A nu-step remix of Hot Money by The Derivatives has come on and a couple of drunk girls next to her start ironically twerking and laughing passing a bottle of Lambrini back and forth. This is why some people don’t like this crowd, these art-kids, some people think they are the problem. Remember when Cathedral group set that crappy disused train carriage up next to the station and ran a café in it, bringing in the artists and the funky creatives? That’s gone now and the space turned over to an artisanal food market for the flats they have built beside it.
There’s a very beautiful, tall, pale boy with a coronet of jet-black tumbling glossy curls and heavy stubble wearing a very baggy blue Nylon blouse, top button fastened, talking animatedly to a shorter Asian guy with a mullet, holding a can of Heineken. She loops their way pretending to look at the paintings. These are the guys with the weekly net radio show, aren’t they? Whose friends John and Jo do Left-Wing Workouts.
She loops away again. Someone is talking about Lizzie Borden’s
Born in Flame
s. Another the role of women within Nepalese Communist groups. The floor is sticky, her coffee carton drained.
She heads toward the door to get a breath of fresh air, there’s a guy there she recognises, in his mid-forties with steely grey hair, a suit and a nervous manner talking to two women in their twenties dressed in what she can only think of as some kind of Sixties style militant Sci-Fi boiler-suits. One of them she knows is Jessica Durham, a lecturer at Goldsmiths, she has seen her speak a few times and has a massive crush on her that she angrily denies to Laura, though Laura probably has one on her too.
The other girl, young, maybe her lover, with a sharp face and very soft blond hair, looks nervous and seems brittle and edgy, all her energy focused on saying brilliant, unforgettable things.
Just out through the doorway there’s another group, looking grim and tetchy texting away. There’s Dan, she nods, he smiles and nods quickly back, looks distracted. Already several people have been arrested in dawn raids or pinched on public transport, in supermarkets, swiping their Claimant Card or passing one of the million chipped bins, windows, lampposts that grid the city, swept up either under the massively expanded powers of the
USG
’s Welfare Enforcement Division or in straight busts by the Met. No one knows where they are now, in cells somewhere, detention centres, holding-pens, being deprived of sleep and food, lent on, intimidated. It’s only a few months since the last hard stop fiasco left Lewisham shopping centre gutted and the police station across the road pocked with flying bricks, and so the crackdown continues. Water cannon, rubber bullets, expanded powers to detain, reclassification of the term terrorists, the legal redefinition of the idea of violence, the extravagant sentencing.
The latest mayoral campaign poster has the incumbent in black and white posing at a window and peeping through the blinds, holding a Taser, a parody of the famous image of Malcolm X and the later recreation by
KRS
-One.
Keeping London open for business. By all means necessary.
Lewis leans against the rail and looks up and down Resolution Way.
Where is she?
Lewis checks the time on her phone, and suddenly Laura has arrived, sashayed in out of nowhere on stiletto heels, sidled up beside her.
She runs her hand up Lewis’s back, says, hello gorgeous. Sorry I’m late, took ages getting ready.
Laura kisses her, her lips taste of nothing but her own delicious lips, her hair smells uniquely of Laura herself. Lewis goes up on tiptoe. Laura’s breasts push against her throat and her whole sublime heft strains against the black satin suit she is wearing. She grips at Lewis’ arms through her tracksuit top and feels the knotted muscle, runs a hand over her shaved head and gazes into her eyes.
You are so amazingly hot, Lewis says and runs a hand up between her legs, watches Laura’s nostrils flare, a smile tickle at the corners of her mouth as her knuckles bump softly to a stop. Laura squeezes a little on Lewis’ fist with her thighs and bites her lip.
