Marley the Rooftop Runner ZINE
& Rehab Hero
I recently met my sister and niece in London, we went to a zine show in Kings Cross
I love it, inspired by the words, the art, and the ease and immediacy of it.
I’ve never tried to create a zine before. My brother Ivan has, his is called… Septic Ears, way back…Brilliant …Yet, something is born.
On the way home, ideas toss and turn in my head. I want to experiment. But I have no idea what I want to say, or what it’s even about, until Marley sits next to me in the rehab centre and begins to chant, childlike, his story.
I tell him I’ll write his words down, exactly as they come out, and as I put them down with him, our first Zine is pre-born, a co-production between me and the Rooftop Runner.
But before I begin, here’s the backstory
Two months ago, I start working in a rehab centre.
No one wants to go there. I don’t know why as the job shines like a beacon on a dull day in my school mailbox. They tell me it’s in the middle of nowhere, that it’ll be impossible to reach. “You have no car.”
“Please,” I say, “let me try. I can walk there.”
They laugh, but I insist. And since no one else applies, the council give in and I go.
I get off the bus at a stop in the middle of the countryside and walk along tiny lanes for my interview. I see a donkey lying in a field, its nose deep in the grass, breathing in spring. Later, I learn that donkeys do have long, deep sleeps lying down. Then I meet a man who walks with me a while. There are no cars; bliss. He tells me he has no phone, and I feel like I’ve stepped back in time. Like before, when Graham and I skip school and walk the width of England: no map, no Google this or that, no real direction except the one we arrive at.
“I’m a mudlarker,” he says. “I go to the Thames once a week and dig. I love finding ancient bones.” Then he waves me off down another lane.
It makes me think of Virginia Woolf who loved walking and talks about it a lot in her journals: “I am extremely happy walking … I like to have space to spread my mind out in.”
I arrive at the house forty-five minutes later, its roofline tipping majestically against the Kentish Weald landscape, sculpted, it seems, in the same way Gertrude Jekyll sculpted that perfect and wild garden at Godinton House.
The interview lasts a little while. I’m then shown around the site where 40 residents live in stage one of recovery.
“But,” the woman says, “I worry about you getting here. I think you’d do better in the one in town.” I am saddened, but, yes, she is right, the one is town will be much easier to get to.
So I walk back to the railway, old oaks lifting heads of fresh green leaves into the deepest blue sky. And then it comes, that shiver, the knowing one, the feeling that, no matter how long it lasts, I will get the job. And it will be that beacon of light to get me through those sometimes dulls days.
There are eight of us, every Wednesday.
I am employed by Adult Education, and this is a test run, the first off, and is meant to be English Level 1, but it isn’t that, it’s a universe elsewhere. Who cares about English Level 1 or E3? This is a new world, a different order. Eight months clean most of them here in second recovery house, and that feeling of CLEAN, is not written between the pages of past, present and future continuous.
They share bread and water. Soul brothers
Marley is the first one to sit next to me. A stand-up comic, a wise-man sage and shy. His story is hard, really hard to hear, so he stops telling me the worst bits. He says I am clever enough to know the rest. He calls himself the Rooftop Runner. He is delightfully fresh, candid and happy.
Now.
There are ten of us in the downstairs room. Under a chair, someone has discarded a slender volume of "The Shorter Poems of William Wordsworth".
So we begin Storytellling Time where words transform, grabbed in their moment, and real …
I’ve got a story to tell - Marley the Wanderer
Marley will leave at the end of May. I will miss him. He will perform this next week.
He is brave and his eyes are hazel green and honest.
Thank you so much for reading this. I did not know it would just gush from me on this May day, the day of the Lilly of the Vally for the French.
Happy May Day.
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Have a wonderful month ahead.