Stalin Ate My Homework (35 page)

All the
other hippies walked to the slip road of the motorway to begin hitching, but I
said, ‘Oh, I’m, em … going to another good hitching spot that I know.’ Then I
took the Métro back into Paris to the Gare du Nord and, ducking round a corner
every time I saw a policeman, got on the first train to the coast and was back
in London by the afternoon.

I decided I didn’t want to
go back to Liverpool as that would have been admitting defeat — the importance
of holidays was so great that they couldn’t under any circumstances be
abandoned but had to be endured at all costs. Maybe I was hoping that if I held
on long enough Ladislav would come and rescue me with a fleet of Tatra
limousines. Some English hippy I had spoken to while in the cells had said, ‘There’s
a cool scene in Brighton, man.’ So, taking the word of a drug-addled idiot, I
caught a train down to the south coast of England.

On the beach
front at Brighton things seemed to be improving. Amongst the druggies hanging
around the deck chairs and ice cream vans I was delighted to see a guy who I
vaguely knew from O’Connor’s pub in Liverpool. I went up to him and said, ‘Hi,
Eric!’

Eric,
however, didn’t seem so pleased to see me. ‘Hey,’ he replied in an unfriendly
manner, looking around to see if anybody else had heard our exchange. Then,
dropping his voice to a whisper, he said, ‘They call me Moose down here, man.

By this
time I was so desperate for company that I chose to endure hanging out with a
guy named Moose rather than be on my own. He told me he knew an empty house
where we could crash for the night, so me and Moose walked a little way out of
town until we came to a suburban villa with boarded up windows. By now darkness
had fallen, so our actions were hidden from the street as we prised back the
rough wooden shutters and climbed in through one of the windows. Breathing
heavily from our exertions, we stood in the derelict room for a few moments,
the only illumination filtering in from the sodium lamps outside. Then suddenly
our eyes were dazzled by half a dozen powerful torches shining in our faces.
The police had been waiting in the house, expecting a teenage runaway to turn
up, but they took me and Moose to the police station anyway I had now been
arrested twice in two countries within twenty-four hours and this time I was
searched. The desk sergeant took my Opinel number 8 with the 8.5cm blade out of
my back pocket and said, ‘I’m not happy with this.’

‘Well,’
I replied, ‘if you’re not happy with that, you’re definitely not going to like
what’s in my bedroll.’

He
looked at the commando dagger where it lay on the padded sleeping bag. ‘I’m
going to have to take this off you,’ he finally said.

I wasn’t
going to argue, but they did give me a receipt written on the back of an
envelope. These police too tried to ring Molly and Joe, but by then they would
have been docking at the port of Rostock and so once more there was no answer.
This time I was kept in a cell until about
6
a.m., after which me and
Moose were given the now familiar speech about leaving town and never
returning. Amazingly, a very young constable offered to take us back into town
in his own car. The desk sergeant gave him a wry and weary look as he did so,
and once we were on the move it became apparent why With ridiculous faux
casualness the young policeman turned to us and asked, ‘Er, I hear, like, that
there are … like people selling drugs in Brighton.’

‘Are
there?’ me and Moose asked with apparent shock.

‘Yes.
You don’t know who they are, do you?’

‘No, we
don’t, officer, honest. We never knew such things went on, but we’d certainly
tell you if we did.’

Pulling
up on a road, still a fair way out of town, the ambitious young constable
said, ‘You two can fucking get out here.’

Me and
Moose-slash-Eric stood on the grassy verge as he drove away in his little red
Ford Escort. Below us across the Downs the English Channel sparkled in the
early morning light and I experienced for the first time something liberating
and empowering, a sensation I would feel many times over the coming years — the
wonderful release of giving up. Completely and utterly I gave in to the reality
that my hitch-hiking holiday was a disaster and, feeling lighter in spirits
than I had for weeks, I headed home.

The house was cold and on
the doormat under a stack of letters were my extremely poor 0-level results,
but I remained happy to be home. That night I caught the bus into town. It took
a while for me to find anyone to have a drink with, but when I did something
else remarkable occurred. Naturally I related what I had been up to over the
last few weeks, and in the telling my catastrophic hitch-hiking holiday gained
a coherence and a vitality it hadn’t had while it was actually happening. In
previous years I had recounted various incidents from my holidays to the kids
at school, but this was the first time I had been able to fashion a complete
saga that was entirely centred on my mishaps and adventures — everything and
everyone were merely a backdrop to the doings of me. People listened fascinated
as I told it in the Philharmonic, and then I went to O’Connor’s and told it
there, and then I went to the Crack and told it there, and then I went back to
the Phil and told it again to some different people, each time adding detail,
dropping bits, altering the sequence of events and mostly making myself appear
much less of a dick, until by the time I got to Kavanagh’s I was a modern-day
Scouse Odysseus. Up to that point I had thought that when things happened it
was the end of them, but it turned out that if you could tell a story that was
only the beginning of their life. In the right hands events could be chopped
and shaped and filleted until they came out exactly as you wanted them to come
out, just like election results in the Soviet Union.

I had a
whole new audience for my story when I returned to school a week later as a
member of the sixth form, studying for three A-Levels: Art, History and
English. Then everybody in the political world came back from their summer
holidays and I told it to them too. One night I was at a meeting in Liverpool
University and afterwards, sitting around, I was relating the story of my
summer holiday, which was by now almost as long as the holiday itself, to a
group who hadn’t heard it before. One particular girl with long auburn hair and
a round pretty face seemed to be regarding me with rapt attention. I thought to
myself, ‘Why is that girl looking at me like that?’ Then I thought, ‘Oh, yeah!’

