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Lonely London 3am is eternal. 3am is infernal. It’s the hour of the wolf. The time at which fear and sadness and regret rack up so that it becomes impossible to get to sleep. Insomnia and self-pity: it’s a recipe for hysteria, for wild, lunging desperation. 3am is the dark heart of the city, when the carefully repressed anxieties, aspirations and dreams of its emotionally parched inhabitants can no longer be contained. The silent night amplifies the din in our skulls, returns us to a primal solitude. There is nothing to be done at 3am except hold on. We stare at ceilings, play old melodies on repeat, curl into foetal balls, stare at old photos, sniff the bed sheets, dial the numbers of people we have not seen or heard from for an age. The pain refuses to go away. We step outside and pace the streets, walk the dog for miles, find a bar to prop up for a few hours, head for a canal pathway where we sit on benches desultorily watching joggers and cottagers. Still the pain refuses to go away. We are stuck, impaled between muteness and wanting to scream, madness and cold reason. In an anonymous office located in a quiet Soho back street, two tired-eyed volunteers are sitting in front of telephones listening intently to people who they have never met before talk about how they are going to kill themselves that night. These volunteers are Samaritans. They have driven or cycled in, sometimes from as far away as Chiswick, to operate what they label the Night Watch. But they watch or patrol nothing. Their terrain is auditory. In a city where friendship is costed, where hundreds of chat-lines and sex-lines price their conversations down to the second, the Samaritans will listen for free to anyone who calls them. Each call is a journey. It sends them to new social and psychological spaces which they, none of them professionals, must wade through with tact and caution. They have chosen to place themselves on the frontline of the city. They receive its emotional sewage untreated and unfiltered. Minute by minute, hour after hour, they are confronted by the wretchedness that the codes and civilities of daytime muffle and insulate. The London that they know is an atlas of suffering. They tap into a forcefield of unhappiness and isolation: a lone security guard at an industrial park in Redbridge gazing at CCTV footage while wishing he could be at home tending to his sick child; a housewife, the husband who gave her the black eye she sports asleep upstairs, trying to summon up the courage to move out and start a new life in a new town; a runaway teenager, fresh off the train from Newcastle, who has wandered the streets of King’s Cross in vain while looking for a homeless shelter and who now sits in McDonalds trying to make a plastic cup of foamy tea last the whole night. The widowers, the orphaned, the smack-heads, the cutters, the bingers, the pre-op trannies, the refugees, the wives of Japanese businessmen: all of them are desperate, all of them are at a dead end. - There’s a question I wanted to ask. - Of course. - Well, I had a friend once. He was addicted to prostitutes. He said he had to stop because he found that he had begun to think of every woman that he saw as a prostitute. Or a potential prostitute. I wonder – does your job shape the way you see the people around you? When you’re walking around London do you always see the skull behind the flesh? - - Sorry. That probably sounded really offensive. - The truth is that anyone who works for the Samaritans is already predisposed to seeing the skull behind the flesh. The Samaritans’ centre is an unassuming non-place shorn of character or individuality. Yet, for the needy and the unable, it is an archipelago of hope, a lighthouse in a darkened, miserly city. Its central call room, separated into booths, looks like a language laboratory. It is deliberately neutral, sterile, history-free. The metropolitan stories that emerge into this space do not leak into crevices or mass and hover in the air like a peasouper. The walls do not have ears. No one likes doing Night Shift. It’s the most physically and emotionally draining of all the slots, so much so that volunteers are obliged to do it just once a month. The first part lasts from 10pm to 3am during which at least five volunteers, guided by a supervisor, answer the phones. But from 3am until 8am only two people are left. They will have been sleeping in the tiny, monastic cells upstairs, or flicking through back copies of Red in the library; it’s hard for them not to feel a little spaced-out or traitors to their body-clocks. They’re not health-care experts, but nor, as one of them insists, are they “kaftan-wearing, granola-munching Christians”; they’re professionals, mostly white, whose close friends killed themselves at university, who struggled for years to come to terms with their sexuality, who do not find their day jobs boosting the profits of foreign media moguls sufficiently rewarding. Night Watch volunteers sometimes think of themselves as spies, round-the-clock members of a secret service who not only get to hear the kinds of things under cover of darkness that no one else does, but for reasons of confidentiality cannot tell anyone about those conversations. They manacle themselves to narrative, teasing out and holding onto whatever gobbets of autobiography their callers feel able to reveal. They have to befriend everyone, from those whose droning voices almost put them to sleep, to the Tooting civil servant who abuses his children. But these friendships are fabricated, remote. They rarely tell the callers about themselves and never profer advice. They become huge sponges, absorbing hurt and perplexity from sprawling suburbs, gated compounds in Kensington, high-rise estates in Peckham. Sometimes, because even the desperate are likely to see themselves as consumers these days, callers hang up because volunteers may be too young, men rather than woman. One volunteer recalls that the first call he ever received lasted two seconds: “Oh, I don’t like the sound of your voice.” - Night time is meant to balm or soothe us, isn’t it? - Yes. I find sometimes that all this negativity corrodes me. It pours into me. Around me. Normally we have boundaries that would allow us to collapse against this excess. So I have to fight to be blasé. To tell myself I have volition to re-experience life in a positive way. The streets outside the Samaritans’ HQ are chocka with lines of muscle Marys trying to get into late-licensed clubs, European teenagers cruising for caffeine fixes, besuited geezers getting out of taxis and heading towards secret gambling joints. These night jays, hungry for excess, craving