It is the smell that you recall more than anything – angry, elastic, burnt – and the sound of it. Porlock is made of cars. It throbs with the growl of traffic and the overheating of engines labouring uphill. Your brother spits apple pips into the gutter. You watch sunlight on metal with an airlessness you cannot explain.
For you, this is where it starts. August 2004, Porlock Hill, aged five. It is your fifth summer of grazed knees, the summer your mum cuts your hair back to the full fringe and bob it’s grown out of, the summer of blackberry stains. It’s also the summer you try to talk to your brother about Wayne Rooney because he’s the only England player you know about, and the summer of not admitting to your best friend that you are too scared of their new springer spaniel to stay over.
Porlock’s turned fuzzy in your memory now – apples standing on the pavement, plastic spades for sale, and the wind-stirred grit of a sea-side holiday – but it sticks all the same. It punctuates a blur of join-the-dots coast path walking and sore feet because Porlock is where it starts.
It waits over three years before resurfacing. Autumn and backstreets. You walk home from school the wrong way, between the chippy and the carpet shop. Your mum wants to buy shoelaces for dad at the acrid place where they cut keys and mend your winter boots. Your brother scuffs a stone with his trainers and folds school paper into origami. You are no longer mesmerised by this; you hop-scotch the paving cracks instead.
You do not remember the price of the shoelaces but you remember what comes after. You remember passing the butchers in the semi-dark of late November and watching them throw out the expired carcasses. You remember the pungency of it and the sweetness hidden within the stench. Corpses stack in the alleyway, too ugly and bloodied and raw to bear looking at, but still too much like the pigs they once were to ignore.
“Why are they throwing them around like that?” you ask.
Your mum scoops you past them with her coat: “Don’t worry, Pumpkin, it doesn’t hurt them anymore – they’re dead.”
But you do worry, because it’s the deadness that’s the problem.
It doesn’t take long to rise to the surface again. This time it’s tuna mayo on Ash Wednesday, 2008. The school hall is full of twelve o’clock: the grating of chair legs and the un-clipping of lunchboxes, the smell of too many sandwich fillings in one room and the disinfectant they use to wipe the tables. Chatter and teeth and banana peel. You smell the crime before you see it and, when you do see it, you stare at it with shameful tears, not knowing what to do.
“What’s wrong?” The girl who already wears a bra asks you. You feel small and taut beside her. The contents of your head do not know how to find their way out. You stare at the mush between the bread slices in front of you – the mush that came in a can from the supermarket but came from the sea first.
The dinner lady doesn’t understand because she doesn’t know that this is not a spur-of-the-moment rejection of a smelly sandwich. She doesn’t know that you won’t have been tempted back to chicken nuggets by tea time. She doesn’t know that this has been three months in the making and formally approved by the woman who packed your lunch. She doesn’t know that you think about unwanted dead pigs in an alleyway more often than you think about eight-times-eight-is-sixty-four.
“You need to eat your lunch.”
You shake your head.
“If you don’t finish up, you can’t go out in the playground after.”
So you don’t go out. You write your mum a note to put on the fridge: Tunas are animals too.
You get an earful of it in year seven Geography, it is 2010 and you find yourself staring into the devastation of the decade to come. The man who reminds you of an overgrown garden gnome strides between your desks, teaching you nothing but everything. He doesn’t teach you the weather, only that it isn’t staying the same. You are disturbed and relieved in equal measure because here is someone who cares. He is a quiet man who withdraws into silence when he is outside the classroom. You recognise in him what you have noticed in yourself: he is not violent enough for the intensity of what he holds.
It spills only once, when he knocks his desk tidy over with an impassioned sweep of his arm. Someone elongates an expletive. Someone else giggles. The girl behind you shares a pack of chewing gum. He’s too lost in the messiness of everything to notice.
He sets you sheets to colour code, tells everyone the exam answers at the end of the year, distracts himself with his own history all while entrusting you with the knowledge most deem too frightening. He’s something of a joke, though, because he’s good with the truth but not with the curriculum.
“Sounds like a right bundle of laughs,” your grandfather says when you relate your education to him on request. “What a miserable old geezer!” and someone makes a comparison to Professor Trelawney.
“Death omens in a weather map!” your mum snorts and you are filled with an uncharacteristic urge to break something.
You get the same need when the school hushes over his suicide four years later.
