There was a time before I fell in love with a pylon on Hackney Marshes.
Back then, I lived with my girlfriend Ruth in a converted clothes factory in Dalston. I was doing okay writing radio ads, brochures and guidebooks. I was sent cheques. I laughed on a wobbly bicycle all the way to the bank. We drank the profits and partied all weekend.
One summer day, I got married to Ruth in a black lamé suit and a cowboy hat. She wore a pretty dress. The sun 34blazed. A psych-rock band played. We got on a plane to Colombia. The party moved to South America. Bingo bango bosh. Life was still okay.
Then we came back, and everything changed.
We bought our own place, the way grownups do. A small flat in Clapton. On the day after we moved in, Ruth discovered she was pregnant. She gave up the drink and I cut down. There were no more parties. I started to watch Saturday night television. For the first time in my life, I bought a lawnmower. I listened to Radio 4. There was an apple tree in our garden. How strange, I thought, to own a source of fruit.
When I stepped off the hedonistic treadmill, everything began to ache. My back, my knee, my wrists, my bones. Pain flashed through my fingers when I typed. Sure signs of repetitive strain injury. I spent hours in quiet despair, eating cheese and thinking about death. Soon I grew a big fat Buddha belly.
A physiotherapist told me to spend less time at the computer, lose weight and do more exercise. I ignored her. Another physiotherapist told me the same.
‘Just cure my pain,’ I said. ‘Please.’
No more help was forthcoming. So I tried acupuncture. I tried Pilates. I went for a swim at the London Fields Lido. I did everything the experts recommended. Nothing worked.
As a last resort I bought a dog. I’d always wanted one, but worried about being tied down. Now I was tied down alright. Strapped to the earth by legions of shrieking responsibilities. The foetus was growing. My wife was vomiting. There was a living room to be painted and furniture to buy. House prices had crashed. And however 35painful my repetitive strain injury was, the mortgage needed to be paid. To pay it I needed to write more words. And to write, I needed a cure for my pain.
A dog would give me enforced breaks from writing and a dose of exercise. If things got too much with the baby, I had an excuse to flee the house.
Besides, what harm could a dog do?
Max came from a breeder in Essex. He was the last in the litter. By the time we got him home, I realised I’d never seen his eyes open. I bought a book called Cocker Spaniels. Inside was a picture of a nine-week-old puppy with bright eyes, glossy coat and long limbs.
I stared at the photo. I stared at Max. He looked like a drowned mole. Fluid oozed from his tear ducts. He had bandy legs and dandruff. He tumbled around the kitchen, leaking piss and bumping into his crate.
‘Shall we take him back?’ I asked Ruth.
‘He’s a living thing.’ She caressed her bump. ‘You can’t just send him back.’
The vet told me Max had congenital cataracts. He prescribed steroid drops. The drug kept Max’s pupils frozen wide so light could flow round his cataracts and feed his retinas with images.
As soon as he was vaccinated, I took him to Millfields Park. That was the point, after all. Me. The dog. Being out and about. 36
We made it to the bottom of the slope, where the park plunged into the Lea Navigation. Across the water a concrete peninsula littered with piles of rubble. Seagulls. Barbed wire. Ducks.
On either side of this peninsula were two park exits. A footbridge over the canal and a steel rampart beneath the Lea Bridge Road. Flowing through these vents was a stream of human traffic. Cyclists, runners, dog-walkers, wasters, jabbering loons, couples, spliff-toting teenagers, baseball-capped men on bikes yelling through megaphones at rowing boats.
I’d no idea where they were coming from. I’d never heard of the Lea Valley nature reserve. All I knew about Hackney marshes was that people played football there on Sundays.
Now I was curious.
As soon as Max was able to walk the distance, I crossed the Rubicon. I took a brief glance behind me at the neat Victorian terraces of Clapton where my wife and unborn baby dwelled. For a moment, I considered turning back. Then I passed beneath Lea Bridge Road, where a splash of graffiti read:
Almost immediately, I realised this was not London any more.
Max and I were on a towpath. Narrowboats lined the navigation, bedecked with pot plants and armchairs. 37Smoke puffed from their tiny chimneys. A man sawed through a stack of wood. Geese bobbed on the water among Coke bottles and foam.
