London Noir

by Cathi Unsworth

  I went into another café and had a cup of tea. My hands were blue and I was shivering.

  I didn’t want to hear it but they fell from the lips of a man sitting opposite. In my father’s voice. The words: “We’re rubbish, us Irish, and all our children—they’ll be rubbish. We don’t even know how to love or kiss or dance. All we can do is dress in rags. If we were in London now, that would be different. We’d deck ourselves in the finest of silks and we’d stroll down Pall Mall with our proud heads held high. Then do you know what we’d do? We’d go off to dinner in some swanky hotel, and after we’d called a toast to ourselves, we’d take a cab off to a dancehall—we wouldn’t really care where it was, just so long as the Inkspots were playing—and what we’d do then is we’d foxtrot and waltz until our feet were sore and bruised.”

  He was leaning over to kiss her when I knocked over the teacup, its contents dribbling onto my feet.

  I think one of the most beautiful days I can ever remember was Boxing Day three years ago. It had been snowing constantly and the city looked like something out of a fairy tale—as though it had been evacuated especially for me. On Trafalgar Square, the Landseer lions appeared even more august than usual, with their Mandarin moustaches of dusty white ice.

  Starched and blue, Soho did my heart good. In the gutters, hardened wrappers possessed a special kind of poetry. It was like being a child all over again, when I’d walk the roads of the little country town which I haven’t, sadly, been back to now for many years now.

  I’m looked after here—I’ve accepted this country as my home. I have a flat the Council gave me—it’s not far from Fenchurch Street, in the suburb of Aldgate.

  There’s a café which I go to, near Leadenhall Market. I sit at the back. The owner is an Italian—he fancies himself an intellectual. He thought I was writing a West End play. “No,” I told him, “I’m writing a novel. A little thriller I’ve titled The London Assignment. ”

  He took up my notebook and read—with superiority: “Once upon a time there was a young boy who lived in a squat. He had to leave it for reasons best left unreported. The city in those days was as though a place under siege. Emmanuelle was playing at The Odeon. A Clockwork Orange was showing somewhere else. On April 26, an old tramp, who happened to be from Ballyfuckways in the Irish county of Mayo, was stumbling good-humoredly through an underpass, throatily declaiming an old ballad, when he was confronted by three youths—each of them sporting a bowler hat and with a single eye mascaraed. They beat him with their walking canes and left him for dead. A bomb blew out the windows of a restaurant that night—on Frith Street, in Soho. Thirteen people were injured. Carroll’s Number Six cigarettes cost fifteen pence for ten.”

  He handed me back the notebook and smiled—in that unfortunately unappealing, superior way.

  “Did you ever hear of Griffith’s theory of consistent memory?” he asked me. He then explained it, in even and measured tones, clearly anticipating my difficulties with its complexity.

  “It’s like this,” he continued, “consciousness prompts you to hypothesize that the story you’re creating from a given set of memories is a consistent history, justified by a consistent narrative voice …”

  I half-expected Edgar Lustgarten to appear out of the throng outside, airily drift up to the window, and press his gaunt face to the grimy glass. After a minute or two of this unsolicited advice, I no longer heard a word he said.

  What must Sinclair Vane—complete stranger, retired physiotherapist and formerly of 7th (Queen’s Own) Hussars—and indeed his wife, have thought when he returned to Frognal Walk Hampstead one night in 1973 to find his parlor window broken open and me, right there in his sitting room, talking to myself and clutching what I had decided was a lethal weapon—in reality a wholly amateur attempt at an imitation firearm, fashioned from a branch I’d found outside? I can only surmise he received the shock of his life. My black bomber jacket was draped across my shoulders as I shivered and menacingly narrowed my eyes. I think I might have giggled a little, in what I thought was a sinister fashion.

  “I’m the most feared terrorist in Ireland,” I said. “You’re going to pay for the sins of your country. I’m sorry to have to tell you but that’s the way it is. I’m a soldier, you’re a soldier. You’re going to die, Mr. Vane.”

