She slowed as she came near, a look of recognition, or swallowed water, on her face. Without goggles she couldn’t have seen much through the chlorine. Then she slid under the tricolor floats into the fast lane, tuck-turned, and slithered away.
Freya first met Janet when they lived opposite each other in the same dorm. They were a year older than the rest of their corridor, so felt superior and wise, the same way a nine-and-a-half-year-old feels about a nine-year-old. They could think of nothing more pleasurable than sitting at the edge of the Union Square, backs to the Student Advice Centre, judging their peers. The square was shaped a bit like an amphitheater: stepped seating on three sides, and a lower area in the middle that was, in effect, a stage. Janet and Freya observed the way freshers’ postures changed as they approached the limelight as though getting into character; the uncasual casualness of onstage Frisbee and Hacky Sack; the theory that people semiconsciously positioned themselves according to their looks: munters on the moldy paving near the dining hall exhaust vent versus hotties having their literal time in the sun, smoldering away in the suntrap southeast quadrant.
Although Don had always felt that it was his unique powers of underwater seduction that had won Freya over, the truth was that she and Janet had been watching him. Don was in the year above them. He had a very part-time job (Wednesday afternoons, fortnightly) delivering the student newspaper, Off Beat. There were four newspaper dispensers in the corners of the square. On a number of occasions, Freya and Janet sat with cups of tea and a slice of banana bread watching the gloveless machismo with which he tore off the plastic ties on each stack. He was chubbier then, pre-beard, with thick, soft arms and a shallow forelock that dangled three fishing lines into the center of his forehead. The student population was genuinely excited by the prospect of a new issue of Off Beat—it had won awards—so as soon as he filled a dispenser, nearby first-years would scurry across to grab a fresh one, giving Don the air, which he clearly enjoyed, of a zookeeper at feeding time. He used a six-wheeled sack trolley and deliberately, they decided, carried way more at one time than seemed practical, even when going up steps. He used a red Ford van, one of the few vehicles allowed onto pedestrianized areas of campus, which he drove with an arm resting on the rolled-down window, parking, they again observed, in deliberately provocative positions, on crosshatched markings, in front of fire exits, all to signal his maverick approach.
Although he was ridiculous, there was also something likable about him, and Janet knew Freya was keen when she described his bum as looking “like an alarm bell.” Janet encouraged her to make the first move.
On a day that felt, to Don, no different from any other, since he was unaware of the mechanisms at work, Freya waited for him outside the changing rooms. She asked him if he’d like to sit with her and, in the café that overlooked the climbing wall, they shared chips with cheap mayonnaise. He admired her chlorine-burnt eyes.
“I like how hungry I feel after swimming,” she said.
“We have such agency when we’re hungry,” he said.
There was the sound of a free-climber hitting the crash mat.
“Before we eat,” he said, raising one fist into the sky, “we are revolutionaries. Afterward, bureaucrats.”
She picked up a chip and dunked it in the gunk.
The next time he saw her in the pool she was wearing goggles. Underwater, she could see the reason he always let her get out of the pool first: his hydrodynamic spoiler, an inverted fin, bulging from his shorts. When she went to the changing rooms, he stayed in the pool to swim it off, which took two and a half lengths. She was waiting for him in the intermediary foot-washing room with indentations on her forehead from where the goggles had been too tight. The smell of chlorine would always remind them of their first kiss.
After a fortnight, they consummated their relationship in the family changing room. In recent renditions of the story, Don toyed with an awkward joke about how the family changing room should be renamed the “changing the family” room because it marked the reinvention of established ideas of family, but he hadn’t worked out quite how to make it funny yet.
By the end of the second term, Freya and Don spent most of their time in her bedroom enjoying the fact that, almost by accident, they had swimmers’ physiques. The remaining time was spent with Janet, who was ruthless on enforcing a ban on canoodling in her company and, if she caught them at it, was known to clap loudly and say hey in the manner of someone shooing a dog away from a picnic.
