Across the city, Kirsteen McNish catches glimpses of her former life.
As the cab travels up and over the carriageway that stretches from Paddington to Euston, I realise I had forgotten the intense traffic of the city. The flow suddenly stems, allowing old memories to seep through the gaps. Back in London, I feel trapped in the membrane between my past life and the present, unable to pierce the skin from either side. I blink hard into the headlights with a new, strange vulnerability.
After a panel in response to the Hard Graft exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, where I talk about semantics and silos, I travel to Oxford Circus and take a shortcut down an old backstreet, once familiar. I lose my bearings as street works and hoardings mask my old desire lines. Misdirected three times to a café, it occurs to me that so few of us know how to navigate outside of our own well-worn maps. I think back to getting caught up in the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings in Tavistock Square and how hundreds of people like me drifted, foglike, from place to place, trying to catch buses that weren’t running, hailing taxis with their lights off, confused and blank-faced with no mobile signal. Most of us know the underbelly of the city better than its network of streets and buildings on the surface, and perhaps that’s why I always gravitated towards the watery artery of the Thames; to feel closer to the city’s pulsing heart when I wasn’t sure of my internal compass. In the café my friend A unwraps two delicate, sculptural, sea-inspired pieces made for me, and I feel my chest skip and lift as I think of the sea for the first time all day.
The low grey cloud makes me squint. I jump on the 73 bus towards King’s Cross where a man senses the weight of my bag and kindly swings it onto the luggage rack as he talks to Google Translate, quizzing the woman on the seat next to him to see if his pronunciation is correct. On the tube, I ask someone else if I am on the right line after too quickly squeezing between the carriage doors as they suck shut. I can hear Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Man At The Garden’ wafting through soft fabric pads that remind me of bats’ wings. I watch as he traces the tube map gently with his lined forefinger and affirms yep, you are going in the right direction, just two stops, smiles broadly and puts his headphones back on. I have lost my confidence with navigation, something I could do two years ago with my eyes closed. An unsettling feeling. As I head out east later, a woman ten years my senior with a neat suit and expensively highlighted hair shifts her bags to allow me to sit down, and tells me in a Midlands accent that she recognises what it is to be tired at the end of a long day. I am clearly the perpetual open book, no mystery in my countenance. She tells me she has been in an airless boardroom, and as she jumps off at Seven Sisters, her high heels click off the platform like the tick, tick, tick of a clock’s mechanism. The notion that London is an unfriendly place is an untruth – it just has many rhythms to listen to concurrently.
I had first arrived here a tiny stitch in a huge tapestry, buzzing with inquisitiveness — but soon stuffed pods in my ears, head firmly marionetted down towards a book, taking cues from all those around me and shutting out the thrum of the outside. With time to spare I would watch from the first floor of Liverpool Street station as people weaved in and out of each other’s way at speed like sperm in a test tube; a dance that used only peripheral vision rather than direct eye contact. I stood in thrall before or after the onslaught of a day’s work, rarely seeing anyone collide, the music blaring around my cranium making it all somehow poetic, no matter what was on the playlist. I was knee-deep in the romance of everything; every flea market, gig venue, bar, kiss or cab ride home, lights blurring past, my own filmic soundtrack deep in my stride.
I arrive at an old haunt of a pub as sweepers clean the remnants of the market into bristles. A man sitting alone in the dark talks through a small taped-up speaker about Jesus’s impending arrival, and the men in their machine shout at him to move, lest he be pulled under the wheels. He shouts back that they will be saved by God’s grace alone. I order a drink at a bar strewn with St George’s Cross bunting and large TVs that weren’t there two years ago, pundits parroting each other from dubby speakers. My friend Z insists this place is on ley lines. Settled at a table by a window I have 15 minutes to people-watch, cradling a glass of red wine. A woman with a tight perm holds her dog under her arm, and a man fingers the loose pocket of his sheepskin coat, repeatedly stroking his bald patch. Another, younger man with tumbling dark hair sits nearby and watches my stuff as I pop to the loo — a record label on his tote bag, Penguin Classic in his hand — a solo full stop, perhaps, at the end of his day. Soon, like a love-strung abacus, my friends’ bright faces arrive and bead before me – all wearing big coats and woollens whilst I am, in turn, inexplicably warm in a sort of sugar rush, giddy in their company. At the end of the night I try to be casual about my worries at home, but I see quiet concern in my friends’ faces; hope held like candles at mass.
