Man Hating Psycho

by Iphgenia Baal

  I got off the train at Farringdon and walked up the hill then turned onto Leather Lane. The market traders were packing up for the day. The air smelt of fat. A man in white overalls stepped up to the kerb with a big bucket of slops, which he emptied into the drain. After the balminess of LA, where the streets are quiet and there is never anyone else on the pavement but you, the closeness and dirtiness of London was awful.

  Arriving at my parents’ house they wasted no time in sitting me down to ʻdiscuss my situationʼ. I was 35, I had no money, writing was all well and good but didn’t appear to be viable financially. What was I going to do? Couldn’t I just get a part-time job or something? In response, I made the announcement that I’d taken a husband, he was American, we’d met two months earlier and I was moving to Los Angeles to be with him. I watched their crestfallen expressions as they realised, as they’d had done many times before, that there was fuck all they could do or say about it.

  The months that followed were the most normal of my life. This was mainly because the visa application was such a paranoia-inducing process that it made me feel like I needed to behave for the duration of it. Nothing stupid, nothing illegal, act like you’re being watched. I unfollowed all the old anarchists I followed on Twitter, stopped going out and getting trashed, released my book and got a couple of freelance gigs (InDesign work for a publishing company and proofreading).

  Thinking I was about to leave London forever and aware that the city was changing fast, I spent the rest of my time going on long walks (or, death marches, as my love called them) in what I can only describe as a farewell tour. I didn’t do it knowingly, it was more like I’d think of a place I hadn’t been to in ages and think that, if I went to LA, I probably wouldn’t see it again in the state it was in.

  I walked round Soho to find whole blocks had been demolished. I went to Dalston to find my favourite Turkish shop gone. I went to Peckham to find trendy galleries everywhere. I went to Deptford to find that the Job Centre had shut down and been replaced by a bar called The Job Centre. I went to the Kingʼs Road to find the streets empty, Sainsbury’s replaced by Waitrose and Morris Minors and Volvos by Lamborghinis and 4x4s. I went to the Earl Percy on Ladbroke Grove, my first employer, now, the Portobello Hotel, invisible behind foliage, security on the door. A craft ale and stonebaked pizza monstrosity. I went back to Bethnal to find the block I’d lived in, which had always been open to the street, now had security gates and CCTV and was inaccessible. The second hand bookshop on the corner that I’d loved was gone and in its place was an S&M lingerie boutique. The local pool had upgraded and was now a relaxation spa. I went back to Bow to find the empty warehouses full of chi-chi arseholes and the estates boarded up.

  Far from prompting rosy reminisces, my trips down memory lane forced me to admit it was too late. The London I loved was gone. The city had become a parody of itself, rebranded as tourist attraction. My affectionate nostalgia went up in smoke, taking with it any belief there was something left worth fighting for. The conviction I’d held – that London needed me, that I owed it a debt – was bollocks. My experience of London wasn’t more real than everyone else’s. It was merely more shit. The obvious finally dawned on me: London wanted rid.

  My visa came through at the end of May. I wanted to buy a one-way ticket but my love needed to be in the UK in September so I bought a return flight for the end of August, because if I was going back I wasn’t going to miss Carnival.

  Because I knew I was coming back I didn’t bother to say any goodbyes other than a lowkey dinner with the fam. I packed an insane amount of my possessions into two huge suitcases and left.

  I don’t know what it was about this trip, maybe the stress of the application process, but things did not go well. To start with my jet lag was horrendous, and combined with a dodgy flu I caught on the plane made me irritable and argumentative. Not the best frame of mind to begin what I was already thinking of as My New Life. I set out to achieve a few basic tasks, which I thought might make my living in LA a bit more realistic. I tried to open a bank account and failed. I needed a State ID. I tried to get a State ID and failed. I needed a bank account. I managed to sort a SIM card for my phone and that was about it. My love was worried about money but instead of listening to his valid concerns about our future, I took his financial musings as personal attack, thinking he was saying he couldn’t afford me, as if I was a pet or something. We managed to avoid an actual fight but spent long afternoons apart or sitting in the stifling LA heat in silence. After two weeks of this I was going stir crazy and persuaded my love to rent a car and drive out of town. We drove to Lake Berryessa, where I swam. My love told me about the Zodiac killer stabbing a bunch of teenagers not twenty feet from where we stood. We debated going to a B&B but in the end drove back to LA the same night, which was lucky because I woke up the next day with the worst ear infection of my life. The pain left me incapacitated, even after a visit to the Hollywood walk-in centre, where my ear was syringed and I was given codeine. It took me a week to get over, by which point I had reached fever pitch about what a waste of a trip it’d been and how little I’d got done. Things between my love and I were quite tense and we’d stopped having sex (the ear infection had infantilised me to such a degree that it’d be hard for anyone to find me sexy). I decided to give him some time to himself and set out to explore the city on my own.

  I went to Griffith Park, endeavouring to climb the mountain but ended up tumbling down a cliffside and getting cut up by prickly plants before having to wade through rubbish, sorry, trash, for half a mile.

