Soft City

by Jonathan Raban

  ‘You’d need a flash for indoor shots.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  But she was gone. She photographed a policeman, a street scene, the front of the V&A (it leaned precipitously backwards in the viewfinder as she tried to get the top pinnacle into the frame), an episcopally purple taxi, a pale adolescent Buddhist with a shaven head and saffron robe, and a dog on a step with a tongue like a length of rubber hose. Then, suddenly depressed, she stuffed the camera into her bag beside the football scarf.

  She ate a puffy pastry at a patisserie, and thought of her body thickening and swelling, the stretched skin of her stomach tight as a guitar string, pulling around the sag weight of flesh and guts. Her legs would turn to bloated stumps; she would waddle, hopeless as a terrapin on wet sand.

  In the cathedral cool of the Victoria and Albert Museum, she dressed herself in all the costumes in the glass cases. She was in crinoline, in hoops, she dragged long velvet trains, she felt the dry crackle of a ruff tickling the soft gland beneath her jawbone. Around her, platoons of methodical Americanos quacked attentively through their adenoids. Weak sunlight filtered through windows of stained glass and made the polished tops of antique tables look as if they were swilling with a wet film. Everywhere she caught her own reflection, all mouth and eyes, a fish that swam to meet her against the invisible wall of an aquarium.

  Twice she came up against the same man. His lugubrious, guilty face sprouted like an inverted root-vegetable from a suit of white denim. He reminded her of the colonial English in tropical kit who got gored by the clockwork tiger in the Indian Gallery.

  The second time, he said, ‘Hullo,’ and looked ashamed.

  ‘ ’Allo,’ she said, drifting past him in an eighteenth-century wedding dress. She could smell the musk of it clinging to her. She heard the squelch of the man’s crêpe soles behind her for a while, but they stopped at the William Morris Room.

  In the dark grotto where the miniatures were lit like glowing icons, she found the Hilliard portrait of a sad Elizabethan gentleman. Leaning against a tree, framed by pale dogroses, every thorn picked out with a brushstroke on the vellum, the young man stared, preoccupied, past her left shoulder, his black cloak slipping unnoticed from his back.

  Dat poenas laudata fides, she read in letters of tiny gothic gold leaf over his head, but she couldn’t puzzle its meaning out. She’d liked doing Latin with her tutor; he’d had the same feathery moustache as Hilliard’s gentleman. But she was never very clever at it. In Latin, people were always having wars and laying siege to cities. French was nicer; it was about furniture and meals and aunts and uncles. But she would have liked to have known what the young man was saying. Perhaps he had just come back from a war. It looked as if he was in love. It would be easy to tear your dress on those dogroses: he was lucky not to have got holes in his tights. But then it was only a picture. Perhaps he wasn’t really a misery man at all, and cracked jokes like her tutor, sly puns that she giggled over, then tried to work out later. The delicate shading where the young man’s narrow white thighs joined under his doublet seemed to shimmer and widen, as if he was stepping towards her from his thicket of thorns.

  Some girls, foreigns from the sound of them, were jostling against her in front of the glass. She spread her feet wide and stuck out her elbows like a peasant. They shuffled off, whispering. Then, in the dead silence of the grotto, she heard the apologetic squelch of crêpe soles.

  The man in the white denim suit pulled a face at her, a sick grin.

  ‘Hilliard . . .’ he said, and coughed, and turned away.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Ah . . . admire . . . marvellous brushwork . . . eloquent sense of setting . . . fine . . . love miniatures . . . don’t you?’ She watched his tongue working away in his mouth as if it was busy putting things in drawers. She shrugged amiably. She would like to take a picture of that tongue making its noises. They sounded arbitrary, yet urgent, strings and dollops of sound that piled on top of each other; the man might have been trying to fill up a deep hole with them.

  ‘I say,’ he said when she started to move out of the grotto. ‘I say . . .’ and squelched behind her, slapping his rolled-up catalogue on the back of his wrist.

  He bought her set-tea in the tea room, still tapping, stammering, hang-dog. ‘Do you see what I mean?’ He tried French on her: ‘yeh, yeh, yeh’, and she sank her fork into a squashy lemon-coloured gateau. He hissed the word relationship over and over again, and she thought of this boat with the man in the white suit in it drifting over a mirror sea above acres of pink coral.

