Bleeding London

by Geoff Nicholson

  The tube wasn’t an option. Mick’s knowledge of the system was patchy, gleaned from a couple of daytrips, but the experience had been profound and bad. It had been a waking nightmare, everything he feared and despised all in one place; countless faceless people jammed into carriages in factory-farm conditions; people blocking your way, taking up too much room, refusing to let you get past, leaving their bags in the way. Then when the train pulled into the station there was the group grope of people getting on before they’d let other people off. Oh sure, there were heavenly voices trying to control all this mayhem, telling you to move right down inside, the guard on the train (a moron with a speech impediment) saying let the passengers off first, and being ignored, then some stuck-up ponce telling you to mind the gap. And when the tubes weren’t full they were occupied by kids who had to put their feet up on seats, by men who thought it was cute to be drinking lager at ten in the morning.

  But Mick’s real problem was more intrinsic, more philosophical. The very idea of sending packed trains through the bowels of the earth, like turds through a vast, curving gut, appalled and frightened him. It would take so little for these tunnels to get blocked, for the electricity to fail, for a fire to start. The King’s Cross fire was a bad dream he’d always been expecting to come true. He could imagine the selfish panic, the fireball, the smell of burning flesh. No point looking to your fellow passengers for help. They were in their own private hells. What if there was a bomb? What if there was a power cut? What if there was a nutter with a gun? Mick wasn’t claustrophobic in any ordinary sense but there was something about the tube that could turn him into a sad, screaming wreck.

  So Mick didn’t travel by tube. He didn’t travel by bus, either. He just didn’t. It was one of those things that a man like Mick couldn’t bring himself to do. The world of bus conductors and bus tickets and request stops, of sharing a seat with some stranger, it wasn’t for him. He was too impatient, too cool, too, yeah say it, aristocratic. So Mick walked. He did a lot, a whole lot of walking. He walked a very long way before he found his way back to the London Particular.

  Judy Tanaka was standing at the top of a set of wooden library steps, restocking the Ordnance Survey section, when she saw him come in. The shop was as empty as ever. Mick was carrying a plastic bag with a Virgin Megastore logo on it, and it bulged with the oblong shapes of the video tapes it contained. The A–Z he’d bought from Judy was in there too. Judy smiled uncertainly. In a way she was glad he’d come back. It would have been strange if she’d never seen him again, as though she’d read only the first chapter of a book she’d then lost, but she was sure he hadn’t come just to be friendly. She knew he had to be there because he wanted something from her.

  She came down the steps and said cheerfully, ‘Can I help you, sir?’

  ‘Don’t call me sir,’ he said as before, and then he realized she was joking. He felt embarrassed. The encounter had got off to a predictably clumsy start. ‘But you can help me,’ he added. ‘You have a television, right?’

  She nodded uncertainly.

  ‘And you have a video recorder, yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted, aware that she might be admitting something else too.

  ‘Good. Can I borrow it?’

  She laughed in sheer disbelief. How could he have the nerve to ask to borrow a video recorder from someone he barely knew?

  ‘OK, I can see you don’t like that idea,’ he said quickly. ‘But I don’t necessarily want to take it away from you. What might be easiest is if I just came round to your place and used it there.’

  ‘You want to come to my flat?’

  ‘Yeah. But only to use your video. There won’t be any funny business. I’m harmless. It’s just that I’m living in a dump at the moment, with no video, no telly, no phone. I’d be really grateful.’

  ‘You’re crazy,’ she said.

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Well, you have a lot of nerve.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘I don’t know you.’

  ‘That’s sort of true too, but you know I’m OK.’

  She wasn’t quite prepared to agree to that, not yet. Instead, stalling, looking for a delaying tactic and simultaneously aware that she was putting him on the spot, she asked, ‘Did you find your friend Philip Masterson?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he said enthusiastically.

  ‘Was he glad to see you?’

  ‘He was knocked out. It was a great reunion and I couldn’t have done it without you. I’m very grateful.’

  She wasn’t entirely prepared to be thanked so effusively, either.

  ‘What do you need the video for?’ she asked.

  ‘To watch some films,’ and he tapped his bag. His face was bright with optimism. ‘You can watch ’em with me if you like.’

  ‘I don’t know why I’m even considering this.’

  ‘Because you can tell I’m not a bad person.’

  ‘You’re asking a lot, you know.’

  ‘Yeah, but I’m asking very nicely.’

  She laughed again; at him, at herself, at the situation, at her inability to say no, at her inclination to say yes. He stood silent and puppyish, waiting for her to speak.

  ‘What videos are they?’ she asked.

  He emptied the carrier bag out on to the counter and lined up the five video boxes. They were films she hadn’t seen, that she barely recognized, but from their titles and packaging she could tell they were somewhat obscure, not very popular, not quite mainstream. They weren’t in keeping with her idea of what Mick’s tastes would be.

  ‘I won’t be watching these movies just for the fun of it,’ he said.

  ‘No?’

  ‘No, it’s research. I’m studying one of the actors in the films.’

  ‘Studying?’

