Bleeding London

by Geoff Nicholson

  A PHONECALL HOME

  That evening, from an old-style, red, urine-tainted telephone box, its walls tiled with prostitutes’ cards, and empty Nourishment cans on the floor, Mick rang Gabby.

  ‘It’s me. I’m here in London.’

  ‘Yeah?’ she said. ‘How is it?’

  A trail bike with a metallic, unsilencered engine note blasted its way past the phone box.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said, after the noise had gone. ‘It’s big and dirty and it’s not easy finding your way around.’

  ‘I wasn’t asking for a postcard home. I meant the business.’

  ‘Yes, well, I’m taking care of it.’

  ‘Don’t do anything silly.’

  ‘I’m not a silly person.’

  ‘I know, but don’t get hurt.’

  ‘OK. But there’s stuff I need to ask you, stuff I need to know.’

  The deadness at the other end of the line was so abrupt that he thought he might have been cut off.

  ‘Are you there?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. What do you need to know?’

  ‘Well, for a start, the bloke who was getting married, was he called Philip?’

  ‘We didn’t get formally introduced.’

  Mick acknowledged the stupidity of his question, then asked, ‘But was he a big bloke?’

  ‘I guess so,’ she said, sounding willing to agree.

  ‘And sort of sporty with it?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And did he have a hairy back?’

  ‘How the fuck would I know?’

  ‘I thought it was the kind of thing you might have noticed.’

  ‘I was trying hard not to notice anything at all at the time …’

  ‘I can see that, but still…’

  ‘And in any case, he didn’t take his shirt off. And even if he had I wouldn’t have touched his back, would I?’

  ‘OK, I can see that.’

  Mick fell silent. There were other things he’d have liked to ask but he didn’t want to make Gabby any more angry.

  She said, ‘I don’t find this very easy, you know.’

  ‘I realize that.’

  ‘Or very pleasant.’

  ‘I’m just trying to work something out, that’s all.’

  Mick noticed a couple of black girls standing outside the call box waiting to use the phone. Their presence was hard to ignore. He was aware of their laughter, their long legs, the can of lager they passed back and forth. Their intrusion made him want to talk more softly to Gabby, more intimately, but with the background roar and clatter and road noise he would have made himself inaudible.

  ‘Did this Philip guy have any distinguishing marks?’ he asked as gently as he could.

  ‘I don’t know, Mick, all right? I had my eyes shut. Is that good enough for you? What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘I just want to be sure I gave a pasting to the right man.’

  ‘Gave?’ She sounded puzzled, then delighted. ‘You already did it?’

  ‘The first one, yeah. It wasn’t that difficult. He said he was sorry.’

  ‘Bastard.’

  ‘Yeah, but he did look genuinely sorry by the time I’d finished with him.’

  ‘I bet he did. Did you tell him who you were?’

  ‘What do you think I am?’

  ‘Did you say anything about me?’

  ‘Oh sure.’

  ‘This is excellent,’ she said. Her voice was giddy with excitement. She sounded grateful and exhilarated and loving. ‘Look, Mick, I appreciate this, I really do. When you’ve sorted all this out then I really want us to be happy.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Like we used to be, you know.’

  ‘You mean sex.’

  ‘Yeah. Like it used to be.’

  He was pleased to hear her saying this, and he hoped she meant it, but he couldn’t resist adding, ‘But not till all this is sorted, right?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘OK,’ he said gamely. ‘So there’s only another five to go.’

  The moment he put down the phone, one of the two girls outside opened the door and they both tried to get in before he’d left.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Excuse me. That’s a phrase we have in the English language.’

  ‘Oh, fuck off,’ they said in unison.

  Mick stared at them. They didn’t look like such terrible girls. He considered wrecking the phone box just to annoy them, but it was just a thought. He knew he’d never do a thing like that. Meaningless violence was not his style.

  RADIO

  It was late and if he could have had his way Mick Wilton would have been sound asleep. Instead he was bristlingly awake in the airless room at the Dickens Hotel. He sprawled on the bed, propped himself up on one elbow, feeling the ruts and craters of the mattress; a relief map of enemy territory. There were ugly noises reverberating through the building; slamming doors, coughing, bad plumbing. What was it about London that could make a man feel so miserable, so melancholy? Mick was not as a rule given to thoughts of self-destruction but he understood how the grey murk of a room like this could seep into you and make you decide you’d had enough.

  Things got so bad that he went to the wardrobe and fished out the girlie magazine. It was fairly soft. Ignoring the Gabby lookalike on the front, and in truth he wasn’t sure she really looked that much like Gabby after all, he opened it at the centrefold and looked down at the pink, polished image. She was a bright-eyed, broad-mouthed girl, thickly permed auburn hair, completely naked, reclining on straw bales in front of a painted backdrop of fields and sky. Her head was thrown far back but she managed to maintain eye-contact with the camera. Her legs were open, more like ten to two than quarter to three, and one hand was raised to her breast. She was pretty enough under the make-up, though no way was she the country girl she was trying to appear. Mick thought for a moment that she didn’t look the type to be posing naked in girlie magazines, but checked himself quickly enough. He reminded himself that he knew nothing about types.

