Bit of a Blur (3 page)

I worked more at the supermarket, to pay the deposit, but it was worth it. Things turned around pretty quickly. We moved in on New Year’s Day and I soon forgot about all the other girls I’d known before. Justine and I spent hours doing nothing in particular. Some girls might have been put off by the bow tie and bright green apron, but Justine thought it was hilarious. She had a crap job as well, running a hotel.

I handed in my notice at Safeway and got another job at a scaffolding depot, putting blobs of purple paint on everything. If it belonged to the yard, it had to have some purple paint on it. It was nasty stuff that paint, took my skin off, but I liked working there. Pretty soon I was labouring for scaffolders on building sites. Scaffolders pride themselves on being the wild men of construction. I worked with a murderer called Bill. He nearly killed me a couple of times, accidentally, but he wasn’t nearly as nasty as the supermarket people. He carried a revolver in the glove compartment of his horrible car, which he drove appallingly badly. We travelled all over the place together, until he had a bad fall. I was lucky to escape from that job with only a few blisters. The gangs often used to drink quite a lot at lunchtime, as much as four or five pints in an hour, and then spend the afternoon swinging from poles high above the ground.

There was a big job at the nuclear power station at Winfrith, rebuilding the main reactor. That went on for weeks. It was spooky in that place, all underground corridors and restricted zones. When we were building the scaffold tower around the core of the reactor we had to wear white suits and Geiger counters. It was still not as bad as Safeway.

Goldsmiths College said they’d have me after all, despite my recent lack of form, and I set off for London a year late to start a French degree. Someone else was getting his stuff out of his parents’ car when I arrived at the student halls of residence with my own parents. I saw him unload a guitar. He was covered in paint, but even if he hadn’t been it would have been obvious that he was an art student: pale and skinny; National Health specs; huge trousers and a stripy, baggy jumper. It’s a moment that I remember very clearly. I liked him from the instant I saw him and I had the certain feeling that one of the main characters in my life had just walked on to the stage. His name was Graham Coxon and he had the room above me, but I didn’t see him again for a few weeks. He had friends who were in their final year, and he spent his time with them.

Camberwell is a far cry from Bournemouth. It’s in the most populous square mile of Europe, in the borough of Southwark, just south of the Thames. Stannard Hall, where we lived, was a rotten eyesore in an otherwise beautiful street that ran around a park with plane trees, tennis courts and a bandstand. It was a leafy enclave in a squalid neighbourhood where civilisation was permanently on the brink of collapse. It really wasn’t safe after dark, or even in the daytime. There were a lot of muggings. In the broad daylight of a Saturday afternoon, a couple of weeks after we all arrived, a gang plundered the hall. There was a high fence around the building and grilles on the windows, but they smashed the doors down and grabbed everyone’s stereos and cameras.

We were encouraged not to look too much like students, especially in October, when the marauding gangs were on the lookout for bewildered-looking, easy targets. A stick-thin, big-brained, benevolent psychology don lived there in the hall with Laura, his Alsatian. He gave us all hope. He drove a VW camper van and he seemed to enjoy sleeping out on the front line. You went to see him when you got mugged or menaced and he made you tea. I never needed to go and see him. When I got to know Graham he told me that there was dog poo in the lounge when he went in sometimes.

Paul Hodgson was the first person I really connected with at college. He was always getting mugged. He still is. I ran into him in the street a few months ago and he had a black eye from a thief. He was set upon by rogues even before he started at Goldsmiths, on his way to the interview. He’s quite a dandy dresser. Maybe that’s what it is. Paul talked a lot about Shelley and Byron. He was doing Fine Art and he made me laugh. The people who did art at my school weren’t that clever, or funny. The clever people did physics and chemistry. Paul was very perceptive and inquisitive. His dad, Ken, was a plumber and Paul manipulated high-falutin’ art concepts in a west London drawl, with a mild stutter. ‘Owls!’ - he called me Als - ‘Maaate, have a word with Brownlee, he’s s-pouting Were-Were-Wittgenstein; the wanger.’ Jason Brownlee was another artist. He had the room opposite me. He had fallen for Wittgenstein, utterly. He hadn’t properly grasped Joy Division lyrics yet; he was straight in the deep end wallowing in a big morass of intellectual spaghetti. Possibly he was looking down the wrong end of his mind, like when you look through a telescope backwards and fall over.

