33 West Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Westminster

  Catherine Hetherington

  Run. Thought. Life.

  Camden

  Neil Ramsorrun

  Dukwane’s Deliverance

  Barnet

  Jemma Wayne

  The Outsider

  Kensington & Chelsea

  Tena Štivičić

  The Truth About the Dishwashers

  Brent

  Nikesh Shukla

  The Samosa Whisperer

  Harrow

  Tim Scott

  Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner, That I Live in London

  Hammersmith & Fulham

  Daisy Goodwin

  Brook Green

  Ealing

  Will Maxted

  Ealing Commondy

  Hillingdon

  Rachael Dunlop

  Holding Patterns

  Hounslow

  Rajinder Kaur

  A Marriage Made in Hounslow

  Richmond

  Jonathan Green

  I ♥ Richmond

  Wandsworth

  Melanie Mcgee

  Chicken Run

  Lambeth

  Tom Bromley

  The Hunt

  Merton

  Jessica Ruston

  White Wedding

  Kingston Upon Thames

  Patrick Binding

  Streetlights

  Sutton

  Nicola Monaghan

  Belmont Nights

  Croydon

  Debi Alper

  How Lucky You Are

  Index of Contributors

  Copyright

  WESTMINSTER

  Run. Thought. Life.

  Catherine Hetherington

  I am thinking about life, I am thinking about my knees. A camel. Am I doing well enough, have I achieved enough, am I getting too old, how old is too old? Lady with a buggy, is that success, or is it the lady with the Gucci handbag? Keep going. I am thinking about my knees again. I am doing OK, surely? I am not 30, well 6 months away. That is plenty of time, yes I am older than the Sugababes and I haven’t had a number one single, but I am still younger than my boss. Keep going. Man with girlfriend, where is my boyfriend, does he really like me? Is he thinking of me right now too, if he’s not, what is he thinking of? Is it someone else, does he wish he was with someone else? What if I am something to pass the time, is her boyfriend passing the time? I had given him my heart to hold, to take care of and sometimes he just drops it on the floor, he would stuff it in his pocket and it would fall out. One day I worry he won’t notice he doesn’t have it anymore, it would lie there alone in the street battered, second hand, irreparably damaged. The couple. Love. What does that look like, how do you know when it’s right? My parents, they weren’t but that doesn’t mean that love isn’t forever. But what is love? Is it about the right time and place or is it about the right person? Who is the right person, maybe it’s him, or it could be him over there. I need to stop. I start walking for a while. When I run it’s not just my legs but my mind that races too.

  ***

  START

  The Marylebone sky is a perfect blue, a watercolour blue that is soft focus and hazy on the eyes. The warm red mansion blocks, the distinguished gentlemen of London housing, comfort the street with an embrace from both sides. There are days for running, and there are days for not. Today is a running day, I wake up in the morning as if I have just had a double espresso. My limbs are ready, they feel alive. I feel a sense of awake in every part of me. I have woken up in single figures, I have woken up with an energy. I love these Saturdays. I leap out of bed and my feet move straight into my trainers.

  Then she left the house.

  A challenge of gross proportions, but somehow it’s possible. There are 10 million people all around, as she steps out of the door and outside of herself she could almost fall over them, but she was completely alone. They sit outside the café downstairs, under its blue awning, a royal blue, very appropriate for the opulence of Marylebone which stares in the face of the high rises of north London and goads them. She could almost imagine an uprising one day when the tower blocks of Mornington Crescent would pull themselves up and thunder down Hampstead Road and straight into Regent’s Park and defiantly refuse to be moved.

  So she started, towards Regent’s Park, a park of small dogs, show dogs and show money. People like her, running nowhere vainly trying to look like someone else, trying to forget things, no-one going anywhere, all engaged in a lonely futile pursuit. She began slowly, listening to Four Tet, this would be a long one, she didn’t want to listen to Daft Punk too soon, she would go too fast and her heart would try to burst from her chest.

