Engleby (22 page)

Then I settled down to do the work. They wanted articles, so I had to give them articles.

How? Initially, I bought science and medical magazines and rewrote brief news stories from them in a more contentious way. If
Nature
reported developments in the chemistry of pollution and its consequences then it wasn’t hard to deduce which multinational companies were most affected. Then I’d ring their press office to see what they thought about the article. Some were sniffy about my magazine, but some did call back with what they called a ‘quote’. If the
British Medical Journal
said that money had run short for research into cervical cancer, it was easy to find out that the government body responsible for the grant allocation hadn’t got a single woman on it, then ring some duffer and ask why not. I became familiar with that forlorn figure the ‘press officer’. Soon the wire cage beneath my letter flap began to clog with press releases. Sometimes I merely rewrote them and passed them on to the magazine. With others, I could find a fault line or a nub – something that could be prised open. Then I rang the press office and kept on at them until they, or someone they had passed me on to, said something unwise. In the right mouth even ‘no comment’ looked like admitting they’d killed or maimed a hundred children with their procedures.

Then I started looking at the book-review sections of these journals and telephoned a couple of the publishers to see if their authors would like to be interviewed by a magazine they’d never heard of. They were so surprised to be asked that they sometimes said yes. I concluded that the market in scientific interviews was slack.

I bought a reconditioned typewriter from Globe Stationers on Praed Street and a
Teach Yourself to Type
manual, which involved covering all the keys with bits of paper till I could touch-type. I was able to check some facts in reference books in the Porchester library, which was in walking distance, but I had to spend a good deal on magazines and telephone calls. The cheques that stuttered in weeks later were at the union minimum rate (and this was one union that clearly hadn’t flexed its muscles), but my work as Glynn Powers’s lieutenant made up the shortfall. Plus, since I had been at it for a decade now, I had developed the knack of helping myself if I liked the look of something. I read in the paper some lawyer offering mitigation for a klepto shoplifter on his fiftieth charge: ‘My client, your honour, is unable to postpone the pleasure of acquisition.’ Mine was more of a need than a pleasure, but I knew what he meant. I joined the National Union of Journalists, freelance branch, and they told me I could offset my subscription against tax. I didn’t pay tax.

I kept the Morris 1100, and the Westminster parking wardens weren’t officious, though eventually I did invest in a resident’s permit. I bought a second-hand television from the Portobello Road, but there was hardly anything I wanted to watch on it, so in the evenings I tended to do what I’d always done: drink.

In London the distances are much greater, so I couldn’t any longer stagger from the Kestrel to the Bradford to the Waterfall, from Bene’t Street to Free School Lane. I could still drink, but now I was obliged to drink and drive. I started with some obvious Young’s pubs in Hampstead and Chiswick and Mortlake and Battersea, and the Spread Eagle in Parkway. All Young’s pubs are similar. You get a certain dependable effect from from four pints of Special: in the adenoids and the back of the cranium. Thunk. Then I winkled out dirtier places in Camden Town and Islington with wooden floors and men with odd tattoos. It was only a few months before I was in the Isle of Dogs – in pubs sleepy, small and underlit, so you felt as though you’d crashed into someone’s living room – and East Ham with its menacing camaraderie. The only area I avoided was the West End because all the pubs there were tourist-tormented and fake; also, even for an efficient smoker like me, it was like being in the beagle section of a Philip Morris research lab. Other districts? I wasn’t an inverted snob. Chelsea had some pleasant bars in small streets going down to the river: men in polo neck sweaters with pet dogs and free bits of cheese and salt biscuits set out on the bar. Mayfair pubs are better than you’d think, and in Belgravia there are one or two – homely yet louche with tall, silent women – that I’d happily go back to.

Sometimes I went to the Hammersmith Odeon. I saw Ted Nugent there (Sunday 12 September, 1976; sorry, but I kept the ticket stub) and my ears rang for a week. I stood next to a tall girl in pink dungarees with long black curly hair; she was so beautiful I had to move away. Joan Armatrading. Thin Lizzy. Graham Parker & the Rumour. Or Dingwall’s, Camden Lock, though there was something smug about that place. And the Stranglers. They seemed to be on everywhere, the Rock Garden, the Odeon. I could never get Stellings to go to these places (‘Punk, Groucho? Got the wrong labial at the front of the word if you ask me’), so I went alone.