overload and oblivion, ricochet around as if they’re in flashing pinball machines. Are they the people the lonely aspire to be? Or are they, beneath the surface, behind the flesh, also hollowed out? The manufactured ecstasy of a place like Soho barely exists in the eyes of the lonely. Some, upon seeing it, feel a violent longing to join in. But for most, unhappiness makes London disappear: the black and inky-blue sky, and the neon-lit streets below it, is replaced with unending white space. An Ice-Age architecture. White is the colour of loneliness; it flattens and razes everything around it. All the buildings, thoroughfares and landscapes by which they negotiate their daily commutes have turned into a vast, aching tundra waste. Loneliness makes speaking very hard too. The calls that those on Night Watch receive are different from those of their colleagues during the daytime or those who work from 8pm to 3am. They are less likely to come from cranks or sex pests or insomniacs simply wanting a chat. They tend to come from a deeper, darker space than those, sometimes made with mobile phones, from young adults who have just been dumped at Camden pubs by their boyfriends. The very lateness of the calls gives them a different texture and gravity, as if the stories narrated in them are inflected by the woozy, soporific atmosphere into which they tentatively emerge. Even those who are ringing from their own flats tend to speak more quietly than normal, in tribute perhaps to the fact that night time is for whispers as much as it is for cries. The effect is to create a complicity with their interlocutors. “We are part of a space like no other,” reflects one Samaritan. “It’s a space of incredible intimacy, of anonymous revelation.” Often though, callers stay on the line for over a quarter of an hour without saying a word. But the silence is not silent. Ambient sounds – from dampened sobs to background radios – can be made out. More than that, the Samaritans learn to gauge the quality and consistency of that silence, to appreciate its rhythms and contours, knowing that to break it too soon would be an act of violence, but punctuating it occasionally with a gentle, “We’re still here” or “Take your time.” Sometimes, the silence is purposeful. It has a mute dynamism. The Samaritans feel sure that if they can just hold out a little longer then a volley of revelations, whether in gaspy fragments or violent outpourings, will likely follow. These trauma narratives are often delivered in serial form over the course of many nights or even weeks. They may be sustained confessions, but the Samaritans are not there to forgive or deliver redemption. They are mere funnels. And yet, the calls can make an impact upon them, invading their dreams and getting beneath their skin, revealing döppelganger individuals, parallel characters whose lives by pure chance have jagged in an unfortunate direction. They don’t wear headless microphones which they think would transform them into tele-workers or call-centre operatives; as a result, long calls leave their eardrums hurting, their ears red. The conversations etch themselves onto the Samaritans’ flesh. -Why do you do this? - It gets harder and harder to remember. Sometimes you wonder if you’re a voyeur. If the calls are a way of getting a fix. - How is that? - You have to ask yourself what you’re getting out of the call. The exchange can act as a poultice, as a way to reaffirm to yourself that things are going well in your life, both because you’re helping and -- this is the fetishistic element -- your life is not like theirs. It’s a dangerous feeling. But you’d be lying to deny that it’s not part of the palate of emotions you go through. The night inches forward. For the lonely it’s a marathon whose wall they hit long ago. They exist in a time zone all of their own, barely aware when they ring the Samaritans that it’s such a late hour. 3 o’clock. 4 o’clock. 5 o’clock. In winter, dawn is barely distinguishable from darkness. There’s scarcely any light at the end of the tunnel. Their calls may go on and on. The Samaritans are the only safety blanket they have; their conversations a long-distance embrace. For the volunteers themselves the absurdity mounts as the hours tick by. They try to relax in between calls, playing chess with their partner until the phone rings once more. But it’s hard for them not to feel like vomitoria, human landfills into which are being hurled all of London’s rejection, pathos and abjection. Everyone they speak to is tottering, precarious. And this city, this imperial centre, this bastion of government and power and fortune-making: suddenly it seems liquid and unreal too. It’s full of millions of people, half-persons, unmoored from the families or solidarities that might give them ballast and belonging, always swimming against the tide, always a breath away from submersion. How, they wonder, can two unshaven, bleary individuals do anything to help? And then, they quickly remind themselves, how can they possibly not try to? Eventually, the calls wind down. Night Watch is over. The volunteers go upstairs for a shower and a shave. Some get on their bicycles and start pedalling home. They feel knackered, jetlagged. But also the uplift of survival, of getting through another long night unharmed. As they cycle back to Hampstead or to Putney, they breathe in the petrol-soaked air which suddenly smells beautiful to them. They pass by building sites, hear motorists yell curses at them. The clamour is ugly and affirming. They move through areas of blight and poverty. If they were normal commuters, they would probably fiddle with the reception for Kiss FM, or make a quick mobile phone-call to their work colleagues. But to them these cartographies bleed biographies. They peer at the estates, acutely aware that it was from places like these that some of their callers last night were ringing. They pass long, straggling bus queues and observe the commuters heading for the Underground. They seem, on the surface, so forceful and in control. But to the Night Watch volunteers their black business suits and briefcases look all too funereal. They think to themselves: why are they heading back to the jobs and to the places that they say make them feel so sick and unhappy? Sometimes, after a really heavy night, when you’ve just heard tragedy after tragedy, people at the end of their tether and wanting to kill themselves, people struggling because they’re so poor, you go out and you see a red bus go by with one of those Mayor of London posters: ‘Seven million Londoners, One London’. And you think: ‘Really?’ Lonely London is part of Night Haunts, an Artangel commission www.nighthaunts.org.uk |