WHELMING

Empty shelves, stripped bed, blank desk. Outside, builders clatter noisily on the construction site. Clouds hover over the concrete factory. The train line hums disconsolately. I take a photo of the room the way I’m leaving it. Just the way I’d found it. Barren.

It was a box when I arrived, it’s a box now I’m going, and it was nothing but a box the whole year. Fuck it.

__________

One month. 

‘These will be the best years of your lives!’ the president of the Students’ Union exclaims excitedly from the stage, arms spread wide in the climactic moments of her welcome speech to new students. We all applaud.

__________

Two months. 

The sink is blocked, and it’s my fault.

Last night, my attempt to use a pint glass to transfer the scummy water from the basin to the toilet, followed by ten minutes spent stabbing a fork fitfully into the plughole, had completely failed to get rid of the sick clogging the drain. The inevitable result of an evening spent in a Soho bar, waterboarding my doubts with cheap lager and shots.

The maintenance man pokes his head around the door.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi…’ I say sheepishly, ‘we’ve got a blocked sink’.

‘It’s a hand basin’ he says with a smile, in gently accented English, entering the kitchen with a tray of tools.

‘Sorry?’

‘Everybody calls it a sink, but it’s not. A sink is in your kitchen. In the bathroom…it’s a hand basin’

‘Uh, ok’

He takes a cursory glance at the hand basin and gets to work, completely unfazed. My mumbled apologies about how it had got into this state trail off feebly in the face of his merry pragmatism, and I hover awkwardly in the bedroom doorway. 

‘This, no problem! I can sort this quick! So, what are you studying?’

‘Politics and philosophy’

‘Oh yes? You want to be a politician?’. He pulls the bag out of the bathroom bin, and places the cylinder under the U-Bend.

‘No, not really…’

‘Why not? It is a good job!’

‘Well… I guess it’s, uh… stressful, and…’ I completely fail to explain my reasons. Partly, my head is telling me to lie down and do no thinking at all. Partly I’m taken aback to meet an ordinary person who thinks that being a politician would be a good – perhaps even an honourable – thing.

He unscrews the U-bend, and a litre of disgusting water splashes into the bin.

‘So… why are you doing this course then? Don’t keep doing it if you’re not enjoying it.’

Damn. Within two minutes, he’s compressed as many months of dilemma into an obvious ultimatum: enjoy it or stop. He has me all sussed out. And he’s unblocked the sink. Hand basin.

‘My parents, they never tried to work out what I was good at’ he continues, flushing the contents of the bin down the toilet, and cleaning it out. ‘I love my job!’ he smiles, ‘but, I could have been an accountant – I could always do maths in my head very well – or I could have been manager. But I love this job, one hundred percent! In this job, I make people happy.’

He pauses to fix my gaze. ‘A girl comes back from classes, very tired, and her shower is broken. I go, and I mend it, and the smile, when she can have the shower she wants, that is worth so much. There is nothing more important in this world than making people happy. It is the best feeling’. He grins broadly.

I stand there, while he wipes the floor with paper towers pulled from the pocket of his cargo trousers. Happiness is helping other people. A cliché, but difficult to dismiss on those grounds when it’s being shared with you by a man who spends his days unblocking people’s U-bends.

‘Where are you from?’ I ask.

‘Armenia!’

‘I’d like to visit there. I like mountains…’

The words feel lame as they leave my mouth. ‘Like’ is not what I mean to say.

‘Oh yes! The mountains! You’ll find the people very hospitable too! But I live here for 25 years now… and I do miss the mountains. But…’ he pauses in what he’s doing, and looks at me ‘what do you like?’

‘I like writing’

‘Ah yes, I love to write as well. At my age, sometimes things just come to you. So, I just open up my notebook, and write a few lines…” he smiles shrewdly, “and then, I don’t write anything more for a long time, until I have something else to write. Writing is special… you can give somebody something valuable, from your head to theirs, just through the words you use.’

I slouch against the doorframe, staring at a man who seems, at this moment, to know the whole world inside and out. ‘And you can make a lot of money too, you know’ he grins, ‘if you sell one million, and you get one pound from each book!’. Inside and out.

He picks up his tray of tools. ‘Have a nice day!’

‘Thank you so much, that’s great, cheers, yeah’ I trip over myself to try and convey how much I’ve appreciated his presence.

‘Goodbye!’

The door clicks shut.

__________ 

Four months.

‘So, how’s it all going down there!?’

The question is posed with a knowing smile and an indulgent tilt of the head by everyone I meet while at home for the winter break, keen as they are for an update on ‘London Life’. My heart sinks just a little each time, as I summon up a return smile. ‘Yeah, it’s going alright thanks!’.

‘Alright’, and ‘pretty good’ are about as much as I can manage without downright lying.

