John C.P. Warner

I first realised my importance some six or seven years ago – dates are not really my thing, at least not any more – when the entirety of North East London disappeared. I know it’s there now of course, but for a while it was touch and go. Not that you’d remember, it obviously didn’t happen; or rather it did happen, but in such a way that it passed you by. Ha! Hngh. One day it was there, the next you would have sworn on your dear mother’s very existence that there was no such thing as a ‘Hotspur’, Tottenham or otherwise, and would have laughed heartily at the very idea of a Chig-well or a Cock-foster. However, immediately afterward, the merest hint of a suggestion that you had felt this way would have raised the very eyebrow you raise now.

           

It’s all particularly stressful – plays merry hell with my ulcer, I have to say. One minute you’re knocking back a bottle of vodka, perhaps pissing a penile yet deeply personal protest on the egomaniacal edifice of the Hilton Hotel, the next you’re waking up covered in your own vomit and poof Alexandra Palace has disappeared. It’s the kind of hang-over symptom I could very well do without, I don’t mind telling you. If that were not bad enough – the poofing­ Palace I mean, not the vomiting – can you remember what colour Alexandra Palace was? Buggered if I do! I must have changed it a dozen times now. It still doesn’t look right.

           

Then there was the Corliswood debacle. What do you mean you’ve never heard of Corliswood – right between Acton and Shepherds Bush? Of course, I do apologise, I completely, irrevocably lost the bloody thing when they started building that ‘Shard’ thing. I tell you that gargantuan, sky-fucking priapus has caused me no end of heart-ache. I’ve considered getting rid of it altogether of course, but I like to try and let people get on with it wherever possible – though I admit that I had to remove that God-awful Gothic castle in Hyde Square to balance things out a little. The new park is lovely though, don’t you think? Very authentic; anyone would think it had always been there. It has, now, of course! Ha! A brand, some might say, spanking new green comma in the endless concrete and tarmac sentence that is London.

           

It’s not something I take lightly, you understand, I mean – the Corliswood conundrum has really brought home to me the importance being on one’s guard, were any further emphasis needed. I mean, have you ever irretrievably misplaced fifteen-hundred homes, thirty thousand people and a few dozen acres of forest? Of course you haven’t, but then you’ve never been the muggins responsible for the imagining of a city, have you? Not just any city, I can tell you, London for fuck’s sake! What a job! I’ve had some trouble with Stevenage and Chelmsford about that. Can you believe it? The ease with which even you could conjure up a passable Stevenage or Chelmsford, yet that pair of buffoons come crying to me about having accidentally misplaced this or that, forgive the air quotations, ‘Cathedral’ or such and such a bloody shopping centre. Have you seen St Paul’s? I say to them. That’s a Cathedral. Not some oversized church! Ha! Haha! Akhahk. What about Westfield? There’s a shopping centre! There they are crying about this and that and here I am trying not to pebbledash the Royal residence in a fit of pique! I mean, how would that look? It doesn’t stop either of them.

           

You mind if I smoke? Of course you do – everyone does now. Well, feel free to waft and splutter through. This is my gift to you. Hoooooo.

           

I’m a fleshy, flaccid little flash drive – you see? I’m a storage device for the big picture – a catalyst, allowing the chemistry of the city to take place, without ever taking part. Speaking of chemistry, did you know that on the off-chance our petrochemical addictions are allowed to continue and our economy to decline, there will come a point, in the not too distant future, when the most valuable thing in this city will be its roads? Platinum, you see, the catalyst in our catalytic converters is constantly hacked and spat onto the road, a plethora of microscopic pearls within the cancerous sputum hawked onto our highways and byways by automobiles. It’s gradually paving the streets of London with precious metal whilst Dick after Dick strives for the Mayoral office. Ha! Haha! Can’t you just see it? As the constant susurration of this city’s slow moving, shimmering, glinting, gleaming, fabulously multicoloured, metallic rivers stop. Stop and dry up. There will be left a platinum highway that will sparkle behind the lingering miasma, the sooty, particulate waste from hundreds of thousands of exhausted exhausts, which will droop impotently from the slowly rusting shells that were once named for equally dilapidated Gods, or for elegant creatures of which they themselves had helped rid the world.

