2013 part 5.

I was relieved when finally I was able to see the chinks of yellow light through a corrugated iron door. We were climbing an iron spiral staircases surrounded by convex mirrors. The air smelt sweet and warm as I stepped out onto the pavement. Jean reached for her pound shop shades and pressed them on her face. We had walked all the way to Manor House from Highbury and I didn’t even realise. The pub near Manor house tube was squatted again like the old days. We went into it; some kids were running some sort of blues in there. You could get booze and we savoured every drop. They’d fixed up the beer garden; everything was bleached white in the glare of the sun.

There was a hyper libidinal undercurrent.
Sex was ubiquitous, untrammelled by media misrepresentation, it was about urgent desire, about affirmation. Encounters were frequent and possessed an elemental quality, it was always as if for the last time. The chance of love was not to be squandered, pleasure and intimacy were sought out and cherished. The moral codes of the past were scrambled, gone were the hypocrisies of recent decades. London was stripped of its billboards and newsagents crammed with bare flesh, but the raw sexuality of it’s people had never been so exposed.
Ish was around here before the strife, sometimes I would see him socially, we knew each other by name. In the first stages, when everyone was going mad, we were thrown together in the mass meetings on the estates. I thought back to the first time, that heatwave, the squatted sixties estate. There were concrete columns, and tin foil squares, walls painted black and graffiti painted words in white, most of it tribal and aggressive, keep away, savage messiah, wrath of god upon you eyes glowering huge in streaks of paint. Some of the windows were gaping and afforded glimpses into sparse flats, spider plants, mismatched furniture, towels, bin liners and blankets for curtains. I heard a soundsystem playing some visceral dub. There were fires in barrels and a few characters loitering and smoking. I was carrying empty containers taking a convoluted route to the standpipe. I sidestepped into an alley, a brutalist corridor, the flagstones were bleached pale pink and lemon yellow in the intense glare of the sun. The young man was familiar, I felt I might have known him before, I scanned the palimpsest of my memory, we’d been circling around each other but I couldn’t locate him. He was handsome, the type to loom up in dreams, mirror shades and a hat like a pilot’s over his long dark hair. He looked at me with the signalled intensity. The air was still and oppressive. We sat on a wall in the lilac shadows of a courtyard, it leapt with lozenges of purple light from a grille in the wall. He needed me, I him, for that moment the need for each other had become everything.

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