“I’m glad. No trouble?”
“No, of course not. This is Sheffield. It’s not like down there in London.”
“No, it’s certainly not,” he said.
“Mick,” she said, sounding suddenly intimate, “I want you to be careful. I want you to hurry up with what you have to do, don’t get into trouble, get it over with and come home.”
“That’s exactly what I have in mind.”
“London, it’s a dump, isn’t it?” she said, and he didn’t really think she meant it but he agreed with her anyway.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s a dump, a slum, a zoo, an armpit. Whatever.”
She made a contented noise down the phone.
“Another thing I was wondering,” Mick said. “When you went through your ordeal, did you recognize any of the guys?”
“Why do I need to recognize them when you’ve got their names?”
“I mean, did you recognize any of them at the time, like before they raped you, while they were just watching you strip. Because it turns out one of them’s quite famous. This Justin Carr character; he’s an actor, he makes films, he appears on television. He’s a bit of a sex symbol. He’s a familiar face to some people, apparently.”
“Not to me.”
“Me neither,” Mick said. “But fame’s an interesting thing isn’t it? I mean if you’d been raped by Roger Moore, you’d have recognized him, wouldn’t you? Or Keanu Reeves or Rowan Atkinson. So he’s not that famous. But I was thinking, he was taking quite a risk, wasn’t he? It wouldn’t have done his career much good if it had got out that he took part in a gang-bang, would it? You could have gone to the papers or anything.”
“He probably wasn’t thinking very straight at the time,”
Gabby said. “He was drunk. He was crazy. The others were egging him on…Look, Mick, I know you’re there sorting this business out for me, but really I find it very difficult to talk about.”
She started to cry loudly and forlornly. Mick had no possible defence against it.
“I can understand that,” he said sympathetically. “I’m sorry.”
“Isn’t your money running out yet?”
“Oh yeah, maybe it is. Look, before I go—”
The phone went dead and Mick was left wondering whether the money had really run out or whether Gabby had hung up on him.
JUDY TANAKA REDRAWS THE MAP
Her letter of application had been irresistible; elegantly handwritten on thick, textured paper, and submitted along with one short page of word-processed CV. It said the sorts of thing Stuart wanted to hear, that she’d lived in London all her life, that she’d travelled extensively abroad, that she was an enthusiast for London, its people and its history, that she wanted to share her enthusiasm with the rest of the world.
It sounded to Stuart as if her ambitions might be pitched a little high for someone wanting to be a tour guide with The London Walker, but he recognized that anybody can get carried away when they’re trying to get a job. He wanted to meet her. But it was Anita who got particularly excited by the application. She noted that the girl had an interesting Japanese-sounding name, and she had an idea that finding a Japanese-speaking guide would be a great thing for the business, and she told her husband that he really had to interview Judy Tanaka. Stuart did as he was told.
It was at the time when Stuart was trying hard to ‘redefine his role’ at The London Walker. Anita, by contrast, was looking around desperately, simply trying to find something for him to do. Fortunately she knew that an ad placed in Time Out or the Evening Standard asking for new tour guides could be guaranteed to bring in scores, maybe hundreds, of applications. The job of sifting through the letters, compiling a lengthy shortlist and then interviewing a lot of candidates could be arranged so that it soaked up massive amounts of Stuart’s time. The need for new guides was genuine enough and a truly good one was always worth grabbing even if you weren’t in absolute need at that moment. Anita had felt some relief when Stuart took to the task with enthusiasm. He might not have. He might have thought it was beneath his dignity. She was delighted to see that dignity was no longer part of his make-up.
At the interview Judy Tanaka seemed disappointingly taut and awkward. Her long black hair was scraped back, leaving her forehead vulnerably high and bare. Her clothes were beige and tight, uncomfortable-looking, as though she’d bought or perhaps borrowed them specially for the interview and would never wear them again. Stuart introduced himself and tried to make a little joke about his name, but she didn’t laugh. Yet the moment she began to talk her real self came flooding out, something much looser and livelier than her look suggested. The voice took him aback, these very correct English tones coming out of an oriental-looking mouth, but he soon got used to it.
He talked her through her CV and that was all fine by him; in most ways far in excess of requirements. The only disappointment was that she didn’t speak any Japanese. She was only half-Japanese, it turned out, and her Japanese father had discouraged her from learning the language, in some dubious attempt at integration. Stuart wasn’t really disappointed at all, and he thought it served Anita right for jumping to such easy conclusions. What was in a name? He started on some basic questions. He asked what was her favourite London park, and she said Green Park. Her favourite museum, the Homiman. Favourite pub, the Cheshire Cheese. Her favourite mews, Grafton. Her favourite market, Leadenhall.
Before long it didn’t feel like an interview at all, but rather like a conversation between two people who had discovered a shared interest. But it was when they started to talk about London follies that he really lost his heart to her.
Stuart mentioned the Pagoda at Kew and wondered if she preferred the Peace Pagoda in Battersea Park built by some Japanese Buddhist sect. The Nipponzan Myohoji, she said. But no, she didn’t love it particularly. She said that when it came to phallic excrescences she was more partial to the Walthamstow ‘land lighthouse’, built by the United Methodist Free Church in the nineteenth century, as a source of spiritual light. He’d heard of it but never seen it. He asked her if she knew the folly tower off Clapton Common, formerly in the grounds of Craven Lodge, and he felt a certain relief when she didn’t. He had started to fear he would have nothing to teach her, that she might know more than him.
Together they fretted about the fate of the Roundhouse and of Battersea Power Station. They wondered whether Marble Arch could now be considered a folly. Or how about the new Mlf building? She said that perhaps ‘folly’ referred not to any real or imagined lack of utility but rather to the kind of imagination that designed and produced a certain sort of architectural style.
The conversation flowed, went back and forth, and before long Stuart had no doubt that she should be offered a job, though he had some doubts about whether or not she would take it. The role of tour guide seemed far beneath her, and the pay was insulting. He was reluctant even to make the offer in case she turned him down, because, strange as it might be, he would have found that hurtful. He didn’t want the interview to end but there was no point delaying or pretending that he had to think about it or consult with somebody else. He offered her the job there and then, and could hardly believe how good he felt when she immediately accepted. Having Judy Tanaka as one of his employees felt like a great step forward, and not simply in the life of the company.
“The people who come on these tours,” he explained, “they’re here to see sights, the Tower of London, Big Ben, Nelson’s Column, and in one sense, of course, they’ve already seen them. They’ve seen them in books and on postcards and on television, and most importantly they’ve seen them in their mind. What they’re usually doing when they come on a tour is having those images reinforced, making sure that the Tower of London is the way they always imagined it. And in most cases it will be. You may regard that as unfortunate or you may not.”