Index Error and the City
London I Know How You Feel I Lost My Queen Too
Between her lunch at two in the afternoon and a nap at half-three, a winter arrives in London. The tide lapping against Embankment measures 4 o’clock, cutting the hour in half through the weakness of her stride. It would be six by the time she would get home, and then dinner would take forty-five minutes. Perhaps, given how she felt, she could book in some time for reading, which would leave bedtime at half past eight. It must have been between Queen Victoria Street and Leadenhall when her contemplation would lead her to a pitiful skirmish between a her body and bicycle, aviator-wearing and un-helmeted, and a misinterpreted traffic light. A situation not too dissimilar had occurred a few months ago. Instead of a bike, it was at a train station in South London and a phone call; teetering between precipices and wailing. If it weren’t for the group of sixth-formers who had caught her, there would have been no row between her and that sunglassed man this evening.
It was not that she went through with it, after all, she reminded herself, struck by the vivacity of such a memory, and an awfully reckless one at that. Though, when the amble took her along the arches of Cable Street and the evening darkness had only separated her work and her walking to an hour and a half instead of what could have been surmised to the strangers gaze as a particularly arduous shift by the frailty of her gait and the fraying of her hair, she did think it would have been easier if she had shattered in half.
West
I found myself lost in Mayfair and it was not a comfortable place to be lost at. At 22, all I knew about Mayfair was that it was expensive, and what I knew about expense was that everything seemed to come at a cost of my own.
It had snowed the day before, as pitiful and short-lived as the snow at the beginning of the year gets, and my hands were cold. These shivers acted in obstruction, a feeble attempt of my own body refusing to commit that frivolous and pathetic little action of telling, exaggerating?, to the man I was in love with that I was going to write the next great British novel, though I went and did it anyway, tongue half in my cheek and half not, and he responded promptly questioning what the last one was. He did not ask what it was that I wanted to write about, and the answer I had prematurely, doggedly, rehearsed in my head spoke of myself as defeated: ‘It would be a self-serving story of suicide and the city… a young woman who lives in the greyest/greatest city in the world and drives herself insane enough to perform a perfect home invasion.’ I would never receive the question and he would never get my answer.
I was drawn to Mayfair because I was still drawn to another. The last conversation we had revolved around something about how he was going to resign himself to a job at a blue chip gallery somewhere around Berkeley Square. Truthfully, I had no heart to want to see him, but I felt my own loss in my hands, unwritten in pixels and a cracked screen. My interest, dawdling the gallery area with flimsy knees, was waning. I wondered at the sight of myself, flinching when my reflection would occlude the frames hanging inside. That’s all writing seemed good for, to me, now. It made me want myself further away. It had come to a point where my hands could not bear the bite and I had got myself an oat flat white next to the outdoor area of Sexy Fish. Pret. Two women had ordered themselves a bottle of champagne for a birthday.
Maudlin. Despondent. No amount of January sun could draw whatever I had sunk into myself years before out of me. I was scattered in the reflections of their glasses, sinking heavy into guts. They clinked their flutes and I turned away, gazing at rows and rows of darkened townhouse windows overlooking a private square. I wanted my own private garden. I wanted my own private swing. I wanted to have that before I realised that wants could be private, that they could just be yours. The capital ejects wants, flashes itself all red and blue through the smog with a grin. You can come here and get your desire ripped and thrown onto the floor. This was only a three year reflection after all. I knew, I understood!, I barely met with the tongue of the city and I found myself wanting to be spat out somewhere that it would forget my taste. Could there have been — splitting between the memories I had all riverine in alleys and fingers, tracing my steps down Ruskin Park and a hand-holding fever, you walk in arms and you forget that the city only cares about The Spectacle and not the practice of you, the practice of you that is weak, bucks herself at her knees in front of her image, that is only wanting, only desiring, ungiving and unspeaking and, worst of all, dull! — a moment of my past with the city, as little and inconsequential as all the moments of my studies had been, I was twenty-two and I had nothing so much as a half-degree to define it, that suggested it actually liked my flavour? I doubted I was the type. If London was going to relish anything, it would be him.
Mayfair has historically been London’s high societal apex. Like with most of the nomenclature of the city, the origin of the district is self-historicising. Yes. A fair held in May for the, yes, upper echelons - but really they just mean bachelors - Bridgerton is not that far of a stretch. I am yet to indulge myself in the past of such a place. My interests and, more ostensibly and most unfortunately, my background, navigate me Eastward. David Zwirner. (More West than I would have liked.) Liu Ye. Portraits of Maggie Cheung’s infamous In The Mood for Love adulterer. She is half-turned, a brilliant azure qipao adorned with roses, tentative though unctuous strokes curling the flowers this way and that, encloses the nape of her neck. A dog-eared Miffy. I leave without staying for longer than a quarter of the clock.
