The Corner of Buck and Stucley

We went to Manston, we went to Mitchum, we went to Ramsgate, we went to Canterbury, we went to Cliffsend and Cal walked and I filmed and Cal pointed at all the corners and proselytised their significance.
Many times on our trips I tried to see, really see, but I saw nothing at all. They were only corners. But Cal had a lot to say about corners, both concave and convex.
A corner: where two walls meet. Cal was most interested in bottom corners, the ones that stick out, or, as he described, convex trihedral angles with a vertex at the corner point– although, he had much to say about other types of corners, too.

‘What are we looking at Cal?’
‘A model of the original point of extension into 3D space. Can’t you see what’s radiating off it?’

We were standing on the corner of Ethelbert Road and Dale View Crescent, with Cal, pointing at the floor where two exterior walls of Benson Steel Fabricators met, and me, pointing my camera at the floor where two exterior walls of Benson Steel Fabricators met. We had walked two hours from our place in Pegwell, west along the viking trail, me, a wanderer in aimless movement, Cal, the pilgrim, in a direct and purposeful path.

Cal would later show me his notebook, pointing with his thumbnail to a passage about that moment.
Like snuffling bassets hounds, inhaling and decoding piss dashed messages, we too opened our nostrils about the Ethelbert/Dale vertex to learn the terrible tales of this neighbourhood – steroid abuse, cannabis puffing, unresolved childhood trauma manifested and calcified within stoney-rough urine.
I don’t remember seeing that. Looking back at the footage all I see is a corner.

I first met Cal on a street corner. This was in the late 70’s when Camden streets, soggy in smack and scratch-throat singers, heaved with unrealised dreams and doped out intellectuals.
The sobered normals thought we were disgusting but the feeling was mutual. In North London gutters there we were, the last bastion of bohemes still itching for the sublime, still growing our hair out and quoting Engels. We were all just characters in a Burroughs-esque play.
Before Cal was Cal, he was the frump in a parka on the corner of Buck and Stucley Place, arguing with his watch. He was waiting for Diesel too but predictably Diesel was late. Diesel was always late. Dope-king Diesel, I swear, he made you wait to sweeten that first rush of blood so it felt like God was sucking your dick. I approached Cal and he saw me and sort of jumped a little bit thinking maybe I was a copper but then his eyes fell to my shoes and he saw them talking, and then I felt his eyes run me up, up my trouser legs, ripped on the right knee, to my flies (the zipper was broke, even when I bought them), then my belt, made of shoelace.
He’s late. Again. Cal’s first words to me.
He’s always late.
Cal thrusted his watch face at me. Forty-five fucking minutes.
That’s why I don’t wear a watch. What’s the point?
Cal scrunched his face up and his thick glasses fell down his crooked nose. I thought I was about to get an ear full about time keeping, about chronological necessity, but instead, Cal, with his big wonky teeth undid the leather strap, threw his watch onto the floor and stamped the face crunch with his hiking boot.
I’m Cal, he then said. That was freeing. Thank you. He shook my hand profusely and it was sweaty and impatient just like mine. After Diesel finally came on his rusty red chopper we found a place by the lock and shared needles.

The next time I met Cal was at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting on Primose Hill. AIDS was rife at this point and really put a downer on things. Everything had changed. That’s the thing I miss most about the smack days. The camaraderie. Back then, in Camden town, you could plonk yourself in a doorway and with a belt strapped to your arm, argue Hume’s position on memory and be met with Nietzsche’s retort. At 3am, you could find, behind the big Sainsbury’s, once all the punters had been kicked out of the music venues, a poetry recital lamenting the dope drought of ’79. But after AIDS it all became suspicious, accusatory. People started smoking crack instead and this rotted tooth and brain alike. It got all sordid, the streets manic, everyone consumed with a rabid presentism.
Even after - what was it, five, six years? - Cal looked exactly the same. Wore the same hiking boots, the same turtle shell glasses. His hair was slightly greyer, his curly strands the only thing that counted time. It was here I first heard him ramble on about corners.