Oh my stars, she is ridiculously hot. That eye makeup and the insanely thick false eyelashes. Lewis is half tempted to just pop back to the empty flat right now but suddenly the buzz in the room subsides and a series of Prezi slides are being projected against the far wall, images taken from property websites, Your-home, Zoopla, Rightmove, others from what is increasingly being called the Shadow Housing Sector, a nice euphemism, the boy in the sky-blue blouse, standing at the front of the slowly assembling crowd says, for slum housing. More specifically he wants to address the overlap between the two and the increasing discursive legitimation in the popular press of price gouging, overcrowding and the construction of ad-hoc and improvised “accommodation” in gardens, abandoned sites, garages, jerry built extensions, the accelerating subdivision of existing housing stock into smaller and smaller spaces, into capsule and, informally, “coffin” accommodation, the Government’s restriction of planning and tenancy laws in order to prolong the housing crisis from which they and their supporters benefit. He concludes with a critique of the Alter-housing movement, the wigwams and yurts and wagons snuck away in outlying fields or sympathetic friend’s gardens as mirroring the logic of rentier capitalism under the guise of libertarian Leftism, and concludes by explaining that their own
Burst the Bubble
campaign differs from the Spanish
Pinchar la Burbuja
, in that the latter attempted to collapse the bubble from below by mass refusal to take on mortgages, whereas they see the necessity of making property itself subject to attacks, to send a clear message that property is not a global asset class and that any attempt to use it as such will be met with concentrated attempts to occupy, confiscate or radically devalue that asset.
By any means necessary? Someone in the crowd asks, to laughter.
Burn baby burn, someone else shouts out. They are all mindful of the undercover police who are certainly in the room, all mindful of the comrades given seven years for unfurling a sign saying “this property is condemned” on one of the new Hypervillages in the process of being constructed by Singaporean magnate Jensen Foo, photographing it along with a number of activists in balaclavas brandishing petrol bombs and comedy dynamite and clock bombs posing on the only half constructed seventeenth floor of Three Bridges Tower, studios starting from six hundred and fifty thousand pounds. They hacked into Throwbridge’s Singapore Property portal and posted the images up over the original pictures of the development. The list of charges was insanely long, including the newly implemented “threats against property” and “violence against property”, the existing
terrorist
classification being extended to those who would “subvert or seek to prevent through means of intimidation the lawful transaction of business”. Housing terrorists. Reification at its purest, someone shouts when the recent conviction gets mentioned. People are property, property is a person.
Shard
apartments, not
shared
apartments, because you were
meant
to be
apart
. A picture of a benignly clean cut young couple gazing down onto a crowded street and across to what looks like a crumbling Victorian slum appears.
There’s your future, Lewis. Being together, being apart.
Time is it?
Shit, nearly ten. Better get back to the flat, Joolzy will be waiting.
It’s raining when Graeme Ferris sets out to get the train to Margate. It seems to have been raining more or less continuously for the last six months and there has been flooding everywhere. The Thames is getting dangerously high. Graeme puts his hood up, pats the pockets of his army coat, checking he has his keys, tobacco tin, the blue plastic Oyster Card holder he uses as a wallet, his Claimant Card.
He buys a packet of Rizlas in the off licence by Woolwich station, uses a tenner, puts the change in a number of different pockets so when he walks it won’t jangle about and attract attention. He doesn’t use his Claimant Card for two reasons: first, he doesn’t want to be building up any more debt on it, second, he knows they track every purchase.
It feels strange to be out and about, going somewhere. He has hardly left the flat at all in the past three weeks, just nipping out to post off records or slogging round to the retail park to get Value pasta and beans from his Designated Retail Point, Charlton Asda. Three whole, glorious weeks with no Giveback have allowed him to concentrate on making some money on the side.
Shop a Skiver! The rain stippled poster on Woolwich station tells him, a photo of a swarthy man taking cash from a disembodied hand in the dimly lit kitchen of some local café, and he feels a distant jolt of panic. He’s sure he won’t get caught, that he has covered his tracks, but you never know, they are cracking down. Now when he gets emails or texts or letters from the
IWP
he just ignores them, unless it’s Giveback dates, better not miss that or, he involuntarily draws his thumb across his throat, makes a quiet squelching sound out of the corner of his mouth, staring out of the waiting room window at a pigeon. The pigeon tilts its head in his direction questioningly. He chuckles. Nah, not you mate. You are all right. Pigeons. That’s the life.