  There was a black felt-tip pen in his free hand and he started doodling on the centrefold. First he drew in the outlines of a bikini, see-through (as it were) to start with, and then he shaded in the outlined area until the model was decently covered. The picture lost its meaning. Why were her legs arranged like that if not to expose herself? He continued shading, turning the bikini into a one-piece swimsuit, then into one with a halter neck, then with sleeves, then extending into a full catsuit with only the girl’s hands and face showing. But somehow the exposed hands and face were enough. The way the fingers were held, the expression in the eyes and mouth, they still said, ‘I’m naked. I’m showing myself off so you can look at me.’ He no longer wanted to be part of the bargain. He closed the magazine and dropped it on the floor.

  There was no TV in the room but there was a clock-radio with a fake wood case. It was tuned to some light jazz station but he wanted to hear speech. He spun the dial until he found a woman’s voice, low, husky, deliberate, and it was talking over the Stones’ ‘Let’s Spend The Night Together’. When the music ended the voice said, ‘Hello, London, you sexy city.’

  He scanned his room again, thought about the colourless, ugly, sexless streets that lay outside and wanted to turn the radio off, but there was something in that voice, a warmth, a compelling quality, that kept him tuned in.

  There was another slice of music, ‘“Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby”,’ and then the woman’s radio voice said, ‘Yes. Let’s. This is Marilyn Lederer talking to London, talking frankly about sex, about hang-ups and cock-ups and let downs. I’m no doctor but I do have a certain expertise in these areas. Give me a call, and for the fans of coprolalia among you (and you know who you are), bear in mind that we do have a licence to keep. Other than that the lines are completely … open.’

  Of course there was no phone in Mick’s room either but it would have made no difference. What would he have said? ‘My girlfriend was gang-raped by six men recently and now sh
e’s lost interest in sex. What do you think I should do?’ He couldn’t understand why anyone would ring these programmes, what they got out of it, what need was fulfilled by speaking on the radio. But he was happy enough to listen to other people’s confessions.

  ‘You know,’ said the woman’s voice on the radio, ‘a lot of people call in and say, ‘What are you wearing, Marilyn?’ and I always answer, ‘What would you like me to be wearing?’ Because, you see, this is the joy of radio. It’s the medium of the imagination and you can dress me up any way you want. Whatever you need you can get. It’s like TV, only the pictures are dirtier.’

  The voice sounded so close, so intimate, and whether it was natural or not, or whether it was a case of successful voice coaching or of electronic manipulation, didn’t matter; it made Mick feel less alone, and he could easily imagine it doing the same for others, for a slew of lonely listeners all over the city. He would have expected them to be mostly male, yet when the calls started to come in at least half were from women.

  The programme functioned partly like a problem page. People called to discuss specific personal difficulties; women whose men came too soon, or who weren’t romantic enough, men whose partners wouldn’t perform certain necessary and desirable acts. Commonplace tortures. Marilyn Lederer handled the calls breezily, warmly. She was serious but not solemn, like a sexy older sister. But not all the callers had problems. Some were more celebratory. A sixty-nine-year-old woman rang in to say she was still enjoying a good sex life, and this was rapidly followed by a sixteen-year-old girl who called in to say she’d recently, i.e. within the last half-hour or so, lost her virginity, and she thought it was fantastic and she needed to tell someone.

  ‘You’ve just told about three-quarters of a million listeners,’ said Marilyn Lederer.

  Mick found himself smiling, an unexpected activity in this room. As the programme went on he saw that it wasn’t a show directed solely at sad, desperate insomniacs, and for a while he felt better about himself simply because he was a listener to such a good, open-armed programme. Then came the crucial call of the night, from a man who identified himself as Bob from Fulham. He said he was fifty-seven years old and he sounded working class, ordinary, essentially cheerful but with something on his mind.

  ‘And what do you want to share with us, Bob?’ Marilyn Lederer asked.

  ‘Well, I’m having a bit of difficulty with the wife.’

  ‘In bed or out?’

  ‘That’s just the problem,’ he said and he laughed uncomfortably. The laugh died and he kept quiet and Marilyn Lederer let the silence last as long as she could, waiting for him to speak, but in the end she had to say, ‘Are we talking about performance, Bob?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘About what you’re doing?’

  ‘No. Not about what. About where.’

  ‘OK!’ She sounded thrilled. Here was something that was going to create sparks. ‘Where are you doing it at the moment, Bob?’

  ‘Er … in bed.’

  ‘Nowhere else?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘And your wife’s not happy with this?’

  ‘That’s it. She doesn’t just want to do it in bed.’

  ‘That’s fine isn’t it, Bob? You don’t object to that, do you? You wouldn’t mind trying it on the carpet or in the bath, would you?’

  ‘She doesn’t just want to do it outside the bed. She wants to do it outside the house.’

  Marilyn Lederer gave a low whistle of appreciation.

  ‘Right, Bob, your wife wants you to make love to her in the open air. And I take it that when she says outside the house she doesn’t just mean the back garden.’

