Just read a poem by Lee Harwood. Two lines jumped out at me and felt unbelievably poignant. Trains run through a town, he writes, 'staring in at the bare rooms and kitchens / each lit with its own story that lasts for years and years.'* Wow. It just caught me off-guard. Funny how often, when you like the music of a poet's work, you find that they also deal with the sorts of ideas and ways of seeing, too, that appeal to you.
*A Poem for Writers by Lee Harwood
Okay, so it's just an image on a two-dimensional screen, but he can move it around, sketching invisible lines on the mousepad. London. A large, terraced house in N19. It looks much the same. as it did back in 1981. The software won't let him but, in his mind's eye it's easy to walk in through the front door, to make his way upstairs to the second-floor flat they've just rented.
The sun is pouring through the window, through the rainbow sticker they'd recently bought from the local wholefood shop. They were feeling optimistic. Right now, he's alone. His other half is out, working an early shift. From where he stands, he can see the sky and the rooftops of the flats opposite. He can hear the noise of invisible traffic going past, two floors below. The noise is less unpleasant than he'd expected. It's quite comforting in fact. Within a day or two of moving in, he'd come to realise that when he heard it, he knew he was at home. The hum of the cars. The roar of the double-decker buses. Sometimes he opens the window and leans out, looking down on it all and smoking a cigarette. He never smokes indoors. The landlord and landlady, who live downstairs, had only wanted non-smokers but they were young and very easy-going. They'd all hit it off immediately. They were more like friends. They all even take it in turns to cook a shared meal every week. The rent is cheap.
He takes his brown corduroy bomber-jacket down from the back of the door. He feels in the pocket for his cigarettes. Twenty Embassy. Well, a half-full box. That should see him through. Matches. He makes his way back down to the street.
This is the way it was.
He turns right, towards the Archway Roundabout. As he does so, he lights his first cigarette of the day. He crosses a side-road, Prospero Road. He didn't know Shakespeare's The Tempest back then, so didn't associate the name with his favourite Shakespeare play. He carries on round the bend, past the privet hedges which conceal the tiny gardens of the terraced houses. On his left, the long, low block of council flats is still there. As he clicks the mouse, moving on further down the street, he is surprised to see that so little has changed.
At the roundabout, he negotiates the pedestrian crossings that take him across the Holloway Road. It strikes him that he has never, neither back then nor since, actually been inside the Archway Tavern, the pub that still stands marooned on the island, in the centre of the swirling traffic. He turns down Junction Road. He walks past the long shop windows of the Co-op supermarket. Once, when he'd been walking past on his way home from work, he'd had to cross to the other side. A bus had lost control as it approached a bus-stop there and careered into the shop front. There were shards of plate-glass everywhere. The pavement and the shopfront had been red with blood. He'd never seen so much blood. The next day, the windows had been covered over with sheets of plywood.
He finishes the cigarette, dropping it between the bars of a drain cover, keen not to burn the soles of his Doc Marten boots. He feels sure there is a way through the pedestrian precinct opposite but the mouse won't take him there. All it'll do is shift the image from side to side. Figures in a blurred background do their best to create a 3D impression. A virtual no-go zone. The images are clearly from a few years ago as a number of pedestrians are wearing face-masks. He carries on down Junction Road towards Tufnell Park. When he reaches the pet shop he turns right, up Bredgar Road. It's a long, straight road lined on both sides, at first, with more low blocks of flats. He passes Hargrave School, an imposing Victorian building which he has no memory of. He has a vague memory, though, of St Peter's Church, now converted into flats, which stands at the top of the road, at the junction with Dartmouth Park Hill. He remembers how, seen from further down the hill, it plays a significant part in the skyline.
He turns left. He's almost there. To his surprise the building's still standing. He half-expected to discover it'd been bulldozed to make way for some luxury development, but no. He still looks back on that first job with affection. He was often five minutes late although they tended to be tolerant, as he often left late, too. Five minutes was one thing; forty-five years, though, was quite another.
Fred D'Aguiar, for those who don't know, was one of the leading writers – along with Linton Kwesi Johnson, Bejamin Zephaniah and David Dabydeen – giving voice to marginalised groups in Britain in the 1980s. As the blurb on the back of his recent pamphlet, Arboretum for the Hunted says, 'what is striking about about this chapbook is how much keeps him dreaming, even in places and situations where many imaginations would stumble and falter in the face of ... relentless violence.' You can read my review of the book here, at Stride Magazine.
