I had lost so many in this strife and walked haunted by all the goodbyes I never said and all the feelings I had that I could have done more, held them when they yearned for warmth.
There was a strange sense now that nothing must be wasted, not a drop of water spilt, not a moment lost, every kiss, every word had to have potency, it had to have meaning.
We could go somewhere, he said. I know somewhere.
We walked north of the old Euston road, through the craters and ruins behind Kings Cross station. The new builds here had not fared as well as their Holloway Road counterparts, everywhere were pits of charcoal, crushed diamonds where the plate glass windows had exploded.
The pathways gave way to a clearing, and then vistas began to unfold.
Is it possible do you think? America? It seemed like a dream, a shimmering mirage. I didn’t know anyone that had successfully got through. When the strife first began, when the first talk of it emerged there were promises of green cards for people who fought. Then we heard the stories that the US had deterritorialized with little bases everywhere, you could be sent to a camp in Wales and told you were living in America. They didn’t want hordes of us teeming across the Atlantic; they wanted us sealed off here in our dirty contaminated little island. We had borne the brunt of this war, but the US didn’t want us. We were an embarrassment. The rest of the South East had become an American model of exurbia, a ring of postmodern development round the M25. The government kept announcing that the sooner London stabilised the sooner the economy would pick up. By stabilised they meant we had to sit meekly at home by the radio awaiting instruction and not illegally occupying the new builds. Investors will never return to London they said if those towers become ungovernable ghettos.
The days of mobile phones and Internet were long gone; they shimmered to us like the memory of some exotic bird, colourful and marvellous but difficult to believe. We quickly reverted to the age of stumbling miscommunication and hearsay. With the date etched into my mind I longed to see him, never had I felt such joy to hear news of someone. I approached the heath from Gospel Oak like a cub with two hearts.
Ishmael was living.
To return click here.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
2013 part 5.
I was relieved when finally I was able to see the chinks of yellow light through a corrugated iron door. We were climbing an iron spiral staircases surrounded by convex mirrors. The air smelt sweet and warm as I stepped out onto the pavement. Jean reached for her pound shop shades and pressed them on her face. We had walked all the way to Manor House from Highbury and I didn’t even realise. The pub near Manor house tube was squatted again like the old days. We went into it; some kids were running some sort of blues in there. You could get booze and we savoured every drop. They’d fixed up the beer garden; everything was bleached white in the glare of the sun.
There was a hyper libidinal undercurrent.
Sex was ubiquitous, untrammelled by media misrepresentation, it was about urgent desire, about affirmation. Encounters were frequent and possessed an elemental quality, it was always as if for the last time. The chance of love was not to be squandered, pleasure and intimacy were sought out and cherished. The moral codes of the past were scrambled, gone were the hypocrisies of recent decades. London was stripped of its billboards and newsagents crammed with bare flesh, but the raw sexuality of it’s people had never been so exposed.
Ish was around here before the strife, sometimes I would see him socially, we knew each other by name. In the first stages, when everyone was going mad, we were thrown together in the mass meetings on the estates. I thought back to the first time, that heatwave, the squatted sixties estate. There were concrete columns, and tin foil squares, walls painted black and graffiti painted words in white, most of it tribal and aggressive, keep away, savage messiah, wrath of god upon you eyes glowering huge in streaks of paint. Some of the windows were gaping and afforded glimpses into sparse flats, spider plants, mismatched furniture, towels, bin liners and blankets for curtains. I heard a soundsystem playing some visceral dub. There were fires in barrels and a few characters loitering and smoking. I was carrying empty containers taking a convoluted route to the standpipe. I sidestepped into an alley, a brutalist corridor, the flagstones were bleached pale pink and lemon yellow in the intense glare of the sun. The young man was familiar, I felt I might have known him before, I scanned the palimpsest of my memory, we’d been circling around each other but I couldn’t locate him. He was handsome, the type to loom up in dreams, mirror shades and a hat like a pilot’s over his long dark hair. He looked at me with the signalled intensity. The air was still and oppressive. We sat on a wall in the lilac shadows of a courtyard, it leapt with lozenges of purple light from a grille in the wall. He needed me, I him, for that moment the need for each other had become everything.
