I invented an illness, and took a few days off work. I went on long walks, avoiding people I knew, trying to sort my head out. I strolled through parks, down by the river, along the canal, around markets. It felt good to see London, let my senses absorb the evidence of people’s lives. I let my Travelcard take me to places I’d never had the time or inclination to go to, sitting on the top deck of buses and seeing where they took me, on sorties south of the river, investigating other worlds of housing estates and market streets. Growing up an hour and a half away, London had always been the place for a half-term treat, school trips to the Science Museum, shopping at Hamley’s, little clusters of fun places around each tube station, pleasure palaces joined by secret passages that everyone knows about. Now I was beginning to see another side of the place. Outside the City and the West End, it’s a succession of villages, with pubs and corner shops and takeaways. People actually live and work there. It’s a real place, not just a series of images from postcards. I took a walk along the South Bank, sticking as close to the river as I could. It was getting dark, but the lights were bright. There was a buzz of possibility in the air as people’s evenings were beginning to take shape. At the same time, there was something of an edge to the night. Small groups of alkies and junkies huddled together in the shadows, unwittingly transmitting the tangible buzz of their desperation, their fear, their otherness. But in a way I envied them. At least they belonged to a group. I kept going, past the big wheel, along the Albert Embankment, just walking until I got to wherever I was going. I looked across the river at the Houses of Parliament, and wondered how I had become so apathetic about politics. Why did I no longer give a shit? The path ended at Vauxhall Bridge, just by the big secret service building. That place looks like some ancient Babylonian temple. Whenever I see it, the word ziggurat floats into my mind, although I don’t know what it means. Built into the structure of the bridge was some kind of alcove, closed off by a padlocked gate. In blue marker pen, someone had scrawled “LONDON IS FULL OF CUNTS” on the gate. They were right, of course, but I wondered why they had felt the need to state the obvious in this way, and why they’d chosen this gate as their forum for discussion. I climbed the steps and headed across the bridge, heading up to Victoria to catch a bus home. I paused to look at the view, leaning on the parapet of the bridge. Lights twinkled along the river as if it was a postcard. London really could be beautiful sometimes. Suddenly the urge to jump off entered me. I had to step back. The image of jumping kept flashing through my mind. I wasn’t suicidal, although I had considered that it might remove a few complications. I just wanted to see what would happen. I wanted to do it. It wasn’t a rational desire, a considered weighing up of pros and cons, but something more vital. Images of the action flew into my mind, slipping under my radar. I tried to put them out of my head, deny the possibility that I could be thinking that way. I couldn’t want to do it. That would make me one of them. It would be a step across the dividing line that ensures we know who we are. It was as if my mind was fighting against my body over whether or not to do it. I placed my hand on the parapet, but had to take it away in case it propelled me over. What was to stop me? It wouldn’t take that much effort to vault over the wall. One step up, and then one drop down. Easy. Come to think of it, what was stopping me from doing anything? I could step in front of that bus as easily as stay on the pavement. I could smash the windows of this police car. I could push that old lady into the road. I could give all my money to that beggar, or I could drop it all, penny by penny, down the drain. What was stopping me from doing any of it? It came as a sudden, shocking realisation to me that there were no constraints at all on the way I behaved. I am a child of the Nintendo generation. I’ve grown up inhabiting a fantasy world where your actions are always constrained. There are always rules, and no matter what combination of buttons you press, you can’t step outside them. You can only do the things that the programmers have foreseen. Possibility is constrained by pixels. In a fighting game, you can’t all sit round and talk about your differences like civilised adults. In a driving game, you can’t stop to pick up hitch-hikers. You can only operate within clearly defined parameters. But then you go into the real world, and you realise that there aren’t any rules. Well, there are, but they don’t stop you from doing anything. They just tell you what the consequences might be. There isn’t anything stopping you. There are no boundaries, except the ones you create for yourself. More to the point, you don’t have a saved position that you can go back to if you fuck up. But if there was nothing stopping me, there was nothing stopping them either. The only difference between good people and bad people was a question of having the bottle. The bad people weren’t some alien species. They were just doing what they wanted, looking out for their own interests, without being held back by the arbitrary set of rules we had made for ourselves. This was freedom, and it scared me shitless. I was seeing the world in a new light. I had tugged at a loose thread, and everything was beginning to unravel. Anything and everything was possible, I knew that now. The only thing stopping me was my belief that it was impossible. I could give up my job and become a tramp. I could burn all my money. I could walk into the office tomorrow and take a shit in the filing cabinet. I could murder someone.
Give me but one firm spot on which to stand, and I will move the earth