Getting To Know Your Town

Adventures in the Otherworld III: Getting to Know Your Town

At certain points I can feel time blowing through me. Walking down
irritable, sun-parched streets I can feel the accumulated weight of
history making a path through my body. Upon noticing the angle of a
wall, the width of a window, a tree root overturning paving stones with
slow but determined force, I am suddenly present at all points in time.
It feels like I have always been here, watching the bogs drain, the
first settlements constantly fighting with chaotic nature, horse drawn
carriages and cowed men and women, buildings growing, swarming with
workers as quick as ants.

When I was on the dole the first time I slept through the day and
would spend hours at night walking deserted streets kicking leaves and
watching the lights of cars that hissed through the night. I saw so few
people in my life that I began to think that I was somehow invisible,
that other people could not see me. I felt like a shadow or a gust of
wind at best, some small detail of nature but undifferentiated from all
the other tiny unnoticed things. Untouched by people I had become part
of the city, meshing with it, whispered to by trees and included in the
secret humming of streetlamps. Somehow it felt that walking the grey
concrete was like stroking my own skin, like I was exploring within me,
my brain strewn with chip papers, its alleyways stinking of piss, my
dreams haunted by the flap of plastic bags caught in scrawny
bushes.

This feeling grew and grew in intensity as the days grew less and less
distinct, impossible to remember whether a letter arrived five minutes
ago or months back, every day a variation or repetition of the same
theme. I would count time in the fortnights between signing on. Months
would seem to pass drinking tea or obsessively writing and rewriting
the same page of notes.

During the times that I did have interaction with people, the
purchasing of cigarettes or second hand books for example, I began to
notice that people seemed to be able to see me less. Being handed my
change in the newsagent, the woman would become vague or confused,
forgetting what I said or needing prompting to hand the cigarettes
over. If you have ever seen a fox run at night it seems to cease to be,
becoming a blur of light and shadow, simply a notion of movement, only
solidifying into an animal when it stops. I began to wonder whether I
appeared like that, not quite there, indistinct, refusing to resolve
into a fixed image.

The city seemed to accept this, wreathing me with shadow, surrendering
hidden parts and altering others. Walking through a group of nineteen
thirties semis, sash windows, privet hedges and wooden garages, stained
glass designs above the doors, I could see the bunting red and white
strung across the road from window to window, trestle tables filled
with cakes and neat sandwiches, welcome home V.E. Day signs and banners
hanging on red brick. I could see boys and girls in cardigans with
scuffed knees and leather shoes, riding bikes and skipping, father
besuited and dragging the smell of hair oil behind him as he strides up
the path, closing the white painted gate behind him. I would see and
feel this all in an instant, merely turning the corner or crossing a
road. It was in no way nostalgia or a wish for times gone by, just a
sudden blast of awareness.

Streets and streets of terraced houses, boarded up, graffitied, debris
on the pavement quiet and cold, sung with dreams and life and
arguments. I could smell the early morning cigarettes and coughs;
collars turned up against the foggy air and hear the swish of skipping
ropes against the tarmac. Inside I felt the dying struggles of parts of
the city as they fought valiantly to survive, lights winking out behind
net curtains, the roads rotting, parks turning to rubbish and
mud.

I found myself becoming fascinated by the juxtaposition of old and
new. The ancient institutions, brick black and crumbling, giving the
impression of attempting to return to the earth, overlooking the soft
and faceless new development, all mock Tudor fronting and rosy bricks,
the Edwardian house facing the glass and stark lines of new offices. It
was as the more I concentrated on my surroundings the less I could
reinforce myself, I had begun to lose my sense of being. If I forgot
about myself then others would do so also, with nothing to pull me into
being I was disappearing. Everyday without human contact was a day
closer to disembodiment. I was becoming a spectre, gaunt and noiseless,
doomed to wandering.

As time went on, the quality of my experience began to change. Rather
than the hopeful exploration and escape I had possessed so far, my
passage through the city began to take on the aspect of a fever dream
or a vision. The city seemed to be unscrewing itself before me,
unafraid of the impression it would make. The revelations it imparted
were not enriching or welcome anymore, but dangerous. I found myself
walking around Jesmond, the most expensive area of Newcastle, with its
comfortable houses and its wide streets criss-crossed with railway
lines and iron bridges, spending hours stood staring into windows.
Beyond curtains and artfully placed potted plants I was tortured with
everything I did not have. In the high ceilinged rooms filled with
books and conversations I would see the poverty of my own cramped life.
My body would ache to stretch out in one of those specious rooms. I
would dream of living in a house where I could not touch the ceiling
while standing on the floor.

Standing in one of those wide, empty, tree lined streets, quiet but for
the scuttle of leaves down the gutters, face bathed in warm light from
a well adjusted living room I would marvel at the luxury of space. The
poor are forced always to live in the pockets of others, so close that
every action builds up static against someone else until suddenly the
discharge explodes bringing violence and anger and fear. I would watch
the children of well-off parents striding out of their houses,
comfortable in the world, laughing as they swung their arms. It was
lucky they never noticed the sweating, pale figure hunched around a
cigarette stood on the pavement.

