Dear Curious Iguana (The Queue 2)
the fanfic continues
Dear Curious Iguana,
So thrilled to hear you like the fanfic — some fresh content for you below
Last post we learned how
Many have formed rafts of umbrellas wedged into tree branches and tied hoarding to a network of tent poles to provide dry cover. You get used to sleeping standing up, but the birds wake you – the birds and the caterers firing up their propane tanks in the mornings leave you sleep-deprived. It doesn’t matter. When you queue, it's like being in the arms of a loving mother: her embrace is stronger than any storm, and ultimately you are comforted in the knowledge that, no matter how often the queue turns, she will always be there. Eventually.
The Queue
‘Let the gentleman in!’ an elderly woman demands in a piercing octave. An elderly man stops to place his body between her and the queue. A sudden alarm bell rings, muffled. ‘They're testing the public-address system!’ says the woman, fainter now, as if lost in her own panic. ‘There’s room enough for a Handsome Daniel,’ the man says, and swings his scythe-like cane at her. Children cheer. The alarm eases into laughter and raucous whistles. ‘Right,’ says the old man, smiling. 'Who wants bubbles?' Cane as giant bubble wand; we should have known. The queue resumes its chatter.
Typically, people walking past give a wide berth so it is clear they are not planning to jump the queue. Once, a man strayed too close and someone up ahead of me smashed open a bottle of Pimms and pointed it at the newcomer. 'Don’t even think it. The end of the queue's back there'. 'What did you say to me?' ‘I'm an eagle and you're a mouse, cut in front of me and we'll see who's the cunning one.’ ‘Oh, “You're an eagle, I'm a mouse.” Go and eat your dick.’ And so on. The police turn up on horses. ‘No, we will kettle ourselves,’ the queue says.
That’s why when a 'friend' returning from Norway tries to visit me in the queue I ask her to keep two arm spans away. ‘I missed you,’ I say. She purses her lips and says, ‘I had to pee.’
‘That was a long time ago.’
A giant bubble lands on her cheek, she smiles, it pops, leaving the ends of her hair wet. ‘Last year it was all about V Festival,’ I say. ‘This year it’s all about Norway.’ She says that Norway is something of an adult country. ‘But you’ve made it there.’ The people around me let her come in for a moment. We hug. She runs. One of the men behind me tries to comfort me with a joke: ‘Hey, you think the Kennedys were in the queue?’
In my own way, I’m privileged. Families are separated by the queue. But then, family is made here too. The first queue engagement brought on a seismic Mexican wave of joy. It petered out after a couple miles. Someone behind me said 'Bless you' after my modest, little cheer. Most of us have never queued up like this before, except when queuing up to buy The Sun. And even then, you didn't actually get to join The Sun. We queued for the last National Health Service, we queued for Clegg. We are in the queue to have our homes seized by the bank. We are in the queue to have more roads built to solve our housing crisis. To get our health service decimated and our free education eviscerated. We are in the queue to gain more rights and protections and less security. For equal pay. To stop anti-immigrant hate speech. We queued to win the right to choose our own gender. ‘Is there a future in a country where it's okay to ask for leave to go to a toilet?’ a young man asks me. ‘You think that will happen again?’
The director of the Tate gets the queue rerouted through the Turbine Hall. It’s the final straw for arts funding. 'The Queue', as this shifting section becomes known, is streamed across the globe 24-hours a day. Asked, in an interview, about ‘the death of the author’, the now-retired artist Christian Marclay says, ‘'The Queue' is about thousands of people who don't know what they're doing and don't care and that's beautiful. In ‘The Queue, you become a participant, not a spectator, yet you also participate in spectating.’
‘It’s a very moving, but hugely heartbreaking, experience to be in a random queue, a bored, uncomfortable one, sitting next to the same people day after day,’ says Martin Parr.
‘Pretentious,’ writes one Guardian journalist.
‘For a laugh’, the queue is funnelled through a musty storage room in a bowling alley, illuminated by a torch shone at a disco ball. In the darkness, with light twinkling mothlike around a room that smells like hundreds of bowling shoes mixed with a fresh spritz of FunkAway Odor Eliminating Spray, I hear the tragic story of a family living behind the pins: Zakaria is survived by his wife (son Adnan, married to daughter Asila, and daughter-in-law Moud, born at the end of 2002) and children – many grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren. They cannot understand why the queue hasn’t been dismantled, or why his statue is never fully reconstructed. They will not understand why ‘a handful of students’ are allowed to create a film about Zakaria’s life, rather than the institutions. I learn a new proverb, perhaps mistranslated: The trees will not see, in their entirety, the remains of their former branches.
Do a small number of queuers dream the dreams of other queuers in front and behind them? If you wake up in the queue after a ‘night out’, will the others be kind and offer you breakfast? Do you ever get the feeling that there are shadows in the queue?
‘I’ve heard of you,’ you tell a woman in a Bernie Sanders T-shirt who knits mittens through summer and sells them in winter. She lives in one of the many homeless camps (mounds of mattresses, mountains of rubbish). ‘Snowflakes,’ the man in a navy cardigan next to you says, and tuts: ‘We’re all homeless.’
All best,
Sammi