London Noir

by Cathi Unsworth

  It’s sad, he said. It’s sad so few people realize. As a society it seems we base our responses on either love or hate, thinking they’re opposites. But they’re not. They’re the same. The opposite of love is not hate. It’s indifference.

  They looked at him.

  People only hate what they fear within themselves. What they fear themselves becoming. What they secretly love. A fascist, he gestured to Derek will hate democracy. Plurality. Anything else—he shrugged—is indifference.

  I would have laughed out loud if there had been anyone else there with me.

  But there wasn’t. So I said nothing.

  A weekend of lyin low. Difficult, but had to be done. Don’t give them a target, Derek had said. Don’t give them an excuse.

  By Monday I was rarin to get out of the flat, was even lookin forward to goin to work.

  First I went down the shoppin center. Wearin me best skinhead gear. Don’t know what I expected, the whole world to have changed or somethin, but it was the same as it had been. I walked round proudly, an I could feel people lookin at me. I smiled. They knew. Who I was. What I stood for. They were the people who’d voted.

  There was love in their eyes. I was sure of it.

  At least, that’s what it felt like.

  Still in a good mood, I went to see Baz. Ready to start work.

  An he dropped a bombshell.

  Sorry, mate, I can’t use you no more.

  Why not?

  He just looked at me like the answer was obvious. When I looked like I didn’t understand, he had to explain it to me.

  Cos of what’s happened. Cos of what you believe in. Now don’t get me wrong, he said, you know me. I agree, there’s too many Pakis an asylum-seekers over here. But a lot of those Pakis are my customers. And, well, look at you. I can hardly bring you along to some Paki’s house and let you work for him, could I? So sorry, mate, that’s that.

  I was gutted. I walked out of there knowin I had no money. Knowin that, once again, the Pakis had taken it from me.

  I looked around the shoppin center. I didn’t see love anymore. I saw headlines on the papers:

  RACIST COUNCILLOR VOTED IN TO DAGENHAM

  Then underneath:

  KICK THIS SCUM OUT

  I couldn’t believe it. They should be welcomin us with open arms. This was supposed to be the start of the revolution. Instead it was the usual shit. I just knew the Pakis were behind it. An the Jews. They own all the newspapers.

  I had nowhere to go. I went to the St. George, but this was early mornin an there was no one in. None of my people.

  So I just walked round all day. Thinkin. Not gettin any-thin straight. Gettin everythin more twisted.

  I thought of goin back to the St. George. They’d be there. Celebratin. Then there was goin to be a late-night march round the streets. Let the residents, the concerned populace, know they were safe in their houses. Let everyone know who ruled the streets.

  But I didn’t feel like it.

  So I went home.

  An wished I hadn’t.

  Tom was there. He looked like shit. Curled up on his bed. He’d been sick. Shit himself.

  Whassamatter? I said. D’you wanna doctor?

  He managed to shake his head. No.

  What then?

  Gear. Cold turkey. Cramps.

  An he was sick again.

  I stood back, not wantin it to get on me.

  Please, he gasped, you’ve got to get us some gear … please …

  I’ve got no money, I said.

  Please …

  An his eyes, pleadin with me. What could I do? He was me brother. Me flesh an blood. An you look after your own.

  I’ll not be long, I said.

  I left the house.

  Down to the part of the estate where you don’t go. I walked quickly, went to the usual spot. Waited.

  Eventually he came. Stood before me.

  Back so soon? Aaron said. Then smiled. Can’t keep away, can you?

  I need some gear, I said.

  Aaron waited.

  But I’ve got no money.

  Aaron chuckled. Then no sale.

  Please. It’s for … It’s urgent.

  Aaron looked around. There was that smile again. How much d’you want it?

  I looked at him.

  How much? he said again. An put his hand on my arm.

  He moved in closer to me. His mouth right by me ear. He whispered, tickling me. Me heart was beatin fit to burst. Me legs felt shaky.

  You’re like me, he said.

  I tried to speak. It took me two attempts. No I’m not, I said.

  Oh yes you are. We do what our society says we have to do. Behave like we’re supposed to. Hide our true feelings.

  What we really are.

  I tried to shake me head. But I couldn’t.

  You know you are. He got closer. You know I am.

