by Craig Taylor
The very final stage of that plan would be that services would have to cease, and we would just have to receive coffins. Almost just be bringing them in by the car-load, if you like. Leaving many bodies around in unrefrigerated areas is a major problem, specially if it’s a pandemic and it’s airborne. You’ve got a worry that they need to go straightaway. Then of course you have to plan in that it could be us that’s got it. We might not die as a result of it, but we could be so ill we can’t come to work. So: ‘Who else can we use; who else can we get trained? Let’s get someone that knows how to work them machines.’ There’s a couple of intense courses that you need to go on, and you need to pass exams in order to be able to use them machines. There’s five of us that can use ’em here. Say three of us are taken ill, and we’ve got to operate twenty-four hours a day? You can’t have one in during the day and one in during the night, it’s just not possible. You need two people at all times.
The bird flu is the worry. It hasn’t happened. Let’s keep our fingers crossed it doesn’t happen. But it’s nice to know that we can deal with it if it does happen. Because that’s obviously the biggest worry, is how do you get rid of the … how do you stop bodies piling up, almost like the old plague?
London has been through that many times before. Hopefully never again. Hopefully our medicine is at a level where we can stop that. But any virus that’s nasty like that does take out your vulnerable age groups, the very young and the very old. But in the city there’s nowhere to store them. Because there are some crematoriums that have just one cremator, and they might need to rely on me. I’ve got four cremators. But I might need to rely on someone who has eight. You see what I mean?
DEPARTING
MICHAEL LININGTON
Seeker
The funny thing about London is how everything feels like it’s trying to push you out. So all these people are trying to get in, but the city itself and the infrastructures that have been created and the social issues, everything is trying to push you straight back out. Everyone’s trying to fight to get into the middle, but then there’s something in the middle that’s just trying to force everyone out and it’s saying, you’ve got to earn your place. But if you get pushed out then someone else instantly fills your space. We feel a bit disposable.
You can have all the knowledge in the world but if you don’t know how to function within the city and learn the language and the codes, you’re fucked. You have to learn how things work here, for a start. First you learn the language of the city anyway, in terms of architecture and transport and things like that. You work out that Tube map and that tells you where stuff is, but actually it’s not like that at all. There’s all these other things going on. It compresses distance. I can remember thinking, okay, that’s just down the road. Covent Garden is right next to Leicester Square. But then you start to learn the languages of subcultures and ways of meeting people and finding things that are going on.
In London, everything feels like it’s on offer. If I can have anything, what is it that I actually want? Even choice in the supermarkets I find a nightmare. How am I meant to choose what I want for lunch, let alone what I want to do for the rest of my life or who I want to go out with? You could go out with someone and then there’s going to be a thousand other people that are ten times hotter and ten times more connected with ten times more interesting stories.
It changes you. It changes the way you deal with things. You’re presented with things changing so quick all the time and with new things being on offer and possibility. Possibility is the problem, when everything presents an opportunity. There’s a possibility within everything. Living like that is horrible, I think, because how are you ever going to be happy? You’re not, you’re just not. Because you’re always going to be considering the other options. When do you get to the zenith? When are you in a place where you’re not wanting something else, you know? I’m living in one place now, but I think I’d really love to live in blah, blah … and then I’d probably move there and be like, this is nice and everything but I could be in a penthouse in EC1 and that would be much nicer and it’d be closer to the Tube. So when’s the top point? When are you actually happy and satisfied with what you’ve got? I guess you’re not and maybe London just likes to rub it in.
And the thing about the city as well is that it glamorizes everything. It glamorizes the full breadth of humanity. It can glamorize drug use. It can glamorize sickness. It can glamorize poverty. That’s weird, right? It can glamorize the high life but it can also glamorize the low life. It’s a meaning-making machine.
I hate that London never satisfies me. Nothing is ever enough. So it’s like always looking for the next thing or waiting for the next place to go to. It would be nice if things just stopped for a while. I just don’t feel like I could ever be satisfied here because there’s too much on offer. When do you stop desiring? You don’t, and I think I’m too stuck in the system to stop wanting.
When I was 13 or 14 I can remember coming here with my parents on a day trip and thinking, oh my god, this is amazing. Look at all these people. Everything must be happening here, this is where I’m going to end up. There’s no other option than that I’ll live in London. But then when it got to making decisions I was like, maybe I’m not good enough to go. Maybe it’s too full-on. How do you start with nothing? But now it’s like, I want more. There’s something bigger and better, but then again starting with nothing’s a horrible thought and yet living here I’m always trying to get back to the neutral, as in trying to strip away all the wanting stuff all the time. I don’t want for things materially, I want for things experientially and maybe that’s a London thing as well.
You’re never full up. You can’t ever have enough sex. You can’t ever eat enough food. You can’t ever be excited enough. It satisfies you for a bit and then you have to start over again, and I think looking at that as a long-term projection is quite disheartening. I’m stuck in this cycle. Something that keeps delivering but can’t satisfy.
