From a Room in Whitechapel

Whitechapel rooves are an uneven palette of architecture. There's dirty 20th century tile and glass reinforced with wire. There is a tall brick chimney, isolated amidst the new buildings, the last soldier still at his post. There's the looming Victorian schoolhouse to the south, thuglike with its dusty spectre of dead schoolmasters and the cane. My favourite, though, is the newest: twin blue-shining blocks that stand foursquare against a sky full of the comet-trails of aeroplanes. It is a hospital.

Each block has big windows, and every night they are filled with watery light. I stare so hard I feel I can sense the inmates, small and hunched like wild animals that are caged in their sickness. The reassurance lies in the certainty of life. The hospital stands as a lighthouse shining solidarity through the lonely dark hours of the morning, those hours that seperate every human being from one another like ships sailing apart on a midnight ocean.

Love is Theft

My boyfriend stole me a bracelet from Camden Market today. He took it from a Chinese woman's stall, lit up with handpainted mirrors and geisha dolls. One hand reveals, the other conceals: he pocketed it while asking the price.

The bracelet has three teeth hanging from a beaded string. I picture an unfortunate urban fox, its life of blood and adrenaline cut with more violence - its meat for the takeaways, its bones for the jewellery and medicine.

How much more authentic is this than the lucky Chinese symbols made of brass? The latter, the sum of human hope and greed; the former, what remains of a life lived into every inch, stained with the blood of a hundred rats.

Autograph Hunting

The setting: the world, a marble in glossy blue and matte green. The United Kingdom with its crenellated coastline. A grey growth that’s London; Camden Town a greasy fold in the north of the night-time city, coloured in as if by six year-olds with felt tips; alt-rock mecca, thronged night and day with the faithful.

Kentish Town Road runs behind the Electric Ballroom (loopy blue neon outside; inside, floorboards with decade-long punk rock memories), where the gates open from the tilted doors and windows. There’s band members with black markers and glam-rock hair, and their own crowded orbits: fan satellites, amateur photographers, old luckless friends.

We’re frozen and half-wet with drying sweat, aching at the joints with the capricious witch-fire energy of a gig seeping into the pavement with its cigarette butts and trodden flyers. His, his, his glossy black two-seconds’-worth of a signature, and then it’ll be the tube home, clinging to the bars like exhausted gibbons.

Tripping Down Recollection Street

In London sometimes you walk amid the ghosts of past centuries, the grey and rain; in Edinburgh, the ghosts are alive and vital, and swarm among the Saturday crowds on the high street. In Edinburgh history isn’t like everywhere else, like used toilet paper; it’s the same room, lived in.

Looking Out Under Eaves

On a level with long, kinked rooves that straggle away from me over idiosyncratic gardens. Apartment blocks squat oblongs, irregular under the clammy amber push of the sky. Lit and unlit windows semaphore untranslatable code, people wakeful and restless in the clutch of another dismal London night.

Saying 'Forever'

We don’t say ‘I love you’, and it’s a hot twist of pleasure inside me, perverse. When those feelings press up inside, wet and close and urgent at my throat, what I fling out is a string of syllables that would have been nonsense to me six months ago, hard and soft, Celtic.

This divorce from my past is a healing amputation. It’s a tiny cut that might drop heartbreak’s deadweight. It means I might be able to believe.

Touch wood.

Always Being Okay (It Means This)

The walls were the colour of the arctic, the paper curtain turquoise and not fully closed, so beyond we saw people in mint coloured scrubs come and go. The bed was a plinth in the middle of the room, and under its cold blanket Leigh was like a doll somebody’d put down and forgotten. I drew up two chairs beside him and put my feet up in defiance of the nurse (she’d already caught me while hamming up his ECG). He held out a hand, palm up, and I threaded my fingers through his (his knuckles callused, fingers thick).

“We should get some sleep, babe,” he said, eyes on me to the side, having to press his cheek to the pillow just to look. “We won’t be out of here soon.”

When we settled down, I curled awkward across my chairs. For a blanket, his jacket on top of me leather and scuffed, heavy as a living thing. A woman down the corridor crying out: a rhythmic kind of moan, half words, almost like sex noises – it would rise unpredictably to a wail then shimmer down again, whimpery. When Leigh mentioned it, I said to try to imagine it as a lullaby.

Finding Out What They Knew Already

I’m learning, at last, not to like hospitals. This one’s proprietory grip is sick: comforting and suffocating. Even smoking outside in London’s winter’s freeze I stand under its glass eaves.

Every nurse passing the cubicles is a threat. They could tell me anything – get out, get away, he’s hurt, he’s dead, he’s not coming back.

Studying Old Photographs

There’s a photo on my wall, whitetacked there. The grass is golden green and touched by gentle treeshadows that darken it to oilpaint vert. Downy soft, short. The trees offer stippled heads and arms of frothy foliage. Glossy dark leaves like hands climb the odd trunk, here, there. Even now I remember when I took the picture I could hardly breathe; looking on it was like an icepick to the sternum.

Feeling Protective

He’s a big puppy of a boy, just eighteen. He doesn’t know the meaning of the word restraint, and he can’t lie. I want to mother all six foot, sixteen stone of him. I’d take on car crashes for him. I’d take bullets.

Sailing

I’ve been breathing cement for a week now. Everybody else’s helpless looks – the whites of their eyes as I’m trying to stare hard enough to semaphore mayday – and they leave the room. I’d close my mouth and sink; panic one second, resignation the next.

Five midnight hours in a hospital south of the river lifted the bell jar and I feel like I’m sailing again. Bouncing off blue waves, spray dancing rainbow in the sun.

Drinking

He dipped his fingers into his wineglass to fish a crumb. From below, the yellow surface of the world broke and inverted around his thick fingertips. A tiny skin-tensive dimension briefly here, gone in the next instant.

Homing Pigeon

Ten hours from London and it’s already a dream I’ve woken from. Every half an hour or so I’ll remember it with that familiar sick jolt, like the one between consciousness and sleep when you feel like you’re falling. Every half an hour I get the feeling I’m forgetting it.

Some turgid feeling lingers about my throat, making it hard to breathe. I want to know how they are, everybody who breathes their hot, turbulent life into our home. Their precise, individual bodies, the crazies they have in their heads, every one of them. I miss the hugs, the headlocks, the hand-clasps.

Noticing

London and New York are sister cities. Minutes count. The newspaperers blaze headlines on the streets, hour by hour. The Times’ underground posters have oil-painted Churchill agaze over the shoulder of the new Tory incumbent, decades of hoary and beaten Britishness bent and staring down at us all. These wintry politics bite.

Being At Peace

The earth is vaster than imagining. It’s an enormous flatness against my ribs where I lie, like a huge heart. My cheek is on my arms, soft. I’m looking across the park at a ninety degree angle, so the sky and the ground are sandwiching me straight up. The bank I’m lying on holds a dribble of other people in the crook of its curve; universally small fleshtangles made slow and happy by sun. The clouds drift along like titanic sheep in a blue field.