It seemed particularly cold this January. I pulled my tight 70’s retro tracksuit jacket tighter around me and pressed my oversized headphones onto my ears. I strolled casually off the footpath to go around a bunch of black gangster looking teens who were just hanging around and playing with their puppy pit bulls. They could just hang around because their fashion made sense. Big down jackets, hoodies and beanies in winter and basketball singlets in summer. Whichever American rapper was getting rich from selling them their clothes, at least they’d thought through what the kids would actually need on the streets.
I walked past the mosque, under the train line and turned at the curry shop.
You can smell Brixton as you get closer to it. It smells like fried Jerk chicken, garbage, fish and marijuana. I sniffed it all in greedily and it fired me up a bit. It smells like life, like opportunity. Like the natural refuse of cool people.
I scurried quickly to keep warm and barely registered the new serious incident poster inviting people to inform on a shooter. Music rolled out of the shops on the high street, mostly regae and hip hop and I realised I didn’t even have my ipod on, but was just using the headphones to keep warm.
I was doing like a little step with a back beat to the music. Dancing around the beggers and junkies and vomit and pot sellers. All within the rhythm.
“skunk, skunk, you could be love, excuse me, skunk, dodge vomit, bop, bop, boom, skunk, 50 p give me 50 p, skunk skunk, you could be lo-ove, boom boom”
“Hey my man yeh” I said to my contact under the bus shelter down from the Ritzy and I handed him a ten pound note.
He broke off some buds and stuck them in my hand. We nodded at each other and I continued in the direction of the underground.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. “Vamos!” It read.
I headed back down through the market. It was crowded as usual but it gave me different noises to grove to. A few young cockney English types calling everyone “love” and “darl” and “sweety” mixed in with the arabs yelling about their Halal meat, and the ubiquitous African music. A thing that always tripped me out were these giant snails that the Africans sell. Big baskets of these massive snails, as big as coconuts, that keep sliding slowly over the top of each other. On a whim I grabbed one as I walked past, sticking it quickly under my jacket, after a look to see that no one was watching.
I walked back to the street where the serious incident sign was, turned and then continued till I got to this old house that backed onto the railway. I adjusted my snail and walked up and knocked.
No one answered. “Typical”
The front yard looked ok. Except for the heavily covered windows it looked like any other house. When you run a squat, you don’t really want to advertise it.
I knocked again and still no answer.
I pulled out my phone and rang her.
“Hola Bill. Where are you?”
“I’m knocking on your front door darling”
“un minuto!”
She hung up.
Locks turned inside the door and it swung open.
“Billy! Darling! Come in! Come in! Oh Besame Darling”
“Looking hot sweet cheeks.”
I extended my hands down around either side of her arse, which failed to meet by a good distance. Her pink mini scrunched up in my hands and I could feel something slick and lacy underneath as I arched my back and swang her around twice. I placed a kiss deep in the black rootes of her bleached hair and sat her down again.
“You look gorgous Sal.” I lied happily.
“Pasa! Pasa!.” She took my hand and lead me into the hallway shutting and locking the door behind me. We passed through an old red rug, strung tightly between the ceiling and the walls such that it blocked out any natural light that could have leaked through the cracks in the door.
The hallway was long and dark. A single lamp with a weak red painted globe, sittling on a low circular wooden table, melted away some of the blackness, like a dark chocolate with a strawberry filling. Extreme heating and the sounds of heavy trance music completed the feel of total immersion in indulgence.
Sally stroked my hand as we walked, past pictures with religious themes, poster size adds for hard core porn films and psycodelic band pictures from the 70’s. We moved slowly through another tighlly strung blanket and into a room where collections of arm chairs, couches and day beds sprawled around a central fire place that was blazing so hot that orange tounges of flame regularly licked right up the brick wall to the wooden mantle.
A few bodies lounged on the furniture.
“Oh Billy always so good to see you. Encontardo! Give me your coat. I’ll get you a drink. Take a seat. Take a seat. Relax. Ah, Que Simpatico! Take of your shoes, Hah! Take off your pants if you want! Huh Huh. Por Favor!”
