Meaning

By Joe Morison

Summer of 1986, and five young men meet in a pub in Brixton, a week later they have opened up and moved into a nearby squat. Meaning follows their lives over the next nine years: the sex and the drugs, the parties and the crime, their ambitions and their loves, their successes and failures. It is a story about friendship and growing up in the modern world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joe Morison
• Release date: Feb 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465826572

Joe Morison

Joe was born in 1960 in beautiful greenbelt countryside just outside London. He has lived in London since 1978, apart from four years studying philosophy at St. Andrews university. He lives with his wife, they have two daughters.

Book preview

Copyright © 2012 by Joe Morison. All rights reserved. Screen Writers Guild no. VQEA3E380432.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.

Smashwords Edition: January 2012

This Book is dedicated to the memory of my parents

Table of Contents

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Envoi epigraph

Appendix

Author Praise

Meaning

by Joe Morison

‘Is it that we still hear nothing of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God?’

Friedrich Nietzsche

Chapter 1

Welcome to the beginning of our story. It is a deliciously warm night in the middle of August - delicious if you have a taste for gentle enfoldment, that is - and we are moving slowly down Coldharbour Lane towards the middle of Brixton.

This London night the air is soft and the sky seems to fill the space around us. The blackness between the stars on a clear moonless night is the absorption of all colour, it is a canopy far overhead. But the colour of this night, that fills the space around us now, is always just out of sight. Focus and it disappears, jumps to the periphery, sparkling its purple and orange.

There is no emptiness, everything pulsates. Even what we hear is backed by a silent roaring just out of earshot - the great beast that never sleeps, turning and turning, a million voices telling their stories.

This is our story, the one I am going to tell.

You can call me Joe. Now my voice is clear, but by the end, you’ll hardly notice me. I’ll be almost gone, drawn into the story, absorbed.

It is 1986, and if the air feels gentle and safe, it is about the only thing that does. Seven years of economic reform has brought a low area lower.

Just three miles north sits the Home Office in a stark modernist tower overlooking the gentle beauty of St. James’s Park. In a locked cabinet sits the report that had so disturbed the Home Secretary yesterday. The old Etonian had sat at his desk gazing out at the sculpted gardens and sunbathing office workers in their lunch breaks.

It was all so complicated, he had thought, these people have no idea.

Of course, poverty is ghastly but order must be maintained - those lucky carefree people down there have no idea how close chaos is to the surface. His duty to them is to keep them carefree, the burden is his.

The police are in a horrible situation. There are a few bad apples but there always will be, the officers in charge are good men - decent and patriotic.

We who take responsibility, the Home Secretary had thought, we are doing our best.

Here in Brixton there is fear and anger, but you and I are safe, we can take our time, look at our leisure with our eyes wide open.

To our left are a couple of white boys - serious squatters by the look of them, thin and dirty and worn all over, tight black trousers and leather jackets, spiky hair and treasured boots. Their drug of choice is speed, I’d guess, and I would not be surprised if they each have a pocket full of pills or little wraps of powder to sell to the weekenders who come to Brixton to forget that for the rest of their time they are running with rodents.

Speed heads or not, their eyes flicker with paranoia and contempt.

To our right, walking out of Brixton, is a young black man dressed in the local street style. In the next ten years this look will spread from a few areas like this to almost every street, avenue, and cul-de-sac in the country. For now, his trainers and baggy trousers and baseball cap mark him out as a troublesome black (in the eyes of the local constabulary) and that would earn him a hiding if it was late and no one was around. But it is early and he is safe enough. He has had more trouble on these streets than he cares to remember, though, and his eyes and ears are open, registering and dismissing our two squatters in a single glance.

Further on, at the doors to the garages under the railway arches to our right, three Jamaican mechanics share a spliff, the rich sounds of their patois and laughter echoing around them. They are at ease, this weather is lovely, and the danger here is as nothing to home. All the same, there are pressures on them (they would not be working on a Saturday night otherwise) and their laughter is possible only because they make themselves forget.

On now, and emerging from our left out of the sodium orange darkness is the great face of the Barrier Block, built in the 1970’s to protect the north side of its estate from the six-lane motorway that was to have been constructed twenty feet above our heads. It is a huge brutalist wall with a few narrow windows. It has three levels of maisonettes, the second and third tiers each overhang the one below in a scalloped line marked out in white against the brown brick. The impression, especially on this strangely un-English night, is of a mighty wave looming overhead, waiting to crash down onto the wasteland in front of it and us beyond.

