Bleeding London

by Geoff Nicholson

  And then, surprisingly, although Stuart had ceased to be surprised long ago, for some reason it was always this way, there were a couple of sulky, awkward, long-haired adolescent girls. Stuart never understood why they were there, why they hadn’t managed to slip away to McDonald’s or Carnaby Street or Camden Market or some place where they wouldn’t have to listen to the spoutings of a tour guide and where they might take the first steps towards some sort of tentative holiday sexual liaison. What else was the point of adolescents coming to London? But they never did those things. In the event these two stayed, sulked and made bad listeners.

  It took Stuart a surprisingly long time to realize that he was witnessing the start of a London Walker tour: one called The Bloomsbury Walk and Beyond. The guide was a very new, very raw recruit called Colin, a boy Stuart had been forced to interview recently at Anita’s insistence. These days the whole business of interviews was an irritating interruption to Stuart’s walking plans and after the most perfunctory chat he’d hastily decided that the boy would do. In more usual circumstances Colin wouldn’t have stood a chance, but turning him down would only have resulted in Stuart having to interview someone else and that would have been even more of a disruption, so he’d given Colin the job, given him an even more perfunctory training session and thrown him in at the deep end where he was currently both waving and drowning.

  Stuart knew this could only be Colin’s second or third tour, and when he saw the new boy in action, Stuart realized what a truly rotten choice he’d made. Colin was a suit-wearing, red-faced, Bunterish young man. He had a fussy, put-upon manner, and his voice, although clear and expressive, was never very loud. What was worse, as Stuart now saw, he was completely incapable of dealing with a group. The would-be walkers milled around him, willing him to exercise some control, to offer some direction, at the very least to say something to them, but as he repeatedly cleared his throat, looked at his watch, flapped his arms and ultimately did nothing useful, the group increasingly ignored him, one or two of them would start to wander off. Only then would he mutter something after them, by which time they were out of earshot.

  Eventually, despite having been unable to command any attention, he decided to start the tour anyway, using more or less the exact words that Stuart had set down for him. He had been speaking for several minutes before any members of the group realized he’d started, and having realized, they began to ask each other what they’d missed, thereby missing more. The overall effect was of a Shakespearean rabble making crowd noises.

  Stuart watched the spectacle and his feelings moved rapidly from derisive amusement through exasperation to anger. He crossed the street and joined the group, apparently as a spectator. Guides were always warned to make sure this didn’t happen. It was all too easy for casual passers-by to join the tour late and avoid paying. Stuart stood close to Colin but it was some time before the new guide became aware of his boss’s presence, and the moment he did so his mouth dangled open and although it still moved as though speaking, no sound came out at all.

  ‘All right,’ said Stuart loudly, busily, taking control. ‘Amateur hour’s over. Step back, Colin. Then look and learn.’

  Colin, surprised but visibly relieved, retreated several large paces and the group turned towards Stuart. His abrupt dismissal of their guide had established a dubious sort of authority. They were glad to have someone who looked as though he knew what he was doing, but his treatment of the young man had been rather nastily dismissive. Their sympathy still needed to be won even if their expectations had been set up.

  Stuart stood silently for as long as he could, milking their attention, then he said, ‘Around the corner in Russell Square you’ll find the Bloomsbury Hotel. Within it you’ll find the Virginia Woolf hamburger bar. Alas, Mrs Woolf’s views on the hamburger are not recorded in her writings but we do know that she committed suicide because she couldn’t bear to live through the horrors of the Second World War.

  ‘You would probably have to ask to what extent Virginia Woolf was actually affected by the horrors of the Second World War, after all she wasn’t exactly on the front line, but then it’s no good saying that a person’s reasons for killing herself aren’t good enough. Arguably, she might have tried to kill herself by wandering the streets of wartime London waiting for the right bomb, or perhaps by driving an ambulance during air raids, or why not by joining some secret show and accepting a suicide mission behind enemy lines? Instead she chose death by drowning and she chose to do it out of London. She apparently thought the country had more tone.’

  The group wasn’t quite with him yet. Stuart had a feeling that many of them probably hadn’t actually heard of Virginia Woolf, or if they had, they thought of Liz Taylor in the Edward Albee play, but at least his talk of hamburgers and death and war had drawn them in.

  ‘There’s a story told by Casanova about his stay in London,’ Stuart continued. ‘He was sitting in a coffee house and heard two Englishmen talking about a friend of theirs who’d recently committed suicide. The first man said he thought the suicide had been a perfectly reasonable action considering the state of their friend’s finances. But the other man disagreed. He’d been a creditor of the dead man and had been able to take a look at his accounts. In his opinion the friend needn’t have killed himself for another six months.’

  There was thin, polite, self-conscious laughter as Stuart concluded the anecdote, not a storm of mirth but enough for him to go on, a sign at least that they knew he was trying to entertain them.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘London’s not at all a bad place to die. Freud did it here. Karl Marx too. Plenty more besides, most of them against their will: Jack “the Hat” McVitie, Charles I, Thomas More.’

  ‘Is this a true story?’ one of the women asked, but she was ignored.

  ‘Welcome to London,’ Stuart said grandly. ‘A city much possessed by death. Come, let’s walk on.’

  He set off briskly across Russell Square in the direction of the British Museum. He had no scarf or cloak to throw over his shoulder as he went, yet there was something sweeping and theatrical about his progress. It would have been demeaning to look back and make sure the group was with him, but he felt sure they were. As he walked he said, ‘You think London isn’t a necropolis? Let me tell you it is. And people love it. Our cemeteries are popular tourist attractions. People pile into the British Museum and all they want to see are the mummies. They pack into Madame Tussaud’s to look at a population of wax corpses. They go to the London Dungeon to gloat over torture and captivity. They go to the Tower of London. They go to Poet’s Corner to walk on the dead.

  ‘Yes, we’re not bad at death in London. This is a city where Dennis Nielsen had no trouble finding the endless supply of sexually available young men he needed to take home, drug and murder. This was the home of Jack the Ripper. This is the city where Ruth Ellis shot her lover; nothing very surprising about that you may say, but it is also a city where the bullet holes from that shooting have been lovingly preserved and can still be seen in the wall of the pub in Hampstead.

  ‘But these are rather specialized forms of death. Once death would have been more quotidian, more public. One might have walked along London Bridge and seen the heads of the recently executed. Or one might have gone to Newgate or Tyburn or to Catherine Street in Covent Garden and seen public hangings, drawings, quarterings, beheadings. We have a fine tradition of celebrity executions: Charles I, Ann Boleyn, Cranmer. No more, alas. London has lost many of its historic attractions.

  ‘In London we are not so good at assassinations. It’s true that Margaret Nicholson tried to stab George III, and it’s true that James Hadfield tried to shoot the same monarch, but these were not very serious attempts. The would-be assassins were considered simply to be mad. Hadfield was confined to Bethlem for thirty-nine years until his death. Margaret Nicholson was despatched to the same place but she spent her forty-two years in solitary confinement. Generations later, Bethlem also provided a resting place for Edward F
ox who attempted to assassinate Queen Victoria.

  ‘We do much better with mobs; various clergy torn limb from limb in the Peasants’ Revolt, a Catholic genocide in the Gordon riots, various bloody persecutions of the Jews. We are good with plagues; the Black Death of 1348, which killed about thirty thousand souls, roughly half the population of London at the time; and we then had the great bubonic plague of 1665, greater in number but smaller in proportion: 110,000 dead, a mere one-third.

  ‘We have had blitzes. We have had terrorist bombs. We have had martyrdoms, burnings at the stake. But they seem so long ago, and they were generally for causes that no longer stir the modern imagination. We have had literary murders: Christopher Marlowe in 1593, in Deptford to escape yet another plague, killed over the failure to pay his bill in a tavern. You will find many contemporary landlords who think his punishment was about right.

