30. And so, after Berlin, I ended up in London...

The thirtieth instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero builds a shrine to his lost love and debates with disembodied voices on the streets of London.

And so, after Berlin, I ended up in London, certain that here was a city vast enough to consume my anguish in its capacious belly, and thereby make it disappear…

I’d also run out of money and was forced to take another soulless office job, this time in the housing office at Hammersmith and Fulham council. The work was one thing, and cruel enough, but the state of my emotions only worsened as time went by. It meant that the long pined-for process of digestion/expulsion never came. If anything, the city exacerbated the circularity of my thoughts and memories, which became entangled in the serried ranks of its stone-hewed villi, stewed like cheap meat, then vomited back up, turning pubs into shrines, pint glasses into ciboria, and ready salted crisps into the flesh of truant loved ones. It didn’t take me long to realise that London breaks your heart every single day.

I found a small flat just off the Holloway Road, where I soon began committing acts of outrageous idolatry in deference to the memory of the Travelling Companion. After somehow wangling an interest-free credit card, I set out to make it look a lot like the place we’d shared in Norwich; a style derived entirely from her superior taste, which I slavishly copied in the hope of drawing her spirit back towards me.

The bedroom was a grey-green colour, understated, austere. The bed itself was made from dark oak, as were the chest of drawers and side cabinet, on which stood a small, brass lamp with obligatory yellow shade. The linen was white, as was her preference. There was a somewhat mysterious wardrobe in the corner. On the wall opposite the bed, hung salon style, were a map of East Anglia, a portrait of Peter Cushing, and various prints of Dutch and Italian masters broken up by a few Pre-Raphaelite staples. A reproduction of Vermeer’s A View of Delft was placed high up on the adjacent wall, just above the door. At the time, I had no idea of its Proustian connection.

The living room was painted Sudbury yellow and home to a framed archive poster of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, her favourite film, and a series of Edwardian illustrations of the little town where I grew up, discovered in a charity shop just off the Edgware Road. In addition to several other prints depicting various flora and fauna, excised from Victorian natural history texts, there were also two large portraits of the Queen and Prince Philip, an ironic reference to my ardent republicanism and hilarious to no-one but me. On the heavy oak sideboard that ran along the far wall stood a series of ornate candlesticks, several Staffordshire flat-back figurines, a marble bust of Baruch de Spinoza, and a crystal decanter, rarely filled long enough to make the desired impression of sophistication upon prospective visitors (not that I had any). Three wooden bookcases, full of the books I’d somehow managed to keep together over the years, completed the look. The overall effect spoke of her style, which might today be called ‘vintage chic’, but didn’t really have a name back then.

All this was redolent of the attempt at self-expression of an individual ensnared in a culture where everything had become an exercise in personal branding. In this case, my target market was comprised of just one person, who’d never actually get to see the spatial homage to her personhood I’d created (and likely wouldn’t care to, even if she knew of its existence). Still, it was designed solely to impress her; to make her think well of me if she ever returned, and to make me think well of myself, so that if ever that golden day came, I’d be ready for it. Despite my delusions, even as I put all this together, and even while I was living my life surrounded by all those cruel but comforting objects, I knew how ridiculous I was being, how much it was damaging my spirit, my pride. I constantly wondered what would become of all this stuff when I’d gone. It’s worth mentioning that after Proust’s parents died, he gave away much of their furniture to a male brothel.

To its inhabitants, London soon becomes the only reality that matters, as everything beyond its outer limits dissolves, first into abstraction, and then into obsolescence. It’s as if the mind reaches a point of saturation where it can no longer conceive of life beyond the ambit of the capital; the physical infrastructure – its roads, railway lines, buildings, bridges, parks, plazas, and monuments – combined with the sheer historical weight of the place (to say nothing of the murmuring dead) begins to determine the parameters on which perception itself is based, so that eventually the typical denizen of London sees only London and nowhere else.