Set in a long red-brick wall were some iron gates. I entered and found myself on the ruins of a Victorian water filtration plant. Concrete pathways rose from circular beds. Service ladders disappeared into pools of rushes. Fragments of machinery jutted from the ramparts. I ran my hands over defunct cogs and the skeletons of pulley systems. In the centre of it all, a stone circle like a sundial where I spun slowly, amazed.
In one of the filter beds, giant ceramic fish heads and tails rose from the rushes. A weir rammed with nappies, cans and footballs gushed water into a river. Cormorants perched on rocks, preening themselves like creatures freshly dragged from an oil slick. A parakeet darted from a tree. Max sniffed at the remains of a sandwich. The air smelled of rotten leaves and bus fumes.
I wondered how such a place could exist on my doorstep. It didn’t even feel like a place, but a space in between. A giant crack in the city where the detritus of London collected.
And then I saw her. Lurching from the scrub like a catwalk model, crackling with power and energy. My head told me it was just another electricity pylon but it was – she was – different. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
That’s how it began.
The affair. If that’s what you want to call it.
Like most of my relationships, it started slowly. Max and I walked by her slender steel body every day. But we didn’t really connect. Not properly. It still hurts me to think of it. But it’s true. 38
At first, too many other things caught my roving eye.
The abandoned toy factory, brooding by the navigation, windows smashed, loading hook like a torture instrument in the bay. Walthamstow Marsh where long-horned cattle grazed, framed by the silhouettes of City skyscrapers. The vast green sheet of the playing fields, stapled with goalposts, scuffed and scarred by a million Sunday League matches.
What was known as ‘the marsh’ was, I discovered, a string of marshes, building yards, bird sanctuaries, reservoirs, railway lines and underpasses. You could get lost in there. Wander into cul-de-sacs littered with fox shit, beer cans and wild flowers. Spend hours among mysterious concrete obelisks. Read graffiti arguments between cyclists, walkers, gangsters and artists. Listen to rats forage in the nettles. Stare down pipes into the bowels of the city. Hear the gurgle of subterranean rivers.
Each day I pushed further down a corridor of electricity pylons stretching from the edgelands of the A12, along the Eurostar lines, to Springfield Marina and the grand Victoriana of Stamford Hill.
I found the pylons magnificent but predictable. Each one led to the next in an endless parade. These giants were wedded to each other with loops of glass and cable. Manacled like slaves. Forced into enclaves of inaccessible scrub. Outcasts in a world that wished they weren’t there, spoiling the view.
She was the exception. Indignant and inconvenient, she stood right there in the Middlesex filter beds, overlooking the art installations, tourist information boards and artificial ponds.
My pylon. 39
She’d been here all the time, waiting for me to notice her properly.
Funny how that happens in life. In love.
From the first day Sophia was born she puked. She shat. She screamed with colic. It was the end of sleep for Ruth and me. The end of sex, the end of meaningful conversation, and – for me – the end of writing.
For the first month, I dutifully followed the pair around, bunching nappies into balls, emptying bins. Did what dads were supposed to do. I hung about in doorways like a demented waiter with a muslin cloth draped over my arm.
‘What does she want now?’ I said, annoyed that I had to raise my voice over the caterwauling.
‘She’s hungry,’ Ruth said.
‘Sorry?’
‘SHE IS HUNGRY.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Nothing, as usual.’ Ruth unbuttoned the breast-flaps of her maternity dress.
Christ. There was absolutely nothing good about this.
My wife was confined to the bedroom once again. She spent the days and nights in front of rolling property programmes, feeding like a sow, trying to keep the baby happy. She was fraught with worry. The relentless screaming, it was unnatural. Sophia clung to her with translucent 40fingers. If I tried to hold her, she’d writhe in my arms until I spilled her back onto Ruth’s chest.
I bought a glossy hardback book called Baby by Desmond Morris. Inside were pictures of pink and peaceful newborn babies.
I stared at the photos. I stared at Sophia. She looked like a stricken bat. Her excrement smelled of sulphur. Ruth would point at the oily green spatter and say, ‘Does that look normal to you?’ I had no idea. It wasn’t in the Desmond Morris book. I sat in grim silence next to the bed, handing out wet wipes, thinking of my next excuse to leave the room.
