And then, like some kind of biblical release, a wonderfully familiar tune at a quarter to six: the jangling of keys. Just as on every other afternoon at a quarter to six, my colleague Henry came ambling through the rooms, hinting to visitors that soon our tiny kingdom would close. He jangled them loudly as he walked, indulging in his favourite moment of the day, when the sun set on our museum and everyone, native and from overseas, was ushered towards the door. There were always one or two individuals who hung back until the last possible minute, to buy the final postcard or see that final painting, and Henry would remind them they could return tomorrow but the reply never varied: they had an early plane or train to catch, this was their very last evening in London, they couldn’t leave until, until, until…
At closing time, key jangling aside, I often thought back on old Dietrich, a former colleague. Dietrich had worked at Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, home to one of the finest painting collections in Europe, people say, for fourteen years before coming to the Gallery. He was with us for only ten months and then left under mysterious circumstances. He missed his old job too much and suffered from a ‘devastating nostalgia’, he confessed, for the paintings in the other collection. Everything, in fact, was about the other collection. At the other collection, there were many more Dürers. At the other collection, there were also more Cranachs (twenty-two to our eleven). At the other collection, the frames were less conspicuous. At the other collection, there were fewer tourists. At the other collection, people didn’t talk so loudly in front of the paintings. At the other collection, they had a nicer way of announcing that the museum was closing. This last reminiscence was, in fact, what wouldn’t free him.
I can’t remember when it started — it must have been the day someone in the canteen inquired into how visitors at the Gemäldegalerie were asked to leave at closing time. Upon hearing this question, Dietrich’s face lit up and he wiped his mouth with a napkin before explaining to all at the table that each afternoon at exactly 5.45 the museum would play the opening bars of Ode to Joy followed by a recording that would say ‘The Museum will be closing in fifteen minutes’ in German, French, English and Spanish. Between each language the same tune from Ode to Joy would ring out. After a decade and a half of listening to this morsel of Beethoven — without ever, he admitted, buying the recording and hearing the rest — it was etched in his mind like his own name.
It wasn’t long after this conversation in the canteen that Dietrich started to look greatly disturbed whenever closing time approached. His face would cloud over and he’d grow distant and not reply when spoken to. Something was wrong, there’d been a shift in the Teutonic plates, and one day he stopped coming to work. Later, we were told a cousin had come to take him back to Berlin. That was years ago, when I first started working at the Gallery, but I’d still think of him at closing time.
After the pushout, museum-guard parlance for kindly requesting all visitors to leave, would come a quick sweep of the rooms to make sure no one had escaped our notice. The paintings fell out of focus; we searched for movement instead. After the halls were cleared, we would congregate in the vestibule for a final tally, some of us spent and still, others twitchy and impatient. Once everyone had been counted we would descend by the main staircase to our changing rooms and branch off into male and female. In a low end-of-day buzz, my colleagues and I would start to unzip, undo and unbutton, removing our grey and returning to civilians like a deflated army on reserve, no uniforms ever allowed to be worn outside the museum, and together with our male colleagues finally rejoin the city.
After going through the motions that evening for the 3,000th time, I exited into Trafalgar Square, reminded of the weather and whatever else had been taking place outside. The square’s lack of coherence bothered me whenever I stopped to give it thought and in a perverse desire to prolong my bad mood I did just that, reiterating my dislike at having to contemplate anyone’s back, from that of Admiral Nelson to Charles I and his horse, not to mention the back of whatever unsightly thing had taken up residence on the plinth. Everything faced Westminster instead of the Gallery and that day just to add offence the two fountains in the square had been stilled, decapitated sea monsters on which pigeons and tourists came to roost in even greater flocks than usual.
Daniel and I had agreed to meet in Piccadilly Circus to go to the Indian restaurant his Colombian friend had recommended. I walked up Haymarket and arrived a few minutes early, struck for the first time by how the layers of the fountain there, also stilled, could easily depict a few circles of hell. Towards the top was a ring of miserable carbonised pigeons, heads tucked in breasts. Below the pigeons, a ring of tourists breathing in city fumes. Below the tourists, a ring of steps coated with the muck of countless shoes from countless countries. Over these three rings, in a failed gesture towards transcendence, towered the statue of Eros with a snapped bow. I caught sight of Daniel about to cross the junction and rushed to meet him before he came to me.
After so many years in London, I still didn’t have a grasp on Soho’s geography. The streets slipped through my fingers the moment I’d walked them regathering behind me like water, and I always had the sense that its residents and prowlers had a secret knowledge of the city’s chambers, held up a mirror to places no one else bothered to look.
That evening the streets became a blaring blinking tangle of neon. Each turn felt like, and indeed was, the wrong one. At first I simply followed Daniel and his limp, assuming he’d looked up directions, but all he could remember, he eventually confessed, as Wardour turned into Frith and Frith to Greek, Brewer and Lexington, was something about a porn shop in an alleyway.
After following several false leads, his instinct proving no better than mine, we came upon an alley with rows of shops with blackened windows. Large, crimson XXXs blinked above the doorways and huge light boxes with pictures of naked women with stars on their nipples cast an erotic glow on to the pavement. In one upstairs window I spotted a woman’s face looking down although she sat so quietly, I wasn’t sure whether it was a woman or a mannequin. Her lips, candy-apple red, seemed poised to indulge every wish, yet there was something, perhaps her vacant stare, that didn’t seem real. It looked strangely familiar and I wondered whether I’d seen it before, behind another window.
Below in the alleyway, large bald men in suits, seedy doormen of fulfilment, hovered in shop entrances. They stopped talking when we appeared, probably eyeing us as potential customers, and lit fresh cigarettes as they stood guard over the red velvety curtains that they alone had the authority to sweep aside, a parting of the curtains, a parting of the legs.
I glanced up at the window but the woman with the deadened gaze was no longer there. As we stood searching for the Indian restaurant amidst the flickering erotica, two peculiar men turned the corner and came ghosting down the alleyway like bodysnatchers on a mission. One was much taller than the other, he could have used his companion as a cane, and they both wore caps angled over their eyes. They passed uncomfortably close to us, I could hear the scraping of their leather jackets and smell the cigarettes they’d just stamped out, but their faces remained hidden and all I saw were their mouths, a dash and a smirk.
The men looked around before jumping into the XXX shop next door, the shorter one removing his cap as if in deference to Eros, a tastier version than the statue in Piccadilly. Once they entered, the velvety curtain fell back into place like a toreador’s cape, obliterating all traces of their arrival. From the doorway of the shop opposite, the competition watched with envy.