Ray saw that though there was derision in Terry’s laughter, there was also something that he could only identify as love.
This was their paper. This was their thing. This was their place. And soon he would be asked to leave. He didn’t know how he could stand it.
“Badge collectors read on,” said Terry, and then he looked up at Ray. ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you?’
‘Nothing.’ When you grew up with brothers, you learned you always had to come straight back at them. ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you?’
Ray turned his back to Terry, busying himself at his desk, trying to straighten the bent spool on his tape recorder, and letting his hair fall forward so that his friend couldn’t see the panic and pain in his eyes.
Leon’s squat was in a large, decaying white house on a street of boarded-up buildings.
There was a kind of muddy moat around the perimeter of the house with wooden planks leading across it, like the ramshackle drawbridge of a rotting castle. On the ground floor the cracked and crumbling white plaster was almost obliterated by slogans.
WE ARE THE WRITING ON YOUR WALL. NO DRUGS IN HERE. CATS LIKE PLAIN CRISPS. Someone had changed a scrawled white NF into a bold black NAZIS OUT.
Leon slipped his hand into his leather jacket and felt for his key, glancing over his shoulder before he began negotiating his way across the planks. He had been in the squat for over a year now, ever since he had dropped out of the LSE and started full time on The Paper, but there was still a taste of fear in his mouth whenever he came back. You never knew when the bailiffs and cops would be coming. You never knew what was waiting for you.
As soon as he was inside the hallway a hairy unwashed face appeared at the top of the stairs, as Leon knew it would, as it always did. It wasn’t just Leon. There was a creeping paranoia about squat life that never really went away. It seemed strangely familiar to Leon, because he thought it was not so different to the suspicion lurking behind the net curtains of the rich suburb where he had grown up.
‘Someone’s waiting for you,’ said the hairy face at the top of the stairs.
Leon was amazed. Nobody was ever waiting for him.
‘Some straight,’ said the hairy guy. ‘Reckons he’s your father.’
I knew it, Leon thought, his stomach sinking. I knew something bad was going to happen.
‘The French guys don’t like it,’ said the face at the top of the stairs. ‘We nearly didn’t let him in.’
‘You shouldn’t have,’ Leon said, trying to keep his voice calm, trying to pretend he was in control. He began climbing the stairs.
The squat was meant to be some kind of democracy, but in reality it was run by the French and Germans, who were older, who had been doing this for years, who talked about adventures in places like Paris and Amsterdam with such authority that Leon always fell silent, and felt like a kid who had seen nothing of the world. Leon was furious that his father should embarrass him in front of these great men.
At the top of the stairs he heard the usual babble of languages and sounds. The floorboards of the squat were bare and everything echoed and seemed louder than it should have. The Grateful Dead, turned up to ten, an argument about the murder of Leon Trotsky, another argument about a borrowed bottle of milk, and a woman’s voice, apparently soothing a baby.
Leon wondered what his father would make of the overwhelming smell, for the squat was full of ripe scents, the trapped air behind the boarded-up windows reeking of dry rot, unwashed clothes, joss sticks and, seeping into everything, the odour of the vegetable soup that was permanently simmering on a big black stove.
The old man. Fuck it. Leon swallowed hard. When would it ever end? That fear of facing his father? That terror of seeing the disappointment in his eyes?
He was by the sash window, his hands behind his back like the Duke of Edinburgh about to inspect the guard, staring down at the street. He was a tall, good-looking man seven days from his fifty-third birthday, calm and regal in his crisp Humphrey Bogart raincoat. He was standing. There was nowhere to sit down. There was nothing in the room but a pile of rucksacks and a few sleeping bags, one of which contained two sleeping teenage girls, curled up like kittens.
‘What are you doing here, Dad?’
The old man turned to him.
‘Hello, Leon,’ he said, as if he could hardly believe their luck at bumping into each other. ‘I could ask you the same question, couldn’t I?’
The old man seemed perfectly relaxed. Leon had to hand it to him – how many of the boys he went to school with had fathers who could walk into a squat and not bat an eyelid? Leon remembered what his father had said to him when he was a boy, and delirious with excitement because his daddy had taken him to his newspaper office as a special treat during the long summer holiday. A journalist has to be at home everywhere, Leon. Remember that.
The old man smiled, and placed a hand on Leon’s shoulder, patting it twice, and then let it fall away when his son did not respond.
‘Good to see you. Are you keeping well?’
He looked up at Leon’s hat but said nothing. Leon’s parents had always been very understanding about the vagaries of fashion. Infuriatingly tolerant, in fact. None of his haircuts – the botched Ziggy Stardust, the failed Rod Stewart – had ever troubled them. That’s their problem exactly, Leon thought. They can understand a bit of youthful rebellion. But they can’t stomach the real thing.
Leon grimaced. ‘You really should have rung. This is not a good time. I’m going out – my friends will be waiting – at the Western World.’
His father frowned, lifting a hand to Leon’s bruised cheekbone, but not quite touching it. ‘What on earth happened to your poor face?’
Leon wanted to say – oh, please don’t fuss, I’ve had twenty years of it. But he couldn’t resist – he wanted his father to know. He wanted his father to be proud of him. And when the fuck would that ever end?
‘I was down there on Saturday. You know – Lewisham.’
Leon relished the frightened look in the old man’s face.
‘The riot? What – they beat you?’
Leon laughed at that. ‘I just got clipped. A cop’s knee.’
His father was wide-eyed. Everything amazed him. ‘His knee?’
Leon sighed with irritation. How could anyone know so little? ‘He was on a horse, Dad. He was a cop on a horse.’ Leon waited. He wanted some acknowledgement from his father. A bit of credit, that wouldn’t have gone amiss. Some small nod of recognition that Leon had done a good thing by going to Lewisham and standing up to the racists. But the old man just exhaled with frustration.
‘Why do you want to get mixed up in all that? A bunch of bower boys waving the flag, and another bunch of bower boys throwing bricks at them. What does that solve?’
Leon’s face reddened with anger. ‘You should understand. You of all people. They’re Fascists, Dad. They have to be stopped. Isn’t that what you did in the war?’
The old man raised his eyebrows. He almost smiled, and Leon blushed. He wished he could stop doing that.
‘Is that what you think it was like at Monte Cassino? A punch-up on Lewisham High Street? What a lot you have to learn, my boy.’
This is why I left home, Leon thought, his eyes pricking with tears. The constant belittling. The just-not-fucking-getting-it. The never being good enough. The being told that I know nothing.
‘I