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My London Story
London is an open wound, a festering tumour upon the skin of England through which oozes the rancid puss of society. Overcrowded streets filled with vacant, directionless zombies who see nothing past the bubble that surrounds them; grid-locked traffic stretching for miles across and beyond the city, snarling up the woefully inadequate road layout; a Third World public transport system, packed way beyond capacity with silently seething commuters who are all far too near their wit’s end to be properly sane. Forget what you read in trashy youth Style publications, aimed at impressionable fifteen year olds; in London-set novels written by trendy young authors trying to be the new enfant terrible of English letters; in cookie-cutter arts reviews from the pages of middle-class Lifestyle Magazines that fold and go bust a week after their first issue. Forget also the achingly hip images you see on popular TV, or in films starring the new Hot Young Things and set in the hustling, bustling, cool metropolis that beats like a heart at the centre of our nation. But remember when I tell you this: London is a tumour. * Everyone who has ever lived in the capital for any prolonged length of time has their own London Story, and here’s mine:
It started for me, as it usually does, on a packed Monday morning tube platform, at the beginning of my daily epic journey into work. I was living in West Finchley and work was a freezing cold office five minutes walk along Charing Cross Road. The trip should take about forty minutes, but due to what seems like the entire population of North London attempting to board a train on the Northern Line every week day morning, it’s usually more like double that time. I’d already let two trains go by without even thinking about getting on; the pale faces smeared up against the glass doors as the vehicle pulled into the station put me off immediately. The carriages were so full that, when the doors slid open, five or six passengers would tumble out onto the platform, the closed doors being the only thing keeping them on their feet when the train was in motion. It was an all-too familiar sight, and one that built up the rage inside me like steam in a pressure cooker. I’d already had two fistfights on the way to work this month, and I really couldn’t be arsed with another. Eventually a train arrived where you could see daylight between the passengers, so I forced my way on, grasped a greasy handrail, and breathed a charming concoction of other people’s farts and body odours. Some prick next to me kept catching my left cheek with the pages of his huge newspaper. After the third time, I slapped the thing from his hands and glared at him as if I was a psychopath; as usual, this performance worked a treat, and the guy quietly folded up his paper and tried to sink his head down between his shoulder blades. As I hung from the tacky metal pole above my head, my knees knocking against the seated woman who’s face was directly in line with my crotch, I closed my eyes and ground my teeth. I imagined myself somewhere clear and bright and without the stale sweat of strangers invading my nostrils. It passed the journey, making this train ride through Hades a little less nightmarish. When I changed at Euston, slamming my palm into the chest of the idiot who stood blocking the doorway as I tried to disembark, the rage returned. As the bloke fell flat on his arse, I kicked his suitcase across the platform, and snarled like a dog. This city was turning me into a lunatic; I could feel my mind straining more and more each day. The place brought out the very worst in me, like a dirty, whoreish woman who appeals to your most base desires. Faces blurred into inchoate pink smudges as I barged past city-soft bodies to reach my platform. Commuters were lined up three deep when I got there, and I stood in my allotted place and closed my eyes once more. As trains hissed to a stop at the platform, allowing a single row of commuters to board before continuing on their way, people moved in unison. Swaying from side to side and shuffling back and forth, like a crowd at a football match. It was hypnotic, and I found the proximity to complete strangers nothing less than repellent. Standing shoulder to shoulder with someone who could be a wife-beater, a paedophile, a fucker of chickens, was unnerving in the extreme. I kept my eyes closed, trying not to think about whether or not the six foot black man to my left, dressed in a filthy ankle-length leather coat and some rumpled 1970s style suit, had bathed in the past seven days. Eventually I reached the edge of the platform, halting just over the painted yellow line that you aren’t supposed to cross. I could feel the deadly weight of a platform full of people pressing against my back. It would only take a single push from someone who had lost the plot entirely to turn me into strips of meat moulded around the rusty steel tracks and the wheels of a speeding tube train. The thought did my mood no good at all. As I stood swaying with the masses, I looked along the track and into the black maw of the tunnel. A slight wind gusted out of the entrance, and there came a faint high-pitched humming sound as the tracks began to vibrate with the thrum of an approaching train. I wondered what cold, half-blind and ancient creatures lived in those labyrinthine catacombs beneath the city, crawling over unused platforms at forgotten stations situated deep underground. Consuming crippled rats and drinking from puddles of condensation; but hungering for something more, something warm and living and breathing. Something human. Suddenly there was a braking train six inches from my face; a line of windows showing a multitude of wide-eyed faces smearing past my vision