  After that I got ripped off in Venice buying weed, paying $200 for a ʻlicenceʼ to buy an eighth of horrible skunk, itself another $35. From here, I took one wrong train followed by another wrong train followed by a long walk in the wrong direction. Starving hungry I bought a burger from a diner, had a terrible reaction a block later and had to shit on a street corner outside a 7-11 in front of a well-heeled Hispanic family. It was my knickers, or the floor.

  And then Grenfell happened.

  I was in the kitchen making supper when my love, who was sat at the kitchen table, looked up from his laptop and said, — Where in London is this tower block that’s on fire?

  Thinking he was (as he often did) feeding his Anglophilia by perusing the BBC’s regional news section, I barely looked up from stirring the onions.

  — Shepherds’ Bush? he persisted.

  — That’s basically Notting Hill Gate, I told him, knowing that was the best point of reference he’d have.

  It was only when he brought it up again a couple of minutes later, making a comment along the lines of the fire being ʻreally badʼ, that I turned down the hob and came to look over his shoulder at the screen. It must’ve been about 6pm in Los Angeles, so 2am in London, by which point the fire was enormous.

  What to do here? The normal thing would be to describe the fire. It’s the sort of sensationalist, pornographic writing that is any writer’s dream. But I shan’t describe it and I’ll tell you why: because it is unnecessary. Because everyone saw it, everyone knows, everyone remembers what happened.

  As soon as I saw the live-streamed feed, which must’ve been filmed from a helicopter or a drone, I freaked. Wooden spatula raised in hand, other hand gripping the back of the chair my love was sitting on, I started to shout. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. I didn’t want to look at it but couldn’t look away. Desperately trying to avoid looking directly at the fire itself, I scanned the background of the shot, searching the horizon for clues of which block it was that was on fire. First I thought it was White City but couldn’t think of any high rises there. Then I thought it was Goldhawk Road, or Golborne but for the life of me, I couldn’t place it. My head reeled. My love lowered the screen then stood to prise the wooden spatula out of my fist. He put his arms round me.

  — It’s okay, mate, he said.

  But he was wrong. It was the furthest from okay anything had ever been.

  — No, I said, pushi
ng him away from me, wanting to say something unkind about how he couldn’t possibly understand because he was American, he wasn’t London… London, London, London.

  I ran into the bedroom to retrieve my laptop. I opened it and sat on the floor, hammering at the space bar. My love poked his head round the door.

  — What are you doing? he said, sounding concerned.

  — I’m changing my ticket, I said, as if it should’ve been obvious.

  — Mate, he said.

  — I’ve got to go back, I said. — I’ve got to be there.

  I managed to open Norwegian Air’s website and click ʻManage Bookingʼ before my love lifted the laptop out of my lap.

  — What are you doing? I said.

  — There’s nothing you can do, he said.

  — What do you mean? I said.

  I started crying. Or maybe I’d been crying all along and only just noticed.

  — There’s nothing you can do, he said. — Whether you’re here, whether you’re there…

  This time my love was right. Being there wouldn’t make any difference but even so, I felt an undeniable guilt at what I saw as a dereliction of duty. I’d left, and this had happened. I’m not trying to say that because I’d left it’d happened, or that if I’d been there it wouldn’t have happened, just that I’d not been paying attention to what was happening and I felt fucking terrible.

  After Grenfell, LA disappeared for me. My heart longed for London and so I did what any powerless person yearning for something they cannot have does: I went on social media.

  I have never spent as much time on Twitter as I spent over the last two weeks of that trip. To say I was obsessed doesn’t come close. I read pages and pages of posts, following every account that had anything to say on the matter. Official news sources, left-wing commentators, right-wing commentators, the London Fire Brigade, local residents, housing activists, solidarity groups, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea…

  Mimicking the future-inquiry, my investigations initially focused on the events of the night of the fire. Where it started, how quickly it spread, how long it took the fire brigade to arrive, why they didn’t have ladders tall or hoses long enough to reach the top floors, how fire engines had to be sent in from out of London taking more than an hour to arrive.

  I sat patiently through hour-long videos of first-person accounts from people who’d got out of the building, from people who lived close by and witnessed the whole thing, from people who had relatives that were still unaccounted for.

  It soon became clear that the official narrative was not up to much and diverged hugely from the thousands of unverifiable (but tempting to believe) personal accounts.

  When I wasn’t on Twitter I lectured my love on the culture of corruption that defined the UK construction industry and the strategy of managed decline employed by London’s inner-city councils in spite of budgets running a surplus.

  The body count went up and up. Lily Allen went on Channel 4 News and said it was a cover-up and that hundreds of people, rather than official number of 72 that was eventually reached, were dead. I, like any person of even meagre calibre, was not of the disposition to take Lily Allen as reputable news source but I found myself (for the first time ever) empathising with her and (also for the first time ever) despairing of Channel 4 News. I understood Lily’s desire to speak out because it was exactly what I was feeling but watching her sticking it to the man, I found that I was glad that in spite of wanting to speak, I didn’t have a platform. Because if I’d had a platform I would’ve used it but the reality was that I, like Lily, didn’t know what I was talking about. I thought it tragic that in a moment where there were so many aspects to discuss and so many persons qualified to discuss them, that Channel 4 News should give the space to a Bedales kid with a waning pop career, however well-intentioned. It wasn’t as if there was a lack of space for speculation and rumour. Blogs sprung up left, right and centre with stories about babies being thrown out of windows and surviving, recorded messages of people’s last tearful phone calls, of letters sent months in advance warning RBKC of disaster. I was shocked that Channel 4 News, until-then my most trusted of all national news broadcasters, had chosen to peddle distractions over and above a proper investigation of events.

