Reading Material

River


I always take Charlie for a midnight walk along the riverfront and nowadays these late walks are the only times I feel at peace with myself on the island. I read somewhere that we originally came from the sea so maybe thats why so many people feel such an affinity with water. I love the river. Maybe I'm part fish. I definitely seem to be part everything else. I've always been surrounded by water. From the womb onwards. I like the darkness of night too because when it falls we are all naturally colour-blind.


It s also easier to think and reflect at night. Come on Charlie. Forward.

I was born on the Isle of Dogs in East London shortly after my parents arrived here as unwelcome refugees from Bangladesh in 1971. Leah on the other hand was born blind in Leeds in 1973 and never knew who her real parents were so I often wonder what people mean when they talk about accident of birth.

What's accidental about it? Having no conscious choice in the matter or the consciousness it gives rise to?

Yeah, I know some kids are born brain dead but regular people seem to go out of their way to develop that condition in later life and never fucking notice. Shadfield Social Services certainly seemed to employ a lot of braindead people who treated people like Leah as permanent accidents.

I first met Leah when the council employed me as her Home Care Assistant in 1991 and that wasn't exactly an accident either as back then, as now ,the council had a strict policy of targetting all it's shit jobs at the Bangldeshi community. To be honest , I didnt feel particularly caring or Bangldeshi at the time but a shit job is better than no job so I took out my earings, left my biker jacket at home , turned up for the interview and a week later started to train to do basic housework and wipe peoples arses.

My first client was an old guy called Ron who'd been paralysed in an accident in the Millwall docks when he was in his thirties. Apparently a crate of bananas being unloaded from a ship had dropped from the crane and broken his back. Ron was very bitter and anti-everyone and everything because he couldnt do anything for himself except talk, think and blink but we got on ok until his family, who hardly visited him anyway, insisted that they wanted someone white to look after their dad . It didn't bother me that much as I was used to it but I think old Ron was gutted as he had someone, maybe the white guy who replaced me, write me a letter with a ten pound note stuffed in it aplogising for what had happened and wishing me well. I spent the money on dope and never got round to replying.

Leah was my second client. Leah was white too yet her greatest disability was not her blindness but the fact that she'd grown up being shunted to and fro between various Care Homes and Special Schools.in different parts of the country. That's what my manager had told me anyway. Leah had ended up in a groundfloor council flat on the Isle of Dogs following some scandal at the her last place in Hertfordshire. Apparently, the home was shut down. The official line was that the move and a home of her own would encourage Leah to lead a more independent life in the community instead of becoming
completely institutionalised. On the other hand, the fact that she had absolutely no fucking ties to the local community meant that at least we had something in common as belonging had never been my strong point either.

On the first day I went to Leah's flat it was obvious that she was uncomfortable with me being there. After a while it really started to bother me so I just came out with it and told her that I was only doing the job because I needed the fucking money and felt even more uncomfortable with the situation than she did . She didnt react one way or the other, so I then suggested that maybe we should take her dog out for a walk and just look around the island. Jesus, I felt so embarassed the moment I realised what I'd said but Leah didn't take offence she just laughed and said I had a funny accent. It obviously wasn't the first time Leah had had to deal with someone who took seeing for granted but my stupid mistake broke the ice a little and at least got her out of the flat.

Back then Charlie was Leah's eyes and he was almost as fearful and jumpy as she was as he hated being couped up in the flat as he'd been trained to be a guide dog not a couch potato. After a while Leah got to appreciate our walks too. She also liked talking and it was like having an ordinary conversation was something completely new to her and I was totally fucking amazed by the things she didnt seem to know. Normal, everyday things. Simple things you just expect people to know, like how much things cost, what friends are for and how fucking pointless it is to sleep all day long. Real obvious things that soon had me asking myself and then Leah awkward questions.

Over the following months Leah opened up more and more and then one afternoon after we had returned to the flat with Charlie after walking along the riverfront as far as the Greenwich foot tunnel and back, and stopping off for a quick pint midway , she suddenly started to tell me about the
abuse she'd been subjected to. Up until then I'd thought her eyes looked the empty way they did because she was blind and that's what blind peoples eyes
looked like but it wasn't that at all, because as she sat facing me telling me everything, I realised her eyes simply looked dead because they were a
visible painful record of everything the bastards had done to her. But Leah didnt cry as she described what she'd been subjected to and how long it had gone on for.


Not once.


In fact, it came across as if Leah was calmly describing things that had happened to someone else, a Leah who was present as we spoke but not her.
Emotionally, I really didnt know what to feel about what Leah told me because I knew I felt so fucking angry it shut me down, which was just as well as I
instinctively knew that all she wanted and needed me to do more than anything else was listen.