My loneliness felt catatonic at times. I was walking in loops around Grosvenor Sq. on two feet though cleaved down the middle. One half of me was clutched in the fist of my Mother and the other half between my teeth to fracture. You could have seen me on all fours. You could have mistaken me for the ash in the wind. I was cavity, an abscess in the most rotten mouth of the world, jaw split and gaping. The way the river cleaves the city, crawls to me.
The nature of her work was such that the only real expense came at those who chanced upon the circumstance of greeting her. Situated a few metres away from the Nth pair of revolving glass doors on [generic CoL street), her cubicle lied at the reception desk where her thighs were pressed so firmly together that the 30 Dernier pair had ladders forming from the base of her buttocks to the underside of her knees. It was not like the skirt provided any favours. The deformity of her character was not to be unnoticed. A wan and wilting concavity of a woman, her best feature was her organisation — exalted in distinction at the guest log-book. The light was graceless at reception and her shirt pressed clean. As according to the agency company that had transferred her candidacy to the imitable linoleum foyer a few hundred meters from Bank’s 6th Exit, the in-house policy was an outright ban on personal memorabilia and any other extraneous flairs of decor. Much of her station had largely gone unused and it’s cleanliness came at a spot of pride for her. It is not like I have much to be prideful for, she would think, and twirl about in her chair. She had committed herself to a lunch that would permit her to walk for the entire half-hour of it, clumsy and flailing, hobbling up and down the street with yellowing Tupperware and ripped stockings. Other foyers were embellished with grander canvasses of mismatched gold leaf dots and sprayed Pollocking acrylic. She thought it would drive her insane to be a host at such a building, how crazy would I get! Having to stare at such silly art all day! Though when she glanced over at the person hunched behind the walls of their desk, and the only evidence of their humanity were the gradient petals of fox-red wrapping themselves loose as the folds of a rose, so brilliantly vermillion at the centre, so audaciously intimate, and ridiculously, irritably, brazenly! out of agency policy, she could not help but wonder what it would be like to receive such a bouquet.
Her romantic life, defined under an agreement with those close to her that it would work through a non-disclosure constraint, came from a pathetic inability to sell herself. She was not sure when the divestment happened but the last sixteen years of her personal affairs were spent in a solitude that made her irritable enough to pity. It was not that matters of the romantic were overlooked by her person, though now she had developed a filthy habit of ending her weekend evenings with late century soft porn and a cold glass of white. ‘‘Matinee Wives,’ 1970, largely unrateable. Not as interesting as written on the Internet. ‘Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama,’ 1988, excellent, busty. Were the bowling scenes chopped and screwed?’ She was anything but a muse herself, lest her shape be more akin to the globules of sand than the hourglass, and musing over the ending of the engagement had been wrung out such that there was nothing left to sift.
If I had any chance of boasting about my wealth (and I mean wealth in my specificity — the languid, lavish time between having to work, which was somnambulant at best when I tried, though that has no recourse as I refused to put myself to a sweat, and having to study a self-fashioned canon of classics, the wealth that meant I could spend my free time, as so often as it was always free, always loose, perusing through the perimeter of galleries encompassing Hanover Square, I loved these luxuries, I knew them, for the very crudest parts of me, as an idea of wealth, the idea of wealth closest to me), it was when I was sat on the yellowed grass of a mound at Italian Gardens up on the Lancaster Gate side of Hyde Park in silence. This was the classic I understood, to carve a space out, in the wealthiest zone of the country, and mimic a part of the continental mainland from the tar just for a pretty place to sit. I had only visited Italy once, the South, Golfi di Napoli, at fourteen. I was somewhere between her midriff and a bite of limoncello sorbet or were they kitten licked together? Couples are slotted into each other underneath the trees here, nearly a decade later, far more careful than the girl I must have been. I remember her being her sweetest then.
I would realise much later her bitterness can only be warranted in the face of such sordid torment, unsuffering, boredom, wan half-smiles, and pity. Sitting here below, watching them move into shapes, lithe and lissom even in the most aged of bodies, I felt their collective weights pull my own being into centre, watching it all unfold in front of my eyes as if a calibration. It was pathetic, minor. My copy of Malina in my hand, dog-chewed with beer, staining of an apple core left in the bottom of my bag, dried out in the heat and contracting in the cold. Nestled in the crevassed space of the Garden’s knoll, the love that exists here appears as vapour and it settles without sound. It would be easier to imagine it in such phantom terms and equally as omnipresent. I was haunted by recollect, and the process of it was obviously, doggedly, pried from my own choosing. It must have taken my thirtieth beeline down Long Acre to plaster over that memory of mine, when tongues were sharper than hands. All rancour and regret.
