Four Hours Passed Warrington
Written for a new reading night in London called 'New Work'. I read this last night.
In the sky were three layers of clouds; the softest seemed pinned to the top of the hills and the train ran alongside the motorway. Tundra is a word I’ve always loved and never use. And ferns and medieval feelings filled the gorges between the hills and the road; decorated with flat grey houses and sheep spray-painted neon yellow. Sunlight was trapped between my cloud layers and fell onto the ground and the tundra was golden and interrupted by flocks of birds in a way that made me feel like I shouldn’t try to write about it. Everything looks poor and there’s so little of it and it’s also fucking freezing.
Between every field the old roman walls still remained but they were half fallen down and they reminded me of my life: gargantuan effort, shit raw materials, very little capital. Stacking rocks on top of rocks with nothing to hold them together and eventually calling it a wall is pretty pitiful. North to the green now, more tundra, it’s like Alaska: North to the Future (their state motto). Only it’s north to my past. In the corner of every conversation is a place called Warrington where I was born. The reason I always feel a little bit like an un-comfy baby, I have bad cuticles, formerly poor cuticles. I have the cuticles of a poor person; do you understand what I’m saying? Do you know what I mean?
Sometimes, when it rains, I think about all the people I don’t know anymore. When my father died, I was in a car on the M40 driving to Heathrow to get on a flight to see him. It was Boxing Day. My mum hung up the phone in the passenger seat and held it to her chest, my stepdad pulled the car over, and I got out and threw up in the hard shoulder. Then I got back in, and we turned around and went home. A small stream of shallow water runs through the centre of the village we drove back to. Everything is covered in lights. We sat in a pub I’d never been to and haven’t returned to since; at the bar atop red carpet and I had a beer. That’s a lie, I didn’t have a beer, I hate beer. I’ve never wanted enough to seem cool that drinking a pint of bread felt worth it.
When someone does something human it’s right to look away. The man on a date in the corner moved four chairs to perfect compass angles and as his date arrived back at the table, I pictured him using her clit as a button the same way he had been nervously pushing his finger into his nose. For a long time, I was in a relationship with someone who used to stand on my foot very subtly if I tried to walk away from him. And sometimes I think I’m still pinned to that spot. When I first took my seat on this train the man next to me didn’t move his legs at all. The mud caked his trainers and the bottom of his backpack. Racist? I am still pinned to that spot. Rule Britannia started playing - the sound of my childhood spent over enunciating, hiding my prune-coloured underarms, laughing with them - and he got his phone out of his pocket to answer it. Racist.
The sky is dark, and I can see the dirt in everything. You may feel alone but you’re not, a Red Cross sign on a platform in white light. Three layers of reflection exist in the train window and a tiny city of low buildings vibrates on the Perspex. Whenever I’m feeling grand, I remember cities like this. I’m never going back. My voice says I’m never going back. Instead, I have a chronic relationship with dust, it’s very similar to my relationship with chaos, it’s always in the room with me. ‘…And do you know what it feels like hanging out with your fucking friends? Fucking horror, that’s what’ she was screaming down the phone. We’re in the quiet carriage. Do you know what’s funny? Nothing, I thought. Nothing is funny anymore. She wasn’t done though, ‘It feels like having your skin turned inside out and standing naked in a windy desert.’ It’s good to be honest.
Now we’re four hours passed Warrington. I’m looking at a house on a small screen and I know it’s filled with ugly art. And as the world gets older, I’m more and more surprised by how ugly everything is. When I imagine tomorrow, I wake up in the arctic circle only it’s Shoreditch. It never gets light. And the tube’s becoming more and more like the subway, a moving, breathing box of austerity. ‘Hello, I’m tired, I’m hungry, I’m homeless, can you help me, any change, can you help me? Sir... Sir’. Check your phone, check it again, and again and again until the world has ended and all that remains is a vacuum of all the things we haven’t said to each other.
Rivers of rain travel hurriedly but staccato along the train window from the top right corner to the bottom left. Some of them meet and I am so glad when one gets to become a tributary, forever guided by the direction of another. I have also come to resent my own autonomy.