After eleven questions he was still at Westminster Bridge, still some way from the Thames Barrier, and Mick belted him across the face a couple of times in order to encourage him, help him to concentrate, and this time it did seem to help. Things started to get better for him. He knew that Woolwich was the site of the first London McDonald’s. He knew that the Marylebone line was the first tube line. He knew that Christopher Wren was a professor of astronomy at the time he drew up his plans for rebuilding London after the Great Fire. To Mick’s amazement he also knew that London’s Dog Cemetery was to be found in the north-east corner of Kensington Gardens, behind Victoria Lodge.
“Hey, this is too easy for you,” Mick said. “Maybe I should change the rules, have you go back a bridge for every answer you get wrong.”
“No,” Sands insisted loudly. “You set the rules at the beginning, now you stick by them.”
“OK, OK,” said Mick. “Don’t get so excited. It’s only a game. Question sixteen: whose grave at the church of St Mary Magdalene in Mortlake is in the form of an eighteen-foot-high stone Bedouin tent?”
“Oh shit,” Sands said, angry at himself. “I ought to know that. Damn it. De Quincey?”
“Well, it says here, Sir Richard Burton and his wife Isabel, which seems a bit rum to me, because I thought Richard Burton was buried in Wales and I didn’t know he was ever knighted, and I thought his wife was Elizabeth Taylor, and I suppose that could be a misprint but I didn’t think she was dead. Still, you live and learn.”
Sands shook his head; he was not going to educate Mick about Sir Richard Burton. Mick thumbed through the little book, halted at one page, was about to ask a question, then changed his mind, and kept looking.
“Hey, what are you doing?” Sands demanded. “Are you trying to find an impossibly difficult question to ask me?”
“I can ask you any question I like,” Mick said.
“Yes, well.” Sands hesitated, realizing the truth of what Mick was saying, realizing the absurd weakness of his own position. “Well, anyway,” he added, “just ask me questions that I have some hope of answering.”
“Sure,” said Mick. “Question seventeen: in The Young Ones Cliff Richard is the leader of a youth club in which area of London?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said Sands. “I don’t know that. How would anybody know a thing like that?” He took a wild guess and said, “Paddington.”
“Yes!” Mick said, and they both let out a sort of a whoop, prolonged in Mick’s case, instantly stifled in Sands’. Mick moved the toy boat up the river to Tower Bridge.
“Hey,” said Mick, “you’re going to walk this. Three questions left. Get any of them right and you’re there. OK, where in London would you find the death mask of Tom Paine and a lock of his hair?”
“Oh, come on,” Sands said, genuinely angry. “How am I supposed to know something like that?”
“Maybe you’re not,” Mick replied. “The answer is they’re in the National Museum of Labour History, Limehouse Town Hall, £14.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Sands.
“Yeah, doesn’t exactly sound like a white-knuckle ride, does it? But it’s all right, no need to panic, here’s question nineteen: what’s the name of Boadicea’s father?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”
“What’s the matter? You wouldn’t want me to make it too easy for you, would you?”
“This is insane. Why don’t you just say I’ve lost and have done with it?”
“Come on, try. It says here he died and had his estate taken away from him by the Romans and that was why Boadicea revolted. Does that help at all?”
Sands was livid at the difficulty of the question. “This has nothing to do with London,” he insisted. “Boadicea was queen out in the wilds of East Anglia somewhere. She only came to London to burn it down and as for her fucking father—”
“No,” said Mick, “I don’t think you’re going to get it. His name was Prasutagus.”
Sands took a deep, chest-puffing breath. He was frustrated and hugely angry, yet determined to retain some dignity.
“Well, that’s really good to know,” he said.
“So, the moment of truth, the final question,” said Mick. “And I want you to know I’m on your side, Jonathan. I really want you to get this right. OK, question twenty: who wrote those immortal words, ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’?”
“Wordsworth,” said Sands at once with a kind of adolescent glee, and he let out a long sigh of relief.
“Oh, Jonathan, that’s such a shame,” said Mick. “I really thought you were going to do it, but I’m afraid the answer’s Flanders and Swann. They’re talking about London buses.”
“No, no,” Sands screeched. “The original line is from ‘Composed on Westminster Bridge’ by William Wordsworth. The line in Flanders and Swann is a parody, a deliberate reference to the Wordsworth.”
Mick looked at Sands disapprovingly.
“Now come on, old chap, play the game. It’s here in the book in black and white.”
“Then the book’s wrong,” Sands shouted.
“Well, it is called Unreliable London,” Mick said. “But you know this is the book we’re using. This is my authority.”
“Then the book’s a piece of idiocy. A piece of crap. Ask anybody. Wordsworth wrote ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’. Ask anyone.”
He was sounding desperate to the point of hysteria. Mick slapped him again to calm him down. Then he slapped him again for luck.
“You’ll have noticed,” said Mick, “that until now I’ve been very careful not to tell you what I’d do if you failed to get to the Thames Barrier by the twentieth question…”
“This is a fix,” said Sands. “This isn’t fair. It never was.”
Mick listened carefully to what Sands had to say, then shook his head sadly, as though disappointed that he was being such a bad sport.
He said, “It’s true that the evening really hasn’t turned out as planned. Not for either of us. By rights we should be out on the water by now, somewhere not too far from the Thames Barrier. I really wanted to go there and see it and have a memorable experience. But anyway, it didn’t pan out. You were expecting something different too. But the fact is, what I always intended to do if you got the answers wrong was take this gun,” and he showed Sands his gun, “and I was going to load it with a new magazine…” He loaded it with a new magazine.
“Ask me another question,” Sands shouted. “You nearly gave me a bonus point for whistling Haydn. Come on, be reasonable…”
“And I was going to pull the trigger a few times and empty the magazine, not into you, you’ll be pleased to hear, but into the bottom of your boat.”
“No,” Sands screamed. “This isn’t right. You know that. Ask me another question. A decider. Double or quits. Please.”
“And you know the other thing?” Mick said. “You’re right. This isn’t fair. It was never meant to be fair. It was meant to torture you a little. The truth is, whether we’d got to the Thames Barrier or not, I was still going to empty the gun into the bottom of your boat.”
“No,” Sands cried out.
Mick was as good as his word, and he was a long way from Chelsea Harbour, and Sands’ sinking boat was a terrible, terrible mess, before any of the sluggish security guards arrived to see what the noise was all about.
MASH
Mick called home again from a pay phone in the corner of an eel and pie shop where he’d just left most of a plate of pie and mash. It was early evening and the place looked ready to close. Cabby’s phone rang for a long time, its tone thin and very far away. When she answered her voice sounded breathless and guilty and there was music playing in the background that she made no attempt to turn down.