Hackney Blues

I don't know how I came to occupy this patch of floor. I don't know how it came to look like this or what I could have done to change it. I tried to prosper. But the gods of prosperity guffawed at my efforts. The more I tried the more absurd the enterprise seemed. So I let it go. I let go. Yes, that's it. That's why here. 

This mess. This bare wood floor covered in shit. Abandoned bits of paper and plastic, half-eaten bits of bread, wine bottles. A pile of mildewed, dogeared books in the corner in a little mound, relics of a writerly ambition long since stubbed-out. Whenever I get round to burning this place down, they’ll kindle the flames. Have to get some use out of them.

I’ve got those stomach cramps again. As if it's full of thorns. What to do? There are empty-bellied schizophrenics at motorway service stations in the most desolate parts of this island with more of a sense of direction than I have. That's the truth. No furniture; no chairs, no sofa, no table. There's a telly – of course there's a telly – but it stopped working a long time ago. Now it just serves as a grotesque mirror reflecting an appalled convex face, which, however I try to alter my expression, always looks exactly like Munch’s Screamer.

I sit on the edge of the mattress in my freezing room and look around in the faint hope of finding inspiration. I look over my possessions for clues. I have books. I could read a book, I think. Pass the time, nourish the mind. But then I remember what A said to me before she kicked me out: “You’re always reading. What for? What are you reading? What are you doing… You don’t do anything.” 

She said this last bit with a little jolt of surprise… realising for the first time that she was disgusted by me. It hurt. I didn’t let her know that it hurt. I just sat there in silence. Easy, ambiguous silence. She told me to leave. I told her to fuck herself. She threatened to call the police. I threatened to set fire to her bush. She called the police. I left.

Whenever the inertia comes on and I pick up a book to cure it, I remember those barbed last words… You don’t DO anything… I remember that look of nascent disgust. Suddenly the book feels very heavy and I have to put it down.

I look around the room. Poor little boy. Unhappy little boy. Deserted by everything which once made life so dear.

I’ve been awake for seven minutes.

I leave the house and straight away it’s an assault. Last night's toxic supper of red wine, ketamine and pornography have given the light of this new day a painfully interrogative tinge. I want the world to myself today. That's the only way I can imagine being able to hold my head up. It was a lovely bottle of wine, but that’s no comfort now...

They're everywhere – on these pavements stained by phlegm globs and piss streaks and greasy chicken bones – so many malignant figures rushing past me. Some with hatred scored into their faces, busy being bastards, some wincing with infirmity, others who look exactly like me – who dress like me, walk like me… Christ, even have on the same shoes as me - who mope about stealing glances of themselves in shop windows. 

And then there's the laughter. Noisy, cackling kids sucking on fried chicken, listening to ‘grime’ at full blast on the mobiles, fearless little shites who smell their prey a mile off and live to see them wither.

I’ve been spotted.

‘Oh ma days, look at ‘im, look at ‘im.’

‘HAA HA HA HAAAAAKGH…’

‘Oh ma days, dat guy is bare butters...’

Hateful, hateful fuckers.

What do I do? Do I find a bar, booze my heart quiet? Do I find a shop and buy something – anything, some sweets, a book, some gloves? Do I get on a bus? To where? Fuck knows. But I have to do something. I can't just stand here in the street.

In the process of moving, I stumble into an old Jamaican woman with a hook-shaped spine. I can’t escape her eyes.

‘Chile, are you aar right?

I almost shit myself.

‘Of course I am, can't you see?’ I gasp. Then I start running.

I can’t stay on this street. Just get on a bus. I hurry towards the bus stop, then pause and turn around. I take a few steps in the other direction, pause, then look around. Still not sure. I shouldn't have had that wank. I didn't enjoy it. My head goes all cold and hot. I can't do this. They know. They all know and anyway I can't hide it. I look like Will Self.

I'm at the bus stop and gratefully lean against the post. There's a bus. 38. That'll do. A long journey through London. I'll go away. I'll just go away from where I am.

I'm on the bus for a long time. A confusion of people, noise and shop signs rushes past my misted up window. An ambulance siren wails, a slighted would-be passenger punches the window of the bus. I just catch the words ‘fucking asshole…’ before we move on to the next horror. Words, words, words, stimuli, stimuli, too many stumuli. Evening dim sum imagine the fun retail and repair mr wu hot buffet sex hotel terror iced chai latte real dutch model credit crunch prices buy before boarding no membership required mind the closing door the end is near...

Never catch a 38 bus. Absolutely the last thing for a crisis.

***

I leap through the beeping automatic doors in Chinatown. Outside a Subway shop, two young workers are having a break. A blond one with split ends and spots and a cheap business suit on, the polyester trousers hoisting up her no-doubt pimpled buttocks, sucks on a Mayfair. Her companion, with short, spiked hair set rigid with gel, eats a burger from a polystyrene box. He's wearing a gold ear stud. They shoot monosyllables at each other, smoke and gorge on burger. Suddenly and brazenly she burps. A loud reverberative open-mouthed one for the whole world to enjoy. She's not even amused by it. He snortlaughs, by way of afterthought.

