42) HERE’S TO OPENING AND UPWARD, TO LEAF AND TO SAP
It has become all too common for my Sunday mornings to be consumed with the ongoing battle of does struggling student spend £7 on unknown Portuguese dish or go home and eat beans out of a can. The wonders of Greenwich market are if nothing but the best part of London to happen to a groggy Sunday morning. All around me are stalls crammed full of print t-shirts and slightly above average art painted on to whatever surface isn’t already a clutter of novelty beer bottle clocks and hand made stuffed animals. Their beady eyes stare at me, which only adds to the pressure of buying this dish. I walk away with my mystery meat dish that burns my hand through the polyester sleeve with slight regret seeping through my brow. As I shuffle the dish between my hands I scan the array of tie dye tops that scream ‘I AM SO PAINFULLY NORMAL GIVE ME A REASON FOR LIVING’ and I think of my little sister back home in Cornwall who I am sure would at least sleep in one of the eye sores. I hand over another couple of notes and make a mental note to live off of whatever cans lurk in my flat for the next week. I grab a top of magnificent blues broken only by a brief shout of a deep red and shove it into my less adventurous tote bag. There is some sort of deep ska music playing from just outside of the market; the sort that thumps so hard it ends up under your skin. It reminds me of the first gig I ever went to, Madness. I was fourteen and not even particularly into ska music but I was into making my dad happy and ska music radiated from every inch of him and surrounded his ever-balding head. I wore a purple silk top with some checkered vans of pink and black which I swear were cool back then and the silk stuck to my bag and I spilt the one cider my dad allowed me to have which I still had by the end of the gig. I remember my dad telling me I was not allowed to go to the front, so me and him stood painfully close to the speaker and I permanently bent my shoes just to see over the cluster of skinheads as I sang to the handful of songs I knew. The band outside mutters an old Toots and The Maytals song and had a gathering of a few dads nodding their head out of time.
I have my dad to thank for my discovery of Greenwich and for my whole being in London really. Before I moved here I had only been to London once before and it was for a very tourist like visit to ‘the big smoke.’ Filled to the brim with trips to the ever disappointing Madame Tussauds and a brief glimpse of the London eye from the back window of a bus. There was Tussauds and Downing Street and Oxford Street and there was Greenwich. There was Greenwich is all of its understated glory. There was Greenwich in front of me and perhaps it was because of the excited buzz of the DLR or because the sun was shining but I felt great. I remember my dad stealing me off from my mum and sister and hurrying me through the market of continuous t-shirts until we were back outside and taking sharp corners until we arrived at a smaller, far less flamboyant market. He tells me that this market was full of hidden gems and his eyes are bright as he tells me how much bigger it used to be and a collection of items he had gotten here over the years. The market is only about four stalls on each of the four lines and there is barely enough room for two people to walk through- leading to a few inevitable situations of knocking things off stalls. I was met with a few warning glares but the market as a whole was a lot calmer and I could not put my finger on why. I picked up a handful of badges brandished with lyrics from The Smiths and at 50p per badge I shoveled them into my pocket assuring myself that one day they would come in handy. I tune back into my dad as he fingers through the badges I have bought and he tells me about the nights he spent in Brixton. Where he spent his nights sleeping on the floors of university rooms and in student unions he didn’t belong to all to see bands like The Smiths and The Clash. Whenever dad talks about his time in London his whole body lights up and his hand gestures mirror the permanent smirk on his lips as he sums up how beautiful it is to be young and in London. The words that came out his mouth did not do justice for the way his eyes creased up as he laughed about old friends and some of the best days of his life. I come out of the market with my badges and a handful of costume jewellery that women insisted brought out my eyes. I follow dad back to my sister and mum who have a handful of polyester pockets full of food from the market. We sit outside staring at the Cutty Sark and my dad is telling us that he once climbed it before the security was like it was. It was a big boat. The only thing I recognize in my dish is a layer of rice, which is encapsulated, in this thick yellow sauce with questionable lumps protruding and mocking me. I take a mouthful. My taste buds are doing somersaults, they are tiny children on a trampoline, and they are pulsating. I do not know what I am eating apart from that it is the best thing I have ever tasted and the flavors are cavorting in my mouth they are asking each other to dance. I am the embodiment used for the ball and my heart takes care of the music.
