Wayfinding

Ana Kinsella | Tolka, Issue One, Feb 2023

Entry

My first home in London is a houseshare with five Icelandic artists. The flat is a maisonette with a small garden on a Shoreditch housing estate, and the garden is neglected, with a fringe of bamboo taller than any of us.

I find it through a friend of a friend and take the room without viewing it. These facts are enough to make me feel legitimate and deft at being in the city, despite my newness. I’m a natural.

It is not my first time living away from home, but it is the first time that it feels meaningful, a page turned rather than merely interrupted. I have a job, sort of, and a course of study, and people to have dinner with at the wide pine table whose grooves and knots I can still feel under my fingers.

The East End

Years before I arrived, my parents lived in London, though at the other end. They had two friends who lived in Shoreditch, beside the flower market I visit on my first weekend in the city to buy armfuls of tulips with all the other tourists. It was not somewhere we went often, my mother tells me on the phone. It felt like leaving London, so they tended to come to ours, instead.

Evenings

It is an easy place to be, Little Reykjavík. There is always someone to eat or share a bottle of cheap wine with. There is no television, but there are decent speakers and I get a feel for the rhythm of the house. Friday nights are for tight, productive techno and on weekend mornings jazz floats around the kitchen and up the stairs. I settle into an easy pattern: the pub and a dance floor on Friday nights, my hungover desk at the gallery where I work on Saturdays, the flower market on Sunday mornings, then bacon and eggs and back to bed for the afternoon. Wine in the evening. Someone is always stopping by, texting to say they’re in the area, knocking on the door with a bottle and some gossip. I become very attached to the wide pine table in the kitchen.

Mirrors

For the first year, I have no access to a full-length mirror. I have the square over the bathroom sink and the round travel mirror on my desk. At first I don’t notice how little I see myself, and then it hits me. I think this will teach me a valuable lesson in curbing my vanity, but really it just results in me peering at my reflection whenever I pass the glass of a shop window.

Job interview

I have no idea what to wear to a real job interview. I go to the second-hand shop I like in Stepney Green and buy a yellow silk blazer. I wear it over a short black-and-white polka-dot dress. The woman interviewing me is very polite, but I do not get the job. I find out in the college library and immediately I let that fact rest on my choice of clothing that day and not on my other faults, which are many. It is the clothes I got wrong. It is much easier to disown the yellow silk blazer and not my own lack of people skills.

No, entry

I keep trying to remember why I decided to come here. I can’t think of an answer except that it felt preordained, which is a very lofty way of evading responsibility for the unremarkable mess of my own life.

Palpitations

The pulse of the city is the possibility within it. It beats and it beats and with every second, every minute that passes, I can become a different kind of person, if I want. Maybe tomorrow is the metronome that keeps it going.

Diversion I don’t know any of my neighbours in Shoreditch. I know that some of them, two doors down, are Australian. They like to drink in the garden when it’s sunny. On one of these sunny weekend days, there is a knock at the door. I open it and there’s an Australian man with a bag of cans and an overly familiar manner.

‘Alright, boys,’ he says, pushing his sunglasses up off his bloodshot eyes. ‘Where’re we getting this started?’ He swings the bag of cans as he saunters directly past me.

‘Excuse me?’ I say. A wave of anger rises in me. ‘Who are you?’

He looks at me, like he is really noticing me for the first time. ‘Jesus. Shit, wrong house.’

I stand back as he pivots and walks out, and I waste no time in closing the door behind him. I retrieve my cup of tea and stand by the back door in the kitchen. Seconds later, I hear the cheer go up from the garden drinkers as he is welcomed two doors down.

Visions

When I get paid, I go to Soho and splurge on a pair of glasses I can’t afford. The price is dazzling: hundreds and hundreds of pounds. No problem. Ah, I say to myself, admiring my new reflection in the window of the Tube carriage. So these are the glasses that will make my personality better.

Romantic love

The Shoreditch flat is just off a busy main road, between two infamous gay bars. Also, there is no way to walk to my house from a bus stop that doesn’t take you past a strip club. On Valentine’s Day, coming home after a late dinner with my classmates, I am walking past one of them. A man, outside on his phone, a pint half-spilled down his shirt, is saying ‘No, love, of course I didn’t forget. How could you think that? I just had this work drinks I had to go to.

The Tube

I work a number of small, poorly paid jobs as well as an unpaid internship at a fashion magazine. At my desk, where I write my assignments for college, I keep a pocket-sized Tube map pinned to the noticeboard. Every time I enter or exit a new stop, I remember to come home and cross it out with a biro.

The pitch

Girl moves to the big city. Girl falls in with a rag-tag bunch of artists, actors and writers – people working boring day jobs to earn enough to sustain themselves. Girl roves around town, having various adventures, getting herself into scrapes, learning difficult lessons, falling in and out of akvavit-soaked love. But the real love affair is the one she has with herself, or maybe the city. Haven’t figured that bit out yet.

