broadly part of their generation, he made a point of not commenting on the state of the flat, red wine on the walls, a webbed crack in the skylight, two missing banisters.
When Janet asked if she could redecorate her room—three walls white, one eggplant—Patrick said he would help her. He paid for paint, rollers, brushes, dust sheets, and they spent days together in a poorly ventilated room, giddy from vapor. Patrick’s oft-proclaimed love for women in work clothes stemmed from Janet in a paint-spattered Radio 1 Roadshow T-shirt. Don enjoyed reminding Patrick of this: “You thought it was chemical attraction; she thought it was paint fumes.” Don and Patrick built their relationship on warmly assassinating each other’s characters. “God bless you, Don, safety valve of Middle England’s discontent.” It was only much later, while building the community, that he and Don, keeping their style of direct communication, slowly lost the buffer of goodwill.
After graduating, Freya, Don, and Janet moved to London, where the early 1990s recession had bedded in. Although residential rent was still high in central London, they’d been advised to look into office space. Don bought a secondhand suit and met the real estate agent, Ash, a broad Australian with a sun-ripened face and almost no lips, to look at a dirt-cheap block in North Lambeth. They shook hands and kept shaking as they walked. The entranceway was entirely mirrored, so that in all directions Don saw himself multiplied: an army of smartly dressed versions of himself shaking hands with anarmy of real estate agents
forever
. Don sometimes said it was the horror of this image from which the community was born.
The agent opened two locks and pushed through into a lightless space, unfastening and throwing up the industrial metal shutters that covered each window. The shutters made a sound like a train passing. Also, trains passed. The space was a huge, single white room, the floor covered with the thinnest blue office carpet, dusty windows running the length of two sides. They were overlooked all around by other offices, which were empty. The flat tar roof, a four-story climb up a New York–style fire escape, had a view as far as Crystal Palace in the southeast, and to the north they could make out a lack of buildings that, it took them some time to realize, was the river.
Once they’d moved in, they discovered that, each morning, the smell of burnt bacon fat pumped out of a nearby ventilation pipe and that huge rats patrolled the bins in the quadrangles between the surrounding buildings.
They built their own walls using office partitions and shelving, piles of books, shoe boxes, wardrobes, dressers, and cinder blocks from a Dumpster down the road. Janet hung curtains and pashminas as doorways. Sound traveled. She invested in musician’s earplugs rather than listen to her housemates’ idea of
silent
sex. The corner by the fire exit became the kitchen, with knee-high gas canisters and a two-ring camping stove on a school desk. They found a still-functioning industrial contact grill (one ribbed surface, one flat) out the back of the café opposite. It produced an unsettling plastic smell but was otherwise perfect.
Don managed to get a job that related to his film studiesdegree, working at the twenty-four-screen Elephant & Castle UCI. He squeezed out bags of nacho cheese, grease-sprayed the hot dogs and, best of all, emptied bladders of salsa that looked like liposuction fat. Popcorn dust clogged his sinuses.
Each screening had to be checked every half an hour to make sure nobody was smoking or having full intercourse in the deluxe seats. He never saw whole films, just glimpses as he moved from screen to screen: a man being tortured with a vise, a boy hugging a dog, animated clocks dancing, a male nurse talking about love, a series of massive explosions, snow on a lake, blood on bedsheets, a gondola trip … and so on, for twenty-four screens. His dissertation
When Janet asked if she could redecorate her room—three walls white, one eggplant—Patrick said he would help her. He paid for paint, rollers, brushes, dust sheets, and they spent days together in a poorly ventilated room, giddy from vapor. Patrick’s oft-proclaimed love for women in work clothes stemmed from Janet in a paint-spattered Radio 1 Roadshow T-shirt. Don enjoyed reminding Patrick of this: “You thought it was chemical attraction; she thought it was paint fumes.” Don and Patrick built their relationship on warmly assassinating each other’s characters. “God bless you, Don, safety valve of Middle England’s discontent.” It was only much later, while building the community, that he and Don, keeping their style of direct communication, slowly lost the buffer of goodwill.
After graduating, Freya, Don, and Janet moved to London, where the early 1990s recession had bedded in. Although residential rent was still high in central London, they’d been advised to look into office space. Don bought a secondhand suit and met the real estate agent, Ash, a broad Australian with a sun-ripened face and almost no lips, to look at a dirt-cheap block in North Lambeth. They shook hands and kept shaking as they walked. The entranceway was entirely mirrored, so that in all directions Don saw himself multiplied: an army of smartly dressed versions of himself shaking hands with anarmy of real estate agents
forever
. Don sometimes said it was the horror of this image from which the community was born.
The agent opened two locks and pushed through into a lightless space, unfastening and throwing up the industrial metal shutters that covered each window. The shutters made a sound like a train passing. Also, trains passed. The space was a huge, single white room, the floor covered with the thinnest blue office carpet, dusty windows running the length of two sides. They were overlooked all around by other offices, which were empty. The flat tar roof, a four-story climb up a New York–style fire escape, had a view as far as Crystal Palace in the southeast, and to the north they could make out a lack of buildings that, it took them some time to realize, was the river.
Once they’d moved in, they discovered that, each morning, the smell of burnt bacon fat pumped out of a nearby ventilation pipe and that huge rats patrolled the bins in the quadrangles between the surrounding buildings.
They built their own walls using office partitions and shelving, piles of books, shoe boxes, wardrobes, dressers, and cinder blocks from a Dumpster down the road. Janet hung curtains and pashminas as doorways. Sound traveled. She invested in musician’s earplugs rather than listen to her housemates’ idea of
silent
sex. The corner by the fire exit became the kitchen, with knee-high gas canisters and a two-ring camping stove on a school desk. They found a still-functioning industrial contact grill (one ribbed surface, one flat) out the back of the café opposite. It produced an unsettling plastic smell but was otherwise perfect.
Don managed to get a job that related to his film studiesdegree, working at the twenty-four-screen Elephant & Castle UCI. He squeezed out bags of nacho cheese, grease-sprayed the hot dogs and, best of all, emptied bladders of salsa that looked like liposuction fat. Popcorn dust clogged his sinuses.
Each screening had to be checked every half an hour to make sure nobody was smoking or having full intercourse in the deluxe seats. He never saw whole films, just glimpses as he moved from screen to screen: a man being tortured with a vise, a boy hugging a dog, animated clocks dancing, a male nurse talking about love, a series of massive explosions, snow on a lake, blood on bedsheets, a gondola trip … and so on, for twenty-four screens. His dissertation
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