The more I was drawn to these streets with their Victorian tennis
courts and antique shops and delicatessens, the more I realised why
they elicited such a strong response of envy and an almost wistful
sense of loss. Under the orange streetlamps, coughing at privet hedges
and shining cars in driveways I realised what richer areas lacked, why
the weight of anxiety and fear did not rest on the shoulders of the
children of these houses.

There was no sense of chaos.

These were streets that had remained constant for years, the only
changes coming through choice or volition of those living there. Money
kept these streets and maintained them.

In the areas where I grew up the streets and people were subject to
all forms of alteration because there is no insulation of money. Above
a certain level of income, housing is seen as a pleasure, a choice of
lifestyle and surroundings. For those of us below that level it is a
problem, both on a personal and governmental level. We do not have the
means to make and choose our surroundings; we are subject to our lives
needing to be solved. A house stops someone being homeless but a house
needs only four walls and a roof. In the places where the windows are
smaller and the roofs less elegant, life is not seen to be concerned
with quality but is merely the opposite of death. As such, people
survive, but no-one cares at what cost.

In poorer areas people are at the mercy of economics and politics and
all of the changes they bring. Looking at the landscape of where I grew
up, I saw they way it changed, died, altered and mutated like cancer,
every tiny change leaving scars etched into both the streets and the
faces of the people who walk them. Unemployment, deprivation,
exclusion, inner city regeneration and decay, all words in the
newspaper in Jesmond, were acted out in other places, noticeable in the
way people moved about the street or even the colour of their eyes.
Estates were built and pulled down, shops opened then boarded up,
industrial estates would sit empty of industry and schools and council
offices and community projects would go blank and begin to collect
empty beer cans and used condoms. Different styles and purposes of
buildings were piled on top of each other like collage, while places
like Jesmond remained constant, protected by the ever-present flow of
capital. It was this pulse that kept it healthy and well, even if one
household became poorer there were always others to climb up their
backs. I suppose what hurt and what drew me there again and again was
the knowledge that these people could become us if they wanted or when
something went wrong, but we could only walk their streets and dream.
They had space and choice and mobility. We had stasis and anxiety and
impotence.

From this realisation onward my relationship with the city changed.
Previously it had simply existed, like a tundra or canyon, something to
be explored. Now it had become the creation of people, the stage on
which lives were lived and acted out, the hand that was shaped in turn
sculpting the sculptor. The city ceased to be a landscape and became
something dynamic, a complex language, a living thing, a subconscious
from which behaviour sprang and was played out in.

I began to notice things that I did not or would not see before. I
suppose at first I had been taken with an idealism, like the imperial
explorer, chronicling and codifying data while aloof from it, the city
like some unexplored province ready to open up its secrets but
remaining alien and exotic. Now I realised the city was not inert but
plastic and amorphous and that in no way could I be an uninvolved
observer. The city had now begun to mirror my emotions and I became
susceptible to its. By emotions I mean the effect that areas and
buildings have on those who frequent them, mere angles or spacings, the
colour of a door frame or the width of a road all contributing to an
over all feeling or sensation. I was now organically involved like a
flower or insect, in symbiosis with my surroundings.

As my days became more shapeless and purposeless, floating free
without the constraints of contact with other people to moor them, so
my walks became more and more deranged. I would purposefully now
attempt to lose myself, to become a random and chaotic thing. I begun
to really believe that no one could see me. Without the constraint of
constant observation by others I began to pick up weird ticks and
mannerisms. I constantly talked to myself and sung, sat down on curbs
and garden walls scribbling notes to myself onto grubby pads, sometimes
jumping the cracks, other times seeking them out, whirling around and
around in the centre of empty car parks, other times splashing through
puddles or sitting for hours observing the comings and goings in A+E
departments or Chinese takeaways. Suddenly everything in the city was
suffused with importance and a need to be seen and understood. I wanted
to see and understand everything, to make some kind of breakthrough, to
bring myself back, to put some kind of reason to my wandering. The more
I tried to bring sense, though, the more jagged and cropped the images
I collected, like some colossal montage.

Everyday I began to ache with emptiness. I would desperately look
around me for people that I knew or had known or could know. In the
times when I did manage to make it out before dusk I had the
disconcerting experience of being passed by on busy streets by people I
had known. They looked the same as they had at school, had I altered
that much? My insides would go numb and my limbs weak as they hurried
past, my eyes misted and fogged.

Around this time I began to go and sit in pubs waiting for something,
anything, to happen. I wasn't drinking at that point and would sit for
centuries at sticky bars nursing a Coke, watching the swirls and eddies
of people moving like cigarette smoke across the dirty
floorboards.

I hadn't drunk for about two and a half years after watching my
parents sink further and further into a fug of Vodka and dodgy spirits
smuggled by shift truck drivers. I had drunk heavily before and had
found myself in situations where I couldn't function as I should have.
I still feel an aching, sick sadness at the phone calls with sobbing at
the other end interspersed with the crackle of line static, me sat on
the stairs in the dark at the phone, unable to say anything but sorry.
I had begun to hate and fear drunken people, with their hazy concern
and soul bearing and violence and stuttering egocentrism. I had even in
dark, lost times thought about blowing up pubs, or covering them with
graffiti telling people to listen to others around them who need them,
and stop hiding away.