Bleeding London

by Geoff Nicholson

  Mick had the feeling that he was being insulted, but he wasn’t quite sure in what way. Conversation ceased and Slater could attack the contents of his plate without distraction. He swiftly and professionally cleared his plate, then put down his fork and looked at Mick like a game but sad-eyed terrier.

  ‘How was that?’ Mick asked.

  ‘Unusual,’ said Slater. ‘Piquant, brave, assured. Am I right to suspect a Cajun influence?’

  ‘Glad you liked it. There’s plenty more where that came from.’

  ‘No doubt,’ said Slater.

  Mick watched Slater sitting there at his own kitchen table, looking so at home, so in control, so poised, and for a moment he thought of coshing him with the gun. How else was he going to get to him? Mick felt as though he was the one being tested. He took the plate away and filled it again, this time with cornflakes, pickled onions, dried figs, raspberry vinegar, a few generous shakes of curry powder and ground ginger, and over the top he swirled thick worms of tomato puree.

  ‘What’s your favourite kind of food?’ Mick asked.

  ‘Until now I think I would always have said eclectic,’ Slater explained, ‘but looking at this …’

  ‘You like Japanese food?’ Mick asked.

  ‘Some of it, yes.’

  ‘I had it for the first time today,’ Mick said, and then he stopped himself. Why did he need to tell Slater anything? He motioned for Slater to eat up. He had rather more trouble this time. With each forkful he grimaced, and Mick watched with pleasure as the face became flushed and blotchy. Nevertheless Slater persevered, gulping down everything on his plate. The effort looked brave and painful.

  ‘How is it?’ Mick asked.

  ‘Ambitious, spirited, traditional ingredients, though iconoclastically presented.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ said Mick. ‘Something to drink? Sweet sherry? Ovaltine? Bovril? Vimto?’

  ‘I suppose water would be out of the question.’

  ‘Too right,’ Mick said. ‘But if you need to throw up or anything just say the word.’

  Slater swallowed hard and shook his head. No, that wouldn’t be necessary. That would be admitting defeat and he wasn’t prepared to do that.

  ‘You’ve got a good appetite,’ Mick said.

  ‘It has something to do with the gun in your pocket.’

  ‘Even so—’ Mick started.

  ‘Look,’ said Slater, ‘I don’t know who you are, whether you’re a dissatisfied reader of my column, or a chef I’ve insulted at some time, or a restaurant owner I’ve criticized too harshly, but, whoever you are, I’m sure your actions are justified. I’m sure I deserve it. And believe me, I’m not brave, not a hero. I’m not going to fight you. Tell me to eat my own faeces and I’ll do it.’

  Mick was disgusted. It was a totally unsatisfactory offer. He was glad he didn’t have to deal with someone who was trying to be a hero, yet he had hoped for a bit more conflict than Slater was providing. Slater’s desire for a quiet life was profoundly at odds with Mick’s desire to see him suffer. Mick certainly had no intention of getting involved with faeces but he served Slater more food: cold stew with marmalade and mayonnaise and a chunk of lard and two heaps of instant coffee granules and a crumbled Oxo cube.

  Slater began to eat. He wasn’t looking good. He was a man in distress, and yet he was still facing his distress all too bravely. He accepted the latest concoction Mick had given him and got on with it. But that was all wrong. Mick wanted him to be unable to get on with it. Mick wanted him on his knees, choking, gagging, weeping, vomiting, pleading and begging for an end to his tortures. Once those conditions were met, once Slater seemed sufficiently wretched and penitent, then the job would be over and Mick could be on his way. But while ever Slater remained collected and stoical Mick would have to continue punishing him, and he was running out of ideas.

  ‘Unusual,’ Slater said as he cleared the plate again. ‘What it lacked in poise it more than made up for in flamboyance.’

  Furious, Mick assembled a final mélange of cat food, cornflour, fish stock, brown sugar, Tabasco, mint sauce, defrosted raspberries, goose fat, mango chutney, gelatine and dried tarragon, then watched in dismay, though not absolute surprise, as Slater determinedly began to eat this too. There were tears in his eyes now, but that was because of the Tabasco, not because he was weak or defeated. Mick had had enough.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘That’s it. Time for the final course. Now take your clothes off.’

