in Sicily and Monte Cassino and the march on Rome. Fighting Nazis.
Leon didn’t kid himself. Lewisham had been one Saturday out of his life. It couldn’t compare to what the old man had done in World War Two. But the experience had been like nothing he had ever known.
When he was younger than today, Leon had been involved in student politics at school and at university. But this was some thing else. The Pakistani shopkeeper at the end of the road where Leon was squatting had had his face opened up by a racist with a Stanley knife. The Nazis were coming back. It was really happening. And you either did something about it, or you went to see Aerosmith at Reading.
Later that sunny Saturday, just when the riot was starting to feel like one of those visions he’d had when he was dropping acid in the lecture halls of the London School of Economics, Leon had stopped outside an electrical shop on Oxford Street and watched the news on a dozen different TV sets. The riot was the first story. The only story. A quarter of the Metropolitan Police Force had been there, and they couldn’t stop it.
Leon wondered if any of the readers of The Paper had gone to Lewisham because of his few measly paragraphs. He wondered if he had done any good. He wondered if soon the – he had to consult his own article here – the ALCARAF would be the name on everyone’s lips. But then he turned the page and the classified ads brought him back to reality. This was what their readers were interested in.
LOOK SCANDINAVIAN! Scandinavian-style clogs – £5.50…Cheesecloth shirts for £2.70 plus 20p postage and packing…Cotton Drill Loons. ‘A good quality cotton drill in the original hip-fitting loons.’ Still only £2.60.
Leon’s thoughts turned reluctantly to fashion, and he wondered, Who wears this crap? Leon himself looked like a shorthaired Ramone – a London spin on a New York archetype. A style that said – I am making an effort, but not much of one.
Leon’s face and body had not quite caught up with the greasy machismo of his clothes. At twenty he was still whiplash thin, frail and boyish, looking as though he only had to shave about once a week.
His Lewis Leather biker’s jacket sported a plastic badge on the lapel featuring the Jimmy Hill-like profile of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He wore drainpipe Levi’s, a threadbare Thin Lizzy T-shirt and white Adidas trainers with three blue stripes down the side. Pretty much the standard uniform for the enlightened urban male in the summer of 1977, although Leon had topped off his look with a trilby hat from a charity shop. Funnily enough, you couldn’t buy that look in the back of The Paper, where they were still packaging what was left of the spirit of the Sixties.
Cannabis leaf jewellery. Solid silver leaf pendant on real silver chain - £7.
Leon closed The Paper, shaking his head. He adjusted his trilby. It was as if nothing had changed. It was as if there wasn’t a war on.
It seemed to Leon that everyone he knew was living in some old Sixties dream. The people he worked with at The Paper, all of the readers, his father – especially his father, a man who had belonged to CND for a few years but who now belonged to a golf club.
What was wrong with them? Didn’t they realise it was time to take a stand? What did they think the National Front was doing marching in South London? He touched the bruise on his cheek again, and wished it could stay there for ever.
This wasn’t about some little style option – the choice between long hair or spiky, flared trousers or straight, Elvis or Johnny Rotten. It was about a more fundamental choice – not between the NF and the SWP, who were daubing their rival slogans all over the city, like the Sharks and Jets of political extremism – but the choice between evil, hatred, racism, xenophobia, bigotry, and everything that was their opposite.
The memory of Lewisham still made him shake with fear. The rocks showering down on the marchers. The faces twisted with hatred. The police lashing out with truncheon, boot or knee. The sudden eruption of hand-to-hand fighting as marcher or demonstrator broke through the police lines, fists and feet flying. And the horses, shitting themselves with terror as they were driven into the protesters. Leon knew how those horses felt. Lewisham had been the first violence that he had been involved in since a fight in the playground at junior school. And he had lost that one.
Mind you, Leon thought, she was a very big girl for nine.
He thumbed through the singles until he found something worth playing. ‘Pretty Vacant’ by the Sex Pistols. He put the record on the turntable, placed the needle on the record, and pulled the arm back for repeat play. Then, as the stuttering guitar riff came pouring out of the speakers, he set about destroying the rest of the singles. The Jacksons, Donna Summer, Hot Chocolate, Carly Simon and the Brotherhood of Man – all of them were thrown to their doom across the review room, all of them perished in a dramatic explosion of vinyl.
Leon was about to launch Boney M’s ‘Ma Baker’ when the door to the review room opened and standing there was an elderly black cleaner with a Hoover in his hands, staring open-mouthed at the destroyed vinyl that littered the carpet.
‘What the goodness you doing in here, man?’ the cleaner said.
‘I’m doing the singles,’ Leon said, his face burning with embarrassment. ‘I was just about to clear all this up.’
Watched by the cleaner, Leon got down on his hands and knees and began picking up the smashed records, his mouth fixed in a smile that he hoped showed solidarity, and some sort of apology.
‘I hope you like curry,’ Terry’s mum said to Misty.
‘I love curry,’ Misty said. ‘In fact, my father was born in India.’
Terry shot her a look. He didn’t know that Misty’s dad had been born in India. It seemed there were a lot of things he didn’t know about her, despite being together since Christmas.
Misty and Terry and his parents crowded awkwardly in the tiny hallway. Misty was making some rapturous speech about the glories of the Raj and something Kipling had written about the correct way to cook chicken tikka masala. Terry’s parents smiled politely as she babbled on. His father took her photographers bag. Terry noticed that she had unclipped her pink fake mink handcuffs, and stuffed them in the bag. It was her first visit to his home and everyone was making an effort. Misty had turned the charm up to ten and Terry’s dad had put his shirt on. Terry’s mum had prepared a special menu and Terry hadn’t brought any of his laundry home.
They entered the front room where an old film was blaring from the telly in the corner. For a moment it commanded all their attention. Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier were runaways from a chain gang, a white racist and a proud black man, still handcuffed together.
‘The Defiant Ones,’ said Terry’s mum. ‘He was lovely, Tony Curtis.’
‘I’ll turn that thing off,’ said Terry’s dad. That was a sure sign that royalty was visiting. They never turned the TV off until it told them to go to bed.
‘What was it that Truffaut said about life before television?’ Misty said, her lovely face frowning with concentration.
‘I don’t quite recall, dear,’ said Terry’s mum, as if she had been asked the name of Des O’Connor’s last single, and it was on the tip of her tongue.
‘Truffaut said that before television was invented, people stared at the fire.’ Misty looked very serious, as she always did when relating the thoughts of one of her heroes. ‘He said that
