Good Times in Dystopia

1

Shoreditch, Sometime in July

The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.

John Fowles

The toilet is vomiting black shit. Toxic, vile, noxious – the rejected bile of the City of London spuming back up from the gullet under the street. Three maniacs in white overalls are jigging around, ankle deep in filth, their hair a red, black and green tricolour fire flashing against shitsmears and white suits. I bring them four cans of beer, and they flick the crud off from their gloved hands to clutch and crack them, laughing amidst choking fumes like sewage tear gas. The beer foams, clean and snowy, in contrast to the bubbling bilious blackness of the bog blowing black bubbles in the back of the Shitness School. It won’t stop. We won’t stop. So we grab the jigsaw and cut a perfect golden triangle into the floor to let the coal black frackshite drain into the empty office space below.

Once that gaping floor-anus is opened, I cannot resist it. I’ll shit directly into the space ten metres below to avoid crapping in an empty pizza box and being caught on the stairs delivering it to the street.

What’s in there?

You don’t want to know.

Once on the street I’ll be sure to bury the forbidden crap-package at the bottom of the trash pile to prevent some unfortunate street-skipper excitedly scooping a box of hot poop off the floor to open it to nothing but disappointment. I try not to inflict my shit on other people.

It’s raining down one side of the room I am sharing. The damp creeps across the carpet tiles inexorably towards the sofa cushions I’ve shoved against one wall. The sound of running water pouring down the walls into the rooms below seems a mocking irony to the fact we have no toilet and shower. I can wash – awkwardly – with a kettle and running water in the dilapidated kitchen, but most of the time I wonder why to bother.

Sunrise on the suicide-shelf at the top of the building where I stood on my birthday and considered that drop into the street below as a gateway to something other than the misery and torment that I had sunk into. Sunrise each time when we brought the randoms and the strangers and the passers-by up on to the heights on the edge of the city and tried our utmost to open them up and fuck them. In the end, it would all unravel around us and there would be nothing left but everything else. I wept there and considered the abyss but in the end I was not as strong as others around – or perhaps I was too weak. Eternity’s fucking sunrise – dangled upon the edge with a beer in hand and not sure whether to cry or to laugh or to puke or to whip my fucking cock out.

At night, we crouch in the window-sill shrieking drunken madness at the passers-by of Shoreditch High Street, beckoning them in to join us beneath the gigantic twisted mural of an emaciated Auschwitz survivor, his eyes exploding from their sockets, painted over the alarm bell that signals each guest that arrives at the door, simultaneously evacuating his bowels and ejaculating in an ecstatic death-throw down one wall.

Mierda painted it, and I like an apostatic apprentice bounded around her scrawling dubious ditties and sloganeering over the walls behind her, happy and in glee to be free and creating amidst the shite and detritus of the city.

The rats run rabid – scurrying and seeking and clawing around us with their little human hands. The wolf stalks – barking a savage sonata to each guest that enters – a challenge and a question and a summons. When I first meet her, the wolf terrifies me into paralysis. I stand and watch frozen and impotent, awaiting the next move – until I realise that the thunder and fury was just that – noise echoing around the clouds and concretising something that would be otherwise abstract and intangible. All the noise, all the mania, all the terror – something real and unreal at the same moment. The echo of a shout into a cave. A cave set in the cliffs mounting the rivers of traffic and hubbub that flow through the City and out into the East End. All our noise and chaos is a hollow echo and tribute to the nightmarish babel that slurries past us every weekend on the streets.

We skip people like we might skip food – fishing them out of the bins to gorge ourselves upon them. Yet when I manage it, I am horrified at the callousness of the exchange. One I manage to fish comes back, exclaims at the rooftop delights of the city looming iridescent and sparkling above us, retires to my shared room half-soggy with rain, then fled to a taxi without so much as an exchange of numbers. When I encounter her again on Great Eastern Street a week later, spotty and empussed, she blithers empty excuses and averts her eyes. I had been fucked and chucked and had no further care for the experience. I’d fucked her like she asked, lying down on top of her beneath a canopy of electric stars, unfettered by her proclamation that she was on her period, exerting to ejaculation despite my broken ribs and crippling liver pain. Afterwards, she’d sucked in futility upon my flaccid cock, hungrily trying to coax it back into action, her sexuality suddenly vampiric, I’d been snared by a Shoreditch succubus.

And so what if I was nothing but food for others? Hadn’t I returned excited and elated with bottles of shoplifted beer to find my lover in bed with another? What did any animal acts such as fucking mean between strangers? I was no better and the ones I desired no worse. We were now but meat-puppets jigging on the strings of our desires...

yet still I was surprised.. –

– the Mierda found a way into me.

2

Down With The Shitness

We are close to dead. There are faces and bodies like gorged maggots on the dance floor, on the highway, in the city, in the stadium; they are a host of chemical machines who swallow the product of chemical factories, aspirin, preservatives, stimulant, relaxant, and breathe out their chemical wastes into a polluted air. The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.