In a different time, in a different world, it could have been beautiful: intense blue lighting at the base shining up, white lights brilliant on the roof, the ground in front filled with trees and flowers, tables and chairs, talking and music and dancing.

But here and now the estate is Brixton’s poorest and toughest, and only the fearless or desperate live in the flats in the wall. The only place nearby that compares is the Loughborough Estate hidden on the other side of the old terraced houses that were to our right as we started our journey. The Loughborough is a fifties dream gone bad - the serried ranks of the once smart blocks sweat in the summer night, the stench of piss and rotting rubbish lurking in the shadows, bits of concrete shedding onto the corrugated iron safety aprons below.

On we go, past the dole office (many years later to be the scene of some spectacular parties after being squatted by Shane and the CoolTan crew); next to it the Steam Laundry, a curious building from 1904, classical with a Dutch twist in its steeply sloped roof and orange bricks.

Opposite, an Italianate four-story block of flats with Corinthian pilasters and curling painted plaster friezes on the façade. It was built in 1891 when Brixton was a comfortable middle-class suburb.

At the traffic lights, we look down the last stretch of Coldharbour Lane into the heart of Brixton, the stretch that years from now will become the last Front Line against the taming of this area.

We are far from that now, tonight Brixton is still wild: no cameras on every corner filming in digital detail; no squadrons of riot-ready officers armed and armoured with the latest techno-power, no battle rooms to coordinate the action - just a few van loads of boys who love to fight with their truncheons and boots and occasional knuckleduster.

Apart from sporadic displays of force, this is a no-go area for the police; best wait until their army has been built, until then a little discipline from time to time to remind them who’s in charge.

The pub on the corner with Railton Road is the Atlantic - a place of fearsome reputation in which the only white faces made welcome belong to women or those paying good money for drugs or sex. This Brixton is in a world before black culture took over the street and the white youth started to copy the black youth, and friendships formed, and romances flowered.

Tonight Mandela is still in prison and black angers burns; tonight the police are impotent and out of control; tonight in Brixton most black people speak different, look different, act different - so remember, this is their bit of town and any white man on the street who is not known to be powerful better keep his eyes down and look respectful.

On we go, down the main drag - there are lights and laughter, drinking and drugging, music and movement - the girls are outrageous, bright and colourful in high cut shorts (batty riders riding the mounds of black Venus) or micro minis, bikini tops or low cut vests. The men hustle and bustle, and laugh and leer, and joke with their friends that they are the man. The passing cars hardly move, windows open, people and music call out - everywhere excitement that the night is young. At last we have arrived: the Prince Albert run by the draconic raven-haired Pat.

The Albert is the Brixton pub for outsiders, for those not looking to blend in with the born and bred here. It is for trendies and squatters, dropouts and workers in dreary jobs looking for excitement, students and festival people in town for a few days.

It is nine o’clock as we come in through the door, into the noise and heat of this safe little island in a sea of danger, the pub is packed and the air is thick with tobacco and human warmth. Over there are Cornelius and Ralph. They are talking to the poet Hobson Choyce - looking magnificent with his mane of blonde hair swept back behind his silver-hooped earringed ears, and flowing down over his shoulders. He wears a charcoal grey suit jacket over an extravagant white shirt, black drainpipes, and cowboy boots.

Cornelius is tall and elegant in his two piece suit. With its slim-waisted jacket and generously pleated trousers, its gentle green check shot through with hints of buttercup yellow, his mustard socks and polished brown brogues, he could be a chum of Bertie Wooster out for a day at the races. Bottle of beer in one hand and roll-up in the other, the light in his pale blue eyes gleams his long thin aristocratic face. He has fine yellow hair combed back, a slight receding at the temples gives the impression of a crest. The elegant statement of his aquiline nose completes his look of natural and easy command. He tips his head back to pour a mouthful of beer, swallows, pulls at his cigarette. He laughs as Ralph finishes his story, lips pulling back in a smile a hint vulpine to reveal fine teeth with just the slightest tobacco yellowing - the sign of his seven year habit kept at bay with regular applications of Bradshaw’s Smokers’ Tooth Powder.

Now Hobson starts to speak, recounting a tale of recently witnessed naivety: a young chap at the dole office dressed all in black wearing what looked like his grandfather’s dressing-gown over the top, was objecting in public school tones to a local hard boy who had queue-barged, and how, when the dressing-gowned lad came out, the hard boy was waiting and after a few words, had glanced at his fist before driving it into the lad’s head and knocking him to the ground.