‘And how are you finding living there? Must be different for you!’

‘Oh, you know…’ I bob my head in a non-committal way ‘it’s a challenge, yeah. I’m not used to it...’

I can never summon the words. It would be easier if I had something to scapegoat: ‘It’s going great! But one of my lecturers is awful’, ‘it’s amazing! Except that I have a roommate I hate.’ People understand those things. They get it. But how do I say, in as simple a way as will fit into a passing conversation, the dull, heavy pain of being out of place?

I feel ill in the city. Lost in my own head. Ungrounded, wandering in unmotivated nothingness, sliding past the lives of thousands of people who seem to understand something I don’t about how to live here. Do I run on some different kind of fuel to them all? Everybody is in a terrible rush to get where they’re going, to do what they’re doing. Life is a constant emergency. I see a complex game that I can only play at loosely, but seem to have been swept into the middle of. My emotions don’t stick here. My thoughts feel frayed, my mind worn away by the all-consuming forces of function and purpose. A few trees forcing their way out of the twisted concrete is not enough. I need space around me. More space. The city feels brutal, coarse, sprawling, choking. It breeds futility in me.

Who would choose clawing fumes over a biting wind? Who would leave high uplands and an untiring sky for crude slabs of steel, concrete and noise?

I did.

__________

Five months.

I bring teabags and a mug back to London with me from the north, so I can try and find home in a cup of tea, but the water tastes strange here. I stare down at the small flakes of grey swirling around in the dark tan, unsettled.

__________

Seven months.

I wake up, already tired of the day, and ache my mind out of the covers. I begin listening to the thoughts bouncing around my skull, as the morning trains welcome me like angry millipedes, screeching their way between my window on this side, and the concrete factory on the other. The thoughts bump blearily into each other, bored and familiar. Occasionally, a collision makes sparks, and I rush for my pen and notebook to capture and catalogue this brief flash of an idea. I’ll write it up properly later, I tell myself.

Mostly, days are wasted. I spend them sifting aimlessly between university work– only ever half completed, never appreciated, never applied – and escapism; television, music, staring out the window, away in the precious somewhere-else-ness of my mind.

Walking in the city, I bumble along the endless grey thoroughfares of obsessive reconstruction and reinvention, in a permanent state of low-grade shock. I moved from a village of 27 people to a city of 9 million. Here I am, and here too are a lot of other people. What did I expect?

I’m a miserable victim of my own fortune, catching myself wishing that something would wrench this reward for a youth of commendable attention to education away from me. A life-threatening illness would do, or the destruction of the campus in a freak weather event, or being robbed of all my money; anything to remove the option of staying, so that leaving was the only thing to do. Everybody would understand. My actions would seem sensible and pragmatic. I would have no doubts. No flicker of loss. I would leap forward into some other thing.

Instead, I have every opportunity to stay. Finances in order, grades perfectly fine, friends here to support me. How long can I tolerate something that’s wounding me, when everything that convention demands is under my control?

Woe is me. What a whingy prick.

__________

Nine months.

‘You’ll get used to it’ they say. They never explain why ‘being used to it’ is good. If I punched you in the face every morning, you’d get used to it.

__________

Thirteen months.

London has become the other. The yardstick of identity against which I measure myself, in units of ‘not being a Londoner’. And so, in a way, I begin to owe to London – more than to anywhere else – my sense of belonging; my sense of me. It’s precisely while I’m noticing what I’m not, that I’m writing the story of what I am. Sitting in my box, in my stack of boxes, in this sprawl of boxed lives, the images of my youth rise up vividly in my mind. Hills, forests and lakes flicker like phosphenes just behind my eyelids.

__________

Fourteen months. 

I try to stop talking about it to my friends. It sounds hollow to them, as I merrily gulp down the dregs of the sixth pint, or energetically wield my point of view in a classroom debate. I’m not a recluse, not a misanthrope. I go out, be loud, have fun.

When we’re dislodged, we tend to think that most of those we know, we know but a little, and that most of those who know us, barely know us at all. Do these friends of mine suspect it’s all an act? That I play the negligent student as part of my performance, while I scrape away at the rock-face of academia in private? That I moan about this place just to sharpen some persona of edginess? If it looks like adjustment and sounds like adjustment, they’ll think it’s…

__________

Fifteen months.

‘I don’t believe that you hate it that much.’

‘Yeah, he’s coming around to it!’

We’re in the pub. Again. They both look at me across the table, the second giving me a wink as he says it. My hackles rise. But hate is the wrong word. I don’t hate it. It is a deeper and steadier discomfort than hate.

__________

Sixteen months.

