Authors: JOHN YORVIK
I spent the next few weeks in hospital with bandaged ribs and a pin in my ankle. But Marty was unscathed and wanted revenge. One Sunday morning not long after the attack he slipped into the gang leader’s house, went up to his bedroom and held him at knife point. Marty said the boy got so scared he pissed himself as he begged Marty not to cut him. It was a risky strategy, but it worked. We were never troubled again.
I never needed to develop that side of my personality because Marty was always there to do life’s difficult things for me. From the first day he turned up at school in 1981, a white-haired, wiry ten year old with a London accent, he’d taken me under his wing.
Before he knew we’d end up living on the same street, before he knew we were both fatherless children, he’d singled me out for friendship.
As we grew up, we began to look more and more alike. Marty’s hair darkened to my ash brown. I lost my puppy fat and grew tall and lean. Our eyes were always the same, pale blue. We were so close we’d begun to resemble each other. Inseparable for fifteen years. But then it happened. And it was down to a mistake on my part. A big mistake.
“Called it a night?” Marty said with a hint of menace. He was being very persistent with this one. “C’mon. That can’t be true,” he continued. “A man with your reputation?”
“I might call her next week. Time for another?” I asked, trying to steer the conversation into safer waters.
“No mate, I’ve got some business to attend to. Let’s go out tomorrow. Saturday. Lads’ night out.”
He stood up and downed the rest of his pint. Then he took out his wallet, left a twenty on the bar and walked back out onto the street.
I ordered a full English and sat down beside the window. I flicked through a copy of
Time Out
. A few wet-haired stall owners came in and ordered coffees. They talked about a flu epidemic and a spate of London murders. One of them said the police offered their daughters no protection and it was time to take the law into their own hands. His workmates fantasised about what they’d do to the killer if they caught him. Each one, outdoing the last. It was horrific.
I finished up and took a walk along the high street. The sun broke through the clouds and set the wet pavements a-dazzle. Eurogoths studded, quiffed and decked out in leather, tartan and orthopaedic footwear paraded up and down carrying record bags. Young men solicited me with offers of “Hash” and “Skunk”, and the professional punks on the lock-side begged under a banner of “Let’s be honest. We’re going to spend it on beer.” Pure Camden.
I walked up to the bridge where I’d arranged to meet Dani. It was getting warmer so I took off my coat and rolled up my sleeves and tried to catch some sun. I was lighting a cigarette for one of the punks just as Dani came round the corner wearing a summer dress and cut-off jeans. Her long-lens Nikon was hanging around her neck. She ran up to me and gave me a hug. She held onto me for some time, her body pressed up against mine, the camera jutting into my ribs.
It’d never been clear to me where I stood with Dani. Two years ago when she first turned up at Free Press (or FP to those in the know) as a rookie journalist of 22 years old, she was a pale-faced Welsh girl with a shaved head and hardly a word to say. Brent, the Editor, had hired her on the strength of her photographic portfolio, which contained, among other things, 30 or so black and white portraits of grim young men in tracksuits sitting on the bonnets of stolen cars. During her interview, sitting in her oversized parker and baggy jeans, she’d deflected Brent’s praise for the photos with shy smiles and obvious discomfort. In her first year at FP, she remained tight-lipped and was often met from work by similarly shaven-headed women with similarly oversized clothes, who never acknowledged our greetings, but instead, stared warily at us like mistreated pets.
Brent and I gave Dani lots of space, admiring her photos and thoroughness as a researcher from a distance. The transition had been gradual. The clothes got smaller. The hair got longer. A year down the road, she started coming along to drinks after work. She opened up and we became good friends. We never reminded her of what she used to be like in case she reverted back in the style of Wile E. Coyote suddenly realising he was running on thin air.
