“One is compelled,” said Soma Jones, “to discover what is around the next corner, what is over the hill, up the road.”
I set down his drink wondering what had caused this outburst and asked him to expand on his interesting comments.
“One lives one’s life within a walled garden. The walls of this garden are immaterial; formed by years and decades of habit. Around a corner one has never taken, on a street where one lives, there might be a row of shops, an unusual building – perhaps a telephone exchange…”
“Why specifically a telephone exchange? Why do you want to find a telephone exchange?”
“Perhaps not specifically a telephone exchange. But what I was trying to evoke was a place where people go every day, to work maybe, for their whole lives. And one has managed to ignore it for one’s whole life… That’s not really it though,” he took a sip of his drink and cast around himself for inspiration. “I find specialist catalogues interesting.”
“Don’t we all?” I said, “you have to be careful about giving out your real name though. I’ve heard about people who have been blackmailed.”
He ignored me thoughfully, “anything will do: elevator parts, radar equipment.”
“Knitting,” I suggested.
“Hovercraft manufacturing industry journals. Not that there would be many of those. You don’t get many hovercraft in these parts anymore.”
“And besides, they’re probably manufactured by the same companies that make aeroplanes and helicopters and the like.”
“But that’s exactly the problem!” Soma Jones jabbed a finger at me excitedly, “the world is becoming a smaller place.”
“You’ve obviously never taken a night bus back from Peckham.”
“London, Paris, Dubai, Sydney. One finds the same shops in the same malls everywhere, selling the same goods…”
“To different people,” I interjected.
“They become less and less different by the year. One cannot escape the homogenising global culture except through specificness. What I am concerned with is locating the specific and the unknown just off the beaten track of one’s habitual circuit. The shops and hovercraft and telephone exchanges themselves are unimportant.”
“Not to the people who work in them.”
“What one searches for is evidence that the world is larger that one knows. More unknowable. That’s how the world seems when one is a child. The field behind the park stretches on forever. The interstellar spaces beyond ones experiences are filled with spectres, appartitions and boojums.”
“Boojums?” I finished my drink noticing that Soma’s had barely been touched.
“Where one seeks new experiences one becomes increasingly disappointed as one ages. One travels further, experiments with the exotic…”
“Ah, those catalogues again!” I tapped my glass meaningfully.
“Like a heroin addict, one seeks increasingly obscure locations to jack up, to release oneself from the monotony of the real world. One should be perpetually travelling. In the Book of Job, Satan is constantly travelling “up and down in the world”. I often wondered what that meant.”
“It’s probably a mistranslation.”
“One imagines him walking on a treadmill in front of a blank screen upon which angels project his progress through the nations of the earth.”
“I do wish you wouldn’t say “one” when you mean “I”.”
It seemed unfair to provoke Soma Jones in this way but I didn’t have the time or the energy to follow up his enquiries anymore. And besides it seemed that he was no longer engaged in any practical psychogeographic work. If it was some sort of internal quest: so be it. There was nothing much I could do to help him with that and whatever energies were being generated through these experiments would most likely be dissipated in explanation.
Or so it seemed to me.
I wasn’t in a fantastic place at that time anyway. The apartment in Asciibridge seemed to have become a trap. I’d wasted a lot of time when I first moved in there on social functions. I showed off the “exceptional view” over the site of the future Olympic Village to anyone who I could bribe to visit me.
At the back of the flat the kitchen opened out into a wide flat concrete roof about forty feet above the ground. There were no barriers at the edges and down below was a wasteland littered with strange scrubby trees with purple green leaves.
One night, when there was a fire in the fuel dump behind the contractors portakabins, I was fortunate enough to have a gang of media students drinking cocktails out on the roof. They took pictures of each other standing near to the edge with the fire out in the dark behind them. It was a good party and I slept with one of them. That felt a bit cheap and I wasn’t sure that’s what the apartment was for.
I was very enthusiastic about the place when I found it. It came on the tail of a number of developments that triggered each other like dominoes. My work was no longer tied down to a single location as it had been in the nineties so I needed a more fluid base for my operations. The first month I was there I did no work at all. I spent a lot of money in places like Ikea and Homebase buying household utilities made out of innovative materials. Anything in primary colours or chrome would attract me. I enjoyed the simple unfurnished spaces in there. In afternoons I enjoyed the quality of light in the big open-plan living area. I sent photos that I’d taken with my phone to a lot of my friends.
“Look at this!”
Very few of my real friends had ever visited the apartment. Clide came over once with a six pack of generic supermarket lager. I lent him a cracked saucer that I’d found in the cabinet under the kitchen sink to flick his ash in. The edge of the saucer had once been gilded, it was made of white china with roses painted artlessly in the middle where they would be obscured by the cup, if the cup still existed. Most of my crockery was heavy, rectangular and Japanese. Textured like tree bark or a chalk board and not dishwasher friendly.
Soma never visited.
“It’s right on the outskirts,” I said, “the W12 will take you there. It’s a little bus that goes all around the houses.”
“I don’t like Asciibridge anymore,” he said.
“It’s not like the rest of Asciibridge. Anyway, you’ll get to sit on a bus for hours with lots of pensioners. They might say anything.”
“Yeah, they might.”
“Will you come?”
“I might.”
