Steve from the North

Robbie did not consider himself first and foremost a northerner, but a human being. Just because he hailed from the north of the country did not, he thought, set him apart significantly from his peers. They still shared a cultural understanding, but then nearly everybody did in the modern age; even the north wasn’t exempt from the process of globalisation. He resented the way the north of England was portrayed in the media as a cesspit of poverty and depravity, and fumed at poncy southern writers who substituted the condescending “fook” for “fuck.” His degree in Film had led him away geographically from his northern heritage for the first time, but in his studies he had encountered the predominantly British genre of social realism. Upon viewing a social realist classic, greyly resplendent with the sorry trappings of hardship, his cruel and austere World Cinema lecturer assured the lecture hall that “that was definitely set in the north.” Robbie hailed from a well-to-do middle-class neighbourhood in Shotley Bridge, and thought that the manner in which the north was typically represented by outsiders let his ilk fall to the wayside of any notions of northernism.

“Bye, mam. Love you,” Robbie kissed his mother goodbye as he left the house for Shotley Bridge station.

“Love you too, son. Try not to drink too much this term, won’t you?” she called after him.

“Aye, mum.”

“And eat well!”

Robbie boarded the southbound train.  He cast a mildly affectionate glance at Shotley Bridge as it disappeared into the horizon, then opened a bottle of vodka he’d bought at the station. He looked around the compartment. Craning his neck slightly, Robbie noticed that the woman sitting diagonally from him was watching the new TV show, Moral Panic, on a tablet device. The guy directly across from him caught his eye and smiled gummily.

“You gannin’ south, son?”

“Aye.  Uni.”

“What’s ya name, son?”

“Robbie, mate–”

“Gi’z’a swig o’ that piss.” Robbie obliged, letting him pour a few generous dollops of liquor down his throat. The man gasped with relief.

Robbie pulled into the station a few blocks from his halls some hours later. His compatriot must really have held more distaste for a place the further south it is down the map, because he had slammed the population of Leeds as “soft” before bitterly dismounting the train at Sheffield, which was “full of pansies”. Robbie would’ve preferred to dissect the north-south dichotomy in a manner less adversarial. He deposited his bags in his flat and headed back out again to satisfy his appetite.

A private number called his phone whilst he was in the waiting lobby of Pizza Town;

“Hello?”

“Aye, Robbie…”

“Yo, sorry man, your number’s not showing up on my phone. Who’s this?”

“It’s…Steve.” Steve had a deep and slow voice, delivering words with a throaty crackle as if with great deliberation. His vowel sounds lasted an eternity, his pronunciation of his name phonetically amounting to “Stieeyuv.”

“Do I…know a Steve?”

“You remember me, Robbie.”

“Where from?”

“You remember me from…the north.”

“Er, aye. What’s your name again?”

“Steve…”

“Right-“

“…from the north.”

“Phil, is that you, mate?”

“Nee, it’s St-“

“Steve, yeah.”

“From the north.”

“Right. Let me guess – South Shields.”

“Watch the fook out, son.”

Steve hung up. Robbie was untroubled by what he assumed was a prank call, as he had no acquaintances by the name of Steve, and thought that it sounded enough like an exaggerated parody of a northern man that it was probably just some of his friends from university poking fun at his “Third World” background. His worries allayed by drink and light entertainment, he rested his head for the night.

It was well into the small hours when his phone rang again;

“Aye, Robbie.”

“What?” he hissed in his delirium.

“It’s Steve. Where’s me fooking money?” Steve spoke quicker and more aggressively. His consonants hit harder; he almost sounded Welsh.

“Fuck off, it’s 3AM” he moaned “What money?”

“Me fooking money! You want me come down from north and fix you up proper?”

“Yo, calm down, man. Your name still means nothing to me. Tell me about yourself, at least…”

Steve appeared placated. “Aye, I were a miner…that were before Thatcher. Since then I been in t’mcat graft.”

“Is that what this is about? That’s bullshit. I don’t use mcat anymore. And when I did, I didn’t buy it off anyone called Steve.”

“Me town ‘ad running water and the lot…‘course, that were before Thatcher. See, all northerners possess a remarkable singularity. They are one and the same; poor bred, low on intellect, even worse manners…I’m Steve…” his timbre escalated “…from the north! Yer fookin’ neck-deep in debt, ya bastard. Watch your fookin’ back, I’m comin’ down!”

Robbie became increasingly paranoid. He called up his mother, but she didn’t pick up the phone. He messaged a couple of his more narcotic-minded northern friends on Facebook to ask if they knew anybody called Steve, but they too were being slow responding to his queries. He barely sat through his lecture; anxious, twitching, unable to think of anything but his mysterious tormentor. His usually sprightly demeanour became all the more hangdog as he wandered back to his accommodation. Waving his electronic key over the lock, he lumbered into the courtyard, drooping eyelids hunching him towards the floor.

His phone rang again as he was waiting for the lift. It was an anonymous number.

“Aye, Robbie.” Robbie gulped… “It’s fooking Steve from North.”

Something was not right. “Sorry, but, are you putting on a Russian accent?”

“…vot?” Steve seemed flummoxed.

“…or German? I don’t get it.”

“Been…reading Dostoyevsky…” he mumbled. “Shit.”

The call lasted for eighteen seconds. As the lift opened, Robbie joined the ranks of the flummoxed, thankful it was empty. The lift ascended. Once again, the phone rang. Robbie contemplated not answering, but curiosity got the better of him.

“What the fuck do you want now?”

“I have information for you concerning…what it is I cannot say.” It was the Russian.

“Are you him? Are you St-“

“Hush, you dafty. Meet me in hour of time in Megamarket car park, fifth storey. Good architectural design. Look behind mirror and you see of what I speak. Goodbye, comrade.”

