Bleeding London

by Geoff Nicholson

  Walked along Wimpole Mews, the place where Johnny Edgecombe came looking for Christine Keeler and emptied a gun into the front door when Mandy Rice-Davies wouldn’t open it, finally taking a pot shot at her when she appeared at a window. Edgecome was only captured after a long siege at his home, somewhere far less desirable and glamorous than Wimpole Mews.

  I think the world is divided between those for whom time passes too quickly and those for whom it passes too slowly. London is probably more enjoyable for people in the latter category than in the former.

  The act of getting from A to B, whether it’s by public transport or in a cab or by car or on foot, always absorbs massive amounts of time. Partly it’s the matter of distances between places, the density of traffic, the inefficiency of public transport, but I suspect it’s more than that. The sheer nature of the city saps your energy and your ability to function. It’s fine if you want to kill time, you just make a short journey and before you know it you’ve lost an hour or more.

  However, if you’re one of those people who’s always short of time the same rules apply, London still takes it out of you and that must be as maddening and frustrating as hell.

  In Lord North Street, a sign surviving from the war, painted on brick: ‘Public shelters in vaults under pavements in this street.’

  In Denmark Street (what used to be called Tin-Pan Alley), a young man with rock star looks and clothes was unloading guitars and taking them into a music shop. His image was very cool and hip and yet he seemed uncomfortable and self-conscious. I couldn’t think why but when he went to get the second load I saw that he was taking the guitars out of a Reliant three-wheeler, and a sweet old man, his father I thought, was sitting patiently at the wheel, doing a good turn, to his son’s excruciating embarrassment.

  In Ilderton Road, Rotherhithe, I saw a red sportscar with six raw eggs smashed on the bonnet.

  In New Cross, a shop specializing in chess sets, one of them consisting of London landmarks, with cab shelters as pawns, the Tower of London as rooks, St Paul’s Cathedral as bishops, equestrian statues of Cromwell as knights, the Post Office Tower as the king, and Thorneycroft’s statue of Boadicea as the queen.

  *

  London always seems so strange in old movies. It’s more or less the London I recognize but it’s only ever half as full. There’s no traffic on the roads, there are no double yellow lines, no cars parked bumper to bumper. The hero’s car always finds a parking spot right outside Buckingham Palace or the Ritz, and nobody ever has to wait around for change from taxi drivers.

  I remember when I was a boy I used to read about India, and how on the streets of Calcutta people slept in shop doorways, and I was always very envious. It seemed so easy and convenient. If I went to London with my parents we had to worry about somewhere to stay, somewhere that needed to be booked in advance, that mightn’t measure up to my parents’ high standards, where the sheets might not be very clean, where the service might be unobliging, where the food might be bad. Today I see people sleeping in the shop doorways of London and I wonder if this is a sort of progress.

  In Amhurst Road, Hackney, a house with a bay window. The curtains were drawn, and there was a photograph of Peter Wyngarde as Jason King tucked into the window frame for passers-by to see.

  In the front garden of a house in Navarino Road there was a seven-foot-high abstract black metal sculpture of a man.

  The window of a basement in Greenwood Road, no curtains and inside a harsh strip light and several women dressed in white at sewing machines stitching pieces of white material together: a sign outside saying ‘Dressmaker’.

  In Stoke Newington Church Street the building above a greengrocer’s was still painted with advertisements for a much earlier business. The biggest of the advertisements said, ‘Have your fountain pen repaired here.’ What a wonderful, safe, decent world that invokes; not only a world where people actually used fountain pens (which seems quaint and old-fashioned enough in itself), but a world where somebody found it worth his while to repair them, where he could stay in business and make a living by doing it.

  Clanricarde Gardens, W2. I used to live in this road when I first left university. I shared a flat with three town planners. We had a party and the brother of one of them came along and said it was really strange, he’d been to a party in this same flat some years ago when it had been lived in by members of Status Quo. Towards the end of the evening somebody standing in the kitchen had been slashed with a meat hook.

  A couple of years after I left, I read there was a fire in the street and several houses had been completely destroyed, quite a few people had died. I always wondered whether my former flat was involved. Today there was no sign there had ever been a fire and I couldn’t remember my old address, not even what floor the flat had been on.

  In Greenwich High Road, a hardware shop, and in the window amongst the spanners and hammers and paint brushes and watering cans there were half a dozen lurid pink vibrators for sale. A handwritten sign said ‘Personal Massager’, and the price was very reasonable.

  In Straightsmouth, also in Greenwich, the front room of one of the little terraced houses was unfurnished and painted all white, and a bearded young man was pointing an old Super 8 cine-camera out of the window as I passed.

  Greenwich, the meridian. You have to be impressed by our ancestors’ confidence, the fact that we were able to say to the rest of the world, ‘This is where time and space begins. If you want to be in step with us then you set your watches accordingly. If you want to know where you are, measure it from here.’ And you have to be impressed, not to say amazed, that the rest of the world agreed. Those (I suppose) were the days.

  *

  In a side street in Fulham, narrow, quiet, full of parked cars, I noticed a Ford Escort with steamed-up windows. That seemed only slightly strange but I peered at it, looked in and it was quite obvious that there were two semi-naked people inside having sex. I couldn’t make out faces or ages, but there was no doubt that is what was going on. Curiously enough the car had a personalized number plate: BOB 47.

  I was walking along Crystal Palace Park Road, and I saw an old woman with an easel and palette, working on a large watercolour. It was very strange, an intricately detailed rendition of the old Crystal Palace as it might have been at the time of the Great Exhibition.

  It was very good, very skilfully done, but of course it bore no relation at all to what was visible in front of us. The woman glanced round and for a moment I thought she was about to talk to me or explain herself, but she stared at me and obviously decided I wasn’t worth wasting breath on. She returned to her painting and I continued walking.

  Later I thought perhaps she was trying to pick up on some sort of ghostly remnant left by the vanished Palace. It had had a long life there, from 1854 to 1936, although if it hadn’t burned down then, it would surely never have survived the Second World War.

  Or perhaps they’d have dismantled it, like they did the glass roof of Cannon Street Station, storing the glass in a warehouse well south of the river for the duration. The warehouse, of course, was destroyed by a direct hit.

  Another painter: at Kew I saw a young woman, an art student, I’d guess, fancy patterned leggings, big boots, hair dyed orange. She had an easel set up and she was gazing out over the river, and I was naively expecting her to be painting some tranquil London river scene, but when I got close up I saw she was making some violent abstract with a sort of crucifixion scene at its centre. Just another vision of London.

  *

  Mortimer Market, a dark secluded yard off Tottenham Court Road, just a place I’d once had sex with Judy – no shortage of those. The whole of London is dotted with them. It’s hard to imagine, given my age, and my uxorious habits, that I’m going to have such wild sex ever again. That’s it for this lifetime.

  Abney Park Cemetery, where, after great hesitation on my part, Judy and I had sex. Clink Street, close to Southwark Cathedral, where Judy fell to her knees and delivered a sp
ectacular blow job. Heath Lane, Blackheath, scene of a rear entry penetration.

  Let’s face it, Judy was special. How many girls lick your semen up from the surface of a map of London?

  And then I saw her. I don’t know why I was so surprised. It was in Dorset Street, not so very far from where I understand she now works. She was on the other side of the road. I waved but she didn’t see me, or didn’t want to, and so I crossed the road and went after her. I only wanted to say hello. By the time I’d crossed she was quite a distance away and walking very fast. I had to break into a run to keep pace. It felt absurd, like I was chasing her, but I finally caught up with her and touched her, I thought perfectly lightly, on the arm.