Later when she was talked out Leah asked about me. I knew she wanted the truth so I didnt even try to bulshit her , I simply told her how I'd never been
able to identify with my family because I wasnt like them and how my life had been one long struggle and shit ever since my mum and dad had kicked me out of the house and disowned me because I fucked up at school and got in trouble with the police. I also told her about all the stupid 'Paki' stuff - yeah geography has never been the racists strongpoint - I'd had to put up with from a lot of the white and black kids on the island I imagined I had a lot in common with and how difficult I still found it trying to just be me in a place where other people, including other Bangladeshis had viewed or actually tried to force me to be someone or something I wasn't.

It was strange, saying all this to this white girl who couldn't even see the cause of most of my problems. It was stranger still for her to be telling me about her terrible problems as if normally I'd give a shit but despite myself I found that I did care and felt really sad that Leah had been fucked up far more than I had.The fact was, I knew nothing she'd been through was accidental whereas I'd always been vaguely aware of the consequences of a lot of the choices I had or hadn t made, yet the choices that had shaped her life had been made by the very people paid and trusted to see that she grew up fully prepared and able to make as many choices as she possibly could for herself.

That afternoon I recognised that , as deep as it went, I simply felt sorry for myself for making all the wrong choices whereas it was Leah, not me, who had
deliberately been denied the right to grow into herself and belong. In short, Leah had alerted me to my blindness.

Being around Leah through my job, you could say I felt overprotective towards her, and maybe I did feel that way at first, but as we grew closer over time we
openly talked about what was happening between us as a matter of course. There was also a sense in which Leah started to protect me from the shitty world I knew and what I'd become, it wasn't all one way, we just seemed to find missing parts of ourselves in each other but when the Social Services Department caught on ten months later that I had, in official terms, flagrantly abused the professional carer/client relationship, I was hauled up in front of the deputy director, immediatly suspended without pay and warned to stay away from Leah or face a court injunction.

We had no idea who'd blabbed - it certainly wasnt Charlie - but I'd always expected fireworks, we both had.however as we'd been completely open and up front with each other it was the sheer hypocracy of it all that got me as Maureen Myers, the Deputy Director of Shadfield Social Services wasn' t the slightest bit concerned about Leah at all she was simply looking out for the department. I called Myers a fucking hypocrite , told her to stuff the job and said if she had any genuine concerns about the relationship then she should call the police, adding that while she was at it, she should ask them to investigate how Leahhad been systematically sexually abused while in the Care of other Social Services departments down the years and why she had had ended up in a previously unlettable ground floor flat on the worst council estate on the Isle of Dogs in the first place .

Far from seeming shocked or in any way moved by my outburst Myers simply made a phone call and had two bastards from security frogmarch me out into the street.

When I continued to see Leah the Social Services department promtly sent round an in-house counsellor to ' talk ' to her and when she failed to provide the answers he wanted he submitted a report to Social Services suggesting that Leah had significant learning difficulties. The Department then attempted to make Leah a ward of the court and take out an injunction against me contacting her or coming within a half a mile of her flat.

We got legal aid to hire a local solicitor to fight the action.

Amazingly, the whole Social Services case turned on allegations and official evidence suggesting sexual exploitation on my part - people who can't see can't possibly make informed choices about sex right?- which was a real home goal as our affidavits made it quite clear , rather Mr Ryan the lawyer who had actually drafted them had, that we had never had sex precisely because Leah found it so difficult to deal with the sexual abuse she'd lived through. Mr Ryan took another statement from Leah, and she still didnt cry but shortly before the scheduled hearing Shadfield Social Services backed down and withdrew the case.

Even so, we had to move out of the flat to escape the unwelcome visits of yet more prying Social Workers.


As we had nowhere else to go and werent about to throw ourselves back on the mercy of the council, Leah, Charlie and I squatted a large groundfloor flat in an empty maisonette block over in Mudshute not far from the city farm. The block was due for demolition but Shadfield Council never got around to it so Leah and I lived there for about 18 months and it was beautiful. It meant going back to living on benefits but someone from the local advice centre helped us get an additional Carers Allowance - about half of my previous wage - so we got by.