Ralph winces in sympathy, then joins in the laughter at the foolishness of it all. He is six foot tall and solidly built, a broad friendly face and bright blue eyes, side-parted rich brown hair. If Cornelius has something of the nobility about him - French, perhaps, cultured and a little decadent - then Ralph seems of that lower upper-class tribe who for generations have owned and overseen the husbandry of Britain, men who have eaten and drunk well, and worked hard, and when asked, have put on the armour of the day to fight for their country.

Both impressions are misleading. Cornelius’s real name is Adrian Wilson. He had always loathed ‘Adrian’ and at fourteen renamed himself after the black US poet Cornelius Eady - he had come across a reference to him while reading a poetry magazine in the school library and it was a name, he thought, which combined exoticism with a highbrow yet street cred provenance.

Cornelius was born and raised in Swindon, his father worked as senior clerk at a local shoe factory while his mother cleaned and polished and freshened their semi-detached house. Such was the degree to which ‘Adrian’ differed from his parents and three sisters that it was a family joke that he must be a prince who had been swapped at birth and that one day his servants would come to find him and he would leave Swindon to take up his throne - either that or, ‘ho ho ho, mother must have been up to hanky panky with a passing duke’. The teasing, though, was entirely warm hearted; as his mother and his father could quite clearly be seen in him. It was just that somehow when their genes were shaken together at Cornelius’s conception they produced a child who was to be larger than his parents and siblings in every way, a child who would excel in sports and academic work and socially.

His sisters and parents adore him, which he accepts as his lot just as he accepts his other successes.

Ralph is from Ireland. His father is a large florid faced man who owns enough land in Donegal to employ a farm manager and live in the large eccentric-to-the-point-of-madness house his grandfather built. For all his love of Ireland and sincere Catholicism, Ralph’s father is an anglophile. As a young man, he came to London for a year and left with a wife - a bright eyed girl from good English stock who returned with him to a place of laughing streams and sudden waterfalls, rich pastures and a house that made her dizzy, to a life of drinking and talking and dancing that she could never have imagined - and never regretted.

She is responsible for her son’s looks, and his education at a top English Catholic school is responsible for his accent and manner. He is wearing a plain white T-shirt with a pair of baggy grey suit trousers and open-toed sandals. He is dressed more comfortably for the warmth of the night than Cornelius, but Cornelius is not a man to compromise for the weather and in the absence of something more suitable (in pale blue linen, perhaps, with a Panama hat), he is dressed as usual - with the exception of thinner socks, a looser tie, and leaving his beloved brown trilby at home.

Hobson begins to opine on the pathos and bathos of losing one’s Brixton virginity when a shout on the other side of the room attracts everyone’s attention. It is as if someone has suddenly twisted the volume button from 6 to 2. They turn to see Pat the landlady striding through the crowd which parts in front of her: ‘You! Out!’ like a blast from a klaxon as she advances on two alarmed young men, for she has seen the telltale hand movements they thought were so subtle but which signalled ‘drug deal’ to Pat as clearly as a red flag. ‘Out!’ she shouts again and grabs them by the arms, pushing them towards the door. ‘I will not have drugs in my pub!’

Not true, of course, there are probably only a dozen people here tonight who are not carrying, or with someone who is. It is the form that must be preserved - that Pat insists on. She doesn’t mind what any of them do outside of here, but this is her domain and she will not be crossed.

The volume rises to 6½ as a ripple of amusement runs through the crowd. The two miscreants hurry through the door, heads low and hearts thumping, passing two other young men on their way in.

The first is Jake, 5’10 of medium build, with dark hair cropped short that afternoon in Soho (a new style for him) and round chrome-rimmed glasses. His solid angled face is softened by the arcs of his glasses and the curve of the top of his head. He wears a black T-shirt, tightish black trousers, and black converse basketball boots.

Behind him is Sam, taller and thinner, with straight ginger hair falling in a rough fringe. He is wearing an old Clash T-shirt, battered red trousers that might once have had bondage straps (that short-lived fashion, as foolish as any the twentieth century produced) and red boots like Jake’s. As Jake’s face is angled, Sam’s is curved - a slim oval of freckled skin, deep green eyes, a small straight nose, and a gentle mouth.

