Here Comes Everybody

by James Fearnley

  ‘Hello,’ she said. She was wearing an eggshell-blue dress and white ankle socks. Her dark hair glistened with washing. I was amazed that anyone could be so clean, living in a place like this.

  I was relieved to be back in London, amid the clamour of King’s Cross. To the north was the racket of Euston Road and the railway stations, Euston, St Pancras, King’s Cross. To the south, beyond Bloomsbury and the British Museum, it was a twenty-minute walk to Covent Garden and the West End. The entire area reeked of literature. Charles Dickens had lived nearby on Doughty Street. The Woolfs had lived on Gordon Square, E. M. Forster on Tavistock Square and W. B. Yeats on Woburn Walk, at the top of Burton Street.

  In a couple of days the guy came back from France. Jem had wiry hair and prominent brows. There was an urbanity and an apparent suspension of judgement about him that was appealing. I liked his air of quiet capability. He didn’t seem to mind all that much that I had been using his room and actually sympathised with my turning up on the doorstep at Shane’s invitation.

  I moved into a room off the top landing that Jackie and Cath had cleared out. It was nothing more than a cubicle with a mattress in it, a window at one end and what remained of a door at the other. I dragged my gear up the stairs and parked it in the corner of the room. I stationed my typewriter and my radio on the windowsill. I set my suitcase of clothes against the wall and draped a woollen blanket over the door for privacy.

  No. 32 Burton Street was a noisy place. On weekday mornings, labourers’ vehicles came to park up and down the street and in minutes the houses on both sides were ringing with hammering, shuddering with impact drills and braying with Capital Radio.

  Nearly every night, in his room on the floor below mine, next to Jem’s room, rant music from Shane’s record player – relentless intoning against a thumping reggae beat – pounded the walls and timbers throughout the house. I tried to keep it out of my ears by pulling the bedding over my head. I went downstairs to implore him to turn the music down.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. He lifted a finger in a gesture of docility. I got back into bed, relieved that it had been that easy to get what I wanted from him. I lay in my bed, naïvely imagining that the delay in getting up to go to the volume knob of his record player might be due to the rolling of a joint, the putting out of a cigarette or something. The ululation went on unabated, pounding through the floor in my ear.

  It wasn’t just Shane’s record player that kept me up. There were arguments, door-slamming, the sound of breaking glass and occasional shrieking as someone or other fell foul of the bicycles which were stacked in the front hall outside the room occupied by people called the ‘Beards’. One night, a beam-shuddering crash started me awake, followed by shouting, the precipitation of footsteps down the staircase and the slam of the front door. Soon, I became aware of the clatter and tinkling of objects striking the corrugated roof of the bus repair depot behind the house. I crept downstairs to see Cath Cinnamon sitting on the overturned kitchen table, throwing items of cutlery, one after the other, through the window.

  *

  I got a sweeping-up job at a repair shop in Soho where they became used to my taking time off. In the afternoons, for a few days a week the Nips rehearsed at Halligan’s on Holloway Road. We spent a lot of time waiting for Shane to turn up. When he did, he was drunk – a couple of times so drunk that he had fallen asleep on the tube, overridden his stop and ended up at Wood Green or Cockfosters. It was funny to begin with. After a while it began to annoy me that he should turn up so late and incapable of doing much. I brought it up with him.

  ‘You don’t understand!’ he said, clawing at his face in disbelief. Shane worked as a barman at the staff bar of the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases. He implied that his lateness and drunkenness were collateral damage that came with the job. He trumped my complaints with the fact that his inebriation happened, actually, to be in the service of nurses and doctors, for whom, if they wanted a drink after hours on a weekday afternoon, he was there to oblige. When Shanne beseeched him to try to turn up to rehearsal on time, and sober, there was a surprising kindliness in the way she dealt with him. I gave up. I was a new boy. I yielded, and spent the afternoons at Halligan’s going over what I and Terry the drummer and Shanne were capable of doing by ourselves, waiting for Shane to make an appearance.