To return to the pictures and continue click here.
There was a hyper libidinal undercurrent.
Sex was ubiquitous, untrammelled by media misrepresentation, it was about urgent desire, about affirmation. Encounters were frequent and possessed an elemental quality, it was always as if for the last time. The chance of love was not to be squandered, pleasure and intimacy were sought out and cherished. The moral codes of the past were scrambled, gone were the hypocrisies of recent decades. London was stripped of its billboards and newsagents crammed with bare flesh, but the raw sexuality of it’s people had never been so exposed.
Ish was around here before the strife, sometimes I would see him socially, we knew each other by name. In the first stages, when everyone was going mad, we were thrown together in the mass meetings on the estates. I thought back to the first time, that heatwave, the squatted sixties estate. There were concrete columns, and tin foil squares, walls painted black and graffiti painted words in white, most of it tribal and aggressive, keep away, savage messiah, wrath of god upon you eyes glowering huge in streaks of paint. Some of the windows were gaping and afforded glimpses into sparse flats, spider plants, mismatched furniture, towels, bin liners and blankets for curtains. I heard a soundsystem playing some visceral dub. There were fires in barrels and a few characters loitering and smoking. I was carrying empty containers taking a convoluted route to the standpipe. I sidestepped into an alley, a brutalist corridor, the flagstones were bleached pale pink and lemon yellow in the intense glare of the sun. The young man was familiar, I felt I might have known him before, I scanned the palimpsest of my memory, we’d been circling around each other but I couldn’t locate him. He was handsome, the type to loom up in dreams, mirror shades and a hat like a pilot’s over his long dark hair. He looked at me with the signalled intensity. The air was still and oppressive. We sat on a wall in the lilac shadows of a courtyard, it leapt with lozenges of purple light from a grille in the wall. He needed me, I him, for that moment the need for each other had become everything.
To return to the pictures and continue click here.
2013 part 4.
Then the spring came and nature was irrepressible, it persisted, oblivious to the horrors it seeped through. Every crack in the asphalt erupted in shoots and vines. The buddleia, bindweed and willow herb shot up in the derelict houses. Areas in the city, abandoned, sealed off and guarded became havens for foxgloves, nettles and dandelions. The cherry blossom and the hawthorn came as they always did, heralding renewal and joy and fertility. I wasn’t alone in feeling mocked and betrayed.
I drifted through dank phosphorescent corridors. Cold then hot, blasts of icy air, then down a stuck escalator to a dull, stifling warmth where little corridors branched off, some with grilles partitioning them, some with pink neon, others candle light. We walked down a service tunnel; it was a tiled tube, yellow tiles with a film of black grease and dust daubed with messages, undecipherable glyphs and mundane ones, declarations of love in marker pen and missing signs. Has anyone seen Shirley? The tile was clean where the photo had been tacked up with gaffer tape.
The tunnel was long and lit intermittently by strip lights. I could hear a dog barking, the patrols, Jean said. I walked along slowly, with a sense of unease. It was dangerous people said, there were strange smells, burnt plastic, paraffin and calor gas heaters, disinfectant and bleach. I could smell spaghetti hoops being heated on a baby belling stove, an uncanny lull into childhood comfort. I could hear a woman’s voice, an argument, bawling shouting, it was over a tin of soup, a fight echoing through the caverns. It was like the drinking schools in the Salvation Army, the bitching, squabbling mass sunk a mile below ground. I commented on the smears of congealed blood on the walls. It’s nothing Jean said. It didn’t mean anything, the life down here was brutal, the scraps, the yelps, the day to day tearing and grabbing just to survive. I saw people caged up alone, they’d built cells around themselves for protection with welded supermarket trolleys, corrugated iron, abandoned car parts. It was like a Piranesi engraving, one I could never have possibly seen, the art deco architecture of the stations and these labyrinthine constructions spanning every tunnel and atrium.