  ‘Oh, really,’ Slater said. ‘Do I have to?’

  It was a complaint born out of inhibition and natural modesty, not out of defiance. Mick assured him that he had no choice and Slater at once removed his clothes, reluctantly but with the minimum of fuss. He looked even fatter now than he had before his heroic bout of eating, and his penis looked even smaller.

  Mick used his forearm to sweep the table clear. He used far more force and violence than was really necessary. Food and its packaging went flying across the kitchen, hitting the floor and the walls and then smashing or breaking open. Mick crunched through the mess to the cupboard beneath the sink and tossed the contents around until he found a washing line and some lengths of rope.

  ‘Lie on the table,’ he said to Slater.

  Slater moved to obey.

  ‘Face up or face down?’ he asked, considerately.

  Mick had to think about it. He decided that face up would be more humiliating and Slater assumed this position on the table top. Mick tied Slater’s hands and feet to the four legs of the table, so that he was spread like a star fish. Then he stepped back and scooped up food from the floor and began to pour and throw and slap it all over Slater’s fat body so that before long he was coated, caked with a layer of solids and thick liquids, powders and emulsions, morsels and chunks, that clung to his shape making his body look as though it was in grotesque ferment.

  Mick surveyed what he’d done and felt no great pride in his handiwork, but then went to the dining room, pulled open the door and let out Slater’s three cats. They found their way, suspiciously but surely, to the kitchen and began to sniff around the food on the floor, before making a swift ascent to the table, following the trail to where the sludge of food was most dense.

  Slater remained motionless, his body tensed as though in a dentist’s chair, his eyes closed, trying to keep his breathing steady, unsure whether his ordeal was nearly over or just beginning. Mick wasn’t sure either, He couldn’t shake the feeling that as an act of revenge this had been a pretty feeble, bodged job. Either way he’d had enough. He walked out of the house, carefully leaving the front door open, a golden opportunity for a more conventional kind of intruder.

  YELLOW

  Mick was walking away from Slater’s house, his steps swift but unperturbed, his demeanour casual but not studiedly so, when he became aware of a car driving slowly along the road keeping pace a little way behind him. He ignored it, didn’t turn round, just kept walking. Even when the driver started sounding the horn he was reluctant to acknowledge the car’s existence. But in the end he did look, and with some relief saw it was an old Datsun Cherry, not a car the bad guys drive, and he then felt free to look at the driver, and he saw that it was Judy.

  She stopped, waited for him to come over to her. He was still reluctant. A car was much easier to trace than a lone man. He looked up and down the street wondering if there were potential witnesses. Then Judy began honking the horn urgently and persistently, and he realized that getting in would make him less conspicuous than not, so he yanked the door open and climbed inside.

  The car was a wreck and as he settled himself in the seat it jerked back and slid out of its runners. He was going to make a remark about the shittiness of Japanese cars, but he stopped himself. Instead he said, ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘Where should I be?’ Judy asked, as she set the car in motion.

  ‘Tucked up in bed with a good jigsaw,’ he said.

  ‘Alone or with others?’

&nbs
p; ‘Alone. Definitely.’

  ‘Actually, I was in a restaurant.’

  ‘Which restaurant?’

  ‘You know which,’ she said irritatedly. ‘The Morel, where Slater was eating. I saw him arrive. I watched. I waited. I thought you’d be coming too. I thought you’d do whatever you had to do at the restaurant.’

  ‘Oh sure. Very discreet.’

  ‘I didn’t know discretion came into it.’

  ‘You don’t know anything, and I like it that way.’

  ‘I know a lot more now than I did a few hours ago. As a matter of fact I thought you did a very good job.’

  At first he didn’t understand the implication of what she was saying. Only slowly did it dawn on him that she was passing judgement on the competence of his work, that she must have seen him operate.

