I went to London once.

I’d never been before and everyone always used to say to me, “Oh, have you been to London?” and “You should go to London, it’s brilliant,” and “I can’t believe you’ve never been to London.”

“London,” they’d say. “It’s fucking amazing.” And then they’d tell me all the ways it was amazing.

There were a lot of ways it was amazing.

Once I admitted that I’d never even heard of London and they looked at me as if I was mad. “What?! How? That’s impossible!” and “You must at least have seen it on the telly?” and “What about that film that came out last year? You must have seen that!” and I said what film and they said, “That one about London,” and so in the end I said “Oh that one! Of course I’ve seen that!” but of course I hadn’t seen it at all.

So I went to London.

And it really was incredible and I’m glad I went.

They had all these buildings and there were so many of them and so close together and they were huge and weird and all sort of knotted and woven together so you couldn’t see where one finished and the others started and they all glittered like jewels in the sun so the longer you looked at them the longer they stayed with you when you looked away.

And there were hundreds of people everywhere, thousands maybe, all going all over the place like they knew where they were and where they needed to be but they all looked kind of dry somehow, all brittle and faded like old newspapers, and when you spoke to them they’d shift and shimmer and get all scared and fly away into the sky in great directionless flocks.

I bought some food in one of their shops but instead of money they had a system based around physical punishment so after that I didn’t buy anything else although I was too polite to put the sandwich back and too cowardly to show them how cowardly I was and so I stuck out my hand and accepted the sharp cuts across the knuckles that it cost me.

In the evening I found this town square and there was a huge unlit pyre of bodies at the centre and more and more people kept stumbling out of the restaurants and the bars and the theatres all around and collapsing against the mass of it and in this way it grew and grew. I danced beside it for a while with a three-armed girl and we danced and danced and kissed and more and at the end I held out my hand so she could inflict her price but she just laughed and said “It’s not there you pay it’s here” and she tapped me on my belly and cavorted away.

I wondered what she meant at first but then I began to feel queasy and dizzy and unwell and eventually I fell to my knees by the empty horse’s trough at the entranceway to the square and began to vomit up my lunch into it, and then my breakfast and then everything else that came before and after that some blood and then more blood and organs and old tin cans and some pieces of string and misshapen lumps of glass that looked like malformed bones and one that looked somehow like a skull and then a few more drops of blood and then it stopped and I spat and spat out all the saliva I had left into that trough of filth and I wiped the tears away from my eyes and I thought I was going to be okay I thought that wasn’t so bad was it and I looked at the blood in the trough and I thought I saw it ripple and I thought I saw it move and then two hands came out and grabbed me round my neck and pulled me down towards whatever it was they belonged to down towards the blood and into the blood and the rubbish and the half-digested food down and down endlessly into the dark.

I think it was London.

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Notes:

1. Written on March 17th, 2016