They took Stuart’s car and drove to Waterloo Road and Judy recalled a passage from Flora Tristan’s Promenades dans Londres, in which she describes how in the late 1830$ the entire road was filled with prostitutes, leaning out of windows, sitting on doorsteps, many of them bare-breasted, raucous and cheerful, arguing with each other and their pimps. Judy took Stuart to Waterloo Bridge where Tristan had later stood and watched as a great tide of women crossed the river, heading into town for the brothels, the parks and theatres and ‘finishes’ of central London, where they would stay and be debauched till morning, when they would return south of the river, used and sated.
One day Judy and Stuart went to Fleet Street and looked for Fleet Alley where on 23 July 1664 Samuel Pepys took ‘a turn or two with a most pretty wench’ in one of the doorways. But Fleet Alley was not to be found. It appeared no longer to exist. Similarly there was no sign of Axe Yard in Westminster where he had lived.
On another occasion they went to Gray’s Inn Road, to a distinguished, four-square, redbrick building now called Churs-ton Mansions. In a previous incarnation it was Clevelly Mansions and had been the home of Katherine Mansfield and her lover Ida Constance Baker, known as L.M. Here, in a three-roomed flat that had as its centrepiece a stone Buddha surrounded by bronze lizards, Mansfield and Baker had committed sexual acts that were for the times, and in the public imagination, genuinely shocking. Here too, at least one of Mansfield’s male suitors had threatened to shoot himself for love of her.
Judy and Stuart walked the streets of London trying to pick up on the mass of erotic energy, the afterglow of these coming togethers, these acts of desire, of love and transgression; acts of defloration and perversion, acts stemming from diverse needs, psyches, cultures. But it wasn’t just sexual tourism. Judy did her best to participate in this afterglow, to make it glow that little bit brighter, and Stuart was her willing, if somewhat self-conscious, accomplice.
Whenever they visited one of these places with an erotic history, Judy insisted that they make love, if not actually there on the very spot, then in a park nearby, or in a dark comer, or at the very least in the back of Stuart’s car. Stuart found himself in a state of homy amazement. He didn’t think he was the sort of man who did things like this. He was also aware that these acts, these couplings, were changing the shape of the maps that could be drawn for them. Each time he returned to Judy’s flat he added a cross or two to his map, but Judy still refused to reveal hers.
She said, “There are an infinite number of maps that could be drawn of London; not just sex maps but death maps, crime maps, drug maps, maps of resistance and insurrection, of liberation and oppression, murder maps, suicide maps.”
“Walking maps,” he said.
“Imagine being blind in London,” she continued. “Imagine having to negotiate the streets, or travel on the tube, having to listen to all the noise, the traffic, the building work, the buskers and beggars. What kind of map would a blind man use? How would he use it?”
Stuart shrugged to show his ignorance about these things, although he did vaguely remember reading about someone who’d made a sort of ‘sound map’ to help the blind recognize parts of the tube system.
“Sometimes I think I’d like to be tattooed,” Judy said. “All across my back. With a map of the London Underground system. Or perhaps not just a tattoo, more a form of scarification, so that the scar tissue would be raised, a little like Braille, to represent the lines and the stations. And I could stand naked in the entrance halls of tube stations and bh’nd men and women would come up to me, and run their hands over me, over the tattoos, until they’d worked out their routes. Maybe they wouldn’t even need to be blind.”
She made him stand naked in the centre of her room, a map of London placed on the floor at his feet. He looked down at the shadow he cast over the city. She stood behind him and her hands curled around him, caressed his chest and his belly, then found their way to his cock. With a few strong, rapid strokes she made him come. His semen eased out of him, seemed to float above London for a moment, like liquid bombs, then fell to earth in thick, scattered splashes. She knelt down and peered at the map. In the places where his semen had landed she could just read through the cloudy translucent liquid the names of Belgravia, Walworth, Angell Town, Brockwell Park.
“More places we have to visit,” she said. Then she lowered her head, snaked out her tongue and meticulously licked his semen from all the places it had fallen.
Stuart had never imagined it would be like this. He felt that things were getting out of hand. He had seen something attractive and vital and, of course, sexual, in Judy Tanaka. He had not thought she was an ice-maiden but neither had he imagined she would be nearly so wild and rash. A part of him was thrilled by it, but increasingly it worried him. He feared that her recklessness might produce a similar recklessness in himself and that was no part of his plans. He didn’t want to get into trouble. He had every intention of remaining completely in control, and above all of remaining married.
Meanwhile Judy revelled in being indiscreet. A woman who dragged you into the Ladies at the Blind Beggar or who insisted that you have sex with her in an alleyway off Tottenham Court Road in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, or who insisted on delivering blow jobs while you sat in your car at a parking meter in Jermyn Street, was not someone who would be very understanding when you explained to her how you needed to be careful in order to protect your marriage.
Of course he hadn’t told Anita about Judy; Stuart and Anita had a frank and civilized marriage, but it wasn’t quite as frank and civilized as that. Stuart was careful to cover his tracks. Discovery mightn’t spell total disaster. Anita was tolerant, forgiving, actually not all that concerned with sexual faithfulness, but she wouldn’t stand for a fuss, for being made to look a fool. Being betrayed by her husband and a junior tour guide would not go down well.
Once, to Stuart’s almost heart-stopping alarm, Judy stripped her clothes off in the corner of a not particularly deserted churchyard in Clerkenwell. He had tried to cover her up but she was determined not to be covered.
“Which way round is it?” she asked as she stood there naked. “Is the body like a city or is the city like a body? Which is the metaphor? Which is the real subject?”
Stuart was far too embarrassed to offer an answer.
“There are some cities you wouldn’t want your body to resemble,” she went on. “Pompeii, Coventry, Milton Keynes. Hiroshima.”
He felt oddly offended. He walked off, left her to her nakedness. It was a bad joke, if she had intended it as a joke.
“Sorry,” she called after him. “I guess you can’t joke about Hiroshima. Not even if you’re half-Japanese. Not even if you’re naked.”
The affair continued for a good few months. Stuart savoured all the usual excitements and guilts, the usual pleasures and the usual sense of risk, but with Judy everything was heightened, as though she was constantly wanting to raise the stakes. He did what he could to avoid analysing his feelings, and he had no urge to categorize the nature of their affair. It was more complex than lust, less nourishing than love. There was respect for the other partner and yet a dizzying sense of transgression, of doing wrong, of going to hell in a basket.
But even though the affair took him all over London it was obviously, in the most colloquial sense, going nowhere. He knew it would have to end sooner rather than later, that the end would be sweetly painful, and that the decision to end would be his not Judy’s. Yet he still surprised himself when he suddenly, abruptly decided it was over.