The Sanctuary of Soho Square

It was December and Christmas had spilt into central London. Streets were adorned with festive lights and illuminated adverts hung across roads, casting patterns of colour upon wet pavements as Xanthe walked down Charing Cross Road.

She passed a loud pub with karaoke shaking the windows, a gaudy casino arcade, a falafel house sandwiched between two bookshops and a well-lit clothes store before heading off the main road, away from the crowds. She drifted down a side street as a couple of hurried shoppers carrying oversized bags overtook her. She watched them stride into the distance through an archway that marked the boundary of Soho. Someone had scrawled “FREE THE SLUMS” above it in spray paint and trails of white dye had run down the brickwork and pooled onto the pavement.

She weaved around strolling Soho couples holding hands and bustling, sporadic crowds of Thursday night drinkers that congregated outside pubs to smoke and talk loudly. Xanthe pitied them, trapped in a squawking world of empty social gestures and meaningless chatter that she had recoiled from long ago.

She sped past each group she encountered, snaking through the cramped, streets, damp and full of noise, to arrive at an oasis of calm in Soho Square. She found a park bench and sat.

Her walk had lasted about forty minutes, covering the meandering miles that began at her home in Mayfair. It had little purpose, the walk, other than to escape the all-consuming energy of her matriarchal mother. The December air was bitterly cold when she departed but she kept moving, and warmth soon set in.

The moment she sat down in the square, the icy wind of winter became familiar once more. She clasped the collar of her thin, black coat that hugged her skeletal frame and pulled it over her face.

She’d been here before. Soho Square in the winter was a sanctuary of quiet. On the opposite side of the square she noticed a diner on wheels had been dragged in, its tow-bar rudely jutting out the front, bluntly pointing to a billboard that read “Americana Diner Now Open 24/7”. It was a long, silver bullet-shaped diner, with a low ceiling and an orange glow emanating from oblong windows. It was half full at best. She didn’t much mind it being there, anyone who entered the square was being sucked into the diner, like a vortex.

On inspection, there was one other person in the square with her. A man in a denim jacket with poodle hair sat on a bench in the distance, smoking. She took special notice of him because, like her, he looked like he had nowhere to go. No one sat outside in this weather with somewhere to go. Perhaps he’d left the diner for a cigarette? He was as inadequately dressed as she was and it made her smile. It was an unfamiliar feeling. Xanthe watched as the man blew smoke rings into the air and kept patting down the curls of his unruly hairdo.

Watching him made her crave for a cigarette, but she found it troublesome to talk to anyone, let alone interrupt a stranger in his private meditations to ask for something.

She also had no money on her. She never did. The irony did not escape her. Her family, so rich and ostentatious, yet here she was, with forever empty pockets and nothing more to her name than a room in a show home and a well-read book collection. And her madness.

Mad. She shouldn’t use that word, she had been told. But maddening she found it. Mad. Mad. Mad. Multifaceted meanings of a tiny word, all of them applicable here. She was angry mad, frustrated mad, mad mad. It became a meaningless word after a while, like anything repeated too much, even one’s own name. This made her think of her younger sister Lana when she was a baby, constantly repeating her own name like a chant. “Lanananananana” her sister would gurgle over and over in a rhythmic style.

Lana. Not mad. Her mother, definitely mad. Her father, he must be mad to put up with her mother; no sane man could stand so close to such a destructive force without succumbing to madness. The drinkers congregating outside the pubs, mad. The shoppers consuming like good citizens, mad. The eight or ten people crammed into a portable diner, mad. Herself; mad. Maddening madness all around her.

The poodle-haired man on the bench across the square finished his cigarette and ground the butt into the tarmac under his cowboy boot and immediately lit another. Xanthe’s craving grew. She was a relentless addict. Tobacco was merely the most pedestrian of her addictions. Her addiction to cigarettes was as old and familiar as her name. She couldn’t remember when she didn’t smoke. Then again, she couldn’t remember much. Her brain didn’t have a filing system like normal brains, hers was just run on impulse.

Her self-coined madness – though the doctors never used that word – manifested itself in the form of a multitude of different impulses. She carried these around with her, like bricks on her back. Put together these bricks and they made up the whole she became. A walking, talking, madness, a smoking; a self-harming, book-loving neurotic; an alcoholic pill-popper, a paranoid anorexic. Tick all that are applicable with a black ballpoint pen. And all these impulses came under the banner of the predictable diagnosis of a personality disorder.

She found it farcical. The non-label label, the bucket diagnosis. How men of science could dance around the truth with words like poets was laughable. The cold, hard fact is that a personality disorder is, in layman’s terms, known as not having a fucking clue.