  If I wanted to describe him, I would say he was a young version of Edgar Lustgarten—still retaining most of his hair, complete with touches of distinguished gray.

  I encountered him once—a number of years after my discharge from Brixton. The snow had passed and the gutters of Soho had been recently rinsed clean by a deluge of rain, twists of steam all about me rising up into the easeful autumn sky.

  He was sitting by the window of a new European-style coffee bar, surrounded by chatting white-T-shirted youths and looking so out of place. It was hard for me to do it but I was glad afterwards that I had made the effort. At first he didn’t recognize me when I said his name: Sinclair Vane.

  As might have been expected, he formally stood to attention and extended his hand to shake mine.

  We didn’t talk much about that night. His soul was still saddened by the recent passing of his wife.

  “She was an angel, you know. She really was.”

  I thought of her, his angel, as she’d encountered me that ridiculous night—weeping hysterically in the doorway by the stairs. Before Sinclair had expertly calmed her down. I recalled him in that photo on their mantelpiece—battalion commander S. Vane, in complete battledress, authoritatively squinting in the Egreb sun.

  * * *

  I don’t know why I thought it, but it was as clear as day as I sat in the Sir Richard Steele one still and uneventful afternoon—this image of myself and Sinclair sitting so comfortably in a London black cab, gliding along before coming to a halt just outside a dancehall whose entrance was lit by a string of warm and inviting multicolored lightbulbs.

  “It was in Brighton all along,” I heard him say, as the door swung open and he reached in his pocket for the fare.

  Which I knew, of course, it wasn’t—and, all of a sudden, hands of accusation seemed to reach out to grab me as I sat there in the corner of the Sir Richard Steele gloom.

  I hadn’t been allowed out of Brixton for the funeral of my mother, but after my father went into the home, his papers and effects were all passed to me. You can imagine my reaction when I discovered the old photograph—creased and faded but instantly recognizable. I didn’t know what to think when I smoothed it out and, having examined it quite exhaustively, came to accept that the image I was looking at—and had been obsessed by—was that of two complete strangers, the inscription on the back reading: Dublin 1953. Neither of my parents had been to Dublin in their lives.

  It was hard not to weep as I looked at it again, slowly beginning to accept that it definitely was THE PALAIS, and that the two lovers in it, well, they could have been almost anyone. For in those box-pleated suits and stiff-collared shirts, not to mention those fearful faces and averted eyes which seemed so grateful for even the tiniest morsel of hope, they could have been any pair of thrown-together souls, adrift in the black and washed-out gray of the lightless, shrinking sad Irish ’50s.

  * * *

  The London Assignment had been an extremely effective operation—from the British establishment’s point of view, not from mine. Or from Sinclair’s, I hasten to add. I don’t think he wanted me charged at all. My demise and subsequent incarceration hastened due to the fact that the day before the trial had been due to begin, three cleaning ladies, a hotel porter, and two foreign tourists had been blown to pieces in a restaurant in Piccadilly.

  In these, the latter days of the ’90s, I largely subsist by means of the dole and a couple of hours a night gathering glasses in a pub. I suppose you could say I’m well-known around Aldgate. No one is aware of my murky past. I live in a tower block, not far from the station, which gets lonely sometimes and sees me perhaps in The Hoop & Grapes, nursing a tepid lager, or back in Trin
ity Square Gardens again, feeding the pigeons and surrounded by clamorous, insatiable, supremacist youth. Whose faith in the future I need to be near. Walkman stereos were just coming in ’74. I was bundled into a van, not to see the light of day until mid-’95. I still derive a childish innocence from wearing mine, fancying myself a lone knight of the streets, immersed in shaky ’30s-style strings and mellow muted jazz trumpets as I drift, a shadow figure, along the golden streets of Soho.

  Among the personal effects forwarded to me after my father’s death was a letter to her, written in 1949. I know it so well I can quote it verbatim.