Nineteen eighty-nine was a good, or at least action-packed year, to be at a left-leaning university. In one corner of the Union Square there was a well-meaning but badly made Tiananmen Square memorial: a life-size sculpture of the “Unknown Rebel,” the man who, with shopping bags in each hand, halted a column of Type 59 tanks. That the memorial was never made to wear a traffic cone showed the seriousness among the student body. In other news, Thatcher was starting to look unhinged; Black Monday revealed the vulnerability of the stock markets; the Happy Mondays revealed the quality of drugs from the continent. It was at a One Berlin–themed squat party in a derelict nursing home that they first discussed the idea of communal living. Along the corridor they could hear the cracking sound of a thin wall giving way as two adjacent bedrooms, east and west, were “unified” with the blunt end of a fire extinguisher. In the hallway there were burnouts jousting in NHS wheelchairs in the name of anticapitalism.
After the party they went back to Janet’s and sat on her mattress drinking West Country cider. Freya said something about how, in their halls of residence, with the tiny shared kitchen, the two unisex shower cubicles, and the papery walls, weren’t they already a kind of commune? And was it just a rumor that the design of the hall was based on a low-security Swedish prison? And the way all students wore the same clothes! They were a cult! Don was not yet known for his charismatic public speaking, but with a skinful of opaque cider he started to build a reputation. Janet and Freya sat on the bed on either side of him, feeling the mattress shift as he gestured and worked up a rhythm.
“All that hippie bullshit,” Don said, starting boldly, though giving the impression that he was not sure how the sentence would proceed, “just about ruined the project, just about sabotaged the whole idea, so they could spend a few years getting idealism out of their systems, then go succeed in their start-up businesses, running fucking plant nurseries and art supplies shops, and referring back to the wild years they spent trying to reinvent society, man [he made the peace sign, then flipped it round to a V]—telling their friends and children ‘imagine our naïveté’ and ‘if me-then could see me-now’—and the truth is, they were never going to get it right the first time, they were never going to just think up a new way of living, a new basis for society, and carry it out successfully, no chance, so you can’t call the hippie movement a failure—you can call them weaklings—but we should never forget it was just the first attempt, and it was decent, they should have kept going but the whole thing got dismissed as a fad, as educated druggies patting themselves on the back, as part of fashion, part of the sixties, because—and this is the real fuck-up—they let it get smeared with the sexual revolution, which has nothing to do with new structures for living.”
“You’re that bloke,” Janet had said, sipping from her plastic cup. “My brother warned me you’d be at university.”
Freya remembered noticing that after Don had said his bit he kept nodding, as though his sentence continued on, unheard, in his head. He strongly agreed with himself.
In their second year, all three of them moved off campus into a mid-terrace place on Maud Street, of which Patrick Kinwood was the private landlord. Janet was only willing to live with the couple on the agreement that they avoid all but the most cursory demonstrations of physical affections within her sight or earshot, saving it for the campus darkroom and swimming-pool changing rooms. This was perhaps one reason why Janet welcomed their landlord dropping by: he punctured the atmosphere of covert groping.
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nbsp; With his rental properties, tinted glasses, coke problem, and loneliness, Patrick reinforced all they hoped was true about someone made wealthy by the greeting card industry. “He signals the impending collapse of consumerism,” Don said, and nicknamed him “the canary in the coal mine.” Patrick supported Norwich City Football Club, the Canaries, who played in yellow and green, and sometimes, when drunk, he was known to shout “I’m canary till I die,” and this pleased Don. It was obvious when Patrick had enjoyed an excessive weekend because he would turn up on their doorstep on Monday holding a toolbox, ready to work through his self-loathing with DIY. Their house had a lot of work done that summer.
Don, meanwhile, was the tenant who told his landlord, “Property is theft.” It helped that Patrick was, at that time, mostly in love with Janet and would stop mid-sentence if she walked across the lounge in her towel. After a couple of months of getting to know Patrick, Don stopped calling him “the canary.” It had become difficult to see him as merely a representation of a particular worldview. Eventually there came a point when they were not freaked out to find their landlord—without the statutory twenty-four hours’ notice—waiting on their sofa for them to get back from seminars. It helped that the house was falling apart so there were always new reasons for him to turn up in grimy joggers. Being fifteen years their elder, but thinking of himself as broadly part of their generation, he made a point of not commenting on the state of the flat, red wine on the walls, a webbed crack in the skylight, two missing banisters.
