'We're in the suburbs of a suburb', W. says. 'In the suburbs of a suburb of a suburb …' Through the suburbs on the slow train, travelling back to London. – 'Did you really grow up here?' I really did. - 'You're lucky to have escaped'. I know that. He's amazed I got out. What would have happened otherwise?
Winnersh, Winnersh Triangle … 'Nothing ever happens here', W. says. 'Nothing will ever happen'. And suburbs like these are spreading to every corner of the world … And everyone will live everybody else's life, and nothing will have happened.
'You'd have to be very strong to survive in such a place', W. says. 'You'd have to go into some kind of internal exile … And even then you'd go mad. Even then you'd lose your mind'. Didn't I nearly lose my mind, living in the suburbs?
He pictures me as a teenager, cycling out to every green patch I could find on the map. He pictures me making my way through fir plantations to the patch of scrappy woodland fenced off by the MoD where solders came to train for future wars. I listened out for artillery, but heard nothing but the wind in the trees and birds singing.
What was I looking for? What did I discover? There were the suburbs and the suburbs were everywhere. That my non-town was growing on the verge of every town; what does it matter where you are? And even the firing range was sold off, the last of the old woodland, to build a new housing estate. Didn't I see myself as Stalker's cousin, ready to lead others through the last patches of wilderness?
What was I looking for in the wide patches of grass between the plots on the hi-tech industrial estate where I first went to work? What, in the rain that was allowed to lie in long puddles in the grass and mud?
The gypsies came with their caravans and churned up the grass. We were warned about them on the tannoy. – 'Make sure you lock your cars'. They left quickly enough, and the companies organised for diggers to cut trenches along the perimeter of each plot. But beyond the trenches, beyond the new chain-link fences …
Once it snowed in April, and the last remaining lot, the biggest, the wildest, was one pristine snow bank, full of space, I thought. Full of time … And I saw my future there in some sense, that's what I told him, W. says. I saw a future.
'You should go to college while it's still free', said a fellow worker, who read Sartre on his lunch break. He lent me his book, I told W., and I underlined a passage. I'm bored, that's all. From time to time I yawn so widely that tears roll down my cheek. And did tears run down my cheek?, W. says. No tears, I tell him.
'So you went north'. I went north. – 'Of course you did, where else were you to go?' For his part, as a northerner, or a semi-northerner, a man of the Midlands, W. went south, lured by the promise of a course on which he could study Kafka in translation (he could only read Kafka in translation, then). But they'd lied, of course. He never studied Kafka, but he studied other things instead. He learnt things – great things. He studied overseas. He visited the great archives. He criss-crossed Europe on the great train routes of Europe.
'And you, what did you do?', W. says. I became Stalker's cousin all over again, looking for space, looking for time under viaducts and on the tow-paths of canals, climbing over rusting pipes and broken girders. I arrived in Manchester while it was still a rust-zone. I arrived just before its regeneration, and the city was still falling apart like Mir space station.
Lars Iyer's Blog 