  An kissed me. Full on the mouth.

  I didn’t throw him off. Didn’t call him a filthy nigger. Didn’t hit him. I kissed him back.

  Then it was hands all over each other. I wanted to touch him, feel his body, his beautiful black body. Feel his cock. He did the same to me. That python was inside me, ready to come out. I loved the feeling.

  I thought of school. How I was made to feel different. Hated them for it. Thought of Ian. What we had got up to. I had loved him. With all me heart. And he loved me. But we got found out. And that kind of thing is frowned upon, to say the least. So I had to save my life. Pretend it was all his doing. I gave him up. I never saw him again. I never stopped loving him.

  I loved what Aaron was doing to me now. It felt wrong. But it felt so right.

  I had him in my hand, wanted him in me body. Was ready to take him.

  When there was a noise.

  We had been so into each other we hadn’t heard them approach.

  So this is where you are, they said. Fuckin a filthy nigger when you should be with us.

  The foot soldiers. On patrol. And tooled up.

  I looked at Aaron. He looked terrified.

  Look, I said, it was his fault. I had to get some gear for me brother …

  They weren’t listening. They were staring at us. Hate in their eyes. As far as they were concerned, I was no longer one of them. I was the enemy now.

  You wanna run, nigger-lover? Or you wanna stay here and take your beatin with your boyfriend? The words spat out.

  I zipped up my jeans. Looked at Aaron.

  They caught the look.

  Now run, the machine said, hate in its eyes. But from now on, you’re no better than a nigger or a Paki.

  I ran.

  Behind me, heard them laying into Aaron.

  I kept running.

  I couldn’t go home. I had no gear for Tom. I couldn’t stay where I was. I might not be so lucky next time.

  So I ran.

  I don’t know where.

  After a while I couldn’t run anymore. I slowed down, tried to get my breath back. Too tired to run anymore. To fight back.

  I knew who I was. Finally. I knew WHAT I WAS.

  And it was a painful truth. It hurt.

  Then from the end of the street I saw them. Pakis. A gang of them. Out protecting their own community. They saw me. Started running.

  I was too tired. I couldn’t outrun them. I stood up, waited for them. I wanted to tell them I wasn’t a threat, that I didn’t hate them.

  But they were screaming, shouting, hate in their eyes.

  A machine. Cogs an clangs an fists an hammers.

  I waited, smiled.

  Love shining in my own eyes.

  SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI

  BY JOOLZ DENBY

  Bradford

  We put six black plastic bin bags of stuff in that Rent-A-Wreck transit van; that’s what we took, and we left another twelve or so of rubbish in the house. We’d cleaned up too—or at least what we thought of as cleaning; though it’s no good excuse, you’d have needed an industrial steam-cleaner to shift
the muck in that kitchen. And we left a note, taped to the spotted mirror in the front room:

  Dear Mr. Suleiman,

  We are very sorry to run away and not pay what we owe you for the rent. One day we will come back and settle up, we promise.

  Yours sincerely,

  The tenants at no. 166

  And we set off in the middle of the night, an old transistor radio and tape deck wedged on the filthy dashboard, the rain smearing the windscreen as the wonky wiper jerked spastically across the glass and we put “Babylon’s Burning” on at full distort and we laughed and you floored the pedal until the engine howled.

  Oh, man; running away from Bradford in the lost, gone, and sadly not-forgotten ’80s. Running into the great spirit gold of the rising sun and the hot rush of cutting loose at last from the viscous, clinging mud of small-town England; every weekday the dole and just enough coarse cheap food to keep you alive, every Saturday night the same round of drinking, fighting, and dreaming, every Sunday a long smashed afternoon of everyone droning on about how shit it was and how if only they had the breaks, cha, just watch ’em, they’d be rock stars and axe heroes and Somebodies.

