Bleeding London

by Geoff Nicholson

  He looked even less impressed. ‘Sounds a bit tame,’ he said.

  They studied the menus in silence until the waitress returned. Without consulting Judy, but with a reckless confidence that Judy admired, he ordered the sashimi. She was pleased. She hadn’t intended that this lunch should be a test for him, yet she was glad he was coping so effortlessly.

  ‘What have you been doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, not much, listening to the radio.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘And the reason I won’t sleep with you has nothing to do with you being a Londoner, and nothing to do with you being half-Japanese either.’

  He was aware that he had been talking very loudly so he clammed up completely.

  ‘Well, that’s some consolation,’ Judy said with enormous self-possession.

  ‘And, as a matter of fact,’ he was now speaking in a loud, hissing whisper, ‘I think it’s a bit bloody much. I don’t know you at all, but I turn on my radio and hear the most intimate details about you.’

  ‘Sometimes it’s easiest that way.’

  ‘Why’d you do it? Why do you call the phone-ins?’

  ‘It’s cheaper than a therapist. And it’s supposed to be anonymous.’

  ‘And I don’t want you phoning up the radio and telling them anything about me.’

  ‘I bet you don’t.’ And she had to stop herself laughing at him.

  ‘And that’s another good reason for not sleeping with you. You blab to radio stations.’

  As though to prove that she was capable of not blabbing she sat in silence for a long time. Mick, feeling that perhaps he’d been a bit rough on her, finally said, ‘You come here often?’

  ‘I’ve never been here before,’ she said.

  ‘How did you know about it?’

  ‘I read a review in the paper. I read a lot of restaurant reviews. It’s a London habit, I guess.’

  ‘It would have to be.’

  He glanced around the restaurant and he liked its air of formal calm. There was no music and nobody was speaking loudly. There were several pairs of Japanese women eating together. It was a little patch of calm and foreignness in the centre of the big city.

  Then, without preamble, he said, ‘So what’s it like to be Japanese?’

  She laughed. Had the question come from anyone else she would have been deeply insulted, but coming from Mick it somehow wasn’t nearly so bad or so crass. His naivety carried with it a built-in irony.

  ‘I can’t say what it’s like to be Japanese any more than I can say what it’s like to be English. Could you?’

  It was a new and surprising thought for him and yet he didn’t have to think very long before he said, ‘Yeah, I think so,’ and although she probably wouldn’t have pressed him on it, he began to describe how it felt.

  ‘Well, we’re used to thinking of ourselves as the best country in the world, which is obviously bullshit because we’re not the best at anything any more. We don’t make the best cars or tanks or aeroplanes, we don’t make the best watches or steel or televisions. We don’t even make the best television programmes any more. And we’re not the best at football or cricket or athletics. And we’re not the richest or most democratic country in the world. But, you know, we still think we’re the best.’

  She smiled. She had expected something much less knowing from him.

  ‘If you’re only half-English, maybe you only feel half of that.’

  ‘Or none of it,’ she added, and she was ready to end the conversation there, but Mick had hit his stride.

  ‘And, you know,’ he continued, ‘it’s a long time since we lost a war, which is a good thing, I think. I mean, I’m not in favour of wars, but if you do get involved in one I think it’s better to win it than lose it, although not necessarily. I mean … well, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, you must know all about that stuff.’

  ‘No more than a lot of English people,’ she said.

  ‘And you know, they say in England we haven’t been invaded since 1066, but the way I see it we’re invaded every day of the year: American films, French wine, Indian restaurants, German cars, Japanese everything, foreign tourists, foreign immigrants.’

  ‘And how do you feel about that?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s the point I was trying to make. I feel fine. I don’t mind being invaded at all. I really like it.’

  ‘You’re full of surprises, Mick, you know that?’

  ‘You thought I was going to say something about bloody foreigners.’

  She didn’t want to admit it, but, yes, she’d thought he might have displayed some sort of distasteful if amusing xenophobia.