  As rehearsals went on, it became clear that Shane was in love with Shanne. In the course of going through the songs, he sought her approval on everything. Shane and Shanne were so obviously the core of the Nips, their union exemplified by their near-as-damn-it homonymy, that after a couple of weeks I was shocked to understand that Shanne and John Hasler – one of the duo of managers – had married the previous May and that Shane had been debarred from the wedding. By September, Shanne Hasler was four months pregnant.

  When I also learnt that Terry Smith was the tenth drummer the Nips had had, and that I was the fifth guitarist, I wondered how long this group was going to last.

  The first gig I did with the Nips was at the Rock Garden in Covent Garden. I didn’t know what to expect. I kept my head down. My experience of gigs, so far, had been ordeals of unrequitedness, a series of sporadic confrontations with an audience’s neutrality. Playing to one which actually knew better than I did what was supposed to happen was shocking. When I stepped up to the microphone to sing backing vocals – on ‘Hot Dogs with Everything’ – I was taken aback by the fact that the crowd had already begun shouting out:

  ‘Lah, la-la-la-la-la lah la-lah, lah la-lah, la-la-la-lah!’

  We did a gig somewhere in South London, the floor incompliantly empty throughout our set, the audience having retreated to the walls, behind iron pillars. Halfway through, Shane, wearing a plum-coloured, quilted smoking jacket, hurled himself from the stage to writhe on the flagged floor, his legs working his body round, singing the whole time. To watch him as if at the nether end of an exorcism, surrounded by what there was of an audience, some of them giggling nervously, scared me.

  The gigs in what seemed to be the Nips’ stamping ground of North London were raucous, teeming, claustrophobic events. I recognised faces I’d seen around the neighbourhood. Jem Finer was a familiar presence at Nips gigs – at the Hope and Anchor, Dingwalls – and held Shane in some esteem.

  When we weren’t playing our own, there were gigs to go to – at the Greyhound, the Lyceum, the Moonlight, the Marquee, Camden Palace, the Rainbow, the George Robey. There were clubs like Billy’s, the Wag, Beatroute and Blitz. I went out a lot with Shane, Howard Cohen and a girl called Mandy who worked for an agent and had the words ‘super ligger’ embroidered on her zip-up jacket. Often enough, though, Shane and I ended up going out by ourselves.

  I had to exert myself to follow him through the cold London streets, in the yellow fog. He was always ten or fifteen feet ahead of me. I had never known anyone to walk so fast. It was as if the matter of getting from pub to pub, from double port and lemon to double port and lemon, snakebite to snakebite, was a bothersome chasm in the evening that needed bridging as swiftly as possible. His long legs strode down the street. He pushed his hands in his pockets against the cold. He was oblivious to the fact that I continually lagged behind. I had to skip to catch up, my hands in my pockets like him, hoping he wouldn’t see me cheat, hoping he would think I could walk as fast as he could.

  If we had to take the tube anywhere, we sat opposite one another in the brash light of the train. We were careful not to meet each other’s eyes. If we did, he’d let out a cackle the significance of which I didn’t understand, but I would reciprocate, as if I did. He’d wipe his nose against the back of his hand and abruptly stare down the carriage, a meekness in his eyes, embarrassed at what he thought was an exchange of intimacy between us.

  One night he took me up to Dingwalls at Camden Market. I felt privileged to go with him. Neither of us was on any guest list but we got in anyway without paying. The kid behind the glass at the box office summoned an older guy, who waved away the kid’s reluctance when
he saw who it was. He nodded Shane and me in.

  The band Shane had brought me to see was already playing down the far end. The bar was fairly empty. There were a few people sitting on stools along the walls or leaning on the shelves round the pillars. I was too proud to be in Shane’s company to pay much attention to the band. Shane didn’t seem to show much interest either. I followed him across to the bar. The lack of words between us I hoped passed for an understanding it looked like we had.

  ‘What you having?’ I said.

  ‘A Black Zombie,’ he replied, but over my head, directly to the barman, a large man with a pink implacable face. I wondered if I detected a weary familiarity in him with Shane.

  ‘You?’ the barman said to me.

