Fugue: Chapter 18

I guessed from the colour of the sky that it was probably about half past three. I walked through South London, looking blankly at street signs, wondering why I hadn’t just got the night bus. I hadn’t realised how cold it was. I wouldn’t have admitted to being lost, but I wasn’t entirely sure where I was. I hadn’t realised how drunk I was until I started stumbling around in the cold night air. The vodka in the club obviously hadn’t been as watered down as I’d thought. Somehow I had managed to get off the main road and into a series of residential streets which twisted and turned, doubling back on themselves. It looked strangely familiar, though. It was a fairly generic suburban street, terraced houses in a moderate state of disrepair, but there was something about it that struck a chord with me. Maybe it had been used as the location for something on TV. No, I’d been here before. There was a memory there, but it was jumbled and incomplete, an unrelated fragment which meant nothing. I remembered, but I didn’t know where or when it was. I had no idea why, but I had a vivid picture in my mind of walking along this street before. The image bubbled and rose in my mind, fermenting to become some sort of answer to some sort of question. I didn’t know how long it was that I’d been walking, but the sky was lightening all the time, and by the time I found myself outside New Cross Gate station, the trains had started running again and I was coming back to sobriety. I love the dawn and the sunset. They’re marker posts, milestones that remind you that everything in the world is progressing as it should, like watchmen, shouting out “Six o’clock and all’s well!”. And all is well. In spite of everything, nature keeps on doing its thing, and sometimes it can be beautiful. The colours of the sky as the sun rises, bands of orange and purple stretching across your field of vision, the glow of the underside of the clouds signalling the gradual approach of the day. The quiet streets, populated only by weirdos and pigeons. It all has a strange kind of harmony. Once, after a midweek night out, I just sat in Leicester Square for hours, watching the city come back to life. In a slow trickle, the population grew, first the cleaners, big African mamas and tiny Eastern European men. Then came the people working in the shops, all bussing in from Essex and Hertford, still living with their parents, next the people in suits, and by the time the tourists eventually started arriving, life had got up to speed, exactly the same as the day before, full of impatience, full of mistrust, full of anger. But for a while there had been stillness. For a while the city had been mine. Seeing as I was awake, it would be a shame not to see the sun rise from a good spot. My grasp of South London geography was pretty shaky, but I was fairly sure that Greenwich Park wasn’t too far away. My plan was to go through the foot tunnel anyway, so it wouldn’t be too much of a detour. I climbed to the top of the hill and waited for the sun to arrive. I looked down at London. It lay spread out before me like a centrefold, leaving nothing to the imagination. It was peaceful now, but I saw it in all its inexplicable horror, the people swarming all over each other, desperate to get out first. Even here, the stench of stale piss seemed more pervasive than ever, seeping through the gutters and the drains, like sweat from the pores of the city. Maybe it was me. I could feel a layer of grime covering me. I rubbed at my arm, bringing up little black flecks of something. As I did so, I noticed how filthy my fingernails were. My hands were constantly dirty these days. No matter how many times I washed them, how much soap glooped onto them from dispensers, the grime remained. Along the sides of my fingers, the dirt from my surroundings had worked its way in, like moss attaching itself to the crevices of my pores, filling the cracks on the canvas of my skin. I waited for the sun, but it didn’t come. Instead of a real sunrise, there was a barely perceptible shift in the sky’s shade of grey. I sat down, and tiredness flooded over me. There was no way I’d be walking all the way home. I thought about lying down and going to sleep on the bench. In the distance I heard a clock striking six. A few hardy joggers had started punishing themselves for their sins of the day before. I headed back down towards civilisation, if Lewisham can be described as that. I wandered the streets, surrounded by the detritus of other people’s Saturday nights. Casting my eye over the rubbish, I saw the flotsam of a thousand nights out: half a pitta bread, trailing a stream of onions and lettuce behind it; a carpet of fag butts, ready for their bones to be picked clean by the scavengers when they surfaced. It disgusted me. I tried to find a space to park my feet between the curry sauce and the dogshit. I went to the shop and bought a Sunday paper. I wasn’t entirely sure why, because I knew it would just make my angry. I hate the fucking Sundays, full of smug people telling you about how perfectly ghastly it is when one can only afford a second-hand car for the au pair, and the living nightmare that is having an Aga put into one’s holiday cottage in the Dordogne. On the other hand, I had some time to kill, and anger was as good a way of doing it as any other. I went to the station and began to prune the sections, lopping off the motoring, the business, the property, the travel, the jobs, until finally I was left with something a little more manageable, a little more relevant. As usual, I began with the sport, but there wasn’t a great deal going on. I found myself in the lifestyle section, and tried not to tear up the article on how to host the perfect dinner party. It was as if I didn’t exist in the world of the Sundays. I didn’t have a mortgage, didn’t have kids, didn’t have a car, didn’t have any money to invest, didn’t have any chance of getting a senior management job, couldn’t afford to go on holiday. There wasn’t a going out and getting smashed on cheap booze section. Whose lifestyle was it, that the lifestyle section described? Back among respectable folk, I became aware of my appearance. I could feel the distasteful looks being cast down upon me. Sitting on the DLR, vacant seats either side of me, I saw my reflection in the window, and realised why the seats were vacant. I was wearing the same clothes I had been in since Friday evening. I hadn’t washed or shaved, and my eyes told the story of my weekend. I felt like a primitive, walking into civilisation for the first time, coming out of some foetid wilderness; scraggy hair, dirty rags. These people looked at me and saw some filthy scumbag, someone who wasn’t to be trusted. They were drawing a line to divide the world into people like them and people like me. They were defining the world, defining themselves by their opposition to people like me. I really hoped I wouldn’t see anyone I knew. I emerged from the station, blinking as my eyes slowly adjusted to the light. I couldn’t see the sun, but it had to be there somewhere, lurking behind a bank of fog which seemed to amplify its brightness, bludgeoning my retina, making me feel hung over. My mouth was forced open by a yawn, like a snake dislocating its jaws to bring up a whole egg. The yawn was closing my eyes, popping my ears, clouding my head. It seemed that the local branch of the junior anarchists’ club had been busy overnight. The wall of the bookie’s had been daubed with badly spelled graffiti with some impenetrable political agenda. They were telling the world that someone I had never heard of was innocent, and there was some message about pigs that didn’t make any sense. I made it home, only able to keep one eye open at a time, and collapsed into my bed.