Jean was lucky, she had one of the prized control offices, and it was a coveted space and had to be well secured. There were three of them in it in little zed beds, a calor gas stove in the middle and all these dials and levers. It’s a place to sleep Jean shrugged. She spent the days, like most people, just roaming, looking for chances, ways out, but this was a secure place to sleep at night and that was the most important thing.
To return to the pictures and continue click here.
I drifted through dank phosphorescent corridors. Cold then hot, blasts of icy air, then down a stuck escalator to a dull, stifling warmth where little corridors branched off, some with grilles partitioning them, some with pink neon, others candle light. We walked down a service tunnel; it was a tiled tube, yellow tiles with a film of black grease and dust daubed with messages, undecipherable glyphs and mundane ones, declarations of love in marker pen and missing signs. Has anyone seen Shirley? The tile was clean where the photo had been tacked up with gaffer tape.
The tunnel was long and lit intermittently by strip lights. I could hear a dog barking, the patrols, Jean said. I walked along slowly, with a sense of unease. It was dangerous people said, there were strange smells, burnt plastic, paraffin and calor gas heaters, disinfectant and bleach. I could smell spaghetti hoops being heated on a baby belling stove, an uncanny lull into childhood comfort. I could hear a woman’s voice, an argument, bawling shouting, it was over a tin of soup, a fight echoing through the caverns. It was like the drinking schools in the Salvation Army, the bitching, squabbling mass sunk a mile below ground. I commented on the smears of congealed blood on the walls. It’s nothing Jean said. It didn’t mean anything, the life down here was brutal, the scraps, the yelps, the day to day tearing and grabbing just to survive. I saw people caged up alone, they’d built cells around themselves for protection with welded supermarket trolleys, corrugated iron, abandoned car parts. It was like a Piranesi engraving, one I could never have possibly seen, the art deco architecture of the stations and these labyrinthine constructions spanning every tunnel and atrium.
Jean was lucky, she had one of the prized control offices, and it was a coveted space and had to be well secured. There were three of them in it in little zed beds, a calor gas stove in the middle and all these dials and levers. It’s a place to sleep Jean shrugged. She spent the days, like most people, just roaming, looking for chances, ways out, but this was a secure place to sleep at night and that was the most important thing.
To return to the pictures and continue click here.
2013 part 3.
He was still talking, Kevin, talking in a monotone voice about what had happened to Mark, all these facts and all this information and it didn’t fit in with the way I was seeing things, Mark’s face, Mark laughing, Mark at his table drawing maps, plotting, planning. Kevin was still saying it, insisting on it, and I was standing for the tenth time in as many weeks feeling awkward because I knew they wanted me to react differently. And all I could do was stand there staring at particles of dust in a shaft of sunlight struggling to show some emotion, thinking instead, inexplicably of Boxing day back home.
Michelle had the room next door. She had a map of the British isles on the wall, it was all drawn on, areas covered in red felt tip circles, other areas just scrubbed out in black marker pen. I lay red eyed looking at the ceiling. I was submerged by grief and guilt and relief that it wasn’t Ish. I thought about that other place, the place we scoffed at before but had to believe in now or there was nothing but suffering and turmoil. It was an escape route I held close, a comfort I could cling to. Mark had gone there, and so many before, why not me, why was I better suited to this hell than them?
Boxing Day, the revelry and shouting, bawling and laughing, falling in heaps, shepherds and angels and girls in tinsel and mini skirts, the whole town out on an all day session, revellers mixing with families and couples shopping, we could never go back to the way it was then, I was here, it was all I had. And now with the shadows hanging everywhere there was a return to an old London, a place that existed at the back of my mind when I was much younger still, of secret pathways, of shadows and fear. And I thought of him sitting at that desk alone at night with all his maps, ashtrays, lighters and those little pills arranged in lines.
The boarded up place I grew up in, that house made my earliest memories and haunted my dreams still. The ceramic trinkets in the little glass cabinet, china teacups in pink and gold, the Toby jugs and horse brasses from when they ran the pub. And the bathroom all in pink, the tiles with little roses, the strange shower attachments and space helmet hairdryer, the smell of shampoo. And in the later years, her looking out of the window from a yellow dreylon settee surrounded by piles of Daily star and TV listings magazines. I knew that house, the carpets, swirls of pale green and black, the kitchen looking out on a bare garden punctuated by rocks and struggling rose bushes. The table with fruit bowl, copies of woman’s own, remote controls and sometimes bourbons or a plate of iced fancies. I made the tea, then went into the lounge, she would say bring that tin of biscuits in and two plates.