The Steve impersonator – what’s to say, Robbie’s mind raced, that all the Steves weren’t impersonators, although of whom he didn’t know – had been as enigmatic as his presumed employer on the phone. What’s more, what he’d said about the mirror implied that he had been in Robbie’s flat. Robbie’s eyes darted between his two mirrors – the one fixed to the wall, and the smaller one that he’d brought down himself, which lay in a pile of detritus on the floor. He hoped for his own good that it wasn’t the one that was fixed to the wall. He’d try the loose one first, anyway.

Carved into the back of the mirror was STEVE, which didn’t provide any new revelations. Whoever this Russian is, thought Robbie between desperate bursts of fear, he doesn’t one-hundred percent seem to know what he’s doing.

“I am Deep Throats!” bellowed the Russian, his voice reverberating through the sparsely packed multi-storey car park. “I have intel. I spill beans on whole Steve operation. You Mr. Robbie?”

“Aye. I’m on the other side of the floor though, so maybe quit shouting ‘til I’m over?” Robbie drew closer to the Russian, who leant against a beam smoking a cigarette. He wore a trench coat, and looked more like a polar bear than anyone he had ever seen.

“Robbie, Robbie, glad to make acquaintance.” He rolled the R’s in Robbie’s name. They shook hands, and Deep Throats gave him a painfully muscular hug.

“Aren’t you worried people might hear what we’re talking about? This is supposed to be a top secret thing, right?”

“No, no, these good people. What you want to know?”

“Steve!”

“Oh yes, Steve…from North! First, let me tell you what Deep Throats do.” He slammed his fist onto his chest “I am security expert! I spend many years undercover as Jewist, reading all of Protocol of Elder Zions and learning ancient art of Jewism, but now Britain government assign me closer to home. They make me work for organisation called STEVE, that is…wait, I knew this bit would be tricky…”

He fumbled in the deep pockets of his trench coat for something, eventually producing a small scrap of paper.

“STEVE is acronym meaning, um… Southern Trade Encouragement of Value Enterprise.”

Deep Throats seemed pleased with himself. Robbie stood staring at him for an uncomfortable period of time.

“And what the fuck does that mean?”

“Name confuse me too, ‘cause there no ‘of’ in ‘STEVE’. What it about is making north a better place. More money-making place.”

“Like…how? There hasn’t been industry in the north for years.”

“My friend, Robbie…the place you come from is being torn down as we speak.”

“What?” Robbie grew exasperated. “What are you saying? Shotley Bridge? Consett?”

“No, no. I am so sorry, Robbie, but you do not think big enough.”

“You mean…?

“Where did Steve say he was from?”

“South Sh–“ he spluttered “The north?!”

“Yes, government is working with very powerful, rich London men to create big shop centre, spa and golf course where north used to be. It violate all sorts of human rights, but they say it worth it ‘cause of tourist money – same reason they keep royal family.”

“So they’re…they’re privatising the north?”

“You have good brain, Robbie. Take memory stick; there is serious documents on here to spill more beans on you…also great documentary on Egyptian Pyramids, four stars, amazing 3D effects – anyone who tells you they’re built by aliens is a fucking idiot, ok!”

Digging into the leaked documents back at his flat, Robbie began to fear the worst. He had received no word from his family and friends anywhere in the north. Perhaps the process had begun. Emotionally exhausted enough that the prospect of all the reading was daunting, he started with an AVI video.

“Hello, ladies and gentlemen, I’m Sir Charles Hattersley. Allow me to introduce you to the STEVE programme,” announced a greying former Yuppie who exuded the aura of uncut business “The Southern Trade Encouragement of Value Enterprise…well, I know that’s a mouthful, but the Southern Trade Organisation was really thinking acronym-first with STEVE. See, Steve is your friendly, everyday northern guy, who works hard and, er, y’know, is a cheeky northerner and whatnot. But sadly, there’s not much use for Steve in today’s world. Steve used to work at the factories, but half the board at STEVE know what it’s like to have to lay off all your northern factory workers. Steve used to work in the mines, but unfortunately Steve’s usefulness expired in that area too. What can be done, you ask, to bring Steve into the 21^st century? Well, very little, I’m afraid. Perhaps through some fault of his own, through some inherent lack of entrepreneurial initiative, Steve has become dependent on a lifestyle that is unsustainable in the present economy. Consequently, he also cannot sustain the property he has been allotted – half the country – to its full potential. We must guide the northern man into the modern era. Just as the Native Americans could not have created modern America at their rate of development, the northern negligence demands we intervene. We must monetise the north. We must create a neon-lit beacon of western civilisation where a grim post-industrial wasteland once stood. And, my friends, we have the resources to do such a thing. The responsibility, however, also falls to us to reallocate the people of the north, and find a way of integrating them into society as the system allows. Property values will rise immeasurably; there will be luxury condos for miles, with the most elaborate technology to combat the vicious northern weather – a cost of living far beyond the means of modest men like Steve. Of course, menial workers will be required to man the shops and whatnot, so those who fit the profile will – with some minor, uh, elocution lessons – be provided with accommodation in return for their labour…”

There was a knock on Robbie’s door. Shaking, he paused the video and cautiously went to answer it. He asked “Who is it?” as he opened the door.

“It’s your weed guy.”

“I don’t sm-” Two men barged the door open. One of them jammed a gun into Robbie’s nose and pushed him onto the floor. The other went straight for his laptop. He rubbed his nose; “And who might you be?”

“We’re the GCHQ. We’ve been keeping tabs on you. Hasn’t been hard, your social media presence is phenomenal.”

“I don’t know anything!” protested Robbie.

The GCHQ guy resumed the video;

“…accommodation which will, of course, be fairly equal to the quality of living of the, uh…camps the rest of the northerners will be situated in.”

He paused it again, and looked over at Robbie with disdain.

Robbie could tolerate no such moral superiority; “…CAMPS?”

“Don’t know what he’s talking about.” Said one.

“No idea.” The other added.

“Right, let’s get down to business. You got a hammer?”

The hairs on the back of Robbie’s neck stood up. “A hammer?”

“We need you to smash up your hard drive.”

“But all my coursework’s on there.”

“No buts. Get the hammer and smash it.”

