Bleeding London

by Geoff Nicholson

  After shed put the maps away Judy felt very, very lonely. She put on a CD but it bored her and made her feel melancholy. She thought of phoning her parents but they would guess something was wrong and how could she possibly explain what? Then she remembered it was time for the sexy phone-in programme. She turned the dial, tried for half an hour to find the station, but the programme wasn’t there. It had been replaced by a sombre programme about community needs in London. Judy lay on her back on the bed and dealt with her own needs as best she could, but it only brought temporary relief.

  Next morning, on her way to work, between the tube station and the shop she saw Stuart. That was typical. That was all she needed. What was he doing in this area of town? He couldn’t be following her could he? And why was he carrying an A–Z? There was no getting away from him. The creep had even gone so far as to chase after her and grab her. Her decision to scream and shout obscenities at him had been calculated but quite unforced. It was genuine emotion.

  Her ploy had succeeded in getting rid of him but when she got to work she was still shaking with anger. She realized that very little had changed so far as Stuart and she were concerned. She still hated him profoundly. She still wanted to hurt him, to see him suffer. He had always made her feel weak and impotent, and the ways of hurting him seemed so few. Maybe she could have told his wife about their affair, yet she suspected that the cold, business-like Anita would have taken it in her stride, shrugged and got on with making a few work calls.

  She’d much rather have punched him with her bare fists, broken a few teeth and bones, smashed his nose open, left him in the gutter, cut and bruised and splitting blood. It was a nice thought, but she knew she was no good at that kind of thing. However, as she unlocked the doors of the London Particular and opened for the day, a blindingly obvious realization came to her: she had just slept with a man who was very good indeed at that kind of thing.

  PEPYS

  As he walked, Stuart felt increasingly that he belonged to London, but he never made the ridiculous mistake of believing that London belonged to him. London is not Shakespeare’s or Dickens’ or Dr Johnson’s. It belongs to everybody and to nobody, to the tourists and out-of-towners no less than to the natives. The racist tells the object of his hatred to get back where he belongs, Bombay not the Isle of Dogs. History may leave its stamp but it can’t make claims to ownership. Was it only because he started keeping a diary that Stuart time and again felt the enduring presence of Samuel Pepys?

  It was Pepys’ eye for detail that he loved, that he wished he could emulate in his own diary. As the Great Fire rages and the houses burn, Pepys watches the pigeons on the windowsills of the houses, loath to leave their homes, waiting until it’s too late, until their feathers catch fire and the birds tumble into space flapping their now useless wings. Yes, Pepys was there and he simply recorded what he saw, but it took a certain talent to be aware enough to see these things. Sometimes Stuart thought he had this talent, sometimes not, but he knew he wanted it.

  As he walked through London he saw St Margaret’s Church where Pepys was married, the Gatehouse prison at Westminster Abbey where he was incarcerated. There was Salisbury Court where he was born, St Bride’s Church where he was christened, in a font that still survives. There were the Gray’s Inn gardens where he walked the same paths that Bacon and Raleigh had walked before him. When Stuart saw Hyde Park he was reminded that this was where Pepys went to show off his new carriage and his new wife.

  Above all there was Pepys Street with the house which he lived in while working at the Navy Office and while writing most of his diary. And in the same street there was St Olave’s Church in whose crypt he and his wife are buried. Elizabeth Pepys died young, and inside the church Pepys placed a marble bust of her that he could gaze at during sermons. Stuart wondered whether some churchmen would find that idolatrous. He also found it a seriously odd thing for any husband to do. If Anita died would he really want her marble effigy staring down at him? No, and yet he would surely keep photographs of her, the way he still kept a photograph of Judy, though that of course was well hidden.

  There were other occasions when Stuart’s own history became conflated with Pepys’, with the history of London itself. His walking took him to the City, to Pudding Lane, the source of the Fire, and the very moment he entered the street and looked up at the Monument, two fire engines hurtled along the street, sirens raging, scattering traffic and pedestrians.

  He became enamoured with Pepys’ motto Mens cujusque est quisque, ‘A man is as his mind is’, and wanted to use it as his own. He began to see London through Pepys’ eyes, failing eyes at that. But it didn’t matter, for it seemed to Stuart that Pepys had created a perfect, mythical city; a city of words.

  Stuart hoped his diary could be a fraction as worthy as Pepys’, but sometimes he felt disadvantaged. It was frequently said that the end of the twentieth century was a strange time to be living, yet Stuart knew it couldn’t compete with Pepys’ days. You might say that these were plague years, but Aids had nothing on the Great Plague of 1665. And again, it was frequently said that the major cities of the world were in danger of destroying themselves, but it was tame stuff compared to the destructive frenzy of the Fire of London.

  Stuart had the not uncommon sense that he was living a life that was simultaneously grotesque yet bland, cruel yet denied the drama of pestilence, fire, war, invasion, blitz. In these horrors there was undoubtedly anguish, but there were also opportunities for redemption. At the very least there were lots of things to write about. Stuart thought Pepys was a very lucky man. Circumstances and history had smiled on him.

