After the vendors arrived, the tourists started in, which makes perfect sense if you think about it. There were a lot of Americans, but also great hordes of Italian teenagers, who always seemed to travel in groups of three thousand, and tidy little gaggles of Japanese photo freaks. Neal had never seen an ethnic cliche come to life before, but it was really true about the Japanese: They would take a picture of anything, and they all took the same pictures, as if they didn’t know you could make more than one print from a negative. They drove Neal nuts. He had spent a lifetime avoiding having his picture taken, and now he was sure he was going to pop up in five hundred photo albums in greater metropolitan Kyoto. Not that it mattered. It was, as they say, the principle of the thing.
However, mostly the tourists were fellow Americans: “My fellow Americans,” Neal thought once, flashing on Lyndon Johnson, and mostly they were that middle-aged type who want to travel but don’t want to leave home. So they go to English-speaking countries. You can go to Canada only so many times, so here they were in London, and boy, were they surprised. London had changed considerably from those great Forties movies. In those great Forties movies, people didn’t have foot-high purple hair or say “fuck” every fourth word. Also, it was always foggy and cool in those great Forties movies. Uh-huh.
And their travel agents had told them there was no crime in London. Crime was reserved for those vaguely greasy people like Italians and French, not to mention Africans, Indians, and Orientals-but not the English.
Neal sat and mused about crime in England one sultry day as he sat watching a pickpocket make his week’s wages from a single tour group meandering through the square. Why is it, he wondered, that about half of all great popular English literature is about crime and yet everybody, English or foreign, will tell you there is no crime in England? The English popular tradition is obsessed with robbery and murder, starting with Robin Hood, moving up through Dickens, then to Sherlock Holmes, and on to Agatha Christie, who had single-handedly depopulated fictional aristocracy. Even staid historical works featured set-piece public whippings and hangings, and mass transportations to Australia and so forth, and yet England maintains the reputation for public order and civility. Maybe, Neal theorized, people figure that England ridded itself through the rope or the long-distance boat trip of its criminal class, so now everybody who was left in the country was genetically disposed toward being law-abiding. He considered his theory for a while, then dismissed it as he watched the pick maneuver toward his next victim.
Neal wondered about a bunch of things as he watched his countrymen absorb the culture of the Main Drag. He wondered how many of them, wary of visiting really foreign lands where people spoke a different language and did really strange things, realized that a good proportion of the Third World had migrated right here to good old civilized London; that many of the Empire’s former subjects had taken the phrase Commonwealth at face value and decided to try to get a little bit of the common wealth in the heart of the imperial city. It was a cruel joke, really, considering the fact that these Africans, Asians, and West Indians had created a big chunk of that wealth back in the good old days in their native lands when they bought at inflated prices the cheap consumer goods cranked out in factories in Manchester and Birmingham, and marketed by London firms. Well, the good old days were long gone, blown away by the Marne trenches, and the Blitz, and the “winds of change” that had transformed the British Empire into the British Commonwealth, or as some wags would have it, the Commonpoor. Neal wondered how many of the tourists would get beyond the artificial Mary Poppins land of tourist London to go into the Brixton slums and Notting Hill Gate hovels, or onto the stretch of Bayswater Road that had become known as “Little Karachi,” or how many would journey north from London to the vast rust belt of the industrial Midlands, where the factories had lost their markets, or up into the sooty coal towns that made their West Virginia cousins look like Opryland, USA. He wondered how a supposedly intelligent man in his fifties could be so stupid as to carry his wallet in his back pants pocket.
Another phenomenon that engaged Neal (what the hell, he had nothing else to do while on this fool’s errand) was the propensity of American tourists to wear clothing extolling the virtues of hometowns they had just paid lots of money to escape. It seemed that half the people he observed wore T-shirts with slogans such as NO PLACE BUT ELKHART and I LUV ALBUQUERQUE, or baseball caps proclaiming loyalty to home teams, which under further consideration Neal realized he understood perfectly. After all, he was the one who checked the papers twice a day to get the baseball scores and root in absentia for Steinbrenner’s team to win the Pennant, which even Neal acknowledged was like cheering for the Nazis to overrun Holland. He wondered why he was being so goddamn superior to the tourists and their expression of affection for their homes. Shit, he thought, he’d rather be home, too. He wondered why, though. He also wondered where the hell this dealer was. And where, oh where, has my little Allie gone? Seven weeks, now, and still counting.
Meanwhile, the hawkers and the gawkers were always well established by one or two o’clock, and by two-thirty or so the freaks, winos, druggies, and hard-core crazies moved on to their ordained places onstage, waiting with varying degrees of patience for the bit players to clear off.
Neal would get off his bench around this time and stroll over to the Dilly on the odd chance that Allie had opted out of the pro ranks to join the recalcitrant hippies and fake down-and-out young travel scene that gathered to sit like stoned vultures around the statue of Eros. These kids sat hunched over, checking out the other kids, watching the swirling traffic, passing the surreptitious joint, enormously self-satisfied with their mass nonconformity. Allie was never there, individual nonconformity being her particular taste and talent. Neal felt sorry, though, for poor Eros, doomed to watch over a mob of kids for whom sex had become so commonplace it was an absolute bore. And aren’t you developing a fine and snooty sense of irony? he thought. He didn’t like himself much these days.