“I’ve already sent it to Wikileaks.”

“I don’t care if you’ve sent it to the pope. Our orders were to come to your residence and symbolically destroy physical copies of virtual documents.”

“I don’t have a hammer.”

“Shite. What have you got?”

“…a skateboard?”

The burlier of the two GCHQ men grabbed the skateboard from Robbie’s huge pile of detritus and began to menacingly wield it.

“Fucking great,” sighed Robbie “now I’m going to fail my course.”

“We’ve been watching you for months” said the GCHQ thug “you would’ve failed anyway. There’s no coursework on this hard drive.”

He brought the skateboard down repeatedly upon the laptop. After a few rounds of beating it lay in shards of technological redundancy, and the computer assassin tore off the back side and started smashing the hard drive itself into submission. He then set upon the memory stick, which took quite a long time because its miniscule size meant he kept missing. He’d irked Robbie.

“How come a guy like you works for the GCHQ anyway? Too soft for MI5?”

“Smart guy. Fuck you.”

“Do you work for STEVE?”

“Steve...I don’t know a Steve.” He turned to his partner. “D’you know a Steve?”

“I don’t know a Steve.”

“Guess neither of us know Steve.”

“Oh, you guys are serious bullshitters.”

“Right!” yelled the thug, grabbing Robbie “you’re a fucking pain in the arse.” He held Robbie in a headlock, gesturing to his partner to open the door “Let’s take this northern cunt to the police station and show him some real southern hospitality.”

Robbie yelled as they dragged him into the lift and out into the courtyard.

“GCHQ business,” the one who wasn’t holding Robbie told the staring onlookers, clarifying “We’re a security agency.”

They left the student accommodation block, dragging their prisoner towards their slick black SUV. Robbie struggled with the GCHQ thug. The other clicked the door open with his keys. As the car made its peep! sound of awakening, the dull, fat clanking of gunfire resounded twice, thudding into the brains of the two agents. Deep Throats shoved his gun into his pants and beckoned Robbie to the vacant vehicle.

“Fuck…fucking hell…you shot them both…JESUS FUCKING HELL!”

Deep Throats scrunched his brow as he hit the gas. “What is matter?”

“…shot them in the head just like that…” Robbie moaned.

“Listen, I have good news. Russia is joining war.”

“…war? What war?”

“Civil war. Just broke out. Russia funds North. Do you not read news?”

“I…don’t have a laptop anymore.”

“It is good news for all who not want north to be shopping centre.”

“But don’t you work for the government? Don’t you work for STEVE?”

“I works for noble leader Vladimir Putin and no other man! Mr Putin says north has democratic right to secede from Great Britain after such appalling treatment.” Deep Throats was a double agent. This explained some aspects of his peculiar behaviour, but only some. “Dude, did you watch that pyramid document–” His voice trailed off as blood began to trickle down his forehead. Robbie noticed a hole in the windscreen. The car veered off the road into a tree.

He awoke on the floor of a police interrogation cell. He had been patched up by a medical professional, but he didn’t remember it. A trio of further professionals were looking over him; a cop of some sort, a politician he recognised from the times he had watched the news, and Sir Charles Hattersley, the head of STEVE.

“I’d never expect this kind of nerve from a British citizen…” tutted Hattersley “not even a northerner.”

“Disgusting.” Spat the politician, his bald head purple with rage. “Giving information to Vladimir Putin…”

“No, sir,” Robbie began “Vladimir Putin gave information to me.” There was a silence. “Aren’t you a northerner yourself, sir?”

“Shut the boy up!” he boomed at the cop, who slapped Robbie around the face.

“This isn’t ethical! Where’s my lawyer?”

“You’re in here under the Terrorism Act,” the cop hollered. “you’re not entitled to one!”

The politician asked the cop; “How long have we had him here?”

“Eight and a half hours, sir. Gotta release him soon.”

“He only just regained consciousness!” protested the politician “Our window for interrogation has not been opportune.”

“He has compromised STEVE’s entire scheme,” said Hattersley “Everybody we know has been looking for something to do with the north for decades. STEVE are the first lot to do anything about it. The North has always posed a problem…in that it takes up half the country, and there’s not really anything of note there. Seemed a shame to waste it all…”

“You’re a fascist!” screamed Robbie “a real Nazi!”

“Let me tell you, boy, that I stroke the sword of my enemy. How dare you call me a fascist? STEVE is a democratic movement comprised of a cross-section of the wealthiest men and women in a tiny enclave of central London. Every day I am working on new solutions; new advancements for society. Right now I have experts investigating the possibility that it might save money if our architects worked with fractions instead of decimals. This is what I am about: maximum efficiency, maximum business. Thank God for Margaret Thatcher, because she reminded this land that in business, not everybody can win, and we’re all the better for it.”

“And why did you target me?”

“We, ” he coughed “’targeted’ you for the same reasons we targeted many like you. Because we need everybody in the civilised parts of the country to believe that the north is exactly as we tell them so we can tear it down and gentrify its ashes. You’re not enough of a degenerate. You compromise the vision of the north that we will profit from. You are a degenerate, but a middle-class one.” He turned to his two associates; “I’ve seen enough.”

Hattersley left the room in disgust.

“I insist that interrogation of the subject continue elsewhere,” decreed the politician gloomily. He spun around and bent over, peering at the huddled figure of Robbie. “What do you know, son, of the leader of the armies of the north?”

Robbie looked at him blankly. The politician shrugged and pulled himself up.

“It’s obvious I’m not getting through here.” He said, addressing the policeman. “I’ll contact the US embassy. We need to get this boy on the first plane to Guantanamo Bay.”

Search for Leicester

by Jack Frayne-Reid

“I knew one boy, yeah, ‘e took like twenty-five eighths to Croydon town centre. He didn’t tell nobody he was shotting, but in a couple hours there was no bags left.”

“Issit?”

“Cunning salesmanship, innit.”

