Man Hating Psycho

by Iphgenia Baal

  Twenty minutes later they leave the house. They don't speak until the Tube station comes into sight when she, not wanting to leave things badly, says — It’ll be okay you know.

  — What? he says.

  — Between us, she says, — It’ll be okay. We’ll work it out.

  He glowers.

  — Come on, she says and jostles him. — It’s not a big deal.

  Still nothing.

  — Fine then, she says. — If you be like that be like that.

  She takes out her phone and pops in her headphones and presses shuffle. Oasis comes on. She skips ahead of him, in time to the distant guitars and when Liam comes in she sings along.

  — I don’t feel as if I know you, you take up all my ti-ime, she sings, thinking what a perfect sentiment it is for the moment. — The days are long and the nights will throw you away cos the sun don’t shine….

  — What the fuck is the matter with you? he says, snatching the headphones out of her ears. — I live here.

  His face is a mask of horror.

  — So what? she says.

  He’s got hate, actual hate, in his eyes. She can still hear the music playing out the headphones, throws out her arms and serenades him.

  — We-e live in the shadows and we ha-ad the chance and threw it away. And it's never gonna be the same' here

  — Fuck this, he says. — You’re batshit and I’m gonna be late.

  He pushes past her and breaks into a run, not a run, a sprint.

  She watches him, thinking how she’d never seen anyone run away from her so fast in her life.

  MARRIED TO THE STREETS

  Issues of race and gender aside, anyone who knows me can vouch for the fact that I am as rude, anti-social, mistrusting and belligerent a London cunt as ever there was. The best way I can describe the relationship between me and the city I was born in is an ʻinvertedʼ psychogeography. Rather than a person or people infusing the city’s lifeless bricks with meaning, the city possessed me and moulded my terrible personality into something that suited it. And not just my personality, the way I walk: swagger; the way I loiter on a street corner: Turpinesque; the way I speak: guttural; the way I think: saturated with a vindictive Victorian moralism that could not have its roots in any other location.

  I have, on occasion, wondered how I might’ve turned out if, instead of gravitating towards western Europe in an attempt to escape their uncertain fates, my parents’ parents had ended up in America. Would I have grown into a self-assured, boundary-respecting ʻtragic mulattoʼ with my eyes on the Presidency? Or the errant Black Lives Matter activist who turned on their sponsors and firebombed McDonalds? There are myriad shoulda, woulda, could bes but one thing I’m certain of is that I wouldn’t have turned out like this.

  The funny thing is, is that the London I grew up in was a very different place to London as it exists today. While it must be taken into account that childhood shields a person (if they’re lucky) from the uglier aspects of racism, sexism and classism that permeates every society, I would still argue that London in the 1980s was a less divided and more tolerant place. The example I always defer to, in order to exemplify the way prejudice worked back then is my friend’s racist grandfather - a type of person that was so commonplace as to have become a fictional trope. My friend’s racist grandfather hated black people and never missed an opportunity to make a racist remark. It was nig-nog this and darkie that and other comments that it is probably better not to put into print. But every evening without exception my friend’s racist grandfather would be joined by his downstairs neighbour, a Nigerian man in his late thirties or early forties, and the pair would make their way through a bottle of whiskey or rum, shouting the odds. Having witnessed this on several occasions my friend and I worked up the courage to question her racist grandfather about this apparent inconsistency.

  — We thought you hated black people grandad, my friend said.

  — I do, was the racist grandfather’s response.

  — But what about Sadic? my friend said. — He’s your friend, isn’t he?

  My friend’s racist grandfather dismissed the question gruffly, as if having a Nigerian friend had nothing to do with thinking black people were stupid, dirty or inferior.

  — Don’t be ridiculous, my friend’s racist grandfather said. — Sadic is a different kettle of fish altogether.

