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It was summer in London, but Sally found that hard to believe. It was fairly warm most of the time, but there was still the looming grey presence handing over her head. The clouds just sat there, not moving, for days on end. Then, suddenly, there was sunshine. It lasted for a day and then the clouds came back. A pattern developed - one cloudy day, one sunny day - and Sally recognized this from previous London summers. But that didn't help. It meant one happy day and one depressed day - and that was something she didn't remember.
It didn't seem to make much difference to Anton. He seemed to be pretty much the same every day. Stoned. Sally didn't seem to be able to talk about how she felt to him and he never said anything that led her to think he felt the same as her. Although, in a way, he did. But he had felt like that so many times before, and he couldn't be bothered talking about it. All he wanted to do was get stoned and hope it would pass. Scam, hustle, score and then relax for a while. He was having a good time in London in a way. But he knew it wouldn't last. He didn't want it to last, he wanted to go back to australia too. But not yet.
Anton knew that the pressures of using and hustling would catch up with him sooner or later, and then out of desperation he'd have to run away. But for some strange reason,that he didn't understand and didn't really want to think about, he wanted to hang on till the bitter end. He thought about Sally a bit and felt that maybe they'd both be better off going back to australia straight away. But he wasn't really sure how she was feeling and neither of them wanted to add to their confusion by getting too involved with what was going in in the other's head.
After a few weeks, Sally moved out of the squat where they were staying and found herself somewhere else to live. She couldn't handle being around Anton all the time while he was using every day. It seemed so pointless. Communicating with someone who's stoned when you're not is basically impossible - you're on two different planets. And the way Sally felt at that time, the additional stress of living with someone she couldn't talk to was just too much to handle. They still saw each other every two or three days and slept together most times, but that was as much as either of them oould really take of each other.
For some reason, when they'd brought their plane tickets in australia, they'd decided on four months as being how long-they wanted to stay in London. After a month, Sally had realized that was much too long for her and spoken to Anton about going back earlier. But he wasn't at all enthusiastic about changing their flights and nothing happened. Sally played with the idea of going back earlier on her own, but somehow she just didn't want to do it. She felt completely trapped.
She didn't want to stay in London and she didn't want to go back to australia. And it wasn't quite so simple as just not wanting to leave Anton. Suddenly some doubts began to creep into her mind, about her life in australia. She wasn't sure what she was going to do when she got back there. Somehow the three months in the city before they left had broken the spell of Happy Christmas and she didn't know if she really wanted to go back there just yet. She would eventually, she was sure of that, but she'd been there quite a while, and in some ways she wanted a change. But what else was there to do? She could go back to Mainline, but that too, she felt, had run its course for the time being.
So where else was there?. Sydney? She didn't think so. Melbourne? Maybe, but she wasn't sure about that. She'd never been there, although she did know people who lived there, so it would be quite easy to find friends and somewhere to live. She'd been homeless before, but this was more than that. She felt completely dislocated, like she had no roots, no home anywhere in the world. She toyed with the idea of going somewhere else in europe, spain perhaps, or Amsterdam, for a while and then going back to australia with Anton. But she didn't have any money and her heart really wasn't in it enough to be serious about getting some.
She didn't want to work in London. She didn't want to do anything in London at all. And that was the worst part of it. She knew if she could find something to do, to occupy her time and her mind, that she would feel a lot better. But there wasn't really anything she wanted to do in London any more. She felt like she'd exhausted all that city had to offer her - that was why she'd left in the first place.
She talked to her friends about it, but they didn't really seem to understand. They were all happy in London - or happy enough, anyway. Most of them didn't even really understand why she'd gone to australia in tne first place. They just plodded on through their lives never really doing anything very different. But never feeling particularly dissatisfied with the way they were living either. In a way this irritated her a bit, although she wasn't sure quite why.
Maybe in a way she envied them. Right now, she would have been happy to be the sort of person who is born somewhere, grows up there and lives there till they die, completely unable to see any point in going anywhere else. At least that way, you know where you are. But she know she could never be like that. She'd go completely crazy. Of course, she felt she was going completely crazy now, but she would much rather travel and be unhappy than stay in one place and be unhappy.
