♦
Clanricarde Gardens, W2. I used to live in this road when I first left university. I shared a flat with three town planners. We had a party and the brother of one of them came along and said it was really strange, he’d been to a party in this same flat some years ago when it had been lived in by members of Status Quo. Towards the end of the evening somebody standing in the kitchen had been slashed with a meat hook.
A couple of years after I left, I read there was a fire in the street and several houses had been completely destroyed, quite a few people had died. I always wondered whether my former flat was involved. Today there was no sign there had ever been a fire and I couldn’t remember my old address, not even what floor the flat had been on.
♦
In Greenwich High Road, a hardware shop, and in the window amongst the spanners and hammers and paint brushes and watering cans there were half a dozen lurid pink vibrators for sale. A handwritten sign said ‘Personal Massager’, and the price was very reasonable.
In Straightsmouth, also in Greenwich, the front room of one of the little terraced houses was unfurnished and painted all white, and a bearded young man was pointing an old Super 8 cine-camera out of the window as I passed.
Greenwich, the meridian. You have to be impressed by our ancestors’ confidence, the fact that we were able to say to the rest of the world, “This is where time and space begins. If you want to be in step with us then you set your watches accordingly. If you want to know where you are, measure it from here.” And you have to be impressed, not to say amazed, that the rest of the world agreed. Those (I suppose) were the days.
♦
In a side street in Fulham, narrow, quiet, full of parked cars, I noticed a Ford Escort with steamed-up windows. That seemed only slightly strange but I peered at it, looked in and it was quite obvious that there were two semi-naked people inside having sex. I couldn’t make out faces or ages, but there was no doubt that is what was going on. Curiously enough the car had a personalized number plate: BOB 47.
♦
I was walking along Crystal Palace Park Road, and I saw an old woman with an easel and palette, working on a large watercol-our. It was very strange, an intricately detailed rendition of the old Crystal Palace as it might have been at the time of the Great Exhibition.
It was very good, very skilfully done, but of course it bore no relation at all to what was visible in front of us. The woman glanced round and for a moment I thought she was about to talk to me or explain herself, but she stared at me and obviously decided I wasn’t worth wasting breath on. She returned to her painting and I continued walking.
Later I thought perhaps she was trying to pick up on some sort of ghostly remnant left by the vanished Palace. It had had a long life there, from 1854 to 1936, although if it hadn’t burned down then, it would surely never have survived the Second World War.
Or perhaps they’d have dismantled it, like they did the glass roof of Cannon Street Station, storing the glass in a warehouse well south of the river for the duration. The warehouse, of course, was destroyed by a direct hit.
Another painter: at Kew I saw a young woman, an art student, I’d guess, fancy patterned leggings, big boots, hair dyed orange. She had an easel set up and she was gazing out over the river, and I was naively expecting her to be painting some tranquil London river scene, but when I got close up I saw she was making some violent abstract with a sort of crucifixion scene at its centre. Just another vision of London.
♦
Mortimer Market, a dark secluded yard off Tottenham Court Road, just a place I’d once had sex with Judy — no shortage of those. The whole of London is dotted with them. It’s hard to imagine, given my age, and my uxorious habits, that I’m going to have such wild sex ever again. That’s it for this lifetime.
Abney Park Cemetery, where, after great hesitation on my part, Judy and I had sex. Clink Street, close to Southwark Cathedral, where Judy fell to her knees and delivered a spectacular blow job. Heath Lane, Blackheath, scene of a rear entry penetration.
Let’s face it, Judy was special. How many girls lick your semen up from the surface of a map of London?
And then I saw her. I don’t know why I was so surprised. It was in Dorset Street, not so very far from where I understand she now works. She was on the other side of the road. I waved but she didn’t see me, or didn’t want to, and so I crossed the road and went after her. I only wanted to say hello. By the time I’d crossed she was quite a distance away and walking very fast. I had to break into a run to keep pace. It felt absurd, like I was chasing her, but I finally caught up with her and touched her, I thought perfectly lightly, on the arm.
She pulled away as though I was some sort of molester, a complete stranger, some London crazy who was bothering her. I don’t know whether she knew it was me or not but she let out a sort of scream. Everybody in earshot turned round, but it being London nobody did anything. That must have been when she realized she was going to have to at least talk to me. I just wanted to ask how she was, make sure she was doing all right, make sure she didn’t despise me. Unfortunately, she obviously does despise me. I said there was no need to run away from me. She said she’d be the judge of that. Then she told me to get lost, and I waved my A — Z, said I’d just been to Clink Street and had been thinking about her, about us. She said, “Fuck off and die, will you, Stuart.” And when I stood there all wounded and speechless, she added, “Not necessarily in that order.”
MISGUIDED
Once Judy had gone, and after he’d seen her car drive away, Mick went out, found a phone box and called Gabby. He knew she wouldn’t be best pleased to hear from him at this time of day. It was still only eight o’clock and she wasn’t an early riser, but that didn’t seem to matter right now. There were other issues. He was the one on his own, the one away from home, the one with needs, and he needed to speak to her. He felt dislocated, not like himself, and he wanted her to offer him something familiar and reassuring, even if it was only a familiar sleep-soaked sulkiness. He wanted to tell her he missed her. He wanted to tell her how guilty he felt about having slept with somebody else, but he would not be doing that. More likely he might have done something silly like tell Gabby he loved her, but he didn’t get the chance to do that either. The phone rang and rang, and remained unanswered.
As he walked back to the Dickens from the phone box he thought of all the innocent reasons Gabby might have for not answering her phone. Many of them were quite plausible but he failed to convince himself. When he walked in the door of the hotel he was confronted by the landlady. She was standing in the hall, supposedly sorting out the post, but he knew she was there waiting for him. She was wearing a scarlet jogging suit this morning, though the gold mules on her feet suggested she wasn’t going to jog very far.
“Had some company last night, did you?” she said.
“That’s right,” he replied. He had no intention of lying about it.
“One of our little Chinese friends?”
“Japanese,” he corrected her. “Half-Japanese.” Then he wondered why he was bothering to set her straight.
“Maybe you’re too young to remember what went on in those camps,” she said. “But I’m not.”