  ‘Maybe you’re prejudiced,’ he said.

  ‘Aren’t we all?’

  The waitress returned, knelt again and set two black lacquer trays in front of them on the table. Mick looked at his not with surprise but with enormous curiosity. He handled his chopsticks deftly and began to negotiate the slivers of raw fish. As he put them in his mouth his expression showed thoughtful concern as though the food was a cause of deep contemplation.

  ‘In the shop windows in Japan,’ Judy said, ‘all the mannikins have western faces. They’re not allowed to be the yellow peril with slitty little eyes. Don’t you think that’s strange, a whole culture that has to misrepresent itself in its own shop windows?’

  ‘Most English people don’t look much like English mannikins, either,’ he said.

  ‘No, but at least they’re of the same ethnic group.’

  He nodded to accept her point.

  ‘And in Japan even quite mild sex films are censored and they electronically blur the genitalia of the actors, while at the same time there are phallic festivals where twelve-foot-long papier mâché penises are paraded through the streets.’

  He looked impressed and amused and he ate another crescent of bruised-looking tuna.

  ‘And in Japan there are love hotels where rooms are rented by the hour and couples go in and have sex on a bed that’s in the shape of a space ship or a Mercedes convertible.

  ‘And if I was properly Japanese, when you mentioned the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki I’d have apologized to you. I would know that the very mention of the bombing would put you in a position where you ought to feel remorse, and that would be very painful for you, so I would have to apologize for making you feel so bad.’

  ‘Just as well you’re only half-Japanese.’

  ‘That’s right. I don’t have to apologize for anything.’

  ‘So what’s the best thing about Japan?’ he asked.

  ‘Mount Fuji,’ she said without hesitation. ‘In early spring when it still has snow on its summit and when all the surrounding hillsides are full of azaleas in bloom.’

  ‘Sounds good,’ he said. ‘How much time have you spent there?’

  She smiled as though she was about to prove a very important point.

  ‘I’ve never been there,’ she said, and when Mick looked profoundly puzzled, she added, ‘I’ve only heard about it, read things, seen movies, just the way you have. Japan’s no more real to me than to any foreigner. It’s like you and London. You had a pretty shrewd idea of what London was like, long before you got here. You created your own version of London. It was just as real as the actual London. Japan’s the same for me.’

  Mick thought she was wrong, but he felt too weary to argue. For her part she wished she’d never spoken. She should have known he was not going to understand, and it didn’t matter. She wondered if he was offended, if he thought she was being too clever for him.

  ‘How’s the sashimi?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he said, and then becoming confidential he added, ‘But do you know, it’s stone cold.’

  She was about to explain patiently that it was meant to be cold, when she realized that she was the naive one, the one being sent up. He was laughing at her and at his own joke.

  ‘You must think we’re a pretty unsophisticated lot up in Sheffield,’ he said.

  ‘I don�
�t know what people are like in Sheffield,’ she replied.

  ‘You haven’t created your own version?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Then don’t bother.’

  She hated this antagonism, though given his reaction to the radio phone-in she was hardly surprised. It was not what she’d had in mind at all. She had brought him here for a good reason, but it had nothing to do with arguing about Anglo-Japanese culture.

  She said, ‘I’ve got something I want you to see.’

  She opened her bag and pulled out a folded page of newspaper. She unfolded it and handed it to Mick. It was from some weekend supplement and across the bottom of the page was a column called ‘Kerry Slater’s Restaurant Round-Up’. The name was immediately familiar from Gabby’s list. The face was familiar too from Mick’s reconnaissance. Mick looked at her in some surprise. She had done well to remember a name from the list, though that was not necessarily a good thing as far as he was concerned. How much more would she remember or work out for herself? And what might she do with the knowledge?

  ‘When I first saw your list I thought I recognized the name,’ she said. ‘But it took me a while to remember where I’d seen it before. Am I right? He is the one you want to have a reunion with, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Mick agreed.

