Holdenby Road

I didn’t actually see this place, but my girlfriend did.  Still it was me that found it on Rightmove and while, theoretically, we should have instantly discarded it for being a farce of itself, the failure with Prince’s Garth made me wonder whether trying to buy anywhere anyone else might conceivably be interested in was doomed to failure.  Maybe it was better to go for somewhere utterly repulsive.

Holdenby Road is back where we started looking, running the opposite way off Brockley’s main road from Marnock Road.  It was a good location although my girlfriend had aspirations more towards north Brockley and the conservation zone, especially if we were going for a flat.  This was a maisonette, a converted top floor of a late Victorian end terrace.   At three bedrooms with two reception rooms it looked surprisingly spacious.  

And it was cheap.

The low price was fairly self-explanatory.  It appeared to have been occupied by self-consciously counter-culture hipsters.  You’ll have seen them about, wearing a trilby, smoking roll-ups, riding single speed vintage bicycles in wincingly tight jeans for ultra skinny legs and not getting up until eleven on a Tuesday because Mummy paid the rent.  Or, actually, maybe it was a seventies acid and speed casualty, still bearded, obviously, but much more shaggily, the holes in their jeans due to ill repair rather than design.  The sort of people who felt it was a good idea to paint a large bedroom deep red and then sketch in black lines a picture of a fat naked woman. 

Which they had done.

Thanks.

Two of the other bedrooms looked as though they’d been used as artist studio space.  One had work benches jutting out into the middle of the room with electric sockets at the height useful for power tools.  The other appeared to have some sort of roughly constructed mezzanine level, the underneath of which was partitioned off by wooden walls so that the open entrance was like an open black maw. 

The reception rooms looked nice enough, with painted floor boards and nice large windows complete with refined window benches that seemed out of place with the rest of the decor.  The kitchen, again a bloody red shade, looked exhausted, as though it had been made to work too hard on things it had never been intended for.  From the kitchen a metal staircase dropped sharply down on a concrete slab courtyard, from which there appeared to be gate through to downstairs garden and then another to the side-street. 

2003.  Skizz lay on the wooden floor wearing just a pair of ragged green combats.  It was unbearably hot.  He’d opened all the windows, but it hadn’t made any difference.  The air was too still and the heat crept across his skin like spider spinning webs. 

Everyone else had gone out.  They’d caught the bus over to Brixton to spend the day in the park, hanging out by the lido.  London by sea where they the water would take the edge off the sweat.  Skizz had opted to stay.  He’d wanted to this finish his sculpture.  When the others had been making their plans, he’d had a clear idea in his head of what needed to be done, but now he was alone the image was more blurred.  He couldn’t quite make his hands go where his head knew it ended.

The sculpture sat in the middle of Skizz’s room.  It was around five feet tall and was made from welded together old bicycle parts in a pattern that gave just a hint of a human shape.  Maybe the saddles were eyes, maybe the spokes were eyelashes, maybe it was all just your mind telling you to see humanity in metal because we seek for the familiar where there isn’t necessarily any.  Skizz had tentatively titled it London Moves Me.

There were times when Skizz had confidence in his art, when he thought he was capable of making work which genuinely said something original about the human condition and how it played out within society.  There were also times, like that afternoon, where he thought everything he touched was shit.

Skizz wondered whether he needed to move away from South East London.  He’d arrived, nine years previously, as an undergraduate at Goldsmith’s.  He had dreams of being Damien Hirst, but instead he ended up with a third class degree, several thousand pounds worth of debt and having sampled a large number of illegal substances.  Somehow the four of them had never quite worked up the energy to move.  They still lived in the flat they’d found in their second year, still making art works that threatened to take their career somewhere and then always whimpered into nothing. 

Of course, Skizz mused, if he spent less time on the borders of sleep and unconsciousness he might make more progress.

Still, South East London had given him a view on a sort of life that he’d never really dreamed of growing up on the Swansea outskirts, but maybe there were other things out there too. 

Skizz looked at London Moves Me.  He looked at the front fork in his hand and wondered where it should go.  He held it up between the two wheels which fanned the sculpture’s shoulders like wings.  No, not there.  It couldn’t protrude from the front either because that would look like, well, not something he’d want his Grandmother to see.  But did that matter?  She wasn’t exactly his target audience and it he only had a few parts left.  They had to gone somewhere, didn’t they?

He sighed and the metal clanged to the floor.

Back in the lounge a slight breeze whispered across his bare chest as he stood looking at the window.  Down below an elderly lady struggled with a shopping bag, dragging her groceries behind her in short increments of half a dozen steps.  A tall guy walked briskly along, his hands stuffed into the pockets of an unseasonable puffa jacked.  A guy in a suit, his tie askew, remonstrated loudly with a girl in a short skirt and cheeks streaked with mascara.  He kept saying he thought it was what she wanted as she kept walking, silently, away.  In the distance two boys cycled along on BMXs, twirling in amongst each other like vultures circling a carcass, their laughs reverberating along the street, chuckling in shrieks like hyenas.

There was nothing else for it, Skizz decided.  No-one could work in this heat.  He pulled a t-shirt on and rummaged for his keys.  He was going to find the others in Brixton.

We ummed and aahed.  Again my fear of DIY inadequacy loomed and we worried that the rooms appeared to have been constructed in such a way that the windows had ended up in corners.  Generally it all seemed somewhat dark. 

In the end, we booked an appointment for the Saturday morning.  It was at least interesting.  There had been a sudden flush of similar properties coming available, most of them recently renovated to the blandest levels conceivable:  all sterile whites and shiny surfaces, the sort of sheen designed to fade as soon as you closed the door.  At least this place wore its history on its sleeve.

As it turned out we didn’t have to wait until the weekend.  My girlfriend was passing, sort of accidentally on purpose, as another agent was adding his for sale sign to the exterior. 

‘It’s okay,’ she said over the phone later.  ‘There’s loads of storage.  A large landing and a massive attic.  It’s much bigger than it looks, but it’s also just as crazy.  The thing is, it’s like everyone says: there’s only two things you can’t change.  Location and light.  The light’s terrible, especially in the fat naked woman room.’

‘Do we want a room which we refer to as the fat naked woman room?’ I asked.  ‘That sort of thing isn’t going away.  We can use it as a guest room.  Here’s some towels.  We’ve put you in the fat naked woman room.  No, wait.  Come back.’