My drug dealer’s living room typically housed a varied bunch of associates, but I did not recognise the guy who opened the door to me, and whom I learned upon entering this epitome of the classical “drug den” had brought his infant son with him, buggy in tow. I left with relative haste, my pockets lined with some auburn rocks of MDMA and a fat sack of piff, as well as a ben [rhyming slang: ten] of the same marijuana for my friend, who waited out on the sodden street corner with his girlfriend.

“Tell him to wait in the park, yeah” my Man instructed me “that corner is hot.”

Burdened by my felonious stash, I too felt pretty hot.

***

I had been pondering the changing shape of my adopted city, Leicester. With 40% of its population hailing from outside the United Kingdom and 50% darker than Western man’s Caucasian archetype, it is one of the UK’s most demographically diverse areas, although I hate quantitative data.  This has been bolstered by historical factors ranging from an explosion of house-building that lasted from the end of the Second World War to the nineteen-seventies, to a deeply racist attempt by Leicester Council to dissuade Ugandan Asians - expelled from their country by the despotic Idi Amin - from seeking asylum therein. A racist contingency still exists in Leicester, but thankfully not on the Council, whose dunderheaded scaremongering, in a delicious irony, attracted around a quarter of those Ugandan refugees to their proverbial door.

This influx of migrants – which British media perennially loves to describe in the terms of a Biblical flood – is not, however, the change of which I speak. For a Briton to complain about immigration is to effectively concede that everything’s been going steadily downhill since 1066; to yearn for an England that has never existed, and moreover, to use the most hackneyed scapegoat for social decline there has ever been. Before I moved here, my aunty – who used to visit a friend here as a student in the 1980s – spoke of some great food cooked up by Leicester’s Asian community all along Narborough Road. Today, you’ll be hard-pressed to find such cuisine on Narborough, but you can take your pick from the fast-food delicacies of Subway, Big John’s or Maryland’s. These are the changes that intrigued me. I wondered how far Leicester been sucked up by the spectral hoover of late capitalism.

So, a plan was hatched; in collusion with a friend, hereafter known as Salvador Allende, I would undertake a psychogeographic voyage through the city. We would soak in the sights and sounds of our milieu – thinking both about where everything came from, and how we would perceive it if it came from nothing. We would consciously attempt to deviate from the paths our internal geography led us down. What’s more, we would take the ecstasy that I purchased the previous day.

***

So, why MDMA? Because it’s marked change of pace from my – and Allende’s – preferred drug, marijuana. Whilst pot cultivates a relaxed yet studious mind, said relaxation means deadly things for a walk of any scale. Ecstasy, however, is like a forklift up your ass; an invigorating ambulatory aid. Also, any excuse to take drugs…

I had written some material – a loose itinerary of sorts – that precluded our expedition, hoping to find some structure from which to salvage what was sure to be a decidedly unstructured set of notes. Allende thought this was cool;

“I read it. It’s, like, a prophecy, man.”

I laughed and handed him my ID.

“Crush up the shit some more, dude. I think I got a chunk up my nose just now.”

“That’s fucked up, man,” he breathed deep with metronomic rhythm and crushed the rocks onto the desk with a flex of the card. I was pacing, snorting, gargling and rubbing my hands together; warped and insatiable, waiting for the kick. “Clear.”

Things continued in this vein for half an hour, and it had begun to grow dark. The devil fools with the best laid plans, I figured, having hoped to view the city with the clarity of daylight.

“We should go.” Sal reasoned, tipping the contents of the bag onto my desk. I dabbed some on my index finger and sniffed it, then howled like a wolf.

“Shouldn’t whuh…we…” I gasped “bring some with us?”

He shot me through with a dead-eyed stare, “…fuckin’ cops, man.”

I gesticulated like I had solutions, “What about I jam it in my phone between my, uh…back cover and battery?”

But it was another pipe dream; the Blackberry was not made to smuggle contraband. So we did it all!

***

Narborough Road bustled icily. The mythical Indian food joints were out of sight, out of mind. At an ecstatic pace we trod the familiar part of the route. In more lucid times, parts of the area had piqued my interest, but we were not yet there. Many of our usual haunts flew by; the deep-fried shithouses I don’t care to name, Scorpion – the totally legal business that sells equipment with which to take illegal drugs – and Key Sounds, the musical instrument outfit from whose window a life-size cut-out of boogie-woogie maestro Jools Holland beams at passers-by, who probably all watch the Hootenanny ritualistically.

“We should go in there and ask if we can have it,” said Allende “when they’re done with it. I’ve grown quite attached to auld Jools.”

“Careful,” I cautioned “his endorsement might be their USP.”

We observed that Rapunzel appeared to have taken up residence above the flashy new bar, Pi, in an enchantingly glowing tower that I suspect may be a loft conversion. Opting for less glamorous surroundings, we swung by Gaul Street and passed our comrade Yair Rice, who embraced me and said "this kind’a shit is in vogue" and then, with the pulsation of his bulbous eyes putting unimaginable strain upon his sockets, he disappeared in a cloud of frivolous paper notes.

“Weren’t those…?”

“What?”

“…your notes?”

“Nah, he’s always writing,” I reassured myself. I don’t know who I was trying to kid “fuck! They must’uh fallen outta my pockets when he hugged me.”

Something dawned on Allende. His eyes widened, which was some feat considering his toxicological condition. He shook me by the shoulders; “WHAT ABOUT THE PROPHECY, MAN?!”

My jaw jutting purposefully, I took control of the situation, “Stay cool, man. It’s on my laptop back home. We can go where we want and lie about the rest!”

“We’ll lie about the fuckin’ rest!” He concurred, shaking me now with affection. “You know what I am? I’m the urban oceanographer!”

“You hear me? We can go where the FUCK we want!” I told everybody on Gaul Street.

It may have been the drugs, but it felt like a triumph. We were freed from all narrative constraints, and as we crossed to Western Road it felt like a great and inalienable liberty to wonder anywhere and everywhere and not have a reason for it. Words like ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’, however, I choked upon when I saw who stood, ranting and raving, outside the East-West Community Project.

