Man Hating Psycho

by Iphgenia Baal

  That changed a couple of years later when Rock Feilding-Mellen decided he wanted to become a Tory MP. I can’t remember who told me the news but I remember my reaction, which was that he was obviously an idiot because a mad aristocrat who smokes crack cocaine clearly belongs in the Labour Party; the class defector, crossing over to the other side. All his potential weakness become strengths. But the Tories? Pah.

  The next time I ran into him I expressed my thoughts on the matter. I was starting to know myself better by this point and opened the conversation in no uncertain terms.

  — If you join the Conservative party, I said, — then I will no longer be able to talk to you.

  He smirked. We argued, him lauding his Classics degree from Oxford over me, me insisting his Classics degree from Oxford was bollocks, him talking down to me telling me I was naïve because the way he did things was the way the world actually worked and that the way I did things wasn’t.

  Amicably drunk, I said we would agree to disagree and as a decider cheersed my full pint of Guinness against his glass of whiskey with gusto. The glass he was holding shattered in his hand, shards flying everywhere. There was blood but the blood wasn’t mine.

  Although unintentional, the glass smashing and bloodied fingers were symbolic enough for us not to speak further.

  Over the next few years the aristo set started to shun me. Some of them married each other and left the city to have kids while random acts of violence on my part edged the general consensus among those who remained in town to my being a ʻpsychoʼ and a ʻloserʼ. I stopped getting invited to the kind of places where Rock might be. I hadn’t seen, spoken or thought about Rock for years except, as coincidence so often has it, I’d run into him the night before I flew to LA. For reasons I can’t fathom, I’d gone to a Fat White Family gig. I’ve never been a Fat White Family fan, in fact I fucking hated the Fat White Family and their horrible swastika scene. I had no time for the referential and derivative garage rock they played or their macho version of heroin chic. And so while the Flat Whites played upstairs, I stayed downstairs by the bar. I was, as it goes, thinking about leaving when Rock appeared.

  — Hello you, he said, in his patronising manner.

  Considering we had not seen or spoken to one another in over a decade, I found the greeting overfamiliar and considered picking things up where we’d left them, giving him shit about being a Tory but then, remembering I was about to leave for good, thought ʻfuck it, who gives a shit?ʼ. I didn’t care what this acid casualty did with his time and maybe, if I wasn’t rude to him, he might buy me a drink.

  We spoke for as long as it took to neck the white wine he bought me. He told me he’d heard I’d got married, which surprised me as I didn’t realise I was still a topic of conversation in the circles he moved in. I told him yes, that I was leaving for LA the next day to never return! Well no, that was a slight exaggeration but I was done with London and its fat white muppets. Rock, it seemed, felt the same way. His life, he said, was boring. He had a wife and two kids (possibly twins but I can’t remember as I wasn’t really listening) but hadn’t got far in his attempt to become Prime Minister and was instead languishing in a council role where there was ʻfuck all to doʼ. I asked him what he wanted to do instead and he told me he had already started a housing development company with two of his friends, which was making him ʻa lot of moneyʼ. He wanted to concentrate on that.

  In five short minutes he mentioned enough things I disapproved of for me to decide to call it a night. I left and thought no more of it or him until seeing him appear on the steps of the town hall. He looked like a ghost. Lots of new grey hairs.

  He started blathering apologetic nonsense that wasn’t up to much considering the four days it’d taken the council to get it together. Fully compliant with regulations. Followed guidelines. Not resigning.

  I spent the next hour yelling at my love.

  — They’ve got holes in their head, holes in their goddam heads! He smokes crack every day. Every day! He was named after a rock of crack, for fuck’s sake! How did he even get into this position? He doesn’t know anything about building or construction. He studied Classics!.

  For once, my love let me yell. When I was done he said, — They’re gonna crucify that guy.

  — They should crucify him! I yelled.

  — No, but seriously. When the press get their hands on this they’re gonna go nuts. It’s a perfect scandal.

  But this was one of the rare instances where my love was not right.

