Adventures in the Golden Triangle

I suppose you want to know who I am and why I’m writing this, but that will have to wait for another time. For there are more pressing things at hand, and I cannot divert my attention into the sheer placidity and dopy literariness of areas like biography and plot and a character’s motivation. Movement, that’s what it’s all about.

All I can tell you is I stole a car. A powdery green number, from Mill Hill Road. Keys were in the ignition, dumbly, so I just climbed in and offed I went. The look on some drivers’ faces as you plough through the neat front gardens, avoiding traffic as you do so, is something to behold. If I could read lips I would have been offended, no doubt. Their red piggish faces crouched over the wheel miming expletives at me who didn’t care.

I never knew what ‘bling’ meant, and, in a way, I still don’t. I met a kid, kicking a ball on the side of the road, real snotnosed like, and he told me it was something to do with rappers and their cars. Doesn’t make much sense to me. I stole his ball and kicked it in the river. I would have cried if I was him, but he didn’t, and said he had stolen it from someone else and what goes around comes around.

Little Prick. The car starts to wobble, which could have been caused by the wall I demolished back there around the corner. Minis can’t take much punishment, it seems. The back wheel goes flying off and flips forward, bouncing on the bonnet, before rolling down the road, a slight quiver in its movement, and rolling across the junction with the Unthank Road, nimbly cutting between traffic and rolling up the hill slightly on the other side before tipping over at the kerb.

I watch this, transfixed by the unusualness of the scene, while the car careens into a wall. I keep my focus on the departing rear wheel, oblivious to the damage I’m causing to the car and wall.

I’m hungry, so walk to the shop and buy a pasty, then walk to the station to get the train back to London, where I’m due in Hoxton in the evening for the opening of my exhibition.

When I first met Ravique, she drank coffee hard like an addict, and swept her dark hair back across her face as she talked fast about everything on her mind. She chewed up topics and spat them out. She moved me.

Then she got into conceptual art hijinks, selling the empty contents of jars that weren’t there to media folk who weren’t there either. It made me laugh; it made her money. I wanted in, she wanted out. We swapped our identities and I claimed to be Ravique. No one raised an eyebrow. I didn’t even change my appearance, just swept my blond hair across my face as I talked hard and fast about everything under the sun.

She left London and moved to a small island in the Pacific, where she’s become a teacher of kung-po, or something like that. Sometimes she sends me leaves through the post, with my address and a stamp on one side and on the other side the word ‘beautiful’ written as many times as she can fit it. I think she’s finally found herself.

So anyway, on the way through Ipswich tunnel I think back to the graveyard I was smoking that bag of shit in, and I swear the monument next to me moved, although I can’t confirm it as I was fucked at the time, and by the time I realised it moved I was in the Ipswich tunnel. Someone should check to confirm it. Or not.

Beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful. Manningtree. Beautiful. Colchester. Beautiful. Liverpool Street. Beautiful. Old Street. Beautiful. Hoxton.