Bleeding London

by Geoff Nicholson

  ‘I wanted to make sure I hadn’t entered the twilight zone,’ Mick replied.

  But he took the room. What else was he going to do? It was just a room. It held no horrors, and he wasn’t planning to be there long. Night was falling. He sat on the bed and watched the gathering darkness drain the pink roses of their violent hue. He wondered if he could face fritters and dumplings. He opened the door of the wardrobe and found that someone had left a girlie mag lying there face up. He thought the model on the cover looked strangely like Gabby. He slammed the wardrobe door shut, spread himself out on the bed and stared up at the cracks in the ceiling. Before long he could make out faces and the outlines of mythical countries.

  THE WALKER’S DIARY

  THE PENULTIMATE DAYS

  I was worn out today as I walked the city. The weather was bitter and my overcoat was barely warm enough. My feet and my back and my head all ached. As the task nears completion, it becomes more frustrating. The need to be finished, to be at an end, is overwhelming. I have worn myself out on this city. It has eroded me. I have left no mark on it but I have been worn down like a pencil, reduced to a stub.

  I have seen it all, the rotting hills, the hungover squares. I have been through the shy neighbourhoods and all the half-deserted streets, and I have been left drained and evacuated.

  I have been to the boundary, to the wall, to the places where the city ends, where the train tracks knot together, where the pylons hiss and fizz their dissatisfaction, where the workings show, the innards, the guts, the secretions, to the place where we hone our taste for fragments. Here in this kaleidoscope of ruins, here where the fabric develops stress fractures, where the plots unravel, and the old stories get forgotten, where oral history is speechless, where myth dies, I have been both lost and found.

  I have seen history and nostalgia. I have seen love and death and their pale companions sex and violence. I have seen a fine town, a nation, a great cesspool, the modern Babylon. In Phillimore Gardens, South Kensington, I looked in through a basement window and watched a heavy woman dressed only in a corset as she kissed a man in a suit and tie.

  I saw statues of Boadicea, John Kennedy and Bomber Harris. I saw a minor road accident in Windmill Road, Mitcham. I saw a woman pissing in the street in Wandsworth. I took my stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul’s. It was a day like any other. I walked and I watched. I did my best to be everybody’s blue-eyed boy.

  I’m not naive enough to believe I know the whole story, but I think I have seen both the broad sweep and the particulars, annihilation rolling in like a fog, as comic and as zany as consumption; all those forgotten diseases: apoplexy, dropsy, canker, spotted fever, palsy, scrofula. I have developed a nostalgia for sedition, for mob rule, the burning of gaols, the contagion of fury.

  I saw the solid, sturdy monuments to trade and its names, the Hoover factory, the Oxo Tower, the Tate Gallery; sweet and sour reminders of empire. I went along wandering roads that waste everybody’s time. I saw a lost London of public executions, of coffee houses, the Euston Arch, Newgate, Bedlam. I heard the unfamiliar poetry of extinct trades, a poetry that speaks of a city’s past, of a long-gone culture: cinder-shifters, tallow-chandlers, ballad-sellers, hawkers of fish, soap-boilers, hammermen.

  I listened too to the plots and rhythms of place names. What was in them? I heard the cracked narratives of the clothed city: the Mozart estate, not famed for its prodigies or genius; the unsnake-like Serpentine; King’s Cross, Queen’s Park, Prince of Wales Road – places not much frequented by royalty. I saw the slew of history, of kings and pretenders, developers and reformers, visionaries and bureaucrats, martyrs and wide boys. I read the obvious eponyms, the roads named after Cromwell, Wellington, Addison, Albert, Mountbatten, Mandela. I saw little pieces of London which are forever foreign: Maida Vale, Trafalgar, Waterloo, Mafeking Road, Sumatra Road, Yukon Road, two Ladysmith Avenues, six Ladysmith Roads. I saw the quixotic and quaint: Artichoke Hill, Quaggy Walk, Yuletide Close, Pansy Gardens, Evangelist Road.

