My London

Like the poet William Blake from two centuries ago I see much of the same. In the dead of winter with the weather unable to make up its mind whether it’s day or night, I pass Samila in the Boris bike lane on Stratford High Road, pushing his Lidl shopping trolley with its argumentative wonky wheel, muleing all his worldly belongings.

Samila was once a brave child soldier caught up in an African conflict over some oil rights, but now his past is locked away in a dark vault in his mind never to be shared. Nervous and homeless he finds his self in East London. He does not move fast now, just a snail’s pace; he has only got one leg. He lost his right one after clumsily treading on a landmine, but his left leg can get his aching body to the cheap offy for some much needed relief, cans of what ever this week’s special offer is.

As he enters Mr. Patel’s “Cans for Cash” off license, he is greeted with the usual, “Goody morning Mr Samila, hope God is blessing you today?” Mr. Patel then informs him that the police are cleaning up the area before the Olympics begins and have already rounded up a gang of petty criminals, the impoverished political graffiti artists.

They were the same ones who Samila would get drunk with under the bridge by the canal. Who had not a sniff of finding any kind of job, not even with one with a zero hours’ contract. He was going to sadly miss the tag gang, killing time with them, smoking their wacky baccy on the cobbles by the canal, with the smell of piss and vomit forever present.

Samila may have lost the tag gang, but there were still the local teenage prostitutes who had befriended him. The ones with mottled complexions no more than school age, runaways and wage refugees who had came to London to better their selves. They are not your cool Mayfair call girls these are your bargain bucket hookers, cheap and cheerful from the East.

The next morning after a productive night’s work, the girls passed Samila a fiver, then arranged to meet up with him in the afternoon, near the rat infested drain that spews into the canal, the one with the nauseating smell. It’s here at their sanctuary they would shoot up sharing dirty needles, there’s no need for health and safety here. Is there? After a night of sex with clients old enough to be their fathers they would chill, have a laugh, but it would only be a sticking plaster over their otherwise monochrome lives.

By the canal they would sit on the embankment amongst the dirt and grime, never visited by the army of corporate cleaners who kept the nearby Westfield shopping centre floors as clean as any operating theatre. Wearing their counterfeit Adidas sports clothes they could see the Olympic stadium, an arena of sport and hope. But what was their legacy to be, a few more discarded Marks and Sparks plastic bags polluting their canal, from the new corporate Westfield shopping mall that accompanies the Olympic Stadium.

When they looked right from the Olympic Cathedral they saw Valentines church, but they couldn’t see the love of the Almighty. They may be able to see one another, but in the eyes of God and society they were invisible. Being illegal immigrants they do not have the luxury of the welfare state, no job seekers allowance for them and as for God, he only seems to favour the clean and the rich who visit his church.

That afternoon as Samila was heading for the canal passing the “Cans of Cash” offy, Mr Patel called out, “Goodness gracious me, we are going to be very clean, the police have arrested those young prostitute ladies; the courts plans to lock them all away!”

Samila sat by the pungent, stagnant canal that was much like his life right now, with only his cans of bargain beer for company. Not even Chloe for company, the hooker’s baby who he would baby-sit for from time to time. The same one that was always ill, always being sick down his lager stained jacket. Sitting there Samila decides tonight with his last fiver, the girls’ fiver, he will treat his self to a lovely bottle of counterfeit vodka with its erroneous label, from the dodgy guys with the Eastern European accents.

At twilight Samila bedded down for the night under the bridge in the corner away from the biting wind. From here he could just glimpse the City, a sea of high rise buildings, monuments to the global ecomomy. It’s here where sharp minds, in sharp suits cocooned in plush corporate chairs manipulate deals, whilst practicing their art of making money. Samila asked his self if they ever looked through their smoke tinted windows down at the outside world, where they are displaced from the every day world, with its ever day people? I must look very small from up there!

His thoughts then left the City to his world, to his plan to comfort himself from the drudgery of his brutal cold environment with his only friend, a bottle of numb juice. As he took his first sip of his rusty tasting vodka, he could see the only lamplight along the canal. In the distance the dim lamp started randomly to flicker caused by a dilapidated electrical connection, it was as if it was relaying a message in Morse code, “Save our Souls.” The lamp continued to flicker until Samila had finished the very last drop of his juice, then as Samila looked up at light the soft glow from the lamp slowly gave up and died.