He had to go back more or less the way he’d come and as he passed the school he watched some fairly talented schoolboys doing catching practice on the playing field. It was then he realized that this first foray was in danger of turning into an aimless ramble. He pressed on determinedly. It took a long time to walk all the way up Scrubs Lane, past the industrial estates, across the bridges that took him over railway lines and canals, and at last he came to the Harrow Road. He wondered why some roads merited a definite article (the Old Kent Road, the King’s Road, the Edgware Road), while others of apparently equal status and nature (Oxford Street, Essex Road) did not.
He followed the Harrow Road on its long, eastward course. It was wide and windy and it rattled with traffic. He saw a tyre centre whose frontage had a mural depicting members of staff. He thought about setting foot in Kensal Green Cemetery but he resisted. Further along, nearer town, he left the Harrow Road, and took a footbridge over a canal and headed towards the Trellick Tower. He thought of Hugh Casson, frightened by Erno Goldfinger, scared by ‘the degree of certainty compressed into a small room’.
He found his way to Ladbroke Grove, passed under the Westway where he saw two drunks standing on top of a prefabricated toilet doing some kind of dance. There was also a hairdresser nearby called Have It Off. Then back through the leafier part of Hotting Hill, or perhaps it should have been called North Kensington, he wasn’t sure, and he returned to where his car was parked.
He sat in the driver’s seat feeling both footsore and pleased with himself. He knew his walking could have been more purposeful but he’d done a reasonable ten miles. Not bad for a beginner. He opened his A — Z, took out a marker pen and drew black lines through all the streets he’d walked along that day. When he was finished he tossed the A — Z on to the passenger seat and drove home.
He knew he should have felt good, yet as he drove he had a profound sense of emptiness and dissatisfaction, and it wasn’t simply because he’d occasionally lacked purpose in his walking. Rather he suspected that something fundamental was wrong with his method. Somehow he couldn’t imagine completing another thousand days like this. Simply scoring out streets after he’d walked along them wasn’t going to be enough. It marked his passage but it didn’t record his presence. Even as he sat there with the day’s walk fresh in his mind, he knew it was already starting to fade away. He could no longer quite picture the prison towers, and he’d forgotten the name of the hairdresser in Ladbroke Grove. Before long the whole day might just as well never have happened. There was nothing to say he’d been there. His experience was disappearing and he knew he had to find a way to reclaim and retain it.
The solution was obvious enough. In order for his experience to feel real and meaningful it wasn’t going to be enough just to do the walking. And if he didn’t have a captive audience of tourists to whom he could describe what he saw, he realized he was going to have to write about it.
PLAYERS
Mick Wilton liked to think of himself as one of nature’s aristocrats. The world obviously saw him as a plebeian, so he had to rely on nature for a second, higher opinion. When it came to cars, suits, women, that sort of thing, he liked to think that he knew quality, even if he didn’t always have enough money to indulge in it. In his fantasies, for instance, he went from one exotic, expensive location to another, in a chauffeur (or, in a better fantasy, chauffeuse) driven Roller, never having to engage with the grime and irritation of the city streets.
He had decided he would not be travelling again by black cab. He didn’t want to be ripped off by some cockney wag who insisted on broadcasting his views on queers, blacks and women, especially if they weren’t prepared to go to Hackney. You had to admire them for knowing their way round the whole of London, and you had to admire them for even keeping their sanity, given the number of hours they spent negotiating London traffic, but they were still people he didn’t want to deal with.
The tube wasn’t an option. Mick’s knowledge of the system was patchy, gleaned from a couple of daytrips, but the experience had been profound and bad. It had been a waking nightmare, everything he feared and despised all in one place; countless faceless people jammed into carriages in factory-farm conditions; people blocking your way, taking up too much room, refusing to let you get past, leaving their bags in the way. Then when the train pulled into the station there was the group grope of people getting on before they’d let other people off. Oh sure, there were heavenly voices trying to control all this mayhem, telling you to move right down inside, the guard on the train (a moron with a speech impediment) saying let the passengers off first, and being ignored, then some stuck-up ponce telling you to mind the gap. And when the tubes weren’t full they were occupied by kids who had to put their feet up on seats, by men who thought it was cute to be drinking lager at ten in the morning.
But Mick’s real problem was more intrinsic, more philosophical. The very idea of sending packed trains through the bowels of the earth, like turds through a vast, curving gut, appalled and frightened him. It would take so little for these tunnels to get blocked, for the electricity to fail, for a fire to start. The King’s Cross fire was a bad dream he’d always been expecting to come true. He could imagine the selfish panic, the fireball, the smell of burning flesh. No point looking to your fellow passengers for help. They were in their own private hells. What if there was a bomb? What if there was a power cut? What if there was a nutter with a gun? Mick wasn’t claustrophobic in any ordinary sense but there was something about the tube that could turn him into a sad, screaming wreck.
So Mick didn’t travel by tube. He didn’t travel by bus, either. He just didn’t. It was one of those things that a man like Mick couldn’t bring himself to do. The world of bus conductors and bus tickets and request stops, of sharing a seat with some stranger, it wasn’t for him. He was too impatient, too cool, too, yeah say it, aristocratic. So Mick walked. He did a lot, a whole lot of walking. He walked a very long way before he found his way back to the London Particular.
Judy Tanaka was standing at the top of a set of wooden library steps, restocking the Ordnance Survey section, when she saw him come in. The shop was as empty as ever. Mick was carrying a plastic bag with a Virgin Megastore logo on it, and it bulged with the oblong shapes of the video tapes it contained. The A — Z he’d bought from Judy was in there too. Judy smiled uncertainly. In a way she was glad he’d come back. It would have been strange if she’d never seen him again, as though she’d read only the first chapter of a book she’d then lost, but she was sure he hadn’t come just to be friendly. She knew he had to be there because he wanted something from her.
She came down the steps and said cheerfully, “Can I help you, sir?”
“Don’t call me sir,” he said as before, and then he realized she was joking. He felt embarrassed. The encounter had got off to a predictably clumsy start. “But you can help me,” he added. “You have a television, right?”
She nodded uncertainly.
“And you have a video recorder, yes?”
“Yes,” she admitted, aware that she might be admitting something else too.
“Good. Can I borrow it?”
She laughed in sheer disbelief. How could he have the nerve to ask to borrow a video recorder from someone he barely knew?