And now all that is gone, she is away, not dead, but hidden from the world, shrunk back in a diorama of memories and fictions.
It seemed to just happen at once. But you had to keep going, a voice came in saying it and saying it, that same voice that always came and I was never sure if it was mine, or my Mum’s or one of the ones who had gone already, that you had to keep going because there were others who needed you, others you had to stay for.
I had to find him.
To return to the pictures and continue click here.
Michelle had the room next door. She had a map of the British isles on the wall, it was all drawn on, areas covered in red felt tip circles, other areas just scrubbed out in black marker pen. I lay red eyed looking at the ceiling. I was submerged by grief and guilt and relief that it wasn’t Ish. I thought about that other place, the place we scoffed at before but had to believe in now or there was nothing but suffering and turmoil. It was an escape route I held close, a comfort I could cling to. Mark had gone there, and so many before, why not me, why was I better suited to this hell than them?
Boxing Day, the revelry and shouting, bawling and laughing, falling in heaps, shepherds and angels and girls in tinsel and mini skirts, the whole town out on an all day session, revellers mixing with families and couples shopping, we could never go back to the way it was then, I was here, it was all I had. And now with the shadows hanging everywhere there was a return to an old London, a place that existed at the back of my mind when I was much younger still, of secret pathways, of shadows and fear. And I thought of him sitting at that desk alone at night with all his maps, ashtrays, lighters and those little pills arranged in lines.
The boarded up place I grew up in, that house made my earliest memories and haunted my dreams still. The ceramic trinkets in the little glass cabinet, china teacups in pink and gold, the Toby jugs and horse brasses from when they ran the pub. And the bathroom all in pink, the tiles with little roses, the strange shower attachments and space helmet hairdryer, the smell of shampoo. And in the later years, her looking out of the window from a yellow dreylon settee surrounded by piles of Daily star and TV listings magazines. I knew that house, the carpets, swirls of pale green and black, the kitchen looking out on a bare garden punctuated by rocks and struggling rose bushes. The table with fruit bowl, copies of woman’s own, remote controls and sometimes bourbons or a plate of iced fancies. I made the tea, then went into the lounge, she would say bring that tin of biscuits in and two plates.
And now all that is gone, she is away, not dead, but hidden from the world, shrunk back in a diorama of memories and fictions.
It seemed to just happen at once. But you had to keep going, a voice came in saying it and saying it, that same voice that always came and I was never sure if it was mine, or my Mum’s or one of the ones who had gone already, that you had to keep going because there were others who needed you, others you had to stay for.
I had to find him.
To return to the pictures and continue click here.
2013 part 2.
A massive camp had emerged in the park. No one knew how many were in there now, the tents bubbled up in the pink light like alien forms. There were strings of coloured lights, generators, and bonfires burning under the low trees. There must be thousands living in there, you could hear them beginning to wake, babies crying and dogs barking, men carrying containers of water.
In the reservoirs behind Stamford Hill we encountered little knots of frenzied activity, the authorities were working hard to get the water supply safe here. We were on stand pipes already but we knew we were facing a complete cut in supply. There was a strong smell of burning as we approached the block, black smoke churned from the chimney stacks, it was like a scene from old London in the days of the pea soupers.
When I reached the landing Kevin was waiting at his door. The number was gouged in with a Stanley knife. There was a hole at the bottom where someone tried to kick it in. The corridor was dingy, buttercup yellow beneath a grey film of dust and ceramic tiles all smeared with dirt. We went through to a room where a scorched low ceiling was punctured with rips and tears.
There was a heap of chopped wood and detritus everywhere and a small fire burning in the maw where a gas appliance had been ripped out. From his window you could scan out across North London, Tottenham, Walthamstow, Chingford. The block was well secured, protected at night by different groups taking turns. The outside had been barricaded but the estate itself was fracturing, not on racial lines but those who lived here before the crisis and those who had come in after.
