The cat killed a bird this morning. A fledgling chaffinch, its right-hand side shredded open and oozing thick liquid, a few matted feathers stuck to the exposed meat. I got it off him, his amber eyes surprised at the intrusion. The bird died a few minutes later, its heart giving up, the shock too much. I couldn’t bear giving it back to the cat so I buried it near the potato patch. I felt nauseous as I lay the tiny body to rest under the dark earth.
I wish I could explain to him not to murder the bees, the few sparrows and starlings that come to this patch of grass in north west London. They’re dying. It isn’t his fault, I know, it’s mine, ours, somebody’s. Dan says we’re the only species capable of realising, and therefore changing, our instincts.
Dan had left for work an hour before. I sat at the kitchen table drinking black coffee, thinking of a tiny body hatched only days earlier. The cat purred and rubbed himself against my legs. I kicked him away.
I set out to meet Sofia, warm June drizzle in the air as I walked to the station. I sat on the brick wall at West Hampstead Overground. Eight minutes until the train. A few other commuters were spread out across the platform, staring at the tracks. Drizzle spotted my cheeks. My jacket was stifling in the unexpected humidity. I rubbed my stomach and thought something moved. Too lethargic to listen to music or read my novel, I let the rain fall.Behind the opposite platform, dug out of the railway embankment, was a patch of exposed earth, fenced off with a metal sign:
CONTAMINATED SOIL DO NOT DISTURB THIS AREA IS BEING TREATED FOR JAPANESE KNOTWEED.
A grey squirrel stop-started over the infected earth before bounding into the mesh of bindweed, Special Brew cans, bramble, willowherb, faded crisp packets and buddleia. Three green parakeets screeched overhead.
I was on my way to meet Sofia in the north east of the city. She and my other London friends didn’t understand why, when I’d finally elected to return after my five-year stint on the Kent coast, I hadn’t rejoined them in the crowded cafes and hangovers of Dalston and Hackney Downs. The memories were tiring. I wanted to raise children in the metropolis, not in the salt sadness of Margate. But the Hackney of my twenties was exhausting.
‘Helena,’ they said, ‘why the hell would you want to live all the way out there? Kilburn may as well as be the moon. There’s nothing to do out there.’ People laughed, I smiled politely, wanting to explain all the things they couldn’t understand and I could not say.
It takes twenty-two minutes from West Hampstead to Dalston Kingsland. I live close by. It’s no cheaper out this way, but Dan and I managed to get a half-decent flat with an actual garden. I’m doing my best to reacquaint myself with the names of plants; things I was good at as a child. I enjoy the names of herbs and wildflowers that grow on the unloved railway embankments, a different lexicon for understanding the city. Speaking their names aloud feels like an antidote to something, a palate cleanser.
My time living on the coast, we had more space and a garden that was only ever half-tended, stocked with local art, carved driftwood terns and ceramic selkies, and a metal thing that hung from a tree, tinny in the breeze. The sea, the salt and shingle, was the draw down there. Gulls, cheap rent, space to work, melancholia. In the end, Dan said he missed the busyness of the city, and I agreed. Said I wanted to do it on our terms though. We weren’t in our twenties anymore, can’t go back to the 4am Thursday nights, white lines on cut mirror-glass.
‘My mum used to live around Dollis Hill way, before I was born. I always quite liked it round there,’ Dan said. ‘It’s on the Overground.’
‘Let’s look then,’ I said.
A year later, we were back in the comforting anonymity of the city, with a new postcode to match a new perspective. It bothers me people didn’t understand.
I stared at the information board. Five minutes to the train. That dead chaffinch, small, buried with the potatoes. I hoped nothing would disturb it, that it was left in peace. Feeling my stomach, I gazed at the sign.
Japanese knotweed. I’d read about it an article in Ham&High someone left on the tube. The plant was everywhere, invading the homes of the famous; an absurdly wealthy footballer up in Hampstead; TV celebrities we thought had been left stranded in the nineties. They said it can grow ten centimetres a day, roots that punch through concrete, brick, wooden floors. Tenacious like bamboo and as aggressive as a triffid, it could knock tens of thousands off property prices: a plant unconcerned by aspirational lifestyles, disrespectful to the English landscape garden, uncaring of hopes sunk in bricks and mortar. It could ruin this station. It is a beautiful plant.
I sat on the wall in the rain. An overgrown and ruined London. Barclays and Costa Coffee overtaken, submerged and redundant. Starbucks and Topshop abandoned like the temples I saw at Angkor Wat, on the first trip we ever took abroad as a couple. Left for our survivors. Families of rust-furred foxes padding through the knotweed jungles, grey squirrels skittering through the trees, packs of cats hunting them as parakeet flocks scream overhead. Escaped animals from London Zoo adapting to a defunct metropolis. A leopard padding through the overgrowth hunting fallow deer. Muntjac picking their way through grassy streets. A few feral humans, dealing in ruined paperbacks, salvaged clothing and the detritus of a culture long gone. Happy daydreams.
