Whispers Under Ground

main entrance. I counted my fingers and then I patted myself down – just to be on the safe side.
    Then I went to tell Lesley that we was up.

11
    Brixton
    T he media response to unusual weather is as ritualised and predictable as the stages of grief. First comes denial: ‘I can’t believe there’s so much snow.’ Then anger: ‘Why can’t I drive my car, why are the trains not running?’ Then blame: Why haven’t the local authorities gritted the roads, where are the snow ploughs, and how come the Canadians can deal with this and we can’t? This last stage goes on the longest and tends to trail off into a mumbled grumbling background moan, enlivened by occasional ‘Asylum Seekers Ate My Snow Plough’ headlines from the Daily Mail , that continues until the weather clears up. Luckily we were spared some of the repetition as the authorities narrowed down the source of the E. coli outbreak to a stall in Walthamstow market.
    Slightly elevated temperatures and no fresh snow had turned the main roads into rivers of brown slush. I was getting the hang of winter driving, which mostly consisted of not going too fast and putting as much room between you and the average driver as humanly possible. Traffic was light enough for me to brave Vauxhall Bridge, but I went on via Oval and the Brixton Road just to be sure. We stopped short of Brixton proper and turned into Villa Road, which forms the northern boundary of Max Roach Park. The snow on the park was still almost white and littered with the half-melted remains of snowmen. We stopped on the park side and Lesley pointed to a terraced house halfway down the road.
    ‘That’s the one,’ she said.
    It was late Victorian with a half basement, orthogonal bay windows and a narrow little front door designed to give the illusion of grand urban living to a new generation of aspirational lower middle class. The same people who would flock into the suburbs a generation or two later.
    There was an arrow painted on to a piece of card that had gone curly with damp. It pointed down a set of iron stairs to the door into the half basement, what used to be the tradesmen’s entrance. The curtains in the bay windows were drawn and when we paused to listen we heard nothing from inside the house.
    I rang the doorbell.
    We waited for about a minute, stepping back to avoid the drips of snowmelt landing on our heads, and then the door opened to reveal a white girl in baggy trousers, braces and pink lipstick.
    ‘What you want?’ she asked.
    I gave her the password. ‘We’ve come to cut the grass,’ I said.
    ‘Yeah, no motorcycle helmets, swords, spears, glamours and,’ she said, pointing at Lesley, ‘no masks – sorry.’
    ‘Do you want to wait in the car?’ I asked.
    Lesley shook her head and unclipped her mask.
    ‘I’ll just bet you’re glad to get out of that,’ the girl said and led us into the flat.
    It was your basic dingy basement flat. Despite the modern kitchen conversion and Habitat trim, the low ceiling and poor lighting made it seem pinched and mean. I glanced into the front room as we passed and saw that all the furniture had been neatly piled against the far wall. Heavy-duty power cables snaked out of the rooms and down the hallway. They were securely held down with gaffer tape and plastic safety bridges.
    It got noticeably warmer the closer we got to the back door, so that by the time the girl held out her hand to accept our coats we were already half out of them. She took them into the back bedroom which had been filled with portable clothes racks – we even got tear-off raffle tickets as receipts.
    ‘You go out through the kitchen,’ said the girl.
    We followed her instructions, opened the back door and stepped out into a crisp inexplicable autumn afternoon. The entire width and length of the back garden was filled with a scaffolding frame that rose until it was level with the roof of the house. Plank flooring was raised half a metre above the lawn. From there, ladders led upwards to ‘balconies’ constructed of scaffolding poles and more planking. The construct encompassed an entire tree and was enclosed in white plastic sheeting. Golden sunlight flooded down from above, from an HMI lighting balloon, I learnt later, which explained the cabling snaking up the scaffolding.
    Trestle tables were ranged between the upright poles to form a line of makeshift booths along each side of the garden. I had a look at the first on the right, which sold books,