It re-enters your life via the local newspaper before 2010 has tumbled into 2011. You are eleven and you sometimes still think about the summer of turning five. Dad goes to the corner shop for milk one morning and comes back with the headline that the fields that hem the bus route to school are to be repurposed. The green will be converted to redbrick. Nine-hundred new homes are to be erected over the remains of a country idyll. You stir the semi-skimmed through your Cheerios, and think of the old warren in Watership Down, the novel you were obsessed with reading while school tried to interest you in sex education.
“I’m going to write to the council,” you tell him and he shakes his head with a crumpled face.
“No point. They never listen.”
So you choke on something that you don’t quite recognise as rage – maybe it’s just cereal – and imagine the earth spilling its innards to make way for cement and asphalt. You wonder how long it will be before all the edges blur and all the villages sprawl into one.
Two days later you stuff the newspaper into your puddle-drowned plimsolls with more violence than usual. The frustration of being voiceless. They dry out in the airing cupboard and the council never writes back.
The next instalment becomes a daily occurrence in the early summer of 2011 when you start walking yourself to the bus stop via the park in the mornings. It is the year before the cracks in your life start to open. The last year in which you are able to switch off from caring. This makes you care, however, because this one issue has made you care ever since Porlock Hill. The green is polka-dotted with crisp packets and condoms. Discarded drinks cans and the occasional disposable barbeque stud the football pitches like piercings on the body of an ex-punk. They’re unsightly but so habitual that no one questions why they’re still there.
On the first day of June you pick up an empty Irn Bru bottle and put it in your school bag. The next, you pick up a half-eaten Monster Munch bag. By the time you turn twelve a month later you are picking up a plastic supermarket doughnut box and a coffee cup lid and some sweet wrappers, a broken bike light, a wedge of polystyrene and a takeaway burger carton.
“You skank!”
“Fucking bin-raider.” They tell you when it spills in the locker room and you kneel on the floor to gather it back up as though it’s precious to you.
“When are you going to stop this?” Your mum asks when you add it all to the pile you are building in the garden shed after school. “What’s it all for?”
You shrug. The park never looks any cleaner when you leave it and the shed becomes a magpie’s stash of junk that hurts you more day by day. You don’t understand the ‘why’. You photograph the pile every time you add to it without knowing where the evidence is going. You want to make someone as sickened as you feel. You want to put the town on trial. You amass a portfolio of human guilt and don’t know where to put it.
It is a mild February day when it nudges you again. You realise you no longer recall what the field that is now nine-hundred homes once looked like and, while Fiats pull up outside the signs advertising luxury home showings, you read the words beneath the contractor’s name with crawling skin: MORE LAND REQUIRED.
You find yourself stumped by it once more as you walk the paths that link the local villages not so long after. Your brother is busy forgetting how to brother you and so you distract yourself with miles of dusty footpath and worn-out flip-flops. You are fourteen and you wish it was still as simple as feigning interest in Wayne Rooney. You wish you knew how to stop the inevitable things that have already started. 2013 is hot upon your shoulders – even in the morning light – and you miss being able to breathe air that hasn’t stagnated above the cereal crops. Premature sweat snakes beneath the back of the t-shirt you will perspire into all day and its significance constricts your oesophagus. It is not the sun, however, that brings the heat to your head and the tightness to your chest:
You pass the other school, the school where the uniforms are smart and the exam results are smarter. Term has ended and the ornate buildings are deserted. No students, no teachers, nobody to play cricket on the lawns and yet you count seven sprinklers spewing water over the cropped grass. While England yellows and Maharashtra browns, an empty school continues to ignore the thirstiness of your blue planet.
It interrupts your life almost an exact 365 days later when the roof can no longer keep the sky out. You have been squandering your summer re-watching old films and re-reading old books in the hope that they might simplify things for you. They don’t. At fifteen, the remains of your childhood age you.
The flash-floods of late July do not swill under your front door, the way they do at the bottom of the hill, or uproot your house, the way they do in Bangladesh, but they hammer the tiles over your head to breaking point.
“It’s raining indoors,” you tell Dad when he’s negotiated the trains home and he looks at the dripping stain over the bedroom door without knowing how to fix the weather that put it there.
“C’est risible!” you are told in a classroom that is too small for the magnitude of its contents in October 2015.
You know that your fellow student has been asked to play devil’s advocate in this debate about banning cars, but you also know that her disregard for the idea is real. She is too concerned with the practical inconvenience of their abolition to be concerned about what cars leave behind them.
