Creative Nonfiction: Omegaville
By Steve Finbow
Listening to “Seeland” by Neu! on
my AirPods while walking along the Staines Road, Bedfont, beneath the
descending aircraft heading towards nearby Heathrow Airport – their
undercarriages glistening in the morning sun, their wings trembling, their
engines unable to escape – an eerie feeling came over me, not quite The Last
Man on Earth (1964), starring Vincent Price; the wrong landscape for
Charlton Heston in The Omega Man (1971); and on far less of a budget
than I Am Legend (2007) with Will Smith – but still, something was
amiss, or seemed that way to me.
The opening lines of the novel on
which these three films are based – Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend –
read: “On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came,
and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back.” But I had set
out at ten in the morning, the sky a bright blue, sunrise a few hours ago, and,
to begin with, I had walked through “the pits,” a municipal wasteland of old
gravel quarries now re-wilded and patterned with paths that led to a small
fishing pond called Bedfont Lake, the cemetery where a few of my friends are
buried, and the notorious Feltham Prison and Young Offender Institution.
On my way along one of these paths
that led to a housing estate – one I used to walk at midnight in the reverse
direction: pitch black, no lights, strange sounds, though drunk or on drugs I
had not cared – I saw a scorched piece of land taped off by the police. In
early August, the London Fire Brigade was called to extinguish a blaze sweeping
through two hectares of brush, rubbish, and abandoned objects that made up the
flora and debris of this neglected land. A week later, a passerby saw human
bones exposed in the ash left by the scorching summer wildfires. After being
collected and examined by a forensics team, the remains were identified as
those of 44-year-old Joanne Sheen, a mother of three, who had travelled from
Fareham to Southampton in the final weeks of 2019 and then vanished, her
whereabouts remained unknown for nearly five years. The Metropolitan Police
turned the investigation over to their Hampshire counterparts, who arrested a
man from Southampton as a suspect in her disappearance and apparent murder. I
have always had a feeling that “the pits” held more secrets, more bodies, more
graves buried under old freezers, or weighted down by chains and submerged in
deep-water holes later filled in by the local council – “Neither could I forget
what I had read of these pits – that the sudden extinction of life formed no
part of their most horrible plan.”
Discarded children’s things were
visible among the debris lazily dumped in the piss-stained bushes. Reading that
back, I wonder if I am correct. The things that once belonged to discarded
children? Maybe I am correct rather than the discarded things that once
belonged to children. The ephemerality of toys and interests. A pink baby-grow
with its feet cut off, a scattering of multi-coloured plastic cubes with
letters from the alphabet extruded on them, an elaborate wooden kitchen-corner
for a once-enthusiastic and then disheartened child chef, a bald doll wearing a
tartan romper suit placed in a tree, leg dangling, eyelids fibrillating in the
breeze. How I wish I still had that Action Man French Resistance Fighter. And
that model of Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery of Alamein. And those Alan
Ball white football boots. And that collection of Esso 1970 World Cup coins.
But I don’t really. Why would I? Like the unwanted and rejected objects, my
nostalgia is strewn with temporary items that lost their meaning within
whatever fantasy I had followed. Objects are oriented towards replacement, the
signifieds peeled off and stuck with Sellotape on another series of signifiers.
These technologically complicated –
comparatively – hoops and diabolos morph into adult toys, the ultimate of which
are our phones with which I/we play music to accompany us on walks, on bus
rides, train journeys – for some also a means by which to broadcast their
musical tastes or lack of – a way to photograph the interesting and banal
things we see during our day, or check our emails, the fortunes of our
favourite sports teams, shares, and partners, a method of getting angry at the
slightest provocation, to check menus for tonight’s dinner or takeaway, to
scroll through what we might watch, what we will buy ourselves to assuage the
daily grind, to verify how to put one foot in front of the fucking other. I too
am guilty of this as Fugazi’s “Song #1” plays on shuffle from one of my Spotify
playlists, and I snap a picture of a broken doll’s pram (a pram of a broken
doll, a broken pram that once carried a doll), smeared with what looks like
raspberry jam, and unconsciously at the sight of this I check my blood-glucose
levels on my diabetes app.
Walking through the 1970s housing
estate along the path where a stony wall—once said to be the protective
boundary of an old manor house turned asylum—separated the playing fields from
the wasteland, I pass a house where a girlfriend of mine used to live. When I
visited her, she played me Beatles albums – the red and the blue one – which I
hated. Her mother used to make me take off my Afghan coat before I entered the
house because she said it stank. Her brothers – older than me and well known
for ultraviolence – disliked me and made it known that I was not welcome. My
girlfriend was tall and skinny with long legs, budding breasts, blonde hair,
large blue eyes. We “petted” as they once called it, not heavy but light,
kissing and touching, I managed to get my hand inside her dark blue knickers
once, and she rubbed my penis through my jeans but that was about as far as we
went. It was a summer holiday and we used to sit together on the playing-field
grass and talk about the future, about what we wanted to be and what we wanted
to do – I cannot remember what our plans were but I do remember the space
around us filled with other children, teenagers, on bikes, kicking footballs, playing
kiss-chase – I remember the screams and the laughter, as if the air itself had
become particulate with noise. Now, outside the house, two cars sit tyreless on
bricks attended by old fridges and castaway heaters, while two large St George
flags herald this small territory now inhabited by strangers.
