Primrose Hill

I click play - damn – the router must be blinking, or maybe Facebook is fucked again – and then it’s ok, and it flickers into life and I’m taken back to a place I never was, but might have been, and it’s all so long ago, although it looks like yesterday.

It feels like yesterday too. It’s been so long since I lived in London - decades; and yet it’s still the place I feel most at home in. I’m back there - I’m almost in the film. Primrose Hill – the lovely quiet part between Camden and Hampstead. I want to be there so badly – it’s my home. It probably doesn’t exist anymore, at least how it was anyway, and it makes me feel so sad that nowhere feels like home.

In the film, it’s summertime. Hot and dusty and airless, but I could breathe there. I wonder how it would have been if I’d stayed. I wonder if I would have been like she is now.

On the screen she’s walking through the squat with her camera. The sunshine picks out the dust particles. She’s living there, along with artists and smackheads and odd-looking men who steal things from each other. It’s kind of a continuation of the people we used to see when we were best friends, floating around London looking for a point.

I’m staring at the little square, holding my breath in case I break the spell; watching as she takes us into a bathroom – it’s really filthy. There’s a woman lying in the bath and the water is red. She’s naked and there’s more red smeared on her face and arms and neck – it looks like thick red paint. Each time she puts her arms in the water, it gets redder. The woman is smiling and chatting about how she is trying to make a point about menstruation, and being female. She’s very earnest about it all.

The film cuts to a man with a beard and very long hair, and he’s talking about how he can’t control his rages. He says this in a very quiet voice. He says he thinks one day he might kill someone and he wonders if he’ll regret it. It’s quite chilling.

It must have been around then that I last met Miranda. I remember asking what she was up to, and her saying she was the drama critic for Spare Rib, and a spy for London Transport because the writing didn’t pay. I think that was just before her sister got famous and Miranda went out to Hollywood with her to try and make it there herself.

That was the last time I saw her, but we spoke once more, years later, and she told me that she’d been very unhappy – had desperately wanted children – tried and tried – and had an awful marriage and then a bad divorce. I had children, and I was also quite unhappy, just in a different place, with more fields.

She kept on trying – all sorts of different things – she still is, as far as I can see, but none of them seem to make her happy. I think maybe I’m frightened that I’m going to be like her when I start my new life – drifting from one thing to another, looking for a point, never quite finding one.

In the film, they’re being evicted from the squat. People are loading all sorts of things onto the backs of clapped out lorries – mattresses, and big, framed paintings, armfuls of clothes all heaped on top. The people are all standing around, watching, with arms folded. It’s so sad, like the end of summer, when the evenings suddenly get chilly and you know it’s autumn.

Miranda was fifty recently and she sounded quite down about it. I wrote to her and I said it would feel ok soon – it was just bad for the first few days, then she’d forget about it, because the same had recently happened to me.

Then, just for a short time, it was like going back – it was so strange – a whole lifetime ago – and suddenly we were very close again – just as we were when we were very young, and she asked me to come up to London – said she was having champagne and cocaine. For a minute I really wanted to go, but I didn’t in the end.

One day soon, I think I will – perhaps when it’s warmer. Even though I’m not sure if it’s a good idea, I think I ought to all the same.