My city is a fiction.
Dreamt up first by my mother who studied here, and when we came up from the country – to break the monotony of the pastoral, the cows and the grass and the blue neon lit chip shop that was the only place to hang out; she would talk of the Cowgate, the Meadows, the no go areas for nice girls like her – like me.
But the city alters, shifts, areas change their own stories as planners, developers and residents reshape them until the city I know does not fit her narrative. I walk the meadows daily – my children play there. The Cowgate, well lit and over policed on a Saturday night and into the long mornings, does not scare me. This city works to hide its poor now, increasingly gentrified, made up, poverty pushed further and further to the periphery.
The city works.
The city seems to work.
The city takes on an identity of its own. It is bigger than me, exists before me and will, after me. The buildings do not need me, its reputation does not need me, I call it home, but do not dent it. It is a beast, bigger than the sum of its parts; it asserts its superiority and, in doing so, reaffirms my temporality.
This fear I have of the tenuous nature of being has only intensified since the birth of my children. I do not like to think of the long series of historical accidents that have led to me being me. People like to pin the existence of an ordered universe on God, to use it as evidence of a God. Only, it’s not ordered at all, it’s accident after accident after accident, only ever a building on things past.
As too is this existence of mine, it’s just a big mistake. So many variables colliding, combining to result in me; my Grandparents’ fortuitous escape from Poland, my Father’s propensity for philandering, my Mother’s vulnerability, and on it goes; it is reducible to that night, that position, that desire. I am only a combination of other’s actions; until suddenly there I am, birthed, blue and unable to breathe. Here I am now, with the accident of self, and my husband’s self and our accidents of children, living in a city, half planned, but still accidental. Only, we want so badly to believe otherwise. We call ourselves grown up, to remove our older self from the chaotic nature of childhood, to create some semblance of order, of intent.
But, it’s fragile.
As are the webs we weave, for ourselves, to support ourselves, to support us, the citizens of this city. We call it infrastructure in an attempt to make it seem solid, strong, a structure strong enough to support us.
But it too is fragile.
Does the city work? Or is it, as is, an outdated concept?
What if it breaks and all this structure becomes too tenuous, not enough planning combining with too many accidents moving towards the inevitable point of crash, because crash we will; boom, bust, swings, roundabouts, Adam and Eve, Utopian Distopias – it’s coming, so they say. But the point of breaking, we see, necessarily, as a future event. To contemplate otherwise is too terrible – too demanding. It means too much to see it in the present tense.
I know, we know, soon we will have to change, to ease our reliance on fossil fuels, on imported food, on capitalism, on scarce resources. Soon we must formulate a new way of living. But not now, not yet the petulant brat in me wails, not yet, leave it for my children, for their children. Let me have the easy option, the comfortable life; do not demand this change of me. But, change I must. Change we must. I do not want to work at it. I do not want to work hard at it.
What if it breaks? Tomorrow, soon, what if the uncomfortable is forced upon us? What if the city ceases to work for us?
In Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, the earth plunges rapidly towards a descent. It is the last days as predicted by the gospels, with shades of Revelation. There is an earthquake in the East Midlands, cutting off food supplies, shop shelves are bare, and a pregnant character begins to miss chocolate the most. It is the little things.
It is so fragile, this fiction we have built for ourselves, our cocooning comfort blankets of dairy, sugar and fat. It will not sustain us.
It’s fiction, I tell myself.
It is, and yet.
Today, in the sun, the city works. Everything works better when it’s like this. Near the Geddes gardens tourists sit in the Grassmarket, drink beer yards away from where once public hangings were entertainment, death a spectacle. Or so says a guide atop a boulder, Australian, his guidees American. We are a nation of storytellers, it is said, we made this nation up. We hide our dead now, ferry them in private ambulances to the city morgue, the Cowgate the Styx – but we parade and sell the historical, the fictive, dead; it’s all Burke and Hare, Rebus and Rankin, tartan shops piping music into the street. It’s what we trade in, this lie of nationhood, of unity, of a better past, but it brings in the tourists, and develops the city economically. That’s the buzz word now, economic development, how the worth of proposed schemes is judged, it’s a market driven economy, just as well we have something to sell. The city works, puts its past to work.
The city thrives on this uncomfortable co-dependency.
Stags leer as they eschew the pavement, walk towards the Cowgate, an arterial route, the vein of the city where once cattle were driven from country to city, to be sold in the Grassmarket. Now, where the two roads meet there’s a community foodbank, asking online for donations of tinned pudding, packeted custard, this will feed empty stomachs, a quick fix, a temporary solution that does not educate as to how to cook economically. It’s that word again, here the economic development falls down, will not feed the demonised poor the con-demnatory government sanction, use as pawns in an election year.