Norman Mailer

Some days, all I can do is lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, pretending that I am dead.

The ceiling is warped, corners blackening with mould, and rainwater pours down one half of the far wall. But I do not mind, because I am dead.

I guess I have been dead since I stood on the edge of the roof and looked down at Shoreditch’s gum-spattered pavements. Maybe I died before and didn’t realise, but that moment was a clear threshold where I made the choice to die.

I didn’t die physically, but something died inside, and although I stepped back from the edge to see what else might happen, I became a ghost, haunting the remnants of this destroyed and defiled metropolis, barely visible, living in the cracks and shadows of the City of London. I become a wraith of petrol fumes evaporating in the bright summer sunshine – people in floppy hats and vintage printed shirts with Ray-Bans bump into me on Brick Lane, their noses wrinkling at the acrid stench – but in the greying summer drizzle of acid rain I attain at least solidity enough for the water to smack off my ragged jaegarjacken.

It’s not so bad being dead, especially in the bed. I lie here for hours, days even, feeling hollow and expired. I emerge and head downstairs to the front room, and the banging and screaming and mania doesn’t bother me so much. Piles of trash and tools and rotting food fill the carpeted walls, and it is not so bad. I join in with the other Hungry Ghosts – screaming and drinking and falling over – and death doesn’t seem so dreary. Most of all, I enjoy the miserable peace of my soggy mattress in my dripping room, a watery purgatory lost somewhere beneath a collapsing roof.

At times, I take my dead self back up to the roof, and stare wistfully out over Shoreditch’s Babylonian vistas: at teams of visceral drinkers squashed into the simmering neon of the Drunken Monkey, at the steady rumble of traffic up Great Eastern Street, at the milky mural painted on the railway bridge that reads We Have To Adore and Endure Each Other, at the distant squat bulk of the Chariot’s sauna behind the wine supermarket. All the fashionable ant people parading up and down, far below us, and over it all, just off to the west, the silvery, glittering towers of the city, watching over us all like the tumescent phalluses of huge metallic sentinels.

Dead – I feel very little but the wind blowing through me, occasional patches of sun warming my dead bones, or the passing rain wetting my face. I wonder what dead people do.

For one, they write. Nostalgia and reminiscence come very easily to the dead.

They drink. It helps the dead to forget, to numb the pain.

They talk to the living, who surprisingly seem to hear it, or at least make requisite and appropriate responses. I wonder if everyone else around me is actually dead as well. Maybe they don’t realise it.

The dead steal from shops. When you’re dead, you don’t worry so much about the consequences of shoplifting. As a dead ghost, I attract a remarkably slight amount of attention taking bottles of beer, wine – red and ginger – from the shelves and unceremoniously shoving them into my trousers. Security guards sometimes apprehend me at the doors, and an unpleasant scene ensues, with unemployed actors playing hired guards arguing with a dead person about what is in his pocket. Once on Great Eastern Street I breeze in like a poltergeist, take hold of a crate of beer and flee, running down the street to the Shitness School and safety.

Occasionally the dead must eat.

Awi, Grizzly and Mierda come back with a mega-skip: a whole trolley overloaded with cider, weak lagers, fruit juices, blackcurrants, bananas, bags of crisps, grapes, chocolate, all the gak. We load it up dutifully in the corner of the front room and proceed to slowly and steadily work our way through it. Naiad joins us, and Awi suggests we watch a movie together, projected on the wall.

It takes a while for him to sort out the technical details, but eventually the four of us sprawl on mattresses, drinking watery lager and eating crisps, and watch a documentary about a man several of us know from another squat. A methamphetamine cook. There is a documentary about his life in the Czech Republic, where he used to live with his wife and children, sometime in a dreamlike past.

In the film, the man looks much healthier than today. He has flesh on his bones, yet already there seemed a gaunt, stark stare to his eyes. He looks dead too.

The documentary follows him in his profession as a performer of autopsies. In one scene, he cracks open the rib cage of a cadaver and looks inside, saying:

You see. There is no soul inside. Just meat.

He also runs a side-line in directing and producing pornography with teenage boys he picks up at the train station and pays money to have sex on camera.

Now, up there, everything is covered in pigeon shit. I want you to roll around in the pigeon shit together and fuck each other. It will be hot.

We watch, somewhat aghast, thinking that at times we had lived in the same squat as this man.

Mierda decides to name one of her rats after him.

Despite being dead, I still enjoy the sight of seeing Mierda playing with her rats. She picks up one or both of the soft, squeaking things and presses them to her lips, blowing farts on their bellies and counting their nipples and squealing and laughing and smiling broadly as they run around.