If I could manage an escape, I’d catch a little sleep on a rug beneath my desk. Max was usually there, curled up, oblivious. I seethed with envy for the dog’s life. It was the only emotion I felt, in truth, but I didn’t tell Ruth.
The pylon, though: she’d understand. That much I knew.
I thought my return to work would solve my problems. But the noise was more excruciating than the shooting pains in my arms. Sometimes I’d hear Ruth crying, too. I’d turn up the music in my office but it didn’t mask the knowledge that they were next door, imploding.
At times I sensed Ruth standing in the doorway of my office behind me, holding our sick, yellow baby. I daren’t turn round. Instead I’d hammer gibberish into my computer, as if rapt with inspiration, until she went away. Then I’d kill the words with the delete button.
A health screening company had commissioned me to write a mail order brochure for them. They wanted old people to get checked for their stroke and heart attack risk.
After two weeks I came up with a single headline:
I spent many hours changing the font and text size. Large, small. Ariel. Helvetica. Garamond. Dingbats. Green, then red, then black, highlighted, underlined, in bold.
Then I deleted it and wrote:
I blamed the tiredness. But I knew that it wasn’t that. Not entirely.
That pylon, she was constantly at the back of my mind. A needle probing at the skin of every thought.
In rare moments when the house was quiet, I lay face down and sucked air through the gaps in the floorboards. I imagined the micro-world an inch beneath. The lice, the mites, locked in a battle for survival, hunting for food, living a wild life. I imagined that I was her, my pylon, looking down on wretched mankind with benevolence and love. I imagined that she saw me staring back at her, and that she felt a deep longing.
To take my mind off things, I watched a lot of television. Programmes about fat people. About unhappy people. About people winning and losing competitions. 42About people cooking. About people having babies. Always the babies.
The doctor refused to accept there was anything wrong with ours. ‘They do cry, you know,’ he said, letting out a great big belly laugh.
Ruth went crazy at him, demanding to see a specialist. Nurses led her into a back room and tried to talk her down, stop her weeping. Later I got a phone call from a counsellor enquiring about her postnatal depression.
‘Fuck you,’ I said, which didn’t help. Now we were on a register.
After that, I found it was best not to talk at all. Not around Ruth, or nurses, or doctors. So I started to avoid the family altogether. Half-hour dog walks became hour-long walks. Two-hour walks. Sometimes I’d be gone a whole afternoon.
I felt more at home on the marsh, roaming among the London tribes. Tracksuit gangsters with bullmastiffs. Hasidic Jews in high black socks and shiny shoes. Vociferous Turks. Pram-pushing Poles. Bearded old men with yappy dogs. Anorak nerds, supping from flasks. Lovers in the long grass. Cyclists with their Lycra bulges. Rastas, hippies, City boys, construction workers, drunks.
It was like strolling through a collective dream. And it felt good, being outside myself.
But not good enough.
This is why, I think, I started taking my dog’s cataract medicine.
The first occasion was a mistake. I rubbed my eyes shortly after administering the drops to Max. Forty minutes later I could feel my irises tear open. Light flooded my retina. 43The room was submerged in a psychedelic haze, pierced by shards of silver. Like a vision.
For a few hours, it was too much. I had to crouch in the wardrobe. Even then, rays of light still penetrated somehow. When I held my hand to my face I realised I could see in the dark. My hand was glowing. It was pylon-shaped.
Ruth mistook my reasons for being in the wardrobe. She stood there with the crying baby, speaking through the door.
‘Charlie, I know you’re finding this hard. But I don’t have the energy to worry about you. I can’t deal with two babies.’
‘I can’t hear you,’ I said.
‘I said that I’m not sorry for you.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I – AM – NOT – FEELING – SORRY – FOR – YOU.’
I’d had enough. I knew where I had to be right now and it wasn’t with Ruth. I stepped out of the wardrobe.
‘Max needs a walk.’
Sporting a pair of sunglasses, I hurried Max to the bottom of Millfields Park. We turned right under the bridge, as usual, past the weir and over the footbridge, towards the Middlesex filter beds.
