The London Room
gluttonous eulogy on the M4 motorway
The EZ MAN N VAN arrives half-an-hour early with a smashed wing mirror. The deal was one man, one van, but the driver – a 6ft 5in Russian in sweats – is accompanied by a woman with bleach blonde hair, wearing a pink velour tracksuit. This is his wife, I guess, given the rock on her ring finger. She sits in the cab, idly tapping at a giant iPhone with lilac nail extensions, while the driver decamps from the vehicle to inspect the damage. I introduce myself.
‘Accident,’ he says.
‘Shit,’ I say.
‘Yes’ he says.
Then he spits several racial slurs by way of describing the moped rider who had apparently pranged him and busted the wing mirror. He lights a clove cigarillo and starts packing the van.
This is the great move West, the migration of all my stuff from the South London Shurgard down to Bristol, where I’ve just signed a 6 month lease, with an old friend, on a 2 bed flat situated above a Veterinarians. With the help of an ally, I’ve spent the morning emptying out my humble storage unit, #156, having given notice and terminated the direct debit, thereby severing the one financial ligature still binding me to the city. As a general rule, I feel nostalgic for the past and future both – a symptom of being permanently ill-at-ease in the present – and yet, simultaneously, I’m unable to handle change of any kind at all. I therefore begin to feel idiotic sentimentality for my now-vacant unit – good old #156, reliably bleak #156 – and Shurgard as a whole, with its rat-traps and cool silver corridors, a peaceful mausoleum of objects, thousands of material lives in abeyance.
So, already feeling weird and teary, the arrival of the slur-slinging Russian and the inexplicable presence of his wife puts me further on the back foot. The idea of riding with them to Bristol, as planned, is a kind of personal nightmare: I already feel claustrophobic at the thought of all three of us stuffed in the cab, what if I puke, or have to piss, how will I explain that I can’t hack 120 miles without stopping at a service station to relieve myself, and so forth. While we load the EZ – the driver, my ally and me – I wonder how to negotiate the situation. Maybe I should ditch and take a train, meeting the van at the other end. But before I can hand-wring myself, like a true liberal, into an awkward and idiotic compromise between my progressive instincts (‘I can’t stomach the company of racists’) and personal comfort (‘I don’t want to sit in a cramped cab for three hours’), we’ve efficiently filled ‘er up, the EZ, and the driver stubs out his cigarillo, swings open the passenger door, extends his hand and says: ‘Please.’
And so we set off along the South Circular. Passing through this neighbourhood, which constituted my entire universe throughout the lockdowns, should make me feel even more sad, but I’m oddly insulated up here in the cab. Heart FM, a soporific cloud of clove smoke, the dash festooned with soft-toys (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Looney Toons characters), sitting knee-to-knee with the driver’s wife… It doesn’t leave much room for emotion. Until the driver, without warning, pulls up on the curb by Dulwich Woods, and asks his wife in Russian to ask me in English if I have any masking tape. Suddenly, the door’s swung open, the affective airlock is broken, he and I are rifling through the back of the van for the tape to jerry-rig a sketchy fix to the smashed wing mirror, which I only now realise – this being a van, there being no rearview – is absolutely necessary if we are to make it to Bristol in one piece. And the fresh bright cold grey air rolling off the treetops and soil-scent and traffic-scent of Dulwich’s ancient woods hits me like a wave, and I want to bolt deep into them and never ever leave.
By the time we hit the M4 I’ve drafted a Substack inside my head, the piece is called ‘The London Room,’ or ‘Leaving the London Room,’ as a friend described my part-accidental part-intentional departure from the city. In essence, it’s a torrential list of images, impressions, and fragmented memories, unleashed in an effort to capture a trace of the (my) experience of seven-plus years in an adopted city, the miscellany of artefacts in the (my) London Room, a second-rate metaphor that, in the piece, I waste no time trying to polish. It begins with a prologue, I guess: the hospital visits, cannulas, antibac, face-masks and gloves, that characterised my first months in London, at eighteen, when my dad underwent unsuccessful treatment for a rare form of cancer at University College Hospital, and was subsequently driven back West for his final disposition. Black cabs from Paddington along the Euston Road, canteen lunches, radiology departments, sleep-deprived doctors, blood tests, transplants, etcetera: an early association between loss and the city, sickness and the city, the dense symbolism inscribed into any and all future journeys from the capital to the West Country…
The piece then jettisons the first person singular, and begins in earnest, unfurling – first – the hayseed years: sleeping on cat-shit-smeared basement floors of kind hearted friends, SpareRoom auditioning, box rooms, seven in a four bed, making rent, weird interstitial shift work at cinemas and museums, climbing the freelance arts charity admin ladder, copywriting gigs, PA jobs, grocery shopping for geriatric trustees, divining Tweetdeck and Google analytics, pleasantly unaware – at first – that this is all a cliche. Breaking and entering into the city’s most readily-apparent literary scene: the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club magazine launches, gatecrashed London Review of Books soirées, cheap lager at the Lord John Russell, niche lit celeb spotting on Judd Street, yet another poetry reading at Matt’s Gallery with its unflattering overheads and stilted small talk, the shock of the scene’s obvious and ignorant elitism, unrelenting wealth, the attendant acid in the back of the throat, the insular cliques and sets and circles that appear, even early on, dead behind the eyes, lacking imagination, or