‘Gabby told me you were bright,’ McLennan said. ‘She told me you’d work out what was going on. But she also said you’d get the job done, and that you’d be a good man to have in the team.’
‘What is this? A job interview?’
‘No. You’ve already got the job, we’re just negotiating terms.’
‘What are you talking about?’
McLennan bristled slightly. He wasn’t used to being addressed so offhandedly.
‘You’ve already done a job for me, right?’ McLennan said. ‘You’re smart. You were right about those guys. Maybe they didn’t rape Gabby. Maybe you realized that a while ago, but it didn’t make any difference did it? You carried on. You knew they deserved what you were giving them, even if you didn’t know why. Or maybe you were just having too much fun to stop. OK, so they didn’t rape Gabby. But they did do something that really got me mad.’
‘So I beat them up because they got you mad?’
‘You’ve got it. Exactly. I mean, if Gabby had come to you and said this bloke you’ve never heard of called Ross McLennan has got six other blokes you’ve never heard of and he wants you to beat them up for him, well, you’d have hesitated, wouldn’t you? But these guys needed seeing to and I can’t do everything myself and Gabby knew you’d do a good job, and if she had to tell a little white lie to spur you on, well, so what? The end justifies the means, right? And besides, it was a good apprenticeship, a good trial run. It gave me the chance to see what you’re made of.’
Mick did his best to look impassive.
‘So what did these guys do to you?’ he asked.
‘You don’t need to know that.’
That old line.
‘Don’t I?’ Mick asked.
‘No.’
‘Somebody could’ve got killed.’
‘Not you though, Mick. You’re too clever for that.’
‘I do need to know what those guys did,’ Mick insisted. McLennan took a gun out of his pocket. He didn’t do anything so uncool as point it at Mick or even hold it properly in his hand, but Mick could take a hint. Suddenly he didn’t need to know at all. He shook his head slowly and dumbly.
‘You two just about deserve each other,’ Mick said, and he waited for McLennan or Gabby to rise to the bait, to defend themselves or each other, but it didn’t affect them, they were immune to such low-level insults.
‘So the first thing, Mick, is that I owe you some money,’ McLennan said. ‘What’s your current rate?’
He pulled out a bundle of notes and began peeling fifty pound notes off it. Then he had a better idea, shrugged and tossed the whole thing over to Mick. Money, he was making clear, was not the issue here. Mick caught the bundle with one hand, put his beer down on the floor and held the notes as though weighing them.
‘Yeah, have the lot,’ McLennan said. ‘Have a little on account for the next job I ask you to do.’
‘No,’ said Mick. ‘I think I’ve done enough for you.’
He threw the money back. McLennan couldn’t catch it cleanly and it hit him in the chest. Mick got up out of the chair, and whether it was deliberate or not McLennan couldn’t tell, but the can of beer was kicked over and its contents leaked rapidly across the floor towards the white sheepskin rug. Deliberate or not, Mick didn’t apologize or try to pick up the can and stop the flow.
‘What are you doing?’ McLennan demanded. What are you doing, you little twat?’
‘I’m ending the negotiation,’ Mick said, and he took a couple of steps towards the door.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’
Mick wasn’t altogether sure but he had to get out of that house. He needed to put a lot of distance between himself and that place, and between himself and Gabby and the business of violent, bogus revenge.
‘Don’t turn your back on me!’ McLennan shouted. ‘Don’t turn your fuckin’ back on me.’
So Mick turned to face him.
‘You know,’ Mick said. ‘I’m not sure I’m quite as clever as you think I am. I never did work out what the real story was. I never really worked out that Gabby had some other man pulling her strings. If I had, in the beginning, if I’d known that you’d stolen my girlfriend and made me beat up six guys for no good reason then I’d have wanted to come up here and fucking kill you. That’s what I’d have wanted as my revenge.
‘But I really didn’t work it out. I didn’t know properly till now. And now that I do know, now that I’ve seen you, I don’t need to kill you at all. It’s enough just to have made a mess on your carpet.’
He wished it could have been shorter, pithier, more like in a movie. He walked out of the house, across the gravel, up the track, on to the main road. He started walking in the direction he’d come from, back towards Sheffield, the city where he lived; but it was a direction that led to other places too. At first he planned to walk the whole way home but after a couple of miles he knew it was ridiculously far away, so he began to stick his thumb out at the passing traffic. It wasn’t long before he got a lift with a van driver from Leeds who was doing a drop in Sheffield then driving on to London.
