inside Hirst building means you don’t have to look at it. I pity the
neighbours — no I don’t. They ostracised poor Uncle William.’
He gestured out of the front window at the tidy Parkville terrace opposite, painted and renovated in tedious good taste. Then he shrugged, and turned back to me.
‘I suppose you want to see the wee flat.’
‘Yes, if I’m going to live there.’
14
The L ipton Village Society
15
He smiled, and I smiled back. Vini Hirst was an agreeable enough
man, in his late forties I supposed, with freckles and shaggy grey hair.
He was agile too, as he demonstrated with a quick scuttle up the steep
stairs behind the shop.
A peculiarity of the flatlet was that it opened off a large room, which
was unfurnished except for a cedar chest in one corner. Otherwise, the
rooms-for-rent were conventional, if having one surprising omission.
‘W here’s the bathroom?’ I asked.
‘Downstairs, behind the bookshop. It comes in handy with dirty
books, I mean dirt of ages, not pornography. You can’t serve a customer when you’ve dirty paws.’
‘I imagine you can’t. Nonetheless, an outside bathroom is
inconvenient.’
‘I’ll take ten bucks off the rent.’
‘Done.’
Even without this deduction, the cost of inhabiting Hirst Building
was very moderate.
‘Great. You look a suitable tenant . . . are you well paid?’
‘Reasonably.’
‘Then why live here?’
‘It’s unusual lodging for a public servant.’
He laughed. ‘I know what you mean. I used to be in the Ed line myself, before I inherited Hirst Building.’
We stepped into the empty room again, and I glanced around admiringly. Vini remarked:
‘I let this room to a dancing class, but the noise — Madame taught
tap — upset the customers.’
‘Nice chest.’
‘The Lipton Village Society found it at a rubbish dump. They use
this room for meetings, but they’re a quiet bunch, won’t disturb you.’
I shaped my lips for a question, but the bell jangled in the shop below, and Vini hurried downstairs.
I moved my worldly goods into Hirst Building, and found myself
oddly happy, although with a nagging curiosity about the Lipton Village Society. Vini was evasive about the subject, and after a while I abandoned queries, preferring to experience the phenomenon firsthand. In bed early one night, nursing a nervous headache, I heard muffled laughter from the great room, and the sound of footsteps
coming and going on the uncarpeted wooden floor. A few nights later,
they arrived at sunset, just as I was preparing to take a bath. I
16
L ucy Sussex
hesitated, and then made a sortie outside my door, clad in a quilted
dressing gown and fluffy slippers. A group of nondescript young
people were huddled around the chest in its lonely comer; they turned
and stared at me.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Hello,’ said one small voice. They had not turned on the electric
light, and were illuminated only by the dusk outside the lancet windows. It was impossible to tell who had spoken. I went downstairs and took a particularly long bath. On my return, they had gone.
My attempts at image-busting continued. I sent off a mail order to
Altered States Incorporated (Eltham branch), and eventually received
a flat box in a plain wrapper. It was filled with moist earth, from which
a fine crop of magic mushrooms was guaranteed. I decided to use the
bathroom as a fungarium; it was suitably warm and damp. W ithin a
week, little white pustules broke through the brown mulch in the box.
They were quite numerous, and I considered stocking the fridge and
getting wrecked on hallucinogenic shores at my leisure. Then, before
the first anticipated harvest, I was nearly sacked from the Department
of Education. When I got home to Hirst folly, I went straight to the
bathroom, to the shower recess which Vini never entered, and
gathered the entire crop.
Coming upstairs, with a briefcase in one hand and the other holding up a skirt filled with fungi, I received a visual shock. A huge sheet of coarse paper was spread on the floor of the empty room, and beside
it were half a dozen pots of paint, placed neatly on a newspaper. They
had been opened, and dripped livid colour. I dumped briefcase and
mushrooms in my flat, and returned to investigate further. Someone
had begun to paint a map, obviously a bad copy of the more garish
Middle Earth posters.
I went calling for Vini and found him in his heaven. He was sitting
behind the Times Gone counter, reading a rare old book, with Rover
asleep in his lap.
‘You let the room upstairs to a playschool or something?’
‘Huh?’ he said, with a little start. Rover opened her eyes and glared
at him.
‘There’s a half-painted kiddy map in the big room.’
‘Ah yes’ he said, ‘the Lipton Village Society.’ He added, half to himself, ‘I saw the pots of paint go up there, didn’t think to ask what they were for.’
‘T hat’s an adult’s work?’ I asked, with exaggerated incredulity.
Vini suddenly lost his temper.
The L ipton Village Society
17
‘W hat’s wi'ong with artistic expression, Miss, and particularly on
the part of unemployed youth? I suppose you’d rather they vandalised
trains!’
It was so unexpected, pacific Vini snapping at me, that I turned and
went back to my flat, doubly depressed. I ate one raw mushroom then
and there, but the taste was repulsive. So I consulted a recipe book and
cooked French mushroom stew, with capsicums and white
