Meditations on Malden Road

Crisp cool bonfire smoked air. Cheese salad sandwiches in tiny yellowing shops run by Greek Cypriots. PG Tips. Greasy Spoon fry ups where sunny side eggs, bacon, sausages, onions and fried bread float in a thin film of oil. The sooty scent of the tube. Libraries whose oft-renewed books contain scribbled opinions in the margin. The smell of antique oils and lacquer on the paintings of the National Gallery. The night-time reflection of Big Ben and The Houses of Parliament in the unquiet waters of the Thames seen from Waterloo Bridge. Hampstead Heath filled with dog walking intellectuals on a Sunday Afternoon. Camden Lock bristling with Japanese tourists being sold stuff they think they want by Thai stall holders… It’s impossible not to feel some sense of warmth walking these streets again.

Warmth doesn’t make the best stories. Maybe it would be better to concentrate on the lost boys in their little hoods hiding their teenage anxiety beneath masks calculated to frighten Daily Mail readers. Maybe the bigger stories of London life are the chav boy racers out to kill the world or the overweight mothers screaming at their distressed mixed race offspring. The thing is that, after a sixteen year spell away, I’ve come back to a town that seems better, not worse, than the one I left. All the social ills are just as prevalent as they ever were but there’s something else; something beyond the usual appeal of chauvinism and nostalgia. For the first time ever I’ve come back to London and it doesn’t seem a bad place to be.

I went for a coffee in Starbucks on Haverstock Hill. Amid the cluster of people rabidly writing screenplays on laptops or permanently discussing fictional business propositions on mobile phones you could fit under your fingernail there were all these elegant and beautiful women talking, smiling and looking sweet. An Indian girl brushing hair from her twinkling eyes as she sipped her coffee in a state of sartori. A blonde goddess with Asiatic cheekbones watching the world pass by and breaking into occasional smiles. A couple of women my own age bright and alert talking about history and politics and the nature of reality like characters in a Godard movie. A stunning clear skinned teenage girl with her head buried in a book of Keats. I caught sight of myself in the mirror and I knew I still didn’t quite belong. I carried the moral vacuum of Bangkok expat in my eyes and I knew that nothing could bring me back into the world of Belsize Park nice people. What have I been doing in Bangkok… Well… I slept with an awful lot of prostitutes and got very drunk and saw a bit of horror that I then wrote about as if it was the source of terrific entertainment.

For sixteen years I’ve avoided the mantra that there’s nothing for me back home. The trouble is that my home is fine. London is fine. You can live like shit in London but you can also live this kind of a life. If you have money you can pass from cinemas to theatres to restaurants to galleries and never get the sense that there’s anything wrong at all. It’s a town filled with colour. Much more colour today than it had in 1991. My only problem with London is that for all the wonderful stuff here - stuff which lies at the core of my being, cultural stuff, mutual understanding, depth – it just doesn’t have any use for me. The women here are amazing. Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, French, Italian, South American, Filipinas. Ten minutes walking down the West End of Oxford Street through fragrant food halls of Selfridges to the people jams of Oxford Circus offers you the sight of more beautiful women than you can see anywhere in the world. It’s just that none of them call you a handsome man and invite you to “pay duay”.

Later on I walked along Malden Road; a street I walked home from school along every day for five years. One side of the road has a long seemingly endless ugly council estate scrawled with graffiti, the other side is a long long row of terraced houses in a style that seems somehow unique in the world to North London. I saw a group of kids wearing the same school blazers that I had to wear. I could have been back in the seventies were it not for the fact that North London-ese (an accent that could safely pass for cockney anywhere but in London itself) had been replaced with a bizarre staccato slanguage which seemed boiled down from Hip hop speak, Jamaican and cockney to become something entirely alien. It struck me that these kids would have all been born long after I left the country. Why should they speak any accent I would understand?

While walking I almost walked by Kevin… I couldn’t make his face out at first. He looked old. He looked like life had given him a kicking.

“Oi… Turk… What the fuck do you look like you old cunt.”

“Not as old as you.”

“I in’t seen you in years. What you been up to?”

“You know… Surviving. Spent a year or two abroad.”

“Yeah… Why’s that? Old bill giving you trouble.”

“Please… I’m independently wealthy.”

“Course you are. Fuck me… Man… I thought you was dead…Talking of which… You wouldn’t have heard but…  They found Benny dead a few months back… You remember Benny don’t you? … Been dead three weeks. Nobody knew. Heart attack… Fucking heart attack.”

“Hear attack?”

“Yeah… Makes you think… Seems only a little while ago we was all kids and now we’re old enough to die of heart attacks. You got any family?”

“No… Not me. I wouldn’t want to burden any kid with me as a dad.”

“Know what you mean… I’ve got five kids though. They all live with their mum. I’ve been in and out of nick since I left school so it wasn’t like I was going to get em.”

He got out his wallet and showed me a series of pictures of him and his kids. The oldest one was a teenager. “Tell you what mate… You don’t know what worry is until you’ve got kids.”

He gave me a business card with his telephone number on it and told me I should ring him up and we’d go out for a few drinks. When he’d gone his way and I’d gone mine I felt I’d aged about twenty years.

© Turk Fist. All rights reserved by the author.