 

It’s strange though, don’t you think – this addiction to the obliteration of smoking in a city where on some days you can hardly breathe through the fog of fumes from executive cars, those that ferry their fat, half-witted passengers to some summit on climate change whilst, by night, the windows of their offices spew pallid light into the gutters, with the effluence of all the other drunks. Now if Oscar Wilde were lying in the gutter, he wouldn’t be looking at the stars, but at the somewhat eerie orange air that wreaths the night-time city, the sullen exhalations of a million sodium lamps. Can you imagine, for example, Sherlock Holmes walking through these nocturnal, neon muffled streets? Unable to halt the villainous criminal because he’d been stopped by a community support officer for smoking in a covered area! Ha! Ha! Hooooo. Hnnk. Go on without me Watson! The hound, and my seven-percent solution, will have to wait – I have to go to the cash machine for this yellow-jacketed cretin. Ha! Haha! Hrrgh!

 

What a morality tale that would be now, don’t you think? Surely no author could portray an addict in such an often golden light – the place for the drunken and the addled now is prison or, worse, soap-operas. Soap-operas: where the drunken and the addled feign disgust as colleagues act out drunkenness or addiction, so that the country may look down from moral high grounds made higher by the media’s encircling trenches.

I wasn’t always a drunk. I wasn’t always London. I had a wife, a child once. Don’t look at me like that, this isn’t a sob story, I’m not after your money. I was simply saying. I had a wife and a child, that’s all; I had a job, a house, a car, all the things Talking Heads once sang about. Once in a lifetime! Haha! I can’t say I was very good at any of them, though I suppose I may have been. It’s difficult to assess one’s own worth. Nobody expressly informed me that I was particularly substandard in any or all of my roles, though from my eventual divorce and dismissal I believe it would be fair to assume that my performance deteriorated in the latter stages, as the pressure of keeping a city real mounted. Excuse me . . . heurgh-ack. Apologies. I mean, it may be the case that I performed my roles adequately for most of my time served as husband, father and subordinate, but my lenses are not rose-tinted, but the thick, warping bottoms of vodka bottles. I see only penury, penalty, perfidy, perniciousness, procrastination, paranoia; perhaps this is fallacy, perhaps I performed adequately, but I can’t see it.

 

I miss my son.

 

Don’t leave. I see you are concerned by the brevity of my levity, perhaps wonder that I shall wax verbose, yet from now on morose? Ha! I assure you I am not a morbid, though maybe a moribund drunk. My story does not end well, but it does – I assure you – end. You’re half way through. Having wasted such time as you have with me, it would be time doubly wasted were you not to double the wasted time, if you understand me. Hnng-hreuch. Sorry. I mean to say that it would be less irritating to have wasted twice the time on the whole of the story, such as it is, than to leave where you are now, shaking your head, muttering about this half-crazed monologue. Ha! Hreuch. Thank you. Where was I?

 

Man, you see, is a boiler that has to fashion its own valve. If he does not, the pressure builds and builds and all that is inside begins to simmer and bubble. Without that valve, without that release, the boiler can sometimes burst. Some can channel that effervescent, energetic essence into forward motion, it drives them forward through their lives, powers their pistons; there are others that find no release, cooking themselves from the inside, the power of their passions never harnessed. I belong to a third category. I leak – not now, there’s no need to look so disgusted, I’m merely continuing the metaphor, I have no problems, as yet, with my bladder control. Ha! Haha! I found that there were so many possible valves, so many, too many outlets for the intense pressure I felt. I opened them all. Sex, violence, drugs and worst of all, drink, I welcomed their release.

I won’t glamorise drink. Better men than I that have done so, dying with the glorification of excess still wet upon their lips. A drunk is a pathetic creature, a child of parents it both inhabits and imbibes. It is difficult to imagine a single individual that could hold such negative sway over so many people’s behaviour. Though, if you can, it is undoubtedly a dictator you picture. Perhaps Bacchus is indeed such a despot, but where are NATO when you need to overthrow Jack-fucking-Daniels, I ask you? I lax wyrical, however, fancy a drink? No? Suit yourself. Ha!

