B - Job Club Diary 2: October 17th 2002

I couldn't sleep last night so I was stood outside on the front
balcony that links the front doors of our block. The sky was black,
with the lights of aeroplanes seeming to hurry and buzz across the
empty space. Even though it was cold, it seemed better to be out there
smoking than indoors. We're three stories up, above the streetlamps so
I can look down onto the street and the estate as if it were a well-lit
film set. Looking toward Greenwich I realised something that struck me
with a strange sense of worry.

Despite what I said in my last entry, I can't see the clock tower of
the old Greenwich Town Hall, not anymore. Without me really noticing
all of the buildings round here have gotten taller, extra stories
seemingly added over night. Since the Docklands Light Railway linked us
to Canary Wharf, this little bit of Southeast London has become a prime
space for urban explorers and frontiersmen and women. When I first
moved down here, you could get a room in a house for about forty pounds
a week. Now you're lucky to get one for less than eighty. All of the
empty patches of ground are being filled with low-rise executive flats.
Where once we had a view that stretched for miles, now all we can see
is the tasteful lighting of some expensive 'urban' property.

It scares me. Deptford, for all of its problems, has a strong sense of
community and identity, which can only be dissipated by ongoing
gentrification. People with real jobs, important jobs will be inched
further and further out, further and further from Central London until
there is almost apartheid, separate buses for them in to their jobs,
separate buses out again. Two countries occupying the same space and
never meeting once.

Walking up to the Job Club I walked up Deptford High Street, which
seems to lead directly to Canary Wharf, even though Canary Wharf is
about five miles away across the river. A pale rectangle of grey topped
with a pyramid, it seems to stand sentinel over the High Street, biding
it's time, ready at the first chance to stomp Deptford down like some
robot monster in a Japanese film. When the light is just right all of
the windows give off slightly different reflections, making it look
like a bombed out shell in a warzone. At night the sky pulses in time
with the beacon at the zenith of the pyramid, as if reasserting the
dominance of business over the city.

Deptford has always been paired with Greenwich. If Greenwich was the
heart of the Empire, the seat of the Navy, then Deptford was its
foundry. It was where the docks were, where the ships that ensured
Imperial domination were built. Greenwich was where the elite lived,
and Deptford was where the workers lived. There are still only a couple
of chain stores, even now. Mostly the shops exist to service the needs
of people who live here. There's African cosmetic shops filled with
hair extensions and cocoa butter, Vietnamese supermarkets with live
crabs clambering slowly out of polystyrene boxes, Pie and Mash shops in
white tile and traditional butchers with pigs trotters laid out like
precious jewellery in the window. The market is on most days, half the
length of the street filled with stalls, stereos sending the sound of
reggae drifting across milling crowds, mixing with the smell of onions
and frying burgers. Not exotic, not intriguingly urban, just
there.

Coming onto Creek Road, which leads into Greenwich, I walk past the
place where I first arrived in London on a windy autumn Sunday, bag in
hand. Rachel McMillan Halls of Residence, the place where I had my
first breakdown, looks like an eastern European housing block, shaped
like an 'E'. In a small room which looked out on other small rooms and
a concrete square below I lay in bed for a week surrounded by rubbish
and papers and dirty clothes, trying to work out what was happening to
me. Two minutes from the Thames, ten minutes from Greenwich, I found
that my head had unravelled and suddenly I had to try and put it all
back together again. Today as I walked past the building a digger bit
and clawed through what was the common room where we'd all sit and
smoke spliff and argue, the giant arm and scoop unfolding the building.
It felt like a kind of exorcism.

I'm not surprised it's being demolished. Creek Road when I first
arrived was a wasteland, a place of gravel silos and old warehouses, a
place of dead industry. Now modern expensive low-rise developments
mirror their sisters on the opposite side of the river, all odd angles
and daring colours. It's like the beacon of Canary Wharf's influence is
spreading infection in a circle around it, like a thorn in the city's
flesh, the irritation changing the tissue around it. It makes sense for
the university to cash its hand now, while the bubble lasts. Ordinarily
I would have stood and watched but I had to get to the Job Club.
There's nothing more fascinating than watching the insides of a
building become visible. Maybe if the building goes, the place where my
first breakdown happened, then the place in my head where I went during
my first breakdown will go too.

Once I got to the Programme Centre I signed in as usual and went
through into the other room, to find it full of people, all heads down,
newspapers covering every available surface. At first glance there
appeared to be no empty seats.