  Wherever she was, he was there too. On the steps of the museum, she photographed him. He turned into a little red and white homunculus in the viewfinder. Then, when she put the camera down, he was there, huge, close beside her, with the long face of an aardvark.

  ‘I find it so easy to talk to you, you know? You understand?’

  She handed the camera to him. He fussed with the knobs.

  ‘You’ve run out of film.’

  ‘Me,’ she said. ‘Photo me.’

  He showed her the red window at the back. She wanted to be distant and small in the glass. He was talking technicalities to her.

  ‘No worry,’ she said, and stuffed the camera back into the Sweet Sixteen bag, her mouth creasing with impatience.

  ‘All I want is to be your friend.’ They were in a restaurant with chandeliers, and the empty circular face of the waiter hung between them like a low moon. The foreign girl coaxed a snail from its shell, as the man wooed her across the table with the guttural murmur of a sinner in a confessional box. He wrote words for her on slips of paper torn from his napkin. She looked at them and smiled; his handwriting looked like knotted balls of wool. ‘You understand?’

  ‘Is nice.’

  ‘What would you like to do?’

  ‘Discotheque,’ she said, tired of all that language issuing from the man’s mouth like ectoplasm. In her mother’s dressing-room there were brown photographs of men in high collars and moustaches, their hair plastered back across their skulls in bangs. They were, said her mother, men of great spirituality, always in contact with the Other Side. They could make things materialise. In their photos, they looked as if they were swallowing dirty sheets.

  ‘Spiritualismo?’ she asked in a taxi as they sped round the darkening rim of the park.

  He took her hand. His own felt like a clammy flannel.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, squeezing his grateful eyes, bland and serious as a marmoset. ‘One does feel things with people sometimes that go beyond, I don’t know, beyond . . . words.’ His head swivelled back and forth. She imagined him coated in fur, his neck muscles bunching in the fur. They were travelling in parallel with another taxi; a man’s face stared out from behind the glass. He wore a turban. She smiled at him. His taxi accelerated and he was pulled slowly, unevenly ahead of them. The last she saw of him, he was craning for a sight of her, his hand brushing at the foggy glass.

  ‘What are you smiling at?’

  ‘Pardon.’

  Then they were in a big noise. ‘Lulu’s,’ said the man. ‘Oh, I know you’ll like Lulu’s.’ It was a cave of pebbled walls and lights the colour of redcurrants. A young man with a wig drank Coca-Cola through a straw and put records on the gramophone. He stood behind the windshield of the severed front half of an old Austin car. Its headlamps winked on and off to the beat of the music, dizzy flashes of electric blue. In these stroboscopic pulses, the white denim suit took amazing leave of its owner: she saw it frozen, in rigid gesture after rigid gesture, unearthly, illuminated, like a saint falling out of the sky in an old picture.

  The man bought her Campari and, fascinated, she watched the ice lumps in her glass leap into brilliance, their veins outlined in dazzling blue, then die. The music went bang-bang-bang-bang; it filled her cranium, as if the whole city was gathering itself up into a concerted heart and thumping in her head, bang-bang-bang-bang. The disc jockey’s melon-slice smile hung disembodied over the bonnet of his car.r />
  ‘I like,’ she said.

  When she came back from the Ladies, past the makeshift bamboo bar, she saw that the whole room was lined at its edges with bodies. They leaned and lay against each other on upholstered benches like so many uncollected parcels. She saw one stir, and in a strobe flash saw its bespectacled half-caste face. It looked like a face on a newsreel, surprised to be there, bathed in a sudden unasked-for celebrity. At the end of the record there was a general swelling and sighing amongst the bodies; the shaking out of a girl’s hair, an upraised ringed finger, a mouth in bulbous silhouette, an ankle bare between trouser leg and sock, a cigarette sharp and white in the flame of a silver lighter. She found the man in the white suit, absurdly upright, running his forefinger around the lip of his glass, making the glass squeal.

  ‘Is funny,’ she said.