The reality

I am waiting for a bus, standing outside what is widely regarded as the worst Tesco Express in London. Across the road, a ten-wheel lorry with the word PANIC on it – the name of the logistics company, I suppose – gets stuck reversing out of a small yard. Several of the yard’s employees stand around, considering matters in hard hats and high-vis vests. When the bus eventually comes, a group of schoolchildren push past me to squeeze on. This, apparently, is my twenties.

Punchline

The yellow silk jacket becomes part of my repertoire, especially in the summertime. It has a story attached to it, which helps, particularly as the story gives me a chance to be self-deprecating – and who doesn’t love a self-deprecating young woman?

Roadworks ahead

I struggle to make sense of the city. Its warrens of roads and lanes can baffle me and I try to learn taxi drivers’ mnemonics to remember them. Good for Dirty Women – Greek Street, Frith Street, Dean and Wardour. But they never stick and so I go by feel instead, linking street corners to certain emotions, people or half-remembered nights out. This creates new pitfalls for me. I get lost much less as time goes by, but seem to fall headlong into traps of memory, embarrassment, sometimes, or else a vague, gnawing sense of remorse each time I need to cross Soho.

Traffic regulation

If there are other ways to live than this, I don’t know about them. Or rather I do, but they seem to be the preserve of other people. For me there is only this shuffling, lilting, grasping thing. This way of passing days until something unknown falls into place, starts making sense.

Lats

Before I moved here, when the city was just a mirage that glimmered at the edge of my vision, I used to stare at a map of it on my computer. I was worried that anywhere I ended up living would be too far to walk home to, from wherever it was I ended up spending my days. Walking was freedom to me and so I was afraid of this fact – that I would be reliant on the complex public-transport network, every single day, as long as I lived in the city. Once I got here, I realised that the complex public-transport network is more like a muscle that you only discover after you start hitting the gym.

Rudeness

Often the cold demeanour, obliviousness or rude posture adopted by the city-dweller is nothing more than a form of self-defence – a method of clinging to some measure of privacy in a city so crowded with the lives of others. On arrival here, I am quick to grow my own bubble of coldness. It takes just a few weeks. It will take much, much longer for me to learn how I can shed it, or why I might want to.

Shrapnel

The way I experience the city is fragmented by its very nature. I see things, smell things, encounter people – and all of it passes by me in a blur. Despite this, I am desperate to put a narrative on my life in the city. Desperate for it. When I try to make sense of it, it feels like recounting a half-remembered dream or falling asleep in the cinema. It is like finding the remains of something blown-up and putting it back together from memory alone. The end result is a messy pastiche of the real thing, all bold lines and bad contouring. There is a plot there, surely, but it is always just beyond my reach. All I have instead is a sequence of events, an accumulation of successive emotions.

An orchestra

It takes a while for the commute’s magic to wear off. My friends say, What magic?, and that is probably fair. But speeding underground, cutting a swath through the majestic city on the Central line, it’s easy to feel like something going on here is magic, in the way a loaded gun is magic, or the relentless ticking of a clock is magic. The whole city is some unexplainable feat of engineering and, for a brief moment, I am a tiny, insignificant part of it.

The big screen

Sometimes I wonder if my view is overly romantic or rosy. Here I think that romantic is a relative term, used by those inured to it. It supposes that the default way of looking at life is grey. But we have all watched the same movies on the big screen, have all seen the same light falling on city streets, the same look of delirious intensity on the protagonist’s face. Most have experience of the same extreme emotions, love, romantic or otherwise, and the kind of painful nostalgia that stabs through the ribs at the slightest provocation. We have all felt like the main character in our lives, or even just on a given street at a given time. These are feelings that can run through entire lives, a silver thread that ties together a person’s selfhood through different times, different places. 

Is it romantic to give those feelings the appropriate weight? I don’t know. Is there any other way to live? I haven’t encountered it yet.

Detritus

I acquire other strange items of clothing that are as incongruous as the yellow silk blazer. I queue for sample sales and leave with discounted designer sundresses and men’s shirts. Everything looks stylish and cool at first, until I start wearing it. Then it takes on another aspect, some inescapable soot that I had hoped I might have stopped emitting by now.

Risk assessment

Everywhere I look I seem to find people who promise, in their own way, to change my life if I want to let them. Everywhere there are new roads to turn down. It’s not that I am scared of gambling or of the possibility of change, it’s more that, on some level I think, shouldn’t I be the one to change my own life?

