The following is a party political broadcast.
I am a bog body and I am ten thousand years old. I am not the man who once lived inside this black and brittle skin, who once felt the wind; I do not know his name. This shrivelled head, this gasping face, these limbs—they have been mine for so much longer than they were ever his. These arms are held tight against the chest, palms out: maybe, in his last moments, he was trying to protect himself. If he was, he didn’t succeed; they threw him into the lifeless, lightless acid fen where I was born. Slowly, as the unseen sun wheeled above me, I pickled into being. The seas waxed over the land until this place was made an island but I remained. New men came, from across the new seas, with pale skin and ploughs for churning up the soil but I remained. And other men followed them; they rode on the backs of horses and killed the farmers wherever they could. I watched through lidless eyes, sunk in my throne of peat, and remained. Then it became cold again; the bogwater drained into the sea, and turf stopped up my sky. More strangers arrived, faster and faster, but I could only dimly hear their thumping about on the surface. The scrape of sawing trees. The faint tap-tapping of battle. Centuries were nothing to me until you started to come to my world, the earthworld, until you dug. First you ploughed out your canal and the loam shuddered wetly about me. Then you dug again, so close you nearly tore me out of my bed. You threaded your holes under the swamp of my wanderings, all coiled like the hard guts inside my skin. I am packed with unrotting slime but your holes you filled with a new violence of noise. Churning and roaring, clanking, the hiss and whistle, the screech of steel, the blurry mouthness of words. I had never heard words. And then, one fantastic day, the pounding above was so loud, like the footsteps of mountains, blasts ringing the entire world like a bell, that the tiniest crack opened in the concrete and my world was scorched with light.
It’s still there. There’s a cracked tile on Plaform 2 at Camden Town Station, just above one of the benches, and behind that cracked tile is me. I have been watching you for nearly eighty years.
I have learned what I can about the last four millennia by reading over your shoulders. I never could recognise faces or decipher the mush of your spoken language, but slowly I taught myself to read. From guidebooks and the Evening Standard I learned that you have built a city over the bogs of my gestation and it is called London. I know much now. I know what's on TV and what's on at the West End; I know which celebs have been nabbed in a secret sex romp and which thugs have been sentenced to jail; I know that the fat cats are in the City, the sleazy pols in Westminster, the sick drug-crazed thugs are in Newham, and the thirty-something professionals who have just started to fully realise their earning potential are sent as punishment to Clapham, where everyone else laughs at them. I know that you want your children to be strong, which is why they are made to duel each other with knives. I know how much a pint costs now. I know there is a river called the Thames, and I have seen pictures of the massive sea-monster that lives in this river, its terrible jaws that swing open and shut as it heaves itself antler-studded out of the wallow, and I know this monster is called Towerbridge.
There are still some things I do not understand. I do not know why you must abandon your London of the sunlight every day and come down here, to my dark wet earthworld. You come here and scurry and rush about, you cram yourselves into a sliding box, the box moves away, then it returns, you get off the box, you crowd back on. What does it achieve? For a while I thought the sun—or, as you call it, the Scorcher—had become dangerous to you; the first of you I saw were hiding underground. But I have seen pictures of you walking around in your London of the winds: it’s not fear that sends you down here. I am beginning to believe that it’s me. You sink into the soil long before your time in worship of me, to be like me, unmoving, buried in loamy darkness, hurtled along by the groaning of the spheres.
The other mystery is how you are ruled. I know that London has three chieftains: a King, a Pm, and a Mayor. For a while I believed that the Kings ruled over the skies, the Pm governed the earth, and the Mayor was lord of the waters. This was elegant but seems untrue; maybe the truth is not elegant. I know the line of Kings is passed from father to son; your present King is called King Charles. Once there was a terrible King, mighty in vengeance, who thundered above the world; his name was King Hitler. (He is also called the Germans, which I know to be a personal title, as in King William the Conqueror and Queen Dora the Explorer.) His son and successor was humble and kind, but always obedient to his Father; his name was King Jesus. Of the Pms it’s harder to speculate. I understand that the most hated person in London is made Pm, to be jeered and despised for a short clutch of years. Over this time he is ritually mutilated, his limbs are slowly hacked away; finally, when he is on his last legs, the Pm is beheaded with an axe.
