In Which I Talk Too Much About An Underpass

It’s been a week of trying to find balance. Doing enough to stay attached to the things I want to achieve, but not enough to break me. Finding quiet moments in the days to check in with myself. Limiting my to do list to a few things instead of overwhelming myself with a thousand things, 995 of which are not in my power to do anything about anyway. Doing a few, important things that scared me but which were necessary. Making time to sit with the feelings of being scared and overwhelmed instead of trying to shush them away to a dark corner. With that in mind, finances have been jiggled and I have reconnected with the therapist who helped me last time I disappeared down a black hole. I have my first session next week.

I have been venturing forth on small walks, for health. My dodgy hip, which is the legacy of an exciting surgery, thirty years ago, decided to make its presence felt this week. I have been in the thick of gnarly negotiations with it. It hurts like fuckery, but I need to exercise it. I limp about, oofing and hissing through my teeth. It protests, but we move and it is slowly getting better.

A few days ago I shuffled off to get bread and milk. That’s how exciting my walks are at the moment. Ambulatory domesticity is the best way to describe them. I was in no shape to hike up the hill to the dizzy heights of Waitrose and the glamour of Canary Wharf, but there are several local shops for local people near me that have less demanding terrain. I had three options and decided to plump for my local Tesco, which is the least exciting of the three, but which takes me past a deli I love. I reasoned that once I had bought my staples, I maybe, might be able to slide into the deli and ‘tret meself’ as Tallulah has inexplicably taken to saying.

Bound for Tesco, you walk out of the marina and follow a curved path down into a subway under the huge roundabout where the A12, A13, Blackwall Tunnel and local routes all converge. You can cross above ground but you take your life in your hands. Too many roads merging and not enough people knowing which lane they need to be in means there is always a frisson of the near death experience on the surface.

Subways can also feel dangerous though. For the most part they are dankly hellish, smelling entirely of stale urine and the biscuity smell of lost dreams. They are clad in filthy, hospital tiles, lit by flickering tube lights that ping and crackle like unsettling scenes in horror films. Underfoot are grim puddles of what you hope is water, but which your nose insistently tells you must be at least 80% bodily fluids. Wet newspapers seep into the floor, rippling and mulching into a Petri dish of possibility that might, at any moment rise up and kill you. The odd abandoned article of clothing leads you to suspect violence but hope it was the casualty of a good night out. Sometimes there are spatters of ‘stuff’ that don’t bear close examination.

This underpass is not like that. It’s wide and well lit. There are gaps where you can see the sky and which allows for the fetid funk of poorly washed bodies to escape into the air. You never get that sense that you entered in one world and you might emerge into another, dystopian reality, which adds to the claustrophobia of the classic model. It’s an upgrade that has been long overdue.

From my end of the underpass, you descend a curving, snail like path, surrounded by high walls and vegetation that widens out at the bottom into the subway proper. This path is aesthetically pleasing but is the least well designed part of the whole thing. If you were going to be mugged/murdered, this is the place to do it. Concealed angles, patches of undergrowth where people can lurk and a narrow pathway which is impeded by metal bollards that are there to stop cyclists flying down and accidentally killing people, but which also impede people who might want to run away from other types of killers. At the other end there is a wide set of stairs and a gently sloping curved pathway bathed in natural light and surrounded by flower beds which would only harbour murderers under a foot tall. I’m not sure why the two ends are so dissimilar. Perhaps the good architect got bumped off by the bad architect and it was a game of two halves, underpass wise.

Curving down into the subway I am always struck by what a great painting you could make of it. As the floor of the tunnel flows away in front of you, your eyes are drawn up and out. Above are slices of sky cut across by bridges, flyovers and the slender, ribboning arc of the DLR. Wedges of blue striped by varying hues of concrete grey hint to Californian, Hockney swimming pools but in grimy, urban East London. It creates a pleasing dissonance.

On either side of the widest point of the path are giant, concrete slabbed steps, slotting between the bridges and the sky. Clumps of trees grow on the steps, doing the hallucinatory job of looking both small and large at the same time. High up one side there is a cluster of tents housing a group of homeless people. Despite what Suella Braverman says, they in no way look like they have made a lifestyle choice. I walk past them almost daily. I have never been threatened or bothered by anyone who lives there. They keep themselves to themselves, quietly getting on with whatever they need to do to survive. It’s a place of precarious safety, a life carved out of the margins and leftovers.

Kids do cluster in the underpass, but on the other side of the steps from the tents. Much as I have never been bothered by the homeless people, there seems to be a code of live and let live that stops other people bothering them, too. I’m almost certainly romanticising things, given that I pass through for a few minutes every day and have no idea what happens for the other twenty three and a bit hours when I’m not there, but it does feel like a conspiracy of gentleness exists down there in the underland.

Grafitti is sporadic and largely uninspired, although there is someone who always sprays an image of a girl who looks remarkably like Tom Gates’ sister, Delia which I like. There is also someone who makes, big, fat comforting images of stars and people who often have one leg lifted, with the legendary line; ‘I farted in yoga,’ sprayed underneath, which I enjoy enormously. Down here, even the tags and mottos are quite gentle. Someone spent the summer spraying; ‘Love is the answer,’ on the walls. They’ve moved on and been replaced by someone who repeatedly sprays the word ‘rehab,’ in various colours and fonts. I’m not sure if they’re asking to go or whether they’ve decided that rehab is also the answer. I wish them well.

There is the occasional, abandoned Boris bike to be skirted round but very little rubbish. Two, wooden palettes have appeared this week, but someone has thoughtfully propped them up against the wall. I expect they will be repurposed by the homeless people. A good palette is a useful thing to have on damp days, when water soaked concrete is your floor.

Despite the fact that my underpass is used in a public information film that shows in local cinemas to educate you about what to do in the event of knife crime, I have an extraordinary fondness for the place. It speaks to my love of the liminal, but it also has a mythic quality to it that appeals to the folklorist in me. Curving down into the earth, cutting a path through the land under the land, looking up into the light. For a short, concrete tunnel, it’s got a lot going on.

On my return from Tesco, armed with bread and milk and a slab of aubergine parmigiana from the deli, I walked up the curving path to the marina to be confronted by a sizeable dead rat that definitely hadn’t been there when I started my journey. It was very much an ROUS (Rodent Of Unusual Size). It lay on its side, tail stiff as a poker, pointing an accusation. Its sharp teeth curving out the slit of its mouth made it look like it hadn’t gone without a fight. Even in death it looked like trouble. I skirted round it and walked back into the light. As I was leaving the path, two girls walked past me on their way down. I waited a beat. A chorus of ragged screams ensued as they rounded the corner into the path of the beast. It was an unusually satisfying conclusion to my domestic adventure.