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.