Even with shades on there was so much light hitting the backs of my eyeballs that the world was in whiteout. It felt like I was stumbling towards the pearly gates, towards God. I entered the filter beds and wobbled across the ramparts, pools of fire on either side of me.
I was so desperate to see her I almost broke into a run. But there was no need. She emerged from the dazzle, a slender giant, looking almost wet in the shimmering light, like Ursula Andress striding from the ocean. She cackled 44and crackled. Lines of black cord whipped from her arms to embrace me.
I went to her, heart pumping. Stood dead centre between her four legs and gazed up. I gasped at the interplay of lines. The poetry of infinity in her delicate spirals of steel. She fired sunbeams at me through her gaping geometry. I laughed in response. I marvelled at the essence of her, trembling with electricity. I touched her legs, each clad in a garter of barbed wire, thrilled at the thought of the volts running through her.
For a moment, I imagined her in a black leather miniskirt and I felt an enormous, surprising erection.
But I did nothing about it.
I didn’t want to sully the moment.
Her name was Angel.
You can laugh. You can mock. But go and tell the captain of a ship he’s deluded when he calls her by name. Tell that to the mountaineer who loves, fears and respects the peak that could kill him.
To me she wasn’t a thing that had been constructed. She was a being who had descended from above. We’d found each other and nothing else mattered. I stopped going to the marina. I grew bored of watching the wrecking balls dismantle the toy factory. Max no longer got to wade in the Lee River’s mudbanks or gambol among the upturned shopping trolleys. 45
Now it was all about Angel. I planned my days around her.
In the morning, I’d help at home with the nappies, the bottles, the puke. All that stuff. Really threw myself into it with gusto, so Ruth wouldn’t know something was up. Then I’d go to the kitchen and prepare sandwiches. Triangle ones.
Ruth found me in the kitchen once, carefully measuring the angle of the bread.
‘You’re making sandwiches.’
I took the cheese out of the wrapper.
‘Blue cheese,’ Ruth said. ‘You hate blue cheese. You say it tastes of metal.’
I froze. Did she suspect something?
‘Things change.’
‘Whatever, Charlie.’
She shuffled back to her bedroom, closed the door.
I tessellated the triangles in a Tupperware box. Carefully placed the box inside a leather satchel. Then off to the marsh.
That summer a gang of hedonistic narrowboat folk had moored outside the filter bed entrance. They wore trilbies and leather jackets. They cracked open beers in the late morning and wiled away the hours on sofas smoking weed. They blared dub reggae from an old ghetto blaster. They laughed a lot.
I’d pass them every day. They’d nod. I’d smile back. It was a happy time. They brought a carnival feel to the place. Every day a celebration. Magical.
Sometimes I’d sit on the bench next to Angel and feel her hum, my legs jiggling in front of me. Max would chase his shadow, or sleep in the shade. When he was settled I’d dab cataract medicine into each eye, wait for my pupils to crank open, the irises to fire up, then out with the iPhone. 46
I’d started recording a series of electronic mixtapes. Drone. Minimalist techno. Really it wasn’t my taste. It was hers. I was only interpreting the vibrations. Giving her what she wanted. She loved the glitch sound. Our favourite track was ‘Test Pattern #1111’ by Ryoji Ikeda, a Japanese sound artist.
Together we’d sing it: ‘Chk chk chk chck chck – tsssssssssssssssssssssst – tk tkt tk tk tkt kk – tssssssssssssssssssss – tk tk tkt tk.’
Afterwards I’d go between her legs and point my camera upwards, let the sun fragment in her girders, spatter rays across my lens. Gently she’d tickle the nape of my neck with volts. It was wonderful.
‘Chk chk chk - tsssssssssssssssssssssst,’ I would coo.
‘Tk tk tk tk.’
A quick cigarette and I was off round the filter beds, taking pictures from every angle, let her slip in and out of view, play peek-a-boo behind the bushes.
Over the weeks my photo library built up nicely. I kept pictures of her on a secret file named ‘Work’. In the first four months of her life, we’d taken almost no photographs of Sophia. Why would we? We’d barely left the house as a family. She was constantly in pain.