My phone vibrated somewhere deep within my bag. A text from Dan: they’ve fenced off part of West Hamstead, the triffids are taking over, have a look when you get there!! Have a great day babe, say hi to Sof from me xx.
I looked around, saw at least fifteen other people, old and young, mirroring my actions. Eyes locked onto a small screen, thumbing words. I felt ashamed, just another part of the London crowd. I didn’t text Dan back.
I like where I live. I wish I could explain better. I walk to places like Roundwood Park on the Harlesden-Willesden border, where I often climb the small hill and look out over the city to Wembley stadium, rearing out of the sprawl like a breaching whale, across over the sombre Jewish cemetery, at pink-brown jays, snogging teens, buggy pushers. It’s not the city I knew and I like that. I was done with the coast, had exhausted that salty fugue state just in time to jump ship before it became fashionable. Once again. I had friends, now, who were looking at Victorian houses in Margate, Ramsgate, Broadstairs. They didn’t like it, but god it was cheap. The Victorians brought the knotweed to these shores as ornamental garden decoration.
Pests, weeds, these terms are subjective.
The train was crowded and sweaty. I stood and stared out the window as the contaminated patch of earth faded from view, wondering what chemicals were being put down. Surely they were worse than the knotweed? Twenty-two minutes later and I was in Hackney, pushing out onto Kingsland Road as if I still owned the streets like I once had and, yeah, I felt a pang when I thought back seven, eight, nine years when I’d stood on that very patch of pavement there smoking the rollies I have finally managed to quit, walking that first time hand-in-hand with Dan and crackling with energy. Whoever thought we’d still be together best part of a decade later? So much has happened in what seems like a blink, but we all say that don’t we? This mix of the two of us, that’s why I’m thinking like this. I haven’t told anyone. Not yet. What will the city, this part of town, be like when my child is thirty-two, when I am sixty-four? Will Margate have sunk under the grey waves? Will Hampstead be a knotweed forest? Will the foxes take over? What shape will the world take? Will our children stand on these streets and drink and smoke and laugh as we did? I hope so.
I passed the market, the smell of fish entrails triggering my nausea once again. The refurbished bar where I once worked (I was a terrible pint-puller). I don’t regret these memories and neither do I want them back. I texted Dan. He doesn’t know yet. I wanted to tell him that night, in person.
The afternoon passed with milky coffee, a toasted sandwich for Sofia who today seemed bony and girlish. I was less queasy now so I ordered Turkish menemen.
‘Aren’t you a vegan anymore?’ she asked.
‘Just your usual run-of-the-mill vegetarian these days.’
I haven’t been a vegan for nearly four years. She remembers me as I was.
We talked, sharing stories and gossip about friends past and present, giggling at events from half a decade ago, news that Dave and Lucy are engaged with a baby on the way (the perfect moment to drop my news, but I held back). We wondered whatever happened to Chris, retold the story of how Deb found love with an Aussie and moved out to Melbourne.
Sofia started to talk about new art exhibitions opening near the market, of new films and recently published novels, but I started talking house prices and my plans for the future. Sofia glazed over, but I continued, bringing up the knotweed, the facts I’d read in the paper, the Victorians who brought it here as an ornamental plant, the beauty that got way out of control, how it can devalue a house by £250,000.
‘Why are you going on about knotweed?’
‘I don’t know. It’s interesting, that’s all.’
Sofia smiled weakly. She knows the knotweed could never affect her world of flats and cafes, of art and nicotine. I let her take the reins of the conversation. I talked little about Kilburn. She talked about folk I half-remember who loom large in her life, events going on in the next few weeks that I should attend, if traveling back is a problem then I can always stay at hers. I nodded and made promises we both know I’ll break. I didn’t tell her my news. I don’t want that conversation, not yet, and anyway not with her. Sofia looked hungover, sunken eyes in a child’s face, and I felt a ripple of pity, then guilt, at judging her.
A moment of silence, then I said, ‘Come on, show me what’s changed around here then.’
We nosed through vintage shops where I wondered what we’ll consider vintage in thirty-two years. We took periodic coffee stops, rummaged through creased paperbacks in Oxfam. I said no to the pub at the end of it all and headed back to the station feeling like a grownup.
Evening by the time I got back to West Hampstead station. No one to be seen working on the infected earth. I decided to walk the distance home. The day’s early rain had drained off the humidity. It was a nice night and I enjoyed the hum of the street. I passed young couples holding hands, heard the bark of foxes starting their day and saluted a drunk who wished me Merry Christmas despite it being June. This city.
Home, the cat greeted me cheerfully. An aroma of cumin and coriander leaked from the kitchen. Dan was in there doing vegetable curry. I entered and kissed him on the cheek.
‘Hello love. How was your day? Did you get my text?’
‘Yeah I did. Didn’t see what you were talking about though, I was rushing for the train.’ I lied. The knotweed forests are for me and me alone.
‘Look it up, crazy stuff. Anyway, what did you want to tell me? Some news or something?’
My husband’s face was shrouded in steam rising from the curry pot. Thick smells in the air. He wiped his damp forehead and stirred the pot.
‘Oh, nothing much. Can’t remember now.’