Free The Red Men by Matthew De Abaitua

fell from the television like a sheath of dead skin. Then, it made slow slinking progress past Raymond, down the stairs and out of the flat.
     
    I met Raymond’s father only once before he died, in a pub in Clerkenwell. Adam Chase was a stocky man in a brown sheepskin coat; ‘He’s a tough Jew,’ said
Raymond, before telling me proud tales of how his father intervened in fights on the Underground, always on the side of justice. There was something of the hard nut in Raymond, although he was
short and slight and chose his battles poorly.
    When I met Adam Chase, I was still editor of
Drug Porn
and sauntered into the pub in a fake fur coat and obscene T-shirt. He was rightly suspicious of me. His son had got into a bad crowd
in Soho, and so Raymond asked me to show up in the pub as a character witness for his better self, the writer. His father, expecting a respectable figure, saw an oversized popinjay and despaired of
the city’s corrupting influence upon his son. Adam Chase nursed one pint of bitter while I bought a succession of drinks for myself and his son.
    He asked me what my magazine was called.
    ‘
Drug Porn
,’ I said, with an interrogative lift, in expectation of him recognizing the title. He had not heard of it before.
    ‘It’s very influential,’ said Raymond. His father wasn’t interested. The title
Drug Porn
flaunted both the forces that had brought his son down. I registered a
slight resistance on his father’s part when I suggested that Raymond’s time in Soho was a writer’s apprenticeship; other than that, I was unaware of how badly the meeting was
going.
    The family took Raymond out of London for a while and tried to get him a job in the local chippy. He always fought his way back. The manic egotism of his youth would not dissipate. He refused to
knuckle down. When suspicions came to him that he was not the centre of the universe, he would dose himself with drugs. Drugs press the inner world upon the outer, the inscape over the landscape.
It is a violent attack upon the everyday, showing callous disregard for the realities the rest of us are struggling through. The drug hero strides through the evening trying to shake some intensity
into us all, but relies on us to pick up the pieces come the morning.
    I was reminiscing about this as I waited for Raymond, many years after that awkward chat with his father. He had called and requested we meet somewhere other than Monad. So I waited at a table
in a pub on Old Compton Street, which afforded me an excellent view of the Soho promenade: the ageing hipsters sticking to their skateboard style of low-slung denim and ironic T-shirts, a work
outfit for industries in which youth had a greater value than experience; the dissolute rodent men moving between drug supply and drug demand; divorced fathers taking their daughters to a musical
in town; unkempt office stooges in ill-fitting suits, with their ties off and tails untucked to let their real selves hang out; a suave older type in yachting linens, red faced with blonde
colouring and drowsy with the effects of his gin and tonic. Then, bobbing through the crowd, in a brown suit and brogues, came Raymond.
    He joined me at my table and set about relating the events of the previous evening, of how he and Florence had accompanied Alex Drown’s red man to a restaurant meeting then on to the
awkward encounter with the real Alex Drown and her young baby and finally the visit from Harry Bravado. I found it all very disturbing.
    When Adam Chase died, suddenly, a heart attack out of the blue, the question of what to do with his son was still pending. With his father snatched from existence, Raymond’s survival
relied upon him taking on some of his father’s decency and stability. It was a struggle. As the Soho promenade attested, London demands you reinvent yourself in its own image. You must become
weightless, drifting above whoever you once were. The danger is that it takes just one push for you