As for Ruth and me, the happy couple, there was nothing to photograph. We’d vanished from our own marriage. We slept in alternative shifts, passed by each other with a grunt.
In this respect, the cataract medicine was an inconvenient habit. The effects lasted up to twelve hours and made sleep difficult. My head ached all the time. Whisky helped a little. I made sure I always carried a hipflask.
Angel didn’t approve of the drinking. The silent treatment; always a giveaway. But I reasoned that relationships were all 47about accepting the idiosyncrasies of others. Drinking was mine, being an electricity pylon was hers.
But they were good days, mostly. At dusk I’d return, happy, from the marsh to find my family slumped like refugees in front of a flickering television. Often Ruth would murmur something at me, ‘I miss you,’ or, ‘I love you.’ I couldn’t make it out. Never replied. My head was always banging with pain. I’d slide straight under the duvet.
Then one night, Ruth wasn’t in bed. She was sitting in the living room with a brown envelope, trembling.
‘I opened this,’ she said. ‘It’s from the bank.’
‘Right.’ The letter didn’t surprise me. I’d not done a single day’s useful work in almost five months. The money had entirely run out. Letters were piling up. Bills. Overdrawn warnings. Council tax. Threats. I’d taken to stuffing them behind the filing cabinet so Ruth wouldn’t see.
‘But all that work you’re doing on the computer…’
Electronic music mixtapes, arranging photos. These took time. Especially when your eyes were fucked. She’d never understand.
‘It’s all in hand,’ I promised.
‘Charlie.’ Ruth had a tone in her voice I’d not heard before. Genuine fear. And I could tell it wasn’t about the money.
‘Really, it’s fine.’
It wasn’t though. It wasn’t fine. That following morning I took Max on the usual route. Through Millfields. Down to the navigation. On my back was a rucksack full of unopened mail. I decided my only recourse was to bury it somewhere near Angel. I looked up to her. She’d been around longer than I had. She provided the city with energy, with life, for 48god’s sake. Surely she’d know what to do about a trivial matter like this.
As I reached the entrance, I was surprised to see one of my narrowboat friends up and about, a rollie glued to her bottom lip. It wasn’t even nine a.m. She clutched what looked like a plastic cup of wine.
I was even more surprised when she spoke to me.
‘You’re the pylon guy, right?’
‘Pardon?’
‘The pylon guy.’
‘I’m not sure I…’
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘You’d better know. Aaron’s back. Says he wants to talk to you.’ She gestured towards the filter beds.
‘Aaron.’
‘Old bloke, hangs around the marsh. You must have seen him. He doesn’t stop talking about you, anyway.’
‘I don’t think I…’ I shrugged.
‘Her fella,’ she said.
Snap. Crack.
Max with a twig in his mouth, grinning.
Me with my heart broken.
I entered the filter beds, trembling. She was there, of course. Looking resplendent against a white sky and – I have to say – relieved to see me.
Beneath her a stooped figure waited with a black Labrador. He must have been sixty or more. Grey hair 49bristled from beneath a baseball cap. His white T-shirt was far too big for him. Even though he was wearing sandals, he had chosen to wear socks, and not even a matching pair. It was hard to make out his facial features, what with my eyes being the way they were. But I could see what looked like egg stains in his beard, and down his chest. Or maybe it was phlegm. He had a dirty hacking cough.
Look at the state of him, I thought. This Aaron bloke. What the hell is she doing with him?
The dogs circled each other, the Labrador growling.
‘He’s alright,’ said Aaron in a mildly cockney accent. ‘He’s old. Bit blind in one eye. Gets snappy.’
‘Max’s sight’s not good either.’
‘Cataracts,’ he said.
‘How did you know?’
‘Got my own eyes.’ I couldn’t quite tell, but it felt like he was giving me a conspiratorial wink. I seethed.
After a long pause he said, ‘You’ve come for her, then?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Her.’ He jerked his head at Angel. I could sense her flinch. ‘Sorry to say, mate, but you don’t have long.’
‘I’m not sure…’
‘You shouldn’t be here,’ he said. ‘It’s not your place.’