  In the middle of ‘Brown Sugar’ she found herself pulled into the flashing folds of the denim. A pocket slid by, and her head came to a stop beside a button. She took it between her lips. In the corner of her eye, she saw the bodies; they had the aquatic exhaling motion of the elastic skin of a toad. Above her the man was mumbling, questioning; his voice kept on rising in little breathy squeaks, but she was safe from it, cocooned in the terrific amplified crash of the record. The denim tasted dry, crackly; she could feel it printing its close wave on her cheek. When the man’s lips trailed wetly over her forehead and through her hair she thought of glistening horned slugs, but did not mind.

  ‘You like it, Brown Sugar!’

  She liked it, turned her face, and licked the twin slugs of the man’s lips with a butterfly-flicker of her tongue.

  In another taxi, with the lights going out all over the streets, she thought she was on the pitching deck of a boat.

  ‘Is asleep,’ she said, and clung to the man, seeing him, white-suited, alone and drifting on his relation-ship. She found one of his hands around her left breast, deferential, apologetic. It was a guilty hand, and she took it away without rancour; it just seemed the wrong place for a hand to be.

  He woke her at the house number she had given, and when the driver switched on the light in the cab, she saw his face, stretched, earnest, the colour of faded wallpaper. He was on a spree of words. She had forgotten something: for a moment she stared at the man trying to remember what it was – some feeling, some dim, generous turning of the heart. But, wherever it was, it wouldn’t come. She settled gravely for a rubbery kiss.

  ‘Bye-bye,’ she said. ‘Bye-bye.’

  The taxi driver switched him off. One moment he was there, white, gesticulating, boiling with his speech; the next he was darkened, drowned by the starting motor. The taxi carried him off and she thought of the pictures of tumbrils in her history book.

  Only the kitchen light was on in the house. When she opened the door, she saw the Spainish sitting at the oilcloth-covered table with a man. A chair skreaked as she came in, and the Spainish looked bad; her whole body had a fishy droop. Between the Spainish and her man was a half-empty bottle of dry sherry and two blue and white striped mugs. The man, Spainish too by the look of him, wore the servile smirk of a born waiter. His clip-on bow tie had come undone on one side, and dangled from his collar. He watched the girl as she snapped down the latch on the lock. His eyes, black and creamy as molten tar, were fixed on the flaring sun of her buckle.

  She walked past them, through the far door, and into the darkened carpeted hall. The Spainish caught her at the foot of the stairs with the shy pluck-pluck of a trout going for an artificial fly.

  ‘No tell?’ said the Spainish, her head a featureless silhouette in the light from the kitchen. ‘No tell lady?’

  She had her foot on the first stair. ‘No tell. I no tell.’ And she laughed at the Spainish, a brisk dismissive snicker that left the maid still teetering nervously, still plucking at her. She climbed the stairs to her room.

  She lay in bed in the dark, feeling the starched sheets heavy on her. The slightest movement made them screech like cicadas. She listened.

  Through the open window of a distant room, she could hear the Spainish and her man. Their words had stopped. She listened to the mean, methodical thump of their bodies in the dark, like the chop-chunk of a woodcutter in the glade beyond the paddock. Then the thin, prolonged squeal of the Spainish, amazed and gratified, and the sobbing grunt of her man. The girl smiled and whispered to herself, her own company.

  She would go to other cities, Rome, Paris, New York, Amsterdam; they stretched away in a haze of lights and taxis, of people murmuring in all their languages, of curtained rooms, of rivers that made buildings twice as tall, and dark places, and the corners of streets where strangers collided and separated, and long connecting tunnels where sounds softened to a low animal hum. Her sheets creaked round her as she turned in bed. She felt her cheek, touched the faint, corrugated imprint of denim. She could feel it fading under her finger. By morning, it would be quite gone.

  Open-eyed, she lay absolutely still, listening to her city like a lover, hearing it wheeze and mumble in its sleep, waiting for the turquoise stir of sunrise and for the monotonous gobble of the pigeons on the lawn.