  Stuart also wondered to what extent Pepys’ fame relied on the mysterious and the partial. For centuries the diary had been indecipherable, and in a way it was also only a fragment. It was a big enough text but it covered a small part of a man’s life. The sense of interruption was very beguiling. Stuart recalled those elegiac passages towards the end of the diary where Pepys writes of his failing eyesight, his fear of blindness and the ensuing, gathering darkness. The diary was finished unwillingly.

  And Stuart wondered by what means, literary or otherwise, his own text might be given a similarly beguiling resonance. Judy had told him to fuck off and die, and, more politely put, that was pretty much Anita’s message to him too. He knew that the death of the author could be a great help to a work of literature. It was a frame that could completely transform a painting. Suicide even more so. He could see the appeal of a London journal that began with high, all-encompassing hopes like his own, and was abruptly completed by the author’s suicide. Suppose a man had seen the whole of London, every part, every street, every dark corner, and had become tired of it. What else was there to do but die? It sounded like a fabulous ploy, a great step forward and a great ending. As he walked past St Paul’s School where Pepys had been a student, his only regret was that he suspected he was too much of a coward to kill himself.

  FIRE

  Stuart was asleep, Anita breathing gently beside him. In spite of everything they still slept together. It must have been three in the morning when the phone rang on her side of the bed. She exchanged just a few words with whoever was on the other end, then lightly replaced the receiver, got up and went to the window. She drew back the curtains and stood there a long time looking out, and although she didn’t try to rouse Stuart he was now fully awake and his curiosity pushed him out of bed. He took up his place beside her at the window and together they looked out at a distant, flickering orange glow in the night sky. There was a fire burning across the other side of the city. It looked large and fierce but it was far enough away that they soon felt able to go back to bed, thinking it had nothing to do with them.

  When they woke next morning and looked out again there was smoke in the sky and the fire was still burning, but in daylight it was much less dramatic, and if anything it looked further away. It was only when Anita listened to the radio and heard the news that hundreds of Dockland apartments had been
consumed by fire that either she or Stuart began to take the situation at all seriously.

  Stuart had planned to cover ten miles of Dulwich that day but come mid-morning he was wandering through the City looking for a high place from which to get a better view of the fire. Unwittingly he came to the Monument, built by Wren to commemorate the previous London conflagration. Stuart paid his money and climbed the three hundred and some narrow spiral steps that took him up to the caged-in observation platform. Once there he could look down and see the scale of the fire. It was much bigger than he’d imagined, more intense and spreading like a hot, living stain.

  There were others beside him at the top of the Monument. Somebody suggested the fire had been started by a terrorist bomb, others said it was a series of uncontrolled gas leaks. One man said it was the blacks who’d started it, but nobody took him senously. One thing was clear from up there; the fire was not being even remotely contained. It was out of control and the fire authorities were fighting a losing battle.

  As he walked, Stuart saw strange activities taking place. There was a great movement of people and their possessions. Those who had managed to save their belongings from the consumed homes arrived at friends’ houses carrying all their worldly goods. They were taken in and for a while no doubt felt safe, but it was clear that before long these new refuges would be no safer than the ones they’d vacated, and they would all have to move again.

  Arriving home Stuart realized that if the fire was as threatening as it appeared, his own house was as vulnerable as any other. He began by taking his valuables down to the cellar, thinking that would be the safest place for them. So his collection of favourite books, his stereo, his computer and of course the disk containing his diary, his photograph albums and certain business and personal documents, not least his insurance policy, were all carted down below ground. He felt briefly reassured.

  That night the fire was still far enough away for him and Anita to sleep in their own bed, but at four o’clock in the morning he woke and felt that everything was still at risk and needed to be moved again.

  He dressed rapidly, and looked out of his bedroom window. There was pandemonium. The police had erected road blocks at every street corner. The use of private cars was forbidden, and many had been towed away to make room for service vehicles, the only ones allowed through the city. If he wanted to carry his possessions to a place of greater safety he would have to improvise with a hand cart or baby’s pram.

  Miraculously he located a shopping trolley, loaded it with his valuables and launched himself and his possessions into the dubious safety of the night. He moved swiftly, but he wasn’t sure where he was going. Then it struck him that Bethnal Green would be safe from fire, and he decided to take his things to Judy’s place. He wasn’t sure what reception he’d get there but this was an emergency after all.

  He pushed on through the crowds but he got nowhere. The streets were too full. There were too many tides, eddies and undertows, all pulling in different directions. He lost his way and before long he had also lost his shopping trolley. He took his hands off it for just a moment and when he turned round it had gone. Somebody had taken all the things he valued most, and yet he realized that he felt surprisingly sanguine about it.

  He knew there was no point going home. Anita would certainly not be there and for all he knew their house might already be in flames. He had no way of telling. There were no radio broadcasts any more, no television, the stations and channels were all silent. Soon the phones went dead and the electricity dried up. No newspapers were being printed. There was no information at all except what could be picked up on the streets, those things that he could see, hear and smell for himself. He grabbed a few pieces of waste paper from the gutter and began writing down what he had already observed. He knew it was good stuff, almost Pepysian; banners of smoke rising behind St Pancras Station, rocket trails of cinders falling over Trafalgar Square. In Clerkenwell Road he’d seen a fireman in tears, in Old Street there had been two tiny children squirting each other with water pistols, completely unaware of the danger they were in. This diary business was easy when you had such great raw material.

