by Max Schaefer
As we rejoined the march I tried to tell Philip about the pelican, but he was too worked up over his own experience: heading up Tottenham Court Road, which was closed to traffic, he had nearly been hit when a silver saloon shot from a side street. ‘Fucking driver didn’t even notice me. The whole country’s on the streets against an illegal war, and he can’t be arsed to follow a diversion. Solipsistic cunt.’ We swapped descriptions of people on our marches, and the signs we’d seen. Bombing for Peace Is Like Fucking for Virginity. How Did Our Oil Get under Their Soil? Cream Your Khakis, Not Iraqis.
‘Did I tell you about the lesbian contingent?’ I asked. ‘With the sign saying The Only Bush I Trust Is My Own?’
Philip laughed. ‘We had Cunt Coven: If You Want to Spill Blood Borrow Ours. Who actually told me war was menstrual envy. And that the banner was written in their flow.’
A teenager in white tunic and tagiyah came up the flank of | the procession. He handed out stickers that turned but to show the Israeli flag, with a swastika in place of the Star of David. I dropped mine quietly, but Philip called the boy back. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m not wearing this. I’m against the occupation and I support the Intifada, but I don’t think it helps to use Nazi imagery against Israel. It alienates a lot of people, including sympathetic Jews.’
He held out the sticker. The boy looked at him for a moment. He said: ‘Yeah, OK then, bruv, thanks,’ took it and headed back down the line. I told Philip: ‘I wish I could do that.’
‘Talk to people? Well, try it sometime.’
‘Perhaps. So anyway, there was this pelican…’
Philip was unimpressed, but Mike seemed taken with the story. ‘Imagine that, Phil,’ he grinned, ‘a pelican eating a pigeon. A fucking pigeon. Eh?’
Adam told me, ‘I don’t understand how it got in there in the first place.’ He had an oddly deliberate way of walking, as if aware of something you were about to discover: he watched his feet as he trod, rocked forward a little on the step. Whether this secret knowledge provoked anxiety or pleasure was unclear. When I looked up his face was candidly quizzical, as if he really expected an explanation of the process by which the pigeon had got in. His eyes looked like they were watering: a recurrent illusion it would take me a while to get used to. Later he told me he worked for a brand consultancy, and I couldn’t think of anything to ask about that. He said, ‘What do you do?’
At the time I was working as a freelance television researcher, one of a number of jobs I’d taken since college in the hope they might lead to something creative, which so far none had. I told him: ‘I’m developing a TV series,’ which was not untrue, but soon confessed that I was hatefully bored, and spent my days fast-forwarding through old programmes, seeking clips from which to assemble new ones on the cheap; that while the ostensible subject was a history of food on television, the real criteria for inclusion were bloopers and wobbly sets, and the holy grail an early appearance by some subsequent celebrity. At the next desk, a bunch of kids worked on a quiz show; every now and again one would call out: ‘Which of these famous daughters has not had a boob job?’ The people they named were the same ones I was meant to find waving egg-whisks on Why Don’t You?, but had rarely heard of — so while the quiz show would be commissioned, and the kids move on to better jobs, Channel 5 would surely pass on Here’s One I Made Earlier. If they did it might be hard to keep my job; I found it difficult to care.
I shared a hesitant, oblique conversation with Mike, my anxious memory of whose book made anything I contemplated saying look misjudged. As we neared the Piccadilly underpass, which seemed, in the light of sunset, to throb like the mouth of the whale, he abruptly turned and said, ‘Fucking hell, eh? All this,’ and I nodded and mumbled something like ‘Jesus, yes.’ At the park entrance a flashing display made the extraordinary claim of two million demonstrators, and Philip passed me a flyer:
‘fuck your war’:
London artists show their disgust at the implied consensus of the inevitability of war. We determine our individual and collective responsibilities in this process.
This exhibition, a fringe event of the 15 February anti-war march, continues for the following week as a lingering protest that won’t stay mute.
We wish to make clear the ongoing and determined application of our voices in the struggle against war.
What are you doing?
‘That’s all right then,’ he said.
The sun was below the horizon now and the speeches were winding down. We sat on the grass, among crowds dispersing even as others still arrived, and drank the beers we had picked up en route. Sarah and Philip sustained most of the conversation while the rest of us listened, Mike staring out at the darkness bleeding towards us, and me stealing glances at Adam. The rest of us, I thought, looking at him, were here a little awkwardly, like tourists in our own city, but Adam was just sitting on the grass, and when he put his hands flat at his sides and leaned back on them facing the sky, it was the sky he saw and not himself doing it. His boots were a long straight descent from his bent knees to his feet, a dark ice scarp alive with sudden glintings.
After two beers he stood: ‘I need a slash.’
‘Me too,’ I said, and got up after him.
