Rushford Road (1)

For continuity purposes, I should point out that we saw this place on the same morning as Tressillian Crescent and Montacute Road.   So the fiasco at the end of the previous post has yet to happen.

Rushford Road is a funny little street in the Crofton Park area of Brockley, where the roads generally run northish to southish.  It’s one of the few routes that cut between its longer neighbours Manwood Road and Bexhill Road.  It is also strangely bleak.  A short street, with a hump in the middle as the road mounts a ridge and drops down either side yet offers limited views, as though, despite what logic tells you, the houses are in some way shorter.  Maybe it was just the light that winter morning, although we hadn’t noticed it at the other properties, but there was a smoky grey misery hanging over the street. 

Which was a shame, when I’d lived on Salehurst Road I’d really liked living down that end.  It always felt like I was in the middle of everything, so much more surrounded by SE4 that the more highly rated conservation area which lurks on the northern reaches.  You were close to Mr Lawrence’sWine Bar, Jam Circus, the Brockley Jack – basically I just liked having a range of options of somewhere to go for a drink.  The rows of two or three bedroom two storey terrace houses built at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries felt more realistic to me; they were somewhere I could believe that we’d end up rather than the fantasy of a four storey Georgian mansion.

Once again the agent failed to materialise making me begin to wonder whether it was our fault.  Did we exude the scent of people who weren’t serious, or at the very least didn’t have that much money to spend?  The nice family who lived there showed us around anyway which, while very friendly of them, made it harder for us to have a frank conversation.  It’s not as though we intended to be rude, but that’s how taste works: everything we were likely to recoil at, they would have loved.

1990:  Ali sat in an old deckchair on the concrete slabs and sipped a can of Skol.  The three o’clock sun felt soft on his neck.  A couple of gardens up, the old chap, the Portuguese fella, tended to his garden, snipping off flower heads and dropping them into a plastic sack.  Ali had never understood why people did that.  Sure, he got that it would make them grow afresh, but why cull back something still alive?  Out in the street, over the tops of the houses, he could hear Jimmy Morris and his mate bunking off school again, yelling and shouting at each other about bands and other rubbish that wasn’t really important.

Ali took a sip of his lager.  It was beginning to go warm, but he had to make it last.  He couldn’t afford many more.  A brief breeze caught his newspaper and he had to reach out and grab it, stuffing it under his chair.  He wasn’t sure why he bothered.  There wasn’t anything in it, just more empty classified pages.  It wasn’t as though there were any jobs to apply for. 

Ali felt sorry for Jimmy and the wakeup call he was going to get when school finished.  Ali was nearly twenty and the only work he’d had was casual, cash in hand stuff.  He should have tried harder, concentrated more.  He should have been like Jimmy’s sister, Gemma.  Got himself onto some sort of vocational course.  She always had been smart, now she was a nurse over at King’s.  He heard that she was doing well for herself while he, he just sat in his Mum and Dad’s garden wishing there was  something else to do.

His Dad had blamed Thatcher, of course.  That was what everyone did, wasn’t it?  ‘Economic miracle?  Not round here, son.  S’alright for the city workers.  Sodding yuppies.  Real jobs for real people?  Nah.’

It wasn’t that Ali didn’t agree, but she’d been gone for a year and there was still no change.  He didn’t hate the yuppies with their flash cars, smart suits and bulging wallets.  He was jealous of them.  He was young and he wanted some of the high life too instead all he had was a garden and a steadily warming can of cheap lager.  He wanted more to live than south east London; at least he was honest about it. 

I could guess at what my girlfriend was thinking: that compared to the two places we’d seen that morning already the rooms were very small.  The ceilings seemed lower thanthey really were. I talked up how we could knock the living and dining room through into one and she nodded, but perhaps a little unenthusiastically.  I could see her point.  I too was geeing myself up, but it was hard.  I’d fallen hard for Montacute Road’s hall, but also it was difficult to see beyond the decor and clutter already installed.  Heavy dark wood panelling in the dining room, so much greenery in the living room it was hard to move, fluorescent pink walls and white lace trims in the front bedroom and in every single room, even the empty ones, a television switched on and broadcasting a different channel creating a cacophony of noise that cluttered over itself.  A background soundtrack playing out multiple narratives all at the same time; it was like having the whole damn city in there with us.

The small concrete yard offered at least some outdoor space if not much option for doing any proper gardening.  The strange clay faces affixed to the wall at the end of the neighbour’s garden were a little disconcerting.  Strange devils in bright reds and sea blues leered down at us threateningly.  Come on, they seemed to be growling with forked tongues that lolled long and heavy across swollen luminous lips.  Say something about us, reel away from the sight of us.  Go on.  We dare you.