  Hopefully this example makes clear what I’m trying to say but in case it doesn’t, what I am saying is that, in my childish experience, London at that time was a city where people might espouse negative sentiments and prejudiced views but when confronted with a person who they might be expected to be prejudiced against, didn’t put those views into practice. An aspect, I suppose, of the infamous English nimby way of thinking – that essentially whatever anyone is or does is fine as long as it’s kept behind closed doors.

  As a kid I lived in a kid bubble (without a thought of what might be going down in another part of town) but upon turning thirteen the streets started calling me. Suddenly the four blocks around my house, the high street and the cemetery, which had served me well up until then, lost their allure and I began to fix my sights on the furthest-flung stations the London Underground had on offer – Cockfosters, Hendon, East Ham… My first excursions into the city without my parents were as lame and pointless as can be expected but at the time seemed like the most exciting thing in the world. My friends and I would jump the Tube (sliding on our knees through the ‘luggage’) and take the train in one direction or another, often alighting before the official destination, at any station that’s name took our fancy. I remember us finding Homerton particularly significant. We’d pile off the train, scoot back out through the luggage then bowl around checking out what the local area offer – not much, as it turned out in the case of Homerton, but that never galled us. We’d find a playground and smoke a joint or try and get people to buy us alcohol before inevitably turning towards home.

  As I got older I got more clued up to the things living in London gave me access to – Soho speakeasies that sold different drugs on every floor, 24-hour south London pool halls where you could stay for whole weekends, Kings’ Cross megaclubs where you could do the same and (big up) Brixton cabbies (if you know, you know) where you couldn’t stay for long but was nevertheless a vital component in the mix. The world my parents and school occupied faded into irrelevance. It didn’t matter how many times I was told that my GCSEs were the most important two years of my life, I never believed it.

  Reaching seventeen, I quit school and left home, desperate to get into the city proper and with zero concern about how my lack of qualifications and money might affect my ability to do so. As far as I was concerned London was mine. I saw the city as my birthright, claiming every brick, no matter who actually owned it, as my own. I was in no doubt that I would find a corner of it to put myself.

  To the grave concern of my parents, I spent my first independent summer like an urban Laurie Lee, ʻI lived free, grubbing outsideʼ, gallivanting between friends’ houses and the rooftops of Bloomsbury, where I slept out under the stars. It never occurred to me that what I was doing was odd.

  When September came and it started getting chilly, I moved indoors. I was fit, I was funny and there was no shortage of boys to fuck and parties to crash and, for the in-between times, houseshares that had so many people coming and going that one more made little difference.

  I moved constantly – two days here, two days there – leaving possessions strewn behind me in a trail across the city. Ladbroke Grove, Camberwell, Clapton Pond, Stockwell, Kings Cross, Peckham, Kensal Rise, Battersea, Shepherds Bush, Vauxhall, Soho, Swiss Cottage, Deptford, World’s End – always careful not to outstay my welcome in any one place, ensuring my (likely) return at a later date remained an option.

  When living like this started to take its toll, I bit the bullet and went to see a few flats. After four viewings I downgraded my expectations according to budget and went to see a few rooms.

  I ende
d up taking an industrial unit in Arnold Circus for £100 a week. A beautiful place and perfect for what I had planned, which was to write a book. A single room with whitewashed brick walls, a skylight made of that reinforced glass that has metal wires running through it and a platform with a ladder up to it, where I put my bed. There was a sink in the room and outside in the corridor were shared toilets. I signed on the dotted line as soon as I saw it, paid the landlord the deposit and first month’s rent and moved in the next afternoon. I cleaned the place up a bit then unpacked. I went to the shops and bought ingredients that could be cooked on a Baby Belling. Great. It was only when I woke the next day that I realised there wasn’t a bath. How could I have been so stupid? Easily, it seems.

  In an attempt to remedy the situation, I walked to nearby Columbia Road flower market and found an upmarket garden shop selling Victoriana from where I purchased an old bath tub. I also bought a hose. I lugged my purchases back to my industrial unit and wasted no time in setting up the tub in the middle of the room and attaching the hose to the taps of the sink and running a bath.