  A week passed and no news story appeared to mention crack cocaine or trepanning. Then, to add insult to injury, the Times ran a soft power piece, interviewing Rock’s mother about her drug legislation lobbying and research group. She banged on about the healing properties of psychedelics for two thousand words. The article made no mention of Rock or Grenfell. I was appalled.

  — Why aren’t they reporting it? I asked my love. — I don’t understand.

  He couldn’t understand it either. However bad contemporary journalists might be at their jobs surely this story was one they could find and follow. There was something dodgy going on.

  A few days later, still on Grenfell (it was all I thought or spoke about) I posed a question to my love. I was imagining being back in London and running in to Rock and couldn’t work out what I should do. Should I speak to him? Should I blank him? If I spoke to him, what would I say? Would I mentioned Grenfell? Would I not? I asked my love what he would do if he knew someone who had done what this guy had done and ran into them. My love considered the question, then said he couldn’t answer it, even theoretically, because he would never be in a situation where he would know someone responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Muslims. (At this point in time the body count was unclear.)

  The day of my departure arrived. My love rented a Zipcar and drove me to the airport. We had the sad conversation, which to some degree we’d been avoiding but had also been swept aside by Grenfell: the trip hadn’t been great, I clearly wanted to be back in London, he couldn’t leave LA. We parted ways with things feeling like they had when we’d parted in Amsterdam, uncertain of what the future would look like, only now we were also married.

  Arriving in London I went back to my parents again. I didn’t tell them the trip had been a disaster and that I’d changed my mind and was going to stay. They didn’t need to know. All they would do with the information was weaponise it, use it as further evidence for my insanity, my loserdom, reinforcing the narrative they (and almost everyone else I know) has always held about me. A narrative which does little else besides setting me up to fail.

  I had planned on going to see Grenfell as soon as I got back but couldn’t bring myself. A trip made specifically to ogle at the ashes seemed crass and I decided that I’d just see it when I saw it, rather than joining the misery-tourism parade.

  I stayed with my parents for a week. All I talked about was Grenfell, but since I’d consumed so much information on the subject and was borderline stalking Rock online, I was no longer interested in the body count or the cover-up, I was obsessed with the completely corrupt way society was set up. A rottenness that not only directly caused the fire (putting a man like Rock, with no qualifications or experience relevant to the field, in the position he was in, as well as countless other examples) but was still at play ensuring there would never be any truth, never be any justice. It was a travesty. My parents didn’t see it that way. They agreed that there was an aspect of things that were corrupt, but being homeowners, were more of the persuasion to accept Grenfell as a tragic accident, a sad thing thatʼd happened by mistake. I found their take offensive. The conversation got personal. Of course they saw it like that because they were getting something out of the system. And if you buy in, you’re gonna make excuses. We argued about generational unfairness and austerity and neoliberalism and the property market until it was clear there was nothing else for it. I had to get out.

  I went to stay in Maida Vale with my old friend, JD. He had a sp
are box room in a spacious two-floor maisonette in a wonderful old flat, which he’d lived in since the Seventies. His landlord had tried to evict him countless times but because he moved in before Thatcher’s Shorthold Tenancy Agreements came in, it meant that try as they might his landlords couldn’t get rid of him and the most they could put his rent up by per year was 10%.

  In spite of being back in the hood I stuck to my guns about not making a specific trip to go and see Grenfell. The first sighting I had of it was at Carnival. Walking in with my sister we turned into whatever the name of that street is that runs towards Portobello. On the horizon was a tower block shining in the sunlight.

  — Oh my god, I said, wrapping my fingers round my sister’s upper arm. Is that it? I felt cold to my bones. Then, — No, it can’t be.

  The block in front of us looked odd but it wasn’t black like in the photos. It was glowing. A beacon of light. A pillar of gold. I couldn’t figure it out. I felt uneasy. I couldn’t stop staring. Neither of us could. Then slowly it became clear. The light was not the sun reflecting off windows, it was the sun shining right through the building from the other side. Every blasted-out window, every burnt out floor, bursting with light. Aside from the basic concrete and metal structure, there was nothing left.