Overnight, everyone’s stopped wearing flares after all these years and is suddenly back into drainpipes: jeans, needlecords, doesn’t matter so long as they’re straight. If you wear flares it’s like saying you’re into Barclay James Harvest or the Moody Blues.

There was a girl I noticed at a Graham Parker gig. She, too, stood alone, glass in hand. She didn’t jump up and down, she didn’t even tap her foot – she swung it, back and forth, so it grazed the ground, in time with the music, just. She had dark hair, cut to the shoulder, was about twenty-seven, with large brown eyes and an expression of resigned amusement. I tried to guess what she was on: detached but not spaced out, controlled but relaxed. Her clothes looked different from the other women’s. She wore black woollen trousers and a quite long black jacket over a low cut white tee shirt with rows of silver necklaces.

I got another drink and moved into a position where I could watch her more carefully.

The gig ended with Parker singing ‘Hold Back the Night’. This thin, rodent-like man with sleeveless tee shirt and bare arms – his snarling manner still seemed defiant even when admitting to emotion: ‘Hold back the night,/Turn on the light/Don’t wanna dream about you, baby,’ he sang, but almost spat. According to
New Musical Express
, he used to be a petrol-pump attendant in Camberley, which is not that far from Reading. If only I’d had the 1100 in those days, GP could have filled her up.

The woman I was watching made her way slowly out of the building and walked towards Fulham Palace Road. I had nothing else to do, so I followed, at a distance. What talent the Secret Intelligence Service had passed up, I thought, as I hung back momentarily in the doorway of the Kentucky Fried Chicken shop.

She turned down Lillie Road, then eventually went round the back of Nye Bevan House on the Clement Attlee Estate. I wonder what it’s like to be remembered as a block with broken windows and urine lifts. Hugh Dalton the Man, I read once, was a pompous arse who went to Eton and Cambridge then got up the noses of his fellow leftist MPs; but Hugh Dalton the House . . . No games fields run down to the Thames at Windsor; no sound of college bells sends brainy boys hurrying to class. (Do you think clever boys like being all together, or does it sap their belief in their individual ability? Tell you one thing: I bet they have better jokes. I bet they aren’t called ‘spaso’ this and ‘Toilet’ that.)

But I wouldn’t want to be remembered as a council block. ‘The lift in Engleby’s out of order again’; ‘The council have refused to grant more money to clean up the graffiti on Engleby House.’ No, no. ‘The Engleby Choral Scholarship’, that’s more my line; ‘The Engleby Foundation Award for International Peace’ – though ‘peace’ marches and ‘peace’ committees have for so long been fronts for old Communists that perhaps I’ll give that word a miss for another couple of decades.

In Tournay Road, my woman went into a house and banged the door behind her. I noted the number and lit a cigarette as I watched from across the street. Sure enough, a light went on in a first-floor window and I saw her come and spread her arms wide to pull the curtains. It was a fine gesture, maternal and inclusive.

Reluctantly, I began to make my way back to where I’d left the car. On Fulham Palace Road there was a small fags-and-paper shop still open. I went in to buy some B&H, and, while I was there, looked through the top-shelf magazines. Some specialise in short, dark-haired girls, some tend to have taller, leggier ones with fairer hair. (They don’t advertise this, but you get to know them.) There’s been a development in all of them lately, and it’s not a subtle one. There used to be veiling, draping, covering – even baldness. Not any more. Now there is disclosure. The girls look a little surprised and some of it – pores, pimples, follicles – has been fogged, you can see, airbrushed and tidied up. But what on earth do they think they’re doing, those girls, smiling as they display their clefts and folds? I suppose they’re all toms and are paid a hundred pounds for it. Perhaps it’s safer than getting in a car behind King’s Cross. I feel for them, when I see their defiant smiles clinging to the centre of the lens, though it’s not their eyes you stare back at. One or two look nice and I’d like to meet them; I’d like to push their knees together, throw them a rug, sit down and talk to them.