  ‘We haven’t got a back garden, but that’s not the real problem. I love my wife, that’s fine, I want to make her happy, I’m game for a bit of al fresco sex but I don’t know where to go and do it, and I was wondering whether …’

  He hesitated, and his silence spoke volumes about sexual reticence and awkwardness. Then he forced himself to continue.

  ‘… whether any of your listeners could ring in with suggestions about where to have sex in London out of doors without getting caught.’

  Bob lapsed into confused silence again. He was glad to have got it off his chest, even so his embarrassment still blushed down the line. Fortunately Marilyn Lederer let him off the hook. She addressed her audience on his behalf, telling them to call in and help out poor old Bob of Fulham. Mick lay back on his bed and listened, hardly imagining that anyone would call in. But they did, in their hundreds.

  At first the suggestions were mundane. Callers recommended parks and heaths and commons and recreation grounds and carparks, but it soon got much more personal and anecdotal. People started to give details of dark alleys and shop doorways where they’d had particularly enjoyable bouts of sex. Station platforms were recalled, churchyards, telephone boxes, bridges, embankments, towpaths, tunnels. It appeared there was no part of the city that hadn’t been used as a venue for sex.

  The idea seemed to please the callers and it especially pleased Marilyn Lederer. She egged on her audience fervently. A woman rang up to talk about all the many, many places she’d had sex. For a moment her voice reminded Mick of Judy Tanaka, but that was probably because all posh voices sounded much the same to him. She was quite a caller. It seemed there was no district or borough, no location or postal district anywhere in London that she hadn’t performed. She was proud of it, as though she had something to prove, was going for a record.

  Mick found himself inexplicably incensed. He thought of ringing up and saying that in Sheffield at least, sluts kept quiet about the precise details of their activities, but of course he didn’t. The programme raced by without any intervention from him and at two o’clock when it ended the lines were still stacked up with callers.

  In his room in Hackney Mick wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or dismayed. The show asserted that sex was fun, easy, commonplace, but right now it didn’t seem like any of those things. It occurred to him that it was quite likely someone might have had sex in this room, on this bed. He didn’t find the thought celebratory or involving. It gave him the creeps. He was not in London for anything so trivial as sex. He did not find it a sexy city, whatever the people on the radio said. He found it hard and scruffy and cold and affectionless, a place where terrible things happened or were made to happen; and the sooner he could cease contact with it the better.

  NAMES

  Once it would have been easy enough for Stuart to blame his parents. They were the ones who had given him his name; a painfully absurd name that he hated. The name Stuart was innocuous enough, and so in most contexts was his surname. It was inherited in his father’s case, acquired through marriage in his mother’s; and he would have conceded that there was nothing inherently absurd about having the surname London. The last time he’d looked in the London telephone directory there were twenty-five or thirty others in the same boat. There were famous Londons, Jack for instance, and Julie. And he would also have admitted that if one had to be called after an English place-name London was clearly preferable to a great many others: Worksop, Diss, Looe, Foulness.

  But surely his parents should have had enough common sense not to join the name of a capital city with the name of a period in history. They should not, they should so obviously not, have given him the name Stuart London. He despised it. It was a chapter in a history textbook, the title of an exam paper, the name of a historical map, scarcely a person’s name at all.

  What had depressed him even more was that for a long time his parents hadn’t even realized what they’d done. They were not stupid or simple people, but they were not students of history either. The Tudors and Stuarts were unknown quantities to them. So for that matter were the Romans, the Georgians, the Victorians. It was only when little Stuart, a short-trousered schoolboy, came home from class, confused, laughed at, mocked to the point of tears, that his parents had some inkling of what they had done. They saw, too late, how their s
on’s name might be considered laughable.

  His father tried to make light of his son’s misery and said how much worse things might have been if he’d called him Norman London, but this didn’t help at all. Besides, his father pointed out, it wasn’t one of those totally ludicrous names that every Tom, Dick and Harry would find hilarious. It wasn’t Eva Brick or Eileen Dover. No, people had to have a certain subtlety of mind and a certain level of sophistication to find his name a joke. His father implied that this would make things better. Stuart knew it only made things worse.

  Alas, he was now no longer a schoolboy, and was therefore no longer able to blame his parents for anything. He was a forty-year-old man, who, in serious consultation with his wife, had decided not to have children. But if he’d had children he’d have called them something plain and simple, Bill, Alice, something like that. They wouldn’t have had to go through what he’d been through.

  Stuart had suffered long and hard but he had never quite had the confidence or the desperation to change his name. He’d considered it many times, had even considered some serious alternatives, but had not taken the final step. And then one day it was far too late. He found himself in a position, in a profession where his name might even be construed as beneficial; albeit a position and profession for which he no longer had much respect or tolerance.

  He hadn’t intended to find himself here. In so far as he had ever possessed any ambitions at all they were about becoming an architectural scholar or a historian, or possibly some sort of curator, something like that. But none of that had worked out. Instead, after several interrupted courses of study, after a number of career changes and crises, he had found himself as a part of the tourist industry, as managing director (he still found the title laughable) of a company called, with what these days seemed to him a ravaging lack of originality, The London Walker. London by name, London by nature. And he wondered if in some sense his name had preordained this fate for him.