This state of being breeds certain ways of thinking, patterns of behaviour, and responses to the environment that are typically predicated on the delusional notion that one might master the city’s rhythms; when in fact it is the city that masters its inhabitants. It’s within this spatiotemporal reality that people pivot, prevaricate, and ultimately perish; a place where billions of decisions are taken, passions are indulged or suppressed, and dreams are realised or crushed. And every day, eight million discrete destinies are determined on the back of the madness of such decisions, passions, and dreams – and this is the inscrutable fuel on which London runs.

There was nothing to be done about any of this, of course; no real choice in the matter. I simply took up my place amid the multitude and tried to cope as best I could. As with Berlin, and Norwich before that, this ‘coping’ generally entailed making extended excursions across the city on foot, which quickly became an answer of sorts to the question of what the hell I was really doing (other than the shitty job, remedial boozing, and mournful masturbation). At least if I was walking, I had the pretence of purpose. The only difference between London and those other two cities was that now I was beginning to hear audible whispers as I walked; voices, somewhat faint at first, but that gradually became louder and more frequent as the weeks and months passed.

The first clearly recognisable voice was my father’s. Somehow, it had slipped loose of my dreams and joined me in the ‘real’ world, insisting that I stop for a drink at this or that pub; that a quick sharpener would do me good. My response was to silently argue or bargain with him, knowing by this time that alcohol wouldn’t help my state of mind, while simultaneously caught up in the idea that it would totally help my state of mind. After a few hours of this, I’d usually give in, if only because (at first anyway) booze seemed to placate the voice. It also helped temper the terrible physical loneliness that I was feeling, having been nowhere near human flesh for nearly a year.

Despite this lack of contact, when not walking or working, I tended to hide away. I’d grown angry with other people and ashamed at myself. The strange thing was that no matter how much I isolated my body, I couldn’t prevent breaches of my mind, as first his voice, and then the Travelling Companion’s, and then my grandmother’s, grew louder. Soon there was an almost continual commentary taking place on the perverse spectacle that was my ceaseless self-flagellation; a trinity of voices, all dwelling, like a trio of Danish princes, over the depressingly obvious question of whether to be or not to be. Every step of my regular walk back from work, for instance – from Shepherd’s Bush to Notting Hill, across Hyde Park and down Piccadilly, through Leicester Square, to Covent Garden, Holborn, then up past St. Pancras and on to Camden, Kentish Town, Tufnell Park, and eventually to Archway – was a step along this dismal line of thought, turning every indifferent edifice, every impatient black cab, every grizzled street drinker, every seductive shop window, every tree, telegraph pole, and telephone box, into a provocation, tempting me to take solace in their unassuming reality, while simultaneously broadcasting the wretchedness of everything.

If this sounds like I was going crazy, then I suppose I was. But it didn’t necessarily feel like it at the time. The voices themselves grew to be distinct, entirely faithful to their progenitors, and yet at the same time clearly manifestations of my own bedevilling thoughts, with unfettered access to my deepest secrets, insecurities, and fantasies. Between them they debated the things I’d long debated myself, advocating everything from suicide to unadulterated hedonism to devotional asceticism as appropriate stratagems for tackling my increasing despair and desperation.

And they took a kind of relish in doing so. My father – lapsed Catholic that he was – made the case for the impossibility of God’s existence, for the utter indifference of the universe to our plight and the futility of suffering. His own slow slide was proof enough of his commitment to secular oblivion, he argued. My grandmother, more at home with the irrational, with mysticism and magic, countered with the idea that faith stands with or without the actual reality of a divine creator, that Hamlet was right in as much as there are more things in the universe than we can understand, that the religious instinct is what makes us what we are, that suffering sometimes has a purpose; that, in fact, it is the ultimate catalyst for creativity. Thus, my task was to endure what I was going through and eventually use it to my advantage. Besides, we’re all dead soon enough anyway, she opined. Don’t throw the pain away; take the opportunity you’ve been given to transform it into something else.