Jake and Sam will soon be starting their second year at Kings reading Sociology. Sam has come up today from his parents’ house in Hertfordshire. He and Jake met up after Jake’s haircut and the two have just dined at Pollos, a cheap Italian round the corner from Jake’s barber. It is Sam’s first visit to Brixton, and Jake has only been here once - they are what Hobson calls ‘Brixton Virgins’ and the walk from the tube to the pub has set Sam’s heart racing.

From the bizarre crowd around the tube entrance with their apocalyptic fashion sense, to the mass of black people on the street wearing clothes imported from black America and Jamaica, and the fast angry beats from a dozen invisible sound systems - everything about Brixton is alien. Alien but exciting.

The energy here is palpable - in the faces and bodies, in the music and the medley of chat and teasing and calling to friends. The air, heavy like some invisible liquid metal, seems to hold and magnify the energy, encasing it in the shining throb of night time.

Entering the warm light of the pub leaves most of that alienness behind - at first sight this could almost be the Union bar.

They are here at the invitation of Cornelius who met Jake last year at Kings while in his second year of an English degree - second and last as he dropped out at the end of Michaelmas term after a disagreement with the authorities about how much work he should be doing. He has been living on the dole and false rent claims ever since (‘patronage, dear boy, patronage,’), while he writes his first novel, a comic masterpiece about an English scriptwriter’s adventures in Hollywood.

Jake sees Cornelius, and he and Sam huddle and slide their way through the crowd. Introductions are made and drinks decided upon. Cornelius has announced that it is Ralph’s (which he pronounces Rayf’s) birthday and Sam offers the first round. Hobson declines, having a near full glass, but for Cornelius and Jake it is pints of Stella. Ralph asks for Guinness which Sam decides on too.

The crush at the bar is a little intimidating to Sam. This may not be the street outside but it is definitely not the Union either. These people are mostly older, if only by a few years, but even those his age seem full of a city sophistication that Sam would love to have but knows he does not. The men are scruffier, but somehow chic-er. The woman look experienced and definitely sexier; at Kings there is still a powerful dour feminism that frowns on sexiness. But sexiness is good, thinks Sam as his attention is distracted from trying to get to the bar by the unbuttoned shirts, shoulderless T-shirts, and translucent tops of the girls around him which show off the cleavage, straps, or general existence of a black bra, the revealing of which appears essential.

Underwear as outerwear is something Sam has read about but never seen in such profusion and proximity. In his youth displays like this, outside of magazines like Mayfair, were only by bad girls in 50’s films who wore tight jumpers and bras that gave them rocket head bosoms of implausible thrust. But those women were victims, Sam thought, and wore skirts and heels that submitted them to men. The women around him are the opposite - free in their strength and proud in their freedom.

This, Sam thinks, I like.

Ralph comes up and lays his arm on Sam’s shoulder. As their eyes meet, Sam sees in Ralph’s smiling that he has seen his looking, and in Sam’s smiling reply, the beginnings of a friendship are born.

With the drinks, they make their way back to the others who have moved to the slightly cooler yard at the back, Hobson having been waylaid on the way by a dark-haired elfin beauty from Camberwell Art School up the road. Cornelius is holding forth on the night ahead.

‘Penny, bless her, is away,’ his nacreous eyes subtle as he smiles at the attention, ‘which means the flat is ours as a base. There’s at least three parties …’

Jake watches impressed: not only is Cornelius a year older than him, and looks more than that, he seems so much more sophisticated - so at home in this world as he talks about the parties they could go to and the parties that have been, and of the squats where extraordinary people behave and dress in ways wonderful and exciting.

These are people, thinks Jake, for whom life itself is a work of art: action, the brushstrokes; intoxication, the toner. They don’t give a fuck about convention and the rest of society - that’s the enemy, the empty lies that are Thatcher and Reagan, glittering surface with nothing inside.

He feels a thrill of recognition - this is the future he has looked for and now he is at its edge. Fuck the old notions of order, whether it’s the scale of value that puts whites at the top and blacks at the bottom, or the one that puts the Mona Lisa at the top and an arrangement of rubbish at the bottom, it’s all the same fascist imposition. That’s what Dr. Clarkson had been saying last term, and Jake had been thinking about it since and reading some of the recommended material.

Ralph is talking now, recounting how at a famous party last winter he had to defend Cornelius against an exceedingly boring and be-badged activist who had accused him of belonging to the capitalist oppressor class.