  ‘Yes, an actor called Justin Carr. You know him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You might know his face.’ And he pointed to the stills on the back of one of the video boxes. They showed a good-looking, lean-faced, brooding actor. He looked very English, very well-bred, yet dark enough and rough enough to be enigmatic. It was a face she was sure she’d never seen before.

  ‘Justin Carr?’ she said. ‘Wasn’t that one of the names on your list? You went to college with him?’

  ‘Kind of thing.’

  ‘And now you’re studying him.’

  That’s it.’

  ‘I feel very nervous about letting you use my video,’ she said.

  ‘Why? You can watch me the whole time, make sure I don’t abuse it or anything.’

  ‘And I feel very nervous about being alone with you in my flat.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I don’t know you.’

  ‘You mean like we haven’t been properly introduced? Come on. This is the third time we’ve met. People get married who’ve met each other less than that. What do I have to do? Catch another shoplifter?’

  ‘That might help,’ she said, and for a moment he feared he’d exhausted the small fund of obligation she felt towards him.

  ‘There are five films there,’ she said. ‘That’s a lot of video watching.’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t need to see them all from beginning to end, just the parts my friend’s in.’

  For a moment she seemed less sure than ever. It sounded so suspicious. It sounded like no way to watch movies.

  He said, ‘Look, I’ll meet you after work, we’ll go to your place, we’ll watch videos, that’s all. I’ll even buy the take-away. I’ll even let you keep the videos. Please.’

  She felt sure she was going to say no, but then he smiled at her, said ‘Please’ again, and completely against her instincts and her common sense she found herself saying ‘OK.’

  He was there waiting for her when she finished work and although he tried to talk her out of it they travelled by tube to her home in Bethnal Green. He wanted to walk but she said that was ridiculous. So the tube it was. They didn’t talk much on the way there and Mick was glad.
It took a lot of concentration to keep his claustrophobia in check. For her part, Judy had decided not to worry about what might or might not happen when they got home. She didn’t usually get to meet men like Mick, and she suspected he was the sort of man for whom all the usual manners and rules didn’t apply. She didn’t think he was a threat to her, yet she felt she was definitely letting herself in for something.

  She lived in one of a long row of terraced houses tucked away in the streets behind the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood. Most of the neighbouring houses were neat and cared for, but the one she lived in was mean and decrepit; cracked rendering over dodgy brickwork, paint flaking off the front door, rotten windows, abandoned scaffolding in the front garden.

  She rented a place at the top of the house. It was more than a bedsit but less than a flat; her own kitchen but a shared bathroom. The room where she lived and slept was long and thin, low-ceilinged, the eaves cutting a diagonal slice out of one side. There was a small bookcase stacked with paperback novels, a crammed chest of drawers, clothes hung on hangers from the picture rail, fancy lamps and candlesticks, a vase of fresh flowers, and there in the corner were the television and video. The single bed had been partly disguised as a couch with cushions, and although the room was tidy, it was so small that every time Mick moved he felt he was going to knock something over, break something, destroy the careful order.

  ‘Nice place,’ he said unconvincingly.

  The walls were painted a stark, wintry shade of blue and she had hung no pictures on them, but on one wall, above the gas fire, stretching from the mantelpiece to the ceiling, was a large map of London. It was perhaps three feet by four feet, and it covered an area from Brentford in the west to London City airport in the east; from Haringey in the north to Streatham Common in the south. Mick knew none of these places, and he thought it was an ugly thing with which to decorate a wall. It made the place look unhomely, as if it were an office.

  She saw him looking at the map and said quickly, ‘It doesn’t cover the whole of London by any means. It leaves off all sorts of fringe areas of Greater London. But then there are parts of London that I wouldn’t think of as London at all. Still, it’s good enough for my purposes.’

  He wasn’t interested enough to ask what those purposes were, but he noticed a couple of hooks directly above the map, and nearby some sheets of rolled transparent plastic. It looked as though the hooks were designed to hold these transparent sheets in place over the map. And as he looked a little more closely he saw that some of the sheets weren’t wholly transparent at all. They’d been marked with mysterious arrows and crosses.

  Judy waved a hand at the map and the sheets and said, ‘It’s just a game I sometimes play.’

  That was all the explanation she intended to give, and it was enough for Mick. He thought nothing of it and sat down on the edge of the bed, carefully, as though he might be about to sit on something precious and breakable.

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s a slum, I know,’ she said.

  He didn’t disagree but said, ‘You should see my place.’

  ‘How come you live in a slum?’ she asked. ‘For that matter, how come you don’t own a television?’

  ‘Too poor,’ he said facetiously.

  ‘I don’t believe that. I know how much that suit must have cost.’

  ‘You can’t live in a suit, can you?’

  ‘So where do you live?’

  ‘Sheffield,’ he said. ‘Sheffield, Sex City.’

  ‘But in London.’

  ‘Park Lane, Hackney,’ he said. ‘But I’m not living there. Just staying there.’

  She went across and looked at her map to see where it was.

  ‘I’ve never been there,’ she said.

  ‘You’re lucky.’