‘Terrible place, London,’ the driver said, ‘but I can take you all the way if you want.’
Mick looked around the inside of the cab, at the silt of cigarette packets, empty drink cans, yellowed football programmes, at the two balding gonks on top of the dashboard, and he looked out at Sheffield visible in the near distance. He thought about his scuzzy rented flat, not visited all this time, his faded old car, and then of the more general scuzziness and fadedness of London.
‘So what do you say?’ the driver asked.
It was a long time before Mick answered.
NEW THERAPY
Judy Tanaka was in her attic room, kneeling on the floor, on the frayed green carpet, her map of London set out in front of her, perhaps like a board game, perhaps like a prayer mat. Coiled at her side was a loose, unruly heap of rolled plastic sheets that were the same size as the map and transparent, except where they had been marked with crosses. She took the first of these sheets, unrolled it and placed it meticulously over the map. This was her own sheet and she experienced a pang of embarrassment and triumph to see just how many crosses there were, and how many sexual acts and partners these crosses celebrated and recorded. They were not distributed evenly or symmetrically or representatively but they certainly showed how geographically promiscuous she had been.
She placed Stuart’s map on top of her own. Although the crosses were far less dense than on hers they too showed a decently wide distribution. Stuart had achieved by accident what she had deliberately strived for, and of course some of them coincided.
She took more of the plastic sheets, maps made by her other lovers, and as they stacked up one on top of another, London seemed slowly to be disappearing, not only under a rain of crosses but also under the accumulating opaqueness of the plastic sheets.
Finally she placed Mick’s map on the top of the pile. This too coincided with one of her own crosses, but she thought there was a certain beauty about a sheet with a single cross on it, even if it was located in Park Lane, Hackney. It was the most recent and therefore the most clearly visible. It was not lost in the sheen of the plastic, in the reflections of her own history.
Judy knew how deceptive maps can be, how quickly they can become out of date, how places in the real world can have meanings and significances quite out of scale with their cartographic depiction.
It was almost spring. The sun had risen high enough to insinuate its way into the therapy room. The days were lengthening, there were daffodils in the garden and the clocks would soon be moved forward. There was even something spring-like about Judy Tanaka as she walked into the room, as though she had a thrilling piece of news for her therapist.
‘Please,’ Judy said brightly, ‘I’d like you to look at my body.’
‘Aren’t we getting a little ahead of ourselves?’ asked the therapist.
‘No, no,’ said Judy. ‘Please look.�
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Before the therapist could protest further Judy had stripped naked and was showing her body, revolving on the spot so the therapist could get a full, rounded view. It was immediately obvious that there was a strange serpentine marking curled around Judy’s torso. At a first glance it appeared to be a kind of bruising, but it would have been a strange kind of injury that created such a long, thin, continuous and precise bruise. The therapist looked more closely and saw that in another way it was rather more like a rash, a series of dark-blue spots that linked together to form a long, unbroken line. But again it was the wrong shape for any kind of rash she’d ever seen. For a moment she wondered if it wasn’t a series of cuts and cigarette burns, something self-inflicted, but knowing Judy Tanaka as she did she thought that surely couldn’t be.
Then Judy began to point out certain features of the mark, how it meandered in certain places, how in one place it formed an almost ninety-degree bend. ‘Much as the River Thames does at the Embankment,’ she said archly.
And as the therapist looked more closely she saw that there was indeed something strangely familiar about the shape and design of the mark. Judy continued pointing to various parts of it and said, as though she were a tour guide, ‘Here we see Chelsea Harbour, here Battersea Reach, here the Isle of Dogs, and here the Upper and Lower Pool …’ And before long the therapist was utterly convinced. The rash or bruise or scar or whatever it was formed a perfect representation of the River Thames, a depiction so accurate, so detailed, that you could have used it as a navigational aid.
The therapist reached out a hesitant index finger and ran it along the line of the mark.
‘Does that hurt?’
‘Not at all,’ Judy said. ‘It’s rather nice actually.’
