She reacted so intensely, so passionately when he made love to her that he knew it couldn’t simply be a matter of his touch or his personality or technique. She was reacting to something in herself, a need and a hunger that was largely independent of him.
Afterwards as she lay panting on her back, still naked, legs still splayed, she said, “I want to be fucked everywhere. In every hole. In every position. In every London borough. In every postal district.”
Stuart grunted uncomprehendingly.
“You know, when sex is good,” she continued, “when it’s really, really good, I feel as though I’m disappearing, being pulverized, being fucked into oblivion, so that I’m nothing, just particles of air pollution, debris, smog, particles of soot and skin floating through the air and settling on the city.”
Stuart didn’t know what to say. He dressed slowly and went to the kitchenette to make coffee. As Mick would do later, he had noticed the wall map of London the moment they’d walked into the room but hadn’t had much time to comment on it. Now he could look at it more closely and see that there was a sheet of transparent plastic hanging in front of it, marked with a series of hand-drawn coloured crosses. When he’d made the coffee, when Judy had put some clothes on, he asked her what the map was all about.
She didn’t give a direct answer. Instead she took down the existing plastic sheet and replaced it with another that hadn’t been drawn on. She got a couple of coloured marker pens, a red and a blue, and handed him the latter. Then she asked him to make a cross at every spot on the map where he’d ever lived.
He considered that by most people’s standards he’d moved around a lot in London, especially in his early years there, and had lived all over the place. That fact seemed to please Judy. He stood in front of the map and found himself making a dozen or so crosses. The pen skidded over the slick plastic surface leaving behind thick, rather imprecise marks. There were some strange, distant scatterings, one in East Dulwich, one in Lee, one in Hendon. Even while he was living in these places they’d seemed wrong, like excursions away from the locations where he really belonged. However, there was a definite clustering around west London, half a dozen or so crosses within a trapezoid that had Notting Hill, Marylebone, West Hampstead and Swiss Cottage as its corners, what he thought of as his area, the place where he now lived with his wife. A dust cloud of guilt suddenly blew through his mind and he had to fight hard to sweep it away.
Then Judy gave him the red pen and told him to mark the transparent sheet with all the places he’d ever had sex. Only slightly embarrassed, he did as asked. Initially the pattern was the same as the previous one. With the exception of one rough, shared flat off the Goldhawk Road, where he’d only stayed for a couple of weeks, he’d managed to have sex in all the places he’d lived. But soon the pattern became very different indeed. There were now marks in all sorts of outlying districts, places where girlfriends had lived: places like Gipsy Hill, Crouch End, Elephant and Castle. There were occasions when he had slept with women on other people’s floors, after parties in Brixton and the Old Kent Road. He had a clear but disconnected memory of being at a very dull dinner party, and of slipping into one of the bedrooms for a tremendous quickie with a woman called Lynn. He was fairly sure this had been in Acton and he drew a cross accordingly, but its positioning was necessarily vague.
By now there appeared to be no patterning at all in the placement of his crosses. A truly critical eye might still have seen a preference for west London and for north of the river, but it was only a slight preference. Beyond that, the marks looked as though they might have been made more or less at random.
Stuart counted up the crosses and discovered that he’d had sex with women in twenty-six separate locations around London: not twenty-six different women, he was quick to tell Judy (he hadn’t changed girlfriends nearly as often as he’d changed flats), though he had no idea whether she’d consider that many or few. And he really had no idea why he was counting, why he was making these maps, except that Judy had asked him to.
She looked at the finished map, apparently approvingly, and said, “I think we’ve still got a lot of ground to cover.”
He liked the way she said ‘we’.
One day she showed him some other plastic sheets, maps that had been drawn on by other visitors to her room, by other lovers, for all he knew. He saw how the city was overlaid with the patterns of where other people had lived and had sex. And he saw how these patterns resembled or differed from his, how they sometimes intersected his own map, sometimes seemed to complement it, other times seemed to have been drawn in strict opposition. There were people whose maps centred intensely around Kensington or Belsize Park, others who were concentrated on south London, others who had lived and fucked all over London at every point of the compass. In one or two cases the patterns appeared to be not merely promiscuous but systematic and exhaustive. He wasn’t sure whether he found this depressing or not.
♦
Soon, not much to Stuart’s surprise, Judy turned herself into a valuable and well-liked employee. Even Anita liked her, though she continued to show a slight and totally unreasonable resentment because Judy didn’t speak Japanese. Stuart took a certain pleasure in his wife’s resentment. On the other hand he sometimes felt acute pangs of jealousy. It was strange to think of Judy going around London with groups of strangers, leading them, talking to them, performing for them, charming them. He thought it wouldn’t take much for some single male tourist to entice her into conversation about art or history or architecture and then offer to buy her a drink and say that he was alone and lonely in London, in need of company, and then…Stuart tried hard not to think about it. He knew what a wasteful, hopeless emotion jealousy was.
He had never imagined that an affair with Judy would be useful as a piece of industrial sabotage and yet she was able to enlighten him about all sorts of things that went on in his business. Most of it was fairly tame stuff, tour guides who cut corners, who found ways of taking money from tourists without issuing tickets. But the thing he liked best was hearing how much the employees disliked Anita, and hearing that they had a pet name for her: Boadicea.
Several times he asked to see Judy’s own personal ‘map’ of London, the plastic sheet that showed where she’d lived and fucked. She was uncharacteristically coy but immovable. She wouldn’t show him. And yet in the weeks that followed, Judy did reveal her own personal, singular version of London to him. She took him by way of the Piccadilly Line to try to locate the pissoir in the Holloway Road that Joe Orton wrote about in his diaries. By his account it was ‘the scene of a frenzied homosexual saturnalia’ on at least one occasion some time in 1967, and presumably far more often than that. The diary said the toilet was under a bridge, but they failed to find anything that could be positively identified as Orton’s old haunt.
“Thirty years is a long time in the life of a cottage,” Judy said philosophically.
More satisfactorily they went to 28 Charlotte Street, the home of an eighteenth-century whipping brothel presided over by a Mrs Theresa Berkeley. It was a place where, in general, customers were flogged with birches, cat-o’—nine-tails, and even fresh nettles. But customers could give as well as receive. There were prostitutes there who were prepared to be whipped, including, for two hundred guineas, Mrs Berkeley herself.
They found two doors in Charlotte Street, both marked with the number 28. One belonged to offices on the upper floors of the building, and the other was the door to a bookshop called the Index Bookcentre. A copy of Trotsky’s In Defence of Marxism was displayed in the window. They browsed briefly in the bookshop and afterwards had a Greek meal at the Venus Kebab House.