On the South Bank. (4)

Circles Within Circles: Photo © Mark Granier

Paul Carney: An Odyssey

I have a huge-mungulous love-hate thing going with the South Bank. On the one hand it’s almost the only place to which I ever escape, ergo overwhelming connotations of freedom, restored sanity etc. On t’other, I think it was designed specifically to kill me.

The whole experience is utterly surreal; out from among Embankment station’s gloomy pillars, I’m falling again, down those same four always-forgotten steps. A silhouette thrusts paper at me as I get up. Selling, collecting, petitioning for something.  I wave my white stick in a signal that clearly reads please either lend a hand or bugger off.  Would a Samurai battle-cry help at this point?  Best not. A bit of wild fumbling and here is the handrail at the foot of the Hungerford Bridge.

At the top, I invariably bump (literally) into a man in a wheelchair who seems poised forever at the top of the 42 steps; it’s as though he’s being punished in a Greek myth. At least I haven’t collided with him this week. Halfway over the bridge an old friend and tripping hazard, Tattered Guitar Man, is still endlessly ringing in the Apocalypse with his one weary, toneless chord, and passers-by are always ridiculing him and he just strums all the more. I would drop him a coin, if I could ever see where he lays his hat.

The first time I ever crossed this bridge, there was a man walking ahead of me dressed as a giant green triangle, with scrawny legs in tights of a paler green, and people weren’t giving him a second glance, whereas assorted hot young women were pointing and giggling at me for having a white stick and a hi-viz jacket.

The South Bank Centre itself is allegedly a stunning view, but to Paulish eyes it looks like a cross between a construction site and Eliot’s Waste Land. I pull my baseball cap down and make myself look up.  Remember the view! Some of these buildings have won awards…  The magazine articles…  A shipwreck on a rooftop… But I see no ships.  There is no view.  Only the Waste Land.

There are, says the legend, doors all over the place here. But only one entrance is my entrance, whence I can feel my remembered way to a lift.  And don’t get me started on the indoors of the Royal Festival Hall! Only in the company of a certain genius poetry tutor I know do I brave it…

One thing I’ve never come across is the beleagured skateboard park – I’ve never made it that far – but since it is clearly doing Paul no harm whatsoever (UNlike the new pre-fab restaurant that blocks my route and has caused multiple injuries!), I’m now passionately in favour of letting it be. Why shouldn’t the young’uns have somewhere to whizz about on wheels? It does actually sound like fun.

Pigeons get into this building.  Often, the clatter of wings above has startled me.  Does some slow-ambling, gently dolorous janitor finally come by night to sweep up their small bones?  Should I get out on the wrong floor, he would probably find my bones too, in due course. Elevator, take me straight to the Fifth, and only to the Fifth … There, all will be daylight and space.  Windows and pale columns.  Got to be wary of those columns, though – inexplicable shelf-things protrude from some of them at vital-organ height.  But I am way-wise on the Fifth, now.  Ha!  Or at least that part of it that is touched by the sun.  I was told that the Poetry Library is right here, in this place and on this floor.  Down the Dark Stairs, past the Lesser Toilets and farther into the Realm of No Light Whatsoever.

Poetry?  Here?  Sometimes I have tried picturing poems – I see them as the little frail white moths of childhood – flitting among all the unlovely columns, slabs and balustrades.  Can poetry truly live here?

I have a table.  I have chairs.  I have my back to the sun, the river and the Telecom Tower.  I can breathe now, and take off my luminous jacket.  I will hang it on the empty chair – it will be my flag, proclaiming this furniture is taken.  It is ours alone.  She will find me here when she comes, and she will yell out my name, dancing and waving her arms above her head.

© Paul Carney