Reports from the Deep End is a collection of short stories inspired by the work of J.G. Ballard. Although he's famous for his visions of urban dystopia (his name has even morphed into the adjective 'Ballardian'), there's so much more to him than that. For example, as a science fiction writer, instead of writing stories about outer space, he turned, instead, to the 'inner space' of the human mind, blurring the distinction between SF and literary fiction. Then there's the exotic locations and the non-specific, slightly surreal aura of colonialism you sometimes get, that no doubt springs from his childhood experiences of Shangai and living in a Japanese internment camp during the Second World War.
There are over thirty stories in the collection, which includes work by Will Self, Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcock (who contributes a new Jerry Cornelius story). You can read my review of the book here, in International Times.
It occurred to me after he'd left that he never told me his name. He looked strangely familiar, though. He had a longish beard that was beginning to turn white. His receding hair was brown with flecks of grey, but looked as if it had once been red. He was at least twice my age. He was dressed much the same as I was, in jeans, trainers and a t-shirt. This surprised me a little: I always imagined – or did back then – people in the future wearing weird clothes. Perhaps I'd been watching too much Blake's 7.
I was sitting on the settee in our flat in North London, staring through the window at the sky, through the colours of a rainbow-transfer we'd stuck on the glass. I was listening to an Ian Dury album I'd just bought. It was 3rd June, 1981. I'm usually hopeless with dates but that one's not one I'm likely to forget in a hurry.
I never got to actually see his time machine. All I saw was a black flash, like a negative of a flash of lightning, and there he was, standing in the corner of the room. He stood for a moment, wide-eyed and open mouthed, looking round.
“New Boots and Panties!” he cried.
A strange exclamation for the first known time-traveller from the future. Speechless and disorientated, I nodded, got up and went over to the hi-fi to take it off. I suppose I thought it was the polite thing to do. He must've realised what I was doing.
“No, no! Leave it on,” he said. “It's one of my favourites. And on vinyl!”
I did as he said, but turned it down a bit.
“These were the days!” he said.
“How did you – “ I began.
“Don't ask,” he said. He laughed.
He made for the chair under the window and sat down.
“It's great to see you again,” he said.
“Have we met?” I said.
He chuckled and smiled knowingly, but offered no further explanation. Perhaps I was too nonplussed to demand one. Somehow, though, we skipped all further pleasantries and settled down to talking as if we'd known each other for years. He told me how all the ecology stuff that was just starting to get trendy in my time was really important and how, in his time, the world was in the middle a climate catastrophe. He said we already were, in our time, only it wasn't public knowledge. People in the UK were getting poorer, too. He explained to me what foodbanks were and how people had to queue at them for food. It got worse: the world, in his time, had been struck by a pandemic and millions had died. And, to make matters even worse, the situation in the health service had been allowed to deteriorate to the point where even the doctors and nurses were going on strike.
“And did I mention the war in Europe?” he said.
“No,” I said. I started to laugh. I must've been watching too many alternative comedians. I thought he was joking.
“Straight up,” he said.
“Really?”
“Really.”
Neither of us said anything for a moment.
“Has anything changed for the better?” I said, finally.
He thought for a moment. He told me how although it'd not all been plain sailing, most people were probably a bit more accepting – a bit, mind you – of people different to themselves. Then he tried to explain how everyone was linked up by computer. He called it the internet. I told him it sounded good.
“It is, I think,” he said. “But if you put it another way and tell people computers are taking over the world, it sounds a lot less attractive.”
“And you've invented time machines,” I said.
“Well, no,” he said. He went on to explain how he'd stolen his from a quadrillionaire entrepreneur from the 2060s who'd happened to materialize in his living room. He'd told him that in 2060, spaceflight was old hat and time travel was the latest thing.
The guy had made the mistake of putting his remote control box down on the table and my visitor, on impulse, had grabbed it and pushed the button on it. It seemed the right thing to do, he said. And here he was, in 1981. He'd left the quadrillionaire stranded in 2023. Not something, he said, he was likely to lose any sleep over. I noticed, for the first time, that he was holding a device like a TV remote control in his left hand.
“I felt I just had to come back and warn you,” he said. “Don't fall for the 'jam tomorrow' scam. If you do, things just get worse. Tomorrow never comes.”
Then he told me he had to leave. The quadrillionaire had mentioned, in the brief time they'd spent talking, that you could only spend so long in the past before your material integrity began to deteriorate. He stood up and stepped back into the same corner of the room he'd appeared from. He fixed me with an earnest stare.
“It's been wonderful seeing you,” he said. He sniffed a little. He seemed to be fighting back emotion. “But you've got to do something!” he said. “All of you!” He looked around as he said it, waving his arms in a helpless gesture to all the people who weren't there with us.
I saw his finger close on the button on the control-box and then he vanished, just as he'd appeared, in a black flash.