I wonder if London will ever stop existing, because you know when you look back in history there’s cities that rose and fell. Is there a limit to how many people an infrastructure can support? I just think, where does all this waste go? How can you just keep building buildings on top of buildings?
ROB DE GROOT
Antique clock restorer
Give me a smoke and I’ll tell you this mad story. Right … okay, I work in Portobello Road, and every day I see people who are so filthy rich it’s out of control, just insane. Often you don’t even see them. Someone will come in and say, ‘Hello, yeah, I’ve been sent to pick this thing up,’ right? And they’ve got this massive fucking luxury supercar and this entourage. But one time this dude came in with his wife, right? I suppose he was trying to impress her. She looks at this thing that’s like ten thousand quid and says, ‘That looks cool.’ He goes, ‘Yeah, okay, let’s buy it.’ And right on the spot, without even thinking about it, he says to me, ‘I’ll have that.’ I said, ‘Well, how’d you want this thing shipped?’ And the guy’s like, ‘Oh, no problem, I’ll get my pilot to like take it over in a helicopter.’
I hate living here. I can’t stand it any more, I just absolutely hate it, every single minute is like living torture. It’s bullshit, I loathe it. You always think to yourself, there’s some sorta thing I might be able to chisel into. It’s like a fruit machine. You think, how hard can it be to wind up with three fucking pies?
But you are losing money every day you are here. It’s always that thing: if I hang in here just a little bit longer, things may happen. I’ll be hanging out with somebody in the pub, right, and they answer the phone and they’ll go, ‘Yeah, shit, no problem,’ and they’ll go, ‘Yeah, someone I know just called, it’s a video director, they need somebody to just hang out for half an hour and they’ll give you 400 quid: can you do that tomorrow?’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, all right.’ And it’s just enough little carrots that dangle in front of you every so often where you think, I am g
onna really get something out of this experience.
No matter what you want to do in London, there’s a million others who are in the queue ahead of you. Everything is always a hassle, because there is just so many people wanting to do the same shit at the same time. No matter what it is. And no matter what cool idea you’ve had, there’s somebody else who’s already done it. And they’re usually younger, richer and more well-connected than you. In New York you’d know that certain places would be jammed all the time, but if you didn’t like it you could go somewhere else. Right? But that’s because it’s a little bit more individualistic, most everybody’s working on their own schedule. Whereas in London, there’s times when it isn’t crowded, but then there’s nothing open so you can’t get nothing done. It’s like you can only do things at certain times. And that’s when everyone’s gonna be doing it. Like shopping for groceries. At certain times of the day everybody is getting them. Even when you go at the weirdest possible time, it doesn’t matter. It’s still gonna be the same queues because all the shelves are empty and they’ve only got one person working on the till. Another typical thing. You have to bring books in to the library when they’re open. I find the manager, and say, ‘Why don’t you have a slot like video shops?’ ‘Oh, because people put burning newspapers through it.’ What is it with the destructiveness of people here?
London is like any other kind of addiction, really. You get 5 per cent entertainment out of it, and that makes you suffer through the other 95 per cent of it. I’m at the breaking point now, though, I figure. I’ve done enough, nobody sane stays in the city for longer than that.
It’s a very punitive culture here. In London there’s more signs telling you not to do shit than anywhere I’ve ever seen in my life. About a decade ago, there was an extreme crime problem on the street, it was really violent. I mean, it used to be just insane. There used to be so much fighting and antisocial behaviour all the time. What they decided to do was, plaster CCTVs all over the city. And now, everywhere you go there’s signs saying YOU ARE BEING WATCHED. Or on the Tube, every ten seconds there’s these announcements: ‘For your safety and security, you are being watched on camera all the time.’ Why do we need to spy on the entire population? Does anybody ever ask why there is such a need for everybody to be under 24-hour surveillance? Like, why is it that half the population feel at constant threat from the other half?
Basically, I’m a lazy sack of shit, right? I hate work. I don’t mean my job, I mean any job. I’ll tell you what I hate, I don’t like getting the Tube in the morning with, you know, you know who’s on the Tube. Loads of tourists who are mindless, they don’t know anything and they bump into you all the time and they step on your feet and they’re just idiots walking at three inches an hour in front of you. Or else the mindless robot zombie drones going to their nine-to-fives, right, and you just … I don’t like getting up in the morning and going on the Tube.
Rob goes to buy a drink. The owners have only recently placed candles on the tables of this Dalston pub. One flickers in front of me. The price tag is still on the candleholder.