  ‘He wants one too,’ Shane said on my behalf. The barman raised his eyebrows and went about putting the drink together. He crooked his finger under each of the optic dispensers to release, one after the other, a double measure of each of the white spirits – gin, vodka, tequila, Bacardi – together with a double shot of pastis into the plastic pint glass. Finally and unceremoniously, he upended a bottle of Coke into it. He pushed the drinks across the bar. I paid.

  I held the Black Zombie up to the light. The plastic glass was scuffed to the point of opacity. The drink was black right enough, but with a noxious-looking, muddy iridescence in it. It looked evil. Shane drew the Zombie to his mouth and, in a succession of elaborate gulps, swallowed all of it. I wished I could do the same, but my adenoids recoiled from the first vaporous mouthful. I set the drink on a ledge for the time being.

  I looked at him, standing in the half-empty bar, dark against the lighting behind the bar, his hair dark, his donkey jacket black, black jeans, the black drink gone. The clop of the empty plastic glass on the counter signalled the end of my naïve and besotted expectation of any real brotherhood with Shane.

  ‘I’m getting another one,’ he said. ‘You?’

  *

  I knew how to get home. It was a question of putting one foot in front of the other, difficult as that might be. It was a question of taking your time, standing for a moment considering your options, a question of rummaging in your pockets for the packet of fags and getting one out without spilling them all over the pavement, finding the lighter, holding the flame steady at the tip of the cigarette. It was a question of quickly rectifying the sudden and unpredictable shifts in your centre of gravity, while taking in a drag of smoke, taking in the night, the sky the colour of Bakelite, the darkened windows of the houses, the yellow light of the streetlamps – and then of setting a flopping foot forward in the direction of home. If my equilibrium was ever abruptly and unceremoniously swiped away and I was flung leg over leg to crash into something – a tree, a parked car, a garden wall – I would sit for a minute, put a finger to the broken skin or the frayed hole in my trousers, and then get up and carry on.

  I was good with drunks. I looked forward to delivering Shane successfully to his room and to his bed. I had an instinct for the dividing line between what was expeditious and what was just fun at someone else’s expense. I knew to wait a few paces ahead, alert to danger, scanning the high street for traffic in case he lurched out into the roadway, to steer him away from a bread-crate in one of the doorways, to stand at a kerb ready for the unexpectedness of the step down to cross a street, to brace myself for his inability to predict a sudden gradient. I wasn’t successful. Shane’s legs were gone. He staggered down Camden High Street, sidestepping, lurching, coming to an abrupt but teetering standstill before precipitating forward, the soles of his shoes slapping on the pavement.

  He kept working his hands into his pockets and working them out, letting out great sighs of frustration at his progress down the street, stopping now and again to hawk phlegm from his throat, but doubling over, gagging with the effort, sucking saliva back into his mouth and wiping his face with his hands. He stopped to light a cigarette, teetering in the middle of the pavement, thumbing the lighter over and over and, once he’d managed to get it to light, circling the flame round and round the end of the cigarette. He took a drag and set off again, but the smoke must have gone to his head because he lost his balance and sidestepped against a shop window. I cowered against what I expected to be the crash of him going through it with his shoulder. The impact though, forceful as it was, only threw him to his knees and set the window quivering for seconds after.

  ‘Ow!’ he wailed. ‘Ow! Ow!’ I stepped forward to help him up.

  ‘Fuck off!’ he screamed. ‘Just fuck off! I don’t need any fucking help! Cunt!’

  I stood back to let him struggle up from his hands and knees, but with my arms at the ready in case he met with failure. When he set off again he hurled himself against the side of one of the cars parked up and down the street, pushed himself upright and launched into a stagger onward down the road. I walked a few paces ahead, to give him some distance, but not so much that I wouldn’t be able to rush back to assist him if he got into more difficulty.

  ‘Cunt!’ he shouted at me, but then laughed.