Allende had been provoked by the morosely terraced houses that lined Gaul St. to ask if its residents were “students or real people?” In Leicester’s housing it is indeed difficult to delineate between the self-imposed poverty of the student and the true poverty of the worker. I felt sanctimoniously liberal as I pondered how a modest, somewhat grimy house was, for my peers and I, a place to crash for a few months, but for somebody else it was home. Elsewhere, in many tall apartment complexes, one gets the sense that the property boom has continued with the student faculty exclusively in mind. Today it’s probably more difficult for a working class migrant to find decent housing and employment in Leicester, and to some that’s a good thing, but I think the true people of Leicester have come from all around the world, and not just for the universities. And, lest we forget, the lecture rooms don’t exactly look like UKIP meetings.

The East-West Community Project represented this melting pot sensibility, and it was emblematic of everything Oliver Heiley, a 25-year old student who, shall we say, dabbled in right-wing politics, hated; “English culture is being destroyed! Sharia Law imposed all over the place! Immigration is out of control…everybody’s thinking it, but nobody’s saying it! Leicester has been subject to something, oh yes, something called ethnic cleansing, and now I must get my dictionary to show you that is the case!”

He fumbled for his book, we jostled towards him, and I spat on his English Democrat manifestoes; “Fucking fascist.”

“You’re twisted up inside, man.” sneered Allende.

“You…” Heiley blustered in the archaic manner of a fustily avuncular character from The Third Man (1949) “…you are a pair of leftist militants!”

“What the fuck?” said Salvador “I only read the Guardian, like, sometimes.”

“I might be a leftist militant,” I said “but you’re on the far-right, man. Get real! Always bitching and complaining you’ve been wronged by society, just shut the fuck up for once and people might start treating you nice.”

“You drug-using leeches on the state are the reason we need more police on the streets!”

***

Maybe that fuck was the real prophet; we instantly left Bede Park, with its imposing skyline of buildings as mundane as Tesco Express, because – SHIT! –a cop nonchalantly patrolled the park, so we moved on to a new-looking development lined with houses so neat, bland, homogenous in their anonymity, that one almost expects them to be inhabited not by people but little tin soldiers, or maybe that there’s some Stepford Wives kind’a shit going on…

“I’ve never seen the Stepford Wives,” inquired Allende “what’s it about?”

“It’s about, uh…well, there’s, like, some families and they’re…married…I d’no, I haven’t seen it either.”

With one row of domiciles surrounded by a spiked iron fence that must certainly fill its residents with a sheer sense of incarceration, the developers had sought to make the area more homely by naming the roads Coriander, Tarragon, Mint and Sage, which are definitely not real road names. All that was missing was Parsley, Rosemary and Thyme. A sign read “police in action” – shit, I thought.

Later, my companion would point to a beautiful but weather-beaten mosaic that depicted the sheering of sheep – even with the cracks and the fading and the overgrown weeds at its foot, it betrayed a kind of majesty, “but” he said “the decay prevailed.” Our plans for a purposefully aimless meander off Leicester’s beaten path similarly began to decay. The catalyst was my bladder.

It dragged me to the Student Union and past it into town on an endlessly familiar route. It’s hard to rebel too savagely against the urban infrastructure; function keeps you following a certain path. Yes, I needed to piss, and the nefarious Leicester Council certainly hadn’t gone out of their way to provide public toilets. So, after a brief chinwag with those ubiquitous students we lathered our hands in the prestigious-sounding soap of the Skincare Management System and made for the doors. It had begun to feel surreal to be – in the drug connoisseur’s parlance – buzzing in the SU, when I remembered the place doubled as a nightclub.

***

Deeper into town, “NHTFG” was scrawled in white graffiti upon the topmost segments of a grey skyscraper, which begs the question; did the owners of said building sanction this oblique – and logistically challenging - artistic display upon their property, or did this minimalist Basquiat take the initiative themselves and either a) hang precariously upside down from the roof of the building and write each of the five characters that way, b) hitch a ride on a friendly window cleaner’s rig, or c) hire a helicopter. Although late at night I have overheard the strange rumblings of low-flying rotorcraft, the curiously lopsided rendering of the letter “n” could support the first theory, yet leaves even more unanswered questions. Not least; what does the pattern mean?

                We were swapping drug stories by the Motorola Warehouse when it hit us that we’d taken all the drugs. This realisation was a major bummer, but certainly should have freed us from fears of the cold grip of the law. Instead, stumbling into the Cultural Quarter’s Curve theatre, Allende was more fucked up than ever.

“Psssst…” he hissed in my ear.

“What?”

“We better split, man, this place is getting hot…” Couples dined and somebody played live piano in the corner, “I don’t think we should be here.”

After grabbing some leaflets, we split.

***

We strolled through the neon garishness of the shopping centre, discussing the transgressions of Woody Allen and Roman Polanski, and how we can reconcile them with their artistry. Highcross, rechristened as such in 2008 but around since 1992, is particularly symptomatic of one facet of Leicester’s gentrification; with the collapse of the Industrial sector in the 1980s, the city compensated for the lack of prospects with a surge of job opportunities in retail. The elastic road seemed to be coming to an end.

                “I’ve got a drug problem…” I began.

My friend is a rock ‘n’ roll enthusiast “Keith Richards has it right,” he grinned, quoting “’I don’t have a drug problem, I have a police problem.’”

                “No, a problem with these particular drugs. We take too much ecstasy! Instead of imbuing me with an all-encompassing desire to just fuckin’ move, it actually relaxes me.”

                “Y’know, now th’t you– my legs are kind’a starting to hurt, man…”

                My friend’s company had, to an extent, kept me focused upon the task at hand. However, I was reminded of my experiences walking alone. Although I attempt to keep observation at the heart of my peregrinations, my walks often cease to be about my environment, whatever my intentions, and revert to a mostly solipsistic focus. We found that at times our one-on-one conversation would render Leicester merely ornamental. Function again grasped us in its hands, and, ever the loyal customers, the final stop on our trip took us to our Man’s living room. I chuckled at the circularity of our haphazard odyssey. Thinking of my grand ambitions, I lamented that I was even mourning structure. I didn’t know if we’d found the real Leicester, but I had material to spare and – any problems – I could just make it up.

