London Overground Read online

  Now came the necessary confirmation that I was still on the right road. On the side of a building offering FREE WALK IN CONFIDENTIAL MEDICAL ADVICE: BLOOD SUGAR TEST, URINE TEST, PREGNANCY TEST was a set of ceramic tiles depicting various London journeys, including the Canterbury pilgrimage. I thought of Chaucer’s doctor and his Natural Magic, grounded in astronomy, his understanding of the bodily humours. A man ‘rather close as to expenses’, the quack held gold tight to his heart as a natural stimulant.

  AND OFF WE RODE AT SLIGHTLY

  FASTER PACE THAN

  WALKING TO ST THOMAS’

  WATERING–PLACE; AND

  THERE OUR HOST DREW

  UP, BEGAN TO EASE HIS

  HORSE, AND SAID ‘NOW

  LISTEN IF YOU PLEASE –

  Chaucer is depicted, riding with his fictional pilgrims. Like Alejandro Jodorowsky taking the lead in his own midnight movie, El Topo. Religion, the road, stories within stories.

  The pilgrims left behind a city dominated by what looks like a premature vision of the Shard, a weathervane cock on its summit. Jack Cade’s peasant army from 1450 are marching in rebellion to London on the next panel. Men of Kent driven to protest government corruption and the crippling drain of foreign wars. They are met by armed citizens ready to defend London Bridge. The last panel is a feathery coop of Pearly Kings and Queens, grim-faced under a black sky in which a red airliner is about to collide with a red helicopter, before the debris smashes into a tower block.

  After this potted history lesson, the next stretch of the road was notable for George Livesey House, a former library, former museum, now under discussion as a potential venue for yoga classes. The charitable Livesey (1834–1908) was the owner of the South Metropolitan Gas Company and ‘one of Southwark’s greatest industrialists’. A man in a beard stood at the door, explaining that there was no longer a museum, no funding for that, no books, but that an empty shell with legacy was a museum of another sort: a museum of memory. Another house of refuge, its grey windows masked with slatted blinds, declared itself: HOLY GHOST ZONE.

  The man in the goat mask and the girl in gypsy skirts and flounces were hanging out, waiting for something better, beside the London Overground station at New Cross Gate. A whiteface voodoo drummer in top hat swayed from side to side, accosting random commuters who looked as if they were hurrying to or from hospital appointments, juvenile courts, drinking dens. Or slouching, reluctantly, towards an art school. That is what I assumed: kids from Goldsmiths in fancy dress, as performance or concept or video demonstration. Another girl, waving, in full theatrical slap, long funeral coat and not much else, slalomed through honking traffic. After hugs and kisses and cigarettes, others joined the group: a short man in a rubber owl mask with sharp beak and huge yellow eyes, and a scowling girl of Slavic inclination with a prison-cropped head.

  I bought the goat a coffee. There was something compulsive in the radiant bone-whiteness of that mask. Ridged plastic with rudimentary horns and stiff ears became a mirror, the death cast of some reforgotten poet. The shape of the mask contrived an elegantly contoured triangle willing me to contemplate pedestrian adventures far wilder and less predictable than my suburban trudge towards Canterbury. The albino goat, coming out of nowhere, saying little, was a whole new story.

  If this boho rabble could be persuaded to walk a little way down the road to Shooter’s Hill, drumming and bird-whistling and frolicking with Afghan hounds, it would enforce my sense of pilgrimage. And I would treat them all to pints in a pub I knew, the Bull Inn, in exchange for their unmediated anecdotes.

  They had other affiliations. They belonged to the Ginger Line, as they called the recently completed circuit of the London Overground railway. They met to party, mystery locations revealed at the last moment, by text, somewhere along the line: it might be Peckham Rye, Imperial Wharf, Kensal Rise. Today it was Shoreditch, the white goat said.

  I was reminded of the microclimate cooked up by the launching of the M25 orbital motorway in 1986, and how the simultaneous arrival of bathtub-cooked ecstasy and mobile phones turned the tarmac tourniquet into a floating fiesta. Locations for raves, in barns or abandoned airfields, were announced to initiates as the start of an era of instant, compulsive communication. Everything, back then, tended to Essex: the rise of security on the door as figures of cultural significance. Steroid gyms. RIBs skidding across to Holland. Butchery with power tools in new estates perched above chalk quarries. Range Rover assassinations.