It was left to the Travelling Companion, or some subtly skewed version of her, to talk about love and to remind me just how lacking it was from my sad and lonely life. Love existed on a frequency I was unable to receive, she said, which meant I was never able to give her the love she wanted. I was finished as far as love was concerned. And I’d insist this was not true. But she’d vocalise the angry, carnal desires which were coursing through my body; desires I’d guiltily indulge by casting a lecherous eye over the parade of attractive females the city casually coughed up, conceiving for each, in the space of a few seconds, an entire life of marital bliss and familial comfort, before the back of each beautiful head and the diminishing sound of each dismissive footstep reminded me that such things would never be the prerogative of a broken boy like me.

But if these epic walks gave greater force to the voices and to the disputation and despondency, then they also played the role of pharmakon, and so were, paradoxically, a way to defy what they promulgated. The sheer mechanics of putting one foot in front of another, of the movement of body and mind from one place to another, offered a sense of meaning that my existence sorely lacked; the act of ‘keeping on’ was in its own small way a defiance of death, a willingness to absorb life, no matter what.

Wherever I was – walking along Milbank by the muddy waters of the Thames, shuffling past the warm alien bodies on Oxford Street, easing across Russell Square in the sun, or through Bloomsbury in the dark, strolling down Deptford High Street, climbing Primrose Hill, striding up Kingsland Road, ambling beside the Regent’s Canal, traversing the Strand in brogues, or Richmond Park in walking boots, or the Harrow Road in trainers, aimlessly wandering around Shadwell, or with sottish intent slouching toward Soho – I kept telling myself that the answer to the question which each step asked of me was simply ‘one more step’, regardless of union thugs, falling chimney pots, or the exhortations of disembodied voices.

Thankfully, as it had most my life, the world usually softened with dusk, as the hard shape of materiality diminished with the failing light; and in the mute gloaming I’d find a sliver of relief from all these incessant parleys. Alone in some far corner of Hampstead Heath, I’d watch midges battle beneath the dark trees and wonder whether I was not unlike the kind of literary protagonist naturally vain enough to insist that everything that happens to him must have some purpose, or be part of some larger scheme, from which something good must eventually come. Or was such a hope merely vain in the other sense of the word?

Either way, there was always the sinking sun, slowly slipping from the sky, leaving the world in a burst of glorious colour; the sidelong glances of solitary men wondering whether to stick around; the voracious bats flapping above my head, reminding me of home; the brightening stars, the incipient moon, markers both of the impossible brevity of life, just so many revolutions of the planet, so many turns around that same now-absent sun, which was going to disappear into cosmic dust soon enough and take everything we’ve ever known and all the worlds we’ll never know with it.

This was how it went, day after day. And if the nights offered some respite, bolstered by the Lethean comforts of booze, then the mornings brought with them the dull throb and dismal nausea of an inevitable hangover, and the creeping sound of the voices reasserting their sovereignty over my soul. I’d get through the working day as best I could, ignoring their sporadic chatter, trying to focus on the ever-growing caseload of housing claims, and then take to the streets and to the pubs once more for a few hours of back and forth, not entirely unenjoyable during those moments when I felt like I was getting the better of the swordplay, rare though they may have been.

I also got into strange little habits that were meant to prevent things from getting worse, magical ways of protecting myself from the world’s mad assignations, like having to walk through St. Pancras station to touch the bulging bronze belly of John Betjeman, or whispering cosmic orisons by the grave of Douglas Adams in Highgate Cemetery, or always wearing a tie on a Friday, or odd socks on a Tuesday. Nothing helped. Over time, the frequency and urgency of the voices intensified, as they somehow detached themselves from the framework of my thoughts, which may sound terrifying, but became utterly normal to me. It was as if London drew them further out into the open and gave them an agency and strength they didn’t originally possess, because no one really noticed anyone in a city of such a size: sane or insane, living or dead, and so the quiet man in the corner silently consorting with his recently expired father, absent ex-lover, and long-gone grandmother, could quite easily be overlooked.