Winter. Back in the north. Entering my room in my home in the woods, I can smell old books on shelves, the cold outside the window, the moss in the garden, the beeswax rubbed into the oak desk, the smoke from the stove. My thoughts are of windswept walks, log fires, past days remembered, and futures grown from them.

__________

Twenty-four months.

Two years. Not two years wholly here, but two years of limbo, split between here, and there. My place and the other place. Between the surges of distracted vibrancy, and the slumps of living-abandonment, I tick along, waiting, waiting... The second day replaces the first, the third replaces the second. Not so subdued in my ways as to be entirely careless, but muted enough to care less than to be entirely present.

The university that brought me here is peripheral to me now. It’s a thing entirely of the city; in location, in feeling, in culture. The students are, for the most part, as proudly rootless as the institution they attend. Global people, with global minds. As comfortable here as they are anywhere, and excited to be so; the ones from nearby just as much as those from far away. I’m studying some interesting things while I’m here, but I studied some before I was here too, and I will study some more when I am no longer here. It has redeeming features, but it cares little about me, and I care little about it. A fair exchange.

My despair has faded, replaced lately with a brooding expectation that change is coming. I try to anchor myself to the present and wait it out, filling my time by rushing around as much as possible. Busy, busy, busy. Maybe that’s what all the Londoners do, all of the time? Just… pass it.

I try to try everything too, because this is my rumspringa; my chance to do the other thing properly, before I leave for my thing, and don’t come back. I get off the night bus at 3am one stop too soon, so I can stumble across the street and buy a pastry with an unknown name and unknown ingredients from the bakery that stays open all night every Sunday, and scoff it down greedily as I walk back to the house. I sit in the coffee shop on a bright spring afternoon and watch old Italian men gesticulate over their third espresso break of the day. I watch bizarre Japanese TV on the muted screens behind the sushi bar in the bento restaurant on my street, just as I did last week, and the week before, steadily eating my way through their entire menu, instead of revising for exams. I herd my drinking companions into the umpteenth pub of the umpteenth placatory pub crawl, eyes peeled for any signs of weakness from the stragglers who I can tell are about to try and slip away to their beds. I watch the Jewish men in their shtreimel hats stride determinedly past my bedroom window towards temple, black cloth flapping in the biting autumn winds.

Now and again, I feel, for a moment, as though I would be sad to leave.

__________

Twenty-five months.

They cut down the tree outside my window. I wasn’t told, just returned in the cold darkness to find it gone, sliced away at the stump. It had, only days before, shed the last of its leaves, but I liked it naked, as much as I did draped in green. It was a quiet companion in my view. Now there was just the street, the bridge, parked cars and distant tower blocks. 

__________

Twenty-six months.

They made the lights on the new train carriages so bright that I can no longer see anything outside the window each week, as I trawl across London in the dark to the ice rink. All I see is my own face staring silently back at me.

__________

Twenty-seven months. 

Purpose is a thing that people create. Strip it away, and you see the wildness of things: that everything is purposeless. It’s not sad, or scary, or unfortunate, it just is the way of things. There are lots of people in the city. Lots of people means lots of purpose. You get smothered in it. Going to a place where there is only one person – yourself – means less purpose. A good place to find yourself alone, is in a wilderness. The wild-er-ness can make the wild-ness of being obvious to us.

Away from the city, friluftsliv is a way we can detach ourselves from society. Going out into the wilderness, and moving through it using our animal bodies, we forget to have a purpose. But here in the city, there is no wilderness. I look for it, and I find foxes, and birds, and parks, and trees, and weeds… but there are also people. Lots of people. Always, people. The closest I come to wilderness are in the witching hours; drunk, solitary and cold, stumbling home along dark, empty streets. The houses are just blocks of stone, and sounds seem muted and far away. I am alone-ish. But it is brief, and it fades quickly in the traffic and footfall of the morning commute, as I snore away the night’s drink into my pillow.

So I have learnt another way to detach. To unhook myself. A little chaos lends a hand.

In the satisfactions London offers, there lies a route to acceptance of the wildness of being, quite different from that of wilderness. While you look up at a fell night sky, you can un-notice everything else, until the lack of demands placed upon you by reality dissolves the mirage of purpose that society has created. And when you’re drinking so hard out on a night out that you really no longer give much of a shit about anything, you end up in a similar place, albeit having travelled a very different path to get there. The longer I stay, the drunker I get. I remove care, and purpose, and thought. The city makes no sense. So being senseless fits. Wasted days in the city are more real than productive ones.

Between enlightened cave-dwelling hermits, and unhinged urban monsters, lie many shades of worry and care, converging at a centre point of tedious, oppressive hyper-connection. There is feel-good to be found in every shade, but some pleasures rest on the peaceful bedrock of purposelessness, while others sit atop a delicate scaffold of social meaning. I’m after the first kind.

__________

Thirty months.