Thanks so much for sharing your story, Isabell. Here, take a tissue. Cal, would you like to go next?
Yes Brian, I would. You see, I’ve been gathering information – He stood up and pulled out his pocket a piece of paper he unfolded for what seemed like ten minutes. He laid out this map of Camden on the floor. It was pocked with red circles like the map itself had AIDS. Listen up everyone. Stay away from these corners. I’ve cross-referenced this disease with these locations. These corners, the concave ones, if you shoot up there you’re thirteen times more likely to get the sickness. Something to do with how atoms behave within trihedral angles. Concave corners attract detritus, have you noticed? Old dead leaves gather in them, even when there’s no trees around? Old plastic bottles, torn up crisp packets. Why? You see, if you use here you attract the scum–
Cal, not again, please, you’re upsetting people.
What? Why?
We’ve spoken about this. Maybe we shouldn’t speculate on these matters. But I am glad you’ve found something to do with your time.
Are you shutting me down? What happened to you people? He slung his pointed finger around the circle. This is deep work I’ve done here. You lot don’t care though do you? Fucking junkies. He stormed out. I followed him and found him at the bus stop rolling baccy in a liquorice Rizla.
Do you remember me? I said.
Of course. The corner of Buck and Stucley. He said this without a hint of nostalgia, like, of course he remembered, who did I think I was to think he wouldn’t?
Tell me about those corners, I said and that’s how we became best friends.

We both found our own little ways of dealing with sober life. We would walk until our shins splintered. Cal had a habit of steaming ahead and lost me so many times we had to agree, look, if we can’t find each other, let’s meet back where we first met, the corner of Buck and Stucley, be there at midday. So that’s what we did.
Whenever I asked Cal how his obsession with corners began he gave a different answer every time. I was born in a cornershop, flopped out my mum onto the middle of the cold aisle, by the milk. I used to be freemason – corners focus the One’s energy, didn’t you know? In a past life I was a dog. Corners are like message boards for dogs, I remember sniffing one was like reading the news.
He would say this with his typical toothy smile, and I would say you’re lying and then his face would scrunch up and his glasses would fall down his nose as they always did when Cal got incredulous.
What about you? What’s your story? he asked me, only once.
I don’t have one, I said, but in my head I was thinking, You’re my story, Cal.

Whenever I want to be with Cal again I take one of my cassettes down off the shelf and let it remember for me. Here’s one, named When Cal Saved My Life.

I guess I must have relapsed. The tape begins with the unfamiliar picture of myself, my face gaunt and green eyes blinking slow, laying in a hospital bed. And then Cal’s voice loud behind the screen This is so you can remember how much of a fucking idiot you are, Nick. Never again, alright, never again. We’re going to fix you up, mate, just follow me, all you need to do is follow me. That was the mantra for the following adventure. Follow me mate, all you need to do is follow me.
He took me to his house and fit me into a pair of his hiking boots. My brain was like a raisin. Everything was grey, even my tongue, the taste of it was grey. I was only in there for a minute or two, but I remember how all the corners were corniced round, there wasn’t a single right angle to be seen. He lived with his mum who was in the kitchen the whole time, puckered face over steam. She tried to close the door on us but he must have sanded the edges of his doors. He caulked up the frames. Even his books were cut, rounded things, like pebbles smoothed by changing tides, and everything was in boxes too except the corners of the boxes were taped up loads to remove the angles.
Come on mate, we’re going.
Then the footage is of Cal walking and the sound is of traffic and my own heavy breath as we crossed the M25 into the Kentish edge-lands. After Dartford the land spreads marshy, and the river booms with an opening mouth. It gurgles, it rushes, it sloshes, calm to the eye but rushing really, out to sea – and then onward we went, follow me mate, striding and stumbling, wild men we felt like, adventuring from City to sea, from frothed up OD mouth to dry, hiking mouth, blood in my throat just follow me mate. Stretch after stretch, past the castles of Rochester where the Normans rested before their victorious charge, and then the Medway and the Chatham docks that supplied the capture of the globe. We slept in bus shelters, in bird watching dug outs, we stole food out of Co-op bins and apples from the orchards near Tenterden, where the air smells like Bramley’s seedling. Cal loved it out in the open, loved mother natures curves, loved the fact She knew right angles were demonic. He was suspicious of the horizon though, and prayed the line wasn’t an edge, that out there the earth didn’t feint and juke and trap us all within a celestial corner of the universe. With this I was silent behind the camera as I my cells screamed for smack.
We made it to Ramsgate after four days walk and here Cal knew of some prime corners. Van Gogh pissed on this corner, did you know that? I laughed because I imagined the piss coming out in pointillism and it hurt, and Cal said, There you go, first time I heard you laugh in a long time.