Motivational speaking

What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? I see this quote everywhere, in hopeful tweets and on Instagram, photographed from real books. I’m going to take on too much work, I think, and then spend any free time complaining to my friends about how busy I am in a way that gestures towards moral superiority. I’m going to let my social life revolve around the same three pubs and one restaurant and call it vibrant. I’m going to spend quite a lot of my weekends hungover. I’m going to listen to the music and read the books I’m told are relevant and important, go to all the art exhibitions that everyone is talking about and then wonder silently why I feel so underfed by it all. Thank you for asking. Next question, please.

A lesson

One thing I did learn during this year: even love, with all its sonic booms and flattening gladness, would not be enough to cure a fear of death. I learnt this the same way everyone does: by waking up beside the same person for long enough that the novelty wears off. For a time I allow myself to feel broken by this new information. Then I start to look around, in case there is something else that might cure me instead.

Opportunity cost

It is very cheap to see the Royal Ballet, I read in the Guardian, if you’re willing to accept a trade-off in terms of visibility and comfort. What have I got to lose? An evening. I have plenty of them. So I pick one at random – Giselle. I remember, last minute, to bring a borrowed pair of pocket binoculars.

It is wrong to say that my horizons expand in the cheap seats of the Royal Opera House, but I start to go often. There are performances where I fall asleep in the second act, lulled by the stuffy air and the warm glass of white wine at the interval. There are segments where I think what I am looking at is pretentious, elitist, not half as entertaining as any blockbuster available at any cinema streets away in Leicester Square. But then there is also this: the sight of dancers, human beings apparently, capable of doing ridiculous, beautiful things with their bodies. There is the sound of an orchestra that swells and falls and thunders and creeps. There are a hundred people or more working in tandem at this moment to make something fleeting for me to gorge on up here in the top corner of the amphitheatre seating.

Riding the Tube home alone afterwards, Tchaikovsky in my headphones, I think, Why did nobody tell me about this? But really, nobody ever tells you anything. And if they do, you don’t listen.

The Thames

The part of growth that surprises me most is the way I can take to new things with an intensity I never anticipated. I had thought I knew myself quite well, my likes and dislikes and the varying forms my interests took. I did not think I was the kind of person to enjoy ballet, or hill-walking, or being alone so much. It emerges, slowly, that perhaps the problem is not me or the things I like, but the concept of kind of person that I find myself so reliant on. Regardless, I still find myself, even now, dissecting the personalities of others with friends over a glass of wine. He’s just the type of person who has a lot of wrong opinions, I say. Some people are just like that.

The Crush Room

I would be lying, of course, if I said I wasn’t drawn in by the opulence of it all, too. I am happy in my precarity, the dilapidated maisonette, the fringe of bamboo. But it is nice, too, to walk into the Crush Room at the Royal Opera House. The feeling of thick carpet underfoot. Me in my jeans, my beaten-up wool overcoat and my Dr. Martens, waiting at the bar behind the well-dressed millionaires. It is not that I lack the ability to dress nicely. I can cobble something from my yellow silk blazer, my discounted brand names. It is that it is more democratic, I think, for me to look so shabby in such a plush place.

Emergency exit

The rug is pulled from under us, in the way it often is to people who live precariously, whether by choice or by necessity. The landlord, a disruptive avant-garde artist of some renown, emails to say the rent is being raised by £1,000 and, even if we want to stay, we have to reapply through the estate agent like everyone else. Rugless, the Icelanders and I scatter. I start to look for a new place to live.

Bridge

There is a walkway over Floral Street in Covent Garden that connects the Royal Ballet School to the Royal Opera House. It’s called the Bridge of Aspiration, which I know is corny, but I can’t help liking it. I like it because it makes it seem so clear-cut, like something from a Greek myth. One day someone gives you a modicum of permission and you are sent across this bridge to begin your real life, the one you have always been waiting for. I have never been a dancer, but I wonder, childlike, if there might be a similar bridge for me to cross, somewhere in this city’s dense gnarl of streets.

Resurfacing

What am I left with when the lease is up? An umbrella I inherited along the way. A cluster of fractured memories. A picture of myself in the garden, standing on a kitchen chair while I hack at the bamboo fringe with a pair of secateurs. A decent recipe for a vegetarian shepherd’s pie. A Tube map with all the stations crossed out. A semblance of a narrative. The inability to smell caraway seeds without thinking of Icelandic akvavit, late nights dancing in the kitchen and a vague sense of shame about how I am when I drink too much. How I was then is how I am now. There is no use in shame and yet it persists like a headache. This is what I am left with, when I unpack my suitcases and cardboard boxes and black refuse sacks in the new flat.

No, exit

The best bit of any ballet, to me, is the break in the music, during a dancer’s solo, when all you can hear is the furious scuffling of pointe shoes along the wood of the stage and the collective hush of a whole auditorium holding its breath.

‘Wayfinding’ was first published in Issue One of Tolka (May 2021). Issue One is now sold out but may still be available from certain stockists. You can subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.

Ana Kinsella is the author of Look Here: On the Pleasures of Observing the City.