  Towards The Globe, where one football fan shouts to another, ‘I’ll ‘ave another lar-ga’. A dirty pub, with sticky floors. There’s a publican’s map of the world on its cracking exterior, which adds a fault line to the whole of South America, crumbling but dressed idiosyncratically in fairy lights. Marylebone was ruined by the dirty clogged artery of Marylebone Road. If only you could create a paper fold in the map from Dorset Street to Regent’s Park, Baker Street station wouldn’t be missed, although its Sherlock Holmes tiles may be. It was a Saturday and she was greeted by riot vans at the top of Chiltern Street, and towards The Globe by a sea of blue, Chelsea FC fans amassing to warm up. Mild hooliganism, like running, needed a warm up. There could be no more distance in usage and attendees in two identically named buildings than The Globe and The Globe.

  Into Regent’s Park and she saw the zoo, the free zoo that is. The better one in fact, free of both the cost of paying and the moral questions of whether one should support zoos. She ran past the camels and llamas, and remembered Chile, seeing real llamas and indeed many camelids. Why so content to be in a city that replicates other places but lacks all authenticity, where everything is available at a price? There is contained exploration banded by prices and snobbery. Imagine being able to run, run out of London, out of zone one, through zone two and beyond, to run with these animals in the wild.

  She ran past a man, sitting on a bench. She still felt alone, sad, and focused on that sadness; to lose it would mean a struggle to regain it. She didn’t know what he was thinking, that he, one of four brothers once, had lost two already and another was dying in two weeks. Even knowing this might not have pulled her from her own sadness. Too many tube journeys avoiding the eyes of strangers and developing and honing her distrust for other humans had slowly scraped away her compassion, her ability to see others for what they were. We were/are all the same.

  To Hyde Park, first navigating Oxford Street. Oxford Street is London’s answer to waterboarding. She was once asked in a job interview, ‘What do you find annoying?’ Would it have been OK to answer, ‘Oxford Street’? The fact that there aren’t traffic lanes for people, the fact that people dawdle, then stop, just stop suddenly in the middle of it all. Don’t they understand the person behind them, well at least one of the throng, is from London, therefore is hurrying, hurrying to be somewhere. Not thinking about stopping. In London there is no slow. Speakers’ Corner was coming into view, audibly first, then she could see it. Why it was Speakers’ Corner who knows, there was no time to learn these things when you were here. One day when she was old, like a withered empty balloon who had given its air to the city, she would learn these things. For now she was running, past the people on the street canvassing, telling the lost masses of their moral obligations. ‘Don’t shop at X they support the war in Palestine, don’t shop in Y they promote landfills, don’t shop in Z they test on animals’. She was always being told what to think; life was like a prolonged Michael Moore film. Could she do it all by herself? She had seen a play once that was about characters being ‘on headphones’, being
told what to think, how to act and what to say. Sometimes this was an appealing prospect.

  Finally into Hyde Park, so open and yet fenced in by the city. Faster. Towards Hyde Park Corner, the lake, the café, more people. Everyone with dogs; who knew you had to bring a small dog, preferably cat-sized to come to the park? She had obviously missed the instructions. She overheard ‘I was so nervous in my driving lesson I almost had a heart attack, I sweated so much I had to go home and change my bra and pants’. She smiled, those moments were when London was a stage, and she a voyeur into everyone’s life, stealing moments of their joy, happiness, sadness and pain.

  Towards the Royal Albert Hall, where listening to Rachmaninoff’s third had dwarfed any achievement she may reach in a lifetime. A soft, beautiful and reflective piece, where the instruments danced with one another, the strings coaxing the piano forward only to then run in retreat at the solid, strong and certain advancing piano. A building befitting of its usage, contrary to many in the city. Past the grandeur and through into Kensington Gardens and round the statue of Peter Pan, a reminder of age, of life. Squirrels darted across the path, like dolphins on land as they arced smoothly from one tourist’s snack to another. She was sure this was a high calibre park for squirrels, the Ivy for a squirrel. Clapham Common is more like a late night kebab shop.