The Fine Art reading list was all pretty chewy. The undergraduates were encouraged to launch themselves into the wits of the great thinkers and ransack what they needed, like they were trawling through a skip. Paul was dipping his toe into some Nietzsche. He always referred to figures he was engaging with by their Christian names, as a nod to his intimacy with them. It’s a good system. It humanises the mythical characters of human history. When Paul called anyone by their surname, it was a dis. ‘Ner-ner-Nietzsche’s n-not funny at all. No jokes in there, mate,’ he said with a grin.

It was through Jason and Paul that I got to know Graham. The art department was a member’s club, really. The artists didn’t mix with the rest of the college. I got to know Paul in the kitchen. He was on first-name terms with the abstract expressionists but he had no idea how to feed himself. I had a year of low-budget culinary experimentation behind me. He’d come straight from his mum’s. He didn’t know how pasta worked and was quite spellbound by tomato purée. He had an artist’s fascination with the mundane. There was something magical for him in a tube of tomato purée, a tomato being transformed into its essence and re-presented as a packaged consumer product. Was it more of a tomato or less now? Was it art? Was it good on toast? Jason waded around in the primary flavours like they were huge splashes of bold colour. He always put too much garlic in. His drawings were very dense, too.

Paul and Jason said I should meet Gra. It rhymed with car, Gra. We went up for some pasta sandwiches. Graham’s door was open and there was loud music. He was a bit drunk. His room was completely full of junk; we’d only been there for three weeks and he’d managed to give the impression that he’d been born there and never tidied up. There were piles of clothes from the flea market, a lot of paintings and posters, some of which were still attached to hoardings. There was a huge fan lying on the floor taking up most of the middle of the room. I’d seen that fan on a skip outside. Stuff was spilling out of cupboards, quite a few records and cassettes but mainly clothes. There was a charm about the magpie clutter. It didn’t look like anyone else’s room, except maybe Paul’s. Paul had a neat little row of books as well, though. Graham only had one book,
Thérèse Raquin
by Emile Zola. It looked like he’d read it a few times. It was dogeared and the spine was all cracked. I was glad Graham had a French book. I had a lot of them.

The first thing he said was, ‘How long have you been playing the guit?’

Graham was as brilliant as he looked like he would be. He was excellent at drawing things - faces, girls, monsters. The morning after we met he dangled the flex from his standard issue student Anglepoise lamp out of his bedroom window so that it banged on the glass of mine. I stuck my head out of the window. ‘Brekkers, cheers? Nice.’ He communicated mainly with facial expressions and in his own language. He was always playing with words. The linguistics department at college would have been fascinated.

There was a student demonstration taking place that day, to protest against the abolition of grants. College was cancelled, and we were to march on Westminster. We had breakfast at the Camberwell Grill in Camberwell Green. There isn’t much green in Camberwell. It’s grey, mainly. The café was all red and yellow plastic. We didn’t ever have enough money to go out for dinner, but breakfast was cheap. There were the four of us - Paul, Graham, myself and Jason. Paul was still interested in tomato sauces. So was Graham. Graham squirted ketchup all over his food. Paul and Graham both saw the possibilities of tomatoes as art, but they were different types of artist. Paul wanted to create the essence of tomato and Graham wanted to make pretty patterns.