  Dear Maggie,

  I hope this finds you as well as it leaves me. Well, since we last met things have not been so bad as you can imagine things are busy here on the farm. I hope to be back up your way in about three or four months time. DV and I was wondering would you make an appointment with me I would be very grateful. My mother is a bit under the weather these times but Daddy is good thank God for that. I am doing a lot of reading at nighttime mostly because it is so busy. I like the Reader’s Digest you will find a lot of articles about London in there it looks like a beautiful city although we shouldn’t say it maybe but I would dearly love maybe to go there one day even if just for a little while. Anyhow Maggie I will sign off now and as I say I hope you are in the best of health since I seen you.

  Yours truly, your fond friend,

  Tommy Spicer, Annakilly

  One of the chapters in my forthcoming book is called The Hampstead Conclusion. With a walk-on part by Edgar Lustgarten.

  I’d wrecked the house that night, of course. And made a speech for the benefit of the Vanes. So that they might clearly comprehend my motivation—the reasons which led to The London Assignment.

  “Then and only then let my epitaph be written!”—a segment from my Republican firebrand namesake Robert Emmet’s famous courtroom speech—I remember bawling as I tipped a small glass table over. “Do you hear me, Vane, you imperious, self-regarding, cold-blooded Englishman?” I’d snapped, before delivering a lengthy soliloquy regarding the inadvisability of antagonizing a “nation who were educating Europe when others were painting themselves with woad,” along with any number of references to a certain “Mahoney” whose underground army was by now primed and about to launch a full-scale assault on “Her Majesty’s government of despots and butchers, as well as …”

  As well as nothing, as a matter of fact, for before I knew it, Sinclair Vane had somehow pinned my two arms behind my back and knocked me out with a well-aimed blow, something which I would have anticipated had I examined the mantelpiece a little bit more comprehensively—there were at least four photos of him attired in military fatigues—or applied myself with more diligence to my researches, particularly those pertaining to ex-servicemen who had distinguished themselves repeatedly in the field of combat, unarmed and otherwise. Particularly, it appeared, with the 7th Armoured Division with Monty at El Alamein.

  The notice of his death I happened to come upon in the Times. I don’t know why I went there—to the funeral in Willesden Cemetery—some unformed notion, a vague desire for closure, maybe. All I remember is shaking his sister, Miss Vane’s, hand. She was so distressed I don’t think she even saw me.

  When I got home I explained to Vonya—or tried to. But in the end gave up about halfway through. I could see it wasn’t making any sense. She was a lovely girl, whom I happened to meet quite by chance one day on my bench in Trinity Square Gardens.

  She stayed with me but we didn’t have sex. As I poured out the coffee, a young Muslim man was arguing with two policemen, employing body language I knew so well.

  “But I lie to you,” she said, a little choked.

  Her mother was long dead, she’d told me. Her father had habitually abused her since childhood. That was the reason she had come to London, the very minute, practically, that she’d come of age. Except that none of it, it turned out, was true.

  It was the morning the IRA bombed the Baltic Exchange. I heard the explosion—it’s not that far away from my flat—and wondered had Mickey Feane, my old friend, been involved. But then I remembered—Mickey Feane was long dead, sprayed in an ambush on a back road in Tyrone.

  I turned to say something and saw she wasn’t there.

  That was the last I saw of Vonya Prapotnik.

  I’d sit there in the gardens opposite the Lutyens monument commemorating the Merchant Navy dead, and think of Mr. Lustgarten arriving—the fat black Panda pulling up outside the building as a burly officer opened the door, clearing a path for the internationally renowned sleuth as he made his way up bare concrete stairs, pushing the door open to reveal the dank interior. Where he’d find me lying prostrate on the bed. I don’t know what title might occur to him as he observed me—rigor mortis having already set in, most likely—An Unfortunate Case, perhaps, or Felo-De-Se: A Volunteer’s Farewell, or, perhaps, best of all, The Aldgate Assignment.

  Yes, I think I like the sound of that.

  I made the tape last night and it’s good, I think—by which I mean that it’s clear and unequivocal. Precise as any good confession ought to be, with or without a black plastic hood. I left it on the table where anyone will be able to see it—you won’t need the skills of Edgar Lustgarten. I bought a jiffy bag and a packet of stickers, and in neat felt marker printed on the front: Who Do You Know in Heaven?

