Unreal City

In those days I escaped to London, walking fast down the long King's Cross platform with music blasting in my headphones, out onto dirty roads longer than I'd ever seen in the relentless heat of the summers, where I'd go to friends' houses I never remembered in patchworks across the city, deciding on my favourite tube lines (the Jubilee, for its vast cement wells you could rattle up and down in and shiny metal doors with perfect Hollywood opening) and getting lost on the ones I hated (the Metropolitan, bomb shelter tubes after which reading anything in maroon causes my mind to empty itself of all sense of direction) and waiting sullenly at 24-hour kiosks run by grinning men while my friends arrived home to let me in, perpetually late.

I'd sleep on sofas or in dingy basements, next to other travellers' belongings on people's parents fine sheets, consume caffeine and cigarettes in wasted gardens or on park benches that all looked the same, ground coated with mountains of leaves and nowhere ever to use the bathroom, by bridges that seemed closer to one another than they were, when you realised you'd come off the bus a stop too early and were a mile down the river. I took night buses with a hand constantly glued to Google maps, terrified that I'd lose the little blue icon that told me I was on my way. And when my battery died, I'd walk miles between closed bus stops past pubs where all my fears of working in London were confirmed, in too-tight shoes that were my only pair, and arrive sweaty and nicotine-stained on a road in Dalston I hoped looked like a friend's.

I was always alone in London. Always dragging a suitcase full of three day-worn clothes onto a crowded train, hitting strangers accidentally on the wrist and being reprimanded, and up endless escalators, to arrive at midnight at a new friend's house in an area where I'd have to write down the tube stops because they'd all blurred into one. Shopping on Oxford Street, loathing my own materialism yet finding things to spend my parents' money on, killing entire days until people returned from work, always in a crowd or on a bus with an alien destination, or walking in entire, deserted new cities of their own that had popped up overnight, chrome and tall as the clouds, for something to do.

One day, I took the bus out to Westfield. It passed through the Olympic park where 5 years earlier my London friends had played their allocated roles, rejoiced and played and visited just for fun, for free, for our country and their capital, because that was part of a normal life. Work was going well. It began at 5 AM yet nobody seemed concerned about it, and their offices were in Moorgate now. There were five Prets within walking distance. They didn't come with me to the Tate; they'd been already last week for a special event. People's café recommendations from friends who didn't know each other would miraculously turn out to be the same place; I'd walk down Hackney roads I'd sworn I'd been to parties on the summer before, but nobody knew who with and I couldn't prove it, my fists stubbornly clenched in the pocket of an unshapely coat I'd thought was on-trend enough to be worn to the big city. The Olympic park was desolate and menacing. A huge structure of steel rose twisting terribly into the sky. The bus stopped for ten minutes in which the passengers sat in silence. I crossed the shopping mall twice looking for the tube, and ended up crossing it again, but underground this time. My feet hurt and I constantly had to pee. And every time I had a lover (they'd turn up after we were long broken up, on opposite tube platforms, in markets and cafés by some stupid trick of fate) it was London they would protect me from yet simultaneously feed me, until I was gloriously drunk on its fearful grandeur.

We watched planes take off from the airport next to the docks at night, the streets too icy to travel, or crossed flyovers to get to miserable shared houses squeezed between two vast self storage warehouses. We looked out from neglected graffitied footbridges I'd only seen in teen television dramas, through smoke across acres of lights winking terrible secrets out into the night's sky. They said, I am here, with my mass of humanity, and I am too great for you to comprehend. I will eat you alive and end you. And I'd cling to a man and ask them to promise to protect me from the city's choking, high, messy, forsaken smoke-laced words.