For all the ones I lost.
I've cried, and you'd think I'd be better for it, but the sadness just sleeps, and it stays in my spine the rest of my life.
Conor Oberst
The Badlands 1989
This story might furnish a certain amount of disquiet. Just saying. If you like your lovers’ conscious and your bathroom clean then I suggest you move on. Otherwise, hold onto your hats, laddies.
It starts as all strange tales do with two heroines, Tara and Lully. Our attitudes were that Rome was truly never built in a day and so we lived our lives accordingly. It was a time of Luke Rhineheart, The Diceman and mind-fucks for puzzlement and pleasure. Our mission statement detailed hedonism and dying quickly rather than slowly.
At the time I found myself limping between a shared flat in Bayham Street, Camden Town and a squat on Albany Street that would have made Mervyn Peake proud. The house faced a major police station, which promised daily busts but turned out to be more of a tease than a threat. Here I had a room, filled with sleazy, waxen memories and Luke.
It was a squalid excuse for a place, a usurped courtesan in a shambling, hazardous street. A street that even the most hardened homeless would reject for a box and watery soup. Here, even the vermin accepted voluntary repatriation and yet we still chose to exist there in our way.
It consisted of four decaying stories much like a Piccadilly whore who was quite passable in youth but had become soft and cracked like rotten teeth. There was no heating, hot water or even passable sanitary conditions. To access the bog would be like to traversing the slums in Mumbai without jabs and drinking straight from the Ganges. Only four of the windows had any glass at all and these acted as only a flimsy barrier between the more anti-social elements and us. During winter an icy gale would hullabaloo its way though the gaps stabbing at our bones that jutted out of our wafer, paper thin skin.
There were nine permanent fuck heads. It could, and did grow, to over twenty depending on what the place was selling. Pretty much every tablet, liquid or blotting paper imaginable was available. We were like a 7/11 but less classy. At our desperate core we pursued degrees in artifice and destruction. All trying to get qualifications without home comforts but at least we had a roof over our heads. Several people I knew lived in boxes on a corner of Taverstock Square and completed their degrees against all the odds. There is a working archaeologist today who lived with his girlfriend for the last year of his degree under a tree in the Square. This was more than can be said for our posse of tricksters. The atmosphere was partisan but we maintained a quasi-body politic towards the place that, to give it its dues, held us all together in a freaky kind of way.
We would congregate at the Union Bar on Gower Street. You need to remember that the late eighties were a time of supreme, disciplined, political correctness. When every culture, religion, sexuality and madness was allowed a free reign. We were fucking each other like there was no tomorrow because if the nuclear warlords had thrown a tantrum we didn’t have one anyway.
The Union resembled an incongruous mock-colonial verandah. Its crowning glory was three bars named after two freedom fighters (Mandela and Biko) and a doubtful character, Winston Silcott. To attempt to describe the place with any degree of accuracy would prove difficult for me because it’s interior changed repeatedly depending on what chemical we had sniffed, snorted or rubbed on our clitori. But it was there and much of the action was played out in the Dance Hall.
So there was Luke, Face, Trip, Tara, Sean, Nick, Stevie and me, Lully. Luke has to come first because he was and, if he's still breathing, is and still will be a bent genius. He had the power of a rampant magnet. An ability to suck everybody in and spit them out like a modern Gilles de Rais. This might take minutes or it might take years. The strangest thing being that everybody knew this truth about him but they still came in their hordes like drug-crazed wharf rats, throwing themselves dutifully into his line of fire. And I succumbed like the whore I had become. We handed over our power that he enjoyed and abused in a perfectly up-front way. Ask anybody.