It had become clear that I was not going to make it very far in the urgent completion of my thesis I had allotted so considerately on a warm spring day at Hyde Park, so the only other option was to drink. On the rooftop at a West London bar. I can smell summer in the air though I am scared of my wanting it. The only time I had spoken aloud in the past few days were garbled between sorries and pints. For the next week, my schedule was to wake up before noon and survive a visit from my parents on Thursday. The fate of my apartment at the time was effectively stolen from me and belonged to the mice, chewing their way through the bread in the morning, and at night running through the collection of my Tabriz rugs gifted by an anonymous stranger. Consequently, the parent’s visit would commence in a Bengali café down the road.
My family had spent two decades in silence: a tradition we revisit in any outing, however big or small. My mother begins mispronouncing all her orders. My father, a strict adherer to the rules of any game, maintains the ritual; gamemaster. My chest was blown apart. I was on my third pack of the week and I had told them I had quit three years ago. The idea of ruining my body is so compelling I yet to unclench the grip fisted around those habits of mine. It was heavy, aching. My father had bought me some groceries that I had not asked for, nor were going to last very long or, in fact, be any useful for someone in the waning days of their final year at university. Before calling the lift, he had asked if I was seeing my friends. We can gather a history that my father never does ask queries of the heart so candidly or, rather, under any circumstances. I answered flippantly, yes, sooner or later, before he left to take the three hour drive back home. The whole consultation must’ve lasted thirty-five minutes. When I got back to my room I cried so violently and told no one at all.
A reluctant commuter, the tube became an uncomfortable mode of defence away from the bite of the cold. Of course, she would much rather walk, the fare is extraneous and greedy, the decline of sensible young gentleman with seat offerings were a horror show to her and, in fact, an offering would not be enough, wouldn’t she rather settle for a shrine? There was a time, long ago, when the man would place his two palms together to form a punnet and so eagerly she would lap up —. March. Her shift ran on twenty six minutes later than she would have liked, so that meant her train would be twenty nine minutes later than normal, and then dinner would have to be served faster, and then this faff, and then all that. The heat of the platform is unbearable. It is a busy hour and her head is so terribly warm, dizzy to a fugue degree, trembling at her knees, which are so haphazardly gauzed in HeatTech. With one swivel, finally facing away the WizzAir Palma offer plastered opposite, she presses her forehead against the tiles of the underground. Hot air soaks the tunnels into damp chambers of lilting breaths and choral sighs. It comes to a lull the moment her skin touches the porcelain and her eyes close. Perhaps, even a few months ago, this would have been a naughty sight. Brazenly out of character, even dirty, the grout had seen better days, but her tension had eased so seamlessly, away from the tenured grasp of those so trained and skilfully passive that maybe, should it exist in the city defined by it’s un-feeling, there might have been someone else - standing on that very platform - who saw her there and lined themselves with compassion. When the tube arrived, a young man was kind enough to offer her a seat. She declined, taking offence to the idea she looked older than she was.
Her house was not so much a refuge than it was a strained agreement extracted on desperation. The volatility of her circumstances would lead her, most candidly and without shame, to call herself a refugee. A lodger, with six months left in her contract until the couple were ready to find fresher (naive and desperate) meat, her room was largely vacant aside from a watercolour postcard of Rodin’s leaning against the bureau so generously gifted from the wife’s great-grandfather. The contract entailed she would only be able to cook in the house between either 5am to 7am or 5pm to 7pm. No eating in her room. Garden access, as shamelessly vast for Zone 2 as it was, lined with an assortment of geraniums and lavender, was only available on the Saturday afternoons of the weekend. Her rent was a little more than half of the city’s average. She affirmed the decision to a simple aphorism: ‘needs must.’ Often describing her living conditions under the metaphor of living under chronic indigestion, it was remedied by the fact the glass was only half-empty. The semi-detached townhouse was beautifully maintained by the leasehold the husband’s family had clutched on for eighty years, an aspect it shared with the rest of the road, coupled with a Mews on one side of the street and a Gardens fitted in the centre. It was so quiet, such was the idea of the curation of the sound-proofed district, and this was a privilege she could scarcely take for granted.
She felt herself as the wealthiest during the evening hours when she had been freshly showered and sitting atop in her bed. Slipping a finger into the zipped pocket of her work purse, she would take her meal deal Twix out and bite one-half in one-half lying on one-half of her double bed. There was nothing that could feel more luxurious.
Author's note: These are the first few pages of the piece. The other postcodes of the city will be posted in due course on a separate website. My email is available here for any other criticism, notes, and/or feedback.