‘Did you do something?’ he heard himself saying. ‘Did you do something to the baby?’ He wasn’t even aware he’d made that connection until he said it.
She laughed again, that hard little laugh he didn’t recognize. ‘Not unless it’s possible to think something away. Maybe it worked out I was going to be a shit mother and decided to get the fuck out of here.’
‘Are you totally sure? It could just be a bit of blood.’
Cold air hit his face and he understood that she’d walked him out of the pub, on to the street.
‘I just know. I know in my body. It was like a switch this morning – something had just flicked off – but I couldn’t work out why.’
They were leaning against the wall of the pub. He was crumbling limestone under his fingers. She reached inside his jacket again, this time for his cigarettes, lit two and put one in his mouth. It seemed like something a girl in a film would do.
‘Do you think you can drive, Danny? Are you going to be OK?’
Oh, who knew. Who knew. He nodded, a very small movement, but his head felt so heavy it might fall off.
‘Let’s just get back to the car, OK?’
She took his arm to walk him down the street.
‘I mean, I can’t drive us. I couldn’t anyway without a licence but I think they’d pick up pretty quickly about my brain right now, ching ching? Eh?’
She was trying to make a joke, and he let her have a tiny flick of a smile.
They sat inside the car, and Clio leaned over him to turn the key in the engine, put the radiator on. It was getting dark already. He didn’t want to sit in this box with this woman for the next two hours. He didn’t want to go back to their flat and begin the process of splitting up their things, watch her pack away her clothes and books. He didn’t know what else they could do.
‘What was the other story?’
‘Sorry?’
‘You said there were two stories. That heap of shit you were spinning yourself into a frenzy about, that was the first story. What was the other one?’
‘I don’t know. I was hoping you’d tell me. I think there probably isn’t one.’
She stroked his face. He pushed her hand away, forcibly.
SAMMI
Brixton, 2009
It will start with a friend request flashing up there on the corner of the screen. Sam will click on it, and it will take her a second to connect the name and the tiny thumbnail picture, red hair, red lipstick. There will be a – something – there. A faint unease, somewhere at her temple. She’ll think it through. Nothing had ever been proved, she’ll think. It had all been speculation, insinuation. The way a group can turn on nothing, a person can become a scapegoat.
Accept. Why not.
Half a minute later, there will be a peaceful chime; a red message icon. No hello. No acknowledgement of the years passed, of blood, bad or otherwise.
SAMMI MY FIREND TOOK THIS ON HIS PHONE IS THIS MARK CARR????!!!!
A picture of a middle-aged man, grainy, profiled, taken in bad light. A moustache, a tuxedo, a champagne flute.
Brixton, 1996
Sammi crouched low to the pavement and put her shoulder under the shutter. It stuck at the point it always stuck at, it needed a shout to force it, a ‘ya!’ that rang out along the empty street. She stepped in, groped in the dark for one of the torches they kept on a side-ledge, then hauled the shutter back down again behind her.
‘Does it ever strike you as funny,’ Mark had said, when they’d been going through the ritual at 4 a.m. after a night out in Camden and a long, sexy walk home, ‘that a group of squatters who believe property is theft should take security measures to keep the rest of the world out of their living space?’
‘Well, it’s not like it’s actually locked, is it?’ she’d said.
‘So why keep it closed at all? Why don’t you – don’t we – just unroll the shutters and invite the world to come in and join us? Wouldn’t that be the ultimate extension of our philosophy?’
Sammi had faced him, there in the cramped porch space, his face only half visible in the torchlight. He’d been looking straight at her, his mouth twitching and amused, like a teacher pitching on-the-spot maths problems.
‘Mate, you wanna leave that shutter open? You want to wake up spooning some of the junkies we got round here? Pretty white boy like you? Go for it. I’m sure they’d love you.’
