L text 7

From the suburb to the city

Text 1 (end of part 1, chapter 8, page 121)

In bed before I went to sleep I fantasized about London and what I’d do there when the city belonged to me. There was a sound that London had. It was, I’m afraid, people in Hyde Park playing bongos with their hands; there was also the keyboard on the Doors’s ‘Light my Fire’. There were kids dressed in velvet cloaks who lived free lives; there were thousands of black people everywhere, so I wouldn’t feel exposed; there were bookshops with racks of magazines printed without capital letters or the bourgeois disturbance of full stops.; there were shops selling all the records you could desire; there were parties where girls and boys you didn’t know took you upstairs and fucked you; there were all the drugs you could use. You see, I didn’t ask much of life; this was the extent of my longing. But at least my goals were clear and I knew what I wanted. I was twenty. I was ready for anything.

Text 2 (part 2, chapter 9, pages 129-131)

(…) Maybe I was just a provincial or something, but I began to see that I was among the strangest audience I’d seen in that place. There were the usual long-hairs and burned-out heads hanging at the back in velvet trousers or dirty jeans, patchwork boots and sheepskin coats, discussing bus fares to Fez, Barclay James Harvest and bread. That was the usual clientele, the stoned inhabitants of local squats and basements.

But at the front of the place, near the stage, there were about thirty kids in ripped black clothes. And the clothes were full of safety-pins. Their hair was uniformly black, and cut short, seriously short, or if long it was spiky and rigid, sticking up and out and sideways, like a handful of needles, rather than hanging down. A hurricane would not have dislodged those styles. The girls were in rubber and leather and wore skin tight skirts and holed black stockings, with white face-slap and bright-red lipstick. They snarled and bit people. Accompanying these kids were what appeared to be three extravagant South American transvestites in dresses, rouge and lipstick, one of whom had a used tampon on a piece of string around her neck. Charlie stirred restlessly as he leaned there. He hugged himself in self-pity as we took in this alien race dressed with an abandonment and originality we’d never imagined possible. I began to understand what London meant and what class of outrage we had to deal with. It certainly put us in proportion.

‘What is this shit?’ Charlie said. He was dismissive, but he was slightly breathless too; there was awe in his voice.

‘Be cool, Charlie,’ I said, continuing to examine the audience.

‘Be cool? I’m fucked. I just got kicked in the balls by a footballer.’

‘He’s a famous footballer.’

‘And look at the stage,’ Charlie said. ‘What rubbish is this? Why have you brought me out for this?’

‘D’you wanna go, then?’

‘Yes. All this is making me feel sick.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Lean on my shoulder and we’ll get you out of here. I don’t like the look of it either. It’s too weird.’

‘Yeah, much too weird.’

‘It’s too much’.

‘Yeah.’

But before we could move the band shambled on, young kids in clothes similar to the audience. The fans suddenly started to bounce up and down. As they pumped into the air and threw themselves sideways they screamed and spat at the band until the singer, a skinny little kid with carroty hair, dripped with saliva. He seemed to expect this, and merely abused the audience back, spitting at them, skidding over on to his arse once, and drinking and slouching around the stage as if he were in his living room. His purpose was not to be charismatic; he would be himself in whatever mundane way it took. The little kid wanted to be an anti-star, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him. It must have been worse for Charlie.

‘He’s an idiot,’ Charlie said.

‘Yeah.’

‘And I bet they can’t play either. Look at those instruments. Where did they get them, a jumble sale?’

‘Right’, I said.

‘Unprofessional,’ he said.

When the shambolic group finally started up, the music was thrashed out. It was more aggressive than anything I’d heard since early Who. This was no peace and love; here were no drum solos or effeminate synthesizers. Not a squeeze of anything ‘progressive ‘ or ‘experimental’ came from these pallid, vicious little council estate kids with hedgehog hair, howling abut anarchy and hatred. No song lasted more than three minutes, and after each the carrot-haired kid cursed us to death. He seemed to be yelling directly at Charlie and me. I could feel Charlie getting tense beside me. I knew London was killing us as I heard, ‘Fuck off, all you smelly old hippies! You fucking slags! You ugly fart-breaths! Fuck off to hell!’ he shouted at us.

I didn’t look at Charlie again, until the end. As the lights came up I saw he was standing up straight and alert, with cubes of dried vomit decorating his cheeks.

‘Let’s go,’ I said.

We were numb; we didn’t want to speak for fear of returning to our banal selves again; the wild kids bundled out. Charlie and I elbowed our way through the crowd. The he stopped.

‘What is it, Charlie?’

‘I’ve got to get backstage and talk to those guys.’

I snorted. ‘Why would they want to talk to you?’

Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia