Octavia

If you think too much about other's people's lives you will want to kill yourself

I am walking home past the row of mix'n'match shops, which is obviously the result of a freak, witch-killing hurricane that picked up buildings from all over the world and dropped them here: a Russian karaoke bar next to a handfired Moroccan tile centre next to Whytes The Bakers Since 1931, where every morning old people queue patiently to buy a white bloomer and a custard slice. 

In front of me is a woman on her mobile, in her forties I'd guess, but hard to say, has 'lived' life. She is accompanied by a little girl, about 5 or 6, with long scrawny brown hair in bunches, who is dressed entiredly in pink and glitter, even the frame of her glasses, and is dancing as if possessed to music no one else can hear above the constant traffic belch alongside her. Shimmy to the left, spin and turn and jump and jazz hands as she crashes off balance into the sticky glass of Chicken Flavorites.

Her mother on the phone is crying hard, gullet gulping air in between sobs:

'But did you tell them, did you tell them that you walked fine before the accident? That you didn't even have a stick?'

A pause. A gullet gulp. A star jump.

'But you could walk! You could! Before your accident.'

The little girl pirouetted around her mum and dropped me a deep curtsey as I overtook and forgot them.

You have mail

Whenever I walk past Mount Pleasant sorting office I fanatacise joining the silent-suffering queue of people clutching their 'You have a parcel' cards. 

When it's my turn I will slice off the top of my head as if it were a hardboiled egg and calmly splat the contents out onto the counter, so the postman with sweatmarks under his arms can with brisk efficiency sort and divide and send my thoughts off in their proper direction, bundling those for the same destination with thin red rubber bands. 

Inspire/expire (screw your daffodils and dappled things and blue Danube)

On nights like these, when my brain bubbles putrid frogspawn and my insides screechjangle like snarled wire hangers, so infuriating I could scream and rip off my skin, I let London save me.

On catsure feet I walk the streets where Labour MPs fear to tread, cutting through the dark as a blade splits a vein. I must force you out, breathe out, expire: safety here comes from emptying my face, so that as an empty mirror I can reflect the glassy eyes of the foxes and the dealers that rear up before fading back into the shadows, ghost ships in the fog. 

My feet push angry against the concrete and you love to kiss my ankle's hollow, to warm my toes with your palms - but that thought is expired.

Past a phone box with shattered sides where a wild-eyed man is hot screaming down the receiver and I slice past him, torrid city air lifting my hair and lying filthy syrupthick on my neck where you bury your lips as you whisper how I've saved you - but that memory is expired.

A hunched crow human nesting on the Tube airvent hisses sex but I don't turn, not even my eyes, and the feeling of your body wrapped round is expired and I'm free, my head is clear and I breathe in the city that brought me to you and hold the inhale for one, two, three..

Innocence

I was shadowy Hackney late night shambling when a Daily Mail definition youth cycled up behind me.

''Scuse me, can I ask you something?'

Shrugged acquiescence.

'Can I play with your pussy?'

I shot him a look as blank as a television screen in a powercut.

'I don't have one,' I explained, in a tone gentle and slightly apologetic.

It was only later that I realised he probably had not mistaken me for a pet owner.

Life leak

There is a man who lives on the pavement outside the boarded-up bingo house at the bottom of my road. He is what my dad (a gentle and generous man) would call 'One of life's casualties'. Instead of a blanket-coddled dog, his companion is a large ginger cat, which he wears slung low round his neck.

Today he dressed his cat in a little Breton t-shirt.

I thought: 'Oh, that outfit suits the cat.'

I am confused by the contents of my own head. 

Exercise

Swinging home through dank air to make myself beauty full for you, I am suddenly lost in a seaswarm of fitness fanatics, as odd-twenty young men in unseasonal shorts huff pump past me in ceremony. 

I am surprised, then stroked into detached desire by the wholesome warmth radiating from the panting-sweet bodies, like in Sparta, where young boys would run naked through the wooden city while lascivious crowds licked with barbed whips at the hollows of their ribs. Testosterone-enfolded my heart beats faster, playing kiss chase with theirs, and my mind flashes tangled limbs and flushed faces. 

But the sudden shock of a sweating palm squeezing my arse - hard - and an 'I'd fuck you' gasped in my ear and I'm back walking a street in north London. Past Tesco Express and the place where Woolworths used to be. 

View from the Hammersmith and City

Hallo, halo in the miserable mist, my sign of hope redemption:

'Self-storage. One month = £1.'

I plan on booking my self in until rancid January is over. 

You always hurt the ones who love you

Halfway through dinner he blurted: 'So, are you still seeing that bloke from work?' 

'Yes,' I lied, eyes cutting away with serrated edge.

Fairytale of Essex Road

I caught the eye of a Polish butcher this morning. Usually I stride numb past his leergruntdarling, my mind immuned by work and love and hate and oh caffeine need clench thoughts; but today i am weak. Weak because of Christmas. So i look him full face and his features turn golden and come away from the edges in surprise and then he grabs a hanfdul of raw sausages and makes fucking gestures at me.

Vicim rage and a day spent imagining scrotum slicing with a ham hook yes; but also anger at Christmas for doing this to me. For changing who I am, for making me tearful and snap mawkish and making fights with my love and taking bites from myself.

Christmas means families. It means migrating south on resisting wings to a prolonged period of my parents, of what they have become. My mother is dead to me herself god whatever; her days exist in pain and madness. 'Home' for me is thus catheters and bedsore ointments and slop feeding and massaging legs swollen like rotten logs while she either disrecognises me or rochester laughs or weeps slow maggoty tears. It is my dad's face alight with joy at seeing me and the guilt gullet twist of how gladly he salutes me as I come through the ticket barrier, his glee that of a puppy that thought himself abandoned.

And I am so angry, so angry for him. And for her, the most independent, the most battling: a single mother in the '60s, who when refused a mortgage by tweedsuits disapproving of her bastard child returned years later to pay for her house in cash. She who caught me creeping in the back door when I was 11 because I was afraid to walk past the builders (at that age I was tall was woman enough to blip on their radar) and made me parade tofro past them, 'becase no daughter of mine is going to be afraid'. She who now lives who for life years has lived able to do nothing other than survey not only the shell of her existence, but how she sucks dry that of my dad, and how she has forced the pink softness out of me. 

When you train to be a Samaritan, they tell you that carers seldom kill themselves. Responsibility deters them. As my Russian granny would say, sprasping the words between the gap in her teeth (sculpted by decades of drinking her tea through a sugar lump clamped there): 'In Moskva, there was no such thing as depression. People either killed themselves, or got on with it.'

So we continue our lives. Or rather, so our lives continue. And all you 'I'm so unhappy although there's nothing really wrong but GOD the futility of existence and no one sees it but us oh and I was bullied at school' bloggers?

Fuck you. 

Merry Christmas. 

Mistletoe and whine

As I rushed into the tube station last night (late for the birthday drinks of the first man who ever made me come), I got slow-laned behind two office christmas party girls. One was a snivel of run mascara, and the other was giving her the kind of reassuring leanhug you only give when you're very, very drunk.

Both had tinsel in their hair.

Hug girl gave sniveller a last squeeze and 'willyoubeokay' as she shoved her through the barriers before sprinting back towards the entrance. As a parting secret santa, she yellowed over her shoulder:

'And just don't fucking sleep with him again, okay?'

The whole station rubbernecked.

'I won't,' snivelled sniveller plaintatively, as she disappeared down the escalators.

It was quarter past six in the evening.

Happy Christmas!