  Delighted by the solution I’d found, I thought having a freestanding bath in the middle of your living room incredibly decadent. It was only when I got out and dried myself off that I was confronted with the issue of there being no way to decant the wastewater. The bath was too heavy to lift and so I spent the best part of an hour decanting it mugful by mugful down the sink. It put me off washing for a while.

  My time in the industrial unit was short-lived. I lasted until the first round of bills. I ignored the water bill because I already knew that the water company aren’t legally allowed to cut you off; electricity I paid in full at the Post Office; but then came council tax. Except it wasn’t council tax, it was business rates. Thousands for the first quarter. The only money I had coming in was the occasional magazine article and cash-in-hand bar work. The bill was unaffordable. I recalled the Evening Standard articles I’d read about people being sent to prison for outstanding council tax bills and they scared me so much that I’m not exaggerating when I say that within twenty-four hours of holding that bill in my hands, I’d packed my bags, left the keys with neighbours and scarpered. I called the landlord to tell him I had a family emergency, that I was flying to Trinidad that afternoon to never return. Adieu!

  I returned to cadging favours off people, exchanging my wit and tidying skills for room and board, before landing a rich boyfriend and a job at a fashion magazine. I found myself thrust into affluence. Free rent meant all the money I earned (pittance) was ʻparty moneyʼ I became the sort of person that could afford holidays, so I took them. My rich boyfriend and I went to Mumbai and New York City and Sicily and the south of France. But although I loved travelling (what London cunt doesn’t?) I found I was always more excited for the return flight; bowling out of Heathrow and onto the Piccadilly line ignoring the hordes of confused tourists or, if I was in a particularly exuberant mood, stopping to give them incredibly detailed and utterly false information on how to get where they wanted to go.

  I lost the rich boyfriend and the job at around the same time but by then I was savvy to ways of surviving without giving over all your time and energy to a boss: housing benefit! I rented a wicked flat in Bethnal Green where I lived happily for five years and then, when the Nasty Party cut housing benefit for under 30s, I moved to a cheaper place on the 15th floor of a pink high rise in Bow. I stayed there until the end of 2012, which was when the Nasty Party as good abolished housing benefit altogether, deciding everyone could die in a gutter. No stars.

  I found myself thrown to the winds. My refusal to take part in the economic fraud that was the order of the day meant I couldn’t afford anything. I tried going back to live with my parents but it was a disaster and pretty soon found myself back on the circuit, only this time it wasn’t party flats and fitties, it was single parents desperate for childcare and lonely agoraphobics who needed someone to go to the shops for them. Still, I was proud of the way I lived off, or at the very least under-the-radar, operating a cashless barter system. I was convinced that my experience of London and moving round all the time was more ʻrealʼ than other people’s and when people, as they often did, asked me where I lived I’d tell them that I was local, stabbing the word at them like a scalpel. I had a cornershop on every high street that knew my name! I was the member of five local libraries! I got warm welcomes from the landlords of boozers in every Irish-Jamaican pub in Zone Two.

  Even as I watched wave after wave of friends jump ship (countryside people going back to where they came from, defeated, and later as gentrification started to compost the city, whole estates left to rot before being felled one by one to make way for luxury investment storage spaces in the sky, and the next lot legged it to Hastings, Margate, Broadstairs to procreate or procrastinate, as was their persuasion) the idea of leaving London never occurred to me.

  Tube fares went up even as the IQ of the population plummeted. London Living Wage was set in law at Not Quite Enough to Live On. The continual auctioning off of public space to the highest private bidder removed huge swaths of the city and introduced anti-homeless spikes outside banks and Poor Doors in new builds. A&E workers were housed in shipping containers stacked in hospital car parks, while Carillion charged £20 a pop to refill every antiseptic soap-dispenser on the wards. Double-dug basements worsened the rising damp, threatening every home from Willesden, to Barking. London Eye, Gherkin, Crossrail, Shard, Westfield, Westfield, Walkie Talkie, Olympic Village, Cheese Grater, Razor, New Spitalfields Market, Taylor Wimpey, British Land, Foxtons… Sure, I was having a terrible time. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do. Yes, everyone was annoying. But who said London was supposed to be friendly?