The city cracks.
The city works for some, but not for all, where does the tipping point sit, who calibrates the scales?
I walk the Cowgate, signalling my near past, the distant past, echoes, ghosts. The aptly named Underbelly venue is closed, out of season, not fit to entertain, instead it stores books, paper on paper of paper, where the smell lingers, tainting live acts with source coding. Books gather dust whilst women’s refuges have none. UNESCO say we are a city of literature, a profitable designation.
The past might hover, but the present presses, as stags stagger, splutter, wolf whistle and spit. In The Three Sisters’ garden of beer oversized screens turn overpaid demi-gods goliath sized for the stags to ape and to admire. Here in the city’s bowels trapped tourists are hens, plastic penises mock bridal veils. Chekov turns, cannot rest.
Coffers swell, if this is development I don’t want it. If this feeds the city does it feed me too?
The city works, just about.
A Tesco truck trundles by, headed no doubt to Holyrood, where the nation’s newspaper is printed; The Scotsman, reflective no longer- if ever- of many Scots men. To parliament, a dead man’s folly where the leaders assemble, where SNP propose a national government – this will not end well. To Tesco, to restock shelves of a multinational corporation on the wane, no longer monopolising, mega stores downsizing, restructuring – a handy euphemism for cuts, but still, government subsidised, whilst the villainous poor, starve, do their own dental work.
Cracks, schisms – don’t dare start looking, once seen you’ll see them everywhere.
This country does not work.
In times of siege they used to wall the city up. Of plague close the city’s gates. Starve the residents, the hungry will not revolt. What would happen then if besieged, by nature, by plague, by strikes, by fragility? It’s all so fragile. It’s all too fragile.
It will not break, not yet. Not now. The world is stable. The city endures. The world is not an accident. Say it often enough, you might be able to fool yourself.
By earlier logic, if I am accidental, if I so nearly was not, another day, another month, another man, another womb; and so by extension, all others too, then this stability is accidental, incidental, a flaw – a fiction.
How then to order it better, to make something we can stand up in, that endures, allows the city and us to endure. It’s food, this politicising weapon, this old weapon of mine.
To backtrack and reveal, I have spent many years trying not to think about food, after too many years thinking only of food. I had a misspent youth, a wasted youth, where flesh atrophied, where I battled with myself to see how little I could weigh, how light l I could be and yet still stand up. Every day was a competition, a game of numbers, of checks and balances. And it was fun, so very much fun to begin with, when it blotted out that which it was meant to. But it quickly lost its gloss and I found myself trapped in this war of attrition against the self. For a while it looked like the only way out was the certain one, I was besieged by this illness, this thing Anorexia is. It was a beast of its own, I lived inside it, and yet, it was not of me, it was not me. It was saying something I was too scared to say, it was a profound statement I was making, just one I failed to understand, and one those around me failed too to understand, since it became only about food.
As if food is ever that simple.
During years of recovery food remained some kind of pharmakon to me, every mouthful holding within itself the possibility of poison and cure, fat or thin, to win or lose. After so many years of considering everything I put into my body, it was too much complexity, it got in the way; and instead of recovering fully, I recovered enough, through avoidance, by equating food to fuel, and leaving it at that. I did not want to ask or to know where it came from. It was just something to put in my mouth, to get me through the day, to chew quickly, and be done. But it bred ignorance in me, until now I cannot remember what seasons are for, what food grows when, or where, or how.
Tesco will not help me with that. My tummy rumbles, demands to be filled. I walk past the morgue with drunks drinking on the steps, crossroads where opposite, as a nearly not child I stood and pressed the button for the green man, excited to be here in the city, cold biting my fingers, blue eye shadow and liner, hair mascara, mistaking the smell of hops for baked potatoes. I miss the hops, I miss thinking it was potatoes, I miss potatoes, fresh from the ground, the feel of earth, the smell of the damp tubers, I miss my Grandpa, I miss home, I miss making home, I miss knowing how to live, how to do the things needed to sustain a life. This city does not work, for me. For me, this city does not work.
And yet, it’s never just food. And never just about food.
I did not know how to feed myself. I stopped knowing because the complexity was too much to handle. And now, the city does not know how to feed itself, that much is evident. Again, the complexity is too much. Economic development is all well and good, but webs are fragile and tangled, the world spins, it might snap, and tourists then will not feed us unless we resort to desperate measures. We need to know as a city, which is little more than a collection of its citizens – how to nourish ourselves again. And Tesco will not help us.
