cf prior

Extracts from Everyone should get this

We borrow a car and take the coastal road east. Phoebe and Karl are at a funeral on the mainland, the baby is with her grandparents in the city. The road is narrow, the car is wide and the Prosser river is frothing beside us. It won’t stop raining. On the other side of the valley, the clouds are eating the treetops. There’s a sign taped to the IGA entrance requesting that families only buy a maximum of two packets of toilet paper. Something’s happening much further north than here but the car radio’s on the fritz and our phones are offline. It doesn’t really make sense, Australia produces its own toilet paper, the worker behind the till shrugs as we buy four rolls, a six pack of cascade, some mint slice. Like everyone, we put nascent worry to one side. In the visitor centre, the person behind the information desk patiently explains to a furious, sodden tourist that boats out to the island are off. Rainwater collects on the peak of his baseball cap and drops when he emotes. She has to say to him, I am sorry and I am not responsible for the weather. The island looks like smudged ink on the horizon. We head to the shack and we get the key out of a pizza oven in the yard. The owners are in Vietnam forever. All night the rain doesn’t let up; it drums against the corrugated roof. We play darts for four hours then fall into bed. Afterwards, on the TV, a man in the middle of the country proudly shows his rain gauge to the camera. In twenty-four hours he has had more rain than he had in all of 2019. He is crying, I am crying. Brief as novelty candles, some of the wildfires go out. 

*****

On our last night on the island, we light a bonfire. When it goes up, Karl asks me to gather up some blue gum leaves. They are everywhere, stripped from the tree and strewn across the grass by the weekend’s strong winds. Look, he says, what happens. Eucalyptus globulus, commonly known as blue gum, is the state’s floral emblem, and a critical habitat for endangered species. The leaves of these trees are lance-like, glossy on one side and coated with a white, waxy bloom on the other. He instructs me to throw them onto the fire. We listen as the oil in the leaves crackles and spits embers like sparklers at the turn of the year. When the temperature rises, the eucalyptus oil vaporises and shrouds the groves in a pale, highly flammable gauze. One lightning bolt or discarded cigarette, can ignite the forest, throwing embers over half a mile ahead. 

The swift parrots, who’ve spent the final days of austral summer darting from tree to tree, breed in the cavities of senescent blue gums before heading north for the winter. Knotholes and branch stubs excavated by other animals, like woodpeckers, or formed by fungal infections, weather damage, and fires create small entrances in the trunks that lead to the deep chambers parrots use as nests. Blue gum flowers look like sea anemones, with sprays of white filaments protruding from smooth green pistils, and their nectar is the swift parrots’ primary food source at this time of year. As it feeds, the parrot gathers a dusting of pollen on its chin and forehead and distributes it from bloom to bloom, tree to tree. All these organisms exist in symbiotic relationship with each other and, like so many others, their relationship is under threat. Forest fires, logging, agriculture, and urban development have depleted the quantity of tree cavities and have created the conditions for increased predation. The parrot’s flourishing is contingent on these activities’ cessation. What happens when the preservation of a habitat conflicts with established economic interests?

For a month we’d been living on an island off an island state off a country itself surrounded by sea and when we returned to this island we were all asked to become our own islands, unless we couldn’t. When we were there, we’d been closer to what had begun happening, but it never really began to happen where we’d been, three oceans and a world away, at least not in the way it was now happening in the place where we habitually live, where it had begun to disastrously. Some of the workers who couldn’t become islands worked as doctors or care workers, teachers and social workers, or in ‘death management’. Some of the workers who couldn’t become islands were not critical in a metabolic sense but an economic one. The museums and galleries of central London were not considered critical in either sense and were promptly shuttered.

I walked to collect the things I needed to do the job I wasn’t sure I’d have for much longer and to collect any plants I could fit into two supermarket carrier bags. I was girding myself with life. On the return leg of the three-hour journey between Camberwell and Piccadilly, I felt a niggling pain in my right shoulder—the resurgence of an ancient injury I knew wouldn’t disappear through sheer force of will alone. I needed to put the bags down and rest. At the Imperial War Museum, someone working for the council had stretched red and white caution tape from the arm rest at one end of the bench to the arm rest at the other end, and through the barrier disguised as an arm rest too. No rest for the wicked, and now nowhere to sit. I felt like The Narrator of Patrick Kieller’s 1994 film London.

In the London of London, it’s 1992. There’s a general election looming and the cusp has, as cusps tend to, prompted a mood of sombre reflection on the part of Robinson, who has undertaken to investigate the problem of the city where he lives and works and wants his erstwhile lover, The Narrator, to join him on a series of psychogeographic excursions. He wants to show The Narrator how, in his prolonged absence, political events like the recession and the Baltic Exchange bombing, have woven their way through the urban fabric. How homelessness, derelict infrastructure, and corrupt new property developments were adapted for use as cudgels against the rest of the city’s inhabitants by those intent on ‘heaping up wealth’. I couldn’t tell from the guidance whether construction workers were considered critical workers but everywhere from Heygate to St. James’ expensive buildings were going up, empty as unfed stomachs.

