Ruby and the Stone Age Diet (8 page)

Outside it is raining with maybe a few hailstones and I wish the sun would shine so I could see a rainbow because I like rainbows and if I don’t see Cis soon I will go totally mad.

‘I wish I could see Domino,’ says Ruby. ‘And I’m fed up with all this rain. This must be the wettest year in history. I’m going to go and paint some sunshine.’

I make her some tea and she strides through to her room to paint. I am envious of Ruby’s ability to paint. I am envious of all artists. I have a good plan for seeing Cis.

Lamia the Eastern Huntress Goddess used to exercise daily to keep her body perfect. She fell in love with a mortal painter and asked him to paint her. Unfortunately, none of the paintings could capture her perfect beauty. Eventually, dispirited by his failure, he took his own life by drowning himself under a waterfall. Afterwards Lamia cried for her lover for forty days and forty nights and her tears fell like rain, washing away crops and houses in a flood of grief.

Izzy told me she heard that Cis was going to art school. I hope she does well. I would hate it if Cis became discouraged and drowned herself under a waterfall.

‘Ruby, I have a good plan for seeing Cis and also it will probably help you to see Domino, and my zip is stuck, can you help me with it please?’

Ruby kneels down in front of me and tries to loosen my zip. Her room smells of paint and I notice she is losing weight.

The person in charge of the physical defence of the squat in Battersea went slightly overboard and barricaded the bay
windows with railway sleepers, filling up the gaps with cement and barbed wire. To fit the railway sleepers in he organised the removal of half the floorboards and part of the ceiling. With the windows barred and barricaded and the doors nailed shut the house was practically invulnerable. The only way in was by ladder into the upstairs window.

We made a yellow banner with ‘Battersea Squatters’ Association’ written on it. On the day of the eviction we would hang it out of the window.

Three people were nominated to stay inside the house when the bailiffs arrived. The rest of the squatters were to stand outside protesting. Nominated as one of the three, I was less than enthusiastic. I knew that when the bailiffs couldn’t get in they would call the police and we would be arrested. But I had not done much for the Squatters’ Association and it was my turn to be useful.

Ruby has to struggle with my zip for a long time but I trust her implicitly to fix it without doing me any damage. And if by chance she did do me some harm then she would call an ambulance right away. She is the sort of person who would have no problem in calling an ambulance and demanding they came right away, no excuses accepted.

Ruby is a wonderful friend and I worry about her losing weight. Ruby is the best friend I’ve ever had. Ruby is the best friend in the history of the world. It enrages me that
she will lose weight and maybe harm herself all because of Domino. I hate Domino.

‘There, your zip is free. If Domino saw me in such close proximity to anyone else’s penis he would go crazy. Do you like my sunshine painting?’

‘Yes, it’s wonderful. The lilac sun matches your dress. How is your writing coming along?’

‘Fine. I’ll show you a story soon. When’s your gig?’

‘We had to postpone it again. We still can’t find a drummer. Do you want to hear my plan for seeing Cis?’

‘OK. What’s your plan for seeing Cis?’

‘Well, first you ring up and check if she’s home. If she answers the phone you put it down immediately like it is a wrong number, but if she’s out then there’s a good chance we could accidentally run into her. It is Thursday and Cis will cash her Giro today and probably go for a drink. There are four pubs in Brixton she might go to and we can call in to each one casually as if we were just there for a drink ourselves and if she is there I’ll naturally just have to say hello. She won’t realise I’ve planned it. If she isn’t at any of the pubs she might be at some friend’s house so we can call round her friends on some pretext, and if that fails we could wait at the end of her street and see if she happens by.’

‘What pretext are we going to use for calling round on her friends?’

‘I don’t know,’ I admit. ‘I hoped you could think of one.’

‘And what will you do if you meet her?’

‘I’ll say hello.’

‘What then?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t planned that far ahead. But there is a good chance we’ll run into Domino along the way.’

‘Fine,’ says Ruby. ‘It seems like a good plan to me. Let’s do it.’

There is a sudden silence as Ruby comes to a halt.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I have writer’s block. I don’t know what happens after Cynthia rides away on her motorbike.’

‘Make her eat a few more people,’ I suggest. ‘I like it when she eats people.’

Ruby frowns, and plays with the material of her dress, and she tells me she is feeling bad. She is troubled because Domino has not been around for a few days. He might be sleeping with someone else. Just like Cynthia.

‘Do you think about Cis fucking someone else?’

‘About twenty or thirty times a day.’

‘What do you do to stop thinking about it?’