  ‘I saw it all,’ she said. ‘You’re not the only one who can spy on people. I followed Slater home from the restaurant. I saw him go into the house. I sneaked round the back, looked in through the window and saw you waiting for him in the kitchen. Then I saw what you did to him.’

  ‘It’s not meant to be a spectator sport,’ Mick said.

  ‘No? It was quite a spectacle. I could tell you were saying a lot to him and obviously I missed that. It was like watching a movie without a soundtrack, and it’s all the more compelling because you don’t know exactly what’s being said.’

  Mick had no time for her interesting little analogy. This wasn’t a movie, silent or otherwise. She wasn’t taking him seriously enough.

  ‘OK, so you saw me,’ he said. ‘You wanted to know what I do, and now you know. Happy?’

  Mick sounded defiant. He was embarrassed and maybe even a little ashamed, but he refused to be apologetic. He was ready for an argument, ready to attack in order to defend his indefensible position.

  Judy stopped the car, turned to him, smiled at him sweetly and said, ‘It’s fine. I liked what I saw. I like what you do.’

  He had no answer to that, nothing up his sleeve with which to defend himself. Nor could he do anything when she leaned over and stroked his face and started kissing him. He was thrown and confused, and he resisted for as long as he could, but before long he found himself kissing back.

  The rest of the night fell into place from then on. She drove them to the Dickens. Mick wanted to go to her place, but she wouldn’t have that. They spent the night in his bed, wrapped together on the slopes and faces of the crummy mattress. Her body was alien in all sorts of ways, novel because of unfamiliarity, but also obeying a geometry and proportion that was different from the white English girls he’d slept with. The skin looked and felt different, smoother with a different grain, the buttocks and breasts seemed to join the body differently.

  She could feel him revelling in the newness and she said, ‘So now you’ve slept with a half-Japanese woman. And with a Londoner.’

  And he replied, ‘And you’ve slept with a Sheffielder.’

  ‘And a petty criminal.’

  Mick laughed. In one way he didn’t find it particularly strange that Judy was turned on by the fact that he was a bit of a villain, by what he’d done to Slater. Women were turned on by the strangest things, attracted to the oddest, most unattractive men. Even when they liked you, you were always surprised at what it was they liked. But he was glad that Judy wasn’t appalled, that she didn’t condemn him.

  It would have been easy enough to tell her everything then, and a part of him wanted to. It wasn’t precisely a desire for confession, more the need to explain to someone else what he was doing, and have that person confirm that it had at least an internal logic, that it still made some sort of sense. But he didn’t take the opportunity to explain. It would have been too difficult. He would have had to tell Judy about Gabby and this wasn’t the right moment. He doubted whether any such right moment would ever come.

  Instead they talked about cities. It was easier for her. She was well-travelled. She talked about her tourist adventures in Paris, Prague, Athens, Florence, Vienna. It meant nothing to him, this stream of incidents, these tales of lost luggage, of flea-bag hotels, of visits to art galleries and museums, of strange sleazy men who tried to pick her up. He asked why she only travelled to cities, why she didn’t go to the beach, to the mountains, and all she could say was that cities were where the life was. He countered with stories about Sheffield, Doncaster, Barnsley, Chesterfield, and she was amused by his sense of the ridiculous, by his refusal to take seriously her attempts at cosmopolitanism. She said she’d like to visit all his places if he’d come with her as a guide. And she told him about the job she’d had with The London Walker, although she made no mention of her affair with the boss. He said it sounded like money for old rope.

  She stroked his chest, pressed her fingers into the depressions between his ribs. Her hands felt cool and long and precise. She said, ‘If you’re ever present at a nuclear attack, make sure you’re wearing long-sleeved white clothing.’

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘Obviously if you’re at the centre of the heat flash it really doesn’t make much difference what you’re wearing, because at that range your internal organs just boil. But let’s say you’re a mile or so away; if your skin’s uncovered it’ll be stripped away from the flesh like orange peel. If you’re wearing a black shirt that’s just as bad. The dark material attracts the heat, it chars, probably catches fire, the skin underneath burns. But white clothes reflect the heat. They really do give you a chance of survival.