Or foxes. There are a couple of foxes that live in the railway siding round the back of his flat. They make a horrible noise at night sometimes and when he can’t sleep he looks out of the window, sees them standing on the roof of the lock-ups across on the other side of the road, jaws hanging open, tongues lolling out, the noise like a cross between a baby screaming and an android dying.
Android. He checks his phone. Nothing. Fiddles with it, power’s all right, I’ve got the power! Serious as Cancer! He smiles to himself.
His online piecework has topped up his housing benefit and his record trading has turned a small profit so he can keep his broadband connection. If that gets cut off he is fucked, as fucked as if they cut off his water. A stab of fear gets in at him, in under his ribs, out of nowhere. Dark forces. If he gets cut off now, now that the local library has closed, now that the nearest one, down in Greenwich, has started charging for internet access and there’s thirty people waiting for their ten minute slot by 8.30 in the morning, he’ll have to start using internet cafés at a quid an hour and almost certainly lose the Cloudsource click-through and O-desk (93% positive rating for username GreyHamAdmin) bits of filing and sorting work that’ve been keeping his head above water.
It’d knock him out of the loop for his record trading too, which is getting savage these days. In fact, using cafés would leave him out of pocket even just for his mandatory thirty hours of online Jobseek courses, searches, and applications. He knows guys who have found some way of free-riding on other people’s wireless signals and who are using routers and mesh systems to pirate bandwidth and keep people hooked up for free, and last time he saw Charlie from
Burst the Bubble
he promised to let him know how and when it was going to be accessible round Graeme’s area, but who knew when he was going to bump into Charlie again, especially now he wasn’t working in the record shop any more.
His niche is Drum and Bass, though of course he listens to everything, everything except metal. Can’t stand metal. When he worked down at the Record and Video exchange in Greenwich he hated working with Chris because all day it was death metal, crust, sludge, doom, hardcore, black metal, technical crust, whatever, maybe gabba if they were lucky. Plus he had this attitude that anyone who wasn’t into it somehow didn’t get music and he took the piss out of everything else for being too lightweight. Maybe that was one of the reasons he left, he stopped getting on with the other guys, who had all been to University and used to take the piss a bit too much, past the point where it was funny. So he left to become a psychiatric nurse, but that meant studying and essay writing and he wasn’t used to it so he freaked out a bit, jacked it in, couldn’t get his old job back and was embarrassed to keep asking anyway. So for nearly two years now, isn’t it, fucking hell, two years, where has that gone, he has been Claiming.
Still, it’s all probably for the best, he has developed a good relationship with a couple of big agents in the States. One of them is connected up to Johannes Altborg, who’s a major collector, maybe the biggest of them all, and he knows that vinyl, white labels, test pressings, Japanese editions, coloured vinyl, whatever, is played out. The market has shifted, the vinyl side of stuff still goes but it’s finished in terms of anything new or any chance of prices going up. Now the line between music and memorabilia, even just junk, even just crap, has been blurred, more than blurred. At the moment whenever he looks at the collectors wants’ list on
SoundHound
he sees cassettes of music taped directly off the radio changing hands for silly money, compilations some sixteen year-old kid made in 1985 listening to John Peel on his portable radio with all the interference and the sound fading in and out, sometimes even the sound of the stop and record buttons getting pressed, bits of DJ banter, noises of people chatting in the room where it is being recorded, hand-written tracklists on the insert cards, some with photo-copied bits of paper stuck over them. All that stuff.
That is a huge market but difficult to get access to. Someone has opened a site,
home taping is still killing music
, trying to get people to send him cassettes so he can act as a middleman and forward them on to collectors he knows, but a lot of the people who have the stuff don’t seem to be interested or don’t know about the site. There is an age gap problem, anyone old enough to have taped things off the radio is too busy fulfilling their family and work obligations to pay attention to stuff like that on the internet. Sooner or later though the site was going to get mentioned in the papers or a magazine and then the guy who runs it is going to make plenty of dough, there is a goldmine of stuff just sitting out there still waiting to be claimed. Claimant alert! He is hoping his brother will give him his old cassettes he taped off Klik FM back in the day and on the way back up from Ramsgate maybe they can call in at Maidenhead to see him and Chloe, have a cup of tea, try to get them off him.