Cul de Sac

Herman Gogoli shares his experience of feeling trapped and isolated in a suburban area called Cheadle. He reflects on the challenges of understanding oneself and others, particularly in a close relationship. The suburban neighborhood in Cheadle becomes a source of frustration and resentment for Herman and his partner Alberto. Herman eventually cheats on Alberto and leaves the suburb, but feels nauseous at the thought of returning. He accidentally steals a wooden moose from Alberto's family and decides to return it in person, leading him to get lost in the confusing streets of Cheadle. As he tries to leave, he finds himself trapped in a never-ending maze of identical houses. In his desperate attempts to escape, he encounters strange occurrences and discovers a dead woman in a house. Eventually, his phone rings and he is able to find his way back to his car. Herman and Alberto are working on their relationship, but Herman refuses to return to the suburbs. The statement concludes with a r Statement of Herman Gogoli regarding his period trapped alone in a suburban area of Cheadle. Original statement written 9th November 2014. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the archivist. Statement begins. Life is hard. I don't want to bum you out or anything, but yeah. You're all alone, trying to connect with people, trying to find your place in the world, but in the end, the only person you really know is yourself. And even then, not all that well. There's plenty of things I've done that I couldn't explain to you. I mean, I'm constantly looking back at my past self and thinking, What an idiot! How the hell could he have done such an obviously stupid thing? How was I surprised it went so badly? What a relief, now I'm so much older and wiser. Except that last part never really turns out to be true, does it? The line of when you were your dumb younger self seems to keep moving forward with you, until each more mature and reasonable version of you eventually falls foul of it and becomes a young idiot. And when you add in another person, you reach a whole other level. You can love them, marry them, dedicate your life to them. That's not the same as actually understanding them. I was with Alberto for 15 years, and I tell you what, I could always anticipate him. He always used to get annoyed at how predictable I found his mood sometimes, but damned if I ever really knew why. Of course, it doesn't help that when you're that close to someone, everything starts to reflect on each other. One bad mood feeds into another, and stress just bounces back and forth between you. It can get real bad if you're not careful, and we weren't careful. The thing is, when we both found ourselves in positions to be working from home, we actually thought it was going to be really good for our relationship. The two of us spending all our time together, we reckoned it was going to be real romantic. We were real stupid back then. And when Alberto's parents offered to sell us their second home in Cheadle, that was a great investment. Nice and quiet, good neighborhood, just a real nice home for the two of us. And so much bigger than anything we could afford in the city. And before you think Cheadle, the suburb of Manchester, that's not the one I'm talking about. I'm talking about Cheadle, the suburb of Stroke-upon-Trent. Hell, technically it's not even a suburb. It's just a village that looks so much like a suburb that you could pull it up and drop it on the edge of any dull town in England, and it would look the same. Just street after street of identical, blandly pleasant houses, all winding around each other in dead ends and cul-de-sacs and one-way systems, making sure every house has plenty of inoffensive garden. I've never seen people happily living in a place so obviously dead. Two years we lived there, two years imprisoned in that beige, comfortable house with a man I loved, watching our relationship turn to snipping and snapping and bitter passive aggression. I'd say that cheating on him was a foolish act of past me, but honestly it's one of the few decisions I've ever made that I completely understand. I didn't even try to hide it. Not really. When he found out and it all ended, I kind of hated myself for just how relieved I was that I'd finally be able to leave that place, to get in my car and drive away from that gentle suburban nightmare. I mean, I'd lived there for two years and I still got lost trying to leave. I thought that was the worst that place would ever make me feel. I wish I'd been right. I got a cheap apartment in Liverpool and tried to tell myself I was happier. A single life, footloose and sitting at home binging bad TV. I tried to get back into the club scene, but honestly I think I'm just too old now. The music was too loud, the drinks were too expensive, and the sort of thing I used to take to dance all night now hit me with a down so hard that I had to write off almost the entire week. It didn't help that over the course of a ten year relationship, my friends had become our friends and there weren't any of them siding with me in this situation. Some would drop platitudes about maybe reconnecting after the fallout was done with, I know what I'm being handled by people who don't want to create any more drama. It was miserable. But every time I thought about going back, I felt nauseous. The idea of returning to those eggshell walls that we never got around to repainting, and the living room that expected me to sit there and watch Midsummer Murders until I passed away peacefully in my sleep, it made me want to throw up. I'd probably have stayed away forever if it hadn't been for the moose. There was a carved wooden moose, you see, something Alberto's grandfather had carved, apparently a real family heirloom. It was an ugly old thing, with this weird angular face that always made my skin crawl a bit. I'd never let him display it in our house, so it had lived in one of the suitcases