Hari Kunzru - My Revolutions

rumor went round that a white informant had told them about the meeting. An edge of paranoia was creeping in.

Though much of our energy was directed at local issues, we had connections to the wider political world. In the messy aftermath of Paris we went to a rally at the LSE, where student leaders from around Europe had been invited to speak. French friends of Anna were there. Matthias knew delegates from the German SDS. The occasion was the foundation of something called the Revolutionary Socialist Students’ Federation. It was the first time I’d been back at the LSE since March; the place felt like a relic of a past life. The rally was a fiasco. For all the rhetorical imperatives — the urgent need to constitute an extraparliamentary opposition, the urgent need to form red bases and commit as a bloc to all anti-Imperialist and anti-Fascist struggles around the world — it was just another sectarian talking shop. Crop-haired delegates from the Socialist Labour League sprayed invective at their rivals. Some fool got up to explain why the thoughts of Chairman Mao were essentially revisionist in character and had to be seen as contrary to the strict principles of Marxist-Leninism.

“So much for the new vanguard,” scoffed Anna. We were bored and disgusted. Eventually we started throwing things at the platform and shouting abuse at the speakers until some of the stewards tried to remove us from the hall. Among them was my old friend Alan. As we pushed and shoved, I jeered at him. He was dressed in a Chinese tunic, the height of revolutionary chic. “No more Carnaby Street shirts, Alan? Worker-peasant now, are we?” Around us people laughed.

“What happened to you?” he snarled.

“I went to prison, remember, comrade .”

Eventually we were frogmarched toward the doors. And that was when I met Miles Bridgeman for the second time, perched on a chair at the back of the hall, panning an 8 mm camera across the crowd. As we were hustled past he called out to me. Beside him, sitting on the floor in the aisle, was a pale young girl in a big floppy straw hat, smoking a cigarette and staring abstractedly at

the ceiling. He followed us on to the street with his camera and filmed us continuing our argument with the stewards. Various groups had set up tables outside the hall to hawk literature and solicit donations. Some onlookers joined in on our side and eventually Alan and the others, most of whom I knew, retreated back indoors. The rest of us went to the pub.

I introduced Miles to the others, only to find some of them already knew him. He introduced me to his friend, whose name was Ursula. She asked me what star sign I was and seemed very put out when Anna told her all mysticism was inherently Fascist. Miles kept filming us as we walked, until he irritated Sean by putting the camera in his face, for which he almost got it knocked onto the pavement. I asked how he’d gotten on after Grosvenor Square.

“They didn’t have anything on me,” he said. “They let me go.” I told him he was lucky. They hadn’t had anything on me either.

For whatever reason, the others peeled off and I ended up spending the rest of the day drifting around Covent Garden with Miles and Ursula. Miles told me about his latest project, documenting the lifestyles of revolutionary youth around the world. He was planning to go to Cuba. By early evening, we were lying around on mattresses at the Arts Lab watching a film of people’s faces as they had orgasms. Ursula told me I had a muddy aura. She rolled joints and passed them to Miles to light.

After that Miles always seemed to be around. He’d drop into Lansdowne Road and Free Pictures and hang about with his camera. Not everyone was pleased to see him. Sean never liked him, despite Miles’s sycophantic efforts to get on his good side. Chelsea poseur, he called him. Super-hippie.

I always felt a bit awkward about Miles, as if I was responsible for him. He’d irritate me, then do something generous, something that made it hard to get rid of him. I remember he always seemed to have drugs, even when no one else was holding.

One night he took me to a party in a flat on Cromwell Road, a high-ceilinged place decorated with big brass Buddhas and cane

furniture. It belonged to a theater director and was full of expensively dressed people drinking white wine and eating macrobiotic snacks out of delicate Chinese bowls. I was sitting against the wall with Ursula, whom, for reasons no longer clear to me, I’d started sleeping with. Ursula’s conversation was mostly about her past incarnations, which included an iron-age priestess, Charlotte Brontë, and a peasant girl who’d died in a workhouse. She had a rage for systems, the more complex the better. Every time I saw her she’d half learned another chunk of tarot or the I Ching . I put up with it because she never wore any knickers under her beaded twenties dresses. We’d done it in a rowing-boat, on a bench on the Embankment. “It’s about your brain blood volume,” she was telling me. “Animals hold their necks horizontally. We’ve evolved into an upright position, but there are real disadvantages in that, from the consciousness point of view. Your level of consciousness is entirely related to brain blood volume. Once your cranium hardens, there’s no room for your brain to breathe. So you drill a small hole. It’s the most ancient surgical procedure known to man.”

I wasn’t really listening, occupied with watching the other guests. They were people on whom the Age of Aquarius was sitting uncomfortably, the men all polo-necks and half grown-out hair, the women caught between matronly respectability and tentative essays at hippiedom. Looming over us as we sat was a group of academic-looking men. While two of them made loud and rather ostentatious conversation about the Kama Sutra , the third was staring fixedly at a point somewhere between Ursula’s legs.

I went to find Miles, to ask if he was ready to leave. To my surprise I found him in the kitchen with Anna. I had no idea she’d be there. She was dressed with deliberate sloppiness, in tennis shoes and a pair of old paint-spattered jeans. Nevertheless she seemed to be at home, dangling a wineglass in her fingers and making some conversational point to Miles, who was vigorously shaking his head. When she saw me, she frowned. “What are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same thing.”

She shrugged. I thought uncomfortably about Ursula. I hadn’t mentioned to Anna I was seeing her. Actually, we almost always stayed at hers — the one time she’d slept over at Lansdowne Road, I’d more or less sneaked her in and out of the house. Just then she came into the kitchen and draped herself possessively round me. Anna raised an eyebrow. Embarrassed, I shook Ursula off and she angrily flounced into the other room, followed by Miles. I watched him skillfully steering her toward a group of actors; she was soon happily reading someone’s palm.

“I hope for your sake she’s a good fuck,” said Anna.

I must have blushed, because she laughed heartily, spilling a little wine out of her glass. I tried to cover my annoyance. “How come you’re here?” I asked. “I thought you despised the decadent pastimes of the bourgeoisie.”

“I thought you did too.”

“I came with Miles.”

“Good for you.”

“You seem to know him.”

“He’s a friend of my ex-husband. Jeremy will probably be here himself, unless he’s found somewhere with more fashion models. You know, it’s odd to see Miles at Charlie’s. I never thought of him as the slightest bit political. Not like your little friend, eh, Chris?”

“That’s right, she’s not political.”

“So you’re just fucking her?”

“Why are you here, Anna? I thought Jeremy was supposed to be a pig.”