‘I think it may have been the carnation in my buttonhole,’ Cornelius replies happy in anticipation of the story to come. ‘I had picked it up that morning in the market, a rather lovely pink and mauve variegated. He asked me why I dressed the way I did and I knew he meant the suit, but he was such a silly little man that I pretended he was asking about the carnation and told him that I walked to Harrods every day to buy one, just as father and grandfather had, because only Harrods sell this particular variety. And then before he had time to splutter,’ here Cornelius pauses to draw on his pint, confident of his audience, ‘I looked down at his badges, he was a small man,’ (Jake guffaws), ‘and said my family has always preferred carnations to coal, whereas yours, it seems, prefers coal to dole, and therein can be seen the ascent of man, as dear old Bronowski might have put it.‘

Ralph says he’s not sure he ‘would have stepped in had he known what Cornelius had said,’ to which Cornelius replies that he knows Ralph is ‘far too stalwart a chap to let a pal take a pasting.’ A fact both know to be true.

‘What about drugs?’ asks Jake, getting the subject back to the night’s entertainment (or the knight’s entertainment, as Cornelius likes to call it, ‘Sir All-of-Us will proceed …’).

This, it is agreed, is a good question (for celebration demands intoxication) and supplies are accounted - Jake has a small lump of black hash and Ralph a little bag of grass. Not enough for a night like tonight, and Cornelius proposes speed, to general assent.

‘Would, my dears, that we could afford cocaine, or coco as our French cousins diminutively call it, to the disgust of the exquisite Marquis de St. Loup in Proust,’ (Cornelius has not actually read any Proust, but had once spent an afternoon drinking with a postgraduate French student from whom he had collected many such useful snippets), ‘but an unjust world has yet to realize our worth and enrich us accordingly. First, though, another pint! You fellows deal with that while I off on the matter of the poor man’s Peruvian.’

With a flash of smile Cornelius turns and with a greeting, both ostentatiously and ironically flirtatious, to a girl with pillar-box red lipstick under a cacophony of pillar-box red hair, he goes back into the main room of the pub.

It is impossible for the three he leaves behind not to admire Cornelius, so utterly at home in this scene. Watching him, Sam thinks that he would love to know a girl like that, or almost any of the strong sexy women here tonight, and that he would love to be able to greet that girl with the flair Cornelius has just displayed.

Jake heads for the bar and Sam promises that he will follow when he sees him being served. Ralph and Sam start to talk. Conversation rests easily between them, and soon Ralph has learnt about Sam’s summer in Greece with his family, before embarking on the more interesting tale of his own time in Italy seeking out the many dialects of Dante.

Five minutes later Sam’s attention is caught by Jake waving at him to come and help. Soon they are back and Cornelius has returned.

‘I’ve spoken to Gabriel, you know him don’t you Ralph?’

‘A bit.’

Cornelius continues, ‘An excellent fellow, a true local, astonishin’ well connected, and to top it all, he’s doing philosophy at UCL. Not only can he get good sulphate at an excellent price, but he told me about a party by a crew who call themselves the Squat Breaker Party Maker Posse - which apparently is going to be a corker. Gabriel will soon be with us; and so, gentlemen, I propose we toast the night ahead.’

They raise their glasses, this little circle.

Cornelius, the prince; the lime clear light in the yard reflects off his high forehead and illumines the contentment in his face: here I am in the heart of the most dangerous exciting cutting-edge part of the hippest town on the planet, money in my pocket that I haven’t had to work for (‘the curse of the drinking classes’ as I used to quote Oscar until it became vulgarized onto a T-shirt), surrounded by people worthy of me, who look up to me and will follow me in tonight’s debauch. His thoughts are interrupted by…

Ralph, holds up his glass, looks around at the three faces: Cornelius is a good chap, so stylish and witty and clever; it’s true that he can be a little cutting to those he considers not up to the mark, but his heart is in the right place. And Sam and Jake, real friends, that’s good to see. I like them, especially Sam; and Jake’s been saying some fascinating things - a clever dude. These are great people, strong, though perhaps -. His thoughts are interrupted by…

Jake looks around: this is hip, this is me. University is so fucking tame - I mean, some of the work is great, but the social side is so retarded compared to this. There are people here who can get me in, Cornelius is the business and this bloke Gabriel sounds really interesting. His thoughts are interrupted by…

Sam is excited: what a night! This place is special, these people are special. It’s all going to be wonderful. His thoughts are interrupted by…

…a figure approaching from the bar. Medium height, slim build, inch long combed afro hair, dark skin, smiling eyes, a green linen jacket over a dove grey T-shirt, jeans and desert boots.

‘Alright Cornelius, alright geezers.’

‘Gabriel!’