In the Mudshute flat we created our own little world and decorated it with wonderful things you could feel as well as see and only let in those people we wanted to share it with. We also got married - we didnt want any of the legal shennanigans again - and had a frantic half hour in the street outside Shadfield registry office trying to pressgang the two witnesses required by law. In the end, we bribed two miserably sober looking drunks who celebrated the wedding reception with Charlie and us in the Rose and Crown pub next door. Leah also got a taste of real independence when - on the advice of a friend of Mr Ryan's - she enrolled on a sculpture course at the local college,

It turned out Leah had a real talent for seeing and shaping things with her hands and it wasnt long before her work started to attract attention. The squat had a spare room so we turned it into Leah's studio and suddenly the house was full of people talking about commissions and exhibitions.

I was also managing to turn my hand to some landscape gardening so things were really looking up. Even Charlie got caught up in all the excitement and was off bounding round the house and wildly chasing his tail every time someone new knocked at the door, Then as suddenly as Leah' s new purpose in life had arrived the whole Mudshute world cracked like dry plaster and everything started to disintergrate and slip away.

It s no accident that the river carved out this island, it's still doing it, it's dark waters simply seek out and wash away the weakest elements of whatever stands in its path and surge relentlessly on. I guess Nature has no time for accidents or words either .It just is and what happens happens in spite of our grand theories. Nature just fucking resists our attempts to contain it.

That's why the doctors who diagnosed Leah's Leukaemia when she complained of constantly feeling tired that summer could not explain why she - as opposed to anyone else - had developed it. The best they could do was describe what it was and how the millions of white blood cells that were rapidly reproducing themselves inside her body were forcing Leah's life out of her.

Charlie hid under the sofa and growled when Leah's hair started to fall out following the chemotherapy so we had to go out shopping for a hat. Leah wouldnt setlle for anything less than a wide brimmed Pink number because my favourite colour was pink so we spent about three days traipsing round every
department store and second hand shop and market in London until I found a pink one Leah liked the feel of. I told her she looked outrageous wearing it but Leah loved it so much she slept in it. But soon beneath that bright pink outrageous hat I started noticing Leah's beautiful skin yellowing and
tightening and smelling of wet metal. Maybe thats what had thrown Charlie, that smell.

Anyway, the chemotherapy proved useless.

In the garden one night, after we'd had a few friends round for a barbeque and they'd all left we sat at a candlelit table in the overgrown communal garden we had to ourselves and Leah suddenly said, 'Hussain, we're all dying, l'm just dying a little faster and sooner than you babe, please look after yourself the way you have me when I go'. I promised I would but immediately went back into the kitchen to refill our glasses and cry. Leah had always been so strong I just wanted to spare her hearing me break down but when I returned with our drinks she saw how I felt with her ears and I saw tears of pure love falling from her eyes and I suddenly hated myself for being such a coward and leaving her alone.
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Leah wanted to stay at home as long she could, so we would sit up at night holding each other in the garden and later in our candle-lit scented bedroom , with Leah bravely fighting against the pain and the sickening side effects of the drugs, and me struggling against my selfish feelings and certain loss, each of us trying to condense an eternity of feeling and purpose into every last shared moment. But there was no way of prolonging the short time we had left together, as time was still flowing by so I just watched on helplessly as the woman I loved and needed beyond anything else in the universe slipped further and further away from us both.
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When the medication became pointless and the pain unbearable the doctors decided Leah should be taken to hospital even though she had begged me and the authorities to let her die at home. I wanted to object but I felt powerless before their arguments that 'it was for the best ' so l just let myself be led out of the house by the arm, believing that it probably was.

In the ambulance Charlie whined and Leah's hands suddenly felt smaller and colder in mine. At the hospital two orderlies were waiting
in the car park to meet the ambulance. I looked up at the hospital , a huge grey bricked Victorian fortress and back at the two orderlies and suddenly started to think about what they were thinking about, how much they were paid and what Leah had told me that aftenoon so many months before.

Sometimes life throws up terrible choices and squeezes evey thing else out. When it does we just have to decide what's right and wrong there and then
and live with it. One of the orderlies kindly phoned a taxi for us but I was so afraid Leah would die on the way home. But she didnt, Leah clung to life and I
to her for 3 more days and just before she died in my arms in the Mudshute flat she whispered to me , " I can see the sun beneath my feet now Hussain " and for a moment I saw that life giving star flicker in her eyes then fade.

A week later, just before sunset as she'd requested, I lovingly carried Leah's ashes in the beautiful pink urn she'd made for the purpose down to the pier opposite Greenwich and scattered them in the outgoing tide and watched them drift downstream towards the sea. Then I again read the words she'd struggled so hard to inscribe on the side of the urn just before she'd lost the use of her hands, " To hold on to me you must let go "

Come on Charlie, home.