Timothy Leary, was he entirely bogus? Can there be any equivalence between mystical ecstasy and psychotropic drug experiences? Corvid intelligence, is it wholly unknowable? Environmental anxiety — the tendency people now have to react to any untoward weather with cries of ‘It’s global warming’ — is this, in fact, a projection of other, more perennial anxieties? Frothy rivers in London — why do they froth? Nick’s resounding affection for Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings — ‘I thought of London spread out in the sun / Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat. .’ That 1970s anachronism — or so it seems to Nick, who finds his tolerance for the niqab and imported theocracy fast declining — ‘No Platform for Racists or Fascists’. A murder in Barnet — or rather, several, for he’s working on a book cataloguing them: an Edwardian, gay crime passionnel on the East End Road in Finchley; illiterate throwback tramps hacking each other to death on in 1930s Edgware; a 1950s gangland shootout in Finchley High Road; the skeletons of numerous babies found buried in the garden of a house in East Finchley at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Nick is, to be frank, irrepressible. He is a walking compendium of fact, opinion and supposition: a great Blue Nile of verbiage, that, when it’s diverted to mingle with my own thoughtful tributary, completely alters its hue. He’s good to walk with and, over twenty years now, we’ve done a few together. Too few, because in those two decades there have been many long hiatuses: Nick shivering for aeons on suburban station platforms, paralysed on his way to hit on suspicious chemists for codeine linctus, a purloined volume of experimental poetry digging into his hip; and me, another of the seven suburban sleepers, slumbering in some numb, tarry cul-de-sac.
So, thus engaged, we walk along Heath Road, a curving interwar shopping parade, with its mansard roofs and snotty rendering. Past the Twickenham Green Baptist Church, a startling folly: the Gothic envisioned by Orwell’s Gordon Comstock. Hard by it there’s a small shop selling Star Wars costumes. Darth Vader’s head sits, unceremoniously, on a shelf. It’s a snip, at £350, this creepy sci-fi chimera: part gas mask, part Samurai-cum-Nazi helmet. Nick and I are a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, here on the outer rim of Twickenham.
We grew up within a couple of miles of each other, on the northern section of this particular London layer. For the city is like a tree, growing ring after ring of brick and privet. An expert — a London dendrochronologist, if you will — can assay precisely the period of the ring he’s penetrating, and tell you what other ’burbs lie within it; thus: Twickenham, Isleworth, Brentford, Ealing, Wembley, Hendon, Finchley, and so on, round to Mitcham and Merton. We even turn off the Staines Road on to a ‘Meadway’, a grassy little avenue of semis exactly like the ‘Meadway’ in the Finchley suburb where I grew up.
And then we turn off this and along the banks of the River Crane, a surprisingly fast-flowing little rill. The Crane loops south here, although eventually it will turn north and, after being fed through the charcoal tanks of the sewage works at Isleworth, join the Thames. This, perhaps, is the hardest thing to explain about the walk to New York: bucolic London. ‘You walked to Heathrow?’ people will ask me in succeeding weeks. ‘Wasn’t that awfully grim? I mean, didn’t you have to slog along the hard shoulder of the A4?’ And then I tell them: ‘Oh no, you don’t understand, probably only four of the seventeen-odd miles were on roads at all, the rest. .’ are like this: the babbling brook, the damp tongue of leaf-pressed tarmac snaking through the grass, the sentinel yews and tipping rowans, the massy oaks still in leaf.
Palisade and picket fences run along the house backs, grubby greenhouses and rusty climbing frames clash in the gardens; then, as we penetrate further into the Nature Reserve, banks of brambles and nettles boil up and the path becomes a muddy slough wending along the riverbank. Up ahead looms the brick, oasthouse-shape of the Shot Tower, where shot was manufactured in the nineteenth century; globules of molten lead plummeting into deadly spheroids. Somewhere beyond this little lost world we can hear the tedious plaint of an ambulance siren.
Nick is entirely at home here, secure in this neglected and underimagined interzone. From time to time he will go into minor ecstasies over a manhole cover, a concrete sluice, or other evidence of interwar, riverine infrastructure. By the Shot Tower a great convocation of ring-necked parakeets are eee-chew-chew-chattering in an ash overrun with ivy. Their bottle-green and iridescent blue markings are dull in the gathering cloud of mid-afternoon. Alien interlopers, exotic escapees from garden aviaries: like other economic migrants they have gravitated towards the airport.
The Crane twists and splits; from piffling islets dangling branches scratch at its syrupy surface, snagging tendrils of polythene and discarded crisp packets. Along the banks great hanks of bramble are interspersed by the mighty umbels of Caucasian Giant Hogweed, another interloper, a vicious Triffid of a plant, masquerading as cow parsley with a pituitary disorder. This is the landscape at once of my childhood and the futuristic dystopia of Ham in my novel The Book of Dave. The stems of the hogweed contain a photoactive poison; if you touch them and then are exposed to sunlight, painful blisters form full of gleet. Nick shows me the hogweed scars on his hands — nothing is really safe, boys may dabble in the brooks of childhood, yet the uncanny lurks in the maw of a foot tunnel jaggy with aerosol graffiti.
This is why the Russian Andrei Tarkovsky remains my favourite film director, and has been since I was twelve. His films are full of locations such as this: unmade environments, discombobulations of the urban and the rural. His favoured leitmotif is rain falling inside a building, a suspension of natural law that is curiously mundane. He is a refusenik — of dialectical materialism, and of all simple, linear progressions, such as time, or narrative commonly understood. His prevailing mood is one of déjà vu: the uncanniness of sudden familiarity.
Neuroscience tells us that déjà vu occurs most frequently in adolescence for this reason: as the two sides of the brain finally begin to fuse, so the right ‘recalls’ what the left perceived only moments before. Yet Tarkovsky’s films suggest that our memories of déjà vu are recollections of a precognition. So, we stand outside of time, here on the bank of the River Crane, Nick and I, our arms companionably linked in those of our adolescent selves, and look down at the plastic bottle, caught by an eddy, then pushed into a trough of virulent green algae. When did you first notice that Evian, backwards, spells naïve?
Then, at Baber Bridge we’re out, back on the Staines Road, traffic swishes by a tyre shop staffed entirely by Asians. The suburban flatlands of north Feltham and Hatton stretch on either side of the road, mean bungalows and boarded-up pubs, a kebab hut styled ‘Turkish Delight’. The Perspex bus shelters are brides scarified by knife-wielding bachelors. One scratched tag even reads ‘FAKER’.
This is an environment leeched by the airport, which now we can hear, hollowly booming and howling in the near-distance, a black hole of internationalism, into which all the matter of outer London is sucked, only for it to emerge, sweaty and frowsty, in Stockholm or St John, Rio de Janeiro or Singapore. Yet the grey sky is curiously void of jets, the fat-bellied fowl that have flown with me all the way from Stockwell. Where are they? Waddling over yonder on their rubber wheels-for-webbed feet.