It was hard to see, this far from the illuminated paths, but he pointed, ‘Over here,’ and headed further into the dim field. Placards, abandoned by tens of thousands of departed protestors, lay scattered on the ground, and were layered in places into a vast collage over which we walked: interspersed with grass and mud, they made our footsteps sound unpredictably. In this low visibility there was a faint gloam to the white that formed the background of some signs and the text of others, and you could make out slogans in angled fragments, enough, it said in thick marker on one hand-made sign, and something about Quakers on another, and over and over again, against the murky image of a soldier, the huge capitals distributed in thousands by the Mirror: no war, no war, no war. At the clearing’s edge began the black scaffolding of trees, between which Adam walked confidently until we were invisible and alone. He stopped and unzipped his fly, and I saw his released flesh in his hands, pale in the dark like a strange fish. ‘Caught you looking,’ he said quietly, and peed against the bark. I fumbled to follow before I was too hard to manage. When we were done we stood in place for a moment, and then there was the crunch of thin roots as we moved closer, and his sudden warmth where we touched and briefly kissed.
‘Philip’s coming to mine for dinner after,’ I told him as we walked back. ‘You should join us.’ I wondered if I should ask Mike too, but when we got back he was about to leave. It was almost six-thirty, and I realized I needed Parmesan, so we walked with him to Knightsbridge tube and made a surreal end to the day of protest in the food hall of Harvey Nichols. (We were not unique in this.) In my flat we watched coverage of the protests while I cooked. Another two million in Madrid; three, perhaps four million in Rome; still more in Damascus and Osaka, Christchurch and Bloemfontein, Kingston, Sao Paolo, Alta, Malta. ‘You have a disturbing amount of Crowley here,’ announced Adam, who was inspecting my books.
‘Ah, you found my black shelf.’
‘James,’ Philip said, ‘is in many ways still a teenager. It’s part of his charm.’
‘Cooper. Sade. You’re an interesting boy.’
‘He’s only whoring himself in TV, you see. One day he’ll be an artist.’
Adam came to the counter and, without asking, helped me scrape sausage meat from its skin. ‘Is that true?’ he said.
I flushed slightly. ‘Obviously what I really want to do is write screenplays. You know, like every fucking other person.’
‘So why not just do one?’
‘Mainly because I’ve got nothing to write about.’
I burned the sauce somewhat, but by then we were too drunk to care. Adam sat across from me, stroking my calf with the toe of his boot. In a lull, as we ate, he asked: ‘When are you going to take that off?’
‘Take what off?’
Philip nearly squeaked. ‘No! Me too!’
‘Take what off?’ I repeated.
‘What’s left of your hair.’
Instinctively I felt it, and had the odd sense of being soothed by my own hand. Bin Laden, with his rifle, mumbled at us before some neutral backdrop.
‘It’s the beard,’ said Philip. ‘It’s very manly.’
Sarah said: ‘I like his eyes.’
‘What do you mean,’ I said, ‘what’s left of it?’
Philip: ‘I think he’d be quite a good fuck.’
‘Oh, I’d give it a go.’
‘What, Osama-fucking?’
Sarah giggled. ‘Osama-fucking.’
‘Stop kidding yourself,’ Adam told me. ‘Shave off the lot and put it out of its misery. What do you call it, that style you have?’
‘Um … I usually say can I have it short and a bit messy on top.’
He smiled and said gently: ‘There is no “on top”.’
‘James moves slowly,’ said Philip. ‘Don’t you, sweetheart?’ ‘I think it would suit you.’
‘Maybe.’ I stood a little unsteadily and gathered plates. ‘I was going to make pudding,’ I said, ‘but I’m not sure I can be arsed.’
‘I want pudding,’Philip announced.
Adam said: ‘Do you need a hand?’
I asked him to grease the ramekins for Nigella’s molten chocolate cakes.
‘What are these?’ said Philip. ‘They look like little tents.’
‘Yeah.’ Sarah prodded hers with a fork. ‘Tents in Tora Bora.’
‘Osama tents!’ exclaimed Philip, and they both collapsed. The phrase was repeated perhaps thirty times in the next ten minutes. At around midnight he said he should be off. ‘You’d better go as well,’ Sarah told Adam. ‘It’s a studio and I’m not sleeping in the bath.’
That week he sent me an email at work:
Hi James
Got your address off Philip. I just wanted to say thanks again for dinner the other night, not to mention the rest! It was a pretty great day I thought, even without the ending. Philip says thank you too, I think he’s a bit embarrassed by the whole tent fiasco.
Anyway I’ve been doing some Googling and I thought you might like to know there have been pelicans in St James’s Park since the early 1660s, when the first ones were presented to Charles II by the Russian ambassador. It’s traditional for ambassadors to give pelicans for the park, but not too many at a time, because if there’s more than 4 they tend to get aggressive with the other wildlife. As you noticed!
Dunno know why the poor bastard was so hungry though, the pelicans are fed every day at 3 p.m. — according to Hansard, in 1995 they were getting 4 lb of whiting a day at a cost of £78.50 a week between them, not to mention vitamin tablets. Which may sound expensive, but according to myth if there are ever no pelicans left in the park things really will go to shit in this country, so I suppose it’s worth it.
See, I told you research was a piss-easy job! Only joking.
Let me know if you fancy a movie or a drink sometime. When are you going to succumb to the inevitable and get a zero crop?