The therapist’s finger moved further along the map made flesh, from the source on Judy’s left leg, up her flank, across her soft, powdered belly, up towards her breasts, then widening out as it curled behind her back.
‘Judy,’ the therapist said quietly. ‘I can see we may need more sessions than I first thought.’
BOADICEA’S LONDON
She likes the smell of burning wattle in the morning. She has swept in from the east, from the big skies and the waterlands, with her armies and her allies. She comes fresh from humiliation, deposed, stripped of her birthright and inheritance, beaten like a slave, her daughters raped by Roman soldiers. She has come to the doomed town to do her worst, to enjoy the smell of burning wood and thatch and human flesh, to reduce Londinium to embers.
Perhaps her revenge will not be so very sweet. The Roman governor, Gaius Suetonius Paullinus, moving before her, has done his best to reduce the mayhem. Ahead of the certain destruction, he has urged the population to evacuate the town. This is, after all, no military stronghold, no capital. There are no fortifications here, simply a narrowing of the river, a crossing, a place of trade and exchange, a settlement not more than ten years old.
Paullinus knows he cannot defend the undefended, and so has decided to make a sacrifice, but he hopes it will be a sacrifice of buildings not of bodies. He leaves with as many of the population as he is able to convince of their imminent fate. They move slowly with all their belongings, their furniture, their bed linen, the tools of their trades, all their transportable wealth.
Perhaps therefore when Boadicea arrived in Londinium she entered a wholly deserted place, took possession of a void, cold winds playing through the empty market place, nothing but rats in the abandoned grain stores. Yet even so, as she rides along the untended jetties, as her men search the cleared warehouses and workshops and abandoned former dwellings, she already knows she must destroy all this and much else besides.
Or perhaps, after all, the governor was not so persuasive as he would have liked to be. No doubt there were some stragglers, the sick, the old, the proud, the recalcitrant. These few remaining inhabitants are driven into the streets and easily, if baroquely, massacred. Yet destruction demands more than simple death. All those things that speak of ease and comfort, domestic things like bowls, jugs, lamps, glassware, little markers of civilization, all are smashed, crushed, pulverized, made nothing.
Those things that cannot be so easily destroyed must be purified by fire. Wood and straw is torched, makes excellent kindling. Twisters of black and grey smoke ascend from the corners of the town, rising above the crumbling, infirm buildings. Roofs are consumed, walls fall in on themselves. A great furnace of air burns at the centre, a core of heat that sucks breath from the earth.
Boadicea watches and approves. It is a job well done. After the flames comes the Iceni winter. She sniffs the thin, blackened air. She and her armies re-group, see what they have done, and head for Verulamium, for more of the same. And when she has done her worst she will kill herself, take poison rather than face capture and humiliation.
The settlement dies, becomes the home to charcoal and ashes. It returns to a time before Rome, before empire, before Caratacus came here. London becomes its former self, a humble river crossing set amid marshland and sandbanks. Boadicea will be remembered here. Future archaeologists slicing through the sedimentary crust of London history will recognize a layer of red earth, the ashes she left behind.
Later, very much later, in 1856, Thomas Thorneycroft begins his statue of Boadicea, with her daughters, her horses and her chariot. It is a grand, heroic extravagance in bronze; confident, profoundly English, and yet, one might argue, profoundly anti-imperialist. It was not unveiled until 1902.
Later still, it is situated in the elbow of Victoria Embankment and Westminster Bridge, and groups of the more curious sort of tourist surround it, stare up at the wild, solid figures and suggest to each other that it must be a depiction of Queen Victoria.
And finally here comes Stuart London, a London walker if not the London walker, conducting a party of Japanese money men round an eccentric, bite-size approximation of tourist London in preparation for their native theme park aspirations. In the years ahead he will learn to understand and respect and even admire Japanese business practices, but for the moment he wishes the members of the group didn’t seem quite so indistinguishable from each other, didn’t look quite so much like small suit – wearing tenpins.
He has told them that Boadicea is buried under platform eight of King’s Cross Station, and they found that a very good joke. Now he gazes up at the statue of her, at her raised arms, her flowing metal tunic. He looks into the face, surprisingly sensitive for a warrior queen, and is pleased to conclude that she doesn’t look a bit like Anita.
Bleeding London Page 33
