Nehaveigur

Emerging from Brixton tube station for the first time and stepping out into the street, I entered a world I hadn’t experienced before. It was loud, multiethnic and crowded but also drab like only London can be. Brixton market was in full swing, the fruit vendors were shouting, buses were honking, someone was playing music, and people were pushing past me impatiently, but without saying anything, because this was England.

I had turned 18 only a few weeks earlier and had just finished school in Austria. As soon as I could, I got a cheap flight to London. This was a bold choice, since I didn’t know anyone there, had no place to stay and no job. On the other hand, I wanted to leave, I didn’t need a visa to work in England, and I more or less spoke the language. The first night, I got a bed in a youth hostel off Russell Square. The next morning, I found a room in Brixton advertised for 300 Pounds a month in the classified section of a local paper.

It took me some time to find the small brick house, identical to the ones to its left and right. I knocked on the door and met the previous occupant, a girl who improbably turned out to also hail from Austria. She showed me the room and explained that she didn’t need it any more since she was moving in with her boyfriend. She had paid the rent until the end of the month and all I needed to do was to pay her for the remaining days. I did, she gave me the key, and I was a resident of Brixton.

The other occupants included Shahid, a Pakistani who I stayed in touch with for years afterwards, an older woman I rarely saw, and a strange Swedish couple with black hair, very pale skin and skull tattoos. The girlfriend worked in a pharmacy and the boyfriend hardly ever left his room. The only evidence I saw of him using the communal kitchen were the notes he left complaining about the rest of not keeping the bathroom clean enough. One time I wrote back, and the next day when I entered my room I found a note he had slipped under my door. It was a detailed drawing of my room, except that where my bed was he had drawn an explosion with body parts flying in all directions. I think they were supposed to be mine.

At the end of the month, the landlord’s son showed up and asked me who I was. I explained that I was now living in the downstairs bedroom. He said that was okay, but going forward I’d have to pay the rent to him, which I did, following the lead of the other tenants. A few days later, the landlord himself showed up. He was a black man who introduced himself as Mr Brown and he wanted to be paid. He didn’t take this well when we explained that his son had already collected the rent.  It turned out that his son had an addiction problem and went around collecting money on his father’s behalf, only to spend it on drugs. Mr Brown didn’t make me pay again, but he also made me promise to only pay him directly from now on.

I had very little money and spent even less. The first few days in Brixton, after I found a job at a call center but before I received my first paycheck, money was so tight that I walked to work on the other side of London  so that I didn’t have to pay for a bus ticket. It took a few hours. Most of the time I ate white bread, since that was the cheapest thing I could find. Once or twice a week I treated myself to fried unidentifiable chicken parts at a local fast food restaurant or to fried noodles at a Chinese restaurant for 3.50 Pounds or less. After a few weeks, a friend told me about the leftover sandwiches that were being handed out of a window behind a run-down factory at a steep discount. From then on, I’d eat those every lunch.

After a few months, my father come to visit me. We met at an Indian buffet where I ate an enormous amount of food, returning to fill my plate at least a dozen times. I was trying to catch up. When I was done, I was so full and tired that I almost fell asleep right there. My father must’ve been concerned but I don’t remember him saying anything.

At the time – the early 2000s – Brixton had a reputation for being unsafe. I sometimes heard shots, but nothing serious ever happened to me. One time a disheveled man started walking next to me, whispering that he had a knife and would stab me if I didn’t give him my money. I noticed that he was limping and was sure I could outrun him easily, so I told him to get lost, which he did.

Another time, I emerged from the tube station and walked home. On the way, I saw two ambulances driving by, their sirens wailing. Arriving at the house, someone was listening to the radio in the kitchen. The news came on and there was an announcement that a man with a samurai sword had just come out of the pub next to the tube station, killing several people. I must’ve missed him by only a few minutes.

The dominant memories of my first few months in London are of bland brick houses, bad food, loneliness and boredom. Years later, I went back to Brixton and found that it had changed. It now is gentrified, a more pleasant place but also less welcoming to those who arrive in London with very little.