  I put my hands to my head. It was obvious my sister and I realised what we were looking at at the same time because we stood still. When we turned to look at each other we were both in tears.

  — Oh fuck, my sister said.

  I took her hand and we started walking. We turned onto All Saints Road, arriving at the first soundsystem and I’m telling you I’d never before, not once in my entire life, arrived at Carnival in silence. It was so fucking heavy, so fucking horrendous, so fucking deep, so fucking fucked, so fucking wrong on so many fucking levels. The first bassline of the weekend licked us and I don’t think there is anything on God’s earth that could’ve kept me away from that speaker.

  Carnival is always wild, but that Carnival under the auspices of Grenfell was something else entirely. No crime, no violence, just an outpouring of the kind of love and solidarity (actual solidarity, which by the following Carnival had gone again, battlelines redrawn) that instead of pretending like everything is okay and making nice, acknowledges all the pain, heartache, misery and unfairness of life. That year was a death carnival, which is what carnival is supposed to be. It was as if all the bullshit everyone'd had to put up with for last three decades was laid bare and what was exposed behind it was the old London, unchanged, untouched, unrivalled, brimful of crims, a poltergeist at every corner.

  VICTIM BLAMING

  I have had more than my fair share of run-ins with the police. I’ve been arrested for singing, I’ve been arrested for shouting, I’ve been arrested for stealing, I’ve been arrested for fighting, I’ve been arrested for texting, I’ve been arrested for posting stuff on Facebook, I’ve been arrested for throwing a chair, I’ve been arrested for ʻdestroyingʼ a hat, I’ve even been arrested for giving someone the finger.

  Though plentiful, my crimes are, without exception, petty and asides from a couple of cautions (accepted under duress, with the police confiscating my phone and laptop and telling me if I didn’t confess they had the power to keep them for up to three months) no charges have been upheld.

  Getting arrested by the Metropolitan Police is never pleasant. It’s an unnecessarily long, drawn-out process, boringly bureaucratic, and having to deal with the sort of donuts who become policemen sucks. But like any dose of bad luck, getting arrested does have a few things going for it. First is that it is very instructive, providing a rare glimpse (or maybe not so rare, depending who you are) of England’s nanny state without her make-up on. That bitch ain’t no Mary Poppins. Nanny reminds, with a withering look, the fundamental fact that everyone prefers to ignore: freedom is at best conditional, at worst illusory. An unfathomably important life lesson.

  Most unfathomably important life lessons are imparted on the fly, putting in an appearance during highly-charged emotional moments like romantic break-ups or having taken too many drugs. These unfathomably important life lessons are often too much to take in in the moment and are instead pieced together in the aftermath, upon reflection. However, the thing with getting arrested and locked in a cell is that it gives you time to think about what’s happening while it is happening.

  Nine times out of ten ‘arrested thinking’ will kick off with the same question: why am I locked in this cell? The simple answer is whatever you’ve done, your crime. This is what the police want you to be thinking about. It’s why they leave you in there for hours while they pretend to do paperwork. They want you to make the connection between your actions and your situation. If you hadn’t punched Jerry Hall’s niece on the nose, if you hadn’t posted a blurry photo of the son of the head of Goldman Sachs’ penis to Reddit, if you hadn’t graffitied ‘fuck you’ on a prolific graffiti writer’s front door, then you wouldn’t be here. If you don’t do anything, you can’t get caught.

  If you’re guilty of the crime you’ve been accused of then you’re likely to begrudgingly accept this as true, but it’s a harder rationale to swallow if you haven’t done what you’re accused of and are locked in a cell all the same.