and a surging sweaty wind blowing my hair into disarray. Doors ratcheted open before me, and I struggled to step aside and allow alighting passengers a clear route off. When that failed, due to the simple number of immobile bodies around me, I just forced my way on instead, stepping on toes, kicking briefcases and head butting huge rucksacks that hung like physical deformities from the backs of grungy Australian travellers on their way to tend bar in city pubs. That was when I saw him. Pushing past me as I struggled onboard. His face was familiar; that of someone I had once known. Something about the set of his eyes, or the line of his jaw…these were the features of someone I’d known long ago, but didn’t quite recognise anymore. Like a familiar body beneath a sheet, or a face glimpsed through heavy fog. I just couldn’t find the name or time or place in my mind with which to associate this person. Then he was gone, just another body in the mass. Another drone in the endless swarm that moved through the Shitty City. All that day at work, my mind returned to the face I’d seen and failed to recognise that morning. For some reason, I couldn’t leave it alone. It was like a bad tooth, or a hangnail; I kept pushing it with my tongue, chewing it with my front teeth. Who the fuck was the bloke? I had a feeling that I really should remember who he was, but couldn’t. There was a sense that it wasn’t really his name that mattered, but rather the time and place in my life that I had encountered him. An old school friend from my younger days in the North East? Perhaps part of the circle I hung with when I attended Wishwell Comprehensive, the State-run hellhole that trained kids to bully each other, fight without losing, and steal cars? I wracked my brain for an identity, but kept coming up blank. This kind of thing was always happening to me. I have a total recall with faces, even remembering the features of people who I’ve only ever met the once, and then only briefly. The problem is that I remember the faces of people I may only have seen in the street two or three times too; my mind retaining their image but not registering why. So I spend hours trying to put names to faces, even when I don’t know those names. Sometimes I say hello to complete strangers, having seen them a couple of times in Tesco, or in the queue at Blockbuster Video, but certain that I know them from somewhere. It can get very embarrassing… However, I knew that this time was different. I had met this person, and some indelible mark had been left somewhere deep within me. I just couldn’t find it in the vaults of memory, not yet. * Tuesday evening I had a phone call from my Aunt Hilda. My sister, Jen, had had another episode. The people from the Cherry Tree Institute had been in touch, and they wanted me to visit Jen again in the near future; my visits seemed to calm her. That got me thinking about the rape again, and I had to drink most of a bottle of malt whiskey to make it all go away. She’d been in Cherry Tree for six years now, since she was sixteen. She was getting no better, and in fact only seemed to sink deeper into herself as the years went by. She had always been a little weak, a little susceptible to life’s knocks and tumbles. If she were stronger, perhaps she wouldn’t have ended up in that place, with the psychos and the failed suicides, and the folk who just sat in plastic chairs and nodded vacantly at the bare walls. On her third night in there, all those years ago, she had woken at some point way after midnight to witness the girl who occupied the bed next to her attempting to hang herself with a towel from the back of the ward door. Jen, still reasonably lucid at that point, had raced over and taken the girl’s weight in her thin arms, screaming for help. After about ten minutes, someone had eventually arrived, but the girl had later died in the infirmary. The episode had set Jen back a lot, and since then she had simply slid further and further into a catatonic state. Yes, Jen was the fragile one, the one with the paper-thin skin. I was the tough guy, the one who let it all pass like water off a duck’s back. Even when our parents had left us with Aunt Hilda, and run off to God-knew-where, I had held us together, looking after my sister even though I was only two years older. She had met Tony Harris at a friend’s party when she was just three months shy of turning sweet sixteen, and she thought that her prayers had been answered. He was tall, good-looking and popular- played as star striker on the school football team, and had every girl in school swooning after him. When he led her upstairs to “talk” and locked them both in the master bedroom, then pushed her down onto the coats that where heaped like corpses on the bed, she initially thought he was just messing about. She only realised her error when he punched her in the face and pulled up her skirt, ripping off her sensible knickers and telling her that he knew she wanted it. I won’t go into details (thankfully, I don’t know them all), but afterwards, my weak-willed little mouse of a sister did the bravest thing in the world and went to the police. She held up amazingly well throughout the whole investigation, only ever breaking down in court. It was the sentence that put her in Cherry Tree; the bastard got six months in a young offenders centre, serving his time in a comfortable private dorm, watching TV and smoking cigarettes brought in by his family on their weekly visits. The only reason he was still alive to put there was because I was fool enough to trust in the law, to put my faith in our puny fucking judicial system; a system that treats the scum as if they are the victims. * Wednesday I slept late, deciding to ring in sick. I spent the morning in bed, then showered and went online to book my train tickets