She was
a couple of years older than me, a student at a teacher training college on the
edge of Liverpool. I went back with her to her hall of residence that night and
stayed until the early hours, when I had to climb out of the window to avoid
the prowling authorities. It was a misty morning as I waited for the first bus
back into town, giddy with the thought that finally I had found somebody who
liked me enough to let me do that to them.

But it
might have been that I hadn’t got it quite right, because as the bus moved off
I began to feel this tremendous pain in my groin. Then a few seconds later the
bus hit somebody with a thump. We had to wait for about a quarter of an hour
before an ambulance arrived and I did think of asking them to take me to the
hospital, but then we moved off. I got home about an hour later and spent the
rest of the day in bed like some Victorian lady who had been violated for the
first time, while Molly kept bursting into my bedroom shouting, ‘Lexi! Lexi!
What’s wrong? Are you all right? Oh God! Oh Christ, are you ill? Shall I phone
Cyril Taylor? What’s wrong? Tell me what’s wrong!’ 1 didn’t mind — in the end
my disastrous holiday had got me a girlfriend.

Molly and Joe brought me a
balalaika, a three-stringed folk instrument with a triangular body, as a
souvenir of their cruise. While my parents had been on the high seas the Soviet
Union had invaded Czechoslovakia, bringing to an end Dubcek’s Prague Spring.
The first Molly and Joe knew of it was when a group of Italians on the
Krupskaya,
having heard the news on the BBC World Service, demanded that they be
landed at the nearest port and allowed to go home right away.

Ladislav
never mentioned the upheaval in his letters, but a little while later he wrote
to say that Prukha, the Minister for Trade Union Affairs who had hosted many
dinners for us and had come to our home several times, was dead, apparently
murdered during a street robbery Which always seemed a bit unlikely in such a
rigorously policed country.

One evening the local BBC
TV news programme,
Look North,
ran a feature on a Japanese performance
artist who was appearing at the Bluecoat Gallery, one of Liverpool’s oldest
buildings, situated behind Woolworth’s in the town centre. This extremely
odd-looking woman wrapped herself in toilet paper and conducted her side of the
interview, composed of various cryptic pronouncements, in a high, squeaky
voice. The presenters in turn treated her as if they were talking to someone
in the novelty slot usually reserved for harmonica-playing livestock or batty,
hundred-year-old men who had fought in the Boer War. They said the woman’s name
was Yoko Ono. ‘That’s the last we’ve seen of her,’ I said to my dad.

To live
in Liverpool in those days it might have seemed as if you were a citizen of
some magical city. Every day was a pulsating stew of music, art, poetry and
theatre. Twenty-four hours a day you might see avant-garde performers from
outside town, such as Yoko or Bob Dylan. At a hundred venues you could witness
home-grown talent, poets, painters and musicians of enormous ability I had very
little to do with any of it.

Largely
this was due to my disorganised nature. I knew things were going on from the TV
and newspapers and sometimes I would try and attend an event but would either
get there on the wrong night or go to a pub that had the same name as the pub
where history was being made so I would spend all evening in some grimy bar
down by the docks, sipping on a half of bitter in a smeared glass and wondering
if the old bloke in the plastic mac talking to his whippet was in fact the
American beat poet Allen Ginsberg in disguise.

It was
probably the only time in the history of a northern city you could impress
people by saying you were a poet. In imitation of Adrian Henry, Brian Patten
and Roger McGough I began composing verse and managed to have one poem
published in the school magazine, a coruscating account of my life as the black
inhabitant of a Chicago slum, which ended, ‘Rats in the basement … sniper on
the rooftops.’ I did a reading at the Library on Walton Road which was run by
two librarians who wore matching black polo-necked jumpers and thought of
themselves as the Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath of Liverpool but it didn’t lead
anywhere. I also began attending the Merseyside Youth Theatre but though we
rehearsed for a couple of years we never managed to put on a play.

Two
people however who had managed to insert themselves into the very heart of
Liverpool’s pulsating artistic scene were Joe and Molly Sayle. As secretary of
Merseyside Medical Aid to Vietnam, Molly organised several blood drives that I
failed to contribute to, as well as fund-raising events and petition-writing
campaigns. There was a Vietnamese woman called Lin Qui, who was officially a
journalist based in Paris but was known by everybody in left-wing circles as
the main representative of both the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Communist
government in Europe who when I got home from school often seemed to be sitting
in our front room, silent and enigmatic in her black tunic staring at the
Secatrol.

Now
because Molly was mixing in the same radical circles as I was she and Joe
started turning up in the same pubs that I drank in, having got over her
revulsion for these ‘noisy smoky places’. I would see my mother coming down
Hope Street striding along while Joe, in his trilby hat and belted raincoat,
ran to keep up with her. Bearing down on me like a destroyer in the
Mediterranean ramming a midget submarine, no matter how I twisted and turned
Molly was always there in my periscope. The only other fifty-year-olds the
young clientele of these places knew were their mums and dads, their aunts and
uncles, quiet and self-effacing souls in cardigans and slippers. Now, here in
their midst, was this red-haired woman who was the same age as their parents
but was shouting fuck as loudly as she could, arguing endlessly, hitting them
when they disagreed with her and expressing deliciously inflammatory opinions,
noisily calling Princess Margaret a prostitute and vehemently defending Stalin’s
show trials. Joe they liked for his gentleness and good humour. In the pubs
where I knew perhaps eleven people to say hello to all the young drinkers
thought Molly was amazing so that often my mother would be surrounded by a
fawning crowd of admirers, who would look at me like an interloper if I ever
tried to join them.