I looked across at the rows of tinned up houses and balconies wrapped in black plastic sheets.
Gary appeared. There were bookcases with old newspapers and pamphlets,
Kevin confirmed the news about Mark. I studied the waxy face, the dark hair, the way he twitched and sniffed a bit, always looking somewhere else. I stared at his scuffed trainers, thinking I don’t want you to deliver this news to me in scuffed trainers, I’ll remember them forever, they’ll be imprinted on this moment. I stared at the office furniture, the old three-piece suite grey with masonry dust, the webs hanging from the dislodged rafters.
To return to the pictures and continue click here.
In the reservoirs behind Stamford Hill we encountered little knots of frenzied activity, the authorities were working hard to get the water supply safe here. We were on stand pipes already but we knew we were facing a complete cut in supply. There was a strong smell of burning as we approached the block, black smoke churned from the chimney stacks, it was like a scene from old London in the days of the pea soupers.
When I reached the landing Kevin was waiting at his door. The number was gouged in with a Stanley knife. There was a hole at the bottom where someone tried to kick it in. The corridor was dingy, buttercup yellow beneath a grey film of dust and ceramic tiles all smeared with dirt. We went through to a room where a scorched low ceiling was punctured with rips and tears.
There was a heap of chopped wood and detritus everywhere and a small fire burning in the maw where a gas appliance had been ripped out. From his window you could scan out across North London, Tottenham, Walthamstow, Chingford. The block was well secured, protected at night by different groups taking turns. The outside had been barricaded but the estate itself was fracturing, not on racial lines but those who lived here before the crisis and those who had come in after.
I looked across at the rows of tinned up houses and balconies wrapped in black plastic sheets.
Gary appeared. There were bookcases with old newspapers and pamphlets,
Kevin confirmed the news about Mark. I studied the waxy face, the dark hair, the way he twitched and sniffed a bit, always looking somewhere else. I stared at his scuffed trainers, thinking I don’t want you to deliver this news to me in scuffed trainers, I’ll remember them forever, they’ll be imprinted on this moment. I stared at the office furniture, the old three-piece suite grey with masonry dust, the webs hanging from the dislodged rafters.
To return to the pictures and continue click here.
2013 part 1.
2013.
The pathways of the heath were carved from stone, little labyrinths in the dry stonewall, mosses and lichens, brooks carving out pathways on the woodland floor. Fungi livid in oranges and reds burst through the muted carpet of grey and burnt umber.
At last I was with Ishmael. He took my hand, he held me, we’ll get through this, I promise. We wandered, for miles, in circles, lost in this magical world of hidden pathways and mist.
We made plans to get out, I knew how it could be, Scotland, Yorkshire, the coast in Northumbria, I knew people up there, the living was alright, they still had a water supply and good services generally. There were food shortages and some restrictions on movement but it wasn’t anything like here. Up there was austerity but really people were free.
From here you could see the cuts and wounds, the scorched swathes of London. Plumes of smoke rose somewhere in the south east of the city, I guessed Lewisham, maybe the big shopping centre there, and elsewhere flashes of fire. I was stunned by the extent of the damage. The old central areas of the West End and City were under heavy armed guard to stop looting and occupation. You could see from this distance that stretches miles long, particularly near the Thames had just vanished into black, smouldering heaps. As quickly as the skyline had altered with glassy futuristic towers so it reverted as one by one they fell into jagged smoking ruins.
The smell was acrid, like a burning chemical factory. There was a toxic pall over the city, but as it shimmered and gleamed in the pink light I was struck by its beauty.
We set out walking through the newly carved territories, London was smarting and smouldering but still there.
The underground had closed six months before, it was dangerous structurally and the money had run out for rebuilding. The Piccadilly line had been ripped to shreds most of the way between the old Strand station and Turnpike lane leaving its’ tunnels blocked and shattered. The main railway stations were lying in ruins and it was under there that the most dense subterranean populations lived. People said there were hundreds of families down there, but it was hard to know. I hadn’t been down since 2010 when the first campaign started in earnest. Before that there’d been sporadic flare-ups, little indicators of the onslaught to come, but then when it really started it was everyday, carnage everyday. And that’s when all the big businesses and banks started to leave London, all the offices in Canary wharf, the City and in Paddington basin, all those places just shipped out into this circle on the periphery, round the M25. They got people working from home or in micro offices in unmarked buildings.