Ramsgate was cheap to be poor so we ended up moving there together into a rotting Victorian doss house – but we loved our Dickensian lives, and we loved how Dicken’s actually used to live down the road and we imagined we were the characters in Dickens’ imagination, it was us he was thinking of when he sat at his crooked spruce desk – that’s how imagination works, Cal said, memories of the future not yet reached, mixed in with your past to create something now, in the present. But he was wrong.
Cal lived in these micro-worlds. It was as if the universe were only corners and everything in between were non-places, not for stopping, not for living – motorway-places, only to move through, only to get somewhere.
In my years with Cal, he taught me to find the deeper meaning, to transcend the skinny existence of the inward-looking man, by believing in the significance of your imagination. I don’t think he respected my habit of filming everything. It was too objective. He thought Hume was an idiot. You got to forget, that’s the crux of it, it’s the act of creative forgetting that truly builds character, that gives form and edge to your self. Not remembering, why would you want to remember everything?

At the time I shrugged my shoulders, but now I look back, my answer is simple. I want to remember because I can’t. And with some semantic algebra I can surmise he had wanted to forget because he couldn’t. He dug corners into his mind to push out the lingering stuff which led him to the needle. It worked. For a while, anyways. Ramsgate wasn’t a sober place. Cal started walking alone. I’d be left in the doss house, organising my tapes which I kept under the bed because Cal didn’t like their squareness. I bought him a birthday card one year, stupidly, and he immediately tore it up, no thanks or nothing. I would wait for him at home, running all my tapes, from start to finish, as he walked and strode. He’d come back, notebooks filled with manic scribble. He kept them strewn across the flat because stacks of them draw right angles. It became insufferable. One day I’d had enough. He’d been gone for a day and a night and we had nothing to eat or drink, we had tea bags but no kettle, Cal did say he’d go shopping for us, but it was twenty hours he was gone and I got pissed off. I took a red marker and drew squares all over the house, I painted corners above his bed like they were demonic sigils and when he finally came home, to a big red SQUARE on the floor like a bloody welcome mat, he took one look at me, glasses fell down his nose, and before I could say my piece - how worried I was, how difficult living became without someone there to live it for me – he slammed the door shut.
I never saw him again, not in person anyways. I’ve got the newspaper clipping of his face on my bathroom mirror, still to this day. Last seen on the corner of King Street and Royal Road. I went looking for him, of course. Round every corner. Every corner I thought I’d see him, every corner I turned maybe this one, maybe this one, I was kidding myself obviously, but there was something in the act of doing it, a feeling in my legs that felt like I was walking in Cal’s footsteps. A funeral was held for him a year later, when the authorities gave up. I was in contact with what I thought was his mum by this time and she had this big Cypriot funeral with black suits and black wailing by women who didn’t know him, they just thought death was sad, any death. It was when I said, I’m sorry, no one should have to bury their son, that the women told me what Id always wanted to know.

When Cal was five, the year they say memories start to stick, he lost his mum, not ‘lost’ like she died – although they presumed so after a year and half – no, he lost her on a walk. They lived in Palmer’s Green and I never knew this but he was Cypriot, his Mum was anyways, and they moved into North London because they couldn’t even buy bread on their little island – anyways they were out for a walk and, the way his aunt told it, he let go of her hand and that was it, poof, she was gone. Cal went looking for her round the laddered, gridded streets, short streets, loads of corners in that area, and every corner he’d turn he’d thought she’d be there, and he kept running and hoping, every time he turned, every corner was a moment of hope, every corner had the image of his mum just out of sight, if only the corner wasn’t there, if only it was rounded and gave a little more sight, then maybe, maybe he wouldn’t have lost her.
Cal’s dad was Turkish, his aunt said, of course she blamed them.
I don’t know why he never told me, I said to her.
He never spoke about it. As he grew up, he acted like he didn’t even remember it. He called me Mum, like she never existed.

Sometimes I follow the routes Cal used to take me on and I stop at every corner and look, and try to see, really see, but I don’t see what Cal saw, instead I see him, see him in my memory but it’s proper real, not a wispy memory, the only thing that makes it not real is the camera doesn’t pick it up.

I’m about to leave London, to head back to the coast, to blue sky thinking, to my doss house that’s now above an art gallery. I check the time, it’s now midday, but I think, fuck it, why not, so I make my way to Camden and it’s all toffies and posh kids and teenagers with fake stretchers in their ears. There’s still the smack heads, of course, and I have to stop myself from feeling high and mighty - maybe they’re arguing Hume and Nietszche, but they’re not, they got phones now, and I see in between nodding off they’re just scrolling, numb on numb.
I make it to the corner of Buck and Stucley and think I see in the little screen the frump and frizz of Cal’s siloutte but the battery on my JVC dies so I fold it back into its case and as I look up I see Cal tapping his wrist, his bald hairy wrist and I hear, Forty-five fucking minutes.