By Phoebe Thomson.
Iphgenia Baal, Man Hating Psycho (Influx Press, 2021)
Reading Iphgenia Baal’s ‘Taylor Wimpey ‘99’ Horror’ – a story in Iphgenia Baal’s collection Man Hating Psycho – is like walking past the shiny hoarding of a new development and remembering the flats that were there before. It’s like opening Rightmove.com and then closing it again when you see the prices. There is a grim humour in her drumbeat list of ‘horrors’: ‘Commerce-meets-culture horror’, ‘Sleek brand-conscious horror’, ‘Ambitious horror’. With every sentence of slick property copy, and with each echo of ‘horror’, the corporate dread creeps closer.
Baal’s London is sprawling and specific, digital and physical. Her London is mediated not only in moving through its streets – which she does with a precision and a feel for London’s many faces – but also in navigating the city digitally, particularly through cell phones. In ‘Pain in the Neck’, for instance, her narrator climbs onto rooftops and roves on Google Streetview, ‘clawing at the screen, trying to zoom in to see the upstairs windows’. Her London is lived online and is also decidedly concrete: boxes are heavy to move and bash her legs; flat-pack shelves disintegrate. Even clambering out onto a rooftop into London’s ‘dark neon sky’ leaves her with the painful crunch of a cricked neck.
The narrator in ‘Married to the Streets’ has lived many London lives. She has visited Burley Fisher bookshop, the British Museum, and the Leicester Square Theatre. She’s snuck onto the tube, spent weekends in Kings’ Cross megaclubs, slept on Bloomsbury rooftops, been a member of five local libraries, and watched as ‘gentrification started to compost the city, whole estates left to rot before being felled one by one’. She is angry with London, loves London, feels known by London. But, in the lead-up to a journey to Los Angeles, she realises the London she ‘loved’ is ‘gone’.
And yet, while she is in LA, the Grenfell Tower Fire happens. And although she ‘desperately trie[s] to avoid looking directly at the fire itself’, the narrator cannot look away from the suffering. She watches live feeds and scrutinises the city in the background. She scrolls Twitter and reads the news, becoming furious with the ‘rottenness that not only directly caused the fire […] but was still at play ensuring there would never be any truth, never be any justice.’
In the aftermath of the tragedy, Baal’s narrator navigates the curiously lonely grief that comes from watching other people’s pain from far away. Her city has become distant, digital; something that she can watch but not participate in.
On the narrator’s return to London, she is jolted back into its physicality. Her housing is insecure, and although she consciously avoids the site of the fire, she is returned to it by the Notting Hill Carnival. She and her sister stand together, seeing that ‘[t]he light was not the sun reflecting off windows, it was the sun shining right through the building from the other side. Every blasted-out window, every burnt out floor, bursting with light. Aside from basic concrete and metal structure, there was nothing left.’ The narrator and her sister stand close together as they stare at the ‘burnt out floor[s]’, crying. It’s not ‘like in the photos’. Holding hands, in silence, they walk into the carnival. And it is there, in the crowd, with the ‘first baseline of the weekend’ that her London is returned to her: ’unchanged, untouched, unrivalled, brimful of crims, a poltergeist at every corner.’
Her final story, ‘Victim Blaming’, ends with a meditation on chance, violence, and the unlikeliness of existence. Hemmed in by the walls of a police cell, the narrator looks to herself, and the precise and wild unlikeliness of her own life. Without the violence that her ancestors endured, her parents would never have met each other, and ‘there wouldn’t be me. I wouldn’t exist. All there would be instead was a couple of weirdoes rolling round Ukraine or Russia or Angola or Sierra Leone or Ghana or The Gambia or Senegal or maybe even Indonesia, who had eyes or a temperament or a physique or preferences or talents or tastes vaguely similar to mine.’ In these possible other-selves, Baal is bluntly honest about the violence of history, of the path to this unlikely present.
This city, this self, they might always have been otherwise. But they are, heavily and exactly as they are, and so Baal attends to them, precisely, in her writing. This precise London is the London of Grenfell, the London of ‘Taylor Wimpey ‘99’ Horror’, the London of the British Museum. It is a place of flurrying Whatsapps, of the ‘roaring whoosh’ of trains, of ‘ugly dickheads and mannerless misogynists and racist cab drivers and middle-class narcissists and […] armchair anarchists and rapey left wingers’. This is a city where your ‘mood’, and your phone and your pain are enmeshed; a kabelsalat, a cloud, a thousand darting datapoints. Baal writes abundantly, conjures an entire internet of happenstance, a thousand twists of fate. ‘There are myriad, shoulda, woulda, could bes,’ her narrator muses in ‘Married to the Streets’, ‘but one thing I’m certain of is that I wouldn’t have turned out like this.’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Phoebe Thomson (she/her) is from South London. Her writing has appeared in Best Small Fictions 2021, Litro Online, It’s Freezing in LA!, Brixton Review of Books, Lunate and Short Fiction. In 2020 she completed an MA at Goldsmiths in Creative & Life Writing, through the Isaac Arthur Green Scholarship.
