Not sure when all the flags went up– it happened while I was away. I’d handed in my last uni assignment and headed straight for Scotland after I’d had some sort of a mental break and decided that with the money I saved off my government school loans, I was gonna live off the land in the highlands for a few years or something. Decided I hated that pretty quick, ended up in Leicester for about eight months, which I liked. Then Derby, much less so. I thought anything was better than Derby, which was how I ended up back in my hometown, back with my family.
So yeah, I was sort of surprised at all the flags. Kind of. I was seeing some of it in Derby already, and it’s a World Cup year in any case, so they all seemed so quaint during the day. Didn’t really think much of it. Every single lampost was a bit excessive I reckoned, but it’s funny times we live in. I can’t really say I ‘love’ this place given how eager I was to escape in the first place, but I know it, I think. Lived here my whole life. Never felt a stranger to these pavements, these buildings, to these people, even if I’ve never said a word to 99% of them. 99.9%.
Anyway, I got egged the other day. At 22:12PM. I remember because I filed a police report on the spot, I was so pissed off. Nothing came of it, I didn’t expect it to, but– not sure. I’m disappointed regardless. The police woman was nice on the phone, said she’d do everything she could, but she pulled up to the house one hour later to say it was a lost cause. I said okay, whatever. At least I did something. I felt weird going on my walk the next night though.
I started this habit of really late night walks (or hikes, depending on where you draw the line) while I was studying in London. Something about London is just good for it, because even when it’s dead it’s alive, you know. The city sleeps for sure, but it snores, it grumbles, it scratches its arse and rolls over.
My town isn’t like that.
At night it’s dead, but it’s like that during the day too. Even when the school kids are out, and the shops are open, and the buses are running, it’s dead even then, like a tired commonwealth graveyard. Dead like sour, like rot. It’s always been like that. I think that’s why it took me so long to realise– getting off track, sorry. So I was egged.
Town’s dead, dead quiet. I’ve got my headphones in, I hear indistinct shouting, it’s getting louder. I don’t think to look up. I never imagine I could ever be the focus of anyone’s, anything’s, attention, that’s my problem. I don’t look up, and then there’s this pain on my leg, and I look down, and I’m covered in gummy egg. Rank, stinking.
I scream a little– but not exactly in fear, like. Just shock, dismay, like what the hell and why the hell. I look up for once, and a black, car-like shape’s in the distance, turning a bend, gone. I submit the report online and forget about the whole thing once the police woman says there’s nothing for it, except I don’t, not really, because I stop walking on that side of that road.
Maybe it was fear, but I wasn’t sure. Because I’m not used to fear. Because I knew this place in my bones, I knew everything about it and it knew everything about me. Again, I don’t love this town, but I couldn’t ever be out of my element within its boroughs. Plus, I felt fine when I didn’t find myself on that side of the road; when I can see the cars coming at me rather than hearing their engines roaring from behind. Totally fine.
Day after that, there’s loud rustling in a bush. It’s particularly odd, because I’m walking a road-bridge that’s traversing a huge decaying pond. The bushes I’m referring to are really reeds and climbing weeds on the other side of the railing, and the way the bridge is set up, how high it is, I shouldn’t be hearing anything like that. Not like that.
I don’t think about it. Not now, not really, and definitely not back then.
Not sure why. I just didn’t like to. If it wanted to hurt me it would have, so whoever or whatever it was, assuming there ‘was’ anything, it didn’t give a fuck about me, right? So there’s no point thinking about it. I just stopped walking that bridge.
So there have been a few things like that, like the eggs and the rustling, but the really big thing is the shadows, right.
So I’m usually walking with a podcast in my ears, and when you’ve got something like that to focus on, you’re not really focusing on what’s around you. At least I’m not. Other people stare sort of mindlessly into the middle distance, me I look mindlessly at the ground. The snails and slugs are coming up to breathe at night due to the first rains of the season, and every step is like navigating a minefield for some stretches. The sudden crunch or burst underneath your boots can feel just horrible, in so many ways, so I’m always absently looking out for that. I’m also looking at shadows. At that time of night, someone walking up behind you makes your heart race no matter what, you know. Or maybe you don’t know, lol, maybe it’s a woman-bits only thing, I don’t know. I’m funny because I’m always scared of getting raped, or getting robbed and raped, or murdered and raped, or mix and match, three for one deal; but at the same time, I walk around like those things can never happen to me. My sister in Southampton, she takes like, actual precautions. One time there was a rowdy crowd outside of The Sigered and she grabbed my wrist with one hand, her keys between the knuckles of the other, and started speed walking. Whole time I’m a grown ass individual btw. I would have never done something like that. I would have just strolled right on past. Up to you to decide if I’m stupid lol, there’s still a bit of this left to tell.
Pardon, I keep wandering off course, I dont know why I–. So the way the lampposts are set up in my town, the shadows cast are long. You get a nice heads up if there’s anyone behind you, and you end up getting used to the shapes and stuff. Oops, that’s a person. Heart-rate starts going. I’ll just step to the side, let them pass. They disappear into the distance, zero acknowledgment of my existence, heart starts slowing back down. Rinse and repeat. The flags disrupt that.
Theyre so high up and so close to the light source, that the shadows they cast on the ground are fucking huge, and fucking weird. Especially in the wind. It’s, you know, it’s fucked. Especially when you’re so used to things being a certain way. Like this building casts this shadow at this time– that tree casts that shadow at that time. A fox darting across the road looks like this. A person coming up from behind looks like that.