  Stuart headed for the river, to Westminster Pier where he boarded a tourist boat that had put its prices up extortionately but was full nevertheless and was running river trips into the heart of the fire. The boat was crowded and Stuart was the last to get on.

  Smoke was thickening the sky, and all along the river they saw large numbers of people continuing to bring their belongings out of blocks of flats, trying to save the contents of their homes, since there seemed little chance of saving the flats themselves. The sirens of fire engines, police cars and ambulances still rang through the city but it was hard to see what good they were doing.

  Suddenly a small, regal-looking motor launch pulled alongside Stuart’s boat. There was a woman standing proudly at the helm. She was dressed in a heavy ball gown, thickly bejewelled and wearing a facial expression that conveyed concern but not anxiety, and, yes, there was something majestic in her demeanour. Nobody seemed to recognize her but Stuart had no doubt at all that it was the Queen of England. Quite a surprise, he thought, but why shouldn’t she be on the river at a time like this?

  The two boats were almost touching and the Queen was well within hailing distance. ‘Hello there, Stuart,’ she called out. ‘What do you suggest we do?’

  Perhaps he should have been surprised to be addressed so directly, but this was surely no time for formality and ceremony. Fortunately Stuart, having recently reread Pepys’ account of the Great Fire, knew exactly what needed to be done.

  ‘We need to pull down some buildings,’ he replied. ‘We have to create large fire gaps. Nothing else will get the job done.’

  The Queen nodded sadly but saw the absolute correctness of what Stuart had said. Then she asked him which buildings would have to come down, and without hesitation he reeled off a list of names: the NatWest Tower, Centrepoint, King’s Cross Station, Canary Wharf, Harrods, the Civil Aviation Authority Building, the whole of the South Bank complex, everything ever built by Quinlan Terry.

  He wasn’t sure where he was getting these names from or why he was so certain that they had to be demolished, but his confidence was enormous and one of the Queen’s minions was meticulously writing down his every word. Finally Stuart said, ‘And I’m afraid Buckingham Palace is going to have to come down too.’ The Queen was close to tears at this news but she accepted Stuart’s infinite wisdom. What else could she do? She issued a few commands into a mobile phone and repeated the list of buildings. It would be done. Her word, Stuart’s word in effect, was law. Stuart was glad he’d gone right to the top, and not bothered with politicians or corrupt local flunkies.

  And so the creation of fire gaps began. Stuart was amazed by the technology of it. In Pepys’ day they’d had to use explosives to create the fire gaps, and the explosions themselves had caused as much fear and panic as the fire. These days it seemed they could simply make buildings disappear. One minute The Nat-West Tower would be standing there all solidity and corporate pride, the next minute it was gone, and not just blown up or even pulverized, but gone from the face of the city, instantly and forever. Stuart suspected there was some sort of laser involved.

  All over London buildings were disappearing, like pieces being taken off a chess board, and only now did Stuart notice that all the buildings that had gone were all the ones he hated most. There was a moral there somewhere. London was being reshaped in his image. Before his eyes all the fires around London were rapidly shrinking and dying. He had saved the day. A feeling of complete well-being came over him.

  The Queen took the trouble to find him again, hailed him as the saviour of modern London, and the last thing Stuart heard before he woke up was the monarch saying, ‘If you would see his monument look around you.’

  He sat up in bed and looked at the clock. It was three in the morning but the phonecall didn’t come. He thought of going to the window and looking
out, but he knew that this time there’d be nothing to see.

  DOCTOR

  Dr Graham Pryce, number five on Mick Wilton’s list, liked to tie up his wife. It was a thing that gave him a curious and largely inexplicable pleasure and he had no desire to have it explained. The textbooks he’d read on the subject suggested that it ought to be the other way round, that he should want to be tied. He spent all his days making serious, life and death decisions. He performed operations, thoracic surgery in the main. It was high stress, intensive care. There were junior doctors, nurses, administrators to be bullied. The failures, though much less frequent than the successes, couldn’t be easily shrugged off. There were spouses and relatives, parents and offspring to be dealt with; sometimes they were weeping, sometimes they were litigious. Sometimes they were in need of counselling, more often they were in need of and were prescribed a good dose of tranquillizer. Dr Pryce took a masculine, professional pride in appearing to cope effortlessly with all the above.

  So after a hard day he should, if he were following the classic scenario, wish to abandon all power, should wish to submit totally and become helpless. He should want someone, a wife, mistress, maîtresse, to take complete control. But he did not. He left the submission to his wife, Louise. Not that the submission was completely straightforward. Within the rules they set themselves she was perfectly entitled to struggle a little, to fight, to beat his chest with her fists, dig her nails into his back, to threaten him with vengeance, police, with the wrath of the BMA. For Pryce’s profession was of paramount importance in their sexual games. His wife played the vulnerable, needy, hypochondriac patient and he played the wicked, invasive, unethical swine of a general practitioner. It was a satisfactory arrangement for both of them.