by Lee Rourke
She addressed him only.
“Do you remember me?”
There was a long pause.
He looked at the woman next to him, then back at her, then back at the woman. He looked nervous, rubbing his thumb into the palm of his hand. The woman’s eyes began to narrow and her whole face started to contort. He looked back up at her.
“Er … I’m … afraid … I’m afraid I don’t, sorry. Er … Have we … Should I?”
“You tell me.”
“I’m sorry, I’ve never seen you before in my life. I fear you may have mistaken me for another person, someone else in your life … I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sorry? That’s all you can say? Sorry? Don’t you remember me at all?”
“I’m sorry, but no, I clearly don’t. I clearly don’t remember you from anywhere, I have never seen you before in my life. Now, we were having a private conversation. I’m sorry, but …”
“So, you just want to leave it like that?”
“If you don’t mind, I’d rather, yes.”
“No. I want you to tell me who I am. I want you to tell me who I am. You have to tell me.”
“I’m sorry, but I seriously have no idea. Can you please leave us alone now?”
“No. Do you not remember who I am?”
“No, I do not. I have never set eyes on you before in my entire life. You have clearly mistaken me for another person. Please leave us alone.”
I was beginning to feel more than ill at ease with the whole situation. The bored waitress behind the counter was leaning on her elbows, chin in palms, looking over toward them, smiling, happy to be watching the burgeoning spectacle before her, happy, at last, that something was eventually happening that day. I remember uttering the word ‘no’ twice, but it went unheard in the ensuing mêlée. I watched as she threw the glass of water over him, the plates crashing to the floor, breaking into shards and fragments, scattering across the tiles into far-flung corners of the café. The blonde woman’s deafening scream nearly burst my eardrum. The man, now soaked, his white shirt sticking to his skin, rose to his feet and pushed her to the floor. She immediately jumped back to her feet and continued her attack, swinging for his face, trying to pull his hair and scratch his cheeks. The other woman began to fight back, too, holding her, leaning over the table to grab her flailing arms, knocking it over in the process. More screaming and shrieking enveloped the room.
“You do remember me. You do remember me. You do remember me. You do remember me. You do remember me. You do remember me.”
And as soon as it had began it was over. She ran out of the café, turning right, up St. Peter’s Street towards Essex Road. I pulled some money from my pocket, I have no idea how much, but it was more than enough to cover what we had ordered. I left it on the table and I ran out after her, leaving the man and the woman from the whitewashed office block and the bored woman behind the counter to clear up the mess. I ran after her. I could see her, running erratically, people stopping to watch, to ask her if she was okay, as she made her way, clumsily up towards the busy Essex Road. I shouted after her. She continued to run away, heading for wherever it was she was heading. All I could do was follow her, up towards the Essex Road. As I drew nearer I could hear her sobs. When she stopped at the top of St. Peter’s Street with the junction of Essex Road she looked frantically from her left to her right, over and over again. Essex Road was, as usual, unbelievably busy, and she was clearly unsure of which way to go. I shouted to her. Passers-by in the street turned to look; cyclists and people in parked cars, people sitting outside cafés. As I finally got to her I reached out to put my hand on her shoulder. She turned to face me, screaming as if I was trying to attack her. I immediately let go of her and she wriggled free and, without looking, ran straight into the road. The number 38 bus screeched to a shuddering halt, throwing many of its crammed-in passengers, who were standing by the doors and in the aisles, to the floor. I could hear screams and much shouting. The bus was inches from her. The whole of Essex Road had stopped doing whatever it was it was doing and everything was focussed on her, standing in the middle of the road, facing the number 38 bus. She began to laugh, running to the other side of the road. I stayed opposite her and began to walk. I acted like I wasn’t with her, like I was a spectator, but everyone within the vicinity knew that we were together. I followed her once more as she continued to run, this time with quickening, assured footfalls, with purpose and determination. When I had walked far enough away from the initial scene in the road I too began to run. I ran as quickly as my legs and body could carry me, after her, on the opposite side of Essex Road to her. Heading up towards Balls Pond Road.
It was a Saturday morning. I must have been in my early twenties. I was with an old companion whom I have since lost touch with. She was older than me and was taking me to a new shop in Soho she wanted to visit that sold expensive, designer underwear. We boarded the bus on Balls Pond Road. As soon as I stepped on board I knew something was wrong. The driver was glaring at me. He held out his hand suddenly, beckoning me to stop. I waited, thinking that a young mother, or an elderly lady needed to get on the bus before me. I turned around: four regular-looking passengers were waiting there, the driver asked them on board before me with nothing, as far as I could see, that suggested they should each receive preferential treatment over me. My friend was waiting for me upstairs. I waited patiently until the four ordinary passengers had paid their fare.
“Excuse me …”
“Yes?”
“Why did you just halt me to let other people on before me?”
“You know why?”
“Pardon?”
“I said … you know why.”
“What do you mean?”
“I said you know why?”
“What!”
“Last night …”
“Last night?”
