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come with you,’ he said. ‘Just give me a couple of minutes.’ He dumped his bags in the hallway, pulled off his shirt and sweater at the same time –
something he always did – and tossed them to one side. After putting on a new shirt and blowing his nose on some toilet paper he was ready to leave.
    ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked as we walked away from the house.
    ‘Tired. I think I’ve got bus lag.’
    ‘What was the cottage like?’
    ‘Damp,’ he said blowing his nose again.
    ‘You sound like you’ve got a cold.’
    ‘I have. It rained all the time. I arrived there soaking wet and woke up with a cold the next morning. I spent most of my time snivelling by the pub fire, drinking hot toddies and
listening to people talking about their walking boots. It turns out that there’s a lot more to walking boots than meets the eye.’
    ‘Did you do any writing?’
    ‘None at all.’
    ‘Too ill?’
    Freddie nodded and smiled. He’d gone to Northumberland to try to make some headway with the book he’d been writing. Off and on he’d been working on it for a couple of years but
it didn’t seem to be progressing very fast. He wasn’t exactly a slave to his art but to Freddie this didn’t matter. The important thing at this stage, as far as he was concerned,
was to
act
like a writer. In recent months he’d taken to wearing jackets, cotton work-shirts, baggy trousers and food-stained ties – clothes, as he said, with an element of
intellectual pretension – and these, together with the black-framed glasses and hair swept back towards one ear (it wasn’t quite long enough to be swept back
over
the ear) gave
him that air of the young would-be often associated with Paris cafés of the 1920s.
    The door of Steranko’s house opened just as we arrived and one of his flatmates stepped outside, engulfed by a wave of hot air that swept out into the street.
    ‘He’s upstairs,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to rush.’ The hallway was as hot as the underground in a heatwave. A three-bar electric fire stood guard at the foot of
the stairs and as we walked up it became even hotter. Steranko’s door was wide open. Like most of the other people in his squat he’d knocked two rooms into one: divided by an assortment
of structural props, one half of the room was a kind of sleeping-living area and the other half was a studio which refused to keep to its side of the bargain. There were cans of paint and brushes
all over the place. Canvases were stacked up against the wall; smaller drawings and paintings on paper were stuck to the walls with adhesive tape. In a corner was a paint-splattered easel. The most
striking thing about the room was the heat. All the windows were open but it was hot as a steel works. Slumped in a chair and swigging water from a bottle, Steranko was dressed for the beach. He
was wearing a vest and boxer shorts, his long arms and legs covered in a thin film of sweat. I was sweating too.
    ‘Oh hi!’ he said, getting up.
    ‘Why’s it so hot in here?’ Freddie asked.
    ‘Probably because all these fires are on,’ Steranko said laughing. I looked around: there was an electric-bar fire full on, a radiator that was too hot to touch and a small fan
heater that emitted a parched breeze.
    ‘How come all the fires are on?’
    ‘The meter is due to be read in a couple of days and we’ve got to use up as many units as possible to get the bill down.’
    This made perfect sense to me. I’d been here on the day Steranko had first tried to fix the electricity meter. It was surprisingly easy. All you had to do was insert a copper pin into the
meter and it stopped working.
    ‘Simple as that,’ he’d said, delicately inserting the pin. The meter stopped quietly without even a murmur. Five minutes later it blew up and there was a total power cut.
    ‘Well that’s one way of keeping bills down,’ I said. The meter itself was blackened and showed obvious signs of having been tampered with. To remedy