  ELEVEN

  A City Man

  For eight months, the manuscript of this book has come with me wherever I have gone. In orange ring-bound notebooks, growing increasingly pulpy and dog-eared, it has bounced, locked in my briefcase, between my knees in tubes and taxis. This exploration of the discontinuities of city life has provided a steady line of continuity for me – a plot for my own personal scenario. For the city and the book are opposed forms: to force the city’s spread, contingency, and aimless motion into the tight progression of a narrative is to risk a total falsehood. There is no single point of view from which one can grasp the city as a whole. That, indeed, is the central distinction between the city and the small town. For each citizen, the city is a unique and private reality; and the novelist, planner or sociologist (whose aims have more in common than each is often willing to admit) finds himself dealing with an impossibly intricate tessellation of personal routes, spoors and histories within the labyrinth of the city. A good working definition of metropolitan life would centre on its intrinsic illegibility: most people are hidden most of the time, their appearances are brief and controlled, their movements secret, the outlines of their lives obscure. Writing a book one pretends to an omniscience and a command of logic which the experience of living in a city continuously contradicts. The truest city is the most private, and autobiography is the kind of writing which is least likely to muddy the city with the small untruths of seeming to know and deduce much more about its life than is really possible.

  I came to London late, and its dazzle has not yet worn off. I still wake in the mornings glad to be here, reassured even by the irritations – the pounding of the traffic, the hangover look of the morning streets, the crush of ashen faces at the entrance to the tube. I grew up, and later worked, in places where strangers were stared at, and certain kinds of behaviour were not tolerated. Upright and censorious, these villages and small towns bred an ethic of knowing yourself, your limits, your station. Being conceited, getting above yourself, were cardinal sins against the community. The local mental hospitals were full of people whose identities had gone soft on them or who had failed to measure up to the rigorous standards exacted by the community – raggy cadaverous men and bloated women who poked aimlessly about behind high railings, ‘inadequates’, in the awful word used by the jolly female social workers who came to tea at my family vicarage. ‘He’s in Knowle,’ my father would say of yet another pale parishioner, and the hospital was a terminus for villagers who were not up to the strenuous moral art of villaging. Yet as an adolescent, I felt as mad as them, as unbounded, unsure and unfitted. With each job I took, the new town seemed to settle round me, a source of mild paranoia as soon as it was known. There are two hills, one above Aberystwyth, one above Norwich, and from them you can see the entire town ringed by green, a natural tourniquet on the social life inside,
a limit to anonymity and privacy. I could not stand those views. One needs to live in a very large city indeed if one is not to be aware of its boundaries and controls; the rings of green hem in the self just as much as they circumscribe the factories and houses. In central London or New York, one cannot see or feel its limits – the city is boundless, perfectly labyrinthine. From here in Earl’s Court, there is no horizon except that provided by distant squares full of houses exactly like one’s own. The sky is streaked pink and lemon like the dyed backcloth in a theatre, and the noise of brakes and engines is a continuous swirl which penetrates every last still corner. One is hardly aware of the changing of the seasons, and the only stir of wildlife is among the pigeons, a scraggy, corrupted, urbanised lot who pester old ladies and live off Swoop birdfood, and loiter, gobbling and lurching like meths drinkers, on pavements whitened with their excrement. This is a place where everything is fabricated; much of it is shabby and jerry-built, but there isn’t an inch which doesn’t bear the imprint of someone’s attempt to make something of himself and his landscape. The failures are endearing in themselves. Earl’s Court is a living tribute to the fact that most of what we try is spoiled, ugly, done on the cheap, doomed to look tired and ripe for demolition almost as soon as it is completed. It does not set impossibly high standards for human conduct. It even makes virtue look easy by its own default. It is hard to be an ‘inadequate’ in Earl’s Court.

  I live here on a corner of the square in a borrowed flat without property, at haphazard. By comparison with the tight family and neighbourhood life of the small town, I have few attachments or continuities. My existence is lax and unshaven. I have no proper job, just an irregular series of commissions and assignments, the chores and errands of a middle-class hobo. My occupation is characteristically metropolitan, dependent on those rarefied entrepreneurs which only an extremely complex urban industrial economy can support – agents, publishers, editors, producers of radio and TV programmes. In 1903, Georg Simmel observed: