At first the suggestions were mundane. Callers recommended parks and heaths and commons and recreation grounds and carparks, but it soon got much more personal and anecdotal. People started to give details of dark alleys and shop doorways where they’d had particularly enjoyable bouts of sex. Station platforms were recalled, churchyards, telephone boxes, bridges, embankments, towpaths, tunnels. It appeared there was no part of the city that hadn’t been used as a venue for sex.
The idea seemed to please the callers and it especially pleased Marilyn Lederer. She egged on her audience fervently. A woman rang up to talk about all the many, many places she’d had sex. For a moment her voice reminded Mick of Judy Tanaka, but that was probably because all posh voices sounded much the same to him. She was quite a caller. It seemed there was no district or borough, no location or postal district anywhere in London that she hadn’t performed. She was proud of it, as though she had something to prove, was going for a record.
Mick found himself inexplicably incensed. He thought of ringing up and saying that in Sheffield at least, sluts kept quiet about the precise details of their activities, but of course he didn’t. The programme raced by without any intervention from him and at two o’clock when it ended the lines were still stacked up with callers.
In his room in Hackney Mick wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or dismayed. The show asserted that sex was fun, easy, commonplace, but right now it didn’t seem like any of those things. It occurred to him that it was quite likely someone might have had sex in this room, on this bed. He didn’t find the thought celebratory or involving. It gave him the creeps. He was not in London for anything so trivial as sex. He did not find it a sexy city, whatever the people on the radio said. He found it hard and scruffy and cold and affectionless, a place where terrible things happened or were made to happen; and the sooner he could cease contact with it the better.
NAMES
Once it would have been easy enough for Stuart to blame his parents. They were the ones who had given him his name; a painfully absurd name that he hated. The name Stuart was innocuous enough, and so in most contexts was his surname. It was inherited in his father’s case, acquired through marriage in his mother’s; and he would have conceded that there was nothing inherently absurd about having the surname London. The last time he’d looked in the London telephone directory there were twenty-five or thirty others in the same boat. There were famous Londons, Jack for instance, and Julie. And he would also have admitted that if one had to be called after an English place-name London was clearly preferable to a great many others: Worksop, Diss, Looe, Foulness.
But surely his parents should have had enough common sense not to join the name of a capital city with the name of a period in history. They should not, they should so obviously not, have given him the name Stuart London. He despised it. It was a chapter in a history textbook, the tide of an exam paper, the name of a historical map, scarcely a person’s name at all.
What had depressed him even more was that for a long time his parents hadn’t even realized what they’d done. They were not stupid or simple people, but they were not students of history either. The Tudors and Stuarts were unknown quantities to them. So for that matter were the Romans, the Georgians, the Victorians. It was only when little Stuart, a short-trousered schoolboy, came home from class, confused, laughed at, mocked to the point of tears, that his parents had some inkling of what they had done. They saw, too late, how their son’s name might be considered laughable.
His father tried to make light of his son’s misery and said how much worse things might have been if he’d called him Norman London, but this didn’t help at all. Besides, his father pointed out, it wasn’t one of those totally ludicrous names that every Tom, Dick and Harry would find hilarious. It wasn’t Eva Brick or Eileen Dover. No, people had to have a certain subtlety of mind and a certain level of sophistication to find his name a joke. His father implied that this would make things better. Stuart knew it only made things worse.
Alas, he was now no longer a schoolboy, and was therefore no longer able to blame his parents for anything. He was a forty-year-old man, who, in serious consultation with his wife, had decided not to have children. But if he’d had children he’d have called them something plain and simple, Bill, Alice, something like that. They wouldn’t have had to go through what he’d been through.
Stuart had suffered long and hard but he had never quite had the confidence or the desperation to change his name. He’d considered it many times, had even considered some serious alternatives, but had not taken the final step. And then one day it was far too late. He found himself in a position, in a profession where his name might even be construed as beneficial; albeit a position and profession for which he no longer had much respect or tolerance.
He hadn’t intended to find himself here. In so far as he had ever possessed any ambitions at all they were about becoming an architectural scholar or a historian, or possibly some sort of curator, something like that. But none of that had worked out. Instead, after several interrupted courses of study, after a number of career changes and crises, he had found himself as a part of the tourist industry, as managing director (he still found the title laughable) of a company called, with what these days seemed to him a ravaging lack of originality, The London Walker. London by name, London by nature. And he wondered if in some sense his name had preordained this fate for him.
You would pick up The London Walker catalogue if you considered yourself to be the more discriminating, more cultured kind of tourist, the type who wanted to get off the tour bus and walk the streets of London in the company of a knowledgeable and articulate guide. The catalogue had a quotation from Samuel Johnson in it, not the obvious one, but instead, “By seeing London I have seen as much of life as the world can show.” If you liked what you read you might well find yourself signing up for one or more of the following guided tours: the Bloomsbury Walk, the Boswell Walk, the Christopher Wren Walk, the London Crime Walk, the Holmes and Watson Walk, the Art Gallery Walk, the Docklands Walk, and so on and so forth, ad nauseam in Stuart’s opinion.
Stuart, even though he had never wanted to be a business man, knew that any kind of business was a series of only partially solvable problems, a series of headaches that didn’t wholly respond to treatment. There was no business that had ever ‘run itself, but for the time being at least The London Walker ran without any input from him. That was because he had a wife, and she ran the business for him, for herself too, and she ran it better than he could. It would have been nice to think he could have sat back and grown fat and rich on the profits. In fact he sat back and felt utterly useless and depressed.
Stuart was not a native of London. He had been born in Colchester in the mid-fifties, but London had always seemed a magical place to him. His father had war stories from when he was a fire watcher in London and, before she was married, his mother had been a great fan of West End musicals and she still talked about them as part of her golden past. When he was a child there had been family excursions, days out in London, an aunt in Finsbury Park who was occasionally visited, but these jaunts were never enough for Stuart. From the earliest age he’d known that he wanted to move to London, live there, be a student there. He’d driven himself to pass O-level Latin so he could study English at UCL, even if his interest in English literature hadn’t survived his first term there.