What's happened to me? she thought, i never used to be like this. Life used to be relatively simple, or at least fairly straightforward. She'd always felt that even if she wasn't fully in control of her life, at least-she had a fair idea where she was going. But now she had no idea at all. She felt like a cork bobbing around on the ocean, lost and completely at the mercy of wind and waves. But a cork would always float - she wasn't quite so sure that the same applied to her.
A friend had told her once that things like this can happen to you between the ages of about twenty eight and thirty. Sally was twenty nine. "Saturn return" it was called, apparently, and it affected everybody in one way or another. That was the astrological point of view, anyway. When Saturn gets back to the position it was in when you were born - about twenty eight years later - all hell breaks loose in your life. But it didn't last. Only a few years, anyway! Apparently, if you don't deal with all the shit that comes with it the first time round, when it comes back again - just before you reach sixty - you'll be forced to deal with it. And there's a fair chance it will kill you that time!
Well, it's good to know it's normal, Sally thought, but it doesn't make it any easier to handle!
*-*-*
"I'm going back..." Sally told Anton one night as they lay in bed together. "I've been thinking about it and i can't stand it here any longer."
Anton turned and stared at her. He looked slightly shocked, but he didn't say anything.
Fuck, i hate you sometimes, with those little pinpoint pupils! Sally thought, as she looked into his stoned-cold eyes. But she didn't say it.
"When?" Anton asked eventually. The expression of surprise had changed to one of sadness.
"As soon as i can get on a flight. I'm going to ring the airline tomorrow."
"Well i suppose i'll see you back there then..." He put his arms round her and she started to cry. Before long, Anton was crying too and they became a big sobbing mess in the dismal London night.
"I can't go yet." Anton said after a while. "It's just not the right time."
"I know. It's alright. We said we'd stay four months, but i just can't handle it any longer. It's so much worse than i thought it would be. It just makes me really sad to have to leave you..."
"Well, i'll be back in a couple of months. We've been apart for a lot longer than that!"
"Yeah. " Sally tried to smile. She wanted to believe him, but somehow she was convinced she'd never see him again. She thought he wouldn't really want to go back there when the time came. Maybe he'd never been so desperate to escape from england as she had. Maybe held had his holiday now and would just decide to stay here.
Similar thoughts were stirring in Anton's mind, but they were just suspicions, possibilities. He was sure he was going back to australia when his ticket said he would. He just wanted a bit more time here now. They'd been away a long time and he had a lot of catching up to do - not that he'd been doing much of that recently. But soon... Yes, once winter started coming, he knew he'd use that ticket.
*-*-*
The next day, Sally phoned the airline and got her flight changed. She managed to get on a flight less than two weeks later. It seemed a bit quick, but once she'd decided she was leaving, she just wanted to go and get it over with. She hated hanging around for weeks waiting to go somewhere.
That afternoon she went to the airline's office in the West End and they stuck stickers over her ticket with the new date and flight details on them. When she walked out of the office everything seemed to be subtly different.
It was as if someone had just freed her from a straightjacket. She felt light and free again. And suddenly London seemed to be a different place. She actually began to like it. From the top of the bus on the way back to Stoke Newington, she looked at her surroundings with a kind of nostalgia. Almost as if she'd already left and had begun to miss the place again.
Over the next few days, her happiness grew and she began to get a nagging feeling that she didn't really want to leave at all, that she loved London and she could stay there forever quite happily. She started to appreciate the good things about Stoke Newington - like the well-balanced racial mix there. No none racial or ethnic group was really in the majority. There seemed to be near enough as many black faces on the streets as there were white ones something you never saw in australia, thanks to genocide and the white australia policy, which is still operating unofficially. That was one of the things she missed most in that country, and one of the things that made her feel most uncomfortable about being there. There were also a lot of people from other places in Stoke Newington, mainly Turks and Kurds these days, but still quite a few Indians, Pakistanis, Bengalis etc. and still a lot of hasidic Jews up Stamford Hill, dressed in their incredibly old-fashioned looking black clothes.