It was quite rowdy when we got to Waterloo. There was a good turnout, thousands of students. All the colleges in London had closed for the day. There were placards and banners and people were chanting, and singing, ‘The students united will never be defeated.’ The march came to a standstill. We couldn’t work out why. The tense and menacing atmosphere was gradually building into a physical uprising. Everyone was shouting and jeering. It was very noisy and exciting. We pushed our way down to the front, like at a concert. There was a line of police defending the end of Waterloo Bridge. They didn’t want thousands of rebelling students going anywhere near the Houses of Parliament on the other side of the river. A police helmet was being thrown high in the air around the crowd. Every time it soared there was a huge round of applause and cheering. Down at the front it was a perilous crush with everyone shoving from behind. I reached out and grabbed a helmet and flung it in the air. There was a big cheer from behind as I felt the hands of many police officers seize me. As I was wrenched bodily from the mob a dozen more hands from the crowd grabbed my arms to pull me back in. I was on my back on top of a sea of people with the police on my feet and the students on the other end playing tug-of-war with my body. I kicked my feet, got one leg free and lost a shoe as I hauled the other leg from the arms of the law. I disappeared back into the throng with the police swearing and the students cheering. You needed two shoes that day, especially when the riot police arrived. The riot police are like a branch of the army, really. You can’t fight them. It’s time to go home when they arrive. Nobody did, though. The police were on horseback and they galloped at the crowd. People were crushed and some were quite badly hurt. Speccy girls reading botany at Bedford New College or anyone who happened to be in the way got charged and flattened. A few people hung around throwing things but it had certainly broken the crowd up. I couldn’t find my shoe, or Graham. It was a big day, though, and we were mates after that. I’d liked Graham from the moment I saw him. He was cool. Everyone doing art was cool, but Graham was the coolest and he floated around college.

He was listening to the Pixies a lot and he had their lyrics pinned up on his walls. He was really good at guitar. He could play anything, even the Smiths. I still find those guitar parts tricky. He was in a few bands. One was called Idle Vice. The songs were mainly about beer, but some were about vodka. He played the drums as well, but there were no drums around so he played on his knees, with air cymbals. There was a piano in the hall and we used to sing ‘Blue Moon’ a lot. Graham only knew how to play ‘October’ by U2 on the piano, so we sang that a lot as well. We were friends. We were interested in each other’s record collections and we both had guitars; we connected through music, but it went beyond that. We were happy in each other’s company just waiting for a bus or sharing a packet of cigarettes and making up words. I liked him because he was instantly brilliantly artistic, but vulnerable; strikingly stylish, but quite awkwardly shy. Why he liked me, I don’t know. Maybe it was mainly because I liked him. Still, when you do know exactly why someone likes you, that’s not really a friend. That’s a fan.

We didn’t often go anywhere apart from college and places that sold breakfast. We didn’t have any money so we just sat in each other’s rooms listening to each other’s records, me, Graham and often Paul as well. Jason got involved with Jo from English and drama and disappeared.

One of Graham’s proudest possessions was a half-drunk bottle of tequila in a sealed plastic bag with a ‘police evidence’ sticker on it. He was planning on keeping it forever, but that was patently never going to happen. We did get drunk and run out of booze quite a few times before it went, though, and we’d try and persuade him to open it. Then one morning the bottle was empty and Paul and I were quite disappointed he’d drunk it without us.

Paul loved the Beatles, but not as much as Graham. Graham’s dad, who was a clarinet teacher, had brought him up on the Beatles and Beethoven. Paul’s sister was friends with Captain Sensible, the singer, so he had the final say in all conversations about punk rock, but Graham was the authority on the Beatles. I had some quite odd records. Papa’s, mainly: he was a big-band man. I worked my way through them all keeping the ones I liked and selling the ones I didn’t to Ray’s Jazz in Covent Garden.

Occasionally Graham would disappear to a studio in Euston, where he was recording with a band. I was insanely jealous. I’d messed around with four-track recorders a lot, but I’d never been inside a studio.

Goldsmiths College is a wonderful place. It’s taken over most of New Cross. It’s spilled out of the original building into the surrounding Victorian terraces and municipal buildings. There are new additions too, the latest in library chic and all sorts of departments, faculties and facilities. It’s really thriving. The university buildings are bisected by the flooding A2, but to turn into one of the little side streets is to enter a world of studious calm. Most of the French department was in a neat little antique cul-de-sac called Laurie Grove. London SE14 doesn’t have the grandeur of Oxford: more screaming tyres than dreaming spires. It’s very much a feet-on-the-ground part of town. It’s quite bewildering how many things are happening at once around there. New Cross manages to be part campus, part ghetto, part middle-class suburb and part motorway, with a lot of pubs. There are always all kinds of people striding around. It is easy to spot the students, especially in October. It doesn’t conform to the traditional image of a hallowed seat of learning but you’d learn more about the world in a couple of terms at Goldsmiths than you would in ten years of eating crumpets and punting around Cambridge.