All of the people back then seemed
to have nouns for names – Bull, Beard, Bloom, Cook, Moon, Pink, Wall – while my
own name (spondee, doubly stressed) consisted of two nouns and often mutated
into Rainbow, Bimbo, and even Simple. As I thought about
this, I walked along the path leading to the youth club field – a field where
we threw down jackets and jumpers for metonymical goalposts, pretending to be
our favourite football players until we were injured, called home by our mothers,
or dragged into a fight. Looking around, I realised the area was still
recognisably what it had been fifty years ago, yet there had been one profound
change.
I walked towards the high street.
The newsagent where I once worked as a paper boy (a boy who delivered
newspapers, not one who rustled), was still there but surrounded by shops that
sold nothing useful or ones that sold everything that was useful but nobody
wanted to buy, not if they had to leave their houses, their television screens,
their laptops, their tablets, their phones. I noticed that outside the
newsagent, there were no sweet machines, no mechanical rides; what’s more,
there were no bicycles or dogs tied to the railings. It was from this shop that
I used to steal NMEs, and Sounds, the odd Melody Maker if the others had sold
out. Then ride my bike – a yellow Chopper, or later, a contraption called
Silver Machine with elongated forks and drop handlebars, totally impractical
for a newspaper round – and then I would get home, drink tea, eat Marmite on
toast but more, I would devour the music publications for bands I liked, bands
that I could discover, obscure, bass-driven, experimental – pre-punk bands like
Can, Amon Düül II, Kraftwerk, Van der Graaf Generator, or Captain Beefheart and
Silver Apples, bands my friends disliked. Music was replacing football and
would soon be replaced in turn by art, and art by poetry, and poetry by
fiction, and fiction by philosophy, my Dinky cars replaced by toy soldiers and
then by Subbuteo and then by board games and then by chess. My masturbation
replaced by foreplay that went no further and then by penetrative sex and then
by deviance and then by perversions.
Approaching 11am on a Saturday, a
time that should be anti-eerie, the reverse of weird, and yet an absence
pervaded these streets, these fields, these pathways. Cars sped by, planes
roared overhead. I saw a group of old men standing in the car park at the side
of the Tesco Express. They were drinking Polish beer and when I got closer to
them I saw that they were not old at all, they were much younger than me. But
they had nowhere to go, nowhere to socialize; the local pubs had closed down or
been converted into restaurants or supermarkets. This is not nostalgia, this is
observation. According to Barbara Cassin, despite sounding like an ancient
Greek word derived from nostos (return) and algos (pain), readers
would not find “nostalgia” in Homer’s Odyssey. The term, coined in the
17th century by a Swiss doctor, is a medical classification for extreme
homesickness observed in Swiss mercenaries and students. The subtitle for
Cassin’s book is When Are We Ever At Home? It is about place and not
objects. It is about emotions and not possessions. It is about home and the
shifting meaning of that word as we age.
Cassin also writes: “The sign of
exile is the transformation in one’s relation to language: exile denaturalizes
the mother tongue. Aeneas no longer speaks the logos, like Odysseus, but one
language among others. And when one settles down in another ‘homeland,’ one
becomes ‘naturalized.’ Hannah Arendt lived and thematized this relation to
language, to culture, and to the homeland of her childhood with the greatest
lucidity in a number of texts, letters, and interviews, during her long exile…”
Like our playthings, like our desires, like our interests, like our obsessions,
like our homes, our language changes to make sense of the worlds we inhabit.
Each increasing gradation of age is a transformation of language.
What I find eerie about these
sunlit streets is that childhood is absent from them, there are no boys on
bikes, no girls with hockey sticks, no children at all – they have become
internalised within the confined language of the home, locked within a confining
language of paranoia masquerading as care. Between the cars speeding by and the
planes ascending and descending there is an almost palpable flow of silence, an
oppressive quiet that sucks in and consumes the joys of energy, of
participation, of contact – the almost erotic charge of children comingling,
what the French call jouissance. Instead, these youngsters are glued to
their screens living a world of manufactured capitalist fantasy, overcoming
computer-generated monsters instead of getting into a physical fight, instead
of walking through the park holding hands, instead of learning the morals and
ethics – the real fears and joys – of human interaction.
E. M. Cioran states: “Nothing shows
more clearly the metaphysical meaning of our nostalgia than its incapacity to
coincide with any moment of time what ever; hence it seeks consolation in a
remote, immemorial past, refractory to the centuries and somehow anterior to
becoming.” But I would argue that in the 21st century, this has
reversed. People seek consolation in a remote, impossible future, compliant to
the irrelevant now and exist somehow exterior to being. The disappearance of
children from the landscape feels like an apocalyptic science-fiction film, a
soundtrack of automobile impatience, of flight and escape, which parodies the
internalisation of experience and the obliteration of fun.
“White Car in Germany” by the
Associates plays as I head towards Longford River, the banks of which provided
the scenery of many a fumbled sexual experience, of gang wars, of stupid
attempts to jump from one side to the next, of cuttings and burns and scars and
bruises, of history and forgetting, a location that links the hypermodern with
the medieval, of spooky tunnels and spiderwebs, of frogs and newts and
sticklebacks, of ducks and coots and moorhens, of memories produced by the
tactility of experience, the caked mud, the lipstick smears, the nettle stings,
the flasher in the public toilets.
Steve Finbow’s most
recent works include In Extremis: the A to Z of Francis Bacon (2026); House
of Contagion – a novella; Being & Happiness – essays (both
scheduled late 2026); plus his forthcoming volume, The Disorder Diaries:
Neurology and the Arts, published by Iff Books in 2027.