I swallowed. “And what am I doing here?”
“There’s loads of room,” he said. “And it’s hard to do this alone. You’ve got to keep someone on the premises at all times, to tell them to bugger off if they turn up wanting to repossess the place. They can’t enter the place so long as there’s someone home, not without a warrant. Oh, sure, I could leave the radio on and hope that that fooled ’em but—”
He was going a mile a minute. I suddenly realized that he was even more nervous than I was. He’d had this place scouted out and all ready to move into, but he couldn’t take it over until he found a confederate—me. Someone had to stay home while he was out getting food and that.
“You want me to move in here? Jem—”
He held up both hands. “Look, the worst thing, the absolutely worst thing, right? The worst thing that could happen is that they get a court order and evict us and we’re back at the shelter. Back where you started. It might take a day, it might take years. In the meantime, what else have you got to do? Do you really want to spend the rest of your life sleeping eight to a room? Look, son, this is the chance to become a gentleman of leisure instead of, you know, a tramp. Don’t you want that? ’Course you do. Of course you do!”
I took a step back into the dark of the stinking, shuttered pub. “Look, mate,” I said. “It all sounds nice, but this is really fast—”
He stood up and dusted his hands on his thighs. “Yeah, okay, fair enough. But you wouldn’t have come along if I’d told you you were going to end up living in a squat, right? I wanted you to see the place before you made up your mind. Just look at this place, son, just look at it! Think of the potential! We’ll get big comfy sofas, clean up the kitchen and get the water going, stick up a Freeview antenna, find some WiFi to nick, it’ll be a bloody palace. A bloody palace! Just think about what it could be like! We’ll get some wood polish and bring up the wainscoting and those old snugs, shine up the chrome in the kitchen. We could have dinner parties! Christ, you should see the fridge and walk-in deep-freeze they’ve got in there—we could store a year’s worth of food and still have room.”
I teetered on the edge between my anxiety and his infectious excitement. “I don’t understand,” I said. “How is it possible that this won’t get us banged up? Aren’t we trespassing?”
He shook his head. “Not until there’s a court order. Until then, we’re brave homesteaders on the wooly outer edges of property law. It’s a lovely place to be, mate. Places like this, it’s in the public interest for us to occupy ’em. The cops might show up, but so long as you don’t let ’em in and you know what to tell them, they won’t do anything except make noises. Come on, what do you say? You want to be a streetkid or do you want to be an adventurer?”
I looked around the reeking and dark pub. Now that my eyes were adjusting to the dim, I could see all the battered furnishings lurking in the shadows. It had once been a lovely place, I could see that. Nice tile work. Old wooden floors and snugs and benches. A long wooden bar with stumps where stools had been torn loose, and a broken back-mirror. I remembered how big the building had been from the outside, all the extra rooms and I wanted to explore them all, map them like a level in a game, find all their treasures and get them put to rights.
“All right,” I said. “Deal. For now, anyway. But you got to promise me you won’t get me arrested or cut me up and leave me in rubbish bins all over Bow.”
He crossed his heart. “Promise. I told you I was a brick-around-the-ankles man, didn’t I?”
* * *
Once he had the locks on the door—three of them, including two deadbolts that had to be slowly and painfully screwed into the jamb and door with long, sharp steel screws, a wrist-breaking task that took both of us an hour in turns—he drew a letter out of his bag, in a sealed envelope with a first-class stamp.
“Right,” he said. “This letter is addressed to me, at this address: The Three Crows pub, Bow. I’m going to nip out and find a post-box and put it in the mail. That’ll get us started on proof that we live here, which’ll be handy when and if the law shows up. I’ll also get us some dinner. You all right with pizza?”
I was well impressed. “You’ve done this before.”
“Never on my own, always as part of someone else’s gang. But yeah, once or twice. I tell you, squatting is for kings, shelters are for tramps. Once you decide to be a king, there’s no going back. So, pizza?”
My stomach leapt at the word pizza. “As the Buddha said in the kebab shop, ‘make me one with everything.’”