  The worse it got the more convinced I was of the importance of staying, if only to defend the city’s grimy, dead end ways against the onslaught of bougie fuckers and their unexamined Insta-lives, because if not me then who?

  But resistance wasn’t easy. The worse things got the more militant I became until I reached a point where having a conversation with me that wasn’t about anarcho-syndicalism or the 2011 riots was impossible. My ʻnormalʼ friends, i.e. those with half-decent houses, stopped having me round. I managed a few months of cat-sitting, dog-sitting, house-sitting, flat-sitting but pretty soon it all evaporated and I ended up slinging my hook from cheap futons in dusty front rooms to damp mattresses in vegan squats to the bunkbed of a kid who’d been taken into care in a junkie’s flat… It might sound exciting/romantic but in reality it was shite. The moving around I could handle. It was the calibre of people I found myself with that was the issue. Somehow, I’d ended up at the margins of society and, I’ll make no secret of the fact that the marginal are my least favourite group of people. Sure, they might look/sound good. Smash the System? Yes mate! Damn the Man? 100%… But if you spend enough time around these fuckers to get to know them and don’t come to see that their sloganeering and anti-establishmentarianism is nothing more than bravado intended to obfuscate the sad truth about themselves (which is that they are all fucking losers) then you’re as much of an idiot as they are. The problem with the marginal is one, they have no understanding of nuance, and two, they have zero awareness that their dropout lifestyles are as much a part and product of the society we live in as any diligent careerist.

  By some small miracle, amidst all this mayhem, I managed to write and publish a variety of things. The writing was as ephemeral and erratic as you would imagine the work of a person in my situation to be. Long anti-gentrification rants appeared in obscure fanzines and self-published ephemera presented largely unedited spiels about how all men were twats… I never stopped to think about what I was doing or why I was doing it.

  Then, just as I was starting to crack, a flat came up. A penthouse no less, in one of the disgusting new builds on Old Street roundabout. A friend was managing the property and hadn’t been able to let it out. He said I could stay there until punters were found. He couldn’t say how long that might
be and told me to be prepared to move out on short notice, like overnight. He gave me a code to get in the front door and left the keys with reception.

  I wasted no time in going over. Couldn’t wait to be alone in my own space, goof around, have a wank, whatever… But walking into the entrance I knew my time here would be brief. Just seeing my reflection in the multiple mirrors in the lobby reflected what was obvious back at me: I did not belong here. The doorman sneered at my approach and was not best pleased about the envelope containing the keys he’d been holding being for me.

  I caught the lift (sleek black leather interior) up to the seventh floor, found the door number and let myself in. The cheapness of the million-pound flat was immediately apparent. The walls were flimsy, the insulation hollow, and I didn’t dare step out on the balcony for fear it would drop off. Open-plan, grey textured fake-ash flooring, sliding glass doors, metallic free-standing kitchen and a giant panel of knobs and switches taking up nearly half of one wall. Hideous.

  I ended up having this place for three months. I got some money work and some actual work done and then, out of the blue, a book deal. No money and a short print run but a book deal nevertheless.

  For those of you who have never published a book, I’ll let you in on a secret: publishing a book will change your life. Now, I’m not talking about ʻchanging your lifeʼ in the trashy magazine sense, where you get thrown off a horse and end up psychic, or maybe, come to think of it, I am… Either way, no matter how shit it is, no matter how unsuccessful, publishing a book is guaranteed to alter your situation. Not necessarily for the better, arguably often for the worse, never in the way you expect it.