As usual, she saw his point. But he was doing it again, floating his brain above them, pointing out wrinkles and discrepancies, handing down solutions from on high like he wasn’t even affected. The shutter was the perfect compromise – to get it open you had to know the knack and be strong enough to shove at precisely the right bit (Spider often had trouble during his bad weeks; that’s how they knew), and to find your way up the stairs into the living space you’d need to know where the torches were. You’d have to be proper determined. It was a system they’d put together themselves, without ever discussing it.
The hallway stank of must and damp. Fran had tried burning oils in the space for a while, but Gaz had been caught out using the burner as an ashtray, and it had caused another fight. Nevertheless, Sammi sat herself down on the bottom step and just breathed it in, all its foul notes, for a while. Imagine bringing her mother here. The rusted shutter would confirm all her fears; the smell would finish her off.
It had been a rough one, tonight’s Tuesday dinner at her mum’s. At first, when she left home, her mum had tried to insist she come back every Sunday, for church and lunch. Sammi’s refusal had been gentle but absolute.
‘I’m not gonna pretend, Mum. Not even for you. Besides, I need my Sundays, don’t I? Got stuff on. Stuff to do.’
Tuesday dinner had become the compromise, and Sammi stuck to it. Most of the others didn’t get it, but then none of them were squatting twenty minutes away from the street they’d grown up on. Tonight, Avril had pulled out all the stops. The aunties had all been there, Sammi’s brother and his fiancée, and she’d even had the bloody vicar stop by for a guest appearance. Sammi was usually quiet at Tuesday dinner. She usually tried to keep her head down, make pleasant chat, not give her mum too much to wail over. Given an audience, though, Avril just couldn’t help herself, had pick-pick-picked away at Sammi’s table manners and clothes, her face squirming in displeasure every time her daughter had spoken. Sammi had left earlier than usual, when Avril was slamming dishes in the kitchen, after the vicar had sensed the tension and made his own excuses.
The squat was quiet when she got up there, no lights on (which didn’t always mean nobody was in). Sammi squinted and could make out Xanthe, curled up on her mattress in the sleep space with Dido’s tiny tousled head nestled into her neck – her eyes glinted in the wan street light coming through the window, and she smiled and put a finger to her lips. Sammi nodded, blew her a kiss and stepped back out. There was nobody in the living area, so she plugged in a side lamp and climbed into the big armchair.
Mark had been trying to organize them on manoeuvres recently, trying to get everyone into the animal rights group he and Fran were pretty much running these days. Sammi had been with them on a couple of recces of a lab Fran swore she’d heard on good authority were testing on animals. She squashed into the clanking old van with Mark’s gloved hand in hers, breathing in Spider’s dope and sweat stench. They’d parked some way away, snuck up to the facility from a distance and checked it out, the three of them. Mark had a surprisingly swish camera, had managed to get some pretty clear shots of the things he spotted – a weak point in a fence, a broken security camera – when he wasn’t acting like bloody James Bond or something, practically commando rolling on the concrete. Sammi had been reminded of that little boy on her mum’s street when she was growing up, playing spies by himself in the back alley, flattening himself to the wall with his fingers pointing a pistol, muttering.
Sammi went in the van runs to support Mark, but not because she cared particularly. There had never been animals around when she was grow
ing up – her mother hated the hair, the shedding, and she’d learned to shy away from cats or over-friendly dogs in the street, to keep her clothes good – maybe that was it. Maybe coming from the inner city she just didn’t get it. She’d noticed Mark had recently convinced their pals from the animal liberation group to meet on Tuesday nights, when he knew she couldn’t be there, and she assumed he must be disappointed in her for it.
Xanthe cited Dido as an excuse, as she always did, but most of her other energies were going into feminism these days. If Xanthe wasn’t in, she would be at the library, ordering books, carting them home to read on the roof space or by torchlight beside the sleeping child. ‘Xanthe’s politics only really happen in her head,’ Clio had said, and Sammi could see she was right. Clio herself, on the days she was staying, was not only critical but the most hostile towards the animal project.