When Janet asked if she could redecorate her room—three walls white, one eggplant—Patrick said he would help her. He paid for paint, rollers, brushes, dust sheets, and they spent days together in a poorly ventilated room, giddy from vapor. Patrick’s oft-proclaimed love for women in work clothes stemmed from Janet in a paint-spattered Radio 1 Roadshow T-shirt. Don enjoyed reminding Patrick of this: “You thought it was chemical attraction; she thought it was paint fumes.” Don and Patrick built their relationship on warmly assassinating each other’s characters. “God bless you, Don, safety valve of Middle England’s discontent.” It was only much later, while building the community, that he and Don, keeping their style of direct communication, slowly lost the buffer of goodwill.
After graduating, Freya, Don, and Janet moved to London, where the early 1990s recession had bedded in. Although residential rent was still high in central London, they’d been advised to look into office space. Don bought a secondhand suit and met the real estate agent, Ash, a broad Australian with a sun-ripened face and almost no lips, to look at a dirt-cheap block in North Lambeth. They shook hands and kept shaking as they walked. The entranceway was entirely mirrored, so that in all directions Don saw himself multiplied: an army of smartly dressed versions of himself shaking hands with an army of real estate agents forever. Don sometimes said it was the horror of this image from which the community was born.
The agent opened two locks and pushed through into a lightless space, unfastening and throwing up the industrial metal shutters that covered each window. The shutters made a sound like a train passing. Also, trains passed. The space was a huge, single white room, the floor covered with the thinnest blue office carpet, dusty windows running the length of two sides. They were overlooked all around by other offices, which were empty. The flat tar roof, a four-story climb up a New York–style fire escape, had a view as far as Crystal Palace in the southeast, and to the north they could make out a lack of buildings that, it took them some time to realize, was the river.
Once they’d moved in, they discovered that, each morning, the smell of burnt bacon fat pumped out of a nearby ventilation pipe and that huge rats patrolled the bins in the quadrangles between the surrounding buildings.
They built their own walls using office partitions and shelving, piles of books, shoe boxes, wardrobes, dressers, and cinder blocks from a Dumpster down the road. Janet hung curtains and pashminas as doorways. Sound traveled. She invested in musician’s earplugs rather than listen to her housemates’ idea of silent sex. The corner by the fire exit became the kitchen, with knee-high gas canisters and a two-ring camping stove on a school desk. They found a still-functioning industrial contact grill (one ribbed surface, one flat) out the back of the café opposite. It produced an unsettling plastic smell but was otherwise perfect.
Don managed to get a job that related to his film studies degree, working at the twenty-four-screen Elephant & Castle UCI. He squeezed out bags of nacho cheese, grease-sprayed the hot dogs and, best of all, emptied bladders of salsa that looked like liposuction fat. Popcorn dust clogged his sinuses.
Each screening had to be checked every half an hour to make sure nobody was smoking or having full intercourse in the deluxe seats. He never saw whole films, just glimpses as he moved from screen to screen: a man being tortured with a vise, a boy hugging a dog, animated clocks dancing, a male nurse talking about love, a series of massive explosions, snow on a lake, blood on bedsheets, a gondola trip … and so on, for twenty-four screens. His dissertation had been called “Collage and Sleep in Late European Cinema” and it was in this essay that Don had first put forward the idea that it was valuable to think of life as a film. Not that the individual was the star and there were cameras watching, but that our eyes and ears were a camera that was always recording. We had to make decisions about what our lives—a live broadcast, one-shot, uneditable film—were going to be about. In Don’s life-film, there was no sound track. He preferred the ambiguity of silence, he said. This was just one justification, of many, for why Don could not enjoy music.
