Diego Garcia by Natasha Soobramanien & Luke Williams

Author:Natasha Soobramanien & Luke Williams [Soobramanien, Natasha & Williams, Luke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2022-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

[iv]

This is a sketch of Diego and Madame Lai. They are sitting together on the sofa, looking shocked, clutching each other. They are not looking at the viewer, or me. They are staring at something to my left.

When Diego came to visit me in London he didn't want to leave me. He couldn't stay legally. He didn't have the right to work here. To be here.

He got given a bike by a charity project and found cash in hand work as a cycle courier.

In winter he used to hang on to the back of buses to keep warm. He got ill from the fumes.

He started renting Madame Lai's spare bedroom. It turns out he loved watching television with her. He enjoyed all her programmes, especially EastEnders, Coronation Street and Holby City. EastEnders was their favourite.

In this drawing they are watching Phil Mitchell set the Queen Vic on fire while going cold turkey from his crack addiction, having accused his mum, Peggy Mitchell, of loving the pub more than she loves him.

When Diego couldn't stand the courier work any more he got a job as a cleaner. He used to go all over, a bingo hall, offices. He complained about not being paid the London Living Wage and they sacked him. But he made a friend there who got him into squatting. The people he lived with taught him electrics, plumbing.

I once saw them turn on the electricity for a whole tower block that a community—his friends and their friends—were trying to squat. It was winter, really cold. I watched Diego and his friend outside in the dark taking out some tool, a welding torch or some such. Then they opened up a lamppost.

They wired the torch's power lead to the panel in the lamppost. Then they used the torch to flip up a metal grid in the ground and then they hit a switch. The whole block lit up. The cheering!

After Diego left, I think Madame Lai got a bit lonely. She'd invite me to go on the church coach trips with her. They are really good value. It's a cheap way to visit museums in other cities.

We went to Hastings. There was a trip to Edinburgh. On the coach to Edinburgh I sat next to a woman called Louise. She told me a story about the founder of Adventism, Ellen G. White.

There is a long-running dispute among some Adventists on the matter of White's heritage: when it was claimed in a book that she had African-American heritage the White estate hired a genealogist to look into her ancestry.

Louise had grown up a Catholic but had a nervous breakdown. Then in hospital she met a kind Adventist so thought, why not.

When he started squatting, Diego was happier. He had friends. He had energy, schemes. He tried to get me to do portraits of people done to look like passport photos. To raise funds for his friends who needed the money for citizenship applications. Diego tried to sell these for me on eBay, but no one bought any.

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