  We successfully made our way down most of Eversholt Street. When Euston Station came into sight and the spire of St Pancras Church, beyond which was our turnoff into Woburn Walk, I must have allowed myself to relax. I heard a crash somewhere behind me, but a crash which seemed to come from one of the buildings set away from the street. I looked back to see the pavement empty of Shane. I ran back to where I’d missed the open gates of a forecourt on the corner of Wellesley Place, where the concrete sloped down to a loading bay and some bins. He was clutching the railings halfway down the incline, swaying from side to side, voiding his stomach onto the concrete. I went down the ramp and, thinking it to be a universally accepted gesture of support and brotherhood, put my hand on his back. He swiped me away.

  ‘Fuck off and leave me alone!’ he cried out. ‘Why can’t you leave me the fuck alone? Fuck off! You sanctimonious cunt! Cunt! Fuck off! Fuck off! FUCK OFF!’

  I wove across Euston Road, past the caryatids outside St Pancras Church and down Woburn Walk to Burton Street. Drunk as I was myself, the idea that he thought I had been judging him sickened me. His belligerence set us facing one another on opposite sides of a chasm, the scant bridge there had been between us dangling in it.

  Four

  Living in London had always been a problem. I’d slept on couches, rented bedsits and squatted, from Kensal Green to Kingston-upon-Thames. Though a friend and I had once managed to get hold of what was called a ‘hard-to-let’ council flat on the Isle of Dogs, council housing was out of the question. Since the Seventies, government subsidies to local authorities for housing had taken a battering. It had fallen to housing associations to take up the job of providing accommodation for people like me, if you could get on their books.

  My arrival at No. 32 Burton Street had been six weeks shy of the passing, in October 1980, of the Housing Act and the implementation of the Right to Buy scheme. The writing was on the wall for housing associations like Shortlife Community Housing, the housing association to which the occupants of No. 32 paid rent. SCH, as the association was known, administered much of the housing stock the Borough of Camden was not able to maintain due to lack of subsidy, particularly round King’s Cross, and notably the forbidding Victorian tenements on the nearby Hillview Estate.

  Over the course of the next few months, a couple of the girls moved out, as, apparently, did the Beards.

  One afternoon, Jem came to see me in my cubicle. He had been working off his rent arrears at the SCH offices. He had come across an empty rent book and filled it out on my behalf. He told the housing association that I had asked him to bring my own arrears up to date. He professed puzzlement that my tenant’s file wasn’t to be found in their records. He handed me the completed rent book with the name James Fernleagh on the front. I owed him £4.

  A week or two later we were all woken up at eight in the morning by pounding on the front door. Men in suits and hard hats strode up and down the staircase. It was d
ue to the building work on the rest of the street, they informed us, that the front wall of our house was beginning to drift away and was in imminent danger of bringing the rest of the house down round our ears. A guy from SCH came round to summon us to a meeting to decide our fate.

  Shane, Jem, Cath Cinnamon and I met in the bare back room of SCH’s offices. We sat around the Formica-topped table and waited to see what would happen. Though efforts would be made to accommodate everyone in time, as it turned out there were just two single-occupancy flats available, one on Mornington Crescent at the foot of Camden High Street, the other on Gray’s Inn Road. Two of us were going to have to think of something else.

  We sat frozen with irresolution. I was scared that the discrepancy in my status as tenant with SCH would be brought to light and that I would be sent back to Teddington. Jem took charge.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think Cath should have one of the flats. I can stay with someone.’ He turned to Shane. ‘And you have friends.’

  ‘What?’ Shane appealed to Jem in disbelief. ‘He gets a fucking flat? Him?’

  ‘He’s in your band,’ Jem said. ‘You brought him here.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ Shane said. ‘But where am I going to go?’

  ‘You know people,’ Jem said.

  To Shane’s chagrin, I was given the flat on Mornington Crescent. I moved into it that night. The morning revealed a living room dominated by a curvilinear, art-deco window with a view over the gardens of the houses in the crescent, and in the distance, beyond the main line from Euston and the housing blocks on Albany Street, the Snowdon Aviary at Regent’s Park Zoo. Shane stayed on a friend’s floor for a few weeks. He rarely missed an opportunity to vent his rancour over my good luck. It was only when a flat became available on Cromer Street, above a corner shop, a few doors down from the SCH offices, that he seemed to give up his resentment.