What interest me most are the Mayors. For a long time there were no Mayors, now there have been three. The first Mayor was a drunken madman with fiery red skin whose passion was the breeding of newts. He wanted to rid the world of rich men on behalf of the poor, so he had them all locked up in glass towers. The second was a demon-man: outwardly warm and charming, he was later revealed to be a cruel deceiver governed only by the hunger for power, and in their outrage the people condemned him to the Pmage. The third and current Mayor is, as far as I can tell, the fanatical holy warrior of an alien god, determined to put the entire population of London to the knife and graze his horses among the ruins. The people support him. This is also a mystery.
At first I thought that this London must be a very interesting place, to have produced such strange and cruel Mayors, and all of them strange and cruel in such different ways. But as I continued to sit motionless and watch, I found another idea slowly growing in my mind. I watched you as you came and stood before the crack in the wall, and shoved your way into the sliding boxes, and returned, and shoved your way out of the sliding boxes, and then repeated the whole process again. I have read that you come in many different kinds—bosses, boffins, thugs, pervs, tykes, fat cats, mums, Prem aces, loonies, celebs—but all I see are the same shoving, shuffling bodies and puffy, defeated faces. You all wear the same clothes. The same sludge of particulates and pigeonshit coats your lungs. Being ruled by these three bizarre Mayors didn't change a thing. London, I understood, is actually a very boring city, perhaps the most boring city there is. An ocean of tedium, in which anything interesting dissolves like a clod of earth.
All I can see are your activities in the earthworld, but the rest is not hard to guess. After a long day of plodding and crowding underground, you return to the surface to plod and crowd under the low umbrella of night. This is what you do, this is the chief activity of your culture: you walk into various rooms and then out again. You plod and crowd into small confined feedlots decorated like pubs. You plod and crowd into supermarkets where they pipe royalty-free pop music between the aisles. Plod and crowd into immersive art experiences, plod and crowd along the boarded-up carcass of Oxford Street, plod and crowd into the dim arches under a bridge, to eat small plates or shoot up junk. Finally you plod and crowd into your homes, eight or nine to a bed, and sleep.
Sometimes, when the lights clunk off and the people depart, I’m aware of the electrical buzz that permeates my earthworld. Flows of power and information in glass and copper wires, all of it buzzing in my native language, which is the silent language of things. Then stranger knowledges zip briefly across the surface of my skin. In those moments I imagine I can see London as King Hitler the Germans must have seen it, on his cherub-lofted chariot in the clouds. A swathe of grey in the greenlands, like the heap of ashes where a victim has been burned. Across its mass are the high streets. Bone-fragments. Chipped terracotta above, plastic-wrapped below, each scored with a dead rhythm of names. Betfred, Sainsbury’s, Gregg’s. Betfred, Sainsbury’s, Gregg’s. Costa, Poundland, Pret a Manger, Betfred, Sainsbury’s, Gregg’s. Or an underrubble, a detritus of vape shops, phone repair, scratchcards, cigs. Sometimes in these reveries I glimpse a Wenzels the Baker and my mummified heart seizes at the name of this half-forgotten King. Strange to think I once imagined your tunnels and sliding boxes might be a way of moving around the city, that these were the mysterious trains I’d read about. Why would you ever need to move around, when every part of London has the same plane trees, the same gum gone to dark circles on the stones? Even if you did travel—if you went to Hornsey, or Hither Green, or Perivale, or Tooting Bec—you’d soon find a familiar pattern of shops, and then a street that looks suspiciously like your own, and a house with the same number as the one you live in, and a person answering the door who doesn’t wear exactly the same face as yours, but something very, very close.
There is a hollowness in this city. It starts here and rises up through the clay. Americans keep coming to London and complaining that there’s no good Mexican food; then the Londoners get upset and reply that their country doesn’t share a border with Mexico. But ten thousand Mexicans live in London, more than enough to support a few good cheap taquerias—it’s just that the Mexicans all have to keep plodding and crowding, locked in the grey drudgework of entering and exiting sliding boxes for no reason, because it takes so much work just to break even, and trying anything else means running the risk of ruin. So all the Mexican food is sold by venture capitalists and American chains instead of the actual Mexicans who live here, and none of it is good. This is your sickness. It’s everywhere. This place has substituted asset price inflation for actual growth. They’ll charge you four figures a month to live in a one-room flat with a hotplate above the toilet bowl and the toilet bowl directly next to the bed. And you’ll pay it, to live in London. But what is London? Museums; wreckage; graves. The only people who still have the space and the air for the activity proper to human life, which is to build new stuff out of the materials of the world, are plodding, balding mediocrities who went to private school. So the city plods and balds in their image, and then they say that London is full of creative energy, that this is the cultural capital of the world. But what creation? What culture? Where’s the literary scene? Where’s the exciting new generation of artists? It’s all just former industrial spaces packed with advertising agencies and chain ramen shops. The last genuinely new and organic cultural movement to have come out of London was grime, and the Eskimo riddim was produced literally a quarter of a fucking century ago. This city is dead.