The toilet paper on our online shop was cancelled. On the news we were discouraged from stock-piling but people had started to talk about ‘provisions.’ It was bringing out the war in everyone. I was worried about my father, Rupert. Writing from exile in London in 1852, well over a century before SARSCoV2 reached the Thames foreshore, the Russian socialist writer Alexander Herzen’s concluded ‘There is no town in the world which is more adapted for training one away from people and training one into solitude than London.’ Rupert can’t cook and quite unlike the common idea of Londoners, he loves talking to people, and has always loved the ‘Continental diversions’ of wandering, drinking, and intellectual sloth whose absence from England’s capital Herzen so laments in his memoirs. If ‘One who knows how to live alone has nothing to fear from the tedium of London’ then what of him? He doesn’t use the internet and his mobile phone still has buttons and is rarely on. In some corners, people were attempting to make bridges s between one person-island and the next, but because he didn’t have signal, these didn’t reach my father. People were dying and I was worried that because of the situation he might die of the same thing those people were dying from instead of the thing he was already dying from and that I wouldn’t be able to see him before he did. They hadn’t made the exemptions they later did by then. How can you be there for someone you can’t be there for? 

*****

My father had been houseless for a long time before he told me. Shortly after I graduated he semi-regularly asked me if he could rent the other room in my flatshare. The landlord had already arranged for the room to be taken by someone who worked as an IT security services contractor for the civil service but if she hadn’t I would have lied. In the years that followed these attempts, he kept trying to take me out for lunch and his card kept getting declined. I was earning more than nothing but not much so I paid. Because of the way things had happened in the past, paying for lunch made my skin itch. At first I was so furious I wasn’t able to be worried or the fury was so big as to eclipse the worry. 

More or less a year after Stephen’s death in 2017, Rupert found he can no longer find the name or memory he is looking for when he went looking for it. And he was getting lost outside of language too. He was saying I was a bad father and crying. So 10 years after Stephen first entered the MRI scanner, Rupert did. It looked harmless in the images, this illness that  would get progressively worse. Like lichen or a Rorschach test. ‘It’ was in fact infarction, necrosis caused by poor or disrupted blood flow to the brain. When he received his diagnosis, the psychiatrist told me that he had had multiple strokes. My maternal grandmother had two before she died and in my last memory of her she is crying because she keeps saying the word ‘potato’ instead of whatever word she is straining, with her whole body, towards. Eventually she resigns from the effort and sinks back into her hospital bed, her gown sliding off one shoulder. Surely not, I thought, surely we’d know if he’d had a stroke. This is how I learnt about ‘silent strokes’. Like all strokes, these are caused by poor blood flow to the brain, but unlike the kind of strokes they make public information films about, there’s no opportunity to act FAST—you’re unaware you’re having one.

You’re looking at the tomatoes in the supermarket, inspecting them for signs of mould or damage and you’re having a stroke. You’re at a friend’s party, perching on a windowsill as she leans over you to tipsily tell you something about her new partner and you’re having a stroke. You’re scrolling on your phone with your feet up on the sofa cushion and also you’re having a stroke. 

People with dementia, especially those living in care or those who’ve recently moved to a new home, often start to tell their carers and loved ones when they come to visit that they want to go home. Researchers think it might be caused by a phenomenon called ‘time-shifting’, where people experience the present moment as if they are living at an earlier time in their life. They want to go back, this phrase indicates, not necessarily to a physical space but to a happier and more comfortable time. 

In the Poetics of Space, Bachelard summons the idea of an originary home, one that represents the ‘protected intimacy’ not just of reality but of language, thought, and dream. ‘It is the human being's first world.’ He writes. ‘Before he is "cast into the world," as claimed by certain hasty metaphysics, man is laid in the cradle of the house. And always, in our daydreams, the house is a large cradle.’ If the home is the child’s first universe, he wants to know, how does it shape the knowledge and experience of all subsequent spaces of inhabitation and cohabitation? My originary home—which is not but might as well be my birth home and which is not the originary home of my siblings—is in Kent. I lived there until I was around nine with my siblings, my mother Mary Ann, Rupert, and, for a few nights each week, Stephen. I don’t know where Rupert’s originary home is. He’s not just an unreliable narrator, but an evasive one. Once I looked at the census records, and it led me to a two up two down in Dartford. His father and grandfather factory workers both. I wonder whose RAF wings I keep in a memory box, whose box they ought to live in.

