Mecca

I worked at my essay most of the day in the Art College Library while Lee built hardboard models of his photographic room.

We came home at eight and at eleven, Pete, L. and I, tooled up with crowbar, screwdriver, torch and bags, caught the bus into town. At dinnertime as we’d wandered near Prince’s Way by the seafront, we’d spotted several boarded up buildings, one that looked like a hotel seeming to offer the greatest possibilities. So while most of Watermouth streamed out of the pubs at closing time we three were clambering over walls and tiptoeing furtively through the shadows.

We gained entry to the Mecca, an empty pub in the downstairs of the building, by squeezing through a window while balancing precariously on spiked railings. Both L. and I ripped our trousers, and it took me much longer than the other two to maneuver myself through the gap. I’m as agile as an elephant, and made a corresponding amount of noise. There was nothing worth removing in the pub, part of which seemed to have been used by skinheads as a glue-sniffing hide-out, so we left. After half-an-hour of hoarse whispering and flitting to and fro on the roof of the pub, we finally figured out a way of getting into the building above, the windows of which overlooked the roof, by managing to force open a toilet window and sliding through.

We found ourselves in the empty offices of the Watermouth Planning Department, every room of which was full of celluloid maps, photographs of road junctions, houses, building sites, pile upon pile of files, and also a couple of scale models of proposed redevelopment schemes. It took us two hours or so to cover the entire building and we finished up in the basement searching for the dark rooms.

Lee was overjoyed when we discovered boxes and rolls of unused photographic paper and also a ciné film developer and film trimmer, all of which he estimated was worth about £300 and will do for his photographic room and also means he won’t have to buy any more paper from college.

It was three o’clock when we finally left, walking casually down the exterior fire escape and catching a taxi.