Dreams less sweet

The day started off idle, listening to the sport on and off in Barry’s room. The TV broke down last week and Ade left on yesterday to go see his girlfriend in Oxford, taking his TV and a quarter of black with him too.

Selfish bastard, thinks us.

So we remain Boxless. Athletic lost 0-3 at Dardray, their seventh straight defeat, and they now languish at the bottom of the table. Goals galore in the First Division; Arsenal beat Aston Villa 6-2 at Villa Park and Liverpool thrashed Luton Town 6-0. Man United are at the top.

In the evening Lee came round and at ten, Pete, he and I went down to The Cat and Lizard to meet Ian, a quiet, thoughtful acquaintance of Lee’s from College. He has a crew cut and a pinched but kindly face, and his eyes seem to speak of good natured smiles; I took an immediate liking to him. He’d brought along a Polaroid instant camera, and Lee had his Pentax ME Super with a borrowed flashgun; the plan was to break open a crypt in Crookgreave Cemetery and take pictures.

We had to scale a wall topped with broken shards of glass skirting busy Treadwell Road. The other three got over in no time but I hashed it up and eventually bundled myself over several yards higher up, cutting myself and tearing my overcoat in the process. We walked cautiously through the ivy-choked undergrowth, over graves and between trees, until we found a path that wound down towards the main Wickbourne Road entrance near the Mortuary, a sinister, clinical-looking building with whitewashed windows and a high ventilated roof.

In this area the path broadened out and skirted a dark and massive chapel; here and there were dotted several above ground crypts. We tried half-heartedly to get into two: the doors were of heavy bronze and wouldn’t yield, but eventually we stumbled across one with granite doors that looked to have been recently opened and re-sealed with a strip of crumbling slate. This was easily pried away with the claw hammer we’d brought and after much shoving and scraping and straining, and with a loud grating noise, the door came open.

Our hearts raced—mine was going hammer and tongs, and we pulled the great sheet of stone down from the top like a drawbridge, but it gave under its own weight and with a loud crash broke into three pieces to the ground.

Blackness beckoned within. Torchlight flickered across stone. In a state of frenzied haste Lee and Ian got their cameras ready and as they clicked picture after picture, the jumbled ranks of headstones were lit with searing blue blinks of light.

Ian leaned right into the crypt, photographing the wooden coffin that lay in funereal splendour on a stone ledge within, its lid scattered with plaster and coming apart at one corner. The fear of detection galvanised Pete and I into hoarse pleas to Ian and Lee to hurry up—grave robbing is still a capital offence supposedly—and eventually (thankfully!), after what seemed an age, Ian and Lee came away and we all scurried through the headstones and back into the trees. We had to lead Lee by the arm because the flash on his camera had blinded him and all he could see as we stumbled toward the wall and safety was the stark brick interior of the crypt and its coffin seared into his mind by the intense light.

We got back over the wall higher up Treadwell Road, Ian, Pete and I vaulting over simultaneously, leaving Lee to wait for a safe moment to escape. Ian’s Polaroid pictures were unimpressive. Only two showed anything, the first an end-on view of the coffin in situ, the second showing it at a more perpendicular angle, centred on the gaping blackness where the seams were coming apart at one end. He’d accidently dropped two pictures actually inside the crypt. The dead won’t mind.

We’d all been invited to a party at Sutton Road, so with still-racing hearts we got a cab that deposited us at the party. It was crammed to overflowing inside, so Ian, Lee and I decided to go back to Ian’s flat in Blenheim Place and dump the evidence. His flat is in a superb Georgian house that sits in a large three-sided square with the open side facing the sea.

The living room is a cavernous place, decorated in a lavish but faded manner, complete with chandelier and heavy curtains. . . . There seemed to be acres of floor space, and in the far corner of the room, diagonally opposite the door, three people sprawled on chairs watching a tiny black and white TV—Mick, with shaved head (a Psychic TV fan), Alex, from Australia, and a bespectacled Computer Studies undergrad on a visit from Hatfield Poly.

Ian sat in silence, playing with a bayonet. A strange atmosphere prevailed in the room, perhaps only because of the vastness of the place, but it was almost as if we were illegally squatting in a closed-up and rambling stately home. The shaved heads, the torn army fatigues and the careless attitude didn’t match the fading splendour of the room. Someone passed a joint around. Alex kept asking questions in a voice that seemed somehow dwarfed by the prevailing silence. So did everything else.

And in one way the atmosphere there fitted perfectly with the visit to the cemetery and the glimpses of the crypt, a funereal mood, as if the room was a chapel, the living occupying something meant for the dead. Or dying.

The party at Sutton Road was OK. It was very crowded. I found the gang upstairs: Lindsey, Shelley and Susie were pissed, Lindsey in a talkative, loosened-up frame of mind, careless & drunk. John Turney was in wonderful form, and dominated the room with his humourous melodrama. Ian sat quietly on a chair in the corner, watching. Then he leaped up and was out of the room in a flash, saying in his low, soft voice that he had to go and “see you on Monday.”

Lee and I returned to Ian’s to sleep. Ian’s room abuts onto the large sitting room I described above and the earlier mood was pressed home more forcefully than ever. Ian’s bed was just a single mattress on the floor. An altar-like stand on which stood a large simple mirror was placed against one wall, draped with a long flowing white shroud that fell in pale and graceful folds to the floor.

The floor was littered with records; Ian put on Psychic TVs latest LP, Dreams Less Sweet. The windows were deep set and on the broad white sill the light from a white candle filled the recess, a pool of shadow playing around its base. The glow diminished and was lost in the vast gloom of the high room.