Day 4

I went to Br

ixton today.

This was not my original plan.

Dining on coffee, and a table splayed with school books, I opened the selected poems of Linton Kwesi Johnson.

last satdey

I nevah deh pan no faam

so I decide fi tek a walk

doun a brixton

an see wha gwaan

I showed Meg this passage – and she proceeded to pour out a history of dialect, immigration, sus laws, Thereasa May, windrush, and other words, inky with fresh pain, that I wrote in my book to look up later.

In the meantime, I took the tube to Brixton.

I stand out here.

Pale, pink sweatered, and wandering.

The people here are warm and move with purpose.

Shouting greetings across the market halls, their stride swayed by the music that pours out everywhere I go – as if descending from the grey sky itself.

I debated eating at a nice looking bistro with a heated patio, but opted for "fish wings and ting" - a small corner cafe with yellow tables and blue benches, filmed in silver rain.

A girl who works there offered me the driest seat she could find and a pink glass of water (no doubt to match my sweater).

Things match here.

Or rather, people and places seem determined to work together. The main street I exited the tube on fell away seamlessly into the winding roads of the market. I had trouble differentiating the separate restaurants and vendors. I saw a shriveled man on a bench scrutinizing passersby, then a group of fresh faced school children clustered around a mural. Old brick walls offer the perfect frame for stunning pieces of art. Colors that shouldn't go together, here, sing together. At the exhibit I stumbled into at the local library, a woman had splayed out all the objects she had collected in her travels – Jamaican rum, Norwegian matchboxes, chicken grease baskets, on the same table.

I am used to the compartmentalized. To a clear line between rich and poor. My neighborhood of spacious streets and trees – and, across the bridge, the dingy facades of east Hastings.

I was a tourist today. An identity, in Fulham, I have begun to fall out of; growing accustomed to my new routine.

I don’t know how these glittering fragments of Brixton fit together – if I squeeze them in my palm, clinging to my initial conceptions, I ear that will cut me and crumble to form an entirely new shape. An entirely new borough.

Thus, nothing said here is said with any authority. Instead of babbling, I think I will listen – returning to truth – to the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson. There you will find the real Brixton.

P.S. this is much less interesting, but, for the record, I made naan bread, fried rice, and cauliflower curry for dinner tonight.