Like in all boroughs across the country, when you declare yourself houseless to the The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea you answer the housing assessment questions and the file is uploaded and circulated in so many ones and zeros; the circumstances of your loss are metamorphosed into data to be analysed, rated, mapped against registers. This process results in a certain number of points. On the subsection of the website entitled ‘number of points awarded and an explanation of terms used’, you learn how points are allocated: 10 points if you're homeless, 50 if you serve or have served in the armed forces, 50 if you're in paid work (an incentive ‘to support economic growth, reduce social polarisation and welfare dependency’) and so on. There’s a notice on these pages that states it is almost certain that you will never be offered social housing and a table documenting the decline in social housing units over the past eight years. The Royal Borough is throwing up its hands and declaring this deficit an act of god as one thousand six hundred and fifty two properties belonging to billionaires fighting extradition, former politicians, shell companies, and luxury property developers sit empty. Give those houses people, they’re hungry for inhabitants! The Royal Borough runs a scheme to wrap your life up and move you away from your home and towards the seaside so that you can feel lonely with a view as it repossesses your home. On the table you can see that in 2017/18 the number of available social housing units in The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea drops from 436 to 144 and, when finally my father has accrued enough points to be temporarily housed in accommodation clad in multicoloured risk, it’s not possible to forget why.

*****

I saw him when I could, leaving no less than two weeks between visits. Public health messaging was very confusing and we are all muddling our way through as best we can. It took two hours to get to him by bike. When I got there, I tried, as I often had over the years, to talk to him about his own death and whether he wanted me to share the responsibility for his finances, his healthcare, and so on. He kept wanting to defer it. I can understand that. All the bathrooms everywhere were closed. He needed my help to renew his bus pass but I couldn’t do it without the forms he didn’t yet want to sign. 

In May, a man named George Floyd has been murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis. We were still being told to stay inside, to batten down the hatches, to forget about ingress and egress, to keep the world from coming in on the bottom of our shoes. But people quickly started throwing open doors that had long been closed or made new openings where there weren’t any before. The embers landed half a world away. In evolutionary time, Mark Duggan’s death was seconds ago. It wasn’t long until the fires reach us. It was different to be doing what we were doing in this time than what we did in that time, we wore new language. Alongside our bust cards we donned masks, we brought ziplock bags of PPE, clipped bottles of hand sanitiser to backpacks and walked forwards, together. People pull statues down, people remove barriers to a peaceful night’s sleep from benches, people stop traffic. The demonstration demonstrated that public space and its inhabitation can be reconfigured according to need rather than profit and for a while, all that we gleaned through the opening shone with potential. In London, the chancellor announced a scheme to start later in the summer that encouraged people to come together, even indoors. At the protest against killing people, we use our bikes like we’d seen people from Minneapolis-St Paul and Tunis and New York and Bethlehem and Oslo and Marseille and Detroit and Copenhagen and Seattle and Zagreb and Oakland use theirs: to keep our distance and walk together. 

*****

The Robinson of London lives not far from me, in Vauxhall. In a shot of the pleasure gardens’ gateposts the narrator says ‘Robinson is worried about the future of the park, about the buses, about the 2b from baker street in victoria about the 88 from Oxford Circus in Westminster and about the library, all of which will be under threat if the government doesn’t lose the election.’ I felt like a 21st-century Robinson when that summer I opened twitter and type the name of my local park into the search field and scrolled. Nestled into information about walk-in test sites, people policing their neighbours’ behaviour, and the week’s litter picking finds, I found a 16 second clip of a man receiving a blow job in the diffuse, early morning, early summer light of the woodland’s understory. From my bedroom overlooking the park, I sought to expand this doorstep world. Sure enough—by searching for variations on the park’s name, the local area, or nearby road names, or imagining spelling errors—the page blossomed with a fascinating but, to me at least, out of reach expanse of men looking for and finding people to and places where it was possible to fulfil their polymorphous desires. The tract of forest on either side of the park buffers the sound of the big roads and, verdant in the spring, provides ample coverage for cruisers. After I discovered their videos, I started walking through that part of the park more attentively. I became an antenna. I started to notice traces, a purple durex wrapper caked in mud, pants imitating leaves. I felt myself getting wound up like an old toy never let loose. 

Amidst efforts to curtail cottaging and cruising after the partial legalisation of homosexuality, the expansion of the bar scene enabled by the fabled pink pound made gay people newly recuperable to the flow of capital. Cruising grounds, where you could but didn’t need to spend money to have a good time, quivered with fresh danger. Capital cannot abide a limit. For filmmaker and plantsman Derek Jarman, it was the aleatory nature of contact that endured. There’s an amazing amount of pretence you have to go through to meeting people in the bars, the drinks you have to buy, the smoke and the noise. 