  ‘Did you know he wrote for the papers?’

  Mick had watched Slater’s house, had seen him sitting at a desk in his study, punching words on to a computer keyboard, and he had followed him to some expensive restaurants, but he hadn’t quite worked out what he did for a living. Mick shook his head, and Judy smiled, pleased with herself

  ‘You really don’t want to get involved with this, you know,’ Mick warned.

  ‘No? Why not? I like reunions. I like parties.’

  ‘Not this sort.’

  ‘I want to be involved,’ she insisted. ‘I don’t know why, but I do.’

  ‘You want to be involved even though you don’t know what it entails?’

  ‘That’s right. Strange, isn’t it?’

  Yes, it was, and it was strangely appealing. It was much sexier than her offer of sex had been. Even so, he said, ‘No, it’s a really bad idea.’

  But she said, ‘I know where he’ll be tonight. I know which restaurant he’ll be reviewing. I rang the paper, wormed it out of them. I know he’ll be eating alone. At the Morel restaurant, eight o’clock. I thought maybe you could use that knowledge.’

  ‘Could I?’ he said. ‘How exactly?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what methods you use.’

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘But I want to know. And I want to be there.’

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘Maybe. But I want to watch. What do you do to these men? Do you beat them? Torture them? Have them crawl and beg for mercy? Or do you kill them? Are you a full-blown hit man?’

  ‘Hey,’ he said. I’m still eating my lunch.’

  ‘Don’t dismiss me,’ she said. ‘I’m not some silly little girl.’

  ‘No, you’re a bookshop assistant who suddenly wants to be a gangster’s moll.’

  ‘Are you a gangster, then?’

  ‘This is stupid,’ he said. ‘This is bullshit.’

  He started to rise from the table, got hooked up on the edge of the sitting cavity, suddenly felt embarrassed and exposed to be shoeless. His socks looked frayed and worn out. His attempt to storm out in high dudgeon was looking pretty inept and comical. He dropped a couple of bank notes on the table and said, ‘Look, Judy, stay out of my work. Stay out of my life. Stay out of my bed. Stay out of my radio. All right?’

  She bowed her head in an unfamiliar, almost oriental gesture of submission. And when Mick turned round he saw that the other diners and the waitresses had their heads down too, as though to spare themselves the shame of having to look at him. Mick pulled his shoes on and left the restaurant. The moment he’d walked ten feet along the street he regretted the whole business and felt terrible about Judy, but there was no going back, no point in apologizing. He told himself it didn’t matter. Judy was just a distraction. She was no part of his plans. First things had to come first. Tonight, for instance, was the night he was going to deal with Kerry Slater.

  BLITZ

  After midnight now, the second year of the war. The soldiers have all gone back to their barracks. Earlier that evening they went to Madame Tussaud’s, to the half-empty cinema, to the restaurant where they ate five-bob dinners and the band played from seven till ten.

  It was a melancholy place. The waxwork halls contained more dummies than visitors, but a few of the men wanted to come and look their enemies in the face, to see the figures of Hitler and Goering and Mussolini; pale, stiff, immobile figures in the deserted Grand Hall.

  London itself feels deserted. The children have been sent away. The young men are at the war. The city is blacked out and the remaining population is burrowed away in air raid shelters and tube stations. This is how they fight the Battle of Britain.

  Through the black September night come the planes, ours and theirs, the Luftwaffe and the Few. The sky shakes with metal, a primitive, focused vibration, a death rattle. And on the roof of Madame Tussaud’s in the Euston Road stands a timid fifteen-year-old fire watcher. Jim London, Stuart’s father, a lone and all too slight figure, looking for bombs that don’t have his name on them, doing his bit before the inevitable call up. Better here than in some cramped Anderson shelter, dug into the earth, corrugated iron above his head. Much better here than sleeping in the underground like one of an army of rats.

