Park Lane was a wide, busy, residential street, full of potholes and jammed with parked cars, although from what Mick had seen so far most London streets were like that. There was a boarded-up pub on the comer and a take-away offering dumplings and fritters.
It didn’t look the kind of street that would contain a hotel. The houses were tall four-storey buildings that must once have belonged to the rich, but a look at the long row of doorbells outside each front door confirmed their rabid subdivision into flats.
A part of him would have been happy to know that he’d come to the wrong place for a second time but on the front of one of the houses he saw a polished brass plaque that said ‘Dickens Hotel’. He had arrived. Yet it took more than a plaque to make a hotel and this place looking like nothing more than a boarding-house with misplaced and unconvincing pretensions. And after he’d climbed the half-dozen steps to the front door and rung a bell, he was immediately confronted by a woman who could only be a landlady.
Her age was hard to guess and you could tell she wanted to make guessing difficult. The hair was dyed jet black, the clothes could have belonged to a brash eighteen-year-old. The makeup was plentiful and a little old — fashioned, suitable, say, for a forties Hollywood musical. He couldn’t stop staring at the beauty spot that he felt sure had been painted on her right cheek.
In return she looked at him only fleetingly, then said, “I was expecting you hours ago.”
“I came by the scenic route,” he said.
“What?”
“I walked.”
The entrance hall wasn’t badly kept. The carpet and wallpaper were new, there was a big gold-framed mirror and a couple of reproduction chairs. But Mick was taken to the third floor, a place of streaked walls and lino and chipped paintwork. His room, situated next to the shared bathroom, was small, with a candlewick bedspread and wallpaper that erupted with pink roses. There were only a few stains on the carpet, only a couple of cigarette burns on the bedside table. The mirror on the wardrobe had only a small crack and the lace curtain across the window had definitely been washed within living memory. He pushed it aside and looked down into the street.
The woman said, “You must be very fit if you walked all the way from St Pancras.”
“Yeah, I’m in training.”
She was impressed. Mick viewed the street scene with disdain. Across the road a man was committing major surgery on a collision-damaged BMW. A female crustie was walking down the street dragging a skinny, grubby Dalmatian behind her. It was a struggle since the dog was doing its best to shit as it walked and was leaving a line of long slender turds along the centre of the pavement.
“What do you call this area?” Mick asked.
“I like to call it Stoke Newington,” said the landlady. “Why?”
“I wanted to make sure I hadn’t entered the twilight zone,” Mick replied.
But he took the room. What else was he going to do? It was just a room. It held no horrors, and he wasn’t planning to be there long. Night was falling. He sat on the bed and watched the gathering darkness drain the pink roses of their violent hue. He wondered if he could face fritters and dumplings. He opened the door of the wardrobe and found that someone had left a girlie mag lying there face up. He thought the model on the cover looked strangely like Gabby. He slammed the wardrobe door shut, spread himself out on the bed and stared up at the cracks in the ceiling. Before long he could make out faces and the outlines of mythical countries.
THE WALKER’S DIARY THE PENULTIMATE DAYS
I was worn out today as I walked the city. The weather was bitter and my overcoat was barely warm enough. My feet and my back and my head all ached. As the task nears completion, it becomes more frustrating. The need to be finished, to be at an end, is overwhelming. I have worn myself out on this city. It has eroded me. I have left no mark on it but I have been worn down like a pencil, reduced to a stub.
I have seen it all, the rotting hills, the hangover squares. I have been through the shy neighbourhoods and all the half-deserted streets, and I have been left drained and evacuated.
I have been to the boundary, to the wall, to the places where the city ends, where the train tracks knot together, where the pylons hiss and fizz their dissatisfaction, where the workings show, the innards, the guts, the secretions, to the place where we hone our taste for fragments. Here in this kaleidoscope of ruins, here where the fabric develops stress fractures, where the plots unravel, and the old stories get forgotten, where oral history is speechless, where myth dies, I have been both lost and found.
I have seen history and nostalgia. I have seen love and death and their pale companions sex and violence. I have seen a fine town, a nation, a great cesspool, the modern Babylon. In Phillimore Gardens, Kensington, I looked in through a basement window and watched a heavy woman dressed only in a corset as she kissed a man in a suit and tie.
I saw statues of Boadicea, John Kennedy and Bomber Harris. I saw a minor road accident in Windmill Road, Mitcham. I saw a woman pissing in the street in Wandsworth. I took my stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul’s. It was a day like any other. I walked and I watched. I did my best to be everybody’s blue-eyed boy.
I’m not naive enough to believe I know the whole story, but I think I have seen both the broad sweep and the particulars, annihilation rolling in like a fog, as comic and as zany as consumption; all those forgotten diseases: apoplexy, dropsy, canker, spotted fever, palsy, scrofula. I have developed a nostalgia for sedition, for mob rule, the burning of gaols, the contagion of fury.
I saw the solid, sturdy monuments to trade and its names, the Hoover factory, the Oxo Tower, the Tate Gallery; sweet and sour reminders of empire. I went along wandering roads that waste everybody’s time. I saw a lost London of public executions, of coffee houses, the Euston Arch, Newgate, Bedlam. I heard the unfamiliar poetry of extinct trades, a poetry that speaks of a city’s past, of a long-gone culture: cinder-shifters, tallow-chandlers, ballad-sellers, hawkers of fish, soapboilers, hammermen.
I listened too to the plots and rhythms of pkce names. What was in them? I heard the cracked narratives of the clothed city: the Mozart estate, not famed for its prodigies or genius; the unsnake-like Serpentine; King’s Cross, Queen’s Park, Prince of Wales Road — places not much frequented by royalty. I saw the slew of history, of kings and pretenders, developers and reformers, visionaries and bureaucrats, martyrs and wide boys. I read the obvious eponyms, the roads named after Cromwell, Wellington, Addison, Albert, Mountbatten, Mandela. I saw little pieces of London which are forever foreign: Maida Vale, Trafalgar, Waterloo, Mafeking Road, Sumatra Road, Yukon Road, two Ladysmith Avenues, six Ladysmith Roads. I saw the quixotic and quaint: Artichoke Hill, Quaggy Walk, Yuletide Close, Pansy Gardens, Evangelist Road.
Often the city felt alive, as though it had flesh and blood, arteries, nerve centres, beauty spots, scars, guts, a heart, parasites, an anus. But which was which? Where was the soul? Where was the cloaca?
I followed in their footsteps; all the great Londoners, the native and the adopted: Dickens and Pepys and Boswell and Johnson and Evelyn and Wat Tyler and Guy Fawkes and Betjeman and Nash and Wren and Newton and Marx and Dick Whittington and, well, you name them.
I went to St Anne’s Court in Soho, a little paved alleyway where, according to her autobiography, Marianne Faithfull sat on a wall every day for several years, strung out on heroin. Her only solace was when Kenneth Anger or Brion Gysin came along and fed her. Not exactly the life of our normal street addict.