Craig Taylor – on moving to London.

London, England
November 16, 2000

Dear Scott,

Your doppelganger lives here, in South London. I passed him on Acre Lane the other day. He’s black – it’s Brixton, after all, which has the highest concentration of West Indians in the city – but the similarities were so incredibly strong, and just plain weird, that I put down my groceries and leaned up against the side of the building to watch him pass. He walked the same way you do. Not even a walk, he jaunted with the same wide, zig-zagging steps. And his hair was the same colour of absolutely unnatural yellow, and it was the funniest thing I have seen since coming here, topping the time a woman on a subway platform told me about the pleasures of Beef and Onion flavoured crisps in breathless detail, surpassing the moment I noticed Brut running down my leg and realized a cylinder of underarm spray-on deodorant had exploded in my packsack. Even funnier than that.

After the London-you passed I stayed up against the brick wall, watching him make his way towards the clock tower, missing the Canadian-you a little, missing familiarity. This all happened on the sidewalk outside Tesco, the supermarket, along the stretch of Acre Lane where the police have put up a sandwich board with an appeal on it for witnesses of a recent beating to come forward. If you want an exact locale, it happened about four steps from that sign, outside Tesco, inside the borough of Lambeth, the area called Brixton, south of the Thames, north of the McDonald’s on the corner, which is across from the KFC, down the street from Cold Harbour Lane where the riots took place years ago, and less than a kilometre from the estate housing, or Crack Central as my housemate Jo calls it. “The police don’t even go in there. Neither should you,” she said on my second day.

Two weeks ago, on my way to take the train to school, a girl walked up to me outside the Brixton tube station. Her mascara was running; she had been crying for a while. She was dressed in a private-school uniform and told me through her hiccups and tears that she was a long way from home. “I’m really sorry,” I said and walked on. She followed and stopped me again, this time at the lip of the station, where the raindrops falling from the overhang were the fattest. Her arm was on my jean jacket, which was a new sensation. I had never been touched in Toronto by someone panhandling. This was an actual, sincere touch. It was a schoolgirl trapped miles from her home. “Where do you need to get to?” I asked her. “Staines,” she said. I had no idea where Staines was, but the way she said it made it sound wicked – a place where the mothers stood cross-armed by the windows until their private-school daughters came through the gate. She shivered and looked expectant, so I acted. I walked her to the Brixton bus stop, gave her a pound coin, and stood beside her, hands in my pockets, trying to look sturdy. We waited. After ten minutes of watching double-deckers pull up and pull away, she looked at me, turned, and walked off without a word.

My London self – when I finally meet him – will not be taken advantage of so easily, or if he does he won’t stand there waiting for ten minutes at the bus stop. But my UK version is proving to be a little harder to find than yours was. Parts of the Toronto me – parts I was hoping to shrug off – have remained. The same laundry makes the same pile in the south-east corner of my room. I still look at people’s faces on escalators for a second too long, lurch around with my eggplant-coloured packsack without any sort of grace. I haven’t yet become what my roommate back home called an otter – one of those sleek urbanites who move through the city with ease, as if passing through warm liquid. They’re the ones who seem slow and graceful but are always covering ground; who cross streets without looking back and forth; who know how to fold a newspaper crisply in the middle of a packed subway car. These are people so sleek that the everyday garbage of the city slides off them. My pockets are full of receipts and Fruit and Nut wrappers. I am the furthest thing from an otter right now; I am not even a lemur.

After all my pre-departure talk of health and the purchase of the How to Live on 99 Cents a Day cookbook, I’ve embraced the opposite: a fondness for British candy. I now love Lucozade, an orange energy drink that comes in a dildonic bottle with a graphic of Lara Croft on the side, as well as the UK Mars bar, which is cheap, 35p, and distinctly creamier than the North American version, as if the makers mined the chocolate from a secret place closer to the source. It’s easy to get attached to chocolate bars here. Most have beautiful, visual names that conjure up pleasant things, like Wispa (a breath on the back of your ear) or Yorkie (that friend who saved your life in high school). Each has a different consistency; each one falls apart differently in your hands. If you break a UK Mars bar in half, the caramel twists out into tiny strings. There’s no clean way to do it. But after six weeks here, I don’t find myself breaking many chocolate bars in two.

Since our first meeting, the private-school girl has staked out her own ground on the stretch of pavement on the Brixton High Street between the newsstand where I buy my chocolate and the Foot Locker. She walks in a slow circle and sometimes leans up against the BT telephone box when commuters start pouring out of the station. I see her almost every week, same tears, same uniform. She even does her mascara so it runs down her face in those same dramatic channels.

Miss you tonnes,

Craig