Land of bones

This was a winter, and everyone coughed. That’s what it was like. There wasn’t a lot of time for thinking or anything approaching reflection, there was just the cold, and the shut windows covered with condensation on the crowded trains. Looking out at the building works designed to transform London, the largest structure so far an immediate and in your face concrete works, the beauty of the architect’s design was lost beneath the alcohol-drenched sweat that filled the train. Somehow, in the modern studios with slim secretaries and smart cappuccino machines, sheltered from the sound and fury of the urban environment, they surely hadn’t predicted this. Dust. Garbage. The iron slope of the new train bridge already decimated by a dangling group of agile graffiti artists, leaving the mark of their high wire temper as a morning sign for us, the workers of London, looking out grimly from the train as it passed. This was our life, standing on the platform, waiting. Waiting. Smoking. Pretending. And some went East, some went West, for no reason more plausible than chaos theory. Whether we chose our situation, or had it thrust upon us, we had no idea. And maybe, we wouldn’t want to. If you had asked any of us, we couldn’t have told you why we were there, what we hoped to do, or how it had all happened anymore than we could have explained the dirt on the seats, or the angle of the wintry sun, or how many times during an hour we could be likely to cough.

For us, it was just another day and I was trying to take some comfort in belonging to humanity. The four builders across from me, eager for money, come over from Eastern Europe because their expertise in building fast cheap concrete flats made them desirable, even more so than I was, a lowly member of the educated class, were alarmingly close to me. Plaster grimed and skin yellowed from smoking, they related to me not only by their proximity to my seat, but their connection to one of the perks of my job. Flats. New flats, cheap, half share, like the one I was angling to buy, the one would apparently fool me into thinking my job was worth something to the market at large. Apparently someone didn’t think I was watching them tear down the derelict factory every day from the train, the lone lot next to the scrap heap; that I wouldn’t mind living over some toxic waste site. Or having my bijou little terrace overlooking the scrap yard, the one they had somehow neglected to buy in their development fever, with its collection of fierce and dirty looking barking dogs that you could sometimes hear when the doors whooshed open at Homerton. A sorry lot, defending their collection of car doors with alacrity despite their dishevelled state. They thought I wouldn’t notice it was built on the oil-soaked ground of a former factory or that next door was a rotting alley I could have moved into for free with a caravan and no one would have noticed. This urban luxury was supposed to make my role as police teacher more palatable, supposed to make me feel I was doing something worthwhile, something rewarding and rewardable.

Meanwhile, as we passed through Hackney Wick, in the distance stood the towers of Canary Wharf. Masonic and forbidding, they reminded me that what ever I did, it was never going to have the smell of rich carpet and endless halls, silk shirts and new Swiss underwear. It would never be easy like Sunday brunch and hand knotted carpet and pushing the heavy curtains open to another reassuring day. It was never going to be like that again. Instead, life was going to smell of plaster and old brandy on the large floppy tongues of the Polish builders, soot and Persil, yellow rainy dust, hand cream and cheap perfume and beer breath. You could see into their mouths sometimes as they yelled to each other, either unreasonably cheerful or still hung over this early in the morning. The saddest one was the older man who took up two seats, stretching out his injured and inflamed leg, looking both weary and angry at anyone who approached him. With his leg stuck out in front and his grimly determined face that reminded of my mother, he made me pray every morning that she wouldn’t have to work until she could barely walk. His leg was stiff and awkward before him and his dark bushy eyebrows pulled together when he had to rise from his position, won and guarded on the crowded train, when, heaving his ancient leather toolbag onto his shoulder, he struggled his way out of the carriage. I always used to watch, holding my breath, as this progress to the door was so slow and wooden, I felt sure that he was on the verge of finding the door shut before him, and being forced to sit painfully down and try again at the next station. Somehow, he always made it out in time, and after weeks of this, I was no closer to admiring the suffering that he lived with as a daily occurrence. Instead, I kept wondering what he had fled from that made this grim trip that much better.

But then, I often reflected, I could have asked myself the same question. Which misguided concept led me to perch myself here, upon this train, watching the comings and goings of a million people, half of whom at least, I could no longer understand, after happily having chosen a country that spoke my mother tongue. Ha. What a nonsense all my notions of making my way in the world seemed now, and I stood on a quicksand of all the ideas I had once embraced. Here I was, a million miles from the clean crispness of the great Northern Woods, thousands of miles from wolves and pine trees and snow; on the same streets where Jack London had written that one never saw a family in the same place beyond two generations, because they all got the hell out or died. Which was it to be today, death, or another half-life? How much longer could I go on, pretending that I knew what I was doing, when I was just a sandbag between the cultured society and the flotsam, the brownish scum rising on the Bisto of modern British life that potentially threatened everything?

Pretending that the Other was harmless and grateful was as foolish as thinking your new shoes alone would get you past the velvet rope at the club. The original Brits left behind in Canning Town were not pleased that they hadn’t managed to escape to Essex, or that they and their children were now in the minority, in their own country. Their anger matched that of the newcomers who had taken all the promise literally, and were surprised at the little they had to enjoy. Their depression at not achieving what they saw quite plainly on the TV was intended for them, was what both groups had in common, and their frustrations led them down a road of suicidal depression or murder. Which would I lean toward today, myself? Fighting another day? Winning the war, not the battle? Because in this world where chicken bones littered the grease stained concrete sidewalks, going blue and soft after a heavy rain, a small disintegrating danger to be stepped over, beauty and faith were found in small protected pockets, noted and dissolved like a secret code before they were attacked. It was a place where ‘you cunt’ was sounded from the youngest throats a thousand times more often than ‘hello love’; a siren filled street where you could watch a mother kicking her child, her boyfriend looking on; see a gang of young mixed race teens running as fast as they could, brandishing wooden two by fours with nails jutting out; anything, anything was likely to happen. And I counted myself as one of the lucky ones. Where was my bedsit, covered with damp, filled with six fatherless boys all with various stages of psychotic disorder and general dysfunctional behaviour? By comparison, sitting next to the old man form Poland was a pleasure akin to cucumber sandwiches and Pimms on a hot day. I didn’t want either of them, but I wasn’t suffering, after all, was I?

I was stepping over the cracks, and the new crop of gnawed over bones that re-emerged on the pavements, with the smashed glass of the bus shelters, diamond-like scattered, hurt me like I was seeing my own body, sliced open. My relationship with the area was complicated, difficult. Co-dependent, on one side – mine. I was getting addicted to the rush of adrenaline that went along with fighting back, with fear. The feeling that I was seeing something I needed to learn. There were mornings where it was a life that revealed some kind of insanity. Who would willingly do this? I was a teacher, an outsider who belonged if only because I’d learned to hide my apprehension like everyone else. I was watching my step, and getting on with it. Fuck off. Disbelief becoming second skin. Like they all said out there – is it. Not a question. A statement that everything was up to be constantly questioned. The ultimate cynicism, born out of trusting in nothing. Is it.

Looking out the window at the remnants of Victorian houses built overlooking the railway cut, now bijou residences, to the square bungalow style wooden houses, with flat leaking roofs, past the new Tesco in Hackney, real shelter from the ugliness was unlikely.