As the season turned from Summer to Autumn, the cruisers from my local park whose uninterrupted fun had been a happy hallmark of an otherwise frightening summer had been noticed. They had begun to receive vitriol online. On twitter, local residents were responding to the videos peppering the search feed. It’s unsightly. Disgusting even. People kept tagging the metropolitan police in their tweets. People seemed at once to want to live here and to pinion the pleasures of the urban lifeworld that makes here here. One morning I walked through and found laminated signs tacked to trees—the council had issued an injunction against ‘persons unknown’. Won’t someone think of the children, everyone seemed to be saying, doing their finest Cardinal Bertone impression. It made me think of Lord Arran too. Which children?

Lord Arran, a Tory peer and one of the key sponsors who presided over the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, which permitted, for the first time, sex between two consenting adult men over the age of 21, provided the act took place in private, said that in return for Royal Assent, homosexuals should: show their thanks by comporting themselves quietly and with dignity. This is no occasion for jubilation; certainly not for celebration. Any form of ostentatious behaviour; now or in the future, any form of public flaunting, would be utterly distasteful and would, I believe, make the sponsors of the Bill regret that they have done what they have done.

*****

I needed to situate him inside some kind of constellation. I could’st bear the thought of him being lonely just as I couldn’t bear being solely responsible for his loneliness. I began researching almshouses and found a few he was eligible to live in. I gathered information from him that he didn’t want to give me. We’d come to a cusp; I could sense change much as I can feel autumn coming in on the breeze. 

Klaus, my father, and I met at London Waterloo with our weekend bags to travel down to Winchester on the train together. Before we got on the train, we went to look around the bookshop Foyles on the station concourse. On a table, there were many books laid out in a display. I think the display may have been books about the natural world, which was very en vogue at the time. It was very noisy inside the bookshop and as my father looked over them he began to furrow his brow. He picked one up from the mass of blue covers and held it close to his face and placed it back down. He looked at me and said that he felt overwhelmed by the display and that it was too much. It is a bit much, I remember saying. I was trying to imagine, because I suspected this is what was happening, what it must be like to look at a table of books, the object in the world around which you’d organised your life, and realise you can’t distinguish one from the other. I threaded my arm through his and took him outside, gesturing to my partner as we left. 

He was undergoing some assessments at the time with his doctor and with the adult mental health team in his local borough. In one of the assessments, he had been diagnosed with depression and in the notes from that meeting he said he felt he couldn’t keep up with the technology that contemporary life necessitated he use to deal with his personal finances, his bus card, his mobile phone contract and so on. His phone still had buttons. In notes from the same meeting, he cited my presence in his life as a reason to stay alive. Our trip was circumscribed by a sense of real urgency. 

Almshouses were first established by Christian religious orders in the UK at some point during the 10th century. Then they were known as hospitals, not in the sense of medicine but rather of hospitality, the word implied a relationship between host and guest. They were founded and still exist to provide a place of residence, food, and rest for elderly people of modest means. The one I had arranged for us to visit claims on its website to be the country’s oldest and perhaps its oldest charitable institution, too. Twenty-five brothers live there, they are usually older, single, divorced, or widowers, without much money. When we arrived, Klaus and I checked into our room above the pub. It was on the top floor and to get to it, there was a narrow, steep set of carpeted stairs. My father followed us up. He wanted to help us with our bags. I wanted to be outside the situation within which I had found myself. I think it was hot, I think it must have been the summer. 

Not long after we arrived, we made our way to the almshouses on foot. The town centre was not unfamiliar to me; it reminded me of the distinctly ecclesiastical town closest to my first home. Like most English high streets, this one had a boots, a WHSmiths, and a few chain pubs but, like in Canterbury, these looked incongruous in their medieval carapaces. After ten minutes of walking, tall townhouses gave way to houses that were wider, further apart from one another, and had around them gravel driveways and enough space to park more than one car. There were a lot of walls, I noticed, some flint and others red brick, dividing the houses from each other and from the pavement and the road. As the hospital is set back a bit from the road and not particularly well signposted, I had been told to look out for two wooden bus stands on either side of the road and a pub called the Bell Inn. 

We met with the master of the house in her office. I felt like I was a parent taking their son to boarding school. She talked us through my father’s visit. Told us that he could, like the brothers, come and go as he pleased and that he was welcome to eat with them on both days in the hall where a warm, two course midday meal is served each day. She described life there: that there was a barber who called in each month to cut the brothers’ hair, that brothers if they so wished could have a garden in which they could grow food or flowers, and that a subsidised taxi would take them for their weekly shop. After all this, she asked us to wait outside while she spoke to my father in private. We stepped out and I closed my eyes into the sun. The almshouses were made of stone and each one had an enormous chimney and next to the wooden doors of some of the lodgings wisteria inched up the walls. The place was ancient, but everywhere there were signs that it had been adapted to the ageing bodies of the brothers. I was so tired. I wanted to be held in the way the almshouses was promising to hold my father. Everyone should get this, I said to my partner.

*****

In my local park, the council has decided to fell the trees.