  Past an old lady on a bench clad in furs, wrinkled in the way she would be after a long bath. Reading the Daily Mail, her prop, with a cigarette held like a pencil, looking emptily at the pages. Remaining completely static but for the arm from the elbow down, which acts as a hinge, and allows the cigarette to enter her mouth. The rest of her is still, the cigarette perpendicular to her face. She surveys the park with her hands on the paper, like someone slowly observing whether it is safe to cross a road. It’s hard to be out there in amongst everyone else, truly on your own, better to take friends in the form of nicotine and printed pages, looking purposeful.

  Towards Kensington Palace and more reminders of the opulence of the city. Why had she had to contribute a charity donation to the ‘royal’ parks when running the half marathon? Surely if these parks are royal then they can be paid for by the aforesaid royals (OK, so it was only two pounds but this more of a principle). The polarised options of life in London were both unfathomable and unattainable. Gangs of youths in Stockwell, toting knives and fighting and treating the streets like their property, to Louis Vuitton-toting ladies with dyed blonde hair – each strand sitting regally, higher than the last – wearing giant sunglasses and engulfing coats. They both reflected a fear, a sense of not belonging, of being somewhere in the middle, but going in neither direction.

  Past another pond, where deck chairs sit idly waiting for residents, with their green and white striping buffeted in the wind, they billow out like a deck chair beer gut. And to the road at the north of the park, the stretch that extends to the horizon, or so it seems. To the Italian fountain, where she sometimes met her friend for running. An anomaly, as this was her solo pursuit. She was always alone although sometimes she inhabited this place from within a crowd, telling jokes about stolen cheese (nacho cheese… ‘nat yo cheese’) and anecdotes of her day. Stories of her success and failures for all to admire, open and honest, yet a closed book as the darkness of her feelings within were pushed away from all to see. Sometimes she would cry in the toilets at work, annoyingly this was often disrupted by other toilet users, one was never truly alone in London despite how hard you may try. She thought again of her friend, they would run together, gossiping of colleagues, boyfriends, husbands, diets, creating a manifesto for the modern woman, yet to be shared with a wider audience. The friend was an 8/10 on the friend scale, it was nice to order life in such a way. She lost only a few marks on the newness of their friendship, which meant that as yet she was unable to share the sadnesses she carried like an albatross with her. She didn’t know why she carried them, people had worse lives, the man on the bench, the helpless lady she didn’t know, old and alone creeping through the park with heavy bags, but she couldn’t run fast enough to avoid the chase of sadness.

  She saw the Odeon emerge from the green, a giant ‘O’ through leaves of orange and brown, a lighthouse at the corner of the park warning those of approaching Oxford Street. She wondered if her expectations were all wrong, if films set us up to fail by relentlessly delivering the happy ending. Where was it? Whose was it? Should we all be encouraged to covet the same thing?

  Around Marble Arch. How does a traffic island become deserving of an 1850s solid marble arch? She remembered a time, which seemed so long ago, when she was in Vientiane and visited the Laotian version of the Arc de Triomphe. The government of the day had been given concrete by the Americans to make a runway. Instead they built a monument. She thought of things we are told we need versus those we want. Are either right in the end? She was tired.

  Up Edgware Road, Lebanese Lane. She ran to eat essentially. If her body were more obedient this bizarre process of donning lycra and pushing her limbs into moving co-ordinately and faster than they ever desired would be less frequent or absent altogether. They say it’s like meditation, when you find the rhythm and your body moves on its own, you are free. She had these moments, releases, and would sometimes run back to where it happened for a hope of a replay, but her conscious would be tricking her to think she could control it to happen again. Tired, pump the arms, keep going.

