'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?
I point out my old school from train window, in the suburbs near Reading. It was the worst of schooling, I tell W. No one knew anything. We didn't know anything. Our teachers didn't know anything, I tell them. The blind led the blind. The blind stabbed out the eyes of the sighted. They stabbed out our eyes, I tell him.
I point out the warehouse where I went as a contractor when I left school. It was the worst of jobs. We stood about doing nothing. Sometimes management would come downstairs and tell us to get on with our jobs. From time to time, there'd be a cull; they'd sack a few of us. But we'd reappear in the warehouse sooner or later, employed by another agency, and go back to standing about and doing nothing, bored out of our minds.
And I point out the twin buildings of Hewlett Packard's UK headquarters, by the dry ski slope in Bracknell, where I worked as an office contractor. It was the worst of offices. I tell him of days and weeks of data entry. I tell him of wandering from coffee machine to coffee machine, of reading trade magazines in the company foyer, and of visiting the koi carp in their pond by the carpark.
And I tell him about my escape to university, my escape to Manchester, although I knew nothing about Manchester. – 'You had an instinct', W. says. 'It's admirable'.
The suburbs, 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 used 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 Kafka on his lunch break. He lent me his book, I told W., and I underlined a passage. K. stood a long time on the wooden bridge that leads from the main road to the village, gazing upwards at the seeming emptiness …
'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, back 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.
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