“In London we are not so good at assassinations. It’s true that Margaret Nicholson tried to stab George III, and it’s true that James Hadfield tried to shoot the same monarch, but these were not very serious attempts. The would-be assassins were considered simply to be mad. Hadfield was confined to Bethlem for thirty-nine years until his death. Margaret Nicholson was despatched to the same place but she spent her forty-two years in solitary confinement. Generations later, Bethlem also provided a resting place for Edward Fox who attempted to assassinate Queen Victoria.
“We do much better with mobs; various clergy torn limb from limb in the Peasants’ Revolt, a Catholic genocide in the Gordon riots, various bloody persecutions of the Jews. We are good with plagues; the Black Death of 1348, which killed about thirty thousand souls, roughly half the population of London at the time; and we then had the great bubonic plague of 1665, greater in number but smaller in proportion: 110,000 dead, a mere one-third.
“We have had blitzes. We have had terrorist bombs. We have had martyrdoms, burnings at the stake. But they seem so long ago, and they were generally for causes that no longer stir the modem imagination. We have had literary murders: Christopher Marlowe in 1593, in Deptford to escape yet another plague, killed over the failure to pay his bill in a tavern. You will find many contemporary landlords who think his punishment was about right.
“But death is not a literary form. It is formless and always with us; common and ubiquitous, just like sex. A long time ago I had a girlfriend who said there wasn’t a single square foot of London where somebody hadn’t had sex. I’m sure she was right and I feel the same must be true about death. Every square inch of the city must be infused with mortality. Boadicea, the plague, the Luftwaffe, queer-bashers, gangland shootings, natural causes; they’ve all done their bit.
“Men die in the street, of heart attacks, of haemorrhages, of knifings, shootings, road accidents. A passing bomb blows them to smithereens. An arsonist torches a cinema full of porn aficionados. Old ladies die in council flats, of hypothermia, of fumes from unventilated water heaters, or they’re beaten to death by burglars hunting down their life savings. Faces burned in the King’s Cross tube fire, lives lost on the river when the Marchioness went down. The hospitals that bury their failures. It goes on.
“London has its share of wife murderers, baby killers, sex killers; odd combinations of the above. We are familiar with casual death, with overdoses, impurities, the air bubble locked in the vein. Drunks falling out of trains, coppers shot in the course of routine inquiries. Londoners killed in the crossfire.
“Dylan Thomas continued the long process of drinking himself to death in pubs not far from here, but he had to go to New York to fully realize his aims. Jimi Hendrix ended it all in London, whether accidentally or not, by choking on a cocktail of vomit and drugs, in a house in Netting Hill next door to where Handel had once lived. Kenneth Halliwell killed himself in London too, having first hammered out the brains of his errant ‘first husband’. Here, in Holborn, Thomas Chatterton poisoned himself with arsenic, finding that preferable to literally starving to death when his literary career foundered; also finding it preferable to accepting a meal from his landlady. These artists are often poseurs as well as everything else.
“London lacks one of those truly great sites from which suicides can propel themselves. The railway bridge across Archway Road attracts a few, but we have no famous lover’s leap, no equivalent of the Golden Gate Bridge. The Monument, commemorating the Great Fire, used to be a favourite place but the top was eventually caged in 1842. So suicide tends to be an intramural matter, something domestic, performed in bathtubs and bedrooms, a private ritual. There are a few who choose to end it all by throwing themselves under tube trains, and this is a messy end, traumatic for the train driver and for those who see it, but essentially a trivial end. All one really succeeds in doing is irritating a few thousand commuters and making them late for their suppers or their night at the cinema, though I suppose this offers certain desperate people more power than they ever had while alive.
“So if you were going to do the dirty deed, where would you choose? I’ve always thought that the Telecom Tower, formerly the Post Office Tower, would be a reasonable place from which to launch yourself; unfortunately it’s not open to the public. The Whispering Gallery in St Paul’s would surely be a spectacular way to go. Imagine yourself falling backwards through all that space, the great dome receding as the wind whips the back of your head and you accelerate towards the cold, solid floor. You’d have an audience, and there’d be people on hand to pray for your soul; but even the most agnostic of us might fret about committing suicide in church.
“The river is a possibility. They say that death by drowning isn’t such a bad way to go, that a strange calm comes over the drowning man. Drinking a couple of pints of raw Thames water might be equally lethal, though far less peaceful.
“One might go to the Isle of Dogs, enter a pub, get chatting to some Millwall fans and suggest that there was a homosexual component to their characters. That would be as good as certain death. Being a black man and entering the same pub would probably have much the same effect.”
Stuart walked and talked for forty minutes or more. His unrehearsed and unstoppable flow had a relentlessness about it that kept most of his audience with him, though he did notice that a couple of the widows had slipped away, the talk of death too much for them. But for the others, his macabre talk had a grim appeal.
When he paused once, for breath and for effect, an old man in a shiny Charlotteville baseball cap got up the courage to say, “Excuse me, sir, I have the feelin’ we may be on the incorrect tour,” but when Stuart stared at him with flaming, intense eyes he added, “Not that I mind. This is entertainin’ as all get out.”
Stuart carried on with his spiel, regaling them with stories about the suicide of Judy Garland in the bathroom of a mews house near Sloane Square, where he’d once been to a party.
Finally, and even he wasn’t quite sure of its relevance, he told them about the Plague Piper, an itinerant musician who in plague-ridden London was found asleep in a doorway, tossed on to a death cart, dumped into a mass grave and only saved from being buried alive by his dog who knew what the men of the plague did not, that his master wasn’t dead, simply dead drunk.
Two of the group applauded at the end of this story but Stuart stared daggers at them and told them it was no laughing matter.
He said, “In the end there’s no need to look for death, much less look for a methodology. The modern London walker need do nothing but keep walking, keep on the move. Wherever he goes death will come looking for him, and it will surely find him.”
The tour didn’t so much end as abruptly cease. Stuart had said all he had to say. He looked at the faces of the group; some were blank, some confused, but most were still alert and demanding. They wanted more, but he realized he had no more to give them. He felt empty, a bit of a fraud and a show-off. He had no encore.
Colin was looking at him in appalled awe, and Stuart wondered what Colin would have to say when he got back to the office. Would he describe this little side show to the other guides? Would he tell Anita?
Stuart wanted very much to be somewhere else. At that moment a black cab pulled up beside him and let out its passenger. Stuart turned his back on the tour group, got into the now empty taxi and departed, giving a regal wave as he went.