“Yes.”
“What?!”
“I remember you from last night … You were on my bus …”
“Last night? I wasn’t!”
“Yes, you were!”
“I wasn’t … I didn’t even get a bus last night.”
“Don’t fuck around with me! I’m calling the police. It was you who spat at me. Last night, as you were all leaving, after I asked you all to leave my bus for harassing passengers …”
“Look here, I have no idea whatsoever what it is you are talking about. I didn’t get on a bus last night.”
“Don’t fuck with me. I’m phoning the police …”
“I’m not fucking with you, I’m telling the truth …”
“I’m phoning the police.”
“Why!? Why!? Why!? What have I done? I just want to get on your bus!”
“Right. I’m radioing the depot right now … H-H-H-Hello … Y-Y-Yes, Okay, I need the police, I am the driver of …”
The driver proceeded to inform the depot of his exact whereabouts the previous night when the alleged incident, supposedly involving me, took place. He described me to the person on the other end of the line. I realised that he could have been trying to frighten me, though, as some act of revenge or something. After the phone call he turned back to me. People started to grumble and complain. His face grew redder with each second that passed us by.
“Listen, here, get off my fucking bus! If you get off my bus now the police won’t arrest you. Get off my fucking bus …”
I realised his call to the depot had indeed been faked.
“No. It’s my right as an innocent person to remain on this bus …”
“If you don’t get off my bus this instant I will turn off the engine and no one will go anywhere …”
“Turn it off … I’m going nowhere.”
He turned off the engine.
The entire bus became silent.
Then, when the passengers had finally realised what was happening, everything seemed to erupt: a cacophony of anger and hatred. All it took was the
silence; the sense that things had stalled.
The passengers’ shrill voices cut into me.
“Get off!”
“Get off the bus, you fool!”
“Get off! I need to be somewhere!”
“Now!”
“Leave, fuckin’ innit!”
“I’ll throw you off if you don’t move!”
“Get off now!”
As all this was happening, the driver stepped out of his cabin. He was small and stocky with a low centre of gravity. He gripped me by the collar, and in one swift move managed to open the emergency exit and throw me off the bus and onto the pavement. I noticed my friend, halfway up the stairs to the upper deck, looking down at me. Before my friend could get off the bus the driver shut the door, started up the engine and resumed his journey. I can still remember each face, peering down through the window as the bus trundled away from me, bathing me in its rotten fumes.
It was at that moment, there on the cold pavement, that I realised I was ordinary and not destined for great things.
- ten -
We were at the top end of Essex Road, near to Balls Pond Road. She suddenly turned right, heading east into De Beauvoir Town. The traffic was noisy, that incessant London drone. Gaggles of scooterists were hogging the road, reviving their hairdryer-like engines at the lights, cutting corners and generally terrifying any pedestrians who attempted to cross the road before them. Some took particular delight in inching forwards, as if attempting to mow one down, as people crossed at the pelican crossing. The road seemed to be filled with them, buzzing about like swarms of angry wasps without a care in the world. It was completely depressing.
I’ve never wanted to hang around in packs. Even when I was at the age I was supposed to, and my friends ventured off to Highbury to watch the Arsenal every other weekend, I would make my excuses until they eventually stopped asking me.
She had stopped running and was walking along quite slowly now, naturally puffed and out of breath. She stopped a couple of times to stroke a cat that had been following her; a small tabby cat that looked undernourished, though probably wasn’t—being as most domesticated cats are overfed and quite fat. She crouched close to it, down to the ground, the cat looking up, circling her, rubbing its scent glands against her shins, lifting up its tail, exposing its anus for her to sniff, to inspect, to classify DNA, then falling to the ground, rolling onto its back in complete and utter submission.
I stopped walking and rested by a garden wall to watch. She obviously knew I was there, watching her and the cat, but she didn’t once acknowledge my presence behind her.
The cat soon trotted away, content with itself, as an Islington Refuge Collection van pulled into the street, its pack of binmen it contained quickly scurrying in and out of gardens, rummaging around for black sacks of rubbish. The cat fled quickly, down into a basement flat’s front garden—if you could call it that—and out of the way.
Again, she began to walk, although she set off with a little bit more purpose this time. It seemed she had finally decided where it was she wanted to go. I naturally presumed she was going home, back to the safety of her flat, but she turned immediately right onto Southgate Road, heading in the direction of the canal again. It made perfect sense to me: she had to find somewhere she could feel anonymous, where she could observe and become invisible—where she could belong. I followed her along Southgate Road, past the Northgate Pub and the small cluster of shops next to it. The canal wasn’t that far away.
- eleven -
I was beginning to realise that I had lost control—what little of it I had had in the first place, that is. No—that I had never had control. Boredom had left me behind, I had succumb to its weight, its unheard-of centre within me. I had embraced it and it had completely consumed me and now I was bored of it. I was bored of boredom. There was nothing I could really do about this. I was like everyone else: I needed something to fill the gap, the time that dragged us, and it, along with it, to return me to the ground beneath my feet and hide away from our gaping hole like everyone else. Who was she to me? Why was she suddenly in my life? Was she there to serve as some warning? Revealing all to me? Everything that isn’t really there?