I am flying into Heathrow. The city looks like a spider’s web of golden threads below me, unmoored and floating free in an endless void. Bright green postage stamps scattered here and there, sports fields flooded with light. Black holes stand out, parks where people have ceded territory for the night. The land is silent and still, from this great height.

__________

Thirty-two months.

I’m at a scholarship dinner. It’s an event for people who have a lot of money to meet people who have less money to whom they have given some of their money. Me and my friend are stuffing our faces with canapes that everyone else seems too polite to do more than nibble at.

We make small talk here and there to keep up appearances, and eventually fall into stilted conversation with a bald man in a suit. He seems to not want to be here. He’s speaking with a notable accent, so I ask where he’s from. 

‘Austria.’

I tell him how much I have enjoyed the times I have been in Austria.

‘Yeah… Austria is ok, but I will never go back. London is much better’

For a while I try and remain open-minded about this. I am, however, twenty-nine months in, and I know that this is complete and utter bullshit, so it’s difficult. I mention snow, and trees, and clear air, and small communities, and mountains.

‘Yes, but mountains don’t speak to you’ he says.

I stare at him.

He’s right. And that’s the point.

‘If you stay in the rural places’ he continues, with complete conviction ‘your mind… it will decay.’

The more he says, the more fascinated I become. He’s such a flawless embodiment of things that I don’t agree with that it’s hard to hold anything against him. I want to take him everywhere with me, to show to people who think I’m over-egging it. I present to you, exhibit A.

We move on to talk about his job. He works in finance. Me and my friend probe for reasons that he likes this job.

‘I love making money’ he says.

__________

Thirty-four months and three days.

When the future is your guiding star, and it suddenly becomes the present, which way do you turn? When discomfort with your environment has grown a cult of rejection inside you, and long exposure to that discomfort has fed that rejection until it becomes addictive, how do you clear it all away, to be replaced with calmness?

I go for one last look around.

I take the underground to the building I lived in first; the tower of boxes. I scan its drab face, trying to pick out my box. It is unremarkable. The train line still hums incessantly. The concrete factory still squats on the other side of it. In an effort to improve things, they built a small park just down the street; a flawless square of felt with a few trees glued around the edge. The view from its benches is of the shiny new office blocks that have erupted on all sides.

I walk down to the sliver of ‘nature reserve’ that clings to the side of the canal where I had tried to find some stillness in my first weeks here, years ago. Half of it has been flattened, diggers now wriggling about on top of it, to make some more space for some more people.

I walk over to the old church where I once managed to steal a few silent seconds from the city. It’s closed. London, apparently, does not do goodbyes. It just shrugs me off without a second glance, and barges onwards, a relentless juggernaut of purpose.

__________

Thirty-four months and five days. 

My friend arranges for us all to go out. We congregate beforehand in someone’s flat to do a lot of drinking. A few hundred metres away, three men start killing people. They drive a van into them on the bridge, then jump out with knives. As we walk from the flat to the bus stop, ambulances and police cars scream past us chaotically in all directions. We don’t go out. We go home instead.

A week later, we do go out. I am stumbling to the music, sloshing my drink down my chest, falling to the floor, staggering back up. I cry on my friend’s shoulder. On the taxi back to my his house, I make a speech to the cab driver. “People do good things…’ I slur ‘and people do bad things! People… are people!”. He nods in agreement.

Next morning, carrying my head back home along the canal, I squint in the bright sunshine. People sit on the canalside, twinkling their toes in the water. I think about the lake. The leaves along the bank flutter gently. I think about the woods. My boxes are sitting on the table, already packed.

I am going home. Garn yam.

__________

Thirty-four months and fourteen days.

Swimmers are whelmed by waves that drag them under. But springs whelm up from the ground, too.

It comes across feebly, this little tale. A partial reveal. There has been no mention of many things that burned brightly at the time. Trips across the country to be with the woman I love. Hours spent in ice rinks battling for the team that I was devoted to. And the rest. For all those ghosts in this essay, I ask forgiveness. This was not the place.

To be true, I need to have shown pain. But no matter how sorely it bruised during some days, some weeks, some seasons of my time there, I am in no doubt that it is of such intense experiences that rich lives are made. I had no regret to be going, but not much for having gone, either. Healthy plants need good compost, after all, and good compost can be made from a pile of shit.

I learnt lessons too, of course.

One of them was that if you pour soy sauce over your bowl of sticky rice, it ruins the stickiness and makes it impossible to eat with chopsticks.

I found satisfaction in parts of the city, certainly, but peace was hard to see. And one is orders of magnitude more important than the other. For three years, I never wanted to hear solutions, because I already knew the only solution that would count. There was no way out except leaving. And so, I left.

Bobby Gard-Storry
Cumbria, 2018