  The night sky is full of litter, not only the aircraft but the beams from searchlights, barrage balloons, the anti-aircraft fire, and, of course, the bombs, invisible as they fall. It is more than the cool autumn night that makes him shiver. Powerless, weaponless he just stands and watches and waits for whatever the cluttered night can throw down at him.

  And yet the city has a beauty about it tonight. Scrolls of smoke twirl slow stepless dances around its edges, the bright fire from the incendiary bombs turns the outlines of buildings into noble, fragile silhouettes. London seems so big, so diffuse, such a sitting duck. The turrets and spires, the dome of St Paul’s, the tower of Big Ben are like targets, chess pieces waiting to be picked off. There is no way of missing. Every stray bomb will score a hit, will destroy something precious, some landmark or piece of the city’s past; if not the docks and the munitions factories, then a Wren church, a row of Georgian houses, a fragment of Roman wall.

  Jim London has never felt so alert and open-eyed. Fear has given him an almost hallucinatory sensitivity. His eyes seem to see more clearly than ever before, his very skin is alive to the attack on the city. His reactions feel spring-loaded, hair-triggered. And yet he doesn’t see the bomb that does the damage, not that seeing it would have helped.

  When it comes it doesn’t even feel like an external force that hits the building. It feels more as though half the structure, the west part, the part containing the cinema, has simply erupted, spasmed and thrown itself into pieces. The air around him seems to bend. There is furious, bone-splitting thunder, and he is hit by a shock wave. Then debris engulfs him like a solid cloud of brick and tile and plaster. He is knocked sideways on the parapet where he was standing and he stays there, stays down, his arms cushioning his head, waiting for either stillness or the next explosion. He feels as though he is there for an age, time enough to know he has no injuries, time enough to realize that if he stays down too long others will come in search and see what a spineless coward he really is.

  When nothing worse happens, he scrambles to his feet and runs to the end of the building to see where the bomb hit. The cinema has simply gone, disappeared as though a heavy, precise child had stamped its fist on a balsa wood model. He can still see the proscenium but nothing else is recognizable, just rubble and rising dust and a deep bomb crater. He scurries down open metal staircases carrying a torch and a fire extinguisher until he reaches street level. He
is the first to arrive and warily he approaches the new-made mound of architectural scrap. The air is still thick with motion, dust particles, pulverized cement, wood splinters, but now he sees fragments that make sense, slashed strips of carpets, wooden mouldings, burst cinema seats, and beyond them a deep, dark hole which the bomb has excavated.

  He climbs up on the shaky hillock of ruins and peers over into the depths of the hole. At first he sees only edgeless darkness which he tries to tame with his torch. He is not sure what he is looking for. There could surely be no survivors down there, and in any case he knows the cinema was empty. And yet there is definitely something lurking in the void, something that the wan beam from his torch slowly begins to define.

  He sees a man’s face, still, lurid pink, incomprehensibly serene. Then he sees another, a second pale, motionless face turned up to the blitzed sky. And then another, and another. And then he realizes there are no bodies belonging to these heads. They are detached and unfettered, all lying together in the crater like so many footballs. Some of the faces are smashed, some are curled into horrible, melting expressions, and yet they are bloodless and do not look as though they have recently been in pain. And as he moves his torch he sees more and more of them, hundreds of these thronging, severed heads, all staring up at him, blank but infinitely knowing. He realizes he has come upon something vile and inconceivable, a plague pit, a murderer’s horde of corpses … and he promptly faints.

  In a more terrifying story he might have pitched forward into the crater full of heads, but instead he falls backwards to safety, where, a few seconds later, one of the other fire watchers, an old man who lost a leg and an eye in Ypres, finds him. Relieved to discover that the fifteen-year-old is not dead, he brings the lad round, gives him some water and explains that the severed heads are wax moulds that have fallen into the crater from the now demolished storeroom of Madame Tussaud’s.

  ‘This’ll be a story to tell your kids,’ the old man says. Then adds, ‘If you live long enough to have any.’