  Often the city felt alive, as though it had flesh and blood, arteries, nerve centres, beauty spots, scars, guts, a heart, parasites, an anus. But which was which? Where was the soul? Where was the cloaca?

  I followed in their footsteps; all the great Londoners, the native and the adopted: Dickens and Pepys and Boswell and Johnson and Evelyn and Wat Tyler and Guy Fawkes and Betjeman and Nash and Wren and Newton and Marx and Dick Whittington and, well, you name them.

  I went to St Anne’s Court in Soho, a little paved alleyway where, according to her autobiography, Marianne Faithfull sat on a wall every day for several years, strung out on heroin. Her only solace was when Kenneth Anger or Brion Gysin came along and fed her. Not exactly the life of our normal street addict.

  In Hertford Road, Edmonton, there was a man wheeling a little girl in a pushchair and he kept saying to the child, ‘If I give you some sweeties you’ll be my friend, won’t you?’ He said it over and over again, love and desperation endlessly repeated in his voice.

  I saw the City, a place of deals and commodities, of money and electronic transfer, a place that believes in futures, that thrives on confidence, a place where markets are made, where fortunes are composed and dissipated, where chaos is not simply a theory.

  In Lupus Street, Pimlico, I saw a traffic warden. He was wearing a little peaked cap, and a blue nylon anorak with the collar turned up. He didn’t look like much, but the way he prowled down the street, muscle-bound and dangerous, you’d have thought he was the villain in a James Bond film.

  In Regent Street, in the window of Dickins and Jones, a display assistant was painting the lips of the mannikins a pale cherry red.

  I found myself on the bridge, between the shores, connected with the past yet living in some poorly imagined future, in this new place of somebody else’s making, futuristically quaint perhaps with cars like Bakelite radios, men with jet packs strapped to their shoulders, dressed in skin-tight silver synthetics, helicopters and monorails full of commuters. We thought it might be like this, the London of Dan Dare. We were wrong to expect the expected.

  London (a city only passingly like hell) is not everything. It is not even all things to some men, but in a certain way it’s more than enough, definitely more than enough for me. It contains all the data from which the ideal city might be constructed; a visible, hard city, a city of forking paths, no city of angels. This also has been one of the dark places of the earth, a place where I have looked to be a victim of someone else’s vengeance, where I have looked for the metropolitan assassin. The city of cross words.

  Sometimes I got lost, or perhaps I was always lost, lost before I started and more lost as I travelled. But it was never a matter of geography, not a malaise that the cartographers could rid me of. I developed a taste for spaces cleansed by plague and fire, by blitzes and bulldozers.

  Soon I will no longer have use for a map. Maps are euphemisms, clean, clear, self-explanatory substitutes for all the mess and mayhem, the clutter and ambivalence and blurring and intermeshing weft and warp of the real places they purport to describe. They are fake documents, pathetic simplifications and falsifications. They’re no longer necessary since I have created a new London, not one made out of stone and brick, tarmac and concrete, but a London created out of memory, imagination and shoe leather. I have dreamed it. I have made my dreams come true.

  Even in the beginning it did not feel like a quest, much less like a journey, though I always suspected there was a destination, a final still point. Although I knew this was not an adventure story, although I did not believe I was paddling up-river, I knew there were things waiting for me in the darkness, in unfamiliar manors, walls with ears, with eyes, with teeth, with everything, things that were unknown and certainly nameless, marked cards, new geographies, bullets with my name on them. Tomorrow I find them or they find me. The end is in my sights.

  The London Walker is his own worst enemy.

  SCROLL

  An
ita looked at the words on the screen and scrolled through the text again, trying to decide exactly what she was looking at. In one sense the answer was easy enough. She was looking at the contents of a computer disk she had found in a desk drawer in the study in her own house. It had been hidden under a pile of envelopes, but it seemed to her that it had been hidden in a way that guaranteed it would be found sooner rather than later. There was a label on the disk in her husband Stuart’s handwriting, but all it said was ‘UNFINISHED’.