- twelve -
Following her along Southgate Road, as I did, seemed real to me, like I was snapping back from a daydream, or some unknowable space outside of myself. As we neared the canal things began to focus within me again; things became normal as we drew near to its space—the only space we could exist together within, where things started, at the boundary of Hackney on Islington, on the canal, by the side of the rusting iron bridge that connected everything.
I was standing by the site of the old Thomas Briggs factory, near where the old gates still stood, the last remnants of the old bell still visible, Factory carved, imperiously into the gnarled masonry beneath it. On the many times I would pass it by I would always make a point of touching it, pressing into it, where the button for the bell used to be (which had long since gone), trying to imagine the factory workers queuing outside each morning, or streaming through the open gates of an evening after a hard shift with the machines and the clatter, and the toil. The area where the old factory stood is called Rosemary Gardens, and nearby stood two pubs—one now converted into a house—where there used to be cockfighting and, much later, trips in an air balloon that used to be tethered there. It’s also the site were the Levellers were first formed: the radical left-wing movement of the seventeenth century whose members wore a sprig of rosemary in their hats at their meetings, held in an old alehouse that once stood on that site. The remaining pub—The Rosemary Branch—is named in honour of them. The whole area, a nondescript place to most people, holds huge historical significance. Yet people will merrily walk by it without a care in the world. Upstairs in the Rosemary Branch is a small theatre. One evening I got to talking to a young actress at the bar. She was starring in some production there. I remember her staring out of the window and seriously ask me: ‘How does one get anywhere from here? We’re in the middle of nowhere.’ I wanted to explain to her everything I knew about Rosemary Gardens. I wanted to say to her that things didn’t revolve around her, that things had already happened many times over in that very spot. But I didn’t. I sipped my drink and listened to her ignorant nonsense.
I could smell the murky water of the canal emanating up onto the road where it ran parallel with the canal for two-hundred yards or so before stopping—Southgate Road, that is—at New North Road, the canal carrying on down towards Islington.
She stopped. She was standing by the Rosemary Branch.
The murky water took on a different stench up there by the road, less pungent, less silty. It had mixed with the exhaust fumes and transformed into something else, machinelike, industrious, something old tainted by a new age.
She was looking out over the canal, her back turned to the Rosemary Branch, out towards Hoxton and the City, farther out towards the Swiss Re building, Tower 42, and the newer skeletal structures in progress appearing here and there—newer buildings about to tower over the London skyline en masse, continuing its progress, an unremitting vista of cranes and building sites, scaffolding and pollution, sprawled in all its vulgarity, ugliness, and beauty before her.
I stopped and waited for her to walk across the road and take the steps down to the canal. She seemed to be frozen, as if every atom within her had stopped sparking. The traffic trundled by in both directions between us, a line of cars in one direction, some cyclists and a number 76 bus in the other. Behind her, to her left, stood the old Gainsborough Studios where Hitchcock had made a few of his films. The whole building was now expensive flats, though in the courtyard lies an impressive sculpture of him in honour. I raised my eyes up above her and looked at the top row of flats. In the end flat, over-looking the canal, I could see a man and a woman standing on their balcony,. They were facing each other, both, it seemed, wearing white bath robes. The woman was gesticulating frantically; the man was quite passive. They were
both completely unaware that they could be seen. The man held his head to his hands after a short while and then lurched forwards, placing each hand on her shoulders, hoping to calm her down it seemed, but this action only served to enrage her further. She stepped back and ran into the flat, out of view. She was screaming at him, I could catch it briefly during the short breaks in the traffic. Then she ran back out onto the balcony; she was still screaming and gesticulating wildly. The man had now sat down at the table and chairs they had up there, so all I could see was her: her arms, windmill-like, flailing, forming a circular mass around her body. Then she stopped. She pointed towards him and stopped screaming. He suddenly rose to his feet, becoming visible to me again. He stepped towards her and attempted to embrace her again. She pulled away, back into their expensive flat, leaving him there. He leant over the balcony, resting on his elbows, his head in his hands again, staring down to the canal below.
When I looked back she had gone. At first I panicked, my heart skipping a number of beats. I swallowed my breath and looked for her about the road frantically. Then it hit me again: she was going back there to see him, to watch him. She was going back to the canal, like I always knew she would.
I’ve often thought that we seek reality in places and not in ourselves. These places can be anywhere we like them to be: a desert island, the beach, a nightclub, in the arms of a lover in a far-off land, rock climbing, up in the clouds, down in the depths of the deepest ocean, in space—ultimately in space. These places, this space, can be anything we want it to be. We need things, extra things that help us to make sense of it all; we need the space where things can happen, where these spaces can become a thing—it is only at that point, when space becomes a thing to us, that we truly feel real.