The Reality Shift (unfinished)

 The Reality Shift

The housing estate apartment blocks rose up on either side of the road in rows of evenly spaced, large, rectangle windows. Like a barracks the building rose shrouded in mist. The short grass around the buildings was fenced in with low, pointed, black iron Fleur de Lys. 

The night coloured in the sky. An immense inky dark purply-black cloud, so thick and heavy that the streetlights struggled to cast down more than a feeble glow of orange light on the slick wet curb. Like sealskin, the wet roads and sidewalk drank it up. 

The mist was looming, enshrouding everything with its cold, damp cloak. It wasn’t even 8pm, but there was no other soul on the streets; it was desolate, deserted. Anything that was out that night was either desperate like herself; or not of this realm. 

It was the perfect condition of night for parallel realities to collide. 

I walked onwards unable to see very little to the left or right, to the front or behind, I was enveloped in night. I pushed my son Dejeaun in his stroller. He’s now 11 months old. I lean over to check on him, he’s totally quiet. He’s fast asleep under a plastic rain cover wrapped up against the cold in a blue all in one snowsuit and a woolly hat with a blue chequered blanket tightly packed around him.

Finally In the distance I see the glow of the community centre window and a dim light blinking over the front door. I hoped that I didn't look like a mess. Suddenly I begin to feel very badly dressed. I’m wearing just about the only outfit I even possessed, my best outfit, but it's cheap and looks like poverty. 

Black plastic knee high boots, a camel coloured plastic skirt and a black sleeveless roll neck knitted jumper. Over the top I’m wearing a black felt coat with grey and white fluffy stuff all around the hem and sleeves, it ties around the middle like a dressing gown. It’s all from the £5/£10 shop in the Lewisham Precinct. 

One of the other girls who lived in the hostel Marsha, once told everyone that her boyfriend bought her a pair of shoes from there. Charmaine said that meant that Marsha's boyfriend didn't care about her. 

I recalled Charmaine saying in disgust "...no man that cared about a woman would buy her £5 shoes!"

Charmaine said a lot of things. She said that men didn't take women who wore high heeled or platform shoes seriously. I suppose she meant knee high boots too. Or ‘hooker boots’ as they called them back in Sheffield where I was from.

All Charmaine wore was flat loafers. She bought all her clothes in the shop right at the back of the Lewisham Precinct. They sold plain trousers in all colours with small Armani or Versace logos on the back pocket and plain short sleeve t-shirts. 

I had tried all that stuff on, a whole afternoon of it, with Charmaine trying to tell me that I looked nice. I thought it all looked stupid. I felt so uncomfortable. It just  didn't fit me good. Even skinny as a stick I still had wide hips. The flat loafers made me think of nurses shoes. I must have tried on every pair in my size. They all looked stupid on me. It was all really expensive too and I couldn’t afford it. Charmaine always had money because her parents helped her a lot. We were not from the same world. 

So I never bought a single thing. Now I wished maybe I had? I knew I looked bad. My hair was stringy, and a bit puffed up with frizz in the damp air. It hung halfway down my back and was dyed so dark it was almost black. The front of my hair was thickly gelled across my forehead in a side fringe. The whole look was inspired by Mutya Buena who was my favourite ‘Sugababe’. (a girl band popular in the 90s and 00s) 

By now I had reached the Community Centre door. It was now or never. I had come to see the local MP at her advice ‘surgery’ to try to get some help to get out of the hostel they nicknamed ‘The Brothel at Breakspears Road’. If only I had waited and not been so impatient to move before it was written for me in my stars, I wouldn’t have ended up at 63 Galahad Road. 

The warm gust of air that greeted me when I ventured inside was unexpected, but welcome; it was so cold outside. I blinked under the bright light and realised that there was no one else there except for me. I parked the stroller facing the seats in the waiting area and stooped to take some handwritten papers out of the nappy changing bag that hung from the stroller handles. Then I walked around the side of the pushchair and sat down. 

I quickly skimmed my eyes over the pages just to make sure I had explained everything right. I had written everything down for the MP so that I didn't have to explain it verbally because I struggled to communicate like that. I always had found it easier to write down all that was inside of me.

My eyes skimmed the handwritten pages, nobody had computers in those days or laptops, or printers, definitely not people like me. If there was such a thing as an internet cafe in the year 2000 I had never heard of one.  

I had written how many months I had lived at the hostel; how many other girls had moved in during that time and moved out after being offered permanent council places. Most of them seemed to stay there for 6 months, they all got nice offers too. Houses, new builds, in good locations; however 18 months later I was still stuck in the hostel with no end in sight. 

Shortly the MP came out of a small room and asked me to come inside.The MP took the papers and said that she would have a read and be in touch very soon. 

Almost as soon as I had arrived I was back out on the cold foggy streets. 

Now for the next part you must understand how parallel realities work, How time isn't linear, how the past and present and future are all running simultaneously side by side; like how it is for Sally in Diana Wynn Jones novel ‘The time of the Ghost’. 

You must begin to understand that all the possibilities of every outcome of every action or decision in life, either intentional or unintentional, are played out in parallel timelines by other versions of ourselves in other dimensions that we can’t see, feel, hear or touch. Although they are there, co-existing with our current life scripts in alternative realities to the one that we abide therein. 

Our reality doesn’t really exist until it is observed

If only I had stayed inside for just a little more time I would have continued along quite comfortably upon a new better timeline. A luckier one. The MP would have called the council the next day and I would have got an offer too good to resist, something like a nice house in Deptford, right near to the market and on the carpet and curtains scheme as well!

Instead, time, which always runs side by side with all the other branches of time beyond the limits of our perception of reality, has somehow got mixed up, confused in this unearthly smog. The night was so still, belonging to Nyx, the Goddess and personification of night, the offspring of Chaos; for those who believe. 

