house roof rescue
3 min readMar 11, 2024
- We were having an enjoyable evening in. the French Brasserie on Frith Street, the three of us with a few others, occasional messages being received to us or some of the other people in the assembled company. Others in the district may suddenly get the the the sudden urge to go somewhere else, moving on to some other establishment, sometimes they would have barely spent anytime at the new establishment than they leave and move on to a place with a better view, somewhere more exciting, where might they go afterwards? We on the other hand are more serious people waiting and listening to the messages, communications being exchanged in the French Brasserie, a place which is full of noise. In the basement is a jazz club and the bass notes and the high note noise of the soprano and alto. saxophones. passes through the wood. We are drinking still mineral water and talking about the strange politics of the world we live in these days. You might want to ask us, the three of us at least if we. really want to be her in the brasserie, but. the woman owns this building and the one next door… Would we not rather go home to bed, sinking back into the. halflight , into ourselves and each other, after passing through the late evening, perhaps we would be passing through the night. invisibly, unnoticed, unbored, each for themselves, free of the constraints we live within, far from the brasserie and the others? not waiting for anything. We will never be in the situation. where we will exchange only bewildered looks as we did years ago in another city. Perhaps if things had been different we would. have opened a little cafe, a platonic cave to hide in just for us, perhaps occasionally having sex with random strangers who came into the cafe, just for us, perhaps even taking them home and using that as the centre of the… we might have done this if the threats had not been real, if we could have lived like everyone else. Instead we had to live within the constraints they had imposed – “you may live here within these rules”… and so here we are no longer quite as alone, friends who are not merely shadows on the wall. As if. in the lights of the French Brasserie the stairs to the roof are waiting for us, whilst the others walked along the street.
- We are walking along. the rooflines of Frith Street, we worked our perilous way, from. the top landing of a French Brasserie. out onto the roof through the. trap and a window, to the building roofs. The busy streets of Soho were below us, and I clung slightly dizzily to telephone standards and smoke stacks, rarely venturing to glance downward into the busy street below, people flowing, dwarfish, in the depths. Sometimes her black clothed figure would loom up grotesquely darker than the night sky as she paused to take breath; rebalance, look back to make sure I was alright and that Alhambra was still following us, and I would find myself contemplating a deep well of blackness, which in daylight was a lightwell, but at night it emitted blackness, with nausea threatening me because it had to be negotiated. “We are the si-fan” she said to me across the gap between the buildings she had just stepped, jumped across, and gesturing towards a future events that had not happened yet, and perhaps it would not in this place, “We make Spectre and Smersh look like the genteel amateurs they are… “ None of these gaps were more than a long stride from side to side; but the sense of depth conveyed in the muffled voices and dimmed footsteps from the pavements far below was almost overpowering. I doubt that i could have worked my way across the rooftops normally, but i am used to nightmare journeys with her. That we were close to a haunt of the people who we were destroying enabled my dislike and my love to co-operate and enable a coolness and address which otherwise I would not. have had. On the north end of the street looking down into glass roof of the sealed well, two floors down a large space with people drinking, smoking. ‘Hullo!” she said peering down.’Found them.’ And today we are agents of the repressive state apparatus about to do their work…
