Fixtures

Last night, not long after we got back from the football, we set off to the pub for a few drinks, and there ensued a brief but intense discussion about the RCP. I stayed silent for much of the time.

Doug feels alienated and find the Party’s inflexibility a little irritating at times; all questions or criticisms founder emptily against the brick-wall of the RCP’s ‘my Party right or wrong’ syndrome. The Party demands 100% commitment and nothing less; Doug took the line that living a life in the best (Marxist) way possible for yourself simply wasn’t enough and was, in fact, futile if you weren’t involved with wider party politics, etc. He was quite forceful about this.

Eventually, after everyone else turned up, we stopped at the pub off-sales shop and walked to Marion Place. Katie greeted us at the door. She cultivates coarseness in herself, and was full of knowing smiles and ‘deep’ looks. Their clean, large house is magnificent compared to ours and it soon filled up, developing into a fairly good party.
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I got pleasantly pissed and found myself embroiled in one of those self-induced and hatefully enjoyable meetings with Rowan alone together in her room. Then I met one of the girls who lived in Jervis Terrace over the summer; she seemed very naïve and innocent. I met other people too, fleetingly in the crush of the corridor or in some dim room; Guy was pissed, and after asking me if he could, head butted me and knocked me over. I saw Lindsey and Susie and Gareth and Stu briefly on the stairs . . . lots of other faces . . . fragments of situations, too many and too complicated to recount in detail. . . .

I drifted up the stairs to find Barry, Guy and Miles Beattie plus assorted others watching a video of The Young Ones. Ade and Doug lay on the bed, the latter with his head in Lindsey’s lap, she with her arm draped across his chest. For an instant the old hurts sprang up like flames inside. “Oh dear, Lindsey’s involved,” said Susie pathetically, sitting on the steps. . . .

My evening ended down in the basement in a windowless room whose walls were papered with words such as “Lust” and “Bonk," scavving dope from a soldier home on leave from N. Ireland and his hippy friends while Katie and Rowan stared unblinkingly at one another, playing their Staring Game.

When I got back to Jervis Terrace everyone else was asleep and it was five a.m.; I had to wake Ade up to let me in.

Today Doug took Barry and I for a drive to see ‘Nick’s Hill,’ a mysterious mound a few miles north of Watermouth. We followed Hill Road through suburbia until we were out into the countryside, the fields rolling flintily away towards the chimneys of Langridge Cliffs power station and the grey blur of the sea.

At the Hill itself there were a lot of Sunday trippers, Mums and Dads and kids who kindled memories of not too distant occasions with my own parents on similar outings. A restaurant and pub stand on a low plateau facing on one side the tremendous grey vista of the flat plain striding toward the horizon and London, and on the other the Hill itself, a perfectly conical mound rising from the bushy landscape, its even slopes dotted with shrubs and clad in a paler grass than everywhere else. The wind was bitter, cutting through us as it roared in from the sea, and although a few people had braved the ascent up the slopes, we weren’t feeling so strenuous so we braced ourselves against the wind and strode back to the car.

Doug left at teatime to go back to London, to be replaced by yet more of Barry’s RCP friends—John again, and Derek Caraway (who they all call Del), a replica of John with a gaping shark-like and down-turned mouth, and the quiet Kevin, who reminded me of a character from a 1930s Boys Own comic. They were all in fine form and I slunk into my customary position along with the rest of the fixtures in the room.

When John and Del got together the sparks flew. The three of them went out for a drink with Barry and came back at closing time in high spirits. Barry and Pete and Mo have gone to bed and the other three have taken acid and driven off into Watermouth in Del’s car.