He snorted and left, calling out, “Lock up and don’t let anyone in until I get back, right?”
“Right!” I called into the closing door. He’d left me with his head torch, and I strapped it on. I’d expected it to be quiet in the pub once he’d gone, but it was alive with spooky old building sounds: creaks and mysterious skittering sounds of rats in the walls. Let’s not mess about: the place was stitching me up. In my head, the clittering of mouse claws over unseen boards was the scrabbling of the local drugs lookouts—the ones we’d heard calling to one another as we made our way to the pub—clawing their way in through secret loose boards. And those creaking boards—that was some monstrous, leathery old tramp who made this place his den, holed up in some dank corner where he was now rousing himself, getting ready to cut up and eat the interlopers who’d intruded on his territory.
I have an overactive imagination. At least I’m man enough to know it. I mean, part of me knew that there was no one else in this rotten tooth of a building. And I’d spent the morning meeting and feeding a whole gang of tramps and even they had been polite, friendly, and more scared of me (and their own shadows) than I was of them. So I resettled the headlamp on my forehead and slowly began to explore the pub, making a conscious effort to keep my breathing even and my shoulders from tightening up around my ears.
Tell you what, though: there are better ways to explore a spooky abandoned building than with a headlamp. The narrow beam of light jiggles like crazy every time you move your head the slightest, teensiest bit. The beam of light that passes right in front of your face means that you have zero peripheral vision. Every time you bounce the beam off something reflective and blind yourself, it creates a swarm of squirming green after-burns that look exactly like the hands of phantoms rising out of the walls, about to strangle you. It is the perfect re-creation of every zombie film you’ve ever seen where the hero’s breath rasps in and out as he walks carefully through the halls of some blood-spattered military base, waiting for a pack of growling undead biters to boil out of a doorway and tear him to gobbets and ooze.
There’s only one thing worse: turning off the lamp.
I started off slow and careful, bent on convincing myself that I wasn’t half-mad with fear. There was a large kitchen which did have a huge walk-in deep-freezer, which smelt a bit off, but not totally rancid. The pipes rattled and groaned when I turned on the taps, but then the water began to flow, first in irregular bursts of brown, rusty stuff and then in a good, steady gush of clear London tap water, the river Thames as filtered through twenty million people’s kidneys, processed, dumped back into the Thames, filtered, and sent back to those thirsty kidneys. It’s the bloody circle of life. Reassuring.
By now, I had a genuine case of the heebie-jeebies, and I had an idea that maybe some of the upstairs windows hadn’t been quite boarded up so there might be some rooms with the light of day shining through them and chasing away the bogeymen. So I found the staircase, which creaked like one of the Foley stages they use for horror-film sound effects, and made my noisy way up to the first floor. I didn’t hang around long. Not only was it pitch-black, it also smelled even worse than the ground floor. Someone had lived here and left behind a room filled with dried-out turds and the ammonia reek of old, soaked-in piss.
You want to hear something funny? Once I’d got past my total disgust, I felt a landlord’s resentment at this abuse of “my” home. Some interloper had installed himself her
e and done this awful thing to my beloved home. Never mind that he’d been there first, that I hadn’t known this place existed before that afternoon, and that I had pretty much broken in and claimed it as my own. I deserved this place, I was going to take care of it in a way that the animal that had crapped all over the floor could never understand.
Yeah, it’s odd how quickly I went from squatter to owner in my head. But on the other hand, I remember the first time I mixed down my own edit of a Scot Colford clip and watched it spread all over the net, and how much I’d felt like that clip was mine, even though I’d taken it from someone else without asking. It’s a funny old world, as the grannie in Home, Home on the Strange (Scot’s first and best rom-com) used to say.
Up on the second floor, things were just as dark, but less awful. There was wax on the floor where someone had burned candles, and I kicked over a few stubs. There was a pretty horrible mattress and a litter of lager-tins in what looked like an old office—the local estate kids’ romantic getaway, I supposed—and another room stacked high with chairs and tables, all chipped and wobbly looking. I filed that away for future reference.