The headland

You never wanted
to be the type
to be immobilised.

Now they ask you
why you always
seem to let
yourself wash away.

I think, like me,
you find it hard
to hear the sea
keep knocking
so you let it in.
You know that, while it's great,
to say
"I will be strong"
you know you're only there
to be engulfed
so why
not play along?

You know that you're supposed to hate
that sensation of letting yourself rot
but
there's something so sexy
about being stripped
to the bone.
Something so thrilling 
about self-destruction
as you tumble down
bit by bit.

I think the world was never made
with us in mind
so, still, we sit.
And gorge ourselves on vertigo
and tumble down
bit by bit.

Harvey Fucking Slade

The Interloper

Gary had awoken with an insatiable thirst for the velvety serenity of a cup of milky tea. Often one awakes with an unaccomplishable set of desiderata in mind, but sitting hulking and inanimate upon the kitchen work surface was a box containing seventy-thousand bags of Tesco’s Own Brand tea, acquired for a price so fractional that, as Gary fumblingly jammed coppers into the self-service checkout, he looked like a triumphant victor collecting his prize from the world’s least challenging slot machine; albeit an image that would be greatly enhanced were the teabags sculpted into the shape of a gargantuan stuffed bear.

                He drifted out of bed and towards the kitchen with tea on his mind, wearing his house as if it were a comfortable old shoe. At the stairway, he turned instinctively; bleary-eyed without his contact lenses, he could hardly see – and certainly had no reason to think about – the route he was taking and the place he was at. He navigated like a speedy vehicle on auto-pilot, mechanically avoiding the creaking steps not out of a conscious concern for the sanctity of the quiet, but because something in him told him the sound was irritating, and because when you’re waiting on a steaming cup, it’s unsettlingly easy to take for granted that you’ve got somewhere to drink it.

                The caffeinated monstrosity reared up through the kitchen door, its cardboard lid hanging open from the previous night, which dissolved into a heavy session on the tea. The kettle sat by the jumble of plates and, lo and behold, there was water left in it. As they do in the business world, Gary conducted a “time and motion study” and concluded that time would be saved were he to not bother refilling. He hit the switch and the kettle – which he had left plugged in; more evidence, he considered, that he was almost predestined to have this cup of tea – flashed orange and began to boil. Gary opened the fridge and–

Fuck! It had all lined up perfectly – the water in the kettle, the plug in the wall, the teabags in their Goliathan receptacle – until now. Gary’s heart skipped a thousand beats as it dawned upon him that he had no milk. He would have to walk for at least five minutes were he to shop at Eastern Bloc, its shop front lovingly adjourned by a promise to provide its customers with the best “Eastern Europe Foods” and, although two grammatical errors in three words is an impressive feat, he regretted the necessity of leaving the semi-detached world he’d built for himself.

***

Milk in plastic bag in hand, Gary sidled up the familiar street. He felt angst-ridden, uneasy; so libidinously was he clucking a mug that he began to sweat, the perspiratory drip clamming up his face and causing him to grimace alarmingly at somebody presumably in the employ of the Auto Repair Garage.  He swung the bag accliviously by its handles and clutched onto the milk, stroking the bottle through the bag’s flimsy skin. Approaching his front door from the opposite side of the pavement, Gary relaxed and let it hang, walking towards it in such an insistent straight line that it was as if he wished he would simply pass through his door like a translucent spectre. Unfortunately, as he emerged upon his side of the pavement, his gaze was broken. His eyes darting upwards diagonally, it became evident to him that there was somebody upstairs and, what’s more, they were having a damn good time.

I mean, Christ, the window was open. See, sound had a spooky way of travelling through Gary’s abode – toasting some toast or brewing a brew, one could seek to improve the overall experience with music, but would hear it better from the stairway. These architectural quirks lead him to make a point of closing his windows in order to really listen to music in the bedroom that faced the street, lest the neighbours be provided with a constant, and some might say unpalatable, DJ set. The current occupant(s), it seemed, had no such qualms about serenading the neighbourhood with the gangsta rap stylings of A$AP Ferg’s Trap Lord.

As Ferg helpfully contemplated whether a semi-automatic or a TEC-9 might best kill an unfortunate “motherfucker”, Gary felt a surge of emotion in which fury was tempered by confusion. He jiggled the keys around in his pocket, but he was extremely reticent about venturing into an unknown that had, about twenty minutes prior to these events, been his stomping ground. Call the police! you will say, but you must understand that that was not a possibility. Gary had left certain sensitive items around the house, and he could by no means justify handing the law enforcement a conclusive piece of self-incriminating evidence; a smoking bong, so to speak. He knocked on the door.

Before he saw anybody, a whale-moan could be heard coming from the stairway, or perhaps the kitchen;

“Yooooooooo…”

Gary stood as a guest outside his own front door. The man who answered was no doppelganger – no sick Dostoyevskian double, come to steal his life, his home, his image – nor was it a cop and, for the latter at least, he was grateful. The intruder – all Heffner smoking jacket and full-moon spectacles – lackadaisically stroked the subtly ginger follicular appendages that had engorged his face, their colour the only distraction from their burgeoning Hasidic dimensionsHasH.

“You here for the meeting?” he asked. The accent he spoke with had travelled one way or another between England and the US, seemingly settling smack bang in the middle on some rock west of Ireland.

“What meeting?”

“Well, I hope it’ll be a meeting of the minds, baby.”

Gary spluttered and stared. The intruder tipped his chin upwards and titled his head. His eyes narrowed as he examined this new specimen. Gary thought he saw something behind them too; a crazily efficient clockwork mechanism spun inside that beardy head, and right now it was analysing him, sussing out just what his whole raison d'etre was in this kerfuffle. The usurper stopped stroking his beard for a second, and this broke his concentration; he abandoned the eye contact and immediately returned to the beard for another round of fidgeting.