He became irritatingly discerning, saying he would not consume toxic food or toxic culture, saying that nacho sauce, Lethal Weapon 3, and Margaret Thatcher all spawned from the same toothless maw. The UCI radicalized him. He knew by heart the trailers for A Few Good Men, Batman Returns, Basic Instinct, and Aladdin. He knew the taglines from numerous high-end adverts: Tanqueray, Omega, Bosch. When he was made redundant, he said this to his boss:
“Your mind—it is the center of your life. Everything you see and hear and feel. How would you know if someone stole your mind?”
It was from the trailer to Total Recall.
Freya worked in the admissions department of the School of Oriental and African Studies. Her two colleagues were married to each other and the office sometimes felt like an extension of their bedroom, with pet names and passive-aggressive whispering. The man was an alcoholic; five or six times a day they’d hear the conspicuous hiss of a can of Holsten Pils spitting froth onto the underside of his desk. It was never mentioned, though at the end of each workday he had the cans lined up by his feet. As far as Freya could tell, it had got to the point in their marriage when it was easier for his wife to pretend that the regular kerrrr-chisss sound was a normal part of the administrative bustle: keystrokes, photocopying, continental lager. As a way to feel better about her job, Freya stole and cycled home so much good-quality stationery that she started to get a backache. The notepads and rollerball pens would become key tools in planning the community.
Meanwhile, Janet worked in a vintage clothes warehouse. Campaigners used to come in and slash the furs. Addicts used to steal novelty ties from the one-pound bin. The clothes arrived in huge, tightly wrapped bales, which, once cut, flopped out, trebling in size: marshes of dead people’s dirty glad rags. There was no heating because heating was pointless in a space that size, so Janet had a permanent dust cough and sniffles and was eventually diagnosed with bronchitis.
This said, the three of them were reasonably happy: Freya and Janet bonded by jobs they despised while Don, newly jobless, was the stay-at-home housewife, cleaning and cooking. Then Patrick arrived. The recession had hit the rental market and he’d had to sell off a property. They didn’t find out until later that the one he sold was the one he had been living in. He was homeless. They thought he would only stay for the weekend, but on Monday evening Janet and Freya came home from work to find he had laid out a bribe: two dozen oysters and a bottle of champagne. S
ince he’d quit cocaine, he had taken up eating. As Janet frowned and prodded at one of the frilled, quasi-testicular sacs, Patrick realized that oysters were no guarantee of seduction. Don, on the other hand, dove right in.
During those first two weeks, Patrick made himself indispensable, doing practical things like building plasterboard walls, which, Don claimed, were mainly motivated by his desire to achieve privacy with Janet. Then Freya got made redundant too and Patrick offered to cover the shortfall in rent, at which point he became permanent. While Janet went to work, the three of them explored free London: morning swims in Hampstead mixed-sex pond, lunch from the Hare Krishnas, museums in the afternoon. Each night, when Janet was at her most tired and susceptible, Patrick would show her his leather-bound notebook full of primitive sums proving that, with a mixture of mild benefit fraud and some extra roommates to lower costs, Janet could quit her job and join them in enjoying the summer of the slump. One glorious evening, when she could feel a new chest infection brewing, Janet caved.
They brought in an old university friend, Li, who was clever, lonely, and had a nose bridge so slight she had to tie on her glasses. Don suggested they invite Ash—the real estate agent—by handwritten letter because, as Don wrote, “I thought I saw something in you that was longing for the other,” but they got no reply. They brought in Perry, a skinny would-be scriptwriter who built himself an actual garden shed in one corner of the room for live/work. There was Chris, who was repetitive but useful, an eco-carpenter in the days when eco-something didn’t just mean he had once climbed a tree. There was Alana, who “disliked bread” and brought with her a hypoallergenic kitten. There was Arlo Mela, a young Welsh-Sardinian sous-chef who worked so many hours at Le Gavroche that they were never sure if he slept in his bed or just muddled the duvet for effect. With each new recruit, they rearranged the walls to make new bedrooms. The rent dropped. They shared food. Sunday lunches were gourmet—oysters not unusual—with above-the-rooftop views.