Dani was on a different sensory level to most people. She experienced the world at a level of emotional intensity far beyond the norm. One day after a lot of alcohol, I asked her what it was like being her, so very self-aware; how did she live with it? She laughed and told me how once she’d set about de-sensitising herself by watching violent films, which at first made her sick with nerves. Having conquered celluloid, she’d then sought out similar over stimulation in dodgy pubs, watching underground cage fights and even joined a martial arts group. She also scoured the newspapers for the most shocking and depressing stories in the belief that through compassion fatigue she could function as a normal member of society. She’d come out of her shell and wrapped herself in an enabling shroud of twenty-first century functional narcolepsy. I’d loved her explanation, but wasn’t sure if it was meant to be taken as a true story, or an oblique critique on the way, post-9/11, we’d all begun to live.
Back in the sunshine, Dani finally loosened her embrace and, brushing back her long raven hair with her hand, stood back to take a look at me. She obviously didn’t like what she saw, slanting her head with concern, fixing her green eyes on my face.
“Lishman, you look awful. Like you’ve already had a weekend. It’s Saturday morning. What is it? Drinking?”
I tried to remember the last night I hadn’t gone out drinking. Friday night had started as a hangover cure but became an alcoholic rollover, ending at some stage at the Jazz Cafe and then another black out.
“Drinking and women,” I said, truthful but unrepentant.
“Ugh, I don’t want to know,” her mood darkened a little when usually she would have laughed. I sensed it wasn’t going to be a day of light-hearted fun.
“Let’s go,” I said, anxious to change the mood.
“Can we get coffee afterwards? I want to talk to you,” said Dani.
“I’m meeting a good friend tonight. Marty. So I was planning on sleeping this afternoon.”
Dani was quiet. She looked disappointed.
“Why don’t you join us? We can talk a little beforehand,” I added. I dreaded the announced ‘talk’ without knowing what it was going to be about. I’d much rather a conversation either happened or didn’t.
“No, I want to talk to you properly. Anyway, who’s this Marty? You’ve never mentioned him before.”
“He’s my oldest friend from Newcastle. We fell out about five years ago, but, he came to the funeral and, well, we made up. Met him for drinks on Thursday night.”
“So you
weren’t
out with a woman?” she accused mischievously, perhaps lightening up because I’d mentioned the funeral and she knew she shouldn’t be giving me a hard time.
“The girl came later. There’s quite a story attached to that. One I’ll probably never tell you,” I said and gave her a wink.
“Sometime next week then for the talk,” she said definitively, “if it’s not too much trouble.”
“I’ll come to find you on Monday afternoon about two o’clock. It’s a bank holiday.”
She nodded her assent and started fiddling with her camera.
As I lit a cigarette, I considered Dani and her borderline possessive behaviour. Every friendship had its pros and cons, I thought. And Dani wasn’t usually such hard work, so there must be something on her mind. Something not easy to talk about. But why talk to me? I’m hardly the kind of well-rounded individual that you tell your problems to. I’ve got quite a few of my own to be getting on with. I looked at my watch, we were late for the first interview of the morning.
* * *
FIGHT THE POWER
BITE THE HAND
FIGHT THE POWER
BITE THE HAND
CANONISE CRIMINALS
CANONISE CRIMINALS
It was EgoFunk in action. Playing their radical punk reggae at a volume the whole of Camden could hear.
There was no bell so I knocked on the door, but there was no chance they were going to hear us above the noise. I found the number of EgoFunk’s manager on my mobile and pressed call. A few seconds later I heard my tinny mobile phone speaker project the same bass line that was swimming all around us through the brickwork and glass. I couldn’t hear a word she was saying so I hung up and texted:
We’re downstairs. Let us in. FP
A few minutes later a black girl dressed like a rasta-pirate opened the door. Her slender arms were covered from top to bottom in intricate tattoos, spider-webbing and overlapping with schizoid intensity.
“You must be Lishman.”
I nodded and introduced Dani.
“I’m Kari. EgoFunk’s manager.” She stepped out onto the pavement. “Let’s grab a coffee before you meet the band.”
Dani motioned for Kari to pose under The Imperialist’s sign and snapped a photo. Kari raised a fuck-you middle finger and smiled a crooked smile.