On the third and top story, I found some rooms whose windows were not boarded up. These let in a weak, grayish twilight, but it was a huge relief after the pitchy dark of the rooms below. I thought I’d wait there for Jem to return. How long could it take to post a letter and get a pizza? Though, from what I’d seen of Jem, I wouldn’t have been surprised if his way of posting a letter involved breaking into the central sorting office, stealing a stamp, then reverse-pickpocketing it into a letter-carrier’s bag.
The third floor was a huge, open space: dusty and grimy, but mostly free from any sign of human habitation. It was ringed with windows on all its walls, and I could imagine that it’d be a lovely penthouse someday when we’d finished doing up the place. But for now, I was more interested in the fact that the western windows were unboarded. I switched off the headlamp and examined them. They were filthy, but they looked like they might open up, letting in even more light. I yanked the painted iron handles and pushed and tugged and grunted and rattled them until they squealed to life in a shower of dried paint and fossilized mouse turds and rust-colored dust. Slowly, painfully, I cranked the windows wide open, flooding the room with London’s own dirty gray light. The fresh air was incredible, cooling and reassuring, as was the light in the room. With its help, I noted a box of candles and a stack of chairs in one corner.
I looked out the window at the bleak housing estate. It looked like a bomb site: blasted flat and partially ruined, with rotting brickwork and railings hanging free. Loads of the flats looked to be completely deserted, with their windows boarded up. We’d had some like that back on my estate in Bradford: places where the roof had caved in or the pipes had burst and the council had decided just to leave them empty instead of finding the money to fix them up. I didn’t know much about how things were run, but I knew that the council didn’t have any money and was always cutting something or other to make ends meet.
If you made a biopic of my life to that point, you could call it Not Enough Money and hire someone to write a jaunty theme song called He’s Skint (Yes, ’e is). It’d be a box-office smash.
So this bomb site was pretty familiar to me. And it looked like Jem might be the first person I’d ever met who didn’t have a problem being broke. He seemed to have figured out how to live without cash, which was a pretty neat trick.
I peered out the window again, looking for Jem. I didn’t see him (did he go to Italy for the damned pizza?), but I did spot the drugs lookouts he was talking about before. Just kids, they were, eight or nine years old, playing idle games or chatting on the balconies of the estate, sitting in doorways eating crisps, doing things that were pretty kidlike. But whenever someone new came onto the estate, they started up with their birdcalls, sending them echoing off the high towers.
They began to coo and call and I thought That must be Jem. About bloody time. But when I looked out, it wasn’t Jem: it was a huge, shambling man with long dreads and a black duffel bag that he hauled as if it weighed a ton. He was wearing scuffed boots, greasy blue-jeans, a beaten wind-cheater—he looked like a tramp. Or maybe a killer who hunted tramps and dismembered them and carried them around in a duffel bag.
And he was headed straight for the pub.
I mean, it wasn’t like there was anywhere else he could be headed for. The pub stood alone in the wasted field, like the lone tooth in a bleached skull. The man bounced when he walked, dreads shaking, arm penduluming back and forth with that weighty bag.
My first thought was that this was some kind of goon sent by the owner to beat the hell out of me and toss me out. But there was no way that the landlord could know what we were up to. Jem hadn’t even put up the sign yet.
Then I thought he must be a dealer, alerted by the lookout. Maybe one of these loose floorboards disguised a secret stash with millions in sugar or smack or something even more exotic—a cache of guns?
Then I thought he might just be someone who had got here before us, someone who lived here and did such a good job of covering up for himself when he was out that I couldn’t find his nest.
Then I stopped thinking because he was standing at the door, thudding rhythmically with a meaty fist, making the whole building shake. My guts squirmed with terror. I thought I’d been afraid before, but that was the nameless, almost delicious fear of something in the dark. Now I had the very pointed, very specific terror of a giant, rough-looking bloke hammering at my door. I didn’t know what to do.
