Field Notes

*

It occurred to me that the city, set in front of the backdrop of fast moving, low lying grey clouds such as it was, had the appearance of a collage, or a pastiche. It appeared both childish and unreal, a recollection of what a city should look like, picked up and placed down, cut out hastily from a magazine. It was an image that spoke to another image, a different place, far away. I had the sense of being alone. There was the indication of other human life, various sounds: a car engine humming; the beeping of a truck reversing; a clang of metal; then suddenly everything was screeching and squealing and smashing, all of it up against each other with me in the middle.

*

I was always feeling a sense of anger, or rather the feeling before anger; I was ready to be riled up. This time, I’m really going to give everyone a piece of my mind. Instead of doing this I found myself right up close to the chest of a stranger, silent, looking at their pores, observing their hair follicles. I closed my eyes, only for a second, but when I opened them I found that I’d passed right through the stranger’s chest as though they were made of ether, and was blinking in the stark light of day without so much as a pot to piss in.

*

I saw the red lights blinking on the big buildings. I thought, you’ve been here before. There was the annoying feeling of my toes rubbing up against the leather of my boots, which rubbed up against the concrete. There were the dead flowers that had dropped from the bushes on the side of the road. There were the same mistakes as before.

*

I tore out all of my diary entries. I ripped them from the spine and then crossed the entries out with a big red X. I burnt it all. I cried, I went to bed with a large man who made me roll my eyes; he was Irish, and I asked him to clean the black mould from my bathroom tiles. I waited and I waited, he never did. I thought about the things I’d done. I watched the red lights on top of the big buildings in the city, winking at me cruelly, evil eyes. I waited again, this time for my body to leave my soul. I was angry again and then I wasn’t. All that remained was the overwhelming feeling that my hands had detached themselves from my arms. It was just me and the litany of people passing me by on the street or in the tube station as I breathed in the dirty air, handless.

*

I cried and observed myself in a shop window as I passed. I noted that I was still beautiful so decided that all of this was someone else’s problem.

*

On the estate I waited for angels to come to me; I did the same thing under the concrete arches at Bethnal Green. When the angels did eventually arrive, on a rainy evening by the canal, I was too distracted to notice, I was waving to a passing boat. I decided to give up writing for a while, in favour of listening to the city sounds and wondering when my hands would once again become attached to my body. The muddy waters of the Tyne allured me, I thought about lying down in them; I thought the same thing at the overground station; ultimately I was tired, so I went home to bed and decided to stop all of this silliness, and waited again.

*

I developed a compulsion where I thought my head was constantly about to be bashed in from behind, and I couldn’t smoke a cigarette without turning around and staring in bewilderment at strangers walking five paces behind me.

*

One evening I thought I saw a shooting star, but it was just an electric cable sparking above the train tracks.

*

Sometimes there is an immense sense of loss. A ferry pulls out, leaving eddies in its wake. Why that feeling? The heart feels tingly, made of a million tiny filaments. Missing something — what is that? Why does it occur at the leaving of the ferry? Everything runs keenly through me, my nails keep breaking, my eyes feel weighted down, filled with lead or another heavy metal. When I look across the port I see small archipelagos covered in dark trees that are getting ready to die for winter, the leaves drooping slightly, golden.