Looking down at them, eyes bright, Gabriel stands easy and confident in the heat, bottle of Pils in one hand and a half-smoked Marlboro in the other.

‘What we got here, then, The Four Musketeers?’ His voice is pure colour-neutral South London.

‘Now that you’re here, my dear,’ answers Cornelius, ‘its more Five Go Crazy in Brixton.’

‘I don’t want to take you down in the world, Cornelius.’

‘I don’t know, I think I prefer English inanity to French vulgarity.’

Now Jake butts in, ‘But who’s Timmy? And George and Anne come to that? No, The Five Musketeers it’ll have to be, but that shouldn’t stop us going crazy.’

‘Controlled crazy,’ says Gabriel. ‘That’s the style for us.’

And so the conversation continues between them, Gabriel fitting naturally into the group, knowing the status his street credibility earns him, proud but insecure of his matching them in wit and learning. Soon they are back to the night’s plans and it is agreed that Gabriel will get the speed and meet them back here when he is done. ‘S’only five minutes away, I won’t be long.’

Drinks are bought again, this time by Cornelius and Ralph, leaving Jake and Sam to talk and marvel with neophyte wonder.

Around them the crowd is loud and growing louder, alcohol is starting to fill up blood streams, speech is more emphatic and laughter bolder. Cornelius and Ralph are back with the drinks, and the four natter and laugh and interrupt as if they have been together for years.

Gabriel has been gone for over an hour, but for once Sam does not assume that something has gone wrong. Early disappointments in trying to buy drugs and a natural tendency to worry (particularly about anticipated pleasures) have produced in Sam the reaction that the inevitable delays that occur (‘First thing you learn is that you always gotta wait,’ as Jake likes to sing at him) are the result of disaster rather than the disastrous inability of drug heads to get things together. Tonight is just too perfect and these people too cool for something to go wrong, and so it is that a wide eyed Gabriel comes into the pub at quarter-past eleven to find the four in high hilarity at Cornelius’s account of his narrow escape on holiday last summer from a Thai lady boy who at first sight was ‘as pretty a little filly as I’d ever laid eyes on.’

Cornelius sees him first. ‘Messenger from the God’s!’ he interrupts himself.

‘Arriving on a cloud of white powder,’ finishes Gabriel. ‘Well, I had to try it, and I can assure you geezers, it is wicked.’

This is the first time any of them have heard the word so used, apart from Jake who heard it that afternoon as he was having his hair done. Cuts, next to the Bar Italia, attracts crowds of frighteningly fashionable young people, one of whom, a powerful-looking short-haired mixed-race woman, had loudly used it in praise of their previous night’s clubbing. Jake makes a mental note.

Now they are out on the street. If it was busy before, it is seething now. Sam feels elated: excited at the prospect of what is to come; secure with his four friends around him - Gabriel the local, Cornelius who knows it all so well, strong reliable Ralph, and his best friend Jake. Even so, they tread their way carefully, voices low, demeanour subdued. The walk up Railton Road is something quite different - the part of Coldharbour Lane they have just left is alive with the thrill of Saturday night. Here, just round the corner, the mood is grim and the smell sour.

First, they call in at an off-licence to stock up for the night. Sam and Jake have never seen anything like it: to walk into it is to enter a cage which separates you from the till, the merchandise, and the people who take your orders and hand the goods through a little window in the cage after they have taken your money - it is like something out of a movie.

Outside as they walk towards Cornelius’s they can see the poverty and violence: in the rubbish on the streets, in the faces of the men who stand in cheerless groups on the rutted pavements, in the nervousness of those who are scurrying home on their own. Sam takes it all in, eyes flicking surreptitiously, feeling at the same time both safe and scared. Soon, they arrive at Cornelius’s flat, or rather his girlfriend’s flat, on the third floor of a brick block built in the thirties round a central courtyard, the front doors facing inward connected by external balconies. Once inside, Gabriel makes straight for the bathroom and emerges with a mirror and razor blade.

‘Let’s have a beer, Cornelius, and get this show on the road.’

Jake and Sam watch fascinated as Gabriel pulls out a little envelope origamied from a square cut from the page of a glossy magazine and unfolds it.

‘This design,’ says Gabriel nodding at the package, ‘dates from Renaissance Florence.’

‘You’re a mine of useless but delicious information, my dear Gabriel,’ replies Cornelius.

‘Useless but delicious, I’ve had worse compliments.’

‘What about cursed wantonness?’ says Jake. ‘That’s what I want.’