But the marsh wasn’t anyone’s place, I reasoned silently. How dare he? I considered hitting him.
‘She’s not supposed to be here either,’ Aaron said. ‘I can see why you two get along. Take a look at that.’
He jabbed his stick towards a laminated A4 sign taped beside the pylon. I stared at the text, but my vision was blurred.
‘I don’t know what it says.’ 50
‘They’re trying to prettify the marshes. Clean it up. Another excuse for them to get their mitts on things, I reckon. It’s all about the money now.’
‘But what does the sign actually say?’
‘It’s a notice of works,’ he said. ‘They’re coming to take her down.’
There was a time before I fell in love on Hackney Marshes. When things were okay. I wrote ads. I got paid. I was in love with Ruth. We laughed a lot. But I couldn’t dwell on the past. I had to think about the here and now.
I tipped the unanswered bank demands from my rucksack and replaced them with tools. Anything I could find.
A hammer. A knife. A spanner.
Ruth knew there was something wrong. With the baby, I mean. And at last the doctors agreed she was right. Sophia had a serious food intolerance problem. Wheat, lactose, gluten, milk, soy, eggs. Whatever Ruth consumed, her breasts would turn into liquid poison.
And there she was thinking everything was my fault.
There was a whole load of medical stuff to read about, apparently, but I couldn’t keep my attention on it. Ruth sat me down with the letter from the doctor and told me it was a turning point. Sophia would get better and better from now on.
‘Now we can get you the help you need,’ she said, rubbing a hand through my hair. My spine tingled. I couldn’t remember the last time we touched. 51
But what help did I need? What the hell could Ruth do about my situation?
They were coming the next morning, contract workers in yellow jackets, with their machinery. And they were going to dismantle Angel, piece by piece. In preparation, they’d erected blue hoardings around the base of her legs. I’d been watching them come and go from a bird hide I’d built in the bushes.
The way they acted around her, laughing, joking. It was disgusting.
If she’d been an old oak, she’d have dozens of hippy tree-huggers chained to her trunk by now. This pylon had stood watch over these beds for decades. She’d kept the city lit, boiled the people’s kettles, provided their shitty television programmes, warmed their babies’ bottles.
This was the thanks she got.
I was all she had left. That Aaron, he was a flake. Since the day I ran from him in tears, he’d completely vanished. Not a trace. I asked the woman from the narrowboat if she’d seen him.
‘Dunno who you’re talking about,’ she told me, straight-faced.
‘The old bloke from the marshes!’ I cried. ‘Her fella!’
‘Sure it was me?’
‘Yes, but you were drunk… out of it… maybe you don’t remember.’
‘Cheeky fuck. You should take a look at yourself, chum.’
Well, what did it matter? Part of me was glad he’d gone. He must have been watching me with her for a long time before he dared to confront us. Once he’d seen how serious we were he’d turned tail and fled. The coward. 52
Not me. I had a plan.
When darkness came, I put the cataract drops to good use. I could see very clearly as I approached the locked gate of the filter beds and made my ascent. As I dropped, a fox scuttled into the bushes and poked his nose out, thinking I couldn’t see him. The fool. I hissed at him. Moved on with my mission.
The hoardings were a trickier climb. It took a few run-ups, but once I had my fingertips over the rim I could pull myself up, using the hinges of the hoarding as a foot grip.
Once on the other side, I settled beside Angel and unpacked my whisky and my tools. I touched her leg. She shivered as if cold. But I knew it wasn’t the cold.
‘Don’t worry,’ I reassured her. ‘Tk tk tk tk tk tk tssssssssssssst.’
I wasn’t afraid. These jobsworths would hardly risk their safety to tackle an armed man first thing in the morning. They’d have to phone the boss. Call the police. Get the local press down here.
A right big hoo-ha. That’s what I expected.
I tried to stay awake but the whisky overpowered me. It was only an engine and the chatter of workmen that alerted me the next morning. I scrabbled to my feet and peered through a slit in the hoarding.
There were four of them climbing out, and beyond, a white van approaching. Almost certainly there would be more of them inside.
A hot sun beat down. My heart was tight. I clenched the spanner. I breathed deeply and slowly.
I waited.