“Non,” you respond, “C’est necessaire.”
She, aided by the only other two who still study French, proceeds to fill the next fifteen minutes with a list of reasons why humans need cars while your teacher makes notes and nods. Nobody manages to locate the real reason for their reluctance: Your world is too accustomed to its hatchbacks and SUVs to imagine them gone. You live in a world that is nonchalant to the last degree – comfortable to not acknowledge the truths that will require discomfort.
You do not know how to translate that into French. You can no longer construct sentences. Your brain stops remembering how to perform the basics. It forgets the talking, then the breathing.
It’s the first time that it comes – the sensation that later becomes the only thing your life is made of – the sensation that your throat is collapsing and your lungs are full of sand and that you could run a marathon and still not exhaust the panic that races through you in circles.
It gets submerged for the entirety of 2016, and most of 2017. It tries to make contact but you forget that there is anything more to life than your parent’s retreating backs as they deliver you to the psychiatric hospital. It gets lost in the noise of other things you’ve tried to scare yourself with. When it talks to you, someone cuts the nerve so you never receive the message. Yellow pills that dissolve on your tongue. Yellow pills that dissolve the world.
It becomes the voice of your insomnia as 2017 hurtles towards 2018. It is the autumn of Attenborough and of crisis in Myanmar. You spend your nights sandwiched between cold sheets, feeling as thin as the ham slices your mum puts in her bread rolls. Your head writes letters to people who are bad at listening and good at evading. You are a little person, picking at the little things, in the hope that the big people will do the big things in response. They don’t, of course, and the thing that began at Porlock Hill swells until it is too fat for the kid-size jeans you still wear, aged eighteen.
It speaks through dad when he retrieves you from your attempted fresh start in Cornwall. It is June 2018. The day is as hot as the thirty that preceded it and the sixty to follow. He is sticky when he reaches you but the day is arid. The fields are scabby like dry skin. He stares at the windscreen while you pack your life into the space on the back seat.
“I remember driving down here for holidays in the seventies,” he says to no one in particular. “Grandpa had to wipe bugs and greenfly off the window at every service station.”
You both stare at the empty windscreen. It clutches at you; a simultaneous sense of grief and dread and knowing and not-knowing and despairing and despising and wondering why everything gets worse.
Through the dawn of 2019, it rears from the ground beneath your restless feet. The dirt ought to be thick and oozing but it isn’t. Things unravel while your brain loops back again and again, tuning into the wrong airwaves; splitting, crashing, nuclear. While your mind functions like a fusion reactor, you stare at the soil you stand on. It is increasingly dry and increasingly scant. The rain falls from time to time but the planet’s skin is intoxicated on an empty stomach and drizzle is not enough. You watch your friends grow out of their teens and go drinking and wonder whether the earth has a hangover too.
It spills out in a week of tragedies. The grief of a boy band you never liked and the grief of a nation shot full of islamophobia and the grief of travellers who never returned home and the grief of the woman in your mum’s office and the grief that paralyses your local Oxfam shop and the grief of having one less elderly family friend. It spills out into a world that is hurt and angry and tired of being torn in two. It spills out when school textbooks can no longer pretend to have the answers and school fences no longer have the power to hold back their charges.
“I know it’s cynical,” your mum says over her Shredded Wheat. “But I’d be interested to know how much litter gets left behind, at the end of the protest.”
So you leave the house with a head full of noise that isn’t yours. You make up one part of an ocean of individual drops. You stand there all day among the others and refuse to remain silent while those whose greed continues to fuck with your future scold you for disrupting theirs. You stand there all day with knuckles whitened around placards that their elected myopia blinds them to. You stand there wondering if he’d have been here too – the man who put the truth into Wednesday afternoon Geography – and whether you should print out all those old photographs you took.
The response that the tide you belong to receives is a shoulder shrug:
Kids will be kids and teens will always jump on the bandwagon and adolescents will always grab at an excuse to be angry and students will always try to avoid studying. “It’s just a phase,” say the mothers who fret more about GCSE grades. “They’ll grow out of their hippy stage when it stops being Instagram-able.”
You want to tell them that there is nothing more dangerous than complacency and that adults will be adults and tycoons will always follow the black gold and politicians will always aspire to popularity and guilty parties will always try to avoid their guilt.
But you don’t.
The board in your hand says it all:
Why aren’t you as scared as I am?
