In Hertford Road, Edmonton, there was a man wheeling a little girl in a pushchair and he kept saying to the child, “If I give you some sweeties you’ll be my friend, won’t you?” He said it over and over again, love and desperation endlessly repeated in his voice.
I saw the City, a place of deals and commodities, of money and electronic transfer, a place that believes in futures, that thrives on confidence, a place where markets are made, where fortunes are composed and dissipated, where chaos is not simply a theory.
In Lupus Street, Pimlico, I saw a traffic warden. He was wearing a little peaked cap, and a blue nylon anorak with the collar turned up. He didn’t look like much, but the way he prowled down the street, muscle-bound and dangerous, you’d have thought he was the villain in a James Bond film.
In Regent Street, in the window of Dickins and Jones, a display assistant was painting the lips of the mannikins a pale cherry red.
I found myself on the bridge, between the shores, connected with the past yet living in some poorly imagined future, in this new place of somebody else’s making, futuristically quaint perhaps with cars like Bakelite radios, men with jet packs strapped to their shoulders, dressed in skin-tight silver synthetics, helicopters and monorails full of commuters. We thought it might be like this, the London of Dan Dare. We were wrong to expect the expected.
London (a city only passingly like hell) is not everything. It is not even all things to some men, but in a certain way it’s more than enough, definitely more than enough for me. It contains all the data from which the ideal city might be constructed; a visible, hard city, a city of forking paths, no city of angels. This also has been one of the dark places of the earth, a place where I have looked to be a victim of someone else’s vengeance, where I have looked for the metropolitan assassin. The city of cross words.
Sometimes I got lost, or perhaps I was always lost, lost before I started and more lost as I travelled. But it was never a matter of geography, not a malaise that the cartographers could rid me of. I developed a taste for spaces cleansed by plague and fire, by blitzes and bulldozers.
Soon I will no longer have use for a map. Maps are euphemisms, clean, clear, self-explanatory substitutes for all the mess and mayhem, the clutter and ambivalence and blurring and intermeshing weft and warp of the real places they purport to describe. They are fake documents, pathetic simplifications and falsifications. They’re no longer necessary since I have created a new London, not one made out of stone and brick, tarmac and concrete, but a London created out of memory, imagination and shoe leather. I have dreamed it. I have made my dreams come true.
Even in the beginning it did not feel like a quest, much less like a journey, though I always suspected there was a destination, a final still point. Although I knew this was not an adventure story, although I did not believe I was paddling up-river, I knew there were things waiting for me in the darkness, in unfamiliar manors, walls with ears, with eyes, with teeth, with everything, things that were unknown and certainly nameless, marked cards, new geographies, bullets with my name on them. Tomorrow I find them or they find me. The end is in my sights.
The London Walker is his own worst enemy.
SCROLL
Anita looked at the words on the screen and scrolled through the text again, trying to decide exactly what she was looking at. In one sense the answer was easy enough. She was looking at the contents of a computer disk she had found in a desk drawer in the study injier own house. It had been hidden under a pile of envelopes, but it seemed to her that it had been hidden in a way that guaranteed it would be found sooner rather than later. There was a label on the disk in her husband Stuart’s handwriting, but all it said was ‘UNFINISHED’.
She had come home today after barely a couple of hours at work. She had claimed to have a headache, but it was a condition more metaphorical than medical. She needed room and time to think about work, something she could only do when not actually at work. There was a new crisis just around the corner and she would soon have to make some very big and difficult decisions. She wished she didn’t have to make them alone. But business matters seemed irrelevant the moment she found the disk.
The discovery had been so casual yet it seemed so vital to her. It was, in a sense, what she had been looking for all along, although her searching had been barely conscious. Yet now that she had made her discovery she knew she had expected more and she had expected worse. She had feared there would be something shameful, something sick and violent and possibly pornographic, something perverse and destructive, something she might be able to understand but would possibly never be able to forgive. Instead she had found something she simply did not fully understand, pages of some sort of journal or diary, perhaps a confession, though she couldn’t work out exactly what it was her husband was confessing to. If anything it seemed to be a text that relished obfuscation, that was trying hard not to give up its meaning too easily.
She read the words again but remained confused. It was not what she wanted it to be. It was not an explanation. She wanted a document, a manifesto, that would make sense of what she increasingly thought of as her husband’s recent ‘absence’. That was what she called it, though it was not the most obvious term. It was not any sort of physical absence. He was there every morning and evening. They worked together in a manner of speaking. He spent time with her, talked to her. They slept their nights in the same bed. They had sex as often as any couple who’ve been married for ten years. He spent most of his time behaving like a good husband.
Nor was there any easily identifiable emotional absence. Stuart was attentive and loving. He was there for her. He supported and encouraged her when needed, and he knew when to leave her alone. He was doing nothing wrong and yet she had a terrible sense of his being not quite there. She wanted to know where he was and why. And perhaps, she now thought, he was in these words.
Stuart’s working day was the sort that entitled, indeed required, him to be away and out of touch for many hours, and that had never bothered her before; in a sense she’d arranged it that way, but now it did bother her. The unaccounted parts of his life had become an intolerable mystery to her, and for a long time she’d had no idea how to solve the mystery. She couldn’t ask him. She could hardly follow him, could hardly employ a private detective. People like her didn’t do things like that. She didn’t want to make a fool of herself.
She had thought it just possible that he was doing something as innocent and banal as attending a gym or health club, for one of the strangest things about Stuart was that he was looking so healthy. He’d lost weight recently, nothing dramatic, just a gradual slimming down. And his face had colour. He looked good, he looked younger.
A less confident wife would have suspected an affair but Anita did not, and even if she had suspected, even if she’d had proof, it wouldn’t have worried her the way she was worried now. She was secure enough, and she knew her husband was responsible enough, that she didn’t have to fear his walking out. He’d had at least one affair that she’d known about. It had been with a very junior employee. Anita hadn’t liked the idea, hadn’t liked the reality, but she’d lived with it. She’d gritted her teeth and waited for it to be over, and sure enough it soon had been.
But the unfaithful Stuart’s behaviour had been nothing like this. This was something quite new, something she suspected and feared had nothing at all to do with sex or love or betrayal, nor with anything else with which she was familiar.