  ‘But death is not a literary form. It is formless and always with us; common and ubiquitous, just like sex. A long time ago I had a girlfriend who said there wasn’t a single square foot of London where somebody hadn’t had sex. I’m sure she was right and I feel the same must be true about death. Every square inch of the city must be infused with mortality. Boadicea, the plague, the Luftwaffe, queer-bashers, gangland shootings, natural causes; they’ve all done their bit.

  ‘Men die in the street, of heart attacks, of haemorrhages, of knifings, shootings, road accidents. A passing bomb blows them to smithereens. An arsonist torches a cinema full of porn aficionados. Old ladies die in council flats, of hypothermia, of fumes from unventilated water heaters, or they’re beaten to death by burglars hunting down their life savings. Faces burned in the King’s Cross tube fire, lives lost on the river when the Marchioness went down. The hospitals that bury their failures. It goes on.

  ‘London has its share of wife murderers, baby killers, sex killers; odd combinations of the above. We are familiar with casual death, with overdoses, impurities, the air bubble locked in the vein. Drunks falling out of trains, coppers shot in the course of routine inquiries. Londoners killed in the crossfire.

  ‘Dylan Thomas continued the long process of drinking himself to death in pubs not far from here, but he had to go to New York to fully realize his aims. Jimi Hendrix ended it all in London, whether accidentally or not, by choking on a cocktail of vomit and drugs, in a house in Notting Hill next door to where Handel had once lived. Kenneth Halliwell killed himself in London too, having first hammered out the brains of his errant “first husband”. Here, in Holborn, Thomas Chatterton poisoned himself with arsenic, finding that preferable to literally starving to death when his literary career foundered; also finding it preferable to accepting a meal from his landlady. These artists are often poseur; as well as everything else.

  ‘London lacks one of those truly great sites from which suicides can propel themselves. The railway bridge across Archway Road attracts a few, but we have no famous lover’s leap, no equivalent of the Golden Gate Bridge. The Monument, commemorating the Great Fire, used to be a favourite place but the top was eventually caged in 1842. So suicide tends to be an intramural matter, something domestic, performed in bathtubs and bedrooms, a private ritual. There are a few who choose to end it all by throwing themselves under tube trains, and this is a messy end, traumatic for the train driver and for those who see it, but essentially a trivial end. All one really succeeds in doing is irritating a few thousand commuters and making them late for their suppers or their night at the cinema, though I suppose this offers certain desperate people more power than they ever had while alive.

  ‘So if you were going to do the dirty deed, where would you choose? I’ve always thought that the Telecom Tower, formerly the Post Office Tower, would be a reasonable place from which to launch yourself; unfortunately it’s not open to the public. The Whispering Gallery in St Paul’s would surely be a spectacular way to go. Imagine yourself falling backwards through all that space, the great dome receding as the wind whips the back of your head and you accelerate towards the cold, solid floor. You’d have an audience, and there’d be people on hand to pray for your soul; but even the most agnostic of us might fret about committing suicide in church.

  ‘The river is a possibility. They say that death by drowning isn’t such a bad way to go, that a strange calm comes over the drowning man. Drinking a couple of pints of raw Thames water might be equally lethal, though far less peaceful.

  ‘One might go to the Isle of Dogs, enter a pub, get chatting to some Millwall fans and suggest that there was a homosexual component to their characters. That would be as good as certain death. Being a black man and entering the same pub would probably have much the same effect.’

  Stuart walked and talked for forty minutes or more. His unrehearsed and unstoppable flow had a relentlessness about it that kept most of his audience with him, though he did notice that a couple of the widows had slipped away, the talk of death too much for them. But for the others, his macabre talk had a grim appeal.

  When he paused once, for breath and for effect, an old man in a shiny Charlotteville baseball cap got up the courage to say, ‘Excuse me, sir, I have the feelin’ we may be on the incorrect tour,’ but when Stuart stared at him with flaming, intense eyes he added, ‘Not that I mind. This is entertainin’ as all get out.’