To Nyx, that great invisible entity who oversees the night, it could have been hours since I stepped into the Community Centre, although it was less than ten minutes.

So it began that I stepped out of the Community Centre doorway and into the timeline of another version of myself, who unseen to me had also been in the room, waiting to see the MP for the same thing, and it was that Jadine who stepped out into better days. 

I felt the shift, but I could never have known that was the cause of my sudden dread. The stroller suddenly sounded so loud in the stillness of the night and the mist so thick I could barely see the front wheels or the blankets edge. 

Dejeaun was fast asleep as silent as the night. Poor innocent child. I pushed slowly, when suddenly under the dim glow of a streetlight, in the middle of the road somewhere between here and Brockley I saw a man walking towards the direction from whence I came. He was slim, and not too tall, good-looking and I couldn't help but stare. And he stared back, and we passed and the moment passes and he turns and I turn and look back, but then we continue onwards our separate ways. 

In that I saw a flash forward of the future. A future in which if we had stopped and spoken words, if we had exchanged numbers, we would have had some kids, in that house in Deptford. HE wouldn't have treated me badly, there would have been no Linton and no more hard life. It was like a television signal had projected him and a series of holographic images around him and destiny and then just like that, the chance of that life was gone.

I watched until he was out of sight, swallowed back into the fog. I never forgot his face for a long time. Often longing for that which could never have been. Being in love, or so I thought it was called, but always found that in men everything which was so far removed. Anything but that advertisement on the London underground of the white girl and the black guy with the little mixed race kid are living a happy life inside a photograph blown up into poster sized on the tube. 

The next morning, I went across the hall to knock on Kellys door, but she didn’t answer. Later that day I heard voices outside my door. I opened it and saw Kelly and Bianca walking across the hall carrying pizza boxes. They stopped and looked at me. I asked them where they had went and they told me they went to the Pizza Hut buffet in Lewisham Centre and brought back some of the pizza they couldn’t eat. 

I felt upset that they had never thought to ask me, so I scooped up my son from where he was sitting playing on the mat on the floor and went downstairs to see Diana. Diana lived in the room that looked out onto the garden, she opened the door and invited me to come inside. 

There was two guys in the room, one was Diana’s ‘boyfriend’ who they called Homie and the other was Linton Ambursley who used to just hang around and try to hook up with any girl that lived in the hostel. 

I didn’t really like him much at all, although he had spent weeks dialling up the hostel payphone asking for me and turning up outside pressing the buzzer to my door, trying to talk to me through the intercom. I told him to ‘fuck off’ every time. 

They called him Boogie on the streets. He was tall, over six feet and skinny. I didn’t find him attractive at all and his energy was all wrong. At 26 he was a predator and teenage girls were his prey.

The other day I was bored in Kellys room. I had called him from the upstairs payphone. We didn’t talk for long. Kelly commented dryly that 

 “...that was going to be a phonecall I would live to regret”

Next I find out that Diana had also gone to Pizza Hut. I was really pissed off and didn’t even want to ask why no one had thought to ask me. It seemed strange. We always went everywhere together. 

It was suddenly as if I was looking in at them all through a window, everything was supposed to be the same, and for the most part everything was the same, but at the same time everything had also changed. 

The uneasy feeling from the previous night returned. 

My gaze drifted beyond these people who suddenly seemed like strangers. 

I suddenly noticed that through the window, the garden was all overgrown. 

I turned and fled out of the room and the door slammed shut behind me. I ran through the fire door and out into the main foyer by the front door, past the payphone and up the stairs into my room. I put Dejeaun in his cot so I could get my thoughts together. 

I’m breathing heavy and deep, confused, nothing makes sense…I’m fully ‘baffed’ right now 

A few minutes later there's a knock at her door. It was Linton. He pushes past me and said he had 

‘…come to chill…’ 

He asked me what was wrong? 

So I told him that the day before the garden had been freshly mown. 

I realised I was shaking and so he laughs at me and told me that 

‘...I was a crazy girl, that grass never got mowed!’ 

Then he came up close and pulled my hair. 

He told me that he had ways to ease my mind. 

He whispers in my ear “Do you like getting your hair pulled when you have sex?” 

Then he kisses me, and I close my eyes and let him do whatever he wants to do.

3 weeks later a letter arrives from Lewisham Council. They had made me an offer of a 2-bedroom property. Shaking, I go to the office to tell the staff. The staff in that place didn’t care, to be honest they were hardly even there, sometimes weeks could go by and not one staff member showed up for work. 

That was how the lock for the front door was broken for so long. Or how G money and Homie had sawed the payphone off the wall trying to steal the money inside, then built a fire in the back garden that night. Or how there was so many mans dogging down the hostel in and out all hours of the night, taking advantage of vulnerable girls. 

Jenny Smith only came to the hostel most times to sit in the office and make phone calls. She didn't really have much to say other than 

"...how lucky I was, as it was obviously a house and not a flat." 

She said that you could tell from the address. 

The address was what was troubling. It was in Bromley. BR1. It was nowhere near any of the areas that I had put on my list all those months ago in the homeless persons unit in Catford, Rushy Green. 

I had chosen New cross, Deptford, Pepys, Woodpecker, Kender St, Brockly, Forest Hill, Sydenham. She had not chosen; Honor Oak, Downham, Mottingham, Eltham. Those places were so far out, it didn't feel like she was even in the city, where it was safe. There was too much space. Too much sky. And now, here she was, about to be permanently housed so far out on the periphery of Downham that it was considered Bromley. I had never been that far, never out further than the big black cat that sat over the top of the shopping centre sign adjacent to the Catford Towers.