ECHO 30/1/06

London again – so overly familiar that I feel I have not even had to travel there despite the fact I have been up since 7am to make my connections – everything I see and hear is so ingrained in me it holds no sense of the new – plus I feel the weight and size of this city like no other, I don’t for example feel that in Birmingham or Manchester, it’s oppressive, bullying – Streatham (my destination) stinks of burnt cooking oil and cigarettes, fluctuates between the two – the high street is laced with questionnaire holders trying to stop people in the street to complete a survey on street crime or better public transport (both of which are beyond repair, this is the new forlorn hope) – when I leave I am surrounded by this halo of acridity and the bitter gripe of carbon dust from the Underground I can taste at the back of my throat –

A man with an eye-patch climbs up to the top deck of the bus – someone receives some harsh news about their finances; always London seems to promulgate financial woes in certain areas (SW and SE being two prime zones), a city where fortune and poverty are side by side in totally unequal measure – a young Ethiopian man bangs his feet hard against the pale blue plastic facia of the bus interior, he is bored, and as he does his kicking he looks furtively around at the rest of the passengers but carries on nonetheless, almost asking to be challenged – at the rear of the bus another young man plays his favourite music extra loud on an MP3 mobile phone, the music distorts and fills the bus with a grating, unpleasant beat –

Passing through Brixton High Street again, I find it hard to believe I lived there for so long – I have no fond nostalgia for it, just a sense of stress and hurt (physical and emotional), struggle and fear - peppered by the occasional pleasant or special memory –

Eventually I hole up in a greasy café near Baker Street run by a Turkish man and wife – ash and cigarette butts have been left on the table and I sweep them off with the edge of my hand – a watching ‘seer’ in the corner comments in Turkish to the owner about each customer that enters and what they order, the two men laugh impishly – I am waiting out the close of this long day, expensive and strange – the seer rolls a cigarette, wraps his beige scarf about his neck, it is a cold day and with night creeping in now the temperature is dropping to its iciest, felt in here as the door opens and closes onto the street with customers leaving or entering – London always seems colder when it gets cold, all those buildings channelling the wind between them and throwing it out in certain places twice as harsh –

Ponder the street through the window – London is like a coating, some kind of jelly-like substance which it is possible to extricate myself from today, but which rests upon me thick and gelatinous and numbing – I can still see through this layer but everything beyond is slightly distant and blurred – it doesn’t have the capacity to wear me down on this short visit, not as it used to; that wearying confusion of space, speed, cacophony and stress doesn’t infiltrate with the same pervasive, seeping, claw-like power as it did day-to-day – London the invader, the rapacious army: consuming, assailing –

Suspicion everywhere: new anti-terrorist posters, new claims that ‘Together We Can Beat It’ – like a war zone – and everyone scans you far more on buses and tubes, judging, wary –

Back in the café, I ask for the toilet and am directed by the seer to a blistered and scratched white door to one side of the room, it is stiff to open, so much so that I have to pull hard and almost fall back into the café – the seer shows me with a quick gesture that I must go downwards – I peer into the long corridor beyond heading toward the rear of the property, at the other end is indeed a stairwell lit by a kind of dim cosmic-blue light and leading down into what I presume is the basement area – there is a large full-length mirror at the end of the corridor so you see yourself walking toward the stairs – the top step is an ornate ceramic tile, decorated in Turkish style – down the stairs and at the bottom the area beyond smells of mothballs – the lavatory itself, off to the right, has a sagging roof and a dark blue shirt has been left on the floor beneath the two wash basins – the toilet itself, when I venture in, is full of dark, semi-solid shit – I presume a vagrant had come in to have a wash and a dump and then left having forgotten his/her shirt – after recoiling from the visions that greet me down there I go straight back upstairs and into the café, to be greeted by the seer grinning back at me as I open the door – for a moment I wonder if he is the faecal culprit and that he had left it there deliberately, that the whole experience beyond that door (the dim lights, the mirror, the otherworldly atmosphere etc) was some kind of test and that he gleans something of each persons character when they venture down there that he can share with the owner – he winks at me and begins the process of rolling another cigarette -