North. As usual, the cheaper tickets were all sold out, so I had to spend nigh on a hundred quid to spend woefully insufficient time with my sister over a rushed weekend. That night I dreamed of a sea of living faces perched on stiff mannequin bodies; they were all vaguely familiar to me, and called my name in identical high-pitched voices that rose to merge into a single ear-aching note, pitched somewhere up near the high end of audibility. I fled silently through wet nighttime streets, along narrow back alleys and eerily empty lamp-lit main drags, but those expressionless faces followed wherever I went. There was no escape, and I knew that eventually they would catch up. What would happen then, I had no idea. All that I felt was fear, and the stark certainty that I had to keep out of reach of those wailing faces… At three-am I was pacing the length and breadth of my tiny flat, trying to outdistance the nightmare in three small rooms. Eventually, I turned on the TV and watched a bad horror film, then went back online to answer a few emails. By the time the sun came up, I felt that I’d outrun the dream, but those faces hovered at the edge of my consciousness, a constant reminder of the nameless fear that I had felt upon seeing that guy on the train. Friday morning it happened again. But this time I knew the geography of the face I saw as intimately as that of my own. I was forcing my way through the barrier at Charing Cross Road Station, when someone I knew commuter-walked briskly past the newspaper stand and out of the exit where homeless men sat sullenly smoking their morning roll-ups. Shock fell upon me like a sack of bricks, and weighed me down in my place. I couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Everything seemed to waver in and out of focus around me, and pressure built up in my ears as if I were underwater. The man, now long gone, was Tony Harris. The boy who had raped my sister, six years on. His still-handsome face was older, with lines at the edges of his thin mouth and dark hollows beneath his big brown eyes, but there was no doubt in my mind that it was Harris. A large Asian woman pushed me from behind, clearing the way as I was blocking the turnstile. I felt panic, and ran through the subway and up onto the street, looking for Harris. I couldn’t see him in the mindless crush of the crowds, but still felt his presence in the air like an approaching storm. Fuck, fuck, fuckfuckfuckfuck… I repeated the obscenity like a mantra, or a spell to ward off evil spirits. I had entered new territory here, and I had no idea how I was supposed to react. This couldn’t happen; it was impossible. What the fuck did I do next? * Ten weeks into his six-month sentence in the Liberton Remand Centre. Harris had entered into an argument with a fellow inmate in the centre’s well-equipped gym. The other boy, a seventeen-year-old drug pusher named Billy Whitehouse, had learned that Harris was inside for rape. Rapists, child molesters and those who harm pensioners are generally frowned upon in most institutions of incarceration, and this one was no different. Harris, not used to being unpopular, thought that he could make a name for himself by taking on this kid at his own level, on his own terms. Whitehouse, being an experienced street fighter, decided to nip this attitude in the bud and stabbed Harris with a homemade chiv- a sharpened spoon handle bound to a six-inch hunk of hand-carved chair leg with course fishing line. I’m happy to report that Harris died in agony. The chiv got him in the throat, and he lay flapping in his own blood for a long time before he went. I just pray that he suffered immensely, that his pain was intolerable for the time that it took the bastard to die. * So, I had seen the dead man who had raped my sister in a London tube station on a chilly Friday morning in mid-November. The event acted as a kind of watershed; the mental force of seeing Harris tore down the walls and forced me to recall the identity of the man I’d seen on Monday. Ernie Brookes. The biggest bully in Wishwell Comprehensive. A kid who had made a misery of the lives of so many of his classmates. He had died in a car crash at the age of nineteen, killing himself and his latest girlfriend on some desolate winding road late one night in the wilds of North Yorkshire. He was mourned by few, missed by none. Another dead man. Another ghost. I began to think of all those other faces I’d seen and almost recognised throughout the years, people whose appearance had tugged at my memory for reasons that I could never define. Familiar features seen in the queue at some generic coffee shop, filing into a cinema, or waiting to be served in a city centre pub. Who were they? Deceased bad people from my own past? Long dead killers and rapists and thieves that I’d read about in newspaper reports or seen in grainy photofits on the television news? I ran home after that, not even bothering to ring work and extend my sick leave. All I could think of were these dead people and the fact I had seen them, here and now, larger than life, truer than fiction.
London is a tumour. A cancerous growth, a series of mutated cells that have turned cannibal and are consuming themselves, like a snake swallowing it’s own tail.
I haven’t left my flat since seeing Tony Harris; I don’t know who I might bump into if I do. There are hundreds of streets out there in the Shitty City, and millions of obliquely familiar faces marching up and down the litter-lined Avenues, hopping on and off buses, eating in high-priced restaurants, drinking in old bank buildings that have been gutted and turned into trendy wine bars. They say that only the good die young. Maybe. But the bad, the really bad, don’t die at all; they just move to London.
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