The university is permeated with the odour of kerosene
Pulling on his black jeans and his black cotton shirt with barbed wire painted in white around the right arm, he shouted along to “Two Monstrous Nuclear Stockpiles” by Discharge. Howling the words of “Class War” by The Exploited, he buckled up the three-row pyramid stud belt. He laced his boots up tight, put on his kahki fatigue jacket and bellowed the whole way through “Just Like Eddie” by Heinz.
Before going into town on his bike, he slid his trousers down and felt under the mattress for the battered copy of Some Cunts. The inevitability of the photo-sets was not expected. But Claudia’s a nice smile. She’s sticking her arse in the air, showing four of her lovely teeth through a gap in her parted lips.
Five glue punks were jumping around having a laugh in the middle of the hall, spilling beer and pretending to kick the shit out of each other. At the edges stood small groups of skins, skunx and hardcore punx, separated by their different clothes. The support group, The Defiled, from Peterborough was playing. Their strident basslines and political stance went unnoticed, and their black combat anarcho-gear only got them showered with lager. The crowd wanted local, homegrown Oi!
When The Defiled finished, the main band, SAS Knife, had to get their stuff on stage and play straight away. The caretaker had a word with the singer, who told him to fuck off. He disappeared and the band kicked off with their first number, “7.62 Exit Wound”. The plug was pulled and the ruck started. The whole place went mad, pint glasses got smashed, blood flowed.
At the first hint of trouble he headed for the door, doing up his scarf and draining the pint of cider, trying not to catch anyone’s eye. The skins started bopping around the dancefloor, shouldering the confused, glued up apocalypse punks as they circled. He was on his bike and away by the time the real trouble started.
He biked up Queen’s Road, towards Mount Pleasant, hearing sirens from all directions. The place was a shambles. Trees splintered and broken, others uprooted. A white marquee lay tattered on the lawn, stained with blood. Bodies and body parts strewn all around. It was hard to tell who was alive and who was dead. Buildings were aflame. Screams rent the air as ambulance crews tended the worst of the living. One fire appliance had ripped through a wrought iron gate on entry, and its crew were trying to dislodge it before they could tackling the blaze roaring out of control.
Police cars sped along Queen’s Road in both directions. The magnificent Wren library was lit from within by multicoloured flames. In the near distance King’s College chapel exploded outwards through a window, but for a split second before the eruption he saw the utter beauty of stained glass illuminated by inferno. People mingled with panicked cows, running blindly to and fro around the edge of the field. Even now they mooed with fright as they milled around, foiled by a ha ha. Behind the trees the tall university library sputtered like a torch in the night.
He stopped and drew breath. Out of sight, an explosion ripped the front off the Fitzwilliam Museum. The street was littered with rubble and torn fragments of canvas, which were blown about by the breeze in flurries of bright leaves. A curator, awoken by the crackling void of the night-time chaos, sobbed, stuffing handsful of the stuff into the pockets of his corduroy jacket. The Senate House was in flames, a Grecian ruin. Caius College, alma mater of Sir Thomas Gresham, notarised gambler to the monarchy, was levelled. Kings Parade was littered with rags of clothing, glass and masonry from the college and chapel.
Within his purview, the crossroads at Castle Hill and Northampton Street was blocked with debris from the Kettle’s Yard complex. Shards of modernist sculpture and found objets were scattered around, mingling in the wreckage with twisted bronzes and torn pieces of coloured card and paper. The stark arrangement of detritus was a reminder of the effect of art on defeated plebian cultures.
The university excluded him. The very land on which it squatted. Closed to its neighbours. 800 years of exclusion. Heritage should be lanced. He was only amazed that no one had given it a shot before. He simultaneously thought of Arthur “Bomber” Harris, Eric B & Rakim and Joseph Mallord William Turner, who rowed out on the Thames to paint the glorious sight of the houses of parliament burning in the night.
He faced the monstrous entity which stood in his path. History. The formless presence that covered everything locally. He felt individual thoughts rustling in conjoined consciousnesses. An impression formed that he must choose a thought and that would be his answer. He felt individual thoughts rustling in conjoined consciousnesses, feeling like a string of snot being hawked up, but caught in the throat, so that it is necessary to extract the hard cord by pulling with thumb and forefinger.
On Histon Road, afterburners, he felt the sound down deep in his guts, rumbled up in the sky, then diminished, leaving the silence and dark to the late lonely rural suburban traveller. Had it been colder for longer, the ground made harder, he would have crossed the fields and done it in half the time, straight across country. In summer, in the brief darkness, the way seemed shorter. In damp midwinter, the field path was endless with mud, weighing you down, stopping the wheels of your bike from turning with brakes of clay.
The bike became a plane as he cycled, arms outstretched, manouevring with his thighs to balance. A keen wind was delaying him and thousands of tiny water droplets, nearly ice, cut into his forehead, inside the bone. He hummed the hymn of the French Foreign Legion, from March Or Die, with Gene Hackman.
A new, warmer breeze, whiff of animals. The wind changed direction and with it came a screaming noise in his ears, distorting his hearing and unbalancing his body. The tinnitus he’d developed months earlier, probably after seeing some excellent 3rd-rate punk band, returned. He stood astride his bike on still pedals, knees bracing the frame, freewheeling, brushed by weathery breaths, and smelled shit and silage.
The spokes of his wheels hummed like harps with his monotonous droning. Intoning as he crept alongside the hedgeless road, this sub-bass filled his head and the sky. Resonating at the pitch of his body, he felt the ebb and flow of a terrifying force.
Cycling over the railway crossing. No trains since 1974. The crossing man’s gone. The price has gone up. It used to be a lovely village. The churchyard yew must be the child of a 1,000-years. Ancient armies, crusaders, Assyrians, Egyptians, used to demonstrate their complete possession of a place by buggery and beheading. Open up, it’s sold! Go on, have a long look. The East of England. Empty before the planners found it. Agricultural, Hanseatic, dwelling place of H P Lovecraft’s epic sense.
Where you from? Say it with Dante Alighieri, Louis Ferdinand Céline, the diverted Dr Destouches. Say it with Ice T and Charles Dickens, with James Joyce and Steptoe and Son, with Monica Ali and John Prescott. Lock down locations before the first word’s written. Get into different consciousnesses. He sang under his breath.
Neil Palmer, 2000
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.