under the stairs, the suitcases I pulled out and filled in a tearful rage when I was leaving. So, yeah, I kind of accidentally stole the moose. When he finally realised and texted me demanding it back, I should probably have just sent it by post. But no, for some reason I decided I was going to drive all the way down there and give it back in person. Maybe I was hoping for a fight. Or just to see him again. I don't know. I was younger then. Foolish. It was late when I got to what I thought was his street, driving through the one-way signs and well-maintained gardens that bordered that snaking road. The sun had disappeared but the sky was still fairly light, that late summer twilight that seemed to just drag on forever. There weren't any other cars on the road and I was already getting frustrated. My sat-nav had decided to start sending me around in a circle and I was apparently no closer to finding our... Alberto's house. The roads weren't like I remembered them. Or rather, they were exactly like I remembered them. Bland, interchangeable and impossible to navigate. I must have driven around for almost half an hour before I finally decided that if the internet and GPS couldn't help me, I'd have a proper look at the actual paper map that I kept in the boot. I spent a few minutes scanning the Cheadle area until I found the road I was looking for, Ash Tree Hill, then I drove on it. I found a street sign at the next turning, hoping to compare it to what was on the map and then I stopped. Because the sign said road. No name, just road. It wasn't as though the actual name on the street had been defaced or removed, the sign was complete. It just didn't say anything else. So I drove on until I found the next one. Street. I tried to compare it to the map, but this place just had some really bland road names and somehow I never noticed in the two years I'd lived there, but no. The places on the map all had names that I remembered. Chapel Street, Meadow Drive, Station Road. Bland, sure, generic, but not literally placeholder. I pressed on looking for more. Avenue, close, way, lane. Only ever with the suffix. Never with a name attached. By this point I was starting to feel a little bit freaked out and I decided to just get out of there. I could come back later when my sat-nav was working properly in proper daylight. The sky was getting darker by this point and I had to put my headlights on. I still hadn't seen any other cars on the road, or as I thought about it, people on the streets. But as you might imagine, getting out of there proved even more difficult than finding the house I was looking for. Every time I thought I'd found a main road that led out of this weird, looping suburbia, a one-way sign seemed to spring up, directing me back into the sprawl. I did U-turn after U-turn as I was channeled into one dead-end cul-de-sac after another until eventually I decided to simply disregard the one-way signs completely. I cruised past the one that seemed to be blocking my most likely exit and almost breathed a sigh of relief as I found myself leaving the suburban maze I'd been trapped in. Until it led me to an entirely different maze upon remarkable residential neighbourhoods. Even then, I still didn't anticipate I was trapped. It didn't make any sense and it wasn't like I'd seen anything blatantly supernatural. It wasn't as though there was anything abnormal about the situation. It was just that the normal seemed to go on forever. At some point, I got out of the car and started to hammer on random doors. I mean, I tried the doorbells at first, but they were silent. So I started knocking and knocking until my hand hurt. There were no answers at any of them. There were no lights on behind the drawn curtains and all the house numbers were zero. I got back into my car and started driving again, going on and on until finally I ran out of petrol. It rolled to a sputtering stop at the end of one of the indistinguishable dead-ends. It had been full dark for hours by this point and my dashboard claimed it was 3am. My phone had died about an hour ago and once the last of the power went in the car, I was left with no way to tell the time at all. I wished I hadn't thrown away the wristwatch Alberto had given me, but it was too late for those regrets. I stepped outside, looking down the street. There were no lights on in any of the houses, but the identical lamppost bathed the place in a sickly orange as far as I could see. I decided that the roads must be the problem. They were what were keeping me trapped in this place, constantly turning and bending and confusing me. If I had just picked a location and kept to it, eventually I had to get to the edge of what by now I had decided was a newly built neighbourhood that apparently no one had moved into yet. As an explanation, it didn't make any sense, but it didn't need to, not at that moment. So I started walking, going around the houses, through gardens, trying at all times to keep my direction straight and consistent. I may be too old for clubbing, but I still kept pretty active, so getting over the fences wasn't much of a problem for me as I passed from identical road to identical garden over and over again. I don't know how long I went like this, but it felt like hours. In the start I was counting how many houses I passed, but when I got to a hundred, I stopped. It was beginning to eat away at my careful rationalizations, and I couldn't have that. Eventually my legs started to go, and I decided I needed some rest. I was about to sit on the street when a thought occurred. I marched to a nearby front door, prepared to kick in the flimsy-looking wood, but trying the handle revealed it was unlocked. I don't know why I picked that house. It was identical to all the others. I've often wondered if there was anything that drew me to it. Perhaps I was just unlucky. Or perhaps there was only ever one house. The lights worked, which was a relief, and the inside looked