Besides, she had no personality. Could they not see that? She was made up of these bricks, these addictions and impulses, they were her. She felt less than the sum of her parts. She was a wisp on the wind, coming together to create an empty vessel. She had concluded some time ago that she was nothing more than a freak occurrence in the universe, a chance meeting of energy where her disorders aligned and stuck together to create matter, like a planet being formed. She wasn’t grown in a womb, she was a cosmic coincidence. She had surrendered to her impulses, to carrying those bricks on her back, for they were more her than she was. Xanthe, whoever that might be, had no control over her parts. She’d come to accept that. Her life was lived for them, through them. Without her impulses, she would have nothing to offer. She has chosen to burn brightly through their dysfunction until she is extinguished. And until that point she will go on, operating under the guise of being a real person.

She wanted to ask the poodle-haired man for a cigarette. Her legged twitched as if pulling her off the bench. He was looking up at the sky and rubbing the top of one arm with the opposite hand. Without thinking, she was suddenly moving towards him. Her addiction had overridden her anxiety. One disorder trumping another, driving her, as always.

As she approached, he nervously watched her out of the corner of his eye. “Yes lass?” he said before she had even stopped walking. “Got any change?” he added before she’d opened her mouth.

“I was hoping for a cigarette.”

“A cigarette? Off me?” the man looked bemused for a second. “Of course,” he said after a short pause and pulled a packet of Marlboro Red out of his top pocket.

“I don’t have any change,” Xanthe replied.

“No bother, no bother.”

Xanthe took the cigarette from the open packet.

“I also don’t have a lighter.” She said, deadpan.

“Ha, OK. I have.” He went into the opposite top pocket and pulled out a gold zippo that had been worn silver on its edges. Xanthe lit the end and the air filled first with the stench of lighter fluid and then with the glorious smell of a freshly lit cigarette. She stood there taking a long drag from it as the icy wind reddened her cheeks.

“A woman after my own heart.” Said the man. There was a long, difficult silence.

“You smoke then?” he said, pointing at her.

“Yes.”

Xanthe wanted to small talk out of politeness, but she couldn’t. She stopped trying to interact with people long ago. Her mother and the doctors explained her personality disorder meant she couldn’t talk to people without getting upset or confused. She didn’t much agree but shared their opinion that she shouldn’t interact with people simply because isolation made her feel comfortable and people did the opposite.

“Want to sit down?”

Xanthe sat on the edge of the bench. This, she could do.

“Nice coat. So, what’s a lass like you doing in a cold park at night, boyfriend trouble?”

“I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“Well that’s ok, neither do I.”

More silence.

“I’ve – been begging, lass. You know? I know what you must think but it wasn’t always like this. Me I mean. Well me and London. This is all just what it has become, you know? Since independence.”

“What it's become?” Xanthe replied.

“Separate. It’s more separate. Everything. You probably don’t remember. Too young. Not that it matters.”

She took an extra-long drag on her cigarette and watched the glowing red ash burn down.

“I know about separate.”

“Yes, aye, I suppose we all do.”

Tiny spots of rain started to darken his denim jacket.

“I really don’t have any money,” Xanthe repeated.

“I know, I don’t want any. I’ve got enough.” The man patted a pocket full of change. “It’s not much but the thing about the slums is they’re cheap. That’s me, that’s where I live. A slummer. I only come here to tap up the rich folk, Mayfair and Oxford Street, especially at Christmas. Those bastards can be generous eh?”

“I live in Mayfair.”

“Sorry… I didn’t mean you.”

“It’s OK.”

This was Xanthe’s first exposure to anyone from the slums, they’re not allowed in central London after dark. In fairness, it was her first exposure to anyone outside her family for a long time.

“Are ya gonna have one of those teleporters in your house then when they come out? Being rich and all that? I heard the London parliament’s giving them out to all you rich people. You could have one instead of stairs, have one next to the bed you know, so you can roll out and end up on the sofa?”

“We – I pay little attention to what my family does.”

“Aye, probably best. Deal with your own shit first,” the man replied, looking down at his hands.

“Lots of shit.”

“Aye. Lots.” He stubbed his cigarette out on the bench and then ground it underfoot.

“I’m going to go now,” Xanthe said blankly.

“Ok,” he replied. “Nice chatting. Happy Christmas.”

“Yes,” she said and got up. She felt like she should say something else. “Happy Christmas,” she said, not meeting his eyes and then she turned and began walking towards the street, muffled music emanating from the silly portable diner.

The street was full of parked cars and drunk pedestrians. Xanthe’s anxiety sat high up in her neck from the interaction. She shunned other people as conversation often became a corkscrew path to paranoia and anxiety that she wanted to keep at bay. Her impulses grew with each new person she met, or at least they became louder. And the louder they grew, the more the concept of Xanthe disappeared, the more the bricks weighed, and the more she was extinguished. And yet there was no she. She was the impulses, nothing more than a collection of impulses and disorders walking into the cold, dark night.