Hot under my skin

My condemnation of Gav and Alex and their ilk seems, on reflection, a little like the pot calling the kettle black.

In the white heat of contempt I don’t pause to look at my own failed bargains with myself. I promise myself so much and reward myself with so little. At least Gav uses every free moment he’s got. I don’t.

I paid the rent today, which was five days late. The landlord phoned us up in case we’d forgotten. So after handing over our money at Botham Street, I walked into town via White Deer Park. On Midden Road I saw a large blue-green dragonfly. This surprised me because to my knowledge, there aren’t any stretches of open water nearby and the area is quite urban.

Then, as I walked along Queen’s Road, a young woman rushed from a house across the street ringing her hands and in a state of agitation, shouting about “the dirty revolting working classes, they make me hot under my skin.” She passed me and ran off down a side road still shouting, beginning a tirade against “dirty fat women” which was lost to me as she disappeared from view.

No one seemed to take much notice.

Watermouth seems to have a large population of grotesques, derelicts and just plain nutters. You see them occasionally in the Cathedral grounds or pacing the pavements around Maynard Gardens.

When Jeremy was down I remember this: as he, Lee and I walked back from the pier, a young woman ahead of us with black hair, her face a ghastly orange beneath the street lamps, and carrying two heavily laden plastic bags, started shouting and cursing (“fucking-this,” “fucking-that,” etc.) at the passing cars and people. The last we saw of her she was squatting on her haunches on the traffic island at the bottom of Andrew St. with her trousers round her knees, calmly taking a shit, oblivious to all but herself.

Then there’s the young long-haired man in trench coat, woolly cap and kickers who’s always deeply engrossed in conversation with himself or some invisible friend, gesticulating with his arms, jabbing a finger to emphasise a point, and speaking in a rapid nasal voice so unintelligible that it sounds like complete gibberish. Sometimes he carries a newspaper and unfolds it, holding it up to show his nonexistent companion some feature of interest or importance.

Or there’s the old lady on the pavement near the Pembroke, she of the muscular, active outdoor variety with a bird like urgency of gait and bright gleaming eyes. The other day I saw her standing at the side of the road with a piece of pink toilet paper in her hand, thrusting it at the approaching traffic with a look of insolent determination on her face and going through the motions of wiping her arse.

The house has been empty most of the day; Lindsey’s at work, at the Admiral. Susie has gone out this evening with Conrad and the rest of Atom Dance Eight. I’ve been watching TV all day.

I was disturbed late on by a blazing row next door between husband and wife, she screaming that “you can’t tell me what to fuckin’ do!” while the kids sobbed and shouted for them to stop.

Entrance hall

I've been worried about all my things piled up unprotected in my old room at the Vicarage, so quite late on Lee and I returned with his bike lock and a hammer, and climbed in through the basement window (the lock on the front door is now at the Grey House). We found Morris snoring off his hangover in Lee’s old room: Lee had locked him in and so he’d had to piss in the corner.

It was pitch black inside, and as we groped for the stairs we bumped into 'Dylan’ who was wandering about, alone in the darkness. Lee nearly hit him with the hammer.

“I thought I had met an early demise” said Dylan, in his odd, precise way.

Lee and I went upstairs and smashed the glass above the door on the first floor landing leading up to my room, wound the bike lock through the gap, and thus sealed off the top floor. We left our friend (“psychedelic Ken,” according to one of Alex’s friends who seems to know of him) standing bewildered and lost in the dark entrance hall outside Ben’s room, his glasses still hanging precariously from his right ear.

Fragile eggshell mind

Ben had a ‘party’ at the Vicarage to celebrate what I heard was an “indefinite extension” Oculus have agreed to (supposedly arranged in London in negotiations with Desmond Ardingly, MP for Watermouth), on the condition that we agree to leave within twenty four hours of notice being given. That changes things slightly; maybe I should stay on for the last three weeks of term at the Vicarage?

Quite a few people turned up to the party, and when I looked in, everyone was sitting in his room talking and smoking; Morris had collapsed in a drunken heap on the threadbare sofa.

Sarah has already arranged for a few homeless wimmin to move in at the weekend. Morris has decided that he’s going to stay in Gav’s room for a while to supervise the haphazard comings and goings: there’s an escaped nut called Tom who believes he’s Jim Morrison and who’s living in Gav’s old room for a couple of days.

Magic roundabout

I packed some of my things up at the Vicarage.

I found someone asleep on my bed on the top floor. His feet stank. I angrily shook him awake, a thin-faced man in his 20s, maybe even 30, who I’d never seen before, with collar length frazzled hair and a distant unconcerned expression on his face. One of Ben Beresford’s mental patient friends, who he’s presumably met at the hospital . . ..

I told him to get off my bed and he did, his glasses dangling askew from one ear, nowhere near his face, where they remained for the rest of the evening. . . He was quite polite and spoke with a sort of unnecessarily precise and slightly mad emphasis on each individual word. He said he’d felt tired and fell asleep on my bed.

“Are there any other beds in the house?”

I directed him down to Ben’s room where he fell asleep on his back, his head propped against the head-board of the bed, a cigarette in his mouth, his glasses still hanging from one ear.

He reminded me of Dylan from Magic Roundabout.

Transient fruits

I helped Lee and Pete move the rest of their things to the Grey House on a sculpture park trolley, borrowed from the Art College. We had an amusing time steering it down hill as it weighed a ton and was difficult to control.