Which is why I am standing to be the next Mayor of London.
I shouldn’t have to tell you why I am obviously the most qualified candidate for the job. My opponents have settled on London like flies, pausing here for a few thousand weeks, slurping at its slime. But I have been in London, deep in London, cradled in its fundament, for ten thousand years. I have been in London longer than London itself. In fact, I think—it is hard to be certain, but I think—that you have built this city in unknowing remembrance of me. Think about your city and what it means, really stop and think, and you will agree that it is only right for London to be ruled by a corpse.
I understand this place, better than any of the people who live in it. My rival candidates all promise to make London a better and more vibrant place in which to live. They promise more homes, more jobs, more buses, more nightlife, less noise, less homelessness, less pollution, less crime. But I know, and you know, that London does not want to live. After thousands of years, your city is finally returning back to what it was. This sterile accretion: this lifeless, lightless brown-water bog. An entire world is mingled here, materials from every country on the planet—and all of it plunged into these acid peat waters where nothing changes, nothing decays, nothing decomposes to bloom with new life, but only piles on itself in stagnant sediments of silt. Only I can deliver London its future. The planetary mire. One all-consuming swamp.
As your Mayor, I will dig more holes under the city. More platforms. More sliding boxes. Even if I still don’t understand what any of it is for, I pledge to treat this ritual with the utmost respect. The only change is that I will remove the seats from the sliding boxes, which are unsightly and take up room. Old people and pregnant women can shove like everyone else.
As your Mayor, I will scrap Ulez, because every swamp needs its miasma. But you do not need to be driving around. The M25 will remain with its exits sealed off, so the cars can spin from service station to service station in both directions around my empire, forever. All other roads will be destroyed. I will tear up the tarmac and and plant reeds and bogwort there. Then I will sow these marshes with cars: face in the sludge, arse upwards, kept running until they rust. Deformed old men in mud-cracked tunics will be hired to dance between them, topping up their tanks with petrol from a goatskin flask.
As your Mayor, I will vastly increase the footage of municipal red tape. I will introduce a baffling new array of forms and licences. I will move City Hall out of its current location in Newham and distribute it evenly across the city. Civic government will be scattered in the corners of abandoned cement plants, in leaky iron rafts on the river, in the hollows of trees. All communication between departments will be carried by eight-year-old boys with protruding ribs and cruel, flinty eyes.
As your Mayor, I will not build any new council housing. I will not build anything new at all. Instead I will devote myself to tearing down the hideous modern buildings that have blighted London for too long, and return the city to its former splendour. All those featureless, festering high-rise estates, with their harsh concrete and ugly, angular shapes: gone. The gaudy eyesore of a Parliament by the river, with its soulless mechanical clock: gone. The red pimple of a concert hall: popped. The Wrens and Hawksmoors, with their contrived Italianate domes and columns, plastered over the ruins of the Great Fire by a cabal of smug planners, blanketing London in this artificial, international style: I will burn them all down. I will tip over Stonehenge. You will go back to living in hovels made from bundles of damp straw. With the reduction in housing stock, rents will inevitably rise. If you can’t scrounge up the cash, landlords will be permitted to collect rent in the form of agricultural produce or newborn children.
As your Mayor, I will tackle knife crime by dulling all the knives.
This might not be the London you want, but it is the London that London wants. When you vote tomorrow, do it for your city. I know my name is not on any of the ballots. I have no name. But if enough of you write a line through all the boxes and scrawl the words BOG BODY over the sheet, if you rise in your millions to demand that London be ruled by a perfectly preserved mesolithic corpse, you will not be ignored. In return, I will keep London boring. I, the unfestering one, will be the tutelary spirit of your tedium. I will be with you in your email job. I will be with you on your lonely evenings, as you spend an hour flicking through the options on Netflix and end up not watching anything at all. I will be with you on your silent morning stomp across the bridge. I will be with you, because all your lives you have been with me.