Adam x
We went to 8 Mile a few days later, but I didn’t succumb to the inevitable for nearly a year. It was Philip who held the clippers, and it was then that he told me about Nicky.
The Regent’s Canal
It is Friday, 10 October 1975, or really Saturday 11, something like three in the morning, and Tony is nineteen, awake with his eyes closed, listening to the sounds from the bed on his right.
He hears rustling, and murmurs in two voices, magnified but distorted by the echoey room, utterly indistinct. He is on his left side and the sounds are behind him. From Jones’s bed, then. Jones and who?
Feigning sleep, he rolls towards them and the noises stop. If he opens his eyes they will see and that will be the end of it. He takes long, slumberous breaths until one of them whispers again and the debate resumes with a new urgency. Tony’s imagination offers speculative interpretations, hazy and metaphorical; it is still fermented by recent sleep, from which he woke to these noises with an erection, conscious of guilt and fast-obscuring dreams of heavy shapes.
It was Jones who in Tony’s first week here sympathetically informed him that he had thrown himself about while sleeping, sat straight up in bed and said loudly: ‘Hello? Hello?’
They are making noises like a search for something: repeating couplets of inquiry and disappointment, probing and retreat. Tony once fell asleep in front of the television and woke to an old film in a foreign language. He dozed half listening, with the sense that he understood. Now the voices sound like they are murmured too close to a microphone.
The other voice sounds younger. Harris is the one who looks fifteen, with long hair and Jagger lips. Jones and Harris?
Tony’s erection persists from sleep like a token given in a dream and found on waking. It strains against the institutional sheets, impatient, heavy with meaning. Tony writhes in the sheets as if he could shake things into a different alignment, as if he and Jones and Harris could enact, beneath thick bars of extruded moonlight, the shared dream of the sleeping others.
What kind of cunt sits up in bed and shouts in his sleep? Not that anyone said anything, besides Jones. Bates sometimes snores, and will wake in a ring of boots tossed to silence him, but Tony is not Bates, and is not thrown at. The blacks especially keep their distance, but he wonders what would happen if enough of them caught him alone.
The blacks for some reason call each other by their first names, which are the names of English grandads: Arthur, Henry, George. Like when he and Dennis climbed at night into the cemetery. You take turns to find a tombstone in the dark, strike a match on it and call the name. If it’s snap you pay a forfeit. There were three Freds in a row, double penalty, and Tony had to sit bollock naked on some family vault while Dennis walked away smoking with his bundled clothes. ‘Don’t fucking drop anything,’ Tony yelled after him.
Dennis and his fucking walking away.
To be honest he feels a bit peculiar since he’s been here. It’s not hard on a practical level. You mainly do what the screws say, without actually looking like a cunt. You’re up early but you get used to that and it’s no problem going to sleep. But this sitting up and shouting is a concern. It was nearly three months ago and as far as he knows hasn’t happened again but he still has nights like this, pointless fucking thoughts. And he keeps thinking of the canal.
The noise is still going on. He knows it’s not what he thinks but if he opens his eyes he will be sure and he doesn’t want that. And open, his eyes might betray what he thinks.
In his dream organic shadows heaved like machinery.
He’s not expecting a visitor but they say he has one anyway. ‘One of your skinhead thugs,’ says Hodges. ‘Tell him to behave himself,’ and Tony’s reaction must be visible because he misinterprets it: ‘Don’t worry, Crawford, if he wants to beat the shit out of you he’ll have to wait.’
Along the corridors on the way to the room Tony tries to think of things to say. He gets as far as ‘Hello’.
The grey failing light of outside leaks into the big hall like steam from a laundry, bleached in patches under hanging lamps. A grid of tables has been arranged, little islands on which the jetsam of lads’ families has washed up, or maybe landed like seabirds with their urgent squawks: the cooing of maternal concern swells and falls in a relentless pulse, above the desultory croaks of fathers indistinguishable from their sons’. The rattling bulk of a tea trolley, helmed, in an emasculating apron, by one of the more docile blacks, ploughs the wide channels between.
Tony surveys from the periphery. Of course Dennis is not there. Tony knows he was never going to be but still he looks again. ‘One of your skinhead thugs’: that’s all over mate. Don�
�t you read the papers? It stopped years ago. They all stopped. Except a few of us.
And then he catches the deliberate, waiting smirk. And it’s not Dennis, or anyone else he had imagined: it’s Steve. Fat Steve, psycho Steve, from the Mile End gang, Steve the brick tosser, who Tony can’t remember when he last saw, much less talked to. But there he is, same as ever, looking at Tony pin-eyed from behind a table that juts out from him like a plastic bib. More of a suedehead now, predictably, but that’s a subtle distinction for the likes of Hodges.
When Tony reaches him Steve says, ‘I was going to bake you a cake but I run out of sugar.’
‘You haven’t changed.’
‘Perfect to begin with, wasn’t I? You going to sit down or what?’
Tony does. They look at each other. Various nearby members of other inmates’ families look at them also.
Steve says: ‘Anyone topped themselves in your house yet?’
‘Be too interesting.’
‘That tie of yours has a twelve-pound break strain.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind.’