Spinning, my head is light. I am light headed, as if without food my brain weighs less, does less. I enter a hermeneutically sealed environment. It’s all hard tomatoes from Spain, apples from South Africa are cheaper than British, milk so cheap it’s nearly free, and behold, best of all it won’t go out of date for two weeks at least, best buy the bulky carton, look how happy cartoon cows look emblazoned in fields. Everything is so clean, there’s no soil, no dirt, the meat is more red than blood, it too verges on the cartoon, bright bright pink the way it looked when I showered after the birth of my first son. Kidneys remind me of haemorrhages best forgotten, it’s the closest this flesh gets to authenticity, how we need new words, or new definitions, or both, so we can begin to understand, to be able to read the environment, the signs, the signals, not just the words, not just the easy narrative. How we need to question. Brands proliferate and beg I buy them, it is impossible nearly to avoid Unilever or Nestle or Pepsi Cola. Down the Great Dragon was hurled, this cornucopia of delights, this over production of food that’s eating up the earth, the balance of power is tipped when resources used outweigh calorific value, we need new ways to price goods. It’s a market economy, what price dairy, sugar and fat? What price comfort? What price modernity? And who pays, when?
This economy does not work, we do well to question exactly what it is we are developing.
There’s a strange hum in the shop. As if it’s all refrigerated, air pumped in, cooled to a standard temperature, who’s standard, who’s temperature. If I stay here long enough will I too live forever, will the preservatives leach into me, will they stamp me with a best before, use before? I need a sandwich, New York Deli style pastrami, I do not recall my New York sandwiches being styled as this, but I buy it. I am not sure what’s in it, although it lists the ingredients in some sort of code, tells me the fat, the calories, the protein, breaks it down nicely so I can add it to my daily total, and best of all, is in a meal deal, I do not need to part with much to get coke, crisps thrown in. I never have to touch food again to live I realise; I never have to peel, to chop, to work, to understand. It’s all right here, every flavour I ever wanted, fusion food fusing until confusingly enough I no longer understand its point of origin, but it’s ok, let’s appropriate everything we want, let’s trample on what we want, because we’re worth it. We’re all fucking worth it, until we know the price of everything, but the cost of nothing.
It’s the hum that gets me, and the child, whinging, begging its mother to get it more hopped up on more sugar, asking for more chemicals needing counterbalanced with more medication, I want I want I want it choruses, more more more. It’s this that’s making me think this way, I think.
I am light headed; I have not eaten this confused sandwich. The parent snaps a picture of a begging brat, for daddy, for Facebook, and for any, every, stranger who cares to look. I make an escape, blinking in the sunlight. This city does not work.
I could assume this position of cynic, I could excoriate, I could play the misanthrope, and play it well. But this is my city, and I am trapped here in it in this awkward trinity of home, belonging and place. Although I proclaimed otherwise I am of it, I leave it and I miss it, I call it home and mean it. I need it to work; I need these webs not to snap. I need most of all to see it through a more hopeful lens because I cannot comfortably live in it and watch it fail, I need to believe change is possible; I need the clichéd comfort of hope.
To work is a verb, and so denotative of action. But, I’d rather confuse it for a different category of word, I’d rather let it remain passive, for I am, at heart, a watcher. I’d rather watch and lambast and nip to the chip shop than do. But all this watching, observing and recording will do nothing, and so I must become the writer as activist, which means allowing the city to function on different terms. And on practical verbal terms, it means actively doing something to change this stasis of knowing, yet not doing. It means letting myself view the city in a different way – if the city can grow and produce food then it starts to buffer itself, to create resilience – and seeing the green spaces. The hopeful spaces that could become something else, that could be dug up, become fertile growing spaces closing the binary between city and country, feeding the city in practical terms. When the city is seen from above green spaces proliferate in all areas, lessening social inequality – there’s as much potential in less privileged areas as in the wealthy ones.
It’s daring to imagine a city that works, that can feed itself and its visitors, that trades not only on an imagined past, but on a vibrant present. That dares to hope to breed a new generation of children who understand the actual worth of their food.
It means arming my sons with spades. It means learning how to live.
Ali Millar has an MA in Creative Writing from Edinburgh Napier University, and is working on her first book, The Last Days, a memoir of faith and loss. She lives in London with her husband and children.
[Published in The Evergreen Vol. II]