  Stuart carried on with his spiel, regaling them with stories about the suicide of Judy Garland in the bathroom of a mews house near Sloane Square, where he’d once been to a party.

  Finally, and even he wasn’t quite sure of its relevance, he told them about the Plague Piper, an itinerant musician who in plague-ridden London was found asleep in a doorway, tossed on to a death cart, dumped into a mass grave and only saved from being buried alive by his dog who knew what the men of the plague did not, that his master wasn’t dead, simply dead drunk.

  Two of the group applauded at the end of this story but Stuart stared daggers at them and told them it was no laughing matter.

  He said, ‘In the end there’s no need to look for death, much less look for a methodology. The modern London walker need do nothing but keep walking, keep on the move. Wherever he goes death will come looking for him, and it will surely find him.’

  The tour didn’t so much end as abruptly cease. Stuart had said all he had to say. He looked at the faces of the group; some were blank, some confused, but most were still alert and demanding. They wanted more, but he realized he had no more to give them. He felt empty, a bit of a fraud and a show-off. He had no encore.

  Colin was looking at him in appalled awe, and Stuart wondered what Colin would have to say when he got back to the office. Would he describe this little side show to the other guides? Would he tell Anita?

  Stuart wanted very much to be somewhere else. At that moment a black cab pulled up beside him and let out its passenger. Stuart turned his back on the tour group, got into the now empty taxi and departed, giving a regal wave as he went.

  One of the adolescent girls said to the other, ‘You know I bet he’d have been a real good person to ask about the tree where Marc Bolan died,’ but it was too late. The walkers were left in some confusion, certain that they’d seen something unusual but not absolutely sure that they’d had their money’s worth. Poor Colin, hapless and speechless, fluttered his arms a little and tried hard to get the group’s attention.

  COTTAGE

  A part from when he’d been at big football matches or rock gigs, Mick had never seen such a crowded men’s public toilet. At first there appeared to be a queue, three or four men skulking about the entrance as though waiting for a urinal to come free, but then Mick saw that there already were free urinals, and that the men were waiting for something quite different.

  He didn’t object. It was OK by him. In a way it was very useful. It gave him cover, a reason to be standing around doing nothing, while in fact keeping an eye on his next victim. For Robin Lawton, the last man on Gabby’s list, was in position at the far end of the row of urinals, poised, going about his business. He had
his back to Mick but it was apparent from his body language, from the steady, regular movement of his hand, arm and shoulder, that he was masturbating, coaxing himself to an erection that could be displayed to his fellow cottagers.

  Lawton was a slight man, short and lean, but athletically built without being muscled. He looked about fifty years old, with cropped hair the colour of brushed aluminium. He had on standard cruising gear, tight blue jeans and a dapper leather jacket. He looked more obviously gay than most of the men in there. He was giving out more signals. The rest of them were a varied and unmatching group, of many ages, many shapes, many skin colours. One or two were advertising their sexuality like Lawton but the majority seemed very ordinary indeed, very straight. They did not look like the sort of men Mick would have expected to find eyeing up other men in public toilets, but it was not a subject he knew or wanted to know much about.

  Mick had followed Lawton to this place, followed him along the embankment, under a railway bridge, down the dark concrete steps into the toilet. If Lawton thought he was being followed he didn’t show it, or perhaps he didn’t mind. As Mick walked into the Gents he was aware that his presence had caused a temporary halt to whatever had been going on. All activity ceased for a moment while the inhabitants made sure he wasn’t some sort of invader. But after he’d stood there for a while, immobile and unthreatening, a palpable relaxation spread through the place and the men resumed their activities.

  There was a lot of looking around, staring, attempts to make eye contact. All attempts were furtive, some were rejected, but some of them must have been successful since a couple of guys paired up and left the toilet together. Soon after that the action became more intense than just looks and glances. There was a steady rhythm of masturbation, of men playing with their cocks and brandishing them. Then as one or two of the men felt brave or safe or aroused enough, they reached over and touched someone else’s.