Grosvenor Square the next day, a Saturday, to protest the war in Vietnam.

‘We'll show those Trot bastards a demo!' he exclaimed, rubbing his hands.

It was a different language he was speaking: a puerile rhetoric of cheap aggression. Vietnam was a distant blur on his radar: he was more interested in the other marchers and how misguided they were.

They weren't his own words, of course. They were something he had learned over three years of drifting and unemployment – what he called ‘action'. This was a good time for Svengalis, and just as I had fallen under Hayden's spell at university, Hayden – unexpectedly daunted by the world outside St John's – had found himself someone to believe in.

The real story, such as it was, came out in asides and gestures. It was all ‘Josh went to Strasbourg in sixty-six.' ‘Did you read Josh's piece in
IT
?' ‘Josh is planning this freak-out happening in Selfridges.' (Even his
syntax had been torn down and rebuilt in his master's image.) It was all ‘Josh's barmy army' and ‘Josh's knit-your-own revolution'. Scathing and intimate, Noah's off-hand comments revealed his infatuation.

I don't remember much about the march itself. I only went along to meet up with Hayden, and in the press of people we somehow missed each other. From the Society's top floor, I had got not a hint of how strange the world had become. Now I was in the thick of it, trapped by the press of marchers up against a party of German students, row after row of them, running on the spot, then performing lusty squat thrusts, as though they belonged to some sort of youth movement. There were even a handful of
bona fide
clowns and jugglers. A welter of languages I'd not heard before outside the classroom dissolved, as we paraded along Oxford Street, into one long monotonous chant: ‘Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!'

Three men in gorilla suits and straw boaters passed me, howling in reply: ‘Hot Chocolate! Drinking Chocolate!' One of them took off his head to grin at me. It was Noah Hayden. The next second, he was gone.

I don't remember much else.

I remember Grosvenor Park; the darkening of the day; the sealing of the exits.

I remember the sky filled with clods of earth, and from this I know I must have been near the embassy, right near the front of the line, because the clods were raining down on us, and they hurt.

I remember someone screaming, and the hooves of the police horses and the sound they made, that non-sound, so unthreatening, like a thousand packets of soft butter falling onto a wooden floor. A great turbulence swept through us, the whole crowd knocked off-balance, and I remember, in that crowd, it felt as though the world itself were dipping and swinging like a passenger plane hitting a pocket of dead air. I remember the crowd scattered, and a white horse reared, and I remember a man with a stick, and the stick coming down.

I remember the taste of earth, and hands under my shoulders, testing
my weight. And a gorilla's head, seconds before a boot stoved it in, and another boot, scissoring, kicked it away.

I woke up on a mattress on the floor of a big, tatty room in a house I didn't know. The trees outside the window were orange, and the sky was black. It was night-time. Beside the bed there was a bedside lamp, and a scarf over the bulb, and a smell of scorched linen. I pulled the scarf away. The light lanced my eyes. I groaned and turned away, and found myself facing a door. It was ajar. Beyond the door, a chair dragged; there were footsteps.

A teenage girl with blond hair shorn close to her scalp came in and knelt down beside me. She laid her hand on me: my brow, my hand, my shoulder. Her eyes glittered oddly in the light coming from the lamp. She went out again and came back with a bowl of tinned tomato soup and a cup of tea. While I ate I heard other footsteps; a loud, laughing conversation, curtailed suddenly by the careless slam of a door. Comforted, I slept a while more.

I had a crashing headache when I woke up again, and the room was full of people. I sat up.

My shoulder was red raw: there would be a bruise the size of a plate there tomorrow. But it moved OK. I wondered who had undressed me.

‘Hey there,' said the girl, noticing me from where she sat, propped up against the opposite wall. She wasn't much more than a child. The rest of them were hardly older. A boy came in with a bundle of something wrapped up in newspaper. I assumed it was chips, but I couldn't smell them.

‘Where's Noah?' the boy asked, glancing round.

‘Still in the Rio trying to get served, I'd guess.'

The boy knelt down and unrolled the newspaper, revealing a bundle of cannabis.

There were books propped up on the window ledge. I could tell I was coming to, because the spines began popping into focus. (Colin Wilson. John Braine. No wonder the revolution failed.)

‘Hey there.'

It was easier to interrogate the books than the people. I couldn't maintain eye contact with anyone for more than a couple of seconds before their faces began to distort, as though their eyes were little gravity wells.

‘Hey.'

The air was spiced suddenly; someone was holding a joint under my nose.

The girl who'd fed me soup went out and came in with a wicker sewing basket under one arm and a bundle of black fur trailing across the carpet behind her.

It was a gorilla suit.

She dropped without ceremony onto the middle of the floor and began unpicking the threads at the gorilla's sides. Without thinking, I took a drag of the joint and handed it over to her.

‘How you doing?' she asked me.

‘The gorilla suits.'

‘That's right.'

‘You're urban gorillas.'

She smiled. ‘Yes.'

‘I don't get it.'

‘You just got it.'

‘I did?'

‘Yes.'

‘What's to get?'

‘That,' she said, nodding at the gorilla fur spread over her lap.

‘The pun?'

‘The deconstruction.'

‘The what?'

She was really very young, maybe sixteen or so, and wanted to be taken for someone older. I thought about Noah Hayden and his extraordinary transfiguration from political player to anarchist clown.
Was everyone here playing a part?