In the morning, I shower and take tea to the soft quilted dumpling of a bed and hungrily nibble fruited oat biscuits. My friend is away. Her huge new bedroom windows reveal glimpses of familiar rooftops, the back of the doctor’s surgery, the Montessori nursery, and the green triangle of grass where my boy would wheel his bike wildly too close to the road, not listening to my pleas. The windows frame living, breathing paintings of amber clouds, flittering whirligig birds and rose gold streaks. I notice the soft marks of fingerprints around cupboard handles, the children’s bedrooms littered with small plastic toys, small furry animals, endless collections of small, well-thumbed books, stickers, nail jewels, Japanese anime figures, colourful drawings creased at the edges — and amongst all this I spot a photograph of my late friend cradling his baby daughter, both sound asleep on the sofa, which winds me.
Creases in the thick silver curtains in S’s bedroom let through light which streaks the wall in spluttering fireworks — these Studio 54 additions incongruent with a mid-century minimalist bedroom that belies her playfulness. Five short years after losing her partner, she will later today be reading poems at her mother’s funeral, her soft Scottish brogue holding everyone like a raindrops in a cup.
Halfway through Friday I suddenly realise it’s Valentine’s day whilst people buy bunches of bright flowers in cellophane and brown paper. I choose large stems of vibrant mimosa to put in a vase for when my friend gets home, hoping their tiny yellow globes won’t drop quickly. I walk at pace again, returning to my own natural speed against the certainty of concrete rather than the boggy slip of the moors. I absorb the hustle of the traders, book stalls, chocolatiers, and phone accessory stalls like blotting paper. Two young women are held in the palm of a tarot reader’s hand as she asks, you are moving away from him emotionally — does that make sense?, her eyelids a 70s metallic blue with crescent-mooned dark eyebrows, more kitsch painting than real scene. I am spewed out too soon onto the main road, taken up in the city’s stoat-like energy, unable to resist its heady momentum.
Travelling into town the next day to meet my son off the train, there is a cluster attack of information at the overland station, commuters tutting as another train is delayed. At each stop I have an opportunity to survey the pylon-studded Walthamstow marshes, grasses swaying; clusters of sandy bricked houses blinking their glass eyes across the tracks. I think suddenly of my then 3-year-old son’s first drawings – each detailed face he drew always had long lines inexplicably emerging from the eyes, pointing like lasers. I wonder what he saw or felt under each gaze that rested on him, as my gaze rests on more faces in two days than I have seen in six months.
I realise, in two years’ space from this city, I am no longer used to men smoking on street corners in the dark, pissing down darkened alleyways, men walking too close behind you as they try to get to their destination. Men on the train snorting as I choose a seat a second before they do, men whose legs are spread in confined spaces like butterfly wings pinned to a board. Just how much space men take up and how close they get, unconscious or otherwise. I have started biting my nails again recently, so much sometimes that they bleed. A tourist in an expensive blue and green ski jacket stares at me on the train as I try to stop the ooze of crimson blood from my right middle finger, dabbing it on my scarf. He does not avert his gaze as my eyes meet his. A heart-shaped stain sets into the green wool like blotted ink. I suck my finger and get off.
I take in the Donald Rodney exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, which turns me inside out, his softly spoken words running around my head at electric eel speed. I visit the Soil exhibition at Somerset House and it is as multi-layered, disarming, nourishing and startling, like Spring’s first green shoots emerging from a lay-by full of plastic. I have missed taking time to stop and stare inside buildings and share opinions rather than my default of solo-gazing on vast patchwork hills.
Before we leave for the train home my son and I go early morning to peer at our former house, and it feels like catching sight of an old lover across a café. A bare bulb shines from the main bedroom, one window is boarded up with wood, and scaffolding wraps the exterior wall’s edges. The side gate to the garden is tantalisingly open. We don’t go too close, and I can’t make out the willow tree at all. As we pause there, my son asks me if I feel anything. The scaffolding seems it’s not just for the house’s expanding footprint, but for us too somehow. We walk away after a few moments, and he squeezes my hand before stuffing his own hands back in his pockets. Unexpectedly, after a hankering for the city, he says he is ready to go home to Devon.
The sea comes into view at Teignmouth. It’s choppy, and as ever this scene so close to the train window takes my breath away. At Totnes station in the damp air, the stereo blasts out Chapell Roan for my daughter’s delectation — the intro surely sampled from Gloria Gaynor’s famous club anthem. As approaching headlights flash their hellos, my partner turns up the volume and we unexpectedly find ourselves screaming ‘Pink Pony Club’ at the top of our voices down country lanes, my daughter whooping in her seat, and my eyes sting with tears thinking of sitting with my girl watching Roan’s recent performance at the Grammys. Art not waiting for the starting gun.
I think of my sister saying to me some months before she died, all we can rely on is change as I flailed about in the shallows over something I now forget. We cannot make things neat or stop the rise of a swollen river — but we can make boats.
