Sunday, January 01, 2006

5 :

I woke with a start. And imediately wished I hadn’t. My head felt as if I’d had the shit kicked out of me. A type of pain that was almost impossible to see it’s way through. It was dark. I didn’t know quite where I was. Or when. I was, but that was all.

I’d lost maybe an hour, maybe eight. Maybe a day. Maybe two days.

If it was morning or night, I couldn’t tell. Around me it was black and quiet. Quiet as if even the insects were dead. As if there were no birds. As if it were Auschwitz, where the silence was louder than anything else. Where there were no answers, only questions

I was woken by the cold. It was too cold to sleep even when I felt like shit. When I felt like meat warmed up, sealed into a plastic box, microwaved and yet my bones themselves felt frozen. I felt reanimated. A zombie.

What had happened? Jeez. My head hurt. Pounded, as if my brain itself was throbbing. Pulsating inside my head like a cartoon wound.

Had I had too much to drink again? Jeez. I thought I had got past that. I was too old for this shit. Too smart to get fooled by the gentle, slow slide into intoxication. Maybe I had missed the velvet path to being a typical drunk fuck. Maybe I had outsmarted it.

The human body is an amusement park of sense. Each nerve a kaleidoscope of feeling. And most of them negative. Headache. Eyes raw, as if I need to take them out of their sockets and washed. Joints swollen raw. Muscles ache with exhaustion. I don’t remember being out again. Normally I would have a dimly formed memory, even if the details are hazy, of where I have been, who I was with. Normally I remember an anonymous chain pub in the financial sector. A basement bar. The odd joke. A new face or not. Normally I remember my friends, what they were wearing, their work suits relaxed, the ties loosened, the cold satisfying chill of glass and liquid in my hands. The hustle and bustle. People who shout at the bar and men trying to impress each other with hollow boasts. Frightened children in the bodies of men, hoping for some security, for some woman who can protect them the way their mother used to. Pretending it didn’t matter, that there were a million women out there who would have them if only there was the chance, but no, they had chosen you, just you, and if you didn’t want them, didn’t choose him, then there was always someone else they could turn, always another love.

Normally I remember something. Even if it is only a fragment, a splinter, a snapshot of a second.

I remember fuck all. I’m drinking too much. These blackouts corrupt me.

But nothing. No memories of aimless conversation. No memories of Paul bringing some bored, pretty girls from his work to try and pair off with us. Nothing. No attempts at stagnant conversation with hopelessly unsuitable partners by which all you’re trying to do is connect and all you’ve got in common is a sense of loss, and geography. You don’t normally even share the same age range with them, and definitely not a gender. They might not even remember Blue Peter, Godzilla without Godzuki, Scooby Doo before Scrappy came along, Charles & Diana’s wedding - anything. All you’re doing is searching for common ground, or at least enough to be able to have a conversation and maybe convince them that your dog can bury its bone. Love is …. so rare and so common that maybe, even I might find some. Sometime. Someone. Special.

My wedding photographs sit unused, unloved, in a drawer somewhere in the suburbs. In a drawer I know not where, a suburb I cannot name, as someone I do not know even exists sidles up next to my wife and holds her in his arms. Thank fuck I never had kids. Thank fuck I got out when I did. Even waking up now seems better than coming to in her unfaithful arms. It’s a mystery to me how the human mind works.

All we share is loneliness. The central fact of human existence. I’m alone now. Focus. The world comes into focus now. Dim shapes form into clearly defined shapes. I’m lying on something. Grass and dry, cracked mud. How the hell did I get here?

Even when The Titanic went down, everyone died alone. There’s no one else there when your mind goes black and shuts down.

Slowly, using one shaking hand as an anchor, then the next, I tried to stand up and stumbled. It was dark, of a sort. At the corner of night stood a thin sliver of daylight that was blinking its way into the dawn. Thankfully my coat wasn’t wet, despite the condensation of the autumn night that had fallen into the night and coated the grass with dew and made it sparkle in the light. Looking up, I could see stars and clouds. It looked so beautiful. How could anything on this planet matter when we can see entire other galaxies with the naked eye?

It makes me feel small. So small that I am not even an insect, an amobae on the face of the universe. What change can I make?

Fuck. My head hurt. Hurt in places I didn’t even know I had. Ached with that dull, constant throb of tedious pain that indicates some serious, painful injury. Waking was a struggle. Movement even more so. My muscles ached like split, strained tendons. My head throbbed like a pulsing, swollen sore.

Someone fucking switch my head off.

I was in the deserted grassy lot at the rear of some industrial estate. Around me in the vague distance, red brick walls, chimney arches, and monotonous grey fencing I could dimly make out in dawn’s shadow. CCTV cameras and guard dogs lay silent as tombs. An elevated railway line with hollowed out arches stretched from one end of the horizon to another. The dull grind of metal on metal of commuter trains, or the goods trains of late nights and early mornings, shunting nuclear waste and unyielded plutonium to Northern towns where the sky glows like distant fire. Streetlights at corners provided dim light. They twinkled like small fireflies or moths in the distance, half a mile away, peeking over the top of a low wall. I looked right.

The shilouettes of the ghosts of cranes, fifty, one hundred feet high, silent as tombs stretched into the sky. Illuminated only by the lights of streetlamps and dawn bedrooms on the other side of the river. It was earlt. I knew this because it was still dark. And before 5.43am, when the first train to Victoria came past here.

This was of course on the assumption that I knew Where The Fuck I Was. That I didn’t.

Jesus. How did I get into this mess?

This is London, right? Then where the fuck was I?

And more importantly, what the fuck happened?

Everybody knows this is nowhere baby.

Standing up unsteadily, I felt in my pockets. There was nothing. No wallet. No cash. No phone. No keys. Nothing. Nothing made sense. I still had my watch. But that was it. How much did I drink last night?