After getting coffees to go, the lead singer of EgoFunk came downstairs to meet us in the empty bar of The Imperialist. Tall and slim, he was naked from the waist up and showing off his pale skin covered in similarly overlapping thin spidery tattoos. He had mid-length blonde dreadlocks and wore no shoes. His feet were black with dirt.
“What’s up? I’m Judas,” he said in a strangely ironic Jamaican accent, patting me warmly on the arm.
“Lishman,” I said, trying to shake his hand and instead being offered a fist, which, catching on, I met with my own.
“Lish-
mon!
I like your interviews. You take a back seat. Let the artist express themself.”
“Thanks, Judas,” I said, bemused. Was it his way of telling me to shut up and let him speak?
I started my Dictaphone and asked, “Why does EgoFunk so openly venerate criminals in their songs?”
Judas smiled. This was obviously his kind of question.
“My parents were travellers in the 80s. I was born in a campervan on a Devon field surrounded by policemen with riot shields. My first seconds on this Earth were serenaded by the slow beat lullaby of batons on shields as the police taunted a travelling community because it had chosen a different way of life. You see,
any successful alternative method of living will be crushed by capital interests
. We’re being homogenised like factory milk. Governments are always working to monopolise decisions. A successful alternative lifestyle isn’t tolerated, because it isn’t part of their plan and they can’t collect the taxes. Travellers are hard to control and assimilate. The criminal – and we’re not talking about sex cases here – is free from cultural hegemony. The criminal is an existential hero. As all alternative lifestyles are considered criminal to some extent, we embrace the term. We reclaim it for the class war...”
I let the Dictaphone run on and only occasionally interjected. I would edit in some clarification questions later. The band would get the chance to approve the quotes. Most bands didn’t want to change anything.
An hour later, with plenty of outrageous quotes and photos in our bags, we said goodbye to Kari and Judas and walked up towards the Roundhouse where AmizFire was located. Dani took photos of renovated factory buildings on the way.
* * *
Dani was blown away by the obelisk. She held up her Nikon and began snapping.
“Lishman, stand in front of this huge silver dick. It will give people an idea of scale.”
“I don’t know if I like the implication – a measure for dicks.”
Beyond the slick sliding doors, the reception was, like the website, fashionably minimalist: greys, whites and inverted triangles cleverly giving the illusion of pyramid forms through the lights and the shadows.
Incongruous in the sea of geometric forms was the placing of a black-marble winged goddess as the centrepiece of the large entrance hall.
“I think it’s Isis, an Egyptian goddess,” said Dani, studying the statue.
“She’s covered in scales.”
“True. Part reptile, part bird, part human. She’s not always like that.”
I looked around in the hope of seeing Natasha, but there was no sign. I walked over towards the reception and gave my name. We were pointed towards the lounge area. I sprawled out on one of the leather sofas and tried to catch a few minutes’ siesta. Dani picked up a stack of art magazines from the triangular coffee table and flicked through them while we waited.
There was a loud ping as the lift doors opened. A heavily built man in a well-tailored suit walked out. As he got closer, I could see he was tanned, in his late fifties with thick grey hair and gleaming, intelligent eyes.
“You from Free Press?” he said in an accent that I couldn’t quite place – an unconvincing BBC accent with a hint of East London.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“The girl who usually deals with this kind of thing hasn’t come into work today, so I thought I’d meet you myself. My name’s Mr Burns. To whom do I have the pleasure?”
“Lishman. And this is Dani.” I guessed ‘the girl’ he was referring to was Natasha and wondered whether I should have just called her directly. I could call her tonight, after my night out with Marty. Girls generally didn’t like booty calls, but something told me Natasha would be different.
“Have we met before, Lishman? You remind me of someone,” said Burns. “I can’t quite put my finger on it.”
“No, I’ve quite a common face, Mr Burns.”
“Ha. I would say it was uncommon if anything. Look, the artist, Diane, won’t be here for half an hour. Why don’t I take you up to the gallery first? See a bit of her work. Then you can do the interview.”
We followed Burns into the lift. There were a lot of floors. He pressed a button marked AmizArt.
“What exactly do you do here at AmizFire Productions, Mr Burns?”