  My initial reaction of not wanting to look gave way to the desire to find out as much as I could. But the coverage hard to swallow. I couldn’t believe that people were reacting the way they were, the same way they always reacted to everything. Couldn’t they see that the normal way of doing things was exactly what had led, both directly and indirectly, to this happening? The deferral of responsibility built-in to privatisation, which made it impossible to follow the chain of command to expose any culprit, was identical to the way spokespersons and pundits presented issues – paying lip service without examination beyond how best to deflect attention from their own culpability and with no regards for the facts. The way it was starting to look to me was that they all had blood on their hands. The system was corrupt and anyone who profited from it in any way should at this point realise it was time to shut the fuck up.

  I was just getting to the point of disengaging in disgust (they could talk if they wanted to but I wasn’t going to listen) when RBKC finally got it together to release an official statement. I decided to watch, not for information per se, but just to hear the official spin.

  I lay in bed with the live feed open on my computer. The camera showed the empty forecourt and entrance to RBKC town hall. A door opened. A man came out. His name flashed up at the bottom of the screen. ‘Rock Feilding-Mellen, RBKC Deputy Leader and Councillor for Housing’. Before he opened his mouth I was squawking like a chicken.

  — Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god! I squawked, bringing my love into the bedroom. — I know him. I know him! Oh my god.

  If you cast your mind back to the beginning of this ʻstoryʼ to recall me speaking of my ʻwildʼ years when I had no home of my own and gallivanted round the place with all sorts of weirdoes, well that was when I first met Rock Feilding-Mellen. And when I say weirdoes, I mean weirdoes. As his name would suggest, Rock Feilding-Mellen was a member of the aristocracy. And not just the aristocracy, the landed gentry no less. Most people’s impression of the aristocracy is way below par. When they think of posh people they cannot think beyond what they can see, people with a big house in west London, people with penthouses by the river, people with two cars, people with trust funds, but none of that shit comes close. That’s just the upper middle class. They might be more comfortable or appear to be more secure than people who don’t own property or have savings but that aside, their lives are not hugely different from everyone else’s. They walk the same streets, they visit the same shops, they go to the same pubs, etc., but the actual aristocracy is on another level, a level which very few people who are not part of it get to see. But I, and I don’t know how, had stumbled upon it.

  I met Rock Feilding-Mellen when I was seventeen. I was in a nightclub with my friends when someone, not Rock, approached our table with an envelope and handed it to me. Inside the envelope was an invitation to a party for the Millennium at Stanway House. The deliverer of the envelope pointed Rock out and said the invitation was from him. Being a skanky teenager with fuck all social life beyond my circle of skanky teenage friends the idea of going to a swanky party in the countryside was thrilling.

  The party was my introduction to how the other side live. Arriving at Stanway House I was amazed – I’d never seen a stately home of this scale that someone actually lived in, but my incredulity at the house was soon overshadowed by the behaviour of its inhabitants. People lounged on Edwardian day beds openly smoking crack cocaine out of specially-crafted glass pipes, others wandered hallucinating through the rose garden shedding clothes and singing, people in yoga pants downed urine, there was an elderly man in a corner on all fours barking like a dog.

  At some point in the night I ended up in conversation with a woman who, I was told, was the lady of the house
– those were the actual words used to introduce her and I couldn’t help imagining my mum or anyone’s mum introducing themselves as the lady of the house when the house was a whitewash semi-detached. Ridiculous. Anyway, this woman spoke in one of those posh voices that are so posh it makes it impossible to understand, barely opening her mouth to talk, pronouncing ʻclothesʼ as ʻcleevesʼ, for example. She seemed nice enough even if I didn’t have the faintest clue what she was on about. It was only when she left to bemuse the next guest that someone, I forget who as I never saw or spoke to them again, informed me that the woman had a hole in her head. I wasn’t sure what they were getting at and asked for clarification, which is when I was informed that ʻthey all didʼ, they were trepanners. They had drilled holes in their skulls to remain permanently high. Apparently it felt like always being on the beginning of an acid trip, before you start hallucinating completely and when you just have that cold shivery feeling and your senses are heightened — colours, sounds (but not smells so much) going up.

  Being as young as I was, I was too overwhelmed by the newness and the extremeness of the reality I had entered to be capable of making a value judgement. I had no context in which to place these people and no reason, at this stage, to judge them, so I didn’t.

  I can’t say Rock Feilding-Mellen and I were close but I was on the guestlist for his parties and outside of that would run in to him from time to time. We were always civil. I liked talking to him because he was such a freak and also because at that time I held anyone who broke the law (even if it was only by taking drugs) in esteem. As long as you weren’t doing what you were supposed to, you were okay with me.