  ‘And definitely don’t wear a white shirt that has a dark pattern on it, because the heat will burn through the pattern. Imagine you were wearing one of those T-shirts with a map of the London Underground, then you’d have the design of the tube lines burned into your chest forever.’

  ‘Are you making this up?’ Mick asked.

  ‘It happened in Hiroshima.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yes. I read about it.’

  She moved her fingertips over his chest again, this time tracing invisible tube lines.

  Mick woke next morning, found Judy still sleeping soundly on his shoulder and felt above all else surprised. It took a while for the events of the previous night to rearrange themselves in his mind. Then he started to feel awkward. He also felt that he’d been seduced and coerced. He hadn’t wanted this woman in his bed, hadn’t wanted even to kiss her, hadn’t even wanted to get in her car. He felt guilty that he was betraying Gabby, being unfaithful to her, and guilty too that in sleeping with Judy he was being diverted. This was not what he was here for. The purity of his mission was being subverted. He was wasting time. But what he felt worst about, what made him feel especially bad and especially guilty, was the fact that despite everything he was still very glad to have slept with Judy.

  When she woke up he was civil to her, kissed her chastely, told her he had no way of making breakfast in his room, not even coffee. She didn’t seem bothered by his distance and he felt some relief that she wasn’t being demanding or romantic. Maybe, he thought, her feelings were as complex as his.

  It was only after she’d gone that he looked around his room, noticed the sheet of jagged-edged hardboard lying on the floor and saw that the final piece had been added to his jigsaw puzzle of London.

  THE WALKER’S DIARY

  WRAPAROUND

  It’s come as some surprise to discover just how much pleasure writing this diary gives me. I don’t quite know who I’m writing it for, but I have a sense that I’m not doing it only for myself. Perhaps I have half an eye on posterity. I hope that isn’t too silly or arrogant of me. I used to try to write when I was a soppy adolescent, and later when I first met Anita she encouraged me. She suggested I write a highly personal guide book to London, but I always thought there were enough unreliable guides to London. I didn’t want to add to the pile.

  Besides, the problem I’ve always had with writing was that I could never finish anything. Personally I rather like the idea of unfinished works or interrupted masterpieces (‘Kub
la Khan’, Edwin Drood), although I can see how a lot of people wouldn’t. But with a diary that’s not a problem. It ends where it ends. It can’t be a beautifully shaped artificial form. It’s the same shape as a human life. It ends because the life of the diarist ends. If you need to have a reasonable excuse for not finishing something, then death seems to me like the best excuse of all.

  I was sitting in a square formica booth in a snack bar in the Charing Cross Road, nursing a cappuccino in a worn white cup, pretending to read my paper. It was mid-morning and the place was empty apart from me and someone in the next booth, a woman aged about twenty-five. I am no longer shy about staring at people. I saw she had a sharp, narrow face, completely without make-up, but as I watched she began to apply mascara, eye-liner, eye shadow, eyebrow pencil. Her eyes were set wide apart and they looked tired and sad and innocent, but as she worked on them they became more defined, more hard-edged, sexier. A slick of metallic blue and grey formed itself above each of her eyes, and finally she drew two long kitten points leading away from the outer corners. It made her look a little Japanese (and of course I thought about Judy). The woman worked hard, continually checking progress in a small circular hand mirror, and it took a long time. It didn’t look like a labour of love exactly, but it was something she knew she had to do.

  I have been trying not to make assumptions about the people I see in London, not to jump to conclusions to reinforce the boring, limiting stereotypes. But if I had been forced to guess I would have said she was not a Londoner, not a native, that she was perhaps a tourist, though not on her first visit to England, or more likely a foreign student. I saw that she had a map on the table in front of her, but it was tattered and well-used.

  At last the eyes were finished. I wondered if she was about to start on her lips, but she wasn’t. She put her make-up away, finished the coffee she’d been drinking and she was ready to go. As she got up she slipped on a pair of wraparound shades that completely hid her eyes.