  She had come home today after barely a couple of hours at work. She had claimed to have a headache, but it was a condition more metaphorical than medical. She needed room and time to think about work, something she could only do when not actually at work. There was a new crisis just around the corner and she would soon have to make some very big and difficult decisions. She wished she didn’t have to make them alone. But business matters seemed irrelevant the moment she found the disk.

  The discovery had been so casual yet it seemed so vital to her. It was, in a sense, what she had been looking for all along, although her searching had been barely conscious. Yet now that she had made her discovery she knew she had expected more and she had expected worse. She had feared there would be something shameful, something sick and violent and possibly pornographic, something perverse and destructive, something she might be able to understand but would possibly never XXX able to forgive. Instead she had found something she simply die not fully understand, pages of some sort of journal or diary perhaps a confession, though she couldn’t work out exactly what it was her husband was confessing to. If anything it seemed to be a text that relished obfuscation, that was trying hard not to give up its meaning too easily.

  She read the words again but remained confused. It was not what she wanted it to be. It was not an explanation. She wanted a document, a manifesto, that would make sense of what she increasingly thought of as her husband’s recent ‘absence’. That was what she called it, though it was not the most obvious term. It was not any sort of physical absence. He was there every morning and evening. They worked together in a manner of speaking. He spent time with her, talked to her. They slept their nights in the same bed. They had sex as often as any couple who’ve been married for ten years. He spent most of his time behaving like a good husband.

  Nor was there any easily identifiable emotional absence. Stuart was attentive and loving. He was there for her. He supported and encouraged her when needed, and he knew when to leave her alone. He was doing nothing wrong and yet she had a terrible sense of his being not quite there. She wanted to know where he was and why. And perhaps, she now thought, he was in these words.

  Stuart’s working day was the sort that entitled, indeed required, him to be away and out of touch for many hours, and that had never bothered her before; in a sense she’d arranged it that way, but now it did bother her. The unaccounted parts of his life had become an intolerable mystery to her, and for a long time she’d had no idea how to solve the mystery. She couldn’t ask him. She could hardly follow him, could hardly employ a private detective. People like her didn’t do things like that. She didn’t want to make a fool of herself.

  She had thought it just possible that he was doing something as innocent and banal as attending a gym or health club, for one of the strangest things about Stuart was that he was looking so healthy. He’d lost weight recently, nothing dramatic, just a gradual slimming down. And his face had colour. He looked good, he looked younger.

  A less confident wife would have suspected an affair but Anita did not, and even if she had suspected, even if she’d had proof, it wouldn’t have worried her the way she was worried now. She was secure enough, and she knew her husband was responsible enough, that she didn’t have to fear his walking out. He’d had at least one affair that she’d known about. It had been with a very junior employee. Anita hadn’t liked the idea, hadn’t liked the reality, but she’d lived with it. She’d gritted her teeth and waited for it to be over, and sure enough it soon had been.

  But the unfaithful Stuart’s behaviour had been nothing like this. This was something quite new, something she suspected and feared had nothing at all to do with sex or love or betrayal, nor with anything else with which she was familiar.

  She’d tried gently asking friends and colleagues whether they’d detected anything different about Stuart and they’d all said no. But even if someone had been prepared to humour her, they would surely have thought the changes were for the better. Stuart had seemed happier recently. In fact he had seemed positively serene. In theory he had no less than the usual number of worries but they no longer threatened or disturbed him. He looked like a man who had achieved wisdom and contentment. No wonder she was terrified.

  She realized that the few pages she’d been reading on the screen explained very, very little. Stuart had, of course, always been a great fan of London, had always gained energy from the city. But this strange poetic ramble did nothing to justify his serenity, nor her feelings about him. However, she had read only one file. She knew that the disk contained a great deal more information, apparently a great many more of her husband’s words. She looked at the other file names. They were intriguing but unrevealing: WRAPAROUND, DISCOVERY, v & D. She knew she would have to read them all. She always hated reading screens. She wanted hard copy. She found another file, set up the printer, then went downstairs to make coffee while the machine churned out the next instalment of Stuart’s diary.