These flags cast the biggest, most unimaginable shapes on the ground, and they flicker and warp and move fast. When you’ve got Amy Poehler in your eardrums and you momentarily forget to pay proper attention, those shadows are going to get you. Every single time. It’s not like I can just cross the road or pick a different route to avoid them. Anyway, I wouldn’t have wanted to. Because I’m not that–. Not crazy. I knew what was causing it. It was just a fright. Predicatable every time in hindsight.
I started naming those shadows ‘Georgie’. Oh Georgie, you’re so silly. Got me again. Good on you. Shitty, tongue-in-cheek nickname. Stupid name for a stupid phenomenon. It sort of worked for a little while, even though the personality I tried to assign to the shadows didn’t really stick how I wanted it to. Kept sliding off in the moment, like a cheap plastic sheet on a big ol’ statue. It kinda started feeling like– okay, so I’m not stupid. In my opinion. You be the judge, but I’m just telling you what i think. I’m not crazy. But it started feeling like there was a real personality underneath the nickname georgie and all I was doing was a damn terrible job of… of obfuscating it. I guess. Anyway, I didn’t think about it too much.
So I’d catch an unnaturally moving shadow out of the corner of my eye, I’d jump, yelp a little, and look straight up, reminding myself that this all makes sense. A bit of cloth flapping in the wind, underneath a light. Damn, georgie, give me a break this time, eh? Heart-rate goes down. All is well.
After “georgie”, came “albie”, which was what I started naming the whole thing. Like, the shapes and stuff, the town. Walk in the dark enough, and flat spot-lighting eventually reduces everything into dark polygons. Buildings and cars are just squares and rectangles of varying degrees of complexity, trees are cut-outs, benches are cut-outs. People too. In a town as dead as my town, it’s sometimes hard to remember that all these people are people like me. I walk by the big rectangle with a smaller rectangle on top called Jolly Friar Pub, and I sometimes hear sounds of people, but I never see them walking in or walking out. Boy shapes on scooter shapes ride past, spitting words at me that I don’t parse because of Amy Poehler’s friendly tones. Thank you Amy. I probably didn’t want to hear them anyway.
Quick sidenote, pls bear with me– what is a town fr? Been thinking about this for time, I’m trying to figure it out. Like, if all the people in London suddenly left for the home counties for whatever reason, I feel like it would still make sense to point to a thing called ‘London’. Right? The geographical boundaries still exist without people, the m25, the globe, the eye, the gherkin, all the shops and stalls and football cages, the boroughs and council buildings and fire departments– they’re still there. But at the same time, feels odd to refer to a place as a ‘town’ without the ‘inhabitants’. Let me know if I’m being stupid and there’s a super obvious answer to that. Actually, dont. I dont know why i said that. You can’t. Probably not ever. But, yeah. I’ve been thinking about it, trying to wrap my head around albie’s nature. It’s got a temperament like a person, but its as big as… as big as anything I’ve ever truly known. Bigger than a person, bigger than a thousand people. I don’t get it.
I did start getting the feeling that Georgie and Albie were trying to scare me on purpose, a little while back. Not just on some prank timing. Like for real. Mean shit. Nasty shit.
Again, just a feeling, I’m not saying anything for definite, I know what’s real and what’s not real. Just saying. I think, okay, I think. I think they don’t like me walking around at night. I think they don’t like me walking around in general.
My route, which had grown slightly convoluted due to having to keep making detours around certain sides of the road, or certain road bridges, and stuff, used to take me to the Tesco two boroughs over before I walked back the same way. I’m not sure if I mentioned this before, but I’m a stroller. I don’t hustle, I don’t run, but one time, at that Tesco, Albie got me really bad. I tried going in the shop for help, and all the employees in their blue jackets looked the same. Like Albie. Weird, but it also felt like they had always looked like that, but here I was, really realising it for the first time. Heart started going, I started going, quick. Got the 28 back to the town centre and walked at a maximum trot the rest of the way home.
That 3 pound spent on the bus wouldn’t leave my head the next day. The Google wallet notification embarrassed me so bad. It’s a pride thing, I think, I’m extremely stubborn, medically so, even. Me personally, I call it quirky. I quirkily kept up with the walks for days after the Tesco Incident despite how scared I was, but the walks got shorter each time. I dragged it out for too long– it made the embarrassment worse. Yeah I don’t know why I did all that. Medically fucking stupid. At one point, after darting out to The Sigered and darting right back, I realised I didn’t feel like a part of this place before. Georgie and albie were georgie and albie and I was… was something else. A mosquito skittering over itchy skin, a moth in the corner of the room. The town wasn’t rotting, I was the rot. I was the larvae in the bread, fat and swollen and vile. Ready to be scraped off, right into the bin.
Listen, I got my gcse in english too, I know how some of you are gonna try to read this. Just drop it. No metaphors, no fucking… interpretation. Stop it. Im using words because thats the only way to translate how this feels, but im talking about— Listen. There’s things living in this town, or on it, or– or something. And I’m probably going to fucking die.
I’ve never really bought it up with my brother and mother in actual terms, but I can tell they feel it too. My brother is always finding reasons to be in London or Birmingham or just straight up abroad. My mum’s just used to it.
She used to tell us stories about how this town used to be when she first arrived with us as babies, and I sympathised, but I never really got it until now. I’m thinking now that I grew up ignorant, at a time when the things were resting their eyes, and now I get to be scared. Just scared all the time. I think my mum had all the scared burned out of her. She goes to work regardless. I stay in my room.
I send off job applications moreso as a pastime, I fantasise about Leicester, or the highlands, or Derby, I lay in bed and watch Amy Poehler chatting it up on Youtube.
St George and Albion pulse outside my window, mean, and slobbering and angrier than anything, but its fine, i keep them shits closed, but I cant go downstairs anymore because my stupid fucking brother keeps leaving and not shutting the door behind him but