It had felt like a halfhearted tradition for the first place for me to visit when I returned to London two years later was Greenwich. As I exited the DLR I could not recognize the place I had only been two years prior. I was still new to the transport and in a flurry forgot to swipe myself out- finding this out the hard way later. The weather was significantly duller since I’d last visited and the streets were sparse apart from a few lost tourists and a police van or two. As it started to drizzle I was rescued by what I knew and welcomed the familiar smell of a concoction of different cultures and their foods. I knew it was a shout into the food void even considering trying to find the food I had had before, so I went for a stall selling rice balls the size of my hand and left. The mixture of smells started to give me a headache so I followed the curved pathway across to my dads little market. I was met with the same four by four of sullen faces selling junk for thrice the price it was bought at. I traced the badges with my hands finding at least four duplicates of the badges attached to the side of my bag. The market was loud with two men shouting over one another over the price of an old fleece jacket worth nothing more than twenty, but the man insisted it as vintage. The stained collar was definitely unique. As I weaved through countless people, two young children dressed head to toe in costume jewellery collided into my legs and the rice ball fell in love with the gravel, and then a shoe. I quickly grabbed another dish from another stall. All too quickly the market became too much, the people were too loud; the jewellery lay there in the colour of bark. As I passed the stall I heard the women complimented a young girls eyes against a necklace I assume was found at the bottom of pile of pantomime clothing. I made haste back to the station fully prepared to forget that Greenwich existed, it was so foreign to me. As I sat on the DLR home I started to doubt my motive for even moving to London, it was clearly my dad’s dream that I was trying to follow. A flurry of fleeting moments scatter themselves in my mind like constellations: The Smiths at Brixton, proposing at the observatory, Rik Mayall at the tram shed, a million memories that weren’t mine at all. They were not mine to write about nor think about. It felt as if the London I had set out to live ceased to exist anymore and I was left with the scraps of the brilliant eighties. Even the flat I lived in now held better memories for I even existed, it peaked before I even step foot in it. Memories of my granddad rehearsing in the rooms I call home with Sylvester Mccoy. Even Kate Bush was in Brockley before I was. I had missed the chance of a better London. I had been left behind.
As I walk past the band still blaring out ska renditions I pass a charity bookstore. I browse the many torn copies of Jane Austen fantasies and there is always a copy of Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks. I find a slender red book ‘100 Selected Poems’ by E.E. Cummings, which finds its way to the till quickly. I stuff that into my bag too. I imagine how nice it would be to own a bookstore in Greenwich. A bookstore in which you would swap a book for a poem until the whole store was a cluster of poems written on old napkins and the back of leaflets that were priceless. I return to my old friend the Cutty Sark and it wavers slightly in the wind, I wave back. I sit and imagine my dad climbing up the ship, standing at the wheel as if sailing the famous boat back home. I imagine the view from the top of the highest point, I imagine jumping. It is all so trivial now as I watch groups of people gather to stare at the ship. I imagine my dad sitting exactly where I am now looking at the boat minutes before he scaled it. I could climb the infamous Cutty Sark. I pull out my newest book from my bag, warm from the company of the polyester and flick to a page and I just read. I just read and think about how far I’ve come. If I was told I would be in London this time last year I would of laughed, it was my dad’s dream after all. The poem is telling me to move on and to stop dwelling. I would like to shout this poem from the top of the Cutty Sark, scream it to the many tourists blinking up at me and tell them London could be our dream too. I rescue my lunch from the depths of my bag and settle down with my new favorite poem. My taste buds are doing the tango under the moon light like star crossed lovers who will never see each other again, a million little cries erupt on my tongue as they tell me they have waited two years for this! They are in harmony with the mixture of fish and rice that greets me like an old friend and as I sit there staring up at a sun kissed ship with a bag of things I will probably never use I realise I have been living my own London dream all along.