‘I don’t do anything. Nothing works. I can remember every inch of Cis’s body perfectly. I can picture her fucking someone else like it was happening right next to me. Usually after a while I get to wondering if it hurts very much when you slit your wrists.’

‘It would here,’ says Ruby. ‘We don’t have any sharp knives. We’d better get drunk instead.’

We hunt out our money. I like whiskey but Ruby likes brandy, so I buy a bottle of brandy at the off-licence. The off-licence is full of Irish women buying Irish whiskey. They have all come over to have abortions in Britain because it is illegal in Ireland. In London they are lonely, separated from their friends and families, forced to travel abroad like fugitives. They buy the Irish whiskey to cheer them up.

I wish them good luck and take home a bottle of brandy. Then Ruby and I drink it as fast as we can till it makes us fall asleep. It is quite a good idea of Ruby’s, because you can’t really think of anything when you are collapsed drunk on the floor, and next morning you have a terrible hangover, and this is good for taking your mind off other things as well.

Come the day of the eviction the publicity person had done his job fairly well and other squatters from south London were there to help us picket. Some pressmen from small local papers arrived with cameras.

All the squatters were cheerful but I was nervous. The week before one of the women in our group had been arrested for causing a fight at the dole office, and she described to me how the police put her in a cell all night and the cell seemed as big as a matchbox. I did not want to be locked up all night in a tiny cell.

Upstairs in the barricaded house we three occupants had a pile of things to throw at the bailiffs. Plastic bags full of paint and piles of rotted fruit and, strangely, cold porridge.

I became more and more nervous and wondered if I could escape over the rooftops when the police arrived. I wondered if it would be normal police or the Special Patrol Group, because the Special Patrol Group was very active in south London at this time.

Sitting in the window I looked up at the sky and wondered if some beings in a spaceship might fly down and rescue me.

‘I like your new earrings,’ says Marilyn, who has called round for a visit and a cup of tea.

‘Thank you,’ I say.

‘Thank you,’ says Ruby.

‘Your flat is cold.’

‘We’re having problems with our bills. How is Izzy?’

‘Stuffing herself with steak to help her muscles grow. And depressed about Dean, and her pregnancy.’

Ruby and Marilyn disappear and Cis is there in their
place. She is wearing a lilac T-shirt I gave her with a cloud on the back and a rainbow on the front.

‘I have wandered in here by mistake,’ she says. ‘I was on my way to spend my Giro at the pub.’

‘Right,’ I say. ‘Perhaps I’ll run into you there.’

‘Nothing would induce me to eat a steak,’ says Ruby. ‘I hate steaks.’

Three bailiffs in suits arrived and shouted at us to come out.

‘We have nowhere to live!’

They did not seem inclined to discuss it. But before we could throw anything at them they went away. Inside the house we were shivering with cold.

Some hours later still nothing had happened and the pickets from other areas began to drift away. By midafter-noon it seemed certain that the bailiffs must have abandoned their efforts for the day and would not be coming back till the next day. We were tired, having been awake all night, so all three of us left to get some sleep while another member of the group climbed the ladder to keep look-out, just in case.

I was very relieved not to have been arrested by the Special Patrol Group, although I knew that after a break of a few hours I would have to go back.

But I didn’t have to go back. Half an hour after we left to go round the corner to our squats, the bailiffs returned
with some police and the look-out immediately fled out over the roof and down into the back alley. The bailiffs repossessed the house without any difficulty.

As an act of resistance it was a pathetic failure. And it ended the Squatters’ Association because while previously we had been negotiating with the council for possible rehousing, the council was now extremely irate at all the damage we had caused to the house in fortifying it.

‘What about our rehousing negotiations?’

‘Pay us twenty thousand pounds for the damage you did to the house and we’ll think about it.’

We were all evicted soon after and no one made much fuss. The local news programme showed pictures of the inside of the house, all cemented and barbed wired and no longer habitable. This is what these vandals do when they squat, they said.

This all sticks in my mind very clearly. I’m not sure why.

I moved to Brixton with Ruby and we still could never manage to find a secure place to live.

Cis had a nice council flat in her own name. I liked sleeping there. But she argued too much with her sister and moved back in with her mother. I don’t know what the arguments were about. I suppose there was lots of Cis’s life I didn’t know anything about.

Maybe it sticks in my mind because it was all so futile. But it wasn’t a ridiculous effort. There shouldn’t be empty houses when people have nowhere to live.

Possibly removing the floor and the ceiling was a tactical error.