I jostled up the packed escalator of the tube station, pushed my way up the stairs, and I was out onto the Dilly — Eros, lights, action. I dodged a couple of taxis and ducked up Great Windmill Street. It could have been a scene from the film script: beautiful girls on the doors of the strip joints, all with flashes of cleavage, coy smiles, or lewd words to tempt me inside. But I wasn’t biting, was I? I had work to do. I turned right onto Brewer Street and then jagged right and left onto Old Compton Street, where I got the eye from the pretty boys sitting at the tables of the cafés and leaning in the doorways of the hip gay boutiques. Everybody wants something in Soho. I wanted lasagne.
I pushed through the glass door into Ristorante Il Pollo and breathed in the rich meat and tomato smells oozing out of the kitchen and the whiff of coffee from the Gaggia machine that roared behind the counter. The Pollo had been selling the same lasagne in steel dishes for at least thirty years and probably longer, and I was really counting on that béchamel and meat sauce and a nice glass of wine to sort me out before the meeting with Jon. The waitress seated me at a little table in the front.
That’s why I didn’t see Magsy at first. Not until after I’d dug my way through the crusty cheese and into the soft green pasta and scraped the brown and crispy bits off the edge of the steel dish. It was a shock to see the old bastard come walking down between the booths from the back of the café. Twenty-six years ago. How did he happen to be in here right at this moment when I hadn’t seen him in twenty-six years? We had a bit of a history, me and Magsy, I got to admit. I pushed the steel dish back and smiled at him, but my shoulder muscles got tight and my knee started bouncing as if somewhere inside me I was all ready to run for it. Like a lot of people who’d gone bald these days, Magsy had shaved his head
But then there was that old Mickey-taking smirk on Magsy’s face when he saw me. He wasn’t a tall bloke, about 5'8 , still five inches taller than me though. He looked well enough off in his cord jacket, checked shirt, and jeans. I’d heard he’d gone to live in Spain after he’d come out of prison. Twenty-two years back that must have been. But he didn’t look at all tanned. He’d been through some real damage, I reckoned: the tiredness around the eyes, the deep wrinkles, the grayness of the skin of a longtime smoker.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
I got up from the table and I even gave him a hug. It was a bit stiff to tell the truth, but he still had that pleased-to-see-me grin on his face when we stepped back.
“I got a meeting,” I said. “Business thing in about...” I jerked my sleeve so the watch showed on my wrist, “ten minutes.”
“What business you in then?”
“I’ll tell you about it later, if you like, if you gonna be around.”
“Half past 4 in Steiner’s,” he said.
“Right,” I said.
Steiner’s, yeah. One of our old haunts.
We came out of the Pollo and into the sunshine on Old Compton Street, walked the few yards to Greek Street in the glare, and then crossed the road to the shady opposite corner.
“You working down here again?” I said.
I hoped he wasn’t.
“Nah, I live in Bridgwater now.”
“Bridgwater?” I said. “What you doing in Soho then?”
“Meeting Richie when he gets off his shift.”
Richie was one of Magsy’s oldest mates, though I didn’t know him that well myself.
“He still work here?” I said.
“Yeah. Manager of about four Harmony shops.”
“Corporate porno.”
“Fully licensed and legit,” Magsy said. “New Labour, son. As long as it makes money, it’s all right. Liberal attitude, innit?”
“Fair play,” I said.
“So I will catch you in Steiner’s?” Magsy asked.
“Yeah, right,” I said.
He just walked off then. I watched him as he headed west. Weird that I ran into him in the Pollo after all those years. It gave me the wobblies a bit. But I checked my watch. I was bang on time for the meeting. I had to get Magsy out of my head for now. I rang the bell on the door of the club and then went up the stairs to meet Jon Powell.
On the roof of Soho House, in the bright sunshine, over a couple of bottles of sparkling mineral water, the meeting went okay. Not great, but okay. It would appear that trying to get a film made is a process that requires a lot of patience. I told Jon that I wasn’t sure how the producers who’d got the soft money for me to write the script planned on coming up with the hard cash to get this thing into production but they did have some serious coproduction interest. That’s filmspeak for a lot of hot air that might one day float a balloon. Jon said that he really liked the script and promised he would pass it on to someone he knew with Pierce Brosnan’s company who might well be interested in the project, and that Jon would do that as soon as he came back from the Toronto Film Festival and a trip to L.A. This was all very positive. But no one had, as yet, signed on the line, or was eating a bacon sandwich on the set of the first shoot. This was either a great way to make a living, or I was chasing a total mirage. Still, I’d been paid for the script and I’d get more money if the film got made, and the sun was shining. It was not a bad way to make a living. I swallowed the last of the mineral water and we went down about five flights of stairs to the street. Mineral water? Christ, I’m losing my identity. I can’t even drink much coffee these days.
I shook hands with Jon and he set off north toward Soho Square while I went west along Old Compton Street toward Steiner’s. I was going to meet Magsy — if he was there. Me and Magsy had been mates together in the mid-’70s and I’d spent long hours back then in his flat, just lying around and listening to music. He’d lived there with his girlfriend, Penelope. I was in their flat in Camden so often that I practically lived there. I did live there when the lease ran out on my own little gaff in Chalk Farm. Then, after I’d crashed there for six months, him and his girlfriend found a place for me in Dalston, “through a mate of Penelope’s,” they said.
So they didn’t have to officially throw me out. We had some times, me and Magsy. Incredible times. Like... just before I was due to move into the new gaff on a hot July afternoon in 1975... me and Magsy decided we’d celebrate my last night in the flat. We bought a 100-gram bag of salt and half a dozen lemons from a corner shop, and three bottles of tequila from the offy on Camden High Street. Then we picked up Penelope from her job at the Royal Free Hospital. She was standing outside the gate with this petite longhaired girl, Angela. We hadn’t expected this at all — we had just planned on going back to the flat and getting blasted on the tequila — but Angela invited us all to dinner at her place on Cornwall Gardens, just off the Gloucester Road. Cornwall Gardens — now that is a class-A address, mate. And it was a bright and lovely summer’s day, and we had the salt and lemons and tequila to donate to the proceedings, so I felt okay. We drove down Haverstock Hill and through the West End and into Kensington in Angela’s car, and Angela said that her boyfriend, Ted, owned the flat that I was just about to move into in Dalston.