“Are you…like…squatters?” Gary asked.

“Nah, we don’t need to squat. We got seats!”

“…and wh-”

“Let me break it down for you. Come in, come in…”

He welcomed Gary into his own home.

“I’m with an organisation called Junkies for Jesus.”

Dumbfounded, Gary could only hazard “is that… some kind of recovery group?”

“Oh no, I have absolutely no interest in kicking the smack. I have a lot of resolve in my belief that there are no two things more compatible than the Zen of heroin addiction and the theological guidelines of evangelical Christianity.” Gary was in a daze, but the current occupant guided him into his kitchen. Where was the tea? “You want anything to drink? Anything to smoke? I can hook you up with a radical bowl…”

“Tea?”

“We don’t have that. I’d give you a hit of my heroin but, ahhh…then I wouldn’t have as much heroin. SALLY! SALLY! SALLY!” he rose to his feet and began screaming at the ceiling, lobbing projectiles against it – although nothing more likely to crack their skulls in their subsequent descent than a box of Coco Pops. “SALLY! HEY, SALLY! YO!” Upon that last “yo” he seemed to have a change of heart, stopping dead in his tracks and reaching into his pocket for something. He pulled out a beat-up iPhone and began to text with a dead-eyed look of total focus and concentration, and then he jerked back to life;

“Ok, Sally’s not going to bring the bong down. Not to worry-” he began to thumb a crumpled Zig-Zag rolling paper, winking at Gary “Bun big zoots, keep smilin’. Whaddya wanna know? I got a whole life to talk about, and a whole life to talk about it in. I can tell my origin story – growing up in the Deep South lonely, ostracised, not knowing the love of Jesus. The only Jew in the whole of Savannah – how about that?! Even my family, they were gentiles! I still don’t know how that worked, but I can tell you I poured my despair, my woe, into the world of drugs. Taking drugs. Selling drugs. Manufacturing drugs.  Drugs were the best goddamn thing Judaism ever did for me. Met Sally at a crackhouse in Minneapolis. Passed out by a river and wound up gettin’ baptised…”

Gary was in no mood for this invasive raconteur. He snapped, grabbing a pint of water off the kitchen table and lobbing the contents in his face.

“How’s that for a baptism, you mad prick? What the fuck are you doing in my house?!”

The proselyte did nothing but smirk. He finished up the joint he was rolling, lit it as he puffed upon it, and sedately looked Gary dead in the eye;

“This is my place now.”

“Tell me…” Gary seethed with clenched fists “…what you did to the tea?”

“I drink coffee.”

“It was a bargain!”

“I know it was. I like to shop at Tesco too. I’m aware of their reasonable prices.”

“And if you were to get milk?” Gary was incensed, but the truth was all coming out. First this hustler had taken his house, now the extraneous parts of his everyday environment?

“There’s a place round the block that sells some real good Eastern Europe Foods.”

Gary began to throw things around the room, recklessly decimating dishware until the settler peacefully restrained him, holding his flailing arms.

“Why don’t you stay for this joint? It’s hella fat. You haven’t even met Sally yet.”

But Gary had hung his head in despair and was walking towards the door.

“I haven’t kicked you out! Stay for a while.”

Gary stopped by the door and turned to face his adversary.

“Can’t.”

“Why not? I got some weed, I got some hip-hop, I got coffee, hell, I’ll even crack into my Henry the Horse if it’ll wipe that frown off your face.”

“The place,” said Gary with a great sense of resignation, “doesn’t feel the same as it did.”

“Places erode – even the stuff humans built. If the bricks don’t crumble, the spirit will. Time changes everything.”

“Yeah,” sighed Gary, and he let himself out.

Time, indeed, had changed everything.

Swan Shenanigans (Swananigans)

The canal and I have got history. When I first moved to the city, so distracted was I by it actually being such a thing, that I dwelled little upon the reality that, for me, Leicester was little more than a surrogate London. Whereas the Thames predates its milieu, the waterway that cuts through the motor city infrastructure of Leicester was crafted not by your Gods, but by man. If the city – a forest of concrete erections that, if you excuse the self-indulgent punnery, inspire Freudian envy in men of a certain age – is humankind’s greatest achievement, then the canal is surely a fractional one, an accomplishment within an accomplishment; a containment of perhaps the most immovable of the classical elements within a manmade paradigm. These counterfeit rivers do for that profulence of H2O what reservoirs do for lakes, and what McDonalds meals do for the good, natural name of beef.

The last irresistible crack aside, I place little weight in bucolia. Don’t misread that; I’m certainly an environmentalist, but urbania can be as beautiful a landscape as a blank-slate field, and what particularly interests me is the ramifications of environment on the human psyche. What applies to nature too applies to humanity; contraception, abortion, euthanasia, and then incarceration, militarism, murder are manners of regulating our sentience just as we do the water. The course your life, and mine, takes will be determined ultimately by where we stand in the hierarchy of capitalism, although to use the word “regulation” bears a bitter irony in this context. These thoughts become increasingly fractured; I try to grasp the fragile strings of ideas I devised forty years ago, to articulate them as I would have then, to compliment them with subsequent cognizance, subsequent wisdom; yet they slip from my grips, lubricated by distraction and eroded by time. Of course, it was wondering this grey-stone shore that I first devised the theory of Prognostic Sentience Measurement, but I must regain my personal equilibrium before I brief the uninitiated, for I am in the throes of a great malaise, and it is the fault of the swans.

