Displaced

A growing nausea was gripping me as our car neared its destination. I couldn’t decide whether it was because I’d barely eaten during the day or because the evening and our surroundings became more and more decadent as the miles clocked up. Here we were, about three miles on the other side of the city (about seven from home) going to pick up a cousin we’d not seen for four months and I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the neighbourhood we found ourselves in.

The Borough, a pub at the junction we came off to get to my cousin’s, lay in disrepute. Windows were boarded with reinforced steel and those that weren’t were shattered. The car park was host to rubbish, wrecked bikes, wheel trims and broken glass. My first assumption was it had been fire-bombed – my brother later clarified this as true, he had even been to school with the guy who did it, some idiot who didn’t anticipate staff still being in there so is now serving a manslaughter sentence to with the initial arson conviction – let’s just say my cynicism isn’t always off mark.

The speed humps didn’t help my disagreeable stomach. As we slowed down to pass over them I took in more of what was around us. A group of hoodies stood by on a grass verge hitting each other and inanimate objects – phone booths, electricity boxes – and played about with foul language and unnecessarily projected voices. The Alpha male complex took a whole new meaning in this back-end part of town. Their eyes met the car with conviction and prejudice. Dear God, what I would give for them to have a lesson in finding peace and true respect instead of what the street says. This world is beyond a joke. We’re born with knives already in our backs and the basic means needed to fuck each other – both literally and figuratively. I guess they never intended for people like us who are blindly naïve enough to think there is still some beauty left in the heart of Man. Or maybe they did, and the Fear took them to the furthest recesses of what they could lose – their power, their manipulation and control of their fellow men – and they’ll now willingly bleed before they bend…

We rounded a corner and I sank my head into my shoulder, watching the houses roll by. The next bend bore another boarded up building, this one somebody’s home. So what did they cross? Who had died? Parents, children, grandparents? How many had died? Who knows? Maybe there was no ill will involved what-so-ever. Maybe the owners had the rotten luck of being in the wrong place at the wrong time when some pyromaniac nut job turned up with plans to light up the sky.

My mother turned the radio up some more – I’d forgotten it was even on, being so lost on my journey of speculative thought – and Brahms provided, possibly, the one and only suitable soundtrack for such a car ride. A playful depression streamed from the stereo’s speakers, the tempo a perfect match to the pace of our travelling as well as the tone of my contemplation. It rose, with coincidence, as we turned again and saw yet more devastating abortions of this ‘regeneration area’. All the while my eyes tracked through the glass the houses and unkempt gardens. It felt other-worldly, as though this weren’t even the same city I lived in just a few miles away.

I thought I’d seen enough of this city when I left it fourteen months ago. I was sick of it then and since the taste of freedom reached my lips in a place hundreds of miles – worlds apart – from here I’ve never once looked back with much sentimentality. Entertaining the thought of my escape from this prison just weeks from now left my heart heavy with ambivalence. I’ll be away from here in three weeks, but it means another three weeks I have to spend here.

I felt pity for these people. For not knowing anything more. For not living anything more. But I despised them greater. For not acting on anything, for just letting things slip by without repercussions – although there were repercussions: their losses – loss of will. Loss of dreams. Loss of lives fulfilled.
I found myself hating them because they never aspired to anything more than some brutal primitive existence and accepted that as a norm.

I wanted God to come and wash them away, to put them out of the misery that they’ve grown so used to they don’t even realise it any more.

The car jerked to a halt and pulled me with it out of my musings. I still felt sick. Now I can only imagine that the disregard I have for this place had manifested into something physical. And I prayed to Brahms for him to help me out of it…