So soft. So white. So pure. Little lesbo rats! she would sing to them. I wasn’t so sure about them, but she insists and I find myself loosely holding some small, wriggling creature in my hand. It peers at me with pink, blinking eyes, and grips my fingers with weird little human hands – dextrous and nimble. It looks like it could work a typewriter.

On average, about once a week, Mierda lets me fuck her.

I want to be used, she hisses at me.

But being dead, this all means little to me. I merely exist amongst the living, witnessing what is happening.

So you end up living with the chaos punks, and they make you be a freak...

Each time I open the door it feels like the future falls through.

The doorbell of the Shitness School is a repurposed fire bell, painted by Mierda to look like an eyeball exploding out of a seven-foot emaciated zomboid refugee mural painted across one wall. It shrieks like a klaxon announcing trouble, terrors and attacks from outside and a roaring, drunken battle-cry:

Everybody’s an enemy!

There are refugees from the Vostok – Sasha and Fyodor. A pair of panthers: snake-hipped, dressed to kill, stiletto boys, in heels and with flick knifes in the back pockets, hot-stepping sleuths out of the suburbs of [location redacted]. In top hats and leggings, with a change of clothes for leisure, to shoplift, party or riot, always dressed to the nines and piercing you with the sparky nervous optimism of a person who has slipped the noose, jumped the fence and fled to the woods on the day of execution. Intently on the go, or immersed in a relaxation so intent and focused it could only have been justified by the flight from a state repression much more severe than the TV licence inspector. I knew Fyodor from barricading 27 windows on the front of Squatopolis, where he nearly lost an arm to a bailiff’s angle-grinder, and Sasha from his determined razor-sharp patter, cutthroat pragmatism and dapper top hat.

There is dark little Nieszka, small like a collapsed star, of weight and presence beyond her size, squirrelling from mystery to cackling laughter, shrewd and sleek like some magical mole that had burrowed into the squat. From the right angle, she looks like a 12-year old boy. She is the inverse embodiment of the Russian doll with a black mask Mierda had tattooed on to the back of her leg in Squatopolis beneath the words Matryoshka Riot.

When the Oval squat of over 100 people is evicted, I open the door to a hydra of piercings and shaved areas, tattoos and leather, cheeky grins and glinting eyes: the brothers Daigas and Ratai, and his girlfriend Lice, fresh back from driving across the States, tearing from one coast to the other in a relentless white-line odyssey. I never see Daigas without his vaporiser, a bemused slant to whole being as he staggers in a cannabinoid fug, his haircut that of a space-bum three million years from Earth, laughing and chuckling his way through the void. He is always in pain – back, or neck, or kidneys or liver recovering from some earlier time when he was as fully dedicated to chaos inebriation as some of the others in the Shitness. Now, he is a machine – scrubbing pots in a city salad bar by day and blazing weed in his free time – making plans to bust out of squat’s waiting room.

Ratai is by all accounts an incorrigible but loveable cunt, so deadpan uncaring with it you couldn’t hate him for long. Street-edge not straight-edge, booze and drugs had no interest for him. He is a cyborg, plugging into the variety of high-end bicycles he had accrued in his time as a courier, slicing hawk-like through London’s vicious traffic by day and each weekend taking scalps and glory in the illegal street-races they organise around town. He’d blast the same anti-cop Oi! Songs on repeat until you thought you’d lose your mind, lips twisting in a satisfied smile if he saw you break and snap at him.

I am bewildered how Lice could put up with him. I learned she’d been a hardcore oil-quiff dyke before they’d got together. She looks like a 50s pin-up who’d time-travelled forward and become an alt-porn star. Arms scrawled with bootleg freestyle tatts and ears stretched to bursting point, her hair an emerald coiffure, she could smoke and strut and chat with the easy grace of a Devon lass and champion of chat headed to the city. She was head-chef at the same city luncher as Daigas, and shared the same easy feline smile.

Naiad sashays in during the third week, aquamarine dreadlocks and a shaved pate, a map of the world inked on the square of her back and a jangling, jolly demeanour of the seasoned traveller. A Holiday Queen of hitch-hikers, but with a distant innocence she once explained as having experienced brain-death as a baby. The doctors had to jumpstart her brain with needles. She got lost a lot, but never really seemed to mind. She’d travelled the US with the others, but stayed on an extra month to explore alone. As they reunited, they split the limited numbers of rooms with sheets and simply picked alternate corners with the ease of old sailors dividing a deck into berths.

Another pairing I only passed in the doorways, dimly aware of in the heights of the building, but they remained mysterious and somehow apart. The aptly named Pinky is an incongruous blue-eyed blonde with spectacular breasts and a penchant for Justin Bieber, stylishly restrapping her voluminous curves in K-pop tones of carnation, fuchsia, fandango and magenta. Her partner, Bill, always wears a full-cap, slick t-shirt, trainers, seemingly forever at work as a bar-man.