The LP that was playing came to an end and I replaced it with the second Passage album, For All and None. I dropped the needle down at the start of track two, ‘Lon Don’, the Manchester band’s caustic demolition of the capital.
I remembered the map in my back pocket and was about to get it out when a man in a brown suede bomber jacket came in with a box of old singles he wanted to sell. While I was dealing with him the shop slowly started to fill up. I bought all the singles — evidently stuff he’d bought in the 70s, as an enthusiast, and had grown out of — and I bought them even though many were already in stock, because I don’t like to send people away disappointed. When the record came to an end I turned it over. I lost count of how many times I turned it over during the rest of the day and I didn’t think about the map again until I locked the door and flipped the open/closed sign. I was reaching into my back pocket for Annie’s number because I’d thought I would give her a call and I pulled out the map. Unfolding it for the first time since that morning, I sniffed it. There was a strange, pungent odour detectable beneath the familiar smell of my jeans. Or I thought there was. An industrial smell, almost. Railways or diesel oil. Engines. But I was losing myself. The main thing was the map.
I looked at it for a minute or two but couldn’t work out where it represented. So I switched off the main light and went into the back office where I made coffee, pulled the anglepoise lamp down over the desk and lit a cigarette.
I studied that map. I gave it twenty minutes’ solid concentration. I don’t give up easily once I feel I’m on to something. I’d always enjoyed crossword puzzles, word games, Scrabble. It’s the challenge of figuring out something to which you know there is an answer. It’s just a question of working it out.
I knew North London well enough to be certain it was not north of the river and my knowledge of South, East and West London was good enough to be fairly sure it was, in fact, nowhere in the capital. And yet it looked like someone had needed to go somewhere and they had taken the A — Z and photocopied a page to take with them because they didn’t want to carry the whole thing. Then they’d dropped their page in the street. A London street, which would suggest they were going somewhere in London. But it wasn’t London. By the end of twenty minutes I was confident enough to put money on it being out of town. I’d been looking for clues in the street names to what provincial city it might be part of, but there was nothing, no mention of the Tyne or the Potteries, no name check for the Malverns, the Chilterns or the Peaks. There weren’t any obvious Irish, Scots, Welsh or Cornish names. They were all bland, English street names. I’d walked down several of them in different cities but not on the same page.
I would have to look at my A — Zs when I got home.
At this stage the map was just a diversion, a puzzle that I expected would keep me occupied for a day or two until I found out whereabouts in the country the streets on it were located. It looked like an area quite close to a city centre. Some of the roads were densely packed. There were long straight drives and grids of narrow streets. There was a park, a canal and railway lines and I would have said from the movement towards the top of the page that the city centre lay just to the north. An inch south of where it started getting busy there was an estate where the streets curved around and around like that game of solitaire where you have to get the ball to the middle of the maze. There was even a little circle at the centre.
I stubbed out my second cigarette, put the map back in my pocket and switched off the light. I sat for a moment looking through the doorway into the darkened shop. Passing cars splashed light over the racks of dog-eared LP sleeves, flashing in the CD cases in the wall-mounted display units. I liked the silence after the continuous noise of the day. I have always liked busy places best when they are empty. It’s partly because I’m there and all the other people are not, and partly it’s that although they’ve gone they’re still very much in mind because of the traces they leave: echoes, memories, smells, a door left open, a dropped glove or, in the case of my shop, a misfiled LP sleeve or a list written in felt tip that says, ‘Only Ones, Dead or Alive, P. Furs, The Servant(?)’.
I hesitated at the door. It had started to rain. Rear lights melted into red pools as cars braked for the stop sign. I hoped the original owner of the map fragment wasn’t wandering around getting wet and hopelessly lost. Then, as I was turning the key in the lock to let myself out, the phone began to ring. I thought about leaving it because the shop was closed, but it was possible it was someone who’d tried me at home and wanted to get hold of me. I left the door unlocked and darted back into the little office.
‘Hello,’ I said, and as soon as I’d said it I knew there was no one there. I heard that same metallic sound I’d heard on the phone at home the night before. Then a whole train of olfactory hallucinations kicked in. I imagined I could smell axle grease and diesel oil and the peculiar tang of rusty cast iron.
My imagination, I told myself as I got up to go. As I was leaving the office, my eye alighted on an old tool box I’d stashed under the desk a few weeks earlier after I’d been doing some emergency repair-work on the car. There was an oily rag sticking out of the top section. I smiled to myself. Imagination overload. I nipped up the back stairs to use the toilet.
Walking to my car I realised I was looking twice at everything I saw, watching taxis and buses and pedestrians. As if I were looking for something without knowing what.
The rain had stopped but my car was covered with droplets. From a distance of thirty yards, because of the streetlamp directly above it, it looked as if it were encrusted with jewels. Once I was behind the wheel I took the pack of Camels from my boot and hit the lighter in the dash. The car started on the third attempt and the lighter clicked out. I raised it to my cigarette, averting my eyes from the glowing spiral filament.
I drove home slowly, avoiding puddles wherever possible because the engine on the Escort did not react well to direct contact with water. The Hong Kong Garden looked inviting — as it did every night of the week — so I went in and ordered hot and sour soup and fried chicken with pineapple and waited while it was prepared.
I was halfway through my dinner when I remembered the map. I didn’t know why I kept forgetting it. Five minutes later I had the map open on the coffee table, the London A — Z, my food and a can of Sapporo. Things were looking up. I went right through the A — Z, checking every page. I picked out a couple of the street names from the map and tried them out on the A — Z index. They were in there, but not on the same page.
Finally I was satisfied that what I had already believed was indeed the case. The streets on the map were nowhere to be found in London.
I also had A — Zs for Birmingham, Manchester and Newcastle. Before looking for them — I wasn’t entirely sure where they were — I stuck on a CD. Something by Vangelis seemed right, just to play in the background while I got on with my search. I chose The City, because it seemed kind of appropriate, and turned the volume low. The downstairs tenant was out — I was on the second floor at the top of the building, there was one tenant on the first floor and the Hong Kong Garden occupied the ground floor. I was glad he was out. When he was in, my life was like a film with a heavy metal soundtrack.
I found the other A — Zs on a bookshelf in the bathroom and spent half an hour or so looking through them before concluding that the streets on the map were not to be found in Birmingham, Manchester or Newcastle.