‘Patience, my son,’ as Gabriel finely chops the powder again and again, scooping it over and back into a pile before running the blade t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t down it like a chef chopping miniature vegetables. ‘This is not a job to be rushed.’

Soon five fat lines lie on the mirror and Gabriel takes out a £10 note and rolls it carefully into a tube. He hands both to Ralph. ‘Birthday boy’s privilege, Ralph, go for it.’ Ralph puts the mirror down on the table and leans over it, one hand holding the note into his nostril, the other holding his other nostril shut, he takes half the line before jerking his head back. ‘Ah!’ the sound is of pain as well as satisfaction. The same for the other nostril then he tips his head back, sniffs again, and hands the note to Sam who is sitting next to him.

Sam takes it, his heart racing. He has never snorted a drug before, he and Jake took speed three times last year, but each time it was the little blue pills that the main dealer in the Union sells. Following Ralph’s lead, he bends his head over the mirror and sees the novel sight of himself with a note up his nose reflected in a drug covered mirror. It is awkward getting your head down like this, but Sam is aware of everyone’s eyes on him, and he takes the first half of his line in a strong snort. ‘Ouff!’ as the sharp chemical pain hits the top of his nose making his eyes water, but Sam will not be found wanting and he lowers himself for the rest of the line. The job done, Sam puts his head back like Ralph and rubs the sides of his nose. ‘Jesus!’

‘The more it hurts, the sweeter it goes,’ says Gabriel as he takes the note from Sam. Picking up the mirror, he takes his line in a powerful ‘schnurrf’ up one nostril without bothering to block the other. ‘Ah, yes indeed!’

‘I’m not sure that’s one of your wiser sayings,’ says Cornelius as he watches Jake take his line from the table. ‘Sweet Cocaine Lil is good deal gentler on one’s tender membranes.’

‘Get me a snowbird hat, Cornelius, and I’ll see about it.’

Cornelius takes the last line, holding the mirror up like Gabriel, but taking half up each nostril.

Sam can already feel the drug starting to work. His nose is glowing now, instead of screaming, and he is filled with energy and the desire to be doing (it doesn’t matter what; if he had to stack shelves in a supermarket, he would do it with enthusiasm). Everything feels so good and so interesting he can hardly contain himself, he turns to Jake, his dear friend Jake, an excellent excellent fellow, but before he can start, Jake is speaking.

‘Fuck, man, what a nasal explosion, it’s like Vim or something.’

‘Yeah, it’s at the back of my throat now.’

Fifteen minutes later and everybody round the room is talking and sniffing and drinking and smoking the spliffs steadily rolled by Jake, Sam, and Ralph - the air swirls and spins with smoke and conversation, the boys shifting around as the web of friendship weaves itself between them. They are becoming a group, a band of brothers who would instinctively stand by each other in trouble, who would, if they had to, fight for each other.

Sam is talking to Gabriel now, telling him about boarding at Bedales, to which Gabriel responds with friendly mock outrage: ‘Bloody middle-class paradise.’ Before going on to tell an utterly absorbed Sam about life at a Brixton comprehensive.

Gabriel likes him, he can see Sam’s callowness, but whereas for Sam this is a cause of embarrassment - it makes him feel that somehow he does not quite belong - to Gabriel it is attractive to see such genuine candour and enthusiasm.

‘So, you had to fight. Wow, man - you know, I’ve never really had a serious fight. Up to Bedales when I was twelve, I’d had a few at school, but they were just sort of clutching onto each other and a few ineffectual whacks and lots of sobbing and ending up best friends.’

‘Nah, mate, it definitely weren’t like that on the streets of South London, but you didn’t have to do it that often, once people knew. Come on, I say one more line and then we party.’

It is past one thirty when they leave Cornelius’s, out into the yellow white darkness which shimmers with the drugs behind their eyes. The street is not quieter but in a way it is calmer: the night people have it now - the dealers and pimps, the criminals, the desperate and the mad, and the drug-head party-fiends like our five. These species of humanity know each other, they recognize and as a rule leave alone - it is the people who do not belong who are in danger. Gabriel and Cornelius lead them well: not too loud and not too quiet, neither arrogant nor cowed, as they walk back up Railton Road a little way before turning off towards Brixton Hill. They are the only people on a quiet back street now and the mood lightens.

‘Tell us about this Posse, Gabriel,’ says Jake. ‘The party we’re going to.’

‘Yeah, good people. They do squats for a fee. Break in, put in new locks, do the leccy and gas. Spend the money they make on throwing these parties.’

