A Shiver Seeking out a Spine

I find the flats in South London, it is pissing down.  Hooded youths hang around menacingly in the stairwells, like a shiver seeking out my spine.  The smell of dope trails after me, as if in some Raymond Chandler short story,  I knock on a vomit coloured door.

From inside I hear the sound of Russian voices.  Then the door opens and I see (let us call her) 'Svetlana' for the first time.  She is in her  mid thirties and stout is the kindest word. She has the kind of build that convinces you London bus seats will have to be designed more accommodatingly for the spread of hips.

She takes my sodden coat and is quick to tell me,that '....she vants to becum achtress...yah.'                                                                         "Yes, right, tell me more..."  I say, this comes across as sickeningly sententious as is the way of the 'arts',. 

"I have this dream yah, ever since I vas in Kiev, my home town yah,  I have vis dream...I go to America and become achtress."

 I gulp and get this feeling I have wandered  into the local  mental ward, or a care centre. For surely people with such unrealistic ambitions should be institutionalised.

 She is up for a part of a Russian spy in an unpaid film. She reads her line.... where she is meant to be menacing, not quite 'Pussy Galore', but I am sure, in the words of Dame Edna,  you catch my drift.. 

"My love, it can leave you...it can leave you,  just like that...(Pinteresque pause)...just as the oceans destroy the rocks."  

Are they serious?. "Right..right...yes, well let's try that again." I theatrically encourage, as I try to work out the line in the script.

"I will leave you....just as the oceans...", but surely it takes millions of years for the oceans to erode the rocks. So there is no urgency in this withdrawing of her love. Get me out of this asylum, quick. 

 "Let's run through that one more time." I say in that cliched way of the 'theatre'.

 After an hour of this nonsense she hands me her fee and I take it feeling like a  racketeer.in the marketplace of exchange. Business people have accountants, investors have stockbrokers, actors have agents,  Russian 'wanna be's' have 'acting coaches',;  prostitutes have pimps, .Thank God this farce is over.

"Great, I reahhly enjoy that, Ven are you free again?"

I balk. "Well, I am going away for the summer...."

"Pity...vere is this?"

I have to pull something out of the air. "Finland..."...

"Oh vy there?"

From behind the closed door to my left, the sound of a hand banging a table and Russian voices raised. These are warm people, the Baltic Irish.

I will never do this again, never, never. "A school in Helsinki, for the summer term."

"Pity..." this is delivered with far more menace than when she was 'acting'. 

As I leave a swarthy man in the adjoining room gives me a if looks could kill glare.


I clank down the stairs which smells faintly of urine.


Outside  I look back at the graffiti daubed flats, the hooded youths, like packs of hyenas,  glare after me menacingly. I head for the cleansing green of a Park in the distance. 

It is still sheeting down. London looks dirty, third world, why oh why does everybody want to come here? Am I being dystopian? I look around,  But so many people, London has become a vast melting pot, and the reaction is  biological,  don't rats get distressed with overcrowding?.


I think of the acting lesson. The Heavens are weeping, and one feels the Gods are frowning for this travesty that has just taken place.

I plonk myself down on a bench. The rain washes my face. I close my eyes and try to think of something clean. Something touches my shoe. 'Jesus; I gasp as I see a Rotweiler sniffing at my trouser leg, . "Don't worry mate;" calls out the tatooed owner, he wont harm you. "Marlon, Marlon, here."

I walk through the park, and more than ever now, that shiver seeks out  my spine. I try to think of something clean, Beckett!  Yes, Sam Beckett, he's clean and the shiver ever so slowly begins to steal away,.

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