Between them, I did my best to keep the peace. If he was usually trying to lead me astray – a reflection of his own predilections when alive – then the Travelling Companion could sometimes offer a more sobering narrative, coaxing me towards moderation, to rebut his temptations, and reminding me, like some nubile Jim Bowen, of the life I could have won, if I’d only been willing and able to grasp it. Rewinding the clock meant confronting a proposition she made me long ago, which I couldn’t see clearly back then, but which by this time seemed glaringly obvious. Long before the fracture, she’d made repeated calls for a sign of commitment from me which I’d blithely ignored. I’d failed to see the good in the situation, to understand the nature of her affection. My mind was still focused on achingly juvenile things, still silently lusting after others, still restless and dissolute, still secretly harbouring thoughts of my own grandeur and literary ambition. More significantly, beyond my numerous faults and petty delusions, I possessed no understanding of what love might mean, and certainly no idea of how to nurture and sustain it.

And so, in this respect, in her absence, she came to embody life’s strange dissonance; the hope of the good and the reality of the bad, all at once. I was left to contemplate all that might have been and grow angry at what I’d missed, while also beginning to reflect on what had happened and to understand the shameful roots of that anger. It took some time. I grew into London despite its pains, falling prey, like everyone else, to its gravitational monopoly of the mind; free to entertain the spirits who flew above me wherever I went, ignored by the mass and excused for my increasingly strange behaviour: counting, cleaning, collecting, and the other mildly obsessive tendencies that steadily coalesced around the strange quaternity that I had become.

Not that this was ever really fixed. Over time, my father’s role ebbed and flowed; and although, never fully relinquishing the side of his personality more akin with Baron de Charlus, and still regularly making the case for pit stops at The French House or the Coach and Horses, another side of his character – lost in later life – began to emerge in death. This was his tendency to rail against injustice and to respond with great consternation at people’s unwillingness to do anything about it. For some reason, swept up in the bitterness and acrimony that characterised the final years of our relationship, I’d forgotten about this quality of his, which had been one of his defining traits in my youth. It was only during these disquieting months, in the darkness of the night time, when the voices were less perfidious and more placatory, that I remembered this side of him, and that such things emerged from our conversations.

At times combative, at others conciliatory, this was the strange discourse to which I was prey, every hour of every day, awake or asleep; as the voices of my father and the Travelling Companion increasingly took centre stage in my mind and began to crystallise as a means of parsing my life, loves, and tribulations. Between us existed a clear confluence of anger – my anger at abandonment, at each of them for leaving me in their own way, her anger at me for spurning our love and at him for obstructing it, and his at her for the claim she had over me and at me for my willingness to succumb to it, to say nothing of his anger at the world, which had only been growing as he got older and came to see little else but its endless corruptions.

These conflicts were a further catalyst for the confusion within my brain. In dreams, the voices took shape in bodily form, but were never confined to one set of behaviours, endlessly protean, almost Proustian. She was cold and cruel one night, loving and kind the next; he was reproachful and manipulative, then tender and remorseful. It meant that, neither entering that nether-world of dreams, nor emerging from it, were easy. Days would be coloured by the memory of these nightly shadow plays, as seemingly powerful and prescient as they were when I was a child. With each fresh awakening, I hoped that I might emerge fixed, the voices silenced, the obsessions evaporated, the rage dissipated. But it never happened.

Instead, there was only ever the same interminable thrum of traffic crawling along the Holloway Road, trucks, buses, sirens, car alarms, and the indeterminate shouts of indeterminate people, crying and cursing in anguish. The mesh of the mechanical and physical life of the capital expressed through the displacement of air, penetrating a pillow wrapped around a head engaged in its own rote fantasies: the remembered touch of the Travelling Companion, warming my body, an urgent heat that can only ever come from another human being, the bottom of her foot resting on top of mine. A place where there was never a need to open my eyes, never a need to speak, because I knew all I needed to know about the world with her beside me; in this reality touch, taste, and smell were enough, and far more truthful than anything that mere sight or sound could confer.

---

Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.