‘Look, Fran pal. I get it. I do. I can see this means a huge deal to you, and I understand where you’re coming from. It’s an injustice, it totally is, and more power to you for trying to do something about it. But me, what makes me get up and fight, is oppression. Oppression of people,’ she added quickly, over Fran’s open mouth. ‘I’ve just no got the energy to spare on bunny rabbits till we’ve made sure that all of our own are all right. There’s people kept in conditions similar to those animals at the behest of this fucking government, I’ll tell you that. It’s the global capitalist machine, babe. Once we get that ironed out, things are going to improve for everyone. Including your hamsters. Meantime there’s enough people getting screwed by this system I’d like to help first. But you keep doing your thing. I can see it means a lot.’
Nobody could deny that life was just a bit more exciting during the weeks when Clio shared their crash space – she made the air electric, was always active, always doing things and full of ideas. But she and poor awkward Fran, a rebellious vicar’s daughter from the Home Counties, were the far poles of the group. Clio’s glamour and sparkle rubbed up against Fran’s seriousness and purpose. Fran couldn’t take a joke, and Clio took too many (although never at her own expense). And Clio also made them feel a bit more connected to the world immediately outside the squat. Apart from Sammi, and Spider, who had moved to Brixton aged eleven with his mum, most of the others just put their heads down and speed-walked to the Centre, the Roxy or the tube station any time they had to venture out. Clio had only been with them a few months when she and Sammi went walking down Electric Avenue, and Clio had smiled at or stopped to chat or nod at six people in as many minutes.
‘Fucking hell, mate,’ Sammi had said. ‘You already know more people than me, dontcha? And I grew up here.’
‘Ach, I just talk to people. I grew up in tiny wee places, villages, where you dinnae get the chance of ignoring folk on the street; they’ll whisper behind your back that you think you’re no better than you should be.’
‘You what?’
‘That you think your shit doesnae stink.’
‘Gotcha.’
‘It was one of the things that really freaked me out when I first came down to London. All those faces just staring ahead. I like it round here, though. Folk talk, don’t they?’
‘Ha! They talk too bloody much, mate. Moira over there with the veg stall, she don’t never shut up. She used to live next door to my nan and she’s always telling me I need to call my mama. Maybe I could do with some fuckers just staring ahead sometime.’
‘Aw, I love Moira. Moira! Hiya, Moira! Anyway, do you need to call your mama?’
‘I just got dinner at hers last night, dint I?’
‘Well, you’re definitely doing better than me on that score. Carry on, pal. As you were.’
She tucked an arm into Sammi’s, pulled her in until their heads were touching, and they walked on together, skip-hopping down the street, not caring who saw.
The boys, Sammi and Xanthe had often whispered to each other, were all secretly in love with Clio (Gaz, Sammi would always point out, was just as much into Xanthe). The unspoken vagaries of Sammi and Mark’s arrangement meant that, while she was pretty sure he’d had it off with most of their female room-mates at some point, none of the boys would even approach Sammi. She remembered a David Attenborough documentary she’d watched duringTuesday dinner with her brother recently, something about a stag fighting off all the other stags to declare himself the alpha male of the pack, with none of them daring to go near his doe, and thought, yeah, that seems about right. Avril had bustled back in and been scandalized at the animals rutting on her television screen, smacked Joseph, who was holding the remote, around the head and called him dirty.
‘You got us by immaculate conception then, did you?’ Sammi had asked, in a rare bit of cheek, and her mother had wheeled on her.
‘And you! Samantha Geraldine Smith! Living in that hovel with them unwashed freaks! Who’s this blond man you been seen with then, my girl? Oh yes, everybody talking to me about you. Everybody talking! Bringing so much shame on your poor mother! Flaunting it in front of the whole neighbourhood like you was the whore of Babylon!’
Sammi had got up and left at that, but she’d come back to Tuesday dinner the week after.
Xanthe wandered into the room and flopped into the other chair, kicking a pair of heeled boots Sammi recognized as Clio’s out of the way as she did.
‘Oof. She’s unsettled right now.’
‘Who is, mate?’