Seemingly of their own accord, my feet propelled me back downstairs into the pub’s main room, where my headlamp was the only light. It made sense, right? After all, when someone knocks at the door, you answer it.
He was still thudding at it, but then he stopped.
“Open up, come on!” he shouted in a rough voice. “Haven’t got all bloody night.”
I cowered in one of the snugs.
“Jem, damn it, it’s me, open the goddamned door!”
He knew Jem’s name. That was odd.
“Jem’s not home,” I said in my bravest voice, but it came out like a terrified squeak.
There was silence from the other side of the door.
“What do you mean he’s not home? I just crossed the whole bloody city. Jem, is that you? Look, mate, I don’t want to play silly buggers. Open the damned door, or—”
My balls shrank back up against my abdominal cavity. It was a curious sensation, and not pleasant.
“It’s not Jem. He should be back soon. Sorry,” I squeaked.
“Look, I’m the spark, all right? Jem asked me to come round and get you switched on. I’ve got loads of other things I could be doing, so if you want to sit in the dark, that’s up to you. Your choice.” A spark—an electrician! Jem hadn’t mentioned this, but he had said something about getting the electricity switched on. I’d assumed he’d meant convincing the power company to switch us on, but that wasn’t really Jem’s style, was it?
Cautiously, I made my way to the door and shot all the bolts and turned the lock.
The man loomed over me, at least six foot six, with red-rimmed eyes. He wasn’t white and he wasn’t black—but he wasn’t Indian or Pakistani, either. He smelled of machine oil and sweet ganja, and his free hand was big and knuckly and spotted with oil. He pushed past me without saying a word and strode boldly into the middle of the pub.
He sniffed disapprovingly. “Doesn’t half pong, does it? My advice: scatter some fresh coffee grounds right away, that covers practically everfing. But I bet this place has a evil great extractor fan in the kitchen, you run that for a couple days and you’ll get it smelling better.” He turned to face me. “You’ll be wanting to close that door, Sunshine. Never know what sort of villains are lurking around in bad old east London.”
I closed the door. I was still wearing my headlamp, and its beam showed my shaking hands as I worked the locks.
“I’m Dodger,”
he said as he clicked on a big torch and wandered behind the bar with it, shining it underneath the counter. “The spark.” He stood up and headed for the kitchen. “You ain’t seen the mains-junction for this place, have you?”
“No,” I managed, still squeaking. “I’m Trent,” I said. “I’m Jem’s friend.”
“That’s nice,” he said. He was in the kitchen now, and I could hear him moving things, looking behind things. “Lucky you.”
“It’s got to be in the cellar,” he said. “Where’s the door?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just got here.”
“Never mind, found it. Come here, Jem’s friend.” He was kneeling in the middle of the kitchen floor, torch in one hand, the other gripping the ring of a trapdoor set into the floor. I accidentally blinded him with my light and he let go of the ring and shielded his face. “Careful, right? Christ, those headlamps are utter toss.” He handed me his torch, heavy with all the batteries in it. “Shine that where I’m working, and not in my eyes. Douse that ridiculous thing on your noggin.”
I did as bid, and watched in fascination as he hauled and strained at the ring, lifting the trapdoor and letting it fall open with an ear-shattering crash. A ladder descended into the darkness of a cellar. “Okay,” he said, “mission accomplished, time for a break.” He fished in his pocket and brought out a packet of rolling papers and a baggie of something—weed, as it turned out, strong enough to break the stink of the pub as soon as he opened the bag. “Let’s improve the air quality, right? Hold the light, that’s a good lad.” He laid the paper on the thigh of his jeans, smoothed it out, then pulled out another and carefully joined it to the first, making a double-wide paper. He sprinkled a mammoth helping of weed into the center of the paper and then quickly skinned up a spliff so neat it looked as if it might be factory made. He twisted the ends, stuck it in his mouth and struck a match on the floor and lit it.