“E’s before lunch again Sally?” I said as I handed her my jacket and kicked back on a stained leather three seater.
“No No. Solo feliz a ver lo! Only happy to see you my darling. I go get us a drink. You role us a joint yes?!
“Sure Sal.”
She kissed me on the lips, whinked at me and wandered off humming to herself, dumping my jacket on the floor as she went.
I pulled out my tobacco and the buds and started rolling up a big one.
This house was one of my main hang out joints and was also a location I used sometimes for filming a bit of amateur work for the website. I’m sure that quite a few of you would recognise Sally, who, despite a somewhat limited appeal, was always keen for a bit of extra cash. I new little about her, except that she came from La Boca is Buenos Aires and seemed really happy to be off the streets. The truth was that I was pretty close to Sally. She was my Swiss army knife of human relations. Sometime mother, confidant, drinking buddy, lover, business partner.
I looked around a bit as I rolled the joint. Whoever owned the bodies on the couches didn’t seem to be planning to use them for a while. Occassionly I noticed them turning or scratching themselves in the low light of another single red light bulb mixed with the radiance of the fire. Framed Alestar Crowley prints hanging from the picture rail along with the slow thump and random scales of the techno, completed a very sexual mood,
Sally came back in with two cans of Guiness clasped to her belly on her left side and a pile of wood wedged up against her breast on the other. Releasing her arm the wood landed with a crash next to the fire. She smoothed off the flakes that had stuck to her clothes, walked over and sat next to me, and handed me a can.
“Salut” she said and we knocked our foaming drinks together.
I lit the joint and we puffed away and sipped our drinks in silence until it was finished.
“Ahh, I have waited long enough.” Sally began after a moment. “What happens next in the story? Tell me about the Bens. I can’t wait. What happens next” “Diga me!”
I took a long swig and staired at the fire which had calmed down a little.
“Its over. He’s decided to stop writing. He says that the other Bens a nice chap and he’s sorry about what he wrote about him and he’s got nothing left to say. The prick’s cut and run.”
“No! But it was going so well. It made me very excited. That evil Ben, I like him. Oh I would like to spend some time with him. Losers make the best lovers. Oh, they will do anything. Anything for a little piece of Sally!”
I looked at her a bit quizickly, reflecting very briefly about my own looser-ness.
“Yeh well what can I do. His story is finished. There was no evil Ben. Just another typical English bloke and a couple of boring Australians. “
“Ahh but you so want a book. Why are you so fucking lazy. Why don’t you just write one like everyone else. “
“You know I tried. It was crap.”
“Well I thought your chapter four was pretty good. Especially the bit where you said you didn’t want to be a writer.”
“Thanks, yeh that was alright. I sounded more like an 18th century cad or a Fanny Hill character than a young Irishman though.”
“Si, es verdad. Mostly your writing is pretty bad. Even with your therapy woman. It is like therapy this book obsession of yours. You want a book like women want a baby. Not so easy to steal a book though huh?”
“The only way to steal a book is to get someone to write it in secret and then either dissapear or have some other reason to never claim it as their own. This Ben character was perfect. I reckon he had it, the ability that is. He was writing to me in secret and his story was going somewhere really interesting.”
Sally came back with “But he said he wanted to be a writer. That he was a gambler, that he would risk their safety for the book. So he WANTS to keep going with it.”
“He said a lot of things.” I retorted. “Who knows what’s real” “Doesn’t matter anyway, if he chooses not to keep writing.”
“But he has the ability and he has the motivation.” Sally kept going excitedly, getting that look she gets when she is about to deliver advice. “He just needs his scary story”
“So what?”
“So we go there, we find these people, and we give them a fucking story.”
“Meo Dios!!” Sally suddenly screamed. “Que feo! What the fuck is that!”
“Oh, that, I’d forgotton about that. That’s my snail.”
The creature had headed out from under my jacket and was on a journey towards the fire.