I have always had a complicated relationship with the swans of the Leicester. Is it not unthinkable to be incapable of abstract thought? To me, it would once have been, but I have since fulfilled the role of a guest speaker at my nephew’s secondary school, and I can attest; it’s extremely thinkable. But, to my knowledge, swans have never had education budgets slashed by the apparently employability-centric scimitar of Michael Gove – their innate capabilities are only for the most basic of instincts; to reproduce, to feed, and survive. So, in this unthinking utopia, do they only know happiness? Or is that extreme contrasted by another – an inherent proclivity to shit the proverbial pants? Do swans know only happiness…and fear?  Primal instinct has a delirious joy; we would all like to fuck like a swan – not fuck a swan – but the reckless abandon they are presumably imbued with as they frolic in the canal is antithetically answered by, when danger rears its ugly head, by a justified fear of death.

To a human, what is more terrifying than death, other than life? How could a swan even know of death? I imagine they are more familiar with a loose sense of imminent danger, but who’s to say their conception of mortality isn’t more concrete? Does the swan know what’s unknowable? Is it possible to know the unknowable only when faced with the great unknown, the seeming unknowable perversely the last thing you’ll ever know? Those four decades ago, suffering from a rampant cold, I needed to blow my nose.

I have passed the swans, and now I can tell you about the Theory of Prognostic Sentience Measurement. It is what I have been building to; in an ascension of words that mirrors the way my own trajectory has sloped downward in the years since the heyday of the theory. Images of subjacent collisions colour my brain; dashed on concrete or dropping to a waterbed with a voluminous gloop. I have always found this tract of the canal to be extremely vertiginous, on account of a the first night I ever went drinking with the group who would prove my closest friends for the next few years, and one of these friends stumbled precariously along the very edge of the Grand Union Canal. Assuming he was, like a swan, aware of his imminent plight, I neglected to question him on the issue. Of course, he fell into the canal. Hesitantly, three of us dragged him out, and after a week of debating as to whether he had succumbed to a ravaging case of pneumonia, he reemerged. It took him, however, a year to replace the pair of glasses that he had, you could say, bequeathed to the swans.

5% of pneumonia victims die. A similar figure, perhaps, for other bacteria that might be in the water system. The Theory of Prognostic Sentience Measurement may sound like a mouthful to you, but I am a writer, and not a mathematician or a scientist or a sociologist – and I am certainly qualified at none of these things – and I am getting to be an old man, and the percentages are harder for me than they once were, when I was a young man, when I had just left school, and the basic mathematical principles were relatively fresh in my mind, not rusted, not buried, not submerged among the detritus of forty further years of severely impractical thinking. Prognostic was my get-out clause, my admission that by its very nature the theory was predicated on guesswork, prognostication; soothsaying for the modern day. And, of course, contemporary soothsaying is best conveyed by percentages. That is what it was; a percentile division of the things that might – just might – kill you.

“Yes, I’m a charlatan! But in the 1970s, ours was a permissive society.” I said to the man on the bike. He looked at me like I were a leper, and sped towards his own private sunset on his skeletal steel steed.

At times I get nostalgic and Google death percentages. Sometimes they relate to that formative incident - 3.2% of deaths in the last year have been caused by alcohol, so I can factor that into my friend’s chances, at the time, of surviving it. Drowning, I have no idea, but a night when one falls into a canal is perhaps a night on which one is particularly susceptible to it. And then one has to look at the percentage, if there is one, of actually getting pneumonia or some other ailment. I take a look up at the flight of stairs leading to the motorised haven of Leicester’s high streets. The bank of the conduit is redolent of the highly pedestrianized air possessed by grand European cities; Amsterdam, Brussels, Venice - they too with a penchant for canals. If I walk steadily, the percentage for drowning will be low. But if I affect a hobble – and at this point I do just this, stutteringly stepping ever-closer towards the edge like a crab on ketamine. But before I take the tumble, an epiphany spreads its light upon the breadth of my person. One day – perhaps as soon as 30 years’ time – the big fire will come (not Biblical rapture, dummy; global warming) and the earth, the universe will no longer be inhabitable. Humanity will certainly be extinct.  But who drove it to this state? Which force in the world, which dominant species is especially gifted with an aptitude for killing and maiming, and creating great beasts of arms and technology, finance and private property that they can be subordinate to, which too can choke life from just about anything that’s got it?

I race up the stairway. “Out of my way!” I say, pushing a hardened bruiser in a manner that ought to add a few fucking per cent to my own Prognostic Sentience Measurement.

“You fucking what, you fucking muggleshitcunt?” he bellows in a manner that, whilst deep, sonorous and extremely authoritative, is not exactly Churchillian; more like Winstonian, as in Ray Winstone. “Where the fuck you going?”

“Come and get me, Ray!” I squeal with delight.

“I’ll fucking kill your slag shit cunt family!” His meaty slabs of leg pulverise the steps as he pursues me.

But if he can find my slag shit cunt family, good luck to him, for the real point of his ire is gone. The traffic halts, lining up into an informal motorcade, as I leap jauntily into the centre of the road and, screaming “ONE HUNDRED PER CENT!” quite literally launch myself upon the muscular bonnet of one of those superfluous military-style trucks beloved of the quintessential suburban bourgeois family. Something’s odd here, I ponder, as my blood spools around my crooked ground-level profile. I try to communicate my query to my inadvertent killer, but they are breathily protesting that “I didn’t have time to brake!” and other banalities. But I’ve seen the jeep, and suspicions are high. It belongs to the old friends of my parents. Maybe they’ve come to take me back – eternity in Surrey must be my destiny, farmed off by these C-of-E berry-growers in their bomb-squad ride. What else, I ask you, could they be doing in Leicester?

Head-land

You never wanted
to be the type
to be immobilised.

Now they ask you
why you always
seem to let
yourself wash away.

I think, like me,
you find it hard
to hear the sea
keep knocking
so you let it in.
You know that, while it's great,
to say
"I will be strong"
you know you're only there
to be engulfed
so why
not play along?

You know that you're supposed to hate
that sensation of letting yourself rot
but
there's something so sexy
about being stripped
to the bone.
Something so thrilling
about self-destruction
as you tumble down
bit by bit.

I think the world was never made
with us in mind
so, still, we sit.
And gorge ourselves on vertigo
and tumble down
bit by bit.

empty

empty