A response to The Asset Strippers by Mike Nelson
Yesterday I
Woke up at 7am, in a loft in Headingley, Leeds, and stood with my elbows pressed against the wooden frame of a dormer window looking down on to quiet green gardens with huge trees and cast iron lamp posts.
I followed an old lady with a black backpack down a shortcut through some trees at the end of Shire Oak Road and found myself lost in wild urban woodland that, on the map app on my phone, showed not as green but a stretch of unidentified grey, and that got my heart beating. I followed the distant sound of traffic down narrow muddy paths, past abandoned concrete buildings covered in careless graffiti, to finally emerge between the back gardens of a row of nondescript houses on a sleepy street. There were no shops. I walked up a hill, crossed several junctions, and came to a halt at a Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall.
I waited there, on the corner, for a cab, then sat in the back for 40 minutes listening to Capital FM breakfast regulars call in to tell Dani Dyer what they thought she should do next with her life. She mostly giggled and said yeah, and even when she didn’t, you could hear the wide open smile in her voice. That basic, beautiful up-for-it-ness. And I thought, they genuinely love her.
In a village shop I stood in a queue to pay for some toothpaste. In front of me were two old men, one with a cane and a flat cap, both with big smiles. Last in line was an eight year old boy with a handful of change. He left the queue to hold the door open for the man with the cane. “There’s a good lad,” the other man said, and nodded in approval.
I sat in a baker’s kitchen on the edge of a field and watched seven wasps, a spider, several flies, a butterfly and a large moth take an interest in iced ginger biscuits shaped like cacti and filled choux pastry with strawberry cream. At the end of the day, I waited for a cab beside an 86ft maypole – painted, gilded and decked with garlands. A friend texted that a hill Kate Bush runs up in one of her videos was nearby. I didn’t know which hill.
I got off the train in Kings Cross with a crowd of drunk football fans and walked along the platform to the exit. A small child in a gold pattu langa stood between a red LNER carriage and three older women in cerise pink, forest green and royal blue salwar kameez with gold trim. The football fans’ chant echoed up into the barrel-vaulted ceiling of the station’s concourse and the night sky beyond its large glass-fronted entrance.
I watched one guy kick a mate’s beer out of his hand as they walked through a tunnel to the tube. The can flew upwards, the beer shot out in a wide arc of brown froth, and the friend stopped in his tracks. “You cunt,” he yelled, pulling his drenched pale pink polo shirt loose from his chest. “What the fuck d’you do that for?”
At the foot of the escalators, four girls on a hen do in glittering makeup and short shorts, did impromptu backing vocals for a busker with a battered guitar and a three-day beard. I turned into the sweaty tunnel leading to the Victoria line and watched a woman from another hen party in thick black mascara, white knickers and a long fitting white lace dress be swept up by a tall bloke in a pale yellow polo shirt going in the opposite direction. “Ruby, love,” her friends shouted. “What you doin’?” She gave him a kiss and loped back to join them.
On the tube a girl with a long Afro scraped back tight around her head with a black headband sat with a large faux leather tote on her knee, talking to her friend about a store discount running out. I couldn’t look away from the soft rose gold she’d shaded on to the inner corners of her eyes.
At home, I read my daughter to sleep then sat on my couch in the dark, scrolling through clips of machines variously blow-shaping water tanks, optically sorting green tomatoes from red, and dipping rows of gloved mechanical hands into liquid rubber, to coat the palms. On the pavement opposite my building, a couple argued loudly.
“Go home,” the man shouted. “I’m taking you to the bus stop now. Go home.”
“But I like you,” said the woman.
I left the windows wide open.
*
Today I
Woke up at 3am thinking of Dani Dyer and the football chant I recorded on my phone, swelling up and out into the hot night. I watched Kate Bush on YouTube with the sound off (dancing indoors to Running Up That Hill and outdoors, on a hill, to Wuthering Heights). I searched for a makeup tutorial about how to make the inner corner shadows of your eyes pop, and watched that in silence too.
The sun came up in a clouded sky of pale, pale blue. I took my daughter to Tate Britain. A quote on the first wall of the Van Gogh exhibition, dated 1874, read “I love London.” I thought about PJ Harvey singing with Said El Kurdi about Engeland. “I have searched for your springs / But people …” And Octavian, shirtless and drenched in sweat on a sparse stage in Kentish Town. “I might be French and have no say,” he said, “but I am here and I am home and this is me. London blud, you are my home, you feel me. You are me. This is home. Trust…”
I walked through Mike Nelson’s ode to a breaking country that no longer makes things. His online haul of defunct machines and mechanical parts, springs, spindles, wheels, clamps, weights, bobbins, hooks, heddles, hinges, NHS doors, MoD wood panels, combine harvesters, industrial looms have been stacked as found (covered in dust and uselessness) on old stone plinths, then set loose on a long stretch of stone flooring, beneath the vaulted quiet of the Duveen Galleries. Post-empire, post-war, post-industry, post-farming, post-feeding, post-clothing, post-caring: a Britain of afters and none of them sweet.
I thought of grown men and women turning their backs like children on musicians so young they looked like children, musicians playing another ode, an ode to joy. I thought of men and women grown old and weak with a lifetime lived here at home, only to be told to go back to where they came from, when they haven’t been there since they too were children.
I thought about what it would be like to leave.
And about what it is like to love, a place.
I thought, I am still thinking, about what home means.