NIGHT 15
Night 15. Friday 2 December 2022
The morning after a terrible first night of December. 1.30am. Flapping tarpaulin. The promise of streaming eyes and potent headache. 3.00am. Violent bursts of air smacking the tarpaulin into faces. 4.45am. Giving up even trying to sleep. Feeling precarious, paranoid and feverish with insomnia. Time passes slowly. Hungover from lack of sleep and invaded by alarm clocks I stagger back inside. A parcel has been left outside the door. It is the first of our postcards from the edge (of the roof). We can begin to write and send out our messages. I probably haven’t ordered enough and now need to organise the production of the packs of six and posters but this is a start. And there is something else. A gift. A book sent from a supporter along with their good wishes and generous pledge. It is called ‘On Gallows Down: Place, Protest and Belonging’ by Nicola Chester. He sends a link to an article about this entitled ‘All this on our doorstep’ –the drama we both observe and create/document and make on our doorstep - a whole world, here. I haven’t read it yet but she describes the hilltop gallows of the title as a “beacon for home, but also a ‘sending off’ place. A hotspot for migrating birds. A gathering place for stories and a conduit for protest. From it, you can see every chapter of my book, and all the places I’ve ever lived. ” Perhaps the rooftop is something similar. I ‘ve always loved the idea of beacons - from the strings of signing light along coastlines to the morse code torch signals of the Famous Five books I devoured - messages reaching out into the world and aiding navigation. There is a quote from John Clare at the beginning of Chester’s book. ‘The place we occupy seems all the world.’ The rectangle of roofing felt is not a cage - we venture up and down and stretch the boundaries of our daily routines but at the moment it, and the footprint of this typical terrace, is our world. John Clare was incarcerated in High Beach Private Asylum just up the road in Epping Forest. Our walks here are layered with this knowledge vividly imparted in a novel by Adam Foulds called ‘The Quickening Maze.’ That this forest could be home to such enclosures and longing haunts me. It is a forest full of fungi and hallucinogenic spectres - spores of things just out of sight - deer, lost dogs and wild poets.
Magnus knocks on the door. He’s asking if a visiting roofer can access their roof from our handy scaffold. Of course. When he walks in with ladder and propane tank and torch he says he’s seen us on TV. I try to stay busy whilst they’re up there unable to shake the issue I have with looking ‘lazy’ even when desperate to lie down. When they come back in he says he doesn’t have much on him but wants to support what we’re doing and awkwardly hands me a £10 note. I want to cry. The crowd funder has been moving slowly. The weather has turned. This act from someone who has spent much of a lifetime on rooftops – every pledge put to the project – is embraced.
Katie is here today packing orders. She lives on the street and joined us printing our greenback banknotes in May. I feel calm when she is around. It’s a relief to have a system in place for the ‘warehousing’ of this project sending out greenbacks and books and DVDs and when she’s here things are sorted. She’s full of problem-solving, organised creativity, has more than a penchant for board games, a growing massage business and big heart. The day is spent organising, editing, emailing - the end of the school week creeps up fast as does dusk and before long it is time to climb the ladders. I am no longer light footed. Tonight I have to haul myself up. The fact that there are no water droplets hanging from the rungs and the scaffold boards are dry seems a blessing. Until I get to the top and feel cold rain falling and attempt to secure the plastic tarp in growing winds. Tink is unsettled, appearing at bathroom and landing windows wondering why we’re still out here. We argue about taking down the tarpaulin – balancing dramatic, sleep interrupting billows with the chance of a soaking. 10% possibility of rain. 74% humidity. The wind is now a North Easterly. I use the damp sheet I ‘ve just removed as a kind of windbreak across the curved metal headboard. It works and the bed is no longer a wind tunnel. We check the crowdfunder. We aim to get out of the ‘60s’ by tomorrow. And on that note we say goodnight.Sleep well. I realise observations of nature have been lacking. Looking through a water strewn plastic sheet means these are more impressionist/vague - lights stretch, silhouettes merge, even birdsong is obscured by murmuring plastic.
