What drove me to it? Why did I decide on speed?, W. wonders, but he knows the answer. I can't bear empty time, he says, he knows that. And there I was, after my studies, unemployed once again, and with no prospects for employment. I thought: life is too wide, too large. I want to constrict my attention. Want to focus on one thing at a time.
Hulme Free State: that's where I went to score, wasn't it? It's where I went to live. Hulme, old Hulme, before it was regenerated. Old Hulme, with its Crescents of maisonette flats linked by old walkways – 'decks'. Old Hulme, put up very quickly in the 60s, concrete panels locked together like a house of cards, but from which its council tenants quickly fled.
The concrete, once white – a futural white – turned chewing gum grey under grey Northern skies. And the empty decks and walkways, the greens between the Crescents, called out to every freak in the north. They came from every direction: hippies and ravers and bikers, travellers with pit-bulls and rastas in their colours. And now the bunker-like pubs were full again, and the bunker-like clubs played hard techno and lover's rock.
'And you came, too, didn't you?', W. says. I wondered into Hulme Free State, that's what the graffiti called it. I wandered among the condemned buildings, past the shattered TV someone had thrown from the top deck of Charles Barry (each Crescent was named after a famous architect: William Kent, John Nash, Robert Adam, Nicholas Hawksmoor …), past the piles of rusting white goods and mouldering furniture.
There were fires burning on the walkways, I noticed that, didn't I? Luckily, concrete doesn't burn. Especially wet concrete. Especially damp concrete. And the Crescents were always damp, I told W. that. Dark grey on grey – that was the damp, soaking through the concrete.
And so the fires made by squatters wanting to escape their drenched-through flats. Fires on the decks burning up old furniture and plywood from boarded-up windows. They didn't touch solid ground for weeks, some of those squatters. They sent others down for beer, chips and tabs, and kept to their eeries.
How did I come to squat in a boxroom next to the back balcony of one of the maisonettes? How did it end up with me scraping away the pigeon shit and boarding up the broken window? How with my dragging up a mattress and spray painting no drugs sold here on the security door to keep the smackheads away. – 'Someone must have liked you. Someone must have taken your side'.
In the end, I wasn't a very good Bohemian, W. says. I coughed too much to pull on the spliff when it was passed along clockwise. I got bored sitting with the others watching traffic on the benches outside the cafe. I wasn't ready to dream my life away. – 'You wanted to do something, W. says. To read, for one thing. To write, for another.
But at night, after the pubs closed, I used to sit with the other squatters on the greens, looking up at the police helicopter. I sat and listened, as they sat around me smoking and waiting for the Kitchen to open – the nightclub they made by drilling through from one flat to another.
I listened to the reasoning of the Rastas. Listened to talk of Babylon and the Babylon system – the city around us and all cities, all civilisation. Listened to them speak about the Almighty, and about the god-King Messiah, about Exodus, about the return to Ethiopia.
I listened to a DJ rhapsodise about the religious significance of dub, about what happens when he slid down the faders and lets vocals and melodies drop out, leaving only the interlocking rhythms of drum and bass, and when he punched in the horns at full volume and punched them out again, and when he amplified snare rolls like detonations, and let the hi hat echo and explode and fizz out into white noise. He spoke of breaking up the lyrics, abandoning verses for fragments, replacing choruses with snatches of words, and of building up the electronic ambience in the dub, letting it gather humid and dark like a humming, squalling storm above the music.
I heard a ruined beauty, eyes shrunk to tiny dots, teeth missing, talk about God. Peace: that's what smack gave her, she said. Peace, spreading warmly out from her stomach – she knew it straightaway, with her first hit. She felt lifted, lightened. Her blood felt warm. She looked upwards, she said, sighed with bliss. What was lifting her up? She felt as light as air. Look in the mirror, someone told her. Why? She hated looking. But this time, she obeyed and saw an angel, a beautiful angel. And now, though her teeth were rattling themselves loose in her mouth, now her cheeks were sunken, her skin grey, she felt the same thing. The high's like nothing else, she said. It's religious. She understood what the word God meant, she said. Complete. You feel complete, she said, stubbing out her cigarette. You feel God when you arms and legs get heavy, when there's a tingling on the surface of your skin, as though it was being brushed by a shoal of fish.
The Most High, that's what they call God, isn't it?, the girl said. The Most High: higher than all highs, but those highs pointing up to him like aretes. She saw them in her mind's eye, she said, riding up ever higher, flashing the light back along their keen edges and converging on a single point: God, God.
I listened to an anarchist speak of the political significance of Hulme Free State, of the new world that was being prepared there outside the constituted forms of political power. He spoke of the direct democracy of the Paris Commune of 1871, of the Soviets, of Lenin's worker's councils. He spoke of the Action Committees of May 1968, of the nights of the barricades, of the general strike and the writings on the walls: Never Work! Speak to Your Neighbours. Alone, We Can Do Nothing. Alone, we can do nothing, the anarchist said. But here, we're not alone.
We looked around. Ravers, bug eyed, danced in tiny circles. French skinheads, newly arrived from Marseilles – they were said to be murderers on the run - went about menacingly, screwdivers hidden in their bomber jackets. Packs of ownerless dogs, tongues lolling from their mouths, loped through the night. We're not alone, the anarchist said.
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