She pushed the suit aside, crawled over and hunkered down beside me on the mattress. ‘“The Spectacle is a slave society's nightmare, merely expressing its wish for sleep.”'

Guy Debord again: a more elegant rendering of his famous line than any I had ever come up with. ‘What's your name?' I asked her.

‘Deb,' she said. ‘Debbie. Deborah.' She seemed unsure.

Another handful of people walked in and Debbie nudged me over, making room on the mattress. It was then, glancing at her, that I noticed, through her fuzz of blond hair, that her skull had a perfect dent in it, the size of a half-crown. Her brutal hairstyle suddenly took on a new and disturbing meaning for me. What if it wasn't some sort of statement? What if it were something to do with that frightening dent?

About an hour later, Noah came in. He was still in full Jerry Cornelius get-up. Debbie got up and went over to him and kissed him on the mouth. Noah had a black eye and news from Vine Street, where two of their number were spending a night in the cells. ‘You know Josh is still bound over?'

‘Fuck.'

‘That's right.'

‘Josh is
fucked
.'

News of Josh's fuckedness rattled around the room like a bean in a can. Underneath their anger, people seemed secretly delighted, as though, of all of them, Josh had made it to the next round.

‘Yeah, but what about Saul?' said Noah, when the commotion died down. ‘Saul took on a horse.' He gestured broadly, conjuring a beast of great size, and his arms, emerging from the capacious flared cuffs of his Paisley shirt, were as white and shapeless as roots. ‘He pulled a pig from his horse.'

‘No, I didn't.'

‘The nasty fucker had his truncheon drawn. Saul ran straight up to him.'

‘No, I didn't.'

‘Saul is our hero.'

The whole room cheered me. A fresh joint slipped itself between my fingers; a box of matches.

It was a good-natured joke. They were making me feel welcome. I managed a grin. A tin of beer found its way to me.

When people went off to bed, it was all at once, as though someone had blown a secret whistle. The joint was back with me again; I stubbed it out on the nearest ashtray: Guinnless isn't good for you. Noah and the girl remained in the room. It was their room. They were sleeping in the bed, opposite mine.

‘Place is stuffed to the gills tonight,' Debbie explained.

‘You OK there?' said Noah.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘If you're sure—'

‘OK, then,' he said, cutting me off. ‘Good. Good to have you here.' He hunkered down and gave me a hug. His hair was long and unkempt, but it smelled sweet. Before I could figure out whether to hug him back he was halfway to the light switch.

I had never been hugged by a man before.

I lay back in the dark and listened to them undress.

I woke the next day with an even more painful headache to find the house was already virtually empty. After much stumbling around I found the kitchen. Noah was in there eating toast. ‘How're you doing?' he greeted me.

‘Where the fuck am I?'

Noah and his friends had manhandled my bloody, semi-conscious form onto a number twelve bus, bearing me like a trophy all the way to Holland Park.

‘Great,' I said. ‘Thanks.' Now all I had to do was work out where Holland Park was.

‘If you've a shilling for the meter I've got eggs for an omelette.'

I fished about in my pockets and came up with a coin.

He took it and pointed to the chair next to me.

‘Try that on.'

Lying on the chair was a ball of black fun-fur – a gorilla costume.

‘What's this for?'

‘Try it on for size. We're going gardening.'

‘We're what?'

‘Gardening.'

‘Where?'

‘A garden.'

‘What?'

‘Parsley? In your omelette. Cheese?'

‘OK,' I said.

I liked the Society. I liked its location, five minutes from the British Museum and its eclectic, down-at-heel satellites – a comic shop, a science fiction bookshop, several showrooms of Middle Eastern antiques, a dealer in defunct stringed instruments. To the east, Senate House resembled nothing so much as an outsize version of those Victorian obelisks you find in cemeteries. I liked the regularity of the architecture, the neat terraces, the sober bulk of the institutional buildings, the absence of bustle. Never did I imagine that I would one day be wandering these streets armed with a pair of bolt cutters, let alone a gorilla costume strapped across an old duffel bag stuffed with balloons.

The gardens of some of the smaller squares here were privately owned. Just over the road in King's Cross there were whole housing estates with nowhere for kids to play. Josh, our leader
in absentia
– he was serving a month in Brixton – had a lively idea of what redistribution ought really to be about. The idea – fleshed out and agreed upon well before the VSC march and Josh's arrest – involved bolt-cutters, balloons, a van full of sand and a great deal of sweat.

Noah drove the van; the rest of us had to cart our gear to Tavistock Square on the Underground. This was risky – people were starting to hear about Josh's ‘urban gorillas', and were cottoning on – but we arrived at the square with no one following, no whistles blown, untroubled, as yet, by what Josh liked to call, in his understated way, ‘uniformed support'.

They expected me to use the bolt-cutters on the gate.

‘We could just climb over,' I protested.

‘We could, stupid,' said Noah, ‘but what about the kids? You expect mums with pushchairs to scale the bloody fence?'

Josh's plan gave us twenty minutes to turn a private ornamental garden into a public play area before the pigs turned up. Frantically, we dug and dug, while another of our number, a dwarvish girl with pigtails and a cut-glass Rodean accent called Nova (a corruption of Veronica), tied balloons to the busted-in gate, the oh-so-private trees, and nearby lamposts. Noah plucked the Do Not signs out of the lawns and beds and ran off with them hidden in a carrier-bag.