South

Welcome to London.

That's all I keep thinking as I hammer my finger into the pedestrian crossing button. I know it doesn’t do anything, but I like to imagine the city feels some pain at my disposal of street etiquette; wait for the lights to turn green, press the button once etcetera.

I watch rain swirl into a murky lagoon where the road dips, the buses gruelling past and missing it by merely a fraction each time. If you have ever been to London when it rains, you'll recognise that salty smell that rises from the pavements as a steam.

I’ve never ridden the 68 to the end of the route. It's the kind of dream you have in your pre-teens, tossing and turning at the agony of falling asleep on a bus to the end of the line and being unable to find your way home. I'm too old to get lost now; being streetwise can sometimes feel burdensome. 

The faces that blur past at measured intervals look out of graffiti coated windows, their faces magnified by rain droplets, all with that same London expression. You know the one. The resting “I work to pay rent to pay tax to pay the man in power and then I die” look. If you squint hard enough even the toddlers have it these days. Or if they don't, everyone on the bus looks at them in curiosity. We manage to pass it off as sleep deprivation; each one of us with an insufferable, insatiable emptiness that we bottle beneath habitual silence. Before we know it, there is a generation of 15-year-old drug addicts. Let's blame the children.

The stream of cars stops. The crossing flashes. The rain pelts on. Almost home.

Here we are, living in a city at the forefront of economic importance and yet, traipsing along these littered streets home, past posters aimed to deter stabbings, thinking about the mould that coats the walls of our council flat, noticing the unbearable gripping fear of the future, the inability to afford our bodies, that American dream doesn't quite translate. Everywhere seems to have greener grass.

My body hurts. I’m thinking about the weight of my organs. I wish I knew more about science. Not the stuff you learn in GCSE. The interesting stuff; the brain, the intricacies of the heart, the links. When you learn about these things academically, it's all grades, units and modules; everything has to be divided and separated. That’s the most frustrating thing; everything - even the human body- becomes inorganic in the eyes of the academic.

We learn from an early age how to distinguish and label things, but never how to sew together the pages we tear apart.

When I was younger and caught myself feeling like this I would let my head fall onto my mother's stomach or the crest of my dad's chest. I wish I could sink back into the folds of grandma’s arms. Sometimes I imagine that orange apron sweeping me across the border, the belt tying up my organs as they spill out the seams of loose skin.

It's my back. Too many bones, too many metres of height grown overnight, so that my everything sits on my shoulders in a way that means I have to hunch over to bear the weight, folding over myself like paper.

It's funny. I'm thinking about how many times I've walked down this road and thought about a specific memory. Or pavement, tracing the same cracks. This exact footprint, right here, between this leaf and that cigarette- in the 6 years I've walked up and down this road, it must be possible? Or maybe there are so many variables it is the opposite. I wonder what I thought the first time I walked this road, when it wasn't on the back of my hand. It's the same feeling when you arrive somewhere on holiday.

We've settled into an accidental routine. Every morning and evening the same faces, the different ones. The pair who always walk together and their greying hair. The one who cycles up the hill. The cracks in the pavement. The neighbour who built the same fences for everyone along this stretch of road and planted the gardens with fake flowers like the ones you could get in Camberwell in the 99p store before it closed down. They were bright once I think.

I spin into the turn of our street, walk along counting the steps- three more than usual today. Open the fence, it grates along the floor, the bikes have been tugged at (I can tell by the positioning of the chain)- they're all still there. I'll need to tell mum. I'll probably forget.

I open the door to the thick smell of must, a shield of grey. An empty home. The stairs are cold. The slamming door is harsh. One void into the next.

I have this one song spinning around my brain on a broken record as I climb the musty stairs “were you better on your own?”

I miss the third step, taking them two at a time and walk into the darkness.

It's not grey, not even dark, but monotone. The curtains are drawn in my parent's room. Usually, I might go in and open them, but today I close their door and walk straight past, through the kitchen and into my room. Even though I'm home alone I shut the door.

And suddenly it's like breathing again.

The pain has shifted up to my skull- I run a bath. 

My room smells of mould. I light an incense stick and feel the traces of smoke rise over my face. The Beatles and white t-shirts and home-baked sourdough and allotments.

Where did the time go?

It's all so cyclical it's cynical. I can't stop thinking about how we work to work to die. The stress consumes you. London is so large and so alone, I feel like I'm floating. 

I don't ever remember consciously looking at the kitchen ceiling before.

I remember when we first moved into this flat all of the walls were a sort of placid, pasty and obviously ancient white. So my parents repainted the whole house. Apart from the kitchen. On the ceiling above the kettle, there is a slight patch of mottled colouration where steam has risen and fogged up an ever-growing freckle. Just next to it are a series of parallel lines, diagonally marching through the paint.

I wait for the kettle to boil, watch the body shake, gasp, flicker, fill an empty cup, walk away.