  What I couldn’t believe most of all was how wonderfully bright it was. THE PALAIS in red and yellow strung-up lights. When I went in, the band were already in the middle of their set, performing their dance steps in front of their music stands, with all their silver instruments gleaming. They were wearing little white jackets and neatly pressed graystripe trousers. The Ink Spots, in black, was printed on a drum.

  When I heard her call out to me, initially I couldn’t make out who it was. Then, to my astonishment, I heard my mother say: “Emmet, will you do something for me? Will you make sure the Infant of Prague is in his proper place on the fanlight and has his little face turned toward the church? We’re getting married tomorrow morning at 10, son, you see.”

  I wasn’t sure quite what to say—her taffeta dress looked so nice—and had to think for a minute to decide on an answer. But before I got the chance, the band had started up again, and as he placed his arm around her waist I saw her lean in toward him and smile.

  But that was the last I saw of them because in the one or two seconds I’d turned to give my attention to the band, as effortlessly as though they’d grown wings, they’d sailed like moths out far beyond the stars, in search of the heaven they’d been dreaming of for so long.

  BETAMAX

  BY KEN HOLLINGS

  Canary Wharf

  1.

  It starts with an accelerating whine that becomes a roaring through darkness and space. You’ll find yourself hurtling into emptiness. Lights travel past your eyes at ever increasing speed. The flooring moves beneath your feet. You’ll feel the rush, pulling you forward. The roaring continues. Everything lies straight ahead. The expressions around you seem dazed, eyes unfocused and distant.

  The sound slows to a stop. A woman’s voice speaks to you from out of nowhere. This station is Canary Wharf. Change here for the Docklands Light Railway.

  Then another woman’s voice: This train terminates at Stratford.

  Everyone around you looks stunned. Lost.

  A gun is a dream that fits into your hand.

  “So I get out here?”

  They used to sleep below ground in places like this. While bombs fell from up above. The steel and glass barrier will slide apart, separating you from nothing. A vast space of columns and moving stairways, designed for handling thousands of people in transit, opens up around you, but it will be almost empty at this hour of the day. On the platform, a young skateboarder drums with his bare hands on a metal guardrail. A little Muslim girl in a glistening pink dress crouches at the edge of the concourse, sniffing at an open pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum. She holds it up to her
face, avidly inhaling the smell. Her father wears black combat boots, the toecaps carefully polished. Behind them, the empty silent track.

  You watch the barrier as it closes again, a yellow and black stripe running the length of it at waist height. Two sets of three isosceles triangles pointing away from each other move slowly together until they are almost touching once more.

  Standing on the escalator, coming up toward the third level on the concourse, just beneath the surface of the world, you get your first glimpse of towers and tall buildings. Shining high-rise blocks of steel and reflective glass, housing a working population of over 65,000. You only have to kill one of them. But anything over that will also be acceptable.

  A scratchy subtitle flickers before your eyes: It is the acts of men who survive the centuries that gradually and logically destroy them.

  Buildings are machines: electrical systems that listen and see and respond. People are just a planet’s biomass redistributing itself in time and space.

  “You have a room reserved for me? Under the name Betamax?”

  The girl at the reception desk will look up at you and smile brightly. “Yes, we do. Thanks for asking.”

  You’ll be vaguely aware of the color scheme in the hotel lobby: a deep rose pink with polished wood surfaces. Beyond them an empty concrete plaza and a fountain swept by the wind.

  You’re just product, denied a place in this world. Something played out on an old system, dated and worn. Set aside.

  Step out of the elevator when it reaches the twenty-third floor.

  “Room 2307?” you’ll say. “It’s along here?”

  The maid will turn from her cleaning cart and smile brightly. “Fifth door to your right, thanks for asking.”

  Anything over that will also be acceptable.

  Your name will appear on the TV screen in your room, incorporated into a message of greeting. You ignore it. You remember a blind operative you once knew who stayed at Holiday Inns all the time because the rooms were always laid out in exactly the same way. It made finding his way around a lot easier.