 

It was after the divorce I really started to drink, I missed them – can you believe it? I’d spent a year, possibly four, trying to avoid them, avoid everything – then I end up so drunk with remorse and cheap spirits I can’t even get to the toilet in a bedsit. Will you stop looking at me like that? I am not about to piss on you. I’m not an animal. I did what any self-respecting drunk would have done, I pissed in the sink. It was closer by almost ten feet. I even took out the washing-up bowl, a true gentleman. Ha! Haha! Hrrch. I’d been having trouble getting to see the boy. It had been dragging on a while and, if I’m honest, I wasn’t doing myself any favours, what with the upcoming trial for assault. I had made my mind up that night, as my cigarette slowly melted the skin from between two numbed fingers, as my empty glass slipped from my lap to the floor and my eyelids staggered closed, I had made my mind up to go and see the boy. Fuck the consequences, I thought. By the time I woke the next day, North East London was no longer there, my ex-wife and son gone along with it. I haven’t been able to get them back since. I’d happily swap them for Lewisham were I able, I’ll tell you that for nothing. Ha!

 

In the days that followed the disappearance of North East London I sobered up, I washed, shaved, tried to get them back, but though I managed to resurrect it all – at least as far as I know, which is all that really matters in the end – I couldn’t find them. I narrowly avoided prison, pleading a temporary loss of judgement and was referred to a doctor for treatment of my disease. Can you imagine that? Ha-hreuch! As though some multi-winged cans of Tennant’s Super were buzzing furiously around the country infecting people with a lack of self-control! Ha! Disease. I’ll tell you about disease! Ha! Haha! Heurgh! First though: a quick jaunt through the National Health Service.

 

I’m sure by now you’ve noticed my somewhat distinctive cough, understated though it is! Ha! Well, it was already in full swing by the time I arrived at my local GP’s office to see about treatment for my alcoholism – there are drugs that can cause you to vomit when you imbibe alcohol, he told me. I told him, in no uncertain terms, that alcohol consumption was quite capable of making me vomit without any additional help, thank you very much. I then proceeded to perform for him one of my more spectacular coughing fits. The doctor seemed quite concerned at the blood I brought forth – nothing really, not like in the rather snazzy kerchief I carry with me now which, as you can see, has seen better, certainly less clotted days. Nevertheless, I was referred to have it checked out.

 

After a series of checks, x-rays, blood-tests, all of the Frankensteinian intrusions to which a doctor can subject a man, I came to be in a room with a rather dapper, elderly Guinean who, after some idle chit-chat, eventually told me I had cancer – though the euphemism he used was mordre par la crabe! Ha! Hahaha-hreuchackah. Can you imagine? I was also told that it had metastasised throughout my body. Metastasised – it sounds like a fitness fad, does it not? Come shed those pounds with our new Metastasise Classes! Hahaha! I was riddled with it. Six months they gave me, but I’ve kept myself busy. I have a city to imagine. It may have cost me my life, but it perpetuates my existence! Ha! I don’t know what will happen when I eventually extinguish, hissing, like a lit match cast into a rain filled gutter, perhaps I shall be resurrected in a new body like the Dalai Lama. Bath-and-Wells reckons he’s been through at least three lives before this one, though it seems a little far-fetched to me. Haha! Maybe London will just cease to be, like Babylon, or Pompeii – or more likely Gomorrah before it. Either way I’m fucked.

 

I was talking with Cambridge the other week about this exact thing – a surprising dullard for what he represents, nevertheless – he seems to take a Platonic view that the world is a reflection on a cave wall, that when we die the reflection will remain until another is chained within the cave to witness it. He may be right, but I probably won’t find out. I know. I know I’ve taken up too much of your time already; I can go on sometimes. I don’t suppose, before you go, maybe there’s a chance, you could possibly spare a few pounds for the most important man in London? I seem to be running a little short.