Had I been mugged? I don’t remember that. The last thing I remember was coming out of the tube station and turning left, but that was after closing time, on the far end of the line, one of the last, deserted tubes, at one end of the train, where the only people were drunk, confused, asleep, tired, their eyes half-closed,where the soft rocking of the tunnels is a lullaby to sleep.

My watch said it was 4.13am. It’s precision engineering, from the Swatch factory of Switzerland, tolled like a bell of the dead. The only sound that echoed in my head.

What the Fuck?

Had I been abducted by aliens? I felt the back of my neck with aching, torn muscles. The dull, evil stretch of tendons, so that my hands moved slowly, my breath coming in odd, stolen gasps. I couldn’t feel the three raised marks below the hairline, those normal indentations that are the only marks left behind by the survivors of a visit from the Little Greys. So what had happened?

I didn’t feel tired anymore. Or hungry. Or thirsty. Or anything. Just aching, painful. And with a splitting headache. There must be something terribly wrong with me. As if every part of my body was somehow broken and wrong. But what? I didn’t recognize this place. Where the hell was it? Suburbs are full of these conurbations, these anonymous grey places where people work and try to fulfil the promise of capitalism in their little empires. And where the failure of capitalism leaves small vacant lots of wasteland at the edges of town. And where developments rise out of rubble, to be sold to people who can barely afford the mortgage in times of spiralling inflation and uncontrolled interest rates.

So this, this was nowhere. This was no place like home. An industrial estate outside a suburb, down a road, a series of anonymous grey buildings with numbers and bland corporate names on their doors in red plastic on white. Somewhere with a fax machine, but without a soul.

For hundreds of yards around me there were a multitude of these places. Vacant lots. Empty space. Empires for rent. New flats being built, cranes reaching to the skies. Derelict, rusted solid cranes of abandoned dockyards, and faded, tired cranes of newly constructed apartments that are beyond the reach of even the most affluent of employees.

Around us house prices are rising like the army of darkness, the infidels, yet here are miles and miles of empty space, the unoccupied rooms. Yet a house, a home, even a flat, are beyond the reach of even those who earn well beyond the national average. One day everyone will be homeless, and nobody will own anywhere. We’ll all be hiring our homes, and all we need is one letter, one notice, and we will be sleeping on the streets.

I’m such a happy camper sometimes.

Slowly, democracy is taking back everything it ever gave us, and pretending that it’s still ours. Democracy is the right to choose. But the choice that is exercised is never by us, only onto us. And the only democracy there is, is the will of the law and the corporations. People exist only to consume and spend money to feed
corporations.

The real programming on television is the adverts. The programmes you think you are watching : they’re just the bait to lure us in. We are the product being sold to the advertisers.

I’m too hungover to think like this. At least I think it’s a hangover.

When the impossible is eliminated, whatever is left, however unlikely, could be the truth.

In these lonely hours, these abandoned moments, left with nothing but our thoughts, our minds race through all the possibilities, and land in the strangest places.

There was a padding noise. A flash of colour somewhere, out of the corner of my mouth. I could detect more the movement than the maker. A fox skittered passed me without even a second glance foraging for food. A KFC bone was wedged into its mouth, grease dripping onto hungry teeth, returning to Fox Base Alpha. I shivered. Even a fox cannot escape the encroaching, inescapable corporatisation of everything. The apocalypse will be sponsored by Barclaycard. Famine brought to you courtesy of McDonalds. Pestilence courtesy of Schlemburger-SEMA. War courtesy of General Motors and EMI Weapons Division. Death courtesy of the Oil Companies and the President.

I could see a dusty dirt track to the left of me, complete with what appeared to be fresh tyre tracks. The air shivered. I need to get out of this shithole. I need to find the way out. I turned around.

Fuck me.

It was huge. I mean, enormous. The type of size that makes you realise that six foot is not tall. Sixty foot is not tall. This. This was tall.

Behind me, about one hundred yards behind me, stood a massive wall. It was about one hundred feet wide and about two hundred feet wide. At the sides the wall protruded forward slightly. The windows set into the wall were dusty and cracked. Many were smashed through. Derelict. Vacant. At ground level, only a handful of pillars stood, supporting the weight of this shell, this wall. Behind the wall was grass and dust. Small trees. Fencing.

I was a dwarf. An insect on the face of the world.

It wasn’t just a wall. But something empty. A building with it’s heart ripped out, and nothing in its place. At the far end, about 200 metres behind the wall, stood another wall.

I looked up. Two huge white cannons, pockmarked, dirty with age, rose forth from the wall, three hundred feet tall. They reached to the sky impassively. They had seen many things. The rise and fall of Germany. The fall of communism. Their very own enviseration at the hands of architect butchers and years of neglect.

Chimneys. And behind them, two more identical chimneys, set on the far side of the building, this enormous shell.

So this was what 188 Kritling Street, London, looked like up close. Like a great natural cliff face, neutral, enormous, imposing, blank. Sad, faded, and yet more than any of us could imagine. It didn’t care if you were there or not. It was just there.

Fuck me. How did I get here of all places?

I gasped involuntarily. Stared for a few seconds at this huge, impersonal thing, towering above me. This ghost building. Watching and waiting for my next, improbable move in a day of improbabilities. It scared the shit out of me.

Stepping back, I tried to comprehend the size of it. A grand madness. Being this close to something this big made me feel suddenly, very very small. And, as if the architects were daring God with the size of their audacity. As if we were insects crawling on the face of something huge.

It’s not good to dare God when one is merely mortal. Whatever is immortal will always outlive you.

I turned round. I looked for a way out. In the distance, the sun was breaking over the shilouette of the estates.

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