  Turning across the grid system she started to run towards Marylebone High Street. Like Tesco Express orienteering, she turned her run into interval training as she ran across the smog of Baker Street. She saw billboards in bus stops, showing her the idea of beauty, the things she ‘needed’. She felt proud that no amount of marketing would steal her sense of self and replace it with an off-the-shelf other. She thought of her flatmate, an ad account director, the balance of intelligence, person-ability and balls. A phrase she had stolen from a colleague. She wished there was a less hetronormatively loaded way of describing the guts the flatmate had, to do the right thing, be herself and yet all the time be human. Not one of those who lose themselves to a perceived appropriate corporate identity, someone who is important, sharp, brief, pinstriped, humourless, the same as all others.

  Along Marylebone High Street, a village in central London. Part of the zone one jigsaw that makes a confused incoherent picture, if you were the child assembling this you would throw the puzzle away. Running along the tree-lined street, the endless row of coffee shops broken by whiteness, shops with little in them, although this is not the point. They softly gaze at you, tempting you to admire their windows full of unaffordable items. She looked passers-by in the eye and wondered how do you have this money, where did it come from, will I ever have this? She passes a lady who murmurs of how the weekend nanny wants time off, but neither her weekday nor weeknight nannies will cover it, ‘some people are so inconsiderate’. The fear of spending time with those made in your own image, when it is something you run from by cloaking yourself in costly garments and sojourns to Harley Street. She thought of her own mother, a saintly woman even in the biblical sense, a lady so patient, intelligent kind and gentle, who thought everyone was great at something, had time for everybody, who had an inner reserve and strength. She felt sad for times she had made her mother cry, even though these were distant from who she was now, she wished she could go back and not be that teenager who needed to win arguments and be right every time. It had taken time but realised the more she knew, the less she knew. The wise woman is the one who knows she knows nothing at all.

  She wanted to stop at one of the cafes but had no money, could she barter her iPhone for a coffee, did she want to, or did she want to listen to Daft Punk for the sprint finish home or did she want a skinny dry half-half caramel macchiato with one pump of vanilla? London made everyone demanding, it would seem ridiculous to request this anywhere else but to not request this in London would be the ridiculous part. Waiting was a thing of the past, the before London time, coffee in moments, food in minutes, a train i
n two minutes. Life was fast.

  She was not ready to go home, she kept running away from something and towards something else. She was slower now, her steps in time with her deliberate breaths, her body obediently moving. Her body was ready to go home but her mind was not, today only more questions and even fewer answers had surfaced. She tried to run from it or to it, she was never sure what. She wanted to be the person who said every day was the happiest of their life, but she didn’t know what that meant. Happiness was elusive in so much that it was undefined.

  Weary she thought to the beginning, of the girl and boy, the couple temporarily in love. With every stride part of her died, as she tried and tired to fit. To become one of those girls who hung on his every word, didn’t question life, who found him funny, who was happy to pretend he was indeed the cleverest not just of the pairing but of them all. So people threw themselves under carts and fought for this moment, that we could realise we are cleverer, better, and then we hide it, as if it were the contents of Pandora’s Box.

  STOP

  And so it ended as all things do. She stood and watched life pass by. She had lost the race with herself, but it was OK to stop, her heart told her, as she felt her veins in her neck pulse as though hitting her rhythmically from the outside. Like a time-lapse film everything glided by in slow motion, people, cyclists. It was as though she were invisible. In the compound stillness she observed life; she had found an inner quiet, sanguine at least for that moment. Her mind was still.

  CAMDEN

  Dukwane’s Deliverance

  Neil Ramsorrun

  When the alarm bell went at 3.45pm, Dukwane stuffed his books into his bag and raced out of the classroom. He charged out onto York Way and sprinted home as quickly as he could.

  ‘Is it here yet?’ he asked, bursting through the front door and gasping for breath.

  Through the wall, Dukwane could hear his dad in the other room, cursing at the election on the telly. ‘Bloody Eton fool. What he gonna do?’