‘Dido. Dido is. Who else would I be – never mind. She wouldn’t sleep. And you know what? I’m not surprised. It’s never the same for her two days in a row, is it? She doesn’t know who’s going to be there when she wakes up in the morning. Jesus, Sammi. What am I doing here? What sort of shitty mother am I that I’m bringing up a tiny kid in a house full of exposed wires and crusty fucking speedfreaks?’
Sammi, having privately thought this many times, decided to stay quiet.
‘I mean, I came here to make a new way of life and I spend my time doing the dishes for a revolving door of ungrateful pigs – mostly male, the irony’s not lost on me – whose understanding of “communal living” is pretty fucking capitalist if you ask me – oh, never mind. Never mind.’
Sammi was too tired for this again. She nodded at the boots.
‘Clio back then? Where is she?’
Xanthe’s face clouded a bit.
‘On the roof, I think. I’d just leave her, babe.’
‘She OK? I haven’t seen her in ages. I could just pop up.’
Xanthe reached under the sofa and pulled out the ancient box of Scrabble someone had found in a chazzer.
‘Stay here. Have a game with me instead. She’ll be down soon.’
Clio came down half an hour later, her cheeks and nose a little red, bringing in the smell of cold air and something else. Mark entered the room five minutes after that, same smell, same expression. Sammi shot Xanthe a look, as if to say, mate, don’t baby me, I’m fine with this, unfurled herself from the chair and went to kiss him on the face. Clio was quiet in the corner, went to bed shortly. Sammi was fine with it, of course she was fine with it, but she began to avoid going up onto the roof.
Although they tried not to rub her face in it, Sammi soon came to realize that Clio and Mark seemed to fuck more than any of the others. And it was something that always confused Sammi, because in all of their other interactions they were ice-cold to the point of dislike; their mutual need to control every situation tending to interfere with even the simplest conversation. Sammi would watch them dance around angrily, and think again of the noise those stags made as their antlers smashed into each other. These were the times when she really felt so much younger than everyone else there, as though they were all talking in a code she hadn’t been taught yet.
The only place where Clio, Fran and Mark found common ground was in the protest against the new McDonald’s on the high street.
The café was busy. Sammi had a song stuck in her head (no time to work out what it was) and she moved and flexed to her own rhythm as she bumped
down bowls of dahl and snatched up used cups. Step step step, ba dum ba dum spin. What’s that, darlin? Yeah, no probs, coming right up. Oi, Jimmy, two falafel plates for number three please. Ba dum ba dum woo!
She might moan about it, and it’s true that the job didn’t pay well (Antoine claimed to have ambivalent feelings about being an employer and to dislike the concept of ‘wages’) and unless it was busy and she could work up a sweat the whole building was bitter cold, even on sunny days, but discovering the Centre had brought so much joy to her life. She’d heard talks that had redefined her politics, danced till the next morning at sound-system parties, and it was here she’d met Fran, and Xanthe, and Mark. Today, Giancarlo and Utti were curled up in a corner under the pig-policeman mural, arms and legs entwined but heads turned away, one reading a rolled paperback, the other a zine. The Italians had met Spider at a party over a month ago, were the latest of his lost lambs. Spider and his big heart kept on bringing people with nowhere else to go back to the squat; usually they were introduced as ‘comrades’ or ‘fellow travellers’ and half the time they’d end up nicking clothes or shoes.
The Italians were very serious. They only ever wanted to talk anarchism and revolution, were uninterested in the day-to-day running of squat life (leaving Xanthe to mutter at their backs that once again she was acting as an unpaid cleaner). But they both stood up with huge smiles and gave Clio noisy, kissy embraces as she arrived and pulled up a stool, a great big slash of red against their funeral clothes. They were joined a few minutes later by a group of people including Fran and Spider, with Mark ambling up after that, and as extra seats were added to the table and Sammi took their coffee orders, she wondered who had decided on this meeting time and place, and why none of these six people, all of whom she had seen in their shared living quarters in the last twenty-four hours, had thought to mention it to her.
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