eleven
I was beginning to realise that I had lost control — what little of it I had had in the first place, that is. No — that I had never had control. Boredom had left me behind, I had succumb to its weight, its unheard-of centre within me. I had embraced it and it had completely consumed me and now I was bored of it. I was bored of boredom. There was nothing I could really do about this. I was like everyone else: I needed something to fill the gap, the time that dragged us, and it, along with it, to return me to the ground beneath my feet and hide away from our gaping hole like everyone else. Who was she to me? Why was she suddenly in my life? Was she there to serve as some warning? Revealing all to me? Everything that isn’t really there?
twelve
Following her along Southgate Road, as I did, seemed real to me, like I was snapping back from a daydream, or some unknowable space outside of myself. As we neared the canal things began to focus within me again; things became normal as we drew near to its space — the only space we could exist together within, where things started, at the boundary of Hackney on Islington, on the canal, by the side of the rusting iron bridge that connected everything.
I was standing by the site of the old Thomas Briggs factory, near where the old gates still stood, the last remnants of the old bell still visible, Factory carved, imperiously into the gnarled masonry beneath it. On the many times I would pass it by I would always make a point of touching it, pressing into it, where the button for the bell used to be (which had long since gone), trying to imagine the factory workers queuing outside each morning, or streaming through the open gates of an evening after a hard shift with the machines and the clatter, and the toil. The area where the old factory stood is called Rosemary Gardens, and nearby stood two pubs — one now converted into a house — where there used to be cockfighting and, much later, trips in an air balloon that used to be tethered there. It’s also the site were the Levellers were first formed: the radical left-wing movement of the seventeenth century whose members wore a sprig of rosemary in their hats at their meetings, held in an old alehouse that once stood on that site. The remaining pub — The Rosemary Branch — is named in honour of them. The whole area, a nondescript place to most people, holds huge historical significance. Yet people will merrily walk by it without a care in the world. Upstairs in the Rosemary Branch is a small theatre. One evening I got to talking to a young actress at the bar. She was starring in some production there. I remember her staring out of the window and seriously ask me: ‘How does one get anywhere from here? We’re in the middle of nowhere.’ I wanted to explain to her everything I knew about Rosemary Gardens. I wanted to say to her that things didn’t revolve around her, that things had already happened many times over in that very spot. But I didn’t. I sipped my drink and listened to her ignorant nonsense.
I could smell the murky water of the canal emanating up onto the road where it ran parallel with the canal for two-hundred yards or so before stopping — Southgate Road, that is — at New North Road, the canal carrying on down towards Islington.
She stopped. She was standing by the Rosemary Branch.
The murky water took on a different stench up there by the road, less pungent, less silty. It had mixed with the exhaust fumes and transformed into something else, machinelike, industrious, something old tainted by a new age.
She was looking out over the canal, her back turned to the Rosemary Branch, out towards Hoxton and the City, farther out towards the Swiss Re building, Tower 42, and the newer skeletal structures in progress appearing here and there — newer buildings about to tower over the London skyline en masse, continuing its progress, an unremitting vista of cranes and building sites, scaffolding and pollution, sprawled in all its vulgarity, ugliness, and beauty before her.
I stopped and waited for her to walk across the road and take the steps down to the canal. She seemed to be frozen, as if every atom within her had stopped sparking. The traffic trundled by in both directions between us, a line of cars in one direction, some cyclists and a number 76 bus in the other. Behind her, to her left, stood the old Gainsborough Studios where Hitchcock had made a few of his films. The whole building was now expensive flats, though in the courtyard lies an impressive sculpture of him in honour. I raised my eyes up above her and looked at the top row of flats. In the end flat, over-looking the canal, I could see a man and a woman standing on their balcony, They were facing each other, both, it seemed, wearing white bath robes. The woman was gesticulating frantically; the man was quite passive. They were both completely unaware that they could be seen. The man held his head to his hands after a short while and then lurched forwards, placing each hand on her shoulders, hoping to calm her down it seemed, but this action only served to enrage her further. She stepped back and ran into the flat, out of view. She was screaming at him, I could catch it briefly during the short breaks in the traffic. Then she ran back out onto the balcony; she was still screaming and gesticulating wildly. The man had now sat down at the table and chairs they had up there, so all I could see was her: her arms, windmill-like, flailing, forming a circular mass around her body. Then she stopped. She pointed towards him and stopped screaming. He suddenly rose to his feet, becoming visible to me again. He stepped towards her and attempted to embrace her again. She pulled away, back into their expensive flat, leaving him there. He leant over the balcony, resting on his elbows, his head in his hands again, staring down to the canal below.
When I looked back she had gone. At first I panicked, my heart skipping a number of beats. I swallowed my breath and looked for her about the road frantically. Then it hit me again: she was going back there to see him, to watch him. She was going back to the canal, like I always knew she would.
I’ve often thought that we seek reality in places and not in ourselves. These places can be anywhere we like them to be: a desert island, the beach, a nightclub, in the arms of a lover in a far-off land, rock climbing, up in the clouds, down in the depths of the deepest ocean, in space — ultimately in space. These places, this space, can be anything we want it to be. We need things, extra things that help us to make sense of it all; we need the space where things can happen, where these spaces can become a thing — it is only at that point, when space becomes a thing to us, that we truly feel real.
The thing is: I don’t feel real, and yet the space had become a thing to me — to us, I’d thought. That space that we had shared together, by the canal, the whitewashed office block, the rusting iron bridge and the coots, the Canada geese, and the swans … It all seemed such a long time ago now. Such a long time.
thirteen
I walked down the steps and onto the towpath. I could see her up ahead, walking towards the bridge in the distance. She was walking quite slowly, but still with some kind of purpose. In the canal, to her immediate left, following alongside her were three or four coots; they were after food, thinking she had come to feed them. Up ahead, towards the bridge and the whitewashed office block, beyond that space, I could see the two swans resting by the far bank.
I honestly had no idea what I was going to say to her; I just knew that I was going to confront her, to ask her if anything she had told me was the truth. I wanted her to look me in the eye and simply tell me the truth. And then, once she had — and I hoped that she would — I would simply walk away and out of her life forever.