  If they had the breaks, yeah. If some god on high did it all for them and made it all for them, they’d be off to London in a trice, because that, we all knew, was where everything was. That’s where über-cool parties were a dazed haze of glitter-floating beautiful people with clothes from boutiques so hip even their names were a transgression, where even the lowliest shop-girl was such a counterculture punkette pinup she got her pic in Sounds, and the streets were paved with cocaine and the gutters ran with Jack in a fumey vapor of sweet decadence; rich boy’s piss, the blood of rock ’n roll. We all knew this to be 110-percent true because what journalist ever wrote paeans to the punk night at Queen’s Hall, Bradford, or eulogies to some darktime niterie in say, oh, Chester? No, it was London; everything, everyone, every luminous, lush, and longed-for treat was stashed in the belly of that old beast. It was a fact. We’d read it in every newspaper, Sunday arts supplement, music journal, and fashionable novel since forever. It was the way it was and we were the huddled peasant masses crouching on our savage hills gazing up in the torch-lit dark at the divine superstar that was London, London, London.

  So we sat in the van as it hurtled down the M1, wired out of our skulls with adrenaline and burning with messianic passion, white hot and calamitous. We weren’t kids, oh no; we weren’t teen escapees, you see; we were genuine artists, gone twenty-five and almost possessing a record contract with EMI; cash-poor we might be, but we’d worked like dogs and earned our turn at the table—so no pallid, plump, dumb fuck of a corporate recording executive was going ruin our Big Chance. We would be there in the thick of it, in London, in control. We weren’t going to be throwaway tinsel two-bit popstrels, oh no—we were going to change the face of music, of literature, of art, of life, forever. Those decadent, air-and-arse kissing Londoners would be forced to welcome us with open arms because we were the future, we were the Warriors of the New. Strapped into our armor of hand-stitched leather and raggedy black, we looked in my tattered old tarot cards and saw rapture rising behind us like a prophecy.

  It had to be that way. We’d told everyone it would be. We’d been princes and princesses in Wooltown, now we were going to live like kings and queens in the Smoke. We’d chanted the spell, we’d invoked the gods. It was a done deal.

  All that winter six of us slept on the spare bedroom floor of our singer’s sister’s shoe-box flat in the Northerner’s ghetto of London, Highbury New Park. Done up like chrysalides in our stinking doss-bags, we waited for spring when we’d be turned into butterflies. At night the floor heaved like a living carpet and the air was sucked clean of oxygen, but it was too cold and grimy to open the window. They’d never said how tumble-down, litter-strewn, and dirty London was in those magazines and on the telly; the muck was terrible. Put on a clean T-shirt and it’d be black-bright in ten minutes of being exposed to the exhaust-fume leaden reek of the monstrous crawling traffic. Blow your nose and the snot was black; clean your makeup off and the grease was shot with gritty gray that wasn’t mascara. The dirt had its own smell too, sour and rank, hanging in the unmoving air like a filthy veil.

  Back home, we’d think—each to ourselves and not letting on for fear of being thought soft—the cold, fresh wind off the moor unrolled through the canyons of gothic sandstone buildings, embroidered with the faint scent of heather and the sweet dust of the craglands, scouring the crooked streets and lighting wild roses in your cheeks.

  But it was no use thinking like that. We were here to stay, to make our mark. So we’d shake ourselves back to the now and think, hey, who cares about Wuthering Heights when we can go to Heaven, guest-listed on the strength of the last article in the NME about our meteoric rise to cult stardom, or my snarling mask adorning the front-cover of Time Out— Kabuki-style, rebel-girl eyes sparkling incandescent with unreason and fury. Fame, we thought, never having been taught to think otherwise, was better than bread—and infamy was preferable to anonymity. We didn’t have to stand in line with the other runaways outside whatever nightclub was in that week, listening to the chopped vowels and singsong drawl of the North, the West, or all the other great cities that netted the country—what Londoners called “the provinces” in that particular tone of voice that made you want to spit in their eyes.

  So we walked past the Liverpool whine or the Brummie choke of the queuing hordes, and strode in a cloud of patchouli, crimper-burnt hair, and Elnett, into the dreamland they could only hope for. A London nightclub; wow. The carpets patinated with muck, spat-out gum, and marinated in beer slops and puke. The glasses plastic and the watered-down drinks a fortune, the toilets a slick tsunami of bog-water and busted, stinking, scrawled-on, paperless cubicles flapping with broken-locked doors. You never really got anything for nothing in London, see; proved how sharp they were, proved no one got anything over on a real Londoner.

