And you hear it like Stealers Wheel singing ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’ — that’s the song you were thinking of before — Gerry Rafferty singing Plee-ee-eease, Plee-ee-eease in this high, long dog howl of need. It’s like that.
And it’s like sweetness and like fury.
23:55
LONDON BRIDGE.
In the end it is — please — possible to reach.
Jon had asked the cab to drop him just a little before the station, his intention being — perhaps — to catch his breath.
He steps out of the cab and pays his fare while experiencing this flapping and plummeting sensation — as if he has opened the door of a plane, stepped out bravely.
He walks up the narrow street that will lead to the station, his body progressing while other parts of him seem to be scuttling low and then lower, keeping to the cracks in the pavement — lizarding along.
The route he has to take shoves him past a succession of restaurants where it would now be completely pointless to try and dine.
Too late.
I don’t think I’m hungry.
I hope she’s not hungry.
I hope that she has forgiven my unforgivability.
The air is unsympathetic against his face. He presses the heels of both hands to his eyes and rubs. He guesses this might look to sensible observers as if he is newly arrived in a country he does not know, a country where one’s surroundings may blur and shine and turn to a wide pelt of light, spines of light.
There are no observers, not as far as Jon can tell.
At the head of the street the architecture seems almost entirely composed of glass: slabs of bright, high glass.
It’s like walking up the throat of a closing box, or into an aquarium, terrarium …
It feels clear to him that he is a clumsy-handed, apeish man, soon to be trapped in this huge and over-elaborate case. He is about to be absurd and lonely — please, Meg, do be here, be with me and see me — and then afterwards he’s going to have the memory of that — of waiting while she doesn’t turn up. And at some date, as yet undisclosed, when he’s sacked, arrested, punished, destroyed — at that point he will have nothing to sustain him.
I did the best I could in the end, but doing it in the end wasn’t quick enough. I wasn’t fastidious, not as I should be. I wasn’t who I thought, not a properly tuned man.
How to tune oneself to the relevant scale.
Usually it’s E-A-D-G-B-E. Elephants And Donkeys Grow Big Ears …
But I tune to open G, I tune to D-G-D-G-B-D because I like the repetition, because repeating known things which have done no harm is always a comfort, or should be a comfort.
I taught myself to remember it with my mnemonic, my very own.
Do Good Do Good Be Determined.
Do Good Do Good Be Despairing.
Do Good Do Good Be Deserted.
No.
Do Good Do Good Be Determined.
I did try.
The pavement is echoing under his shoes as if it is tensed above some vast and peculiar nowhere. Still, Jon proceeds. Above his left shoulder rises the new and ardently modernistic head office of a rebranded newspaper group.
They wouldn’t let Milner over their threshold: all of those shiny surfaces he’d smear. And the place would make him look Cro-Magnon, look like me.
The building’s vast foyer — glistering and mainly transparent — does manage to have one solid wall, which is blocked across with dark, impressive letters, capitalised words that build into phrases of fugitive, yet stirring meaning. They provide just enough to occupy a reader without embarking on any kind of communication — a wash of elevated intentions.
I think I have real intentions. I think …
He tucks his head lower and pictures the shades of all the pubby, grubby, digging old hacks gone on before, the ghosts who still knew about subbing and sources, there to doorstep the premises and haunt — if they could be bothered — chucking about lead type and pissing into corners.
At the end of the high-concept, low-content display are four last words.
THE BUSINESS OF STORYTELLING
The Four Last Things, I was taught, are Death and Judgement and Hell and Heaven. I like to close the list with Heaven, although others may not choose to.
The foyer gives itself a dashing exit line, truthful as death and judgement and nobody’s ever too clear about the hereafter so never mind.
Here it is.
THE BUSINESS OF STORYTELLING.
Which is now all the business there is, all the truth there is. No goods, no services, nurses, teachers, doctors, artisans, soldiers, warders, guardians, leaders, technicians, experts, knowledge, justice, privacy, safety, dignity, mercy and so forth.
This is what we have instead.
THE BUSINESS OF STORYTELLING.
And I am in this business.
I was in this business.
I think I have decided to retire.
Fuck the lot of ’em, I say.
Yeah.
Shining directly ahead is the tower that blades up into the soft sky above the station: overmastering height and bleak windows, illumination that gives an impression of festive threat. The thing is too big to be comfortably visible, even comprehensible, once you have drawn this close.
Here it is.
The open piazza beneath it is blighted by its influence and even on a sunny day those who pass under its glimmer and shadow tend to scuttle anxiously, rather than linger, rather than wait.
But Jon is going to wait.
She isn’t here.
Beyond him is even more glass: the walls and doors to the station concourse — another wide and immanent space.
She isn’t here.
Peering through he can see — of course — no rush-hour crowds, no heads raised to watch the indicator boards, intent like worshippers, like animals standing ready to be startled.
She isn’t here.
Without its people, the place seems burdened, packed with a strange energy, on the verge of being reckless.
She isn’t here.
One of the late, of the final, trains must have straggled in, because now a small wave of passengers appears. They amble, or rush towards the Underground. They head out of the exit that leads past him and walk in the outside air, gravity serving them nicely. A man by himself and draped in, no doubt, significant colours trots by and lets loose the kind of cries that end a Friday and start a weekend. The man’s calling does not summon companions, does not stir up echoes of agreement, as he seems to expect. He shakes his head and sways on.
Jon studies the angles of backs and shoulders, the differences of walks and hair, bags, coats and … I’ve no reason to bother — they’re not her. Jon doesn’t know these people: they are strangers, they are irrelevant to his purpose, they are in the fucking way.
If this were a film, they would be the crowd. You don’t need to care about the crowd when it’s a film — the crowd is only there, all dressed up and shifting about, to make the world look real and populated. The people aren’t people, they’re scenery, the backdrop.