  She pulled away as though I was some sort of molester, a complete stranger, some London crazy who was bothering her. I don’t know whether she knew it was me or not but she let out a sort of scream. Everybody in earshot turned round, but it being London nobody did anything. That must have been when she realized she was going to have to at least talk to me. I just wanted to ask how she was, make sure she was doing all right, make sure she didn’t despise me. Unfortunately, she obviously does despise me. I said there was no need to run away from me. She said she’d be the judge of that. Then she told me to get lost, and I waved my A–Z, said I’d just been to Clink Street and had been thinking about her, about us. She said, ‘Fuck off and die, will you, Stuart.’ And when I stood there all wounded and speechless, she added, ‘Not necessarily in that order.’

  MISGUIDED

  Once Judy had gone, and after he’d seen her car drive away, Mick went out, found a phone box and called Gabby. He knew she wouldn’t be best pleased to hear from him at this time of day. It was still only eight o’clock and she wasn’t an early riser, but that didn’t seem to matter right now. There were other issues. He was the one on his own, the one away from home, the one with needs, and he needed to speak to her. He felt dislocated, not like himself, and he wanted her to offer him something familiar and reassuring, even if it was only a familiar sleep-soaked sulkiness. He wanted to tell her he missed her. He wanted to tell her how guilty he felt about having slept with somebody else, but he would not be doing that. More likely he might have done something silly like tell Gabby he loved her, but he didn’t get the chance to do that either. The phone rang and rang, and remained unanswered.

  As he walked back to the Dickens from the phone box he thought of all the innocent reasons Gabby might have for not answering her phone. Many of them were quite plausible but he failed to convince himself. When he walked in the door of the hotel he was confronted by the landlady. She was standing in the hall, supposedly sorting out the post, but he knew she was there waiting for him. She was wearing a scarlet jogging suit this morning, though the gold mules on her feet suggested she wasn’t going to jog very far.

  ‘Had some company last night, did you?’ she said.

  ‘That’s right,’ he replied. He had no intention of lying about it.

  ‘One of our little Chinese friends?’

  ‘Japanese,’ he corrected her. ‘Half-Japanese.’ Then he wondered why he was bothering to set her straight.

  ‘Maybe you’re too young to remember what went on in those camps,’ she said. ‘But I’m not.’

  He pushed past her and started up the stairs. He could hear her still speaking, though now more to herself than to him.

  ‘I don’t object to a young man bringing a girl back, but there are plenty of local girls without having to resort to the yellow peril.’

  Back in his room Mick looked around for something belonging to the landlady that was worth stealing or smashing, but he could find nothing. He did his best to pace the room but it was too small for that. He had to get out again, immediately. He stormed down the stairs and through the hall where the landlady was still in occupation, and left the hotel in a fury. He was in such a demented state that when he found himself next to a bus that had stopped at traffic lights he leapt on and headed for the West End.

  An hour later he was walking along Oxford Street, a place he had been before, a name that he recognized, and at first all he noticed was the rubbish. Not the rubbish in the streets, there was surprisingly little of that. It was more the rubbish in the shops, tacky souvenirs: snow domes, plastic policeman’s helmets, T-shirts that said, ‘Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go to London.’ There were clothes shops selling cheap tat that he wouldn’t be seen dead in. London was supposed to be this slick, fashionable place, but he thought he was far too cool for most of these shops.

  Then there were all the junk food restaurants, not even English junk but American junk, Dunkin Donuts and Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Some of the architecture was impressive, big solid buildings with columns and arches and ornate stonework, but at ground level they always turned into C & A or Shelley’s or Mr Byrite.

  There were men on the pavement selling fake perfume from suitcases, pretending it was stolen. And there were people who wanted to give Mick things: flyers advertising shoe shops and warehouse outlets situated off the main drag, cards for dodgy colleges and language schools, free papers and mags with jobs for secretaries and computer nerds. He accepted everything he was given, looked at it, then placed it carefully in the next bin.

  Mick didn’t know what he was doing here. He couldn’t pretend that this was any sort of reconnaissance. He was just walking. He wasn’t even doing very much thinking. He’d done his best to shrug off Judy. OK, so they’d slept together. No big deal, and there wasn’t any reason why Gabby should ever hear about it. He also tried to shrug off Gabby’s failure to answer the phone. Forget it, he told himself, get on with the job.