at any rate lacking generosity, which might be the same thing. It takes years in the London Room before you realise it’s possible to be attracted to this world, while remaining critical of its chief operators and inhabitants. Then there’s the surface-level politicking, the CND marches and anti-war protests, the ceaseless, corny, shortsighted personification of 2016 (‘good riddance, twennysixteen!’) and the summer when ‘things’ seem like they could maybe ‘change,’ the memes are good, we’re all acolytes, it’s really going to happen. It doesn’t happen, obviously, but it almost does. If it’s true that first comes the little agony, the great agony comes later, it’s the ensuing winter election with its uneasy algorithmic canvassing, rich kids and old school socialists parachuting into alien constituencies, repeating scripts, getting sick, getting sicker, ice rain and sun dogs shimmering over the palatial townhouses of Kensington, the memes are bad, luxury communist avatars plug dodgy polling data, who the fuck is Rob Delaney, Hugh Grant’s photo ops in Chingford, and the so-called progressive academics care less this time round, they’re ‘socialists,’ sure, but not ‘free broadband’ socialists… Could it happen? No. It doesn’t happen, and the bottom falls out. Well, there’s hope in the movies, as Hilton Als says. Living in cinemas from autumn to spring, dosed and dozing on threadbare velvet, Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland fucking at the Prince Charles, nightmarish Bergman with flu and whisky at the BFI, made-for-TV Fassbinder at Close-Up, docs at the DocHouse, everything else at the Rio. Crawling back outside as the seasons shift, the light’s in abundance, that one week in May, every May, when all the trees explode at once, the brick-walled gardens are swimming pools of green liquid light, light rays thickened with pollen and exhaust fumes, the light in London in late spring is an element to walk through and imbibe. The city in summer, cycling in short shorts to the Downs or Victoria Park, Highbury Fields or the Heath, Moretti from the offy that keeps its beer ultra-cold, cadaver cold, a feeling of invincibility or endless adolescence, despite the bike crashes. Neon pink t-shirts, iced white wine, weed, whiteys, five-a-side, frisbees, The Captain Kidd, the Catford Cat, bargain Valentino at Lewisham TK Maxx, the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, the OG’s angelic hum rolling into DJ, ancient relics on the banks of the Thames. London under the heat dome, like suffocating inside the rotting corpse of a beached whale, bedsheets in the freezer, low blood pressure, fever dreams, coiled lightning over queues outside the Lidos, algae blooms, cocks of every conceivable shape and size at the men’s ponds, swimmer’s itch, straining to leave the city for fictive pastorals and rolling fields, making-do with polluted East Coast beaches and gritty oysters… But even before the anaesthetised iteration of London, the lockdowns and nascent agoraphobia, the conspiracy theories and paranoia, the dissolution of identity that makes me think of pointillism, there’s the sense that this city of 9 million appears, after several years, to be a city of several hundred. The professional and social networks cultivated in the first few months may have grown, mycelium-like, may have burrowed deeper into the substrata of specialist zine fairs, noise shows, plant swaps, micro restaurant pop-ups, etcetera, but this growth has permanently stalled. Everyone knows – or knows of – everyone else. Not even the Camberwell art crowd (‘beautiful and mean’) seem special, anymore. The legacy lit scene is stuck on repeat, it’s all ambient sexual puritanism and creative stagnation, necking halves at the French House, creepy agents sucking down Marlboros at The Lamb on Lamb’s Conduit, except now the talk of the town is promotions and salaries, when it used to be about art, it used to be fun. Didn’t it? Strangely, this sensation isn’t one of fatigue, but tranquility. Because now it feels possible to really live in the city. Now it feels possible to make one’s own life here, on one’s own terms, to forge one’s own path, an avowal accompanied, almost simultaneously, by the crushing realisation that this is impossible. Things bifurcate. Friends and acquaintances are squeezed out – the hustling life has run its course, too many shitty arts employers, zero hours contracts, malicious private school bosses, terrible fees for astronomical projects, etcetera, as rent and bills crest the £1k pcm mark – while others inexplicably purchase £700k properties in Hackney, and complain about having to install ‘prison bars’ on their windows… The sound artist-cum-landlord borrows a tenant’s copy of The Dispossessed and never returns it…
The piece I draft inside my head – as we race in the EZ at 90mph – carries on in this vein, a kind of gluttonous eulogy, characterised by a psychogeographer’s masculinist urge to list, index and acquire. It’s the technique of a collector: I hope to bottle-trap, preserve then pin all these experiences under glass, to make them inert, to hoard and exhibit them. ‘The London Room’ feels intuitively inauthentic, a willed conclusion, bidding for the false and cowardly comfort of forced endings. It’s the opposite of movement, which is the opposite of narrative. And narrative, so John Cheever wrote, is a synonym for life. Cruising along the M4, the driver’s wife FaceTimes her son back in Stratford – he can’t find his swimming kit – while the driver, nonplussed, keeps his gaze glued to the tarmac and lights a third cigarillo. We’re making good time. It’s a peaceful journey. I watch road signs whirl by the passenger window, each signalling how close we’re getting to our destination: Bristol, South West, and River Avon, which means ‘river river,’ a name that brings to mind twin-tracks, reflections, or the idea of flux redoubled.
I lived the journey, and the years that preceded it, with you. Brilliant writing. May Bristol be a safe creative haven and a jump off point for new adventures.
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