  Not that we ever met a real Londoner. Not one born and bred, like. Maybe they were out there somewhere, but we never found them. Certainly not one who could truly say he’d entered this vale of tears to the cheery clamor of Bow bells, the coarse comforting din of the old pub pianner belting out “Miybe It’s Becorse I’m a Lunnoner,” and the smiles of pearly royalty handing out platters of jellied eels and cockles. No, folk said they were from London, but there was always somewhere else hidden in the dusty folds of their fast-forgotten past; they’d lived in London, oh, now, you know, God, forever. But they came from Leicester or Bristol or Glasgow or Cyprus or Athens or Berlin or Ankara. They came to be famous, but until that bright day they washed dishes, threw plates of greasy nosh about in caffs, or struggled round the heart-and-soul-breaking savagery of the infamously brutal London dole offices.

  Oh, aye, it was a cold coming we, and many like us, had, and no mistake. But what did we care? If we felt heartsick or homesick, we stood ourselves up straight, wiped our eyes if we were girls, unset our rock-hard jaws if we were boys, and commenced afresh our sure-to-be-stellar careers in the world of art. We would show them, we would not be broken and crawl off home like yellow, sag-bellied curs—we had a meeting with EMI tomorrow where we’d tell ’em how it was, and tonight there was a Happening at an old warehouse by the river, promising an installation featuring a naked model-girl embedded in a tank full of jelly created by the latest cutting-edge performance art duo, a clutch of ranting skin-punk poets, and a couple of hot new London bands cobbled together from the tatterdemalion remnants of last year’s hot new London bands.

  How many of those Happenings did we go to, expecting the dark whirligig of cruelly brilliant excess and getting instead a half-cocked mock-up in a rickety-rackety drafty squat where some anorexic pilled-up slapper was toted round in a rusty wheelbarrow slopping with lime Chivers by two public schoolboys whose aristo boho dads had been Hampstead artists in the ’60s, and people we recognized from magazines cooed about authenticity and artistic daring as they wip
ed their coke-snotty noses and patted each other on the back? They always, always all knew each other from school and from their families and they didn’t know us—but suffering Jesus, we knew them, because we knew what real really was and they. Did. Not. Still don’t, as it goes. Anyway, all these evenings ended in fighting, in smack-and-thunder brawls driven by our frustration and our rage at those whited sepulchres and their great stitch-up. How we frightened them, the faux-Londoners, how we shook their skinny trees. Yeah, yeah, yeah—all that talk of voyeuristic ultra-violence and the thrill of the street evaporated like oily vapor off a stagnant pond when they saw the lightning we were. They never knew us, no, they never did. They never saw us weep.

  Oh, it was all such a shill, a sell, a sham; while we ripped ourselves apart searching for the pure, beating heart of things, believing we could, by telling the truth, by tearing the old lies apart at the seams, set ourselves and all our tribe free, London rolled on, a tottering juggernaut of blind and desperate delusion, all the little mannequins trying to find the tailor who made the emperor’s bee-yoo-ti-ful new clothes, so they could ape the great cockalorum and maybe, maybe grab a tiny bit of reflected glory. It was a nonstop dance macabre and we didn’t realize how bone-tired we were becoming.

  Then, for us, it all came down in twenty-four hours.

  First, we woke up and knew that yet again we wouldn’t be able to see the sky. Might not sound like much but it finally got to us, hemmed in and overshadowed as we were by the ugly gray buildings crouching over us, the exhalations of air-cons and extractor fans panting rancid fast-food farts into the starving air, choking us. In Bradford, you see, the skies constantly scroll above us in a massive cloudscape, as free and ever-changing as the wild pulse of nature—the sandstone of the city is buttery amber, lit from within by a million prisms when the light hits it at sunset. We live in a flame, in a painting by Turner, in Gaia’s Lamp. In London, we were dying for lack of light.

  That morning, well, we knew it would be another London day, and lo! It was. And that night it was my thirtieth birthday, and I wasn’t a kid anymore. I had decided to have a party. It was to be at the Embassy Club, private, just for the tribe, and it would be a suitable send-off to my disheveled youth. I spent hours with the crimpers and the kohl pot and I looked like the priestess at Knossos, but I covered up my breasts out of modesty. The snakes, well, I had them tattooed on; easier that way.