‘And anyone can go?’

‘Yeah and no - you don’t need an invite, but you’ve got to look the part or know someone.’

‘And Gabriel knows everyone,’ says Cornelius, happy in the thought that he too knows many people.

They cross over the Effra Road and climb the side of Brixton Hill; after a few twists and turns, set back from the road, here it is: a three-story red-brick Edwardian house that had been boarded up by the council last winter after the lead was stolen off the roof while it was awaiting modernization. People in various peculiar and wonderful costumes wander around the front garden which is illuminated, from the trees, by an assortment of lamps stolen from roadworks, christmas lights, and spotlights, and, from the house, by multicoloured disco lights shining from every window. On the front of the house is a car bonnet sprayed with one huge eye, a giant papier-mâché spliff, and a flower bed made from a blanket of chicken wire into which turf and flowers have been arranged.

At the door, two men. The first has bright blue Doc Martin boots that yellow lace up to a couple of inches below his knees; a kilt, with a steel sporran on which is a copy of the eye on the bonnet; on top, nothing but a battered leather jacket covered with occult symbols marked out in studs; spiky blue hair and large skull earrings. The other, a white man in his early thirties, has a mass of blonde dreadlocks held up high by a rasta cloth bound around them. His clothes seem relaxed to the point of near liquidity: a shapeless loose-knit yellow jumper above light brown trousers that seem not so much to start and finish at top and bottom but to vaguely fade away. His open-toed sandals, mostly hidden by the raggy baggy length of his trousers, look a part of him they are so worn and supple. Sam thinks that he is the most comfortable looking person he has ever seen.

‘Alright, Gabriel?’ says the booted man in a broad Glaswegian accent.

‘Yeah, alright Moonshine. Things here?’

‘Fucking mental, pal. You have fun, eh.’ And with a nod at the others as they pass in, he turns back to the street.

The first thing that hits them as they walk through the door is the noise: it does not seem to have any focus, it just fills the air - a deep booming thudding beat. The next is the heat and the crowd and the smell of incense and dope, quickly followed by the fact that the inside is even more bizarrely decorated than the outside. The floors have been painted with psychedelic patterns and the walls, ceilings, and furniture have all been decorated - sometimes with nothing odder than cooking foil or Christmas paper (where from? Jake wonders), but usually with something extraordinary that has been made by the Posse or something ordinary placed incongruously. There are brilliantly coloured kites (which could never fly, Sam judges) hanging from the ceiling; the upstairs corridor is open on one side, with a balustrade covered with tiny mirrored squares; the wall opposite has been roughly knocked down and replaced with hanging shards of broken glass lit from behind. Downstairs on the largest wall is a circle made of thirteen old typewriters surrounded by an explosion of scattered letters cut from shiny coloured card. The lighting adds to the strangeness, everywhere coming from unexpected places - from underneath sofas and chairs, behind pictures and clocks with flowers or paste jewellery tied to the hands, from within boxes filled with jam jars. Sam is relieved to see that the clothing in here is more like the pub than outside, there are dressed-up people who thereby have status and people make way for them, but there are plenty who are not and he does not feel too out of place.

Cornelius looks around. ‘Magnificent, gentlemen, magnificent. An Aladdin’s cave for our delectation - I suggest we explore. I shall head for the darkness, naturally,’ he points at the corridor off to the right which is lit by flickering violet fairy lights on the ceiling, and the orange glow of burning incense on the walls, ‘and see your good selves later.’

A moment or two passes. Gabriel sees some people he knows and, with a farewell look to the remaining three, goes over to them. For a moment Sam feels a nervous sadness as at the breaking of a fellowship; but then, taking a deep breath, a rush of drug enthusiasm hits him and he looks around. Suddenly he is feeling confident, he is feeling great - he will explore, upstairs, on his own! His boldness fills him with delight, he takes a can and asks Jake and Ralph if they will be okay with the rest of the booze while he takes a wander. They see an empty sofa tucked into a little alcove (both of which have been covered in newspaper) and nod at it.

Sam climbs the stairs feeling splendid, observing the people he passes - everything seems friendly and unexclusive, although it is, he reminds himself with a shiver of pleasure, very exclusive; but then he is back, observing happily. Along the corridor, now; gently gently slipping and sliding past people, pirouetting with balletic grace around a girl with long curling hennaed hair as he holds his beer at arm’s length; standing against the wall pressed on one side by a star-child in ragged bright