Since the strife it was like the old wars, people had started squatting out of necessity. Some just stayed in their own flats, no one cared about paying some landlord when the crisis was at it peak. Housing had become another issue, one of survival not speculation, repossession orders were torn up and bailiffs barred from estates. There were waves of people coming all the time from other parts of London like Elephant and Castle after it got really badly hit and all that area round Waterloo and Oval, loads of them started turning up. They’d had the dirty stuff down there, radiation I mean. There were other areas devastated with bomb damage and fire but you could fix that up and people did. There were big estates where the brutalist lines were suddenly broken and you had all this stitching and patching going on with plastic sheets, rugs, tarpaulin and bin liners. But when they used the dirty bombs, everyone was getting out dragging their kids and only the most desperate were left. And where could they go?
To return to the pictures and continue click here.
The pathways of the heath were carved from stone, little labyrinths in the dry stonewall, mosses and lichens, brooks carving out pathways on the woodland floor. Fungi livid in oranges and reds burst through the muted carpet of grey and burnt umber.
At last I was with Ishmael. He took my hand, he held me, we’ll get through this, I promise. We wandered, for miles, in circles, lost in this magical world of hidden pathways and mist.
We made plans to get out, I knew how it could be, Scotland, Yorkshire, the coast in Northumbria, I knew people up there, the living was alright, they still had a water supply and good services generally. There were food shortages and some restrictions on movement but it wasn’t anything like here. Up there was austerity but really people were free.
From here you could see the cuts and wounds, the scorched swathes of London. Plumes of smoke rose somewhere in the south east of the city, I guessed Lewisham, maybe the big shopping centre there, and elsewhere flashes of fire. I was stunned by the extent of the damage. The old central areas of the West End and City were under heavy armed guard to stop looting and occupation. You could see from this distance that stretches miles long, particularly near the Thames had just vanished into black, smouldering heaps. As quickly as the skyline had altered with glassy futuristic towers so it reverted as one by one they fell into jagged smoking ruins.
The smell was acrid, like a burning chemical factory. There was a toxic pall over the city, but as it shimmered and gleamed in the pink light I was struck by its beauty.
We set out walking through the newly carved territories, London was smarting and smouldering but still there.
The underground had closed six months before, it was dangerous structurally and the money had run out for rebuilding. The Piccadilly line had been ripped to shreds most of the way between the old Strand station and Turnpike lane leaving its’ tunnels blocked and shattered. The main railway stations were lying in ruins and it was under there that the most dense subterranean populations lived. People said there were hundreds of families down there, but it was hard to know. I hadn’t been down since 2010 when the first campaign started in earnest. Before that there’d been sporadic flare-ups, little indicators of the onslaught to come, but then when it really started it was everyday, carnage everyday. And that’s when all the big businesses and banks started to leave London, all the offices in Canary wharf, the City and in Paddington basin, all those places just shipped out into this circle on the periphery, round the M25. They got people working from home or in micro offices in unmarked buildings.
Since the strife it was like the old wars, people had started squatting out of necessity. Some just stayed in their own flats, no one cared about paying some landlord when the crisis was at it peak. Housing had become another issue, one of survival not speculation, repossession orders were torn up and bailiffs barred from estates. There were waves of people coming all the time from other parts of London like Elephant and Castle after it got really badly hit and all that area round Waterloo and Oval, loads of them started turning up. They’d had the dirty stuff down there, radiation I mean. There were other areas devastated with bomb damage and fire but you could fix that up and people did. There were big estates where the brutalist lines were suddenly broken and you had all this stitching and patching going on with plastic sheets, rugs, tarpaulin and bin liners. But when they used the dirty bombs, everyone was getting out dragging their kids and only the most desperate were left. And where could they go?
To return to the pictures and continue click here.
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