  Next up for dissection is how the matter came to the attention of the police. If you’ve been caught red-handed, apprehended mid-crime, then there’s not a great deal to consider. It’s your own silly fault and you should’ve planned it better. But if (as is the case with every single instance of me being arrested) someone has made a call, an allegation against you, collated a file of evidence, provided your name, your number, your address and email addresses, well then, there’s plenty of meat…

  Knowing you are incarcerated at someone else’s whim spins the whole situation 180. Just think how many bops have landed on schnozzes, the levels of mindless vandalism and all the limp-dicked nonsense that exists online without warranting police attention. No, viewed through this prism of desire, whatever crime you have (or haven’t) committed pales into insignificance; when someone you know brings the police to your door, the one thing you can be sure of is that it is always, always personal. Personal meaning it has less to do with what you’ve done than who you are.

  Bizarre as it may sound, it wasn’t until I started getting arrested on a semi-regular basis that I gave any thought whatsoever to the matter of ‘whoʼ I was. I’d never been in any doubt. I was me. Dur.

  Luckily for me, the police didn’t give it any thought either. The desk sergeant who booked me on my first arrest took one look at me and didn’t even bother to query before marking the ‘SOUTHEUROWHITE’ box. And why should I have corrected him?

  Upon release, I did allow myself a quiet chuckle imagining how differently the arrest might’ve played out if he’d marked the ‘MIXEDOTHER’ option, but my laughter was accompanied by another, less comfortable sensation I found impossible to place. The closest thing I can describe to it is guilt but not the kind of guilt you feel when you’ve done something wrong, the kind of guilt you feel you feel when you know you’ve got away with something that someone else wouldn’t've.

  The reason I’d never thought about who I was comes down to one simple fact: my parents never told me. Insofar as there was any conversation on the topic of where we were from, my dad was Dutch and my mum was English. The End. I doubt my parents’ reticence was intentional. I can’t imagine them sitting down to discuss what to tell or not to tell ‘the kids’, whereas I can picture them making the optimistic assumption that there was no need to talk to their children about things like race because race didn’t matter anymore. This was a widely-held social convention in the 1980s, where pointing out racial differences was considered racist, unlike now, when it’s racist not to. But propping up that social convention was a past compromised by many painful and difficult-to-explain things, as well as plenty of ominous inexplicables.

  Any conversation that might’ve taken place wasn’t the sort of conversation anyone in their
right mind would have with children, their own or anyone else’s. There’s no point explaining famous violences like slavery or the Holocaust to a five-year-old. It’s too confusing, too upsetting, and in a world of bike rides and learning to read, hardly matters. So my childhood began, like so many first-world childhoods before it, in a utopian bubble where I was no different to the Sophies and Lauras surrounding me. But as with any attempt – however well-intentioned – to repress and deny reality, my parents’ blinkered decision to shut their mouths and hope that their mulatto children would default to ‘white’ backfired. The foundations were too shallow, the fault lines too deep.

  A good place to begin is a story my dad still occasionally tells from before my sisters were born. He was holding baby-me in his arms when I peed on him. A childhood event so common in normal circumstance it would barely merit a mention, but in this instance my dad freaked out. Even with a total absence of statistics to go on I’m going to take the bet that the majority of babies over the millennia have peed on their fathers. To most fathers it’s no big deal, sweet even. The way my dad tells it is that he found it challenging. He wasn’t challenged by the realness of it, this was no test sent by the gods. He was being challenged by me. He read it as a throw-down, a gauntlet, me attempting to assert my infantile dominance over him. An insane reaction that it took me years to understand: the reaction of a man who feels like the world is taking the piss.

  The precedent was set.

  It has to be said that, for the most part, my early childhood was pretty groovy. My parents were clever, attractive, in love, lived in a nice flat in a good part of town, had a car. My dad had a job and my mum looked after my sisters and me. We were sent to good schools and went on faraway holidays, with evenings and weekends packed with ballet and swimming and parties and trips. The only fly in the ointment was that every now and then my dad (who, like a lot of little girls, I thought of as my best friend in the world, coveting his approval far more than I did my mother’s) would lose his temper. Never with my mum or my sisters, only with me. I didn’t understand why my dad got so mad at me but then I didn’t really try to, I accepted his bad moods in the way all little children accept the more unpleasant aspects of their parents’ personalities, because they don’t know any different.