  But he couldn’t do that either. He couldn’t concentrate. He’d slept badly having Judy in his bed. He felt tired and out of shape. For now he just continued wandering, looking in the shop windows, at the streets, at the people.

  He came to the eastern end of Oxford Street and he let his feet carry him into the narrow webbing of streets around the British Museum. They were unfamiliar, yet not unwelcoming, and the buildings were big but human. He found himself in a Georgian square, tall town houses around its edges, a locked garden at its centre, and there was a group of people gathering in the far corner. He walked towards them and he could tell they were tourists. He would have walked right past but one of them, an old American dude with half a dozen industrial size cameras strapped around him, called out, ‘Are you part of criminal London?’

  Mick stopped, wondered what he was being accused of here and who by, then it all fell into place. He was witnessing the start of a guided walking tour. If Judy hadn’t told him the previous night that she’d once been a tour guide he would never have recognized it. He stopped, looked at the gang of tourists and said, ‘London, no. Criminal Sheffield, maybe.’

  At that moment an unhappy-looking woman announced herself as Anita, their tour leader. She smiled, trying hard to appear pleasant, but Mick reckoned she thought she was too good for this sort of work.

  ‘Are you coming on the tour or not?’ she demanded officiously.

  He shook his head.

  ‘No, but if anybody wants a crash course in GBH, let me know.’

  Anita didn’t smile and Mick slipped away. He wondered if he should have gone on the tour, but no, it wasn’t his style. He wondered if it would have been more his style if Judy Tanaka had been leading it, and then with dismay he realized he was thinking about her again. He sat on a bench for a while and felt sorry for himself. He was bored and lonely and the day was far too long. It took a lot of self-control not to invent some reason for going back to the London Particular but he just managed it.

  After she left Mick’s bed that morning Judy drove her car home from the Dickens and only had time for a quick shower before work. All day as she unpacked books and helped with customer enquiries she thought about Mick. She didn’t think she wanted anything from him and she didn’t even intend to see him again unless he initiated it. She knew he had a girlfriend back home, that
he would have no use for her.

  All the same, she kept wondering where he was, whether he was on the trail of his next victim, whether he was even now engaged in beating somebody up. She knew she shouldn’t ‘approve’ of Mick’s violence and yet she was aware that her approval was irrelevant. She didn’t for a moment think that he was simply a criminal sadist. She knew he must have his reasons for what he was doing, and if the reasons were good enough for him they were good enough for her.

  The working day was long and she was eager to get home. She managed to escape half an hour early and she hurried back to her flat where she had important things to do. She took out her map of London and one of the transparent sheets. It was the one that charted her own sexual progress through the city. She added one new cross, placing it carefully in Park Lane, Hackney, in an area of the map that was otherwise quite free of such crosses. Then she took a brand-new overlay sheet, put Mick’s name at the top and drew a cross on that too, a single mark that coincided exactly with the new cross of her own.

  In the evening Mick finally got through to Gabby. He didn’t mention that he’d called that morning and he made no attempt to find out where she’d been. In fact they were both lost for conversation. The urgency he’d felt that morning had completely disappeared.

  He told her he’d dealt with the fourth of her violators, though he didn’t tell her what he’d done, and she said she was pleased, although she sounded indifferent. Then, only because he didn’t know what else to talk about, he told her he’d been walking around Oxford Street, had considered going on a walking tour, and she exploded with anger. What the fuck did he think he was doing there enjoying himself and having a good time? Why wasn’t he out doing what he was supposed to be doing, taking revenge?

  He took it on the chin, didn’t argue, didn’t apologize, admitted that he’d been wasting time. Her rage seemed appropriate, something apt and deserved, even if her actual reasons for raging at him seemed hopelessly out of kilter. He promised he’d get back to work without delay. That was all it took to pacify Gabby. The phonecall ended on a note of complete and completely misguided serenity.