  ‘What do you do for a living?’ she asked.

  ‘Let’s watch some films, yeah?’

  The collection of videos that Mick had assembled did not by any means constitute the complete filmic works of Justin Carr, but the examples were representative enough to form a good introduction. They also came from the raunchier end of his catalogue. None of them was remotely pornographic but there was often nudity, even if it was mostly female and mostly tasteful.

  The first of them, called Red Fins, was a kind of English road movie, and Mick watched intently as the plot unfolded. Carr had a lead part as a wheeler-dealer who imports classic sixties American cars from California. He was even better-looking on screen than he had been in the stills. He was animated yet vulnerable, tough yet boyish.

  There was a cops and robbers plot involving drugs and stolen cars and Mick was engrossed by it, but Judy saw the way he became even more involved whenever Carr appeared on screen. It was as though he was an obsessive fan of the actor, seeing only him and only his performance.

  In a coda after everything had been worked out, Carr and an actress had sex on the bonnet of a Cadillac while it was parked on a beach in Northumberland. The scene was apparently shot at dawn, the sky was icy blue, and the two actors looked freezing and windswept as they flailed about on top of the car. However, it was shot from a great distance so that although they were both completely naked the scene was scarcely explicit at all.

  The moment the film ended, as the credits started to roll, Mick pounced on the machine and put in the next video. This time it was some kind of Australian co-production, called Roo, set in the Outback, with Carr the only English actor surrounded by a cast of leathery character actors who all looked vaguely familiar from other Australian films and soap operas. There were a couple of mystical Abongines who kept staring off into the distance in a knowing manner, and there was love interest in the form of a female photographer who was there taking pictures of the local wildlife.

  This time Mick couldn’t be bothered to watch the scenes where Carr didn’t appear and he hit the fast forward button whenever Carr wasn’t on screen. There was a brief sex scene between Carr and the photographer in an end-of-the-world desert motel, while the radio played ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’. The lighting was very dim and orange and the actress held a sheet around her most of the time. Carr undertook a little breast-fondling and kissing, but in fact they never got very far with it since they were disturbed by vile animal noises coming from outside the motel.

  Once that scene was over, even though it was some way from the end of the film Mick yanked the video out. He’d seen enough.

  He slotted in the next video, Unhappy Jack, a coming-of-age movie set in an unnamed London suburb in 1980 just before the Falklands War. Carr had an unpromising role as the boyfriend of the eponymous fifteen-year-old hero’s older sister. Mick only stayed with it as far as the moderately kinky sex scene in which, after a drunken night out, Carr watched while the sister did a nude dance for him, pouring wine over her breasts so he could lick it off.

  ‘You mentioned something about a take-away,’ Judy said as Mick pulled the tape out of the machine.

  ‘Oh yeah, sure,’ said Mick and he extracted a twenty pound note from his pocket and handed it to her.

  ‘Any preference?’ she asked as she went to the phone.

  ‘No, no preference,’ said Mick, as the fourth film began. This time he skimmed rapidly, not even watching the whole of scenes in which Carr had a major part. It was called Rochester, and in Mick’s opinion it didn’t look like a real film at all. The titles, even the packaging, didn’t look the way a film was supposed to look.

  It was a long, arty experimental movie, a series of ‘meditations’ on the life of the seventeenth-century rake. It looked as though it had been largely improvised; the dialogue rambled and occasionally died completely.

  There was a fair amount of nudity, although Carr was fully dressed throughout, and in his biggest scene he tried with increasing difficulty to read an obscene poem by Rochester while a female skinhead, naked but for black stockings and a ruff, fiddled around inside his trousers and distracted him. But by and large it was all talk and no action. Mick paid it little attention and when
the pizzas were delivered he was able to look away from the screen and eat without feeling he was missing much. He ran the final third of the film through on fast forward and found nothing worth stopping for.

  The final movie was called City of Skin and was the classiest of the bunch; one of those late-eighties movies about corruption in the City, about public and private morality, in which the lead characters lived in opulent converted warehouses, drove Porsches and talked about Docklands development, took cocaine, did ruthless financial deals, and had athletic and empty sex. Carr was the leading man. His sex scenes (there were two) both took place in his massively over-designed penthouse looking out over the Thames. The first scene was shot in daylight and after romping all around the room he pressed his naked co-star up against the flat’s big panoramic window, and there was an external shot from the river showing her breasts and belly squashed flat against the glass. The second scene was shot at night and made great use of reflections. The blinds were open and the lights were on in the penthouse so that this time the windows reflected the two people having sex inside the room while the lights of London outside were superimposed over them.

  Again the rest of the film scarcely interested Mick, but this time he rewound the tape and watched both sex scenes again. Then, at last, he’d seen enough. He knew what Justin Carr looked like from all angles. He glanced at his watch. It was very late. He hadn’t been much of a guest and he reckoned he must have overstayed his welcome. He turned towards Judy and was ready to apologize but he saw she’d fallen asleep beside him on the divan. He looked around and found a coat to drape over her, then without waking her he let himself out and walked home, leaving the videos behind but being sure to take his A–Z with him.