Complicated Vistas

Scary Boots is a beautiful and delicate zine, risograph printed with a small-scale, handmade feel. It’s not ‘about’ addiction, but lots of its stories revolve around the desperation and vulnerability that come from losing control of your life. It doesn’t ask for pity, but it does insist on empathy, as you’ll see in this piece that finds light in one of the darkest places on Earth.

I was walking home yesterday and all the clouds looked like veins and I was thinking about Romana.

Romana was a woman I used to know in West London. You could tell that at one point she had been a great beauty. Romana had two obsessions: the luminescent fish that dwell in the deep recesses of the ocean, and crack cocaine.

I first met her in the summer of 2011. A good friend had, in AA-speak, ‘fallen off the wagon’, and one sticky evening a series of madcap escapades culminated in us chasing Romana along the Harrow Road; us on foot, her on a bicycle. He had assured me that we would be meeting a brilliant woman – mad, but brilliant. He failed to mention that the two were locked in the kind of petty squabble characteristic of relationships built on a shared fondness for hard drugs.

“There she is” he said, pointing at a woman screaming at us from across the road. He hurried over to her as she continued berating him, before swinging a leg over her bike frame and pushing off with a little wobble.

“Come on, we need to follow her”. So there we were, chasing Romana along the Harrow Road, for reasons that weren’t clear to me. It was, I later understood, a pantomime of sorts, one to engineer restitution with the pledge of money or drugs; the final boss of making things right. We jogged behind Romana for around 15 minutes, fielding abuse tossed over her shoulder, until we reached her flat on Lanhill Road and a brief summit meeting was held. Soon after, an accord was reached and all was well with the world.

As a mini Martell bottle rushing with milky clouds passed between beleaguered hands, Romana spun great yarns about her life – how she was descended from Polish aristocracy, her time spent living in New York and Persia, her connections to aesthetes of the art underworld. Sure Romana. Years later, I found out that everything she had said was true. She cohabited with Klaus, an old Swedish alcoholic with gossamer hair and a face like crumpled Kraft paper. Klaus didn’t take drugs, but he did drink endlessly, and as empty cider cans accumulated around him, he’d talk about his role in organising the first tour of British punk bands to Scandinavia. He told us that John Lydon slept on his mother’s kitchen floor. Looking back, that was probably all true too.

Romana was a scammer who you didn’t mind getting scammed by. If you went over to her flat to score, a portion of your junk would inevitably be squirrelled away beneath her bra strap. She’d normally stage some form of theatrical scene as a distraction while liberating your wares. But you didn’t care too much because a.) she was a genuinely charming and magnetic individual and b.) that’s just the way it goes.

It was after a few months of visits to Romana’s that I learned of her obsession with luminescent deep sea fish. She would watch hours and hours of documentaries on the subject until sunrise crept into her bedsit like fingers up a skirt. She then began making artworks with highlighters, attempting to capture the ineffable magic of marine bioluminescence, the beauty in the inexplicable possibility for light to spring from the darkest places on earth. She believed it would pioneer a new art movement, which she named ‘Global Vista’.

One endearing quirk of Romana’s was that she would ‘collect’ little pieces of British ephemera and impart them to you as gifts. Postcards mainly – lots of postcards harking back to the glory of The Empire. I still have some, in an old suitcase that contains the debris of a life long since departed. They all depict flags, and ships, and crests, set against expansive seas and gloaming skies. They say things like "One King, One Flag, One Fleet, One Empire" and "We don’t want to fight, but by jingo, if we do, we’ve got men, and coin, and ships, and guns to see it through and through and through".

To Romana, the British Empire wasn’t an emblem of imperial might or territorial robbery. Addicts have few concerns beyond immediate survival, and despite being incredibly smart and cultured, valid conversations on the problematic nuances of colonialism were beyond Romana’s purview at the time. It was more personal and conceptual for her; a representation of strength and hope in times of suffering – the sun that never sets. She’d frequently talk about The Plan^TM; which consisted of travelling to the Andaman Islands on some unspecified future date and getting clean among lilting palms and cerulean waters. I was amused to discover, while writing this piece, that the Andaman Islands served as a penal colony for the British Empire.

I’m watching TV and a trailer for David Attenborough’s new documentary Ocean pops up. I’m reminded of Romana; a little fish glowing through the dark. I hope she made it to the Andaman Islands and is working on establishing her global vista.

Scary Boots is a risograph printed quarterly art and literature zine, exploring different aspects of human experience. Each issue of the zine is themed, and contributors are invited to respond to the theme as they see fit.

Beck Raine is the alias of an elusive contributor to Scary Boots zine. They know nothing about him beyond the stories he submits to their pages.

Emma Quan is a British Chinese illustrator and graphic designer based in London, specialising in editorial and children’s books. Growing up at the intersection of Eastern tradition and Western environment, Emma creates art that vibrates with the energy of both worlds. You can see more of her work on Instagram.