On the other side of the street, by the bus stop some alkie bird is turning heads. She's stumbling in front of two alkie blokes who are sat on a wall. I don’t know it yet, but this is in fact an act of seduction. She’s focused on one of them. He’s young, unshaven, and wears a baseball cap. The other is old and pale. He just stares straight ahead, like a sphinx. She's talking to the young bloke, who is sneering at her with a mixture of lust and hatred.

There’s quite a lot wrong with this girl, but she’s too fucked to care. Her eyes roll back in her head. Her face is covered in purple blotches, like acne scars. She’s wearing fluorescent pink velour leggings, knee-high black boots and a black vinyl puffer jacket. Her lacquered hair is scrunched up into a bun which explodes from her crown in a profusion of tight coils.

In the act of standing still she stumbles. She looks like she's on the deck of a churning ship. Whenever she speaks she lunges forward at this bloke as if she might headbutt him. She can't stop shouting and stumbling all over the place. People at the bus stop are smiling at her antics. They are entertained, as if it were a show.

She’s shitfaced, but she’s loving it. She’s excited. She’s having fun. Because… yes - because she’s flirting.

She wants to give him her phone number. She fumbles in her pockets and pulls out a bookie’s pen. She drops it between his legs. She bends over to pick it up. Her legs are wide apart and awkwardly bent. It’s a struggle to get down. Her high heeled boots thrust her backside upward disgracefully like she’s trying to crap into the sky.

She grasps at the pen once, twice, and picks it up on the third attempt. All the while her head is bobbing over this bloke's lap. Then, in the supreme act of shamelessness, she drops to her knees and rubs her face into his crotch, as if it were a baby's belly.

Everyone at the bus stop is smiling. The other alkie just sits there, staring straight ahead, like a sphinx. This one, he's untouchable. No sorrow or horror he can't let slide over him. He just is. Sitting there in the autumn sun with his tin of Spesh. I suppose we all have our ways of getting through the day.

***

You're not on the stage for long. It seems a shame to waste it listening to the bullshit of barflies. When I grasped that, I jettisoned them for good. Left them buzzing at the bar.

They suck you in so they don't feel as bad, like low-rent vampires diluting their wretchedness with purer blood. The wheezing, silver-stubbled old man ushers me over… I have a feeling that I'm crossing a malign threshold, that I'm about to become part of a squalid tableaux with these grisly old wasters, that I will be stuck with them for ever, doing the same squalid things over and over again, for ever. But I need a drink and I don't know this part of town so well.

He orders me a large whisky and himself another glass of red wine. I perch on the stool and try to hold my breath as he brings his stinking, sunken face right up to mine. Behind us a flabby, red-faced bag lady is sat opposite a purple-faced old bag man. Bag lady is wearing old Walkman headphones and is throwing her arms about, singing loudly. Shakira. Hips Don’t Lie. She slurs the bits she doesn’t know and as she becomes excited, starts massaging a shapeless sagging mammary in front of the grinning old bag man. ‘Errr… derrdee drrem… merr… baby… asi es perfecto!’ She knocks her half-pint of lager on the floor. The liquid runs over the wood panel floor and starts to seep under her Tesco bags.

The old man looks lasciviously at me. He says he is lonely and needs someone to talk to. Our drinks come and the old man pulls out a dirty crumpled tenner, carefully straightening it out with his yellowed fingers before handing it to the barmaid. He tells me that this barmaid – a middle-aged gaseous woman with sack-like breasts and wiry, red-dyed hair in a schoolgirl ponytail – wants to be with him, that when she gave him his change she made sure she touched his hand ‘as a sign’. His sour breath is all over me and as he speaks, spitting liberally on his plosives.

He says his name is Antonio. He says he is a painter. He says important people are interested in his paintings, and frequently visit his council flat to look at his latest work. I thank him for the drink, wipe my face and leave. 

Out now, stirred by the firelick of whisky, into the dark street… bristling with night static, thrilled by the thought that I'll never have to see them again.

***

***soho, more drugs, close shave with a gang of coke-addled sodomisers on the 18th floor of a council flat, retreat home***

I've made it back to my street with my bum intact. Of life's small mercies, one for which I'm particularly grateful. My heart's thudding against my ribcage like a maniac, but being back on this landfill site of street is strangely soothing. Back among these cramped together old houses, most of them long since abandoned, with awful black cavities where windows used to be, a collapsing row of houses that looks like a set of rotten old teeth... it feels like the authorites have erased this place from the map, and that suits me.

A freight train rumbles over the rusty iron bridge.On the wall below, a corrugated plastic sign declares: 'We buy gold.' There's a boarded up pub across the road with a dirty tiled facade. Above the doors is a marble relief of Adam and Eve standing either side of the tree of knowledge. Eve is shyly insinuating an apple into Adam's hand.