exactly how I expected it to. And I mean exactly how I expected it to. From the blank IKEA furniture, to the subtly-patterned cream wallpaper, to the picture frames lining the wall, containing what were clearly stock photos, each of a different family pantomiming a scene of domestic bliss. I headed into the living room and sat down on one of the almost-comfortable armchairs. My body was aching, and my eyes were heavy, and I had the thought that maybe I should head up to the bedroom. In the back of my mind, though, I knew that was a trap. I had somehow become convinced that if I slept here, that I would never leave. My hands drifted down and brushed the plastic remote control. Almost on instinct, I picked it up and turned the TV on. A cooking show. A woman I almost recognised, fussing over a turkey. She was talking, or at least it sounded like she was. The cadence and the sounds were so much like English that it took me almost a full minute to realise that she wasn't actually saying words. She never looked at the camera. There seemed to be something wrong with her eyes, though I couldn't say what. Her hands moved over the pale skin of the turkey, poking and prodding at it, as though preparing it, though she wasn't actually doing anything to it. Eventually she gripped a part of it between finger and thumb and ripped off a long strip of dry-looking meat before tossing it over her shoulder and returning to her strange mimicry of cooking. I pressed the remote again. A shopping channel. The host was a tall, clean-shaven man with close-cropped hair. He was holding a brick, talking about it in that same flow of non-words that still had a familiar salesman's patter. The screen scrolled the message, BUY NOW. But there was neither price nor contact details, as this man, who wouldn't look at the camera, earnestly pretended to sell me a brick. It was almost hypnotic. I leaned back in the chair, trying to think clearly about what was happening. My eyes found themselves focusing on the ceiling, on a small part of red that seemed to have seeped through from above. As I climbed those stairs, I desperately tried to tell myself I didn't know what was going to be up there. And to be fair, I was surprised by some of the details, but as soon as I saw the spot, I just knew that someone else was up there and that they were dead. The only questions were how and who. I think I'd given up on why. I didn't know them, as it turned out. A young woman, conservatively dressed. Her face was bloody, but I was sure I didn't recognize her. She had a bag with her, and her ID read Yetunde Uthman, not a namer I'd ever encountered before, just another victim of this place. She looked as though she had forced her head through the mirror on the dressing table, the shards cutting her face and neck to ribbons, a particularly large piece piercing her jugular, spilling blood all down the unremarkable white table onto the light brown carpet below. I don't think she'd been dead for that long. I'm not a doctor, and I didn't really try to check. Instead I turned and ran, all my tiredness gone in a sudden rush of adrenaline, down the stairs, out the door and into the night, and the rows upon rows of bland, empty houses. And then all at once I wasn't running any more. I was lying on the ground, collapsed, the tarmac rough and cool against my cheeks, wet from tears. I was going to die, I knew that now, just as she had, just as anyone else who came here had. How many corpses lay waiting behind the placid façade of this endless false suburbia? And that was when I heard it. It was quiet. My mind took a few moments to accept it could be real, but sure enough, there it was, the sound of my phone's ringtone. I looked up, and not three doors down was my car, the door still open where I had left it. I stumbled over, my legs still weak, and grabbed the handset, which should have been long, out of battery, and I stared at the glowing screen. It was Alberto. He was calling me. I don't know how, but the tears came even faster now as I answered, sobbing with relief to hear him yelling at me for taking so long. Had I forgotten? Was I even planning to bother? I tried to explain, but all I could manage to say to get through the shaking sobs was, I love you. He went very quiet, and then he hung up. It didn't matter, though, because when I looked around, the windows of the houses were lit, and a woman was coming down from her front door to ask if I needed help with my car. We're working on it now, the two of us. We're not exactly back together yet, but I think it's going well. He's reluctant to sell the house, but I've made it quite clear that I'm never going back to the suburbs, even if I can't really tell him why. I checked to see if I could find anything about Jitende Uthman, and I did find a few old social media profiles, but I wasn't able to get through to any family or friends. As far as I can tell, she disappeared a year ago, and nobody noticed. Statement ends. The lonely is possibly the most insidious of the powers, I believe. Certainly it is the one that delights most at having you do its dirty work for it. Even the spiders seem to have a hard time matching it for sheer seductiveness. Time to yourself. Self-care. Putting yourself first. Not being a burden on those you care about. Doesn't even need to tell you any lies. Just waits for the lies you tell yourself. We're all well aware, with Peter Lucas in charge of the Institute, it's a very real danger to all of us. We are trying. Daisy, Basira and I. We don't leave the Institute much anymore, so we do spend a lot of time together. It's not that easy, though. When everyone has so many walls, so many defenses, sometimes you can feel lonely even when you're all in the same room. But it's better than the alternative, and at least none of us are suffering alone. Martin's got it the worst, of course, but it still seems to be his choice, and I have to trust that he knows what he's doing. End recording.