I made that mistake the second day I was at the Programme Centre. I
went in and there weren't any seats, so I grabbed a newspaper and sat
on the edge of a desk, conscious of everyone else sitting around me.
One of the Job Club women came over to me.

"Would you mind not sitting on the desk? If you could find a
seat?"

I felt a boiling rage rise up inside of me, and absurdly I had a vision
of my fifteen year old self, squaring up to a teacher for an argument
for the first time, words sticking in my throat, heart pounding in my
chest.

"There aren't any seats, that's why I'm sitting on the desk."

"There's a seat over there."

"There's someone sitting in it."

"There's not now.'

I could feel myself shaking as I dragged the chair across the room
putting it next to where I had been sitting on the desk, plonking
myself down onto it with a protracted sigh. A massive childish anguish
in the face of arbitrary authority burned inside me, making my face red
with its heat. There was no reason why she should be higher up any
hierarchy than me, except that the situation was weighted in that way.
She had all of the power behind her, I had none.

"Oh you can't sit there, you're blocking the fire exit, if there was to
be a fire, people wouldn't be able to get out. You'll have to move your
chair in case there's a fire."

I could have cried, I really could.

Not wanting to make the same mistake again, I went and hid in the
toilets for twenty minutes. Coming back, the room was slightly emptier
and everyone was quiet except for one man talking loudly on the
telephone. He was about fifty and wearing a German army shirt and a
baseball cap, his face a powdery pink colour as if the shading had been
applied with chalk. As I squeeze past him, making for an empty seat, he
looked up at me and winked. I made a grab for the nearest newspaper as
I sat down and pretended to pore over it, even though I had already
read all of the adverts in it yesterday. Behind me the man was trying
to get some application forms for a security job, trying to explain
that all of the firms that could have given him references have gone
bust. At the end of each sentence he called the person on the other end
of the phoneline 'love or 'ducks'. When he finished he sat down
diagonally opposite me.

I picked up another jobs supplement and found a page full of security
jobs, and agonised about whether to point it out to him. I really
wanted to, but the silence hung like a thick fog in the room, and when
I looked around everyone was intently staring at papers, isolated in
their own space. Finally I settled for leaving it open at the page, so
that he would see it.

In the face of the silence, the man in the baseball cap made quiet
comments to himself, giving a real time commentary on everything he
did.

"That's about as much use as a chocolate teapot that one&;#8230;
Tried that one yesterday&;#8230; Oh, I'll have a look at this though
I don't suppose it'll make much difference&;#8230; Ah, look at that,
I've got two of these."

All clumsy and self-conscious, I stood up to get another newspaper.
There was a big pile next to a man in dark rimmed glass, who looked the
classic Hampstead Guardian reader, brightly coloured baggy woollen
jumper, black tousled hair.

"Is it alright if I nab this, I mean, is anyone reading this?"

His hissed 'no' surprised me in its aggression, as if I had committed
some sin in disturbing him. He usually just reads the Guardian from
cover to cover, even completing the crossword.

Sitting back down, I banged my elbow on the radiator next to me, which
gave out a loud and happy clang. The man in the baseball cap
laughed.

"You've been here five minutes and you're already wrecking the place."
We both exchanged chuckles before returning to our papers. I noticed
that in-between his commentary on himself, he would sometimes stop and
look around, absentmindedly rubbing his hands over and over on
themselves as if he were washing them. It was like he was comforting
himself, like the way a child will suck their thumb.

Later, I rolled a fag and went outside of the Business School, onto the
front steps to smoke it. As I leaned against the banister at the
centre, the man in the baseball cap came out through the double
doors.

"I saw you out here having a fag and I thought it was a good time to
make my escape. I'm David," he said, offering his warm dry hand.
Clasping it with my own damp, cold one, I told him my name.

"What do you think of it here? They're alright here, they are.
Nice"

"I got told off for sitting on the desk."

"Did you? Nah, they're alright. You should try going to the other
place, they're right bastards. Any way I'd best get off."

As I smoked I stood and watched him walk off, away from the Programme
Centre, past the sheer brick face of the clock tower. I would have
loved to go with him, but I had another two hours to do. In three
weeks, he was the only one of my fellow jobseekers who'd talked to me.
I stubbed my fag out, looked up at the clock tower, the brick glowing
in the hard autumn sunshine, then stepped back inside.