  The New Cross goats and rubber owls had responded by morphic resonance to their motorway predecessors. They texted and tweeted and ear-wormed their way around the novelty of this railway circuit of London. The Ginger Liners met at previously unknown stations for balloon parties, gossip, the taking of selfies. The traditional antisocial, mute, infolded, hate clusters of the Underground now became a means of Internet partnering. And the investigation of territories where accommodation might not be so ruinously expensive. It was sad to see that much of their conversation was about money, competitive levels of debt.

  ‘My friend, he gets a one-bed flat and develops it into a two-bed. Lives out west, Willesden or wherever? With the Overground, no problem. He can buy in … Clapham, Shadwell? You’re looking at two hundred for a one-bed. Living space is tiny. Like, “legal” means nothing. He rents to the council. Guaranteed return. This guy’s clearing seventeen grand a year. Like, guaranteed.’

  The gypsy, the drummer, the futurist girl with the shaven head are unimpressed.

  ‘He uses his brother’s income. He takes the train. Like, he jumps off anywhere, Forest Hill? Finds another property. I’ve got two jobs now: property and charity. Charity’s just great for contacts. Councils love charity.’

  By now the double red stripes at the edge of the road are trumped by the lurid orange coveralls of railway maintenance staff preparing for chemical warfare. The Overground, linking everywhere with everywhere, had spawned dining clubs for young marrieds bored in Denmark Hill. And changed the lives of lecturers living in Walthamstow and teaching in New Cross. There were also, so the rubber owl told me, orgies in Peckham Rye, partner exchanges in Kensal Rise: no guilt, no chance of running into your rug date on the school run. Late trains were reliable and patronized by a democracy of nightworkers.

  Once again I aborted my Canterbury walk without reaching Bexleyheath. I followed the Ginger Liners down to the platform and took a train home to Haggerston.

  At Rotherhithe, two sets of twins, male and female, faces painted the Lucozade-orange of sunbeds, joined the New Cross coven, whooping, helium-high, and synch-spitting their ‘likes’ and ‘omygods’ and sweet little nothings in Mickey Mouse cheeps and trills. A late goth, a phone-slate in each hand, came aboard in Whitechapel. There was an intriguing and affectionate communality at work. It took me a couple of stops to appreciate that none of these people knew each other. They had never met, but the train made them, instantly, brothers and sisters of the night. When they spilled out into Shoreditch, I realized that I had blundered once again into a version of London about which I knew nothing. And which I would have to find some way to investigate. As he passed my window, the goat held up a finger to his lips. A warning I was foolish enough to ignore.

  Fish Magic

  For several days, I sleepwalked through streets so familiar they felt like sinister fakes, replicas of themselves occupied by new tribes. Tribes who had arrived yesterday and would be gone tomorrow. The canal was still there (even if it was closed for unexplained excavations). Packs of charged banker-cyclists, swerving through sluggish traffic, competing for pavement space, kept pedestrians on their toes. I hugged the Overground railway, head in a bag, listening to the siren song of the metal tracks, and watching for signs.

  And then I found the cave.

  Hidden under one of the deeply recessed archways, a small miracle of fish. Lustrous. Comic in their doll’s-house dignity. Cartoon yellow. Or pink as a razoring of live meat waiting for transplant. A long, chill, smooth-bricked cavern dimly
illuminated by golden candle-points beamed upwards to mimic a baronial torture chamber. Autopsy tanks of violet-blue light. Anorexic screens replete with some mysterious liquid, purer and brighter than water, in which tiny but perfectly formed tropical inbreeds flicker like vanishing quotations.

  CHARTERHOUSE AQUATICS. You can see right through creatures intended as stress filters, Zen blobs of non-being, barely materialized wafers of cosmic drift matter.

  In my ‘moment of conscience’, as the poet Vernon Watkins called it, my New Year pilgrimage of disaffection, I followed the railway line like the stripped spine of a beached monster I had no hope of recognizing. The weirdness of the fish cave drew me in for a tour of inspection. I smelled possibilities for a future routine, an essay, a surrealist catalogue of the most unlikely enterprises to be found beneath an elevated railway.

