Drudge nation

Del dropped Lee and I off at the Art College with the purloined drink in two holdalls, and within minutes we had our £20. We gave Ian a fiver and pooled the remainder in order to buy a decent second hand ciné camera for the planned Grey Triangle venture, an idea we still talk about. . . .

We left the booze in Room 312 and went off to look for somewhere to live, trailing round to two rental agencies and even scanning the window of a newsagent near Ian’s for flats. There was nothing. “We’ve not had any houses since the summer,” said the lady behind the desk, blithely, and we’re facing the prospect of spending a few weeks next term bedding down on various floors. We were very despondent until we whiled away an enjoyable hour in a games shop, admiring a Mayan style chess set. Lee pilfered a set of gaming dice and this cheered us up a bit.

We went back to the Art College and found the Combined Arts ‘party’ in full swing, a few people standing awkwardly in one room drinking and hardly talking, while the real mania was taking place down the corridor in the printing room—an impromptu disco, shaving foam everywhere, a set of screaming stumbling snogging laughing drunks covered in booze and sweat. I wasn’t drunk enough at all. Lee cleared the dance floor with a fire extinguisher and everyone reeled at the clouds of white powder.

George stayed quietly in the first room, talking softly, upright and tall like a spectre, until he, Lee and I, plus a few other people I didn’t know, left for the Bellemoor. One of the girls was from Easterby, the other—called, coincidently enough, Alison Martindale—wore leopard-print tights and had her hair tied back with a band of the same.

I talked with the girl from Easterby; something struck me as odd and neurotically intense about her wide eyed, faltering smiles. We moved on from the pub to a pizza restaurant before splitting up, Lee and I intending to go on to Ian’s and the crypts in Smith Square, but we never got there.