The Grey House was opened as a squat on May 29th. Alex and Gav slept the first few nights here; the police were told, the owner of the building informed and legal warning notices put up. It was decided not to go through the Watermouth Housing Association as everyone is by now sick of Morris’s unrealistic promises and his mania for publicity and his Squatting Cause.

The owner of the Grey House is a Mrs. Coldman-Hicks, who’s slowly dying in a mental hospital; her son said that we can live here until she finally pegs out and he wants to sell. Lee showed me some of her insane letters, some to “The Col. of the Guards Regiment,” scrawled in a childish, almost illegible hand, that rant on about the people next door and their “machine” that when they switch it on hurts her right eye and right leg, the postman who keeps people prisoner and all the visitors who steal from her. She even had her solicitor send the next door neighbour a letter saying that “our client kindly asks that you refrain from putting your hands through the wall and stealing her money.”

Her son obviously wants shut of the whole business. Gav said he was very decent about everything and put just one condition on their living there, that his fiancée’s daughter be allowed to move in to the basement. But when the daughter turned up she brought along three friends, all of whom seemed to want to move in too.

Mo has moved out of Castle Mount Court as the landlord wouldn’t renew her tenancy so she is now living in Pete’s back room. Apparently I could have had Alex’s room because Alex said he was going to Amsterdam, but now he’s delayed his departure until the summer so that Gav can go with him, but at least he offered me his front room while I clean up the basement. I can hardly complain when it’s free, and Pete’s offered me his room when he goes to America in late August.

Until then I’ve got several possibilities. I could stay here another two-and a-half weeks until the end of term and move into Gareth’s room at Westdorgan Road as he’s going home for the summer, or I could try find a place on my own straight away. There are advantages and disadvantages to both schemes.

Guy moved out of his flat into a bedsit of his own in Ledwell Street. It’s £25 a week and he said it was very difficult finding a decent place; he hung around newsagents waiting for the first edition of the Herald every morning, trailed round the agencies and made numerous and fruitless ‘phone calls and trips to see dingy pigsties let by sharks and con men before he found his current place.

I know this would get me down, but a single room on my own would be ideal. Moving into Gareth’s room is easier but I can’t help worrying I’d get caught up in the enjoyable but fatal round of going out and staying up into the early hours, or sitting about talking or taking drugs . . . transient fruits, soon rotten. Plus Westdorgan Road is miles from central Watermouth . . ..

I just can’t decide. The rent at Gareth’s is £17.50 a week; the rent for a bedsit is bound to be much higher.

City of words

I should have been spent the day working on the vacation essay for Conflict and Consensus, but instead I sat in the library and read through the Times Literary Supplement for 1963 and 1964 (“Ugh”—a review of Naked Lunch—plus the spate of subsequent letters, including one from Burroughs himself about the review, the book itself, and the pros and cons of publishing such material). I photocopied all this and the famous Burroughs Paris Review interview from 1965, read through another interview with Kerouac (who by then was an alcoholic fiercely guarded by Stella, his wife of one year) and also the chapter “Rub Out The Word” on Burroughs in Tony Tanner’s City of Words.

All this cost me £3 altogether, but was enjoyable. I read some sceptical reviews of Wilson’s The Outsider and The Occult which left me wondering about the absence of any critical faculties in my mind when I read them.

When I got back from campus, I came across Ben Beresford in The Pembroke, talking loudly, insistently, and very obscurely about his messianic destiny. Since Tuesday, he's begun to exhibit all the manifestations of madness. At a nearby table, Ian and George sat drinking, silent and watchful.

Alex kept asking, “Do you want an education?” to anyone who would listen, and said he has secret knowledge that he’ll give to us once we’ve earned it. He sat at the bar talking to everyone and to no one. The landlord—who we’ve got to know—came over to the other bar and demanded to know what Ben was “on’—“Look at his pupils! They’re huge!” But as far as we know, he’s not ‘on’ anything at the moment. Gav thinks he’s having an acid flashback (Ben said the floor was shimmering as though it was moving), but then Gav changed his mind and decided Ben had gone totally mad. Ben talks with a direct, unblinking and earnest stare, yet seems emotionless.

“Do you want an education?”

We rushed from the pub certain of his insanity, and when we neared the Vicarage we could see people stopping and staring across at the Church opposite. We knew immediately that he’d done something dramatic. Across the gleaming white façade of the Church, Ben—we immediately assumed it was him—had spray-painted in large, painfully conspicuous red letters across the base of the crucified Christ:

CRASS So what if Jesus died on the cross what about the fuck-up I don’t give a Toss
On the gate of the Vicarage, he’d pinned a Learner driver symbol and in his room was another 'L', pinned to the window and facing the Oculus building. Pete and I hung about helplessly. Alex’s hippy friends—they of the ‘I’m really wrecked’ glazed appearance, one bearded, one with Mohican and anxious face—turned up but seemed blasé about the whole situation. We suspected them of collusion with the graffiti opposite.

A little later we heard that Ben had sprayed the word “ANNIE” (for Annie Anxiety of Crass we assume) on the Post Office building and showed up there, delivering his spiel to alarmed pedestrians who, frightened for their kids, phoned the police who then came round to the Vicarage asking questions. They discovered that the Church had been broken into, which betrays a clear link with us, because ‘The Means’ keeps going on about opening up the church to the public.

Later, we all went to Inga and Ebbe’s party at Castle Mount Court which was a quiet affair, so we left after an hour or so for another party at 28 Essex Circle. Stu, Gareth and I ended up at the all night café near the Art College.