*
Having to go to Portobello from where I live in the East End, I hate that. I always think to myself, okay, what would happen if I left slightly earlier? It doesn’t matter. I will always be late, no matter what time I leave the house. If I get to the Tube station at eight, there’ll be one tube leaving every ten minutes. And if I get there at half nine, there’ll be one leaving every two minutes, but there’ll be people backed all the way up the stairs. I’m starting to think the people who actually run this idiot circus actually love it. They love watching people suffer. This is the whole English thing, isn’t it? Make people suffer. How do we conquer the world? By making our infantry in the colonial wars take cold baths for nine years. Everything is to do with suffering.
It’s like George Orwell said: war is peace, ignorance is strength. In London, happiness is misery. A friend of mine was going on this art course and one of their assignments was to come up with a new advertising campaign for London, like. He asked me for a slogan. I told him the best slogan for London would be, ‘It just gets worse.’ [Laughs.] Well, that just sums it up.
Dave takes a toilet break.
The image of London that you get around the world is far different than the reality. Like, okay: you see the image of London in films and in television and you figure, it must be so beautiful and everybody is very mannerly. Right, this is the paradox of London. It’s like Japan, there’s a code of manners, and etiquette, and protocol, and everybody is mannered. But also everybody is violent and everybody is rude and everybody is willing to fucking kill everybody for the smallest thing. I couldn’t work out this contradiction in my head, right, for the longest time. And then I figured it out. I thought, there’s a public face and a private face, right, and the public face is always opposite, it’s the demi-urge, right? And the reason that people are so preoccupied with manners and etiquette in London is because if you do not show the right etiquette it might – possibly – get you killed. And this works on all levels of society.
All evil originates here. Well it does, really. I mean … industrialization, capitalism, imperialism, the whole idea of enslaving people for their resources and turning everybody into zombies and robots and, you know, raping the earth and raping the world’s population and … they all start here.
I got to get out of this fucking city.
ETHEL HARDY
Old-age pensioner
I had a caravan down in West Mersea, on the beach. And we used to go down there every weekend nearly. But whenever I got there I’d want to come back to London. I don’t know why, but I always want to get back.
Oh, but there’s something that gets you in London. There’s something here that makes you want to stay in London. A lot of people don’t want it. If they’ve got a house, they want to live on their own. They don’t want other people to live near them. It’s funny. I’ve got a neighbour, she doesn’t like certain people, but when she was ill they come in and helped her, didn’t they? She doesn’t want them to live near her, but I’m pleased to have them live near me in case. All different nationalities, all different people mixed up. They help me a lot, these people. I go in every day and they help me up the stairs. I’ve got my key but they open the door, and it’s a very heavy door. I’ve had so many offers to move out, to places like Hertford and that, but …
She taps her finger against her mug of tea. It’s just been delivered to her by a volunteer at the community centre.
*
I’ve packed up three times and each time I had to tell my grandson, I’m sorry, I don’t want to go. I don’t want to move. I’m staying where I am now. My son-in-law, he died. They’ve got a plant-hire business down Broxbourne way, but he died, and my daughter was left on her own. They’d bought me a flat down there, a lovely flat, near the river at Broxbourne. I had packed everything. But I said to him, I don’t really want to move. I want to stay in London. It was a flat by the river in Broxbourne, a nice building, two or three flats in it. It was very nice. They were buying it for me, and it was going cheap because a nurse and her son was selling it. But I told him I wanted to stay where I am. So I unpacked. He was a bit annoyed.
Another time, my children come here and they say, we’ll be taking you out on the Sunday. Where are we going? Come on, we’ll go. And I went with them. Did I ever. And they took me to a flat also in Broxbourne. It was a nice flat with old ladies and that. They said, you can move out with the ladies. I didn’t feel as if I wanted to go. I didn’t want to move at all. But I talked to the ladies, or I tried to. I went downstairs and had a cup of tea. There you were, sat on a settee with a book, and they didn’t talk. I looked around at these ladies in Broxbourne. I looked back and forth. I looked at this flat. I thought, they’re not very friendly here. It was so quiet. It might have been painful for them to even say a word. But an old lady with a walker was there. I went over and talked to her. She was looking for company and that.
She spoke very slowly. But anyway, I didn’t take it, not that flat.
There’s something that gets you in London and you don’t want to let go. It’s so quiet in the country, isn’t it? Too quiet. You meet so many people here that you get to talk to and that. I’ve been here so many years, I’ve picked up so many friends. I think there’s something here in the East End. It’s all different nationalities. You get mixed up with them, don’t you? When I ran the little charity shop round there, I used to meet all sorts of people, mostly Asians. My best customers, the Asians. Plenty of men round there had no places to live and that. And they used to come in to buy bits of furniture. They must have been given little flats eventually, and they’d take their little bits of furniture.
Oh, London. You never know if you’re going to be ill or fall. I did fall years ago and I crawled to the door and I opened the door and I called help. Two Asian boys that live upstairs, they come and they got me help. They phoned the ambulance, got my son for me, helped me right to the last, right until I got into the ambulance. You wouldn’t think that, but they did. They stayed with me until the ambulance come and my son come. They held my hand.