  I thought of Paul Klee’s 1925 painting Fish Magic. And of the provocative notion in one of André Breton’s automatic texts: Poisson soluble. Fish dissolving like complimentary bars of hotel soap. A liquid medium that was part water and part fish, with no sense of one element having precedence over the other. Humanoid doodles, trapped within the rectangle of Klee’s composition, can breathe freely, floating among flowers, fish and stars. Between 1924 and 1926, Klee painted the series of piscine works that must have inspired – although they don’t know it or acknowledge it – the designers of CHARTERHOUSE AQUATICS. It took a poet-painter of his tough delicacy to foresee how the shape of the canvas or panel anticipated the laptop screen as a cinema-aquarium. That balanced equation of elements. Colours of earth and heaven in which our failure to understand is suspended. The flatness is both the flatness of the world as we once understood it and a tapestry of disconnected symbols. The anthropomorphic figure at the bottom of Fish Magic is waving goodbye. His head faces both directions at once, like a person who has just witnessed a fast train, carrying away a relative or lover, leaving the station.

  Ducking under the curve of old brick, beneath the neurotic weight of the London Overground railway, with the constant arrival and departure of trains confirmed by the voice of a never-seen oracle, is to risk immediate dissolution inside a whirlpool anomaly within the space–time continuum. Walk that tight chasm, between blocks of new-build flats and the railway, and you risk becoming one of the city’s soluble fish. The particle accelerator of our snail-rail version of the Large Hadron Collider spins seated humans (with all their electronic slates and earplugs) both ways around the orbit of London. Sexualized moans and whistles challenge undercroft tranquillity, the expensive dharma of those designer fish. Fish ownership as a lifestyle.

  Fish previously encountered in this ward, about to be plunged in a bath of sizzling fat, or hooked gasping from the canal, were slippery and scaly. And thick. The Klee offprints exhibited in the drowned-TV aquaria, on offer for upwards of four figures, have to be viewed side-on, with all their intricate workings on show. They are flat as silk bookmarks. Colourful ghosts of a better way.

  The inappropriate screech of trains overhead. Like the secret groans of celebrity predators. And the price-exclusive tranquillity of the fish cave. They slide against one another. Taking this casual Hackney drop-in pedestrian out of his comfort zone. Into the challenge of how to respond to a high-concept space which is not quite an art installation, not quite a start-up Silicon Roundabout operation. Not quite a Chinese supermarket in Silvertown in which you are invited to choose your lunch from a bubbling tank. I think of the way fish have become a code for money. As well as slang for a prostitute, a vagina, a gambling chip, a pound note, the new inmate of a prison. Heron Tower, a recent cloud-scrape development in Broadgate, sells itself in a skirt of soothing fish motifs – without appreciating the special relationship between sharp-beaked herons and their watery breakfast.

  Sunday-afternoon attendees at CHARTERHOUSE AQUATICS are subdued, museum-disciplined. Hushed kids straining at the leash. Adults in discriminations of black. Techno-geeks in sloganed T-shirts, tapping at keyboards, tweaking lights, invite you not to make an approach. The background thrump and drip of computer muzak is just loud enough to phase out overhead train rattle: serial heartbeats setting a mood, which would otherwise be too melancholy to solicit credit-card action.

  Plinths dressed with flat screens. A sympathetic design concept bleeding into mute fish action. Slow-mo promotional trailers for meditation packages that come with the sound switched off. ‘Made from acrylic, not glass … Acrylic has a transparency rate of 93%, making it the clearest material known.’ Zero green tint. The whitecoats at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hamburg ran tests on oxygen concentrations, to prove that you don’t need a large surface area of water to produce an optimum oxygenation exchange. In other words, those antique Chinese-restaurant tanks, and the goldfish bowls favoured by expelled council-flat-dwellers relocated to Loughton, are now as redundant as primitive personal computers, the size and weight of the safes of Bethnal Green moneylenders. So redundant, in fact, that they’ll soon be back in the retro boutiques of Broadway Market, and the pits of neo-junk dealers returning to the arches under the railway alongside London Fields, in anticipation of dross-sentimentality on the part of incomers with slender bicycles on the narrow balconies of their dropped-in flats. Schoolroom maps with an excess of red. Dysfunctional portable typewriters. Rusty scythes of a discontinued peasantry. All the beachcomber detritus of vanished worlds. Everything CHARTERHOUSE AQUATICS disavows.