But she wasn't quite taken in by this new feeling. She could still remember vividly the horrors of the last few weeks. She knew very well that if she hadn't decided she was leaving she would still be miserable and hate the place. You can't win! she thought, and laughed to herself. What a fucking mad world!
Then there was the sadness she felt as she started to say goodbye to people. First she visited her family and stayed a few days with them. When she left and said goodbye she cried a bit and felt thoroughly depressed. And over the next few days, as she saw friends she wouldn't see again before she left, the sadness grew and grew. But still, between the sad moments, she felt more and more elated at the thought of getting away.
During that time, her relationship with Anton changed again. They became much closer than they'd been for a while. Although at the same time they held each other at arms length in a way. it was a kind of defence against the sorrow of parting. Sally noticed with some sort of satisfaction that Anton wasn't getting as stoned as he had before. She realized he knew how it kept them apart and he was trying to take down that barrier between them. He still used most days, but he wasn't constantly whacked off his face as he had been for a few weeks.
During this period, as the smack haze cleared a little, Anton began to wonder what was happening in his life. It had been a long time since he'd had a binge like this. The last time had been when he was in Sydney, before he went to Happy Christmas, getting on for a year ago now. Held used once or twice in that time, but never even for two days in a row. Held been happy not using. And now here he was again, up to his eyeballs in it.
A lot of emotions surfaced in him at that time. He missed australia, but didn't feel like going back there just yet. He didn't really want to be parted from Sally, although they'd spent a long time together, without a break and he thought having a bit of space between them wouldn't be such a bad thing. Apart from anything else, he knew he had a month or two more to go before his smack binge finished - he didn't know why, that's just the way it was - and it was better for both of them if he and Sally weren't together for that.
But that wasn't all. There was something indefinable, something deeply buried in his unconscious that was stopping him going back to australia at that time. He didn't know what it was, he couldn't quite touch it. Fear perhaps. It was something like that, but fear of what, he had no idea. Maybe he wasn't really cut out for living in another country. Maybe it was something to do with his family's history of migration, some kind of accumulated memory of suffering and rootlessness that made him less capable of pulling up his roots and leaving forever the place he was born.
This thought scared him a lot and he tried to push it out of his mind. He really believed he was going back - although he wasn't quite sure why. So far he hadn't found much in australia that made it so much better than europe. But he liked it. And he liked the idea of living there. And anyway he'd hardly seen any of it yet. But also, he couldn't imagine never seeing Sally again. He really loved her. They'd spent long periods apart, they'd both had other lovers, but he loved her more than anyone else he'd ever known. Maybe that was why he loved her - because they were both quite free within their relationship. They could never take each other for granted. And they knew that when they were together it was because they both really wanted to be - not just that they felt they had to, or that there was no other choice.
No, he was definitely going back to australia in a couple of months. It would be stupid to stay here, anyway. What was there in britain? It was cold, grey and depressing - like the people! It was becoming more of a police state every day. Every day there were more and more homeless people, adding to the thousands that already lived on the streets. Margaret Thatcher had bought half the population - and was using them to keep the other half sliding rapidly downwards into the depths of poverty and defeat. Prices were going up, hospitals were closing and everything possible was being privatized. Even the water supply. It was incredible, but now it was getting to the point where you couldn't drink the tap water in many parts of britain. It really was becoming another "third world" country.
Poll tax was in, demonstrations were illegal, they were trying to outlaw squatting and it was possible to be arrested for walking on the street in a group of more than thre people but despite all this, it looked like Thatcher was going to win the next election. The only thing that wasn't going up, he thought wryly, was the price of heroin.
australia wasn't that much better, of course. Things were heading the same way there. But somehow there still seemed to be hope for that country. And anyway, when it did get bad, there was always the bush. In britain, there was nowhere to escape to.
"Don't worry, i'll definitely be back in a couple of months." he told Sally. "I just want to get this place sorted out in my head before i leave again."
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