  PARTICULARS

  Two lost, frustrating days passed before Mick Wilton returned to the London Particular, days in which he came to fear that he might be making a fool of himself in this alien, overpopulated capital. They were days in which he’d not even known where to start. He had drifted the streets, aimlessly, idiotically, a man without direction. At last he’d decided that the bookshop was his only hope. He found it using the A—Z, and the address on the paper bag the book had come in.

  Again the bookshop contained few customers and Mick was pleased to see the same assistant behind the counter. It was odd to think this complete stranger was the person he knew best in the whole city. She recognized him and half-smiled.

  ‘Hello there, Judy!’ he said quickly. ‘I need some assistance.’

  ‘Yes, sir, what were you looking for?’

  ‘Don’t call me sir. It’s Mick.’ Then he hesitated, embarrassed to be admitting need. ‘Hey, are you really English?’

  ‘It depends what you mean by English. It depends what you mean by really.’

  ‘OK,’ he said, happy to accept that there were any number of things that might be meant by those words. ‘But how well do you know London?’

  ‘I know London,’ she said.

  It was the answer he wanted. He moved closer to the counter and leaned on it conspiratorially.

  ‘This assistance that I need, it’s not really very complicated,’ he said and he took a deep breath. ‘You see there are some friends of mine who I’ve lost contact with, old college pals kind of thing. And obviously I know their names but I don’t know their addresses any more. I mean they’ve moved since I last saw them. So like, for example, I look them up in the phone book and there’s maybe six Graham Pryces and four Justin Carrs, and the addresses mean nothing to me because I’m not a Londoner, and I don’t want to have to go round to every single address looking to see if I’ve got the right one. So I need some local knowledge.

  ‘You see, I happen to know that these old friends of mine have done pretty well for themselves. And I’m sure somebody like you, who is a Londoner, could check these addresses and say, yeah, that’s the sort of place a well-to-do person would be living.’

  He finished, took another breath, and looked at her hopefully.

  ‘Why don’t you just ring all the different numbers until you find the right person?’ she said.

  ‘I want it to be a surprise.’

  Her glance told him she was completely unconvinced.

  ‘That’s why I wanted to be sure you really knew Lon
don,’ he said.

  ‘I know London,’ she repeated.

  ‘So are you going to help me or not?’

  Out of his pockets he pulled a list of names and several folded pages torn from telephone directories.

  ‘It sounds fishy,’ she said.

  ‘I realize that, but it’s not. Honest. What can I do to convince you?’

  ‘Frankly, I don’t know.’

  He looked around as though the setting itself might offer some chance for him to prove himself. Then he caught sight of one of the other customers in the back of the shop and the opportunity came straight to him.

  ‘You see that guy over there,’ he said very quietly, nodding towards a bald, skinny man in a raincoat. ‘He’s hiding a hundred quid’s worth of atlases underneath his coat.’

  ‘You saw him?’ she said, shocked.

  Mick nodded and the man turned his head a little towards them, just enough to indicate that he knew he was being talked about. He waited a moment then started for the door, his progress marked by an elaborate casualness. Mick took two steps away from the counter and stood blocking the exit.

  ‘Put the books on the counter,’ he said to the shoplifter.

  ‘What books?’ the man asked.

  ‘Don’t get me angry, you little twat,’ Mick said, and the man immediately produced the atlases and placed them on the counter.

  ‘All right,’ he said, and he shrugged. ‘You can’t have me for nicking them ’cause I hadn’t left the premises.’

  Mick stared at him with bored contempt. ‘Now pay for them,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want to pay for them,’ the man said.

  ‘I know you don’t, but you’re going to.’

  The man decided to make a run for it, and he launched a determined effort to get past Mick and through the door. Mick made only a perfunctory attempt to stop him, apparently letting himself be shouldered out of the way. The shoplifter accelerated down the street in a panic and Mick turned to Judy who asked, ‘How did you know he was stealing books?’