  The London Overground arches between Haggerston and Shoreditch have been colonized by German and Japanese enterprises primed to exploit the frontier aspect of the undefined post-Olympic legacy moment. Flagrantly localized car-repair businesses have gone. Or transferred to the street as all-weather, roofless improvisations, shuttles around wardens, neighbourhood watchers and civic improvers. The former railway caves were heroically polluted, corpse-clammy, and shuddered with perpetual radio noise to set the nerves on edge. Room would be found for a warm glass cabinet in which sat an impressive woman with scarlet talons and a smoker’s cough, leafing through brochures for the next winter cruise to the Caribbean, and relishing a good gossip before handing over the bill (no credit cards, please). The hollow-chested mechanic would present you with some apparently damaged part, in a pool of oil, as evidence of work undertaken. I miss all this theatre, the people. The new economy of the arches is not covert, subterranean. No longer a chain of survivalist troglodytes in dingy pits, but a brick mall, a linked street of calculated economic and subcultural decisions.

  Shadow the Overground in the direction of the canal, once an attractively illegitimate gulch, a slice of oily-handed marginalists and crumpled drug wraps (outside the range of surveillance cameras), and New Hackney stands revealed. Before the winter sun rises, freshly installed flat-dwellers are hefting weights. Tight young women in black leotards, down on their backs, raising wagon-wheel discs. Number crunchers grunting at resistance machines. The arched tunnel behind a curtain made from overlapping fronds of translucent plastic looks like a high-security-prison gym; masochism and narcissism striving for improved body image and the cult of infinitely sustainable youth.

  There is always an artisan bakery ‘promoting well-being and recovery from mental ill health’ by endorsing traditional methods (of flour-grinding, not health care). Hot-spiced loaves drip a trail of authentic grain from brown paper bags.

  Then, beyond CHARTERHOUSE AQUATICS, in symbiotic connection, a stylish Japanese restaurant: TONKOTSU EAST. Slanting roof across yard. Long bar. Raw fish-meats arranged in poetic portions on white plates.

  These interconnected enterprises, nudging one into the next, mimic the sleepers of the railway overhead. An endless tunnel – food, fitness, money-art, van hire, storage – looping, cave after cave, around the span of London. Parasitical on blocks of secure flats selling themselves on the spectacle of those twinned pseudo rivers, the Regent’s Canal and the elevated railway. Balconies jut over the cobbles to within a few yards of the Haggerston platform. Station announcements, every tw
o minutes, punctuate sleep. Dream destinations: Clapham Junction, New Cross, Crystal Palace, West Croydon, Dalston Junction, Highbury & Islington.

  The new line, with its new bridges, artisan bakeries, blue-bike racks and coffee shops, was opened by Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, on 27 April 2010. The first train left Dalston Junction at five minutes after midday. And I was on it. I liked the experience so much, the wide carriages, the views, the orgasmic hiss of the brakes, the absence of pioneer clients, that I stayed with the shuttle: to Surrey Quays on the wrong side of the river. And back.

  I might have settled permanently in the time capsule, this cynosure of a transport system that actually worked, if it hadn’t been for the din from a couple of profoundly deaf mutes. One of them had cropped silver hair, ear attachments that hummed, and a bellicose thrust of chin. The other, serene to the point of dead stop, was Japanese. They debated, discussed, translated, revised at Morse-code velocity, across the carriage’s generous aisle. Threatening silences were broken by strangulated yelps from the white man – who I took, on no hard evidence, for Northside Dublin. Wanting to come closer, to feel the projectile impact of unspoken words, their excitement at something beyond the journey they were presently undertaking, they relocated. Repeatedly. The Irishman thumped down next to me and waved his friend to the vacant slot on the other side, leaving me caught in the middle like a referee with no idea of the rules of the game.

  My head was ringing. The more the Japanese man displayed his beatific smile and pre-chemical calm in the face of the onslaught of dumb-show dialectic, the more his study partner insisted. The tensed hush of the other widely dispersed travellers was absolute, clenched: trainspotters, railway buffs entering details in notebooks, a great transport occasion. They remembered all too vividly that this novel fairground railway, Boris-puffed, freighted with boasts and predictions, surfeited on statistics, was a very old railway revamped.