You can’t browse for too long; you can’t stand there, thumbing through a wide selection; there’s an art in not embarrassing Mrs Patel at the till. Confidence is the key. There’s no point in pretending that at midnight the magazines are incidental – an afterthought – and that your main reason for venturing into the shop was to buy this morning’s
Daily Express
.

I placed two magazines frankly on the counter, then asked for cigarettes. I paid with a ten-pound note and Mrs P dropped the change from a safe height into my open palm.

She looked pale and sad, with her red shawl wrapped round her head and shoulders. She must have hated this country and her job, selling pictures of English girls with their legs apart. There were little patches of brown pigment round her tired brown eyes.

She also looked cold. In her mind, I suppose, she was hearing the warm winds of Uttar Pradesh.

Why are there so many Indians and Pakistanis in London? It doesn’t seem to suit them at all. On Star Street, round the corner from my room, there’s a grocer whose family got kicked out of Uganda by that tubby cannibal Amin. He’s educated, this grocer man, went to university, but now has to sell raw ginger, woolly apples, chillies, UHT milk and canned lager for night workers who pay over the odds. He had no choice, I suppose, but to come here; and he’s going to push his children hard in school. He goes to bed at one a.m. and gets up again at four to go to the markets; there aren’t enough hours in the day for him. His family will be shopkeepers for one generation only, that’s his vow. He also knows a hell of a lot about football and remembers every detail of England going out to Poland in the World Cup qualifier (‘then Kevin Hector came on as sub’) though he can’t have been here long at the time. I’m pretty friendly with him; we’ve had a few chats.

I understand why these people came to England – because they had to. Also, it was good for us to have new blood, different customs, new music, revitalising cultures. (I’m trying to make it all not boil down to curry restaurants, though that’s clearly been a potent aspect of it.)

A certain number would have been fine. But all those hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis who came just because they could – because their mother’s cousin knew someone in Camberwell who had a spare room where they could sleep six more. Did you hear that, Saeed? There’s a vacancy. So, forget the Khyber Pass; goodbye, Peshawar, farewell Karachi – come to Peckham.

I feel guilty about how disappointed they must be. There’s nowhere near enough one-room shops in Tulse Hill for all these people to own. There’s only so many raw chillies, Quavers and cans of Strongbow cider that Lewisham can stomach. Even for top-shelf mags and John Player Specials the appetite sometimes sleeps. You need a break. I think in Leicester and Nottingham these people work in factories; they’ve become the manufacturing labour force. But not in London, because there are hardly any factories here. And they don’t do much on the buses or the Tubes or in the hospitals, either, because those jobs are mostly taken by West Indians.

And how miserable are
those
guys? What are they doing here? They look completely out of place. They’d been coming in small numbers since the War, but they say it was a Midlander with a thin moustache, a man called Powell, who urged them to come en masse and clean the hospitals when he was Minister for Health. But it was so cold when they got off the ships. It wasn’t a change of town, it was a different world. Imagine arriving in Halesowen or Sutton Coldfield, shivering, looking like that – like someone whose forbears for millions of years had lived in the tropics – then having to cover your sensitive shivering skin with woollen hats and gloves. And sallow natives staring at you with their pink eyes. The only jobs on offer are shovelling human waste in dirty hospitals or driving trains in underground tunnels so tight they’re like barrels round a bullet. So, from islands with big skies and the effects of sun you’re imprisoned under windless locked grey cloud.

They don’t like it, those people, they don’t like it here and their children don’t like it either. The kids don’t play the game, though. They don’t work or drive buses; they take drugs, play music and think of bright islands they’ve been ripped up from, but never seen. They’re angry. Who can blame them?

The ferret on my magazine, Wyn Douglas, had a party in the Windsor Castle on Mayall Road in Brixton. He lives there. It’s black council tenants and squatting white marginals: Trots, rad fems, primal screamers. The council’s trying to pull the area down but they keep running out of money, so every other building’s a dope centre or a speakeasy or an anarchist bookshop. They don’t work, the West Indian boys, they hang out on the street with reggae music thumping all day. It hasn’t happened yet, but they look like they’re up for it, the black boys. The way they look at the police. The way the police look back. The cops seem oddly rural and old-fashioned – rather pale and bovine; they look well fed and scared. But the Rastas look fly. Even stoned, they look sharp.