Everyone hates the town they grow up in, they say so in all the emo boy songs. My memories are diseased for the most part by a sick nostalgia. There’s magick that swells beneath the ground that tricks you. You find significance and charm in bus stops, Tesco; the low level dealers in trackies and trainers, with wee Adidas shoulder bags for easy distribution of the baggies kept inside. Milton Keynes has no culture, so it bought its culture instead. Sarah and I considered going to Asda an event; running down the meat aisle, slapping chickens in their cellophane. Surreal actions that confuse me now as a vegan, and in general, but we got a real Holden Caulfield kick out of it. The cellophane bounced in an interesting way.
Commissioned in the late 60’s and modelled after the typical American grid system, the Milton Keynes council manufactured a cosy home for social cleansing. Fragmented council estates are kept closer together whilst placed in their respective boxes, linked via red ways and roundabouts. The obtuse amount of Roundabouts is the only recognition MK gets. That and the deflated looking fake cows. I saw a shit article a few months ago claiming Milton Keynes to be "The Illuminati stronghold of the UK" due to its inordinate amount of pyramid shaped structures. MK is manufactured for consumption; designed to make sure you needn't ever leave. Once Primark arrived I knew it was time to go. For a while you're sedated by IKEA and Willen lake till you find out even the lake is fake. They kept a gigantic tree like a shrine in the middle of the shopping centre, ripping off its branches every year till they cut it down altogether and put wooden benches in its absence.
My mum was sectioned countless times from the age of 18 in 1990, spending years in and out of the Campbell Centre and other institutions outside of Milton Keynes. Memories of visiting her as a child are fuzzy with a vignette around the edges; watching her dragged out of the room by nurses, leaving carpet burns and bruises; nurses bending her body in ways that leave her wrists broken; times she was held down by several men whilst another man injected her in the arse to sedate her; bloody noses, and smiles on my birthday when I had come to visit, moments after she had been beaten with a chair by a male patient. The things I’ve seen, that I can attest to, that no one will give a shit about anyway. Looking at the Campbell Centre now, it seems haunted. Discreetly Hidden behind A&E and the oncology ward, it has the same yellow painted corrugated tin that it always had, positioned next to the same pointless roundabout. To be the temporary home for so many over the decades, it still makes no attempts to seem homely. When my mum was first sectioned she was asked if she heard voices and she replied: ‘I’m hearing yours and I don’t fucking like it.’ Mum had a problem with authority, so authority had a problem with her. Or perhaps the latter came first – it’s hard to know these things. The interior of the Campbell Centre depicted the typical white walls and barren concrete smoking areas that one might imagine. I never saw the “isolation room” on visits, although mum claims that there were questionable stains. She would spend a lot of hours inside there, whacking her head against the wall under white lights. Given meds that caused hallucinations and insomnia, she would joke sometimes that she was under mind control. Funny jokes, but there’s a dangerous knowledge that comes from within the confines of mental institutions. Knowledge easily discredited by the “madness” of the person in possession of the knowledge.
When a person is sectioned the police are often the first responders. When I was eighteen I came home from the pub to see the street littered with broken glass and newspaper. The window to mum’s bedroom was open, the blinds snapped and tangled in suspense. I pushed open the already unlocked door to see bloody foot and paw prints; our dog was crying in the living room. My bones were tense, and mum wasn’t there. A broken broom was bitten and bent on the floor, my dog barked when I picked it up and I closed my eyes knowing she was probably beaten by a fucking broom. Abstract splotches of blood lined the walls of the bedrooms as a hole formed in my abdomen. The police said they couldn’t tell me where my mum was, so I played hysterical detective by myself, concluding that they seemed to have pulled her half-naked, drunk, and bleeding body out of her fucking bedroom window. She confirmed this after with bruises and an additional 12 hours in a police holding cell. Casual things. Perhaps all this happened exactly as I say. Who can know this shit, all I have is blood stains and a sense of curiosity. The police’s erased body-cam footage will never tell me. We can live inside allegedly to keep us safe from further harm.
Campbell Park takes me through versions of myself, and of the people that have walked through it with me, positioned upon the leyline that runs through Midsummer Boulevard, to coincide with the sunrise that reflects on the mirrored surface of the ugly modernist style train station. Most of Milton Keynes’ architecture is modernist, and ugly, which perhaps denotes something of the effect on its inhabitants. Inducing a disconnected and compartmentalised mind-set. To offset this disconnection, spirituality is laced along the gravel paths and sun dials that lead you from Campbell Park to Willen Lake. Different iterations of myself trace these steps as a toddler and a teenager, with my eyes as a present witness. I held my mum’s hand as I hobbled around the stone circle for a full moon party. Witch friends of my mothers with glitter on their faces, and lager on their breath would tend to suffocate me with hugs, and the bonfire smoke always made me sleepy. Later versions lay in drunk contortions next to the peace pagoda, whilst younger versions were told of Buddhist faith and tradition. Taking myself to where the leyline starts at St Mary Magdalene Church in Willen Village, I see my mum doing history coursework at sixteen watching steam rise from goose shite whilst on LSD.
The canal weeps through the cracks of the more middle class areas, lined with symmetrical trees and ornate bridges to walk over. When I was wee my mum would drop a stick off of one side before rushing me over to the other side so I could watch the stick emerge with the currant. Her friend lived on a house boat which often smelt of incense and weed. I would bike through portions of perceived paradise, then fall asleep in the heart of the boat when we arrived; mums laugh echoing behind my eyelids.
Constructed greenery puts MK to sleep, it’s too hard to appreciate your allotted connection to something real when you know it aint real. They created a watered down wasteland for the wilfully ignorant. Neutered nature placed on top of lay lines and (alleged) underground tunnels has lizard people potential. An abbreviated name that sounds like a 1960s mind control experiment doesn't diminish suspicions, either. Mum still claims to be under mind control from the MK mental health system, and perhaps she is, who can know this shit. The world is fucked.
I lived for a decade in an asbestos ridden semi formed of corrugated tin, which was initially erected as temporary housing for the fuckers that built the town. The whole estate was skint, aside from the few on the outskirts who could afford red brick - though, they were often retired, or disabled, like my grandparents who live there still. They live like relative kings with double glazing and roof insulation, which means they have been burgled thrice, once on Christmas Eve when I was eleven. Whoever stole the shit never got caught, they left a shit book, though.
You walk across the courtyard, past the tree Moe and I would sit under so he could help me cheat on French exams that I failed regardless. We would kiss for hours in the 15 year old in between of how nice kissing is all on its own. Moe would bring me Brandy in fruit shoot bottles when mum got weird, talking about the bad in our lives in vague mumbles and empathy squints; knowing we could only hope for distractions rather than solutions. Drinking litre bottles of Cherryade and vodka on the grassy bank beside the motorway is a cute date.
