Suburbia
Suburbia“I only wanted something else to do but hang around”
Pet Shop Boys, ‘Suburbia’Sitting with Tim and Jane and Tina and Terry and Mal and Michael and Rachel and Sean, I know that everything I wanted is everything I can’t accept. His smug middle-class certainty of being always right, and my writing, with savage fury, of gilt rings and Beamer keys and women applying false smiles behind the kitchen door. We listened to ‘Suburbia’ under the beech trees in Bath, a scorching summer day after our GCSEs. An hour of this suffocates the life from me.My granddad died when I was one. He’d planned to buy a house in Spain, spend his winters there - so Posh and Becks, so aspirational middle class - but that was 1982, and he never had the chance. With retirement imminent, he’d bought a new set of bowls, bought a new snooker cue and joined the club. Working down the mine brought home the cancer that killed him. My grandma’s senile, and Richard unnerves me by settling into her rusting leather chair, where I perched with my sewing when I was twelve. She doesn’t recognise me, and neither do Mal’s friends. Natural brunette “more mature” than the bright ginger dye I really loved.***They mention colour writing, and people look around, confused. We’re walking through Elephant and Castle, writing news, and everything is colour to me. A soiled white van scenting cheap bread, its driver scarred around his shaven crown, perforations bitten deep into the scalp. Plastic mobiles in chunky pink, chinking in the wind and accompanied by t.A.T.u.’s tinny squeak. On the bus, a jowly youth bears flowers with crushing fingers and expressionless face; on the Tube, a single fleck of dandruff on a businesswoman’s immaculate suit. On the stairs, there’s the brief sputter, like a dying engine, of a dry kiss.
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose leaves
The way I feel today - 10 July 2004
Just seventeen - 17 March 2004
Roads to freedom - 25 February 2004
Confessions of a failed self-harmer - 25 February 2004
Manchester, united - 25 February 2004