Bleeding London

by Geoff Nicholson

  By the same author

  Fiction

  STREET SLEEPER

  STILL LIFE WITH VOLKSWAGENS

  THE KNOT GARDEN

  WHAT WE DID ON OUR HOLIDAYS

  HUNTERS AND GATHERERS

  THE FOOD CHAIN

  THE ERROL FLYNN NOVEL

  EVERYTHING AND MORE

  FOOTSUCKER

  Non-fiction

  BIG NOISES

  DAY TRIPS TO THE DESERT

  Copyright

  First published in the United States in 1997 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  Lewis Hollow Road

  Woodstock, New York 12498

  Copyright © Geoff Nicholson 1997

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-59020-928-8

  Contents

  By the same author

  Copyright

  Strange Meeting

  Therapy

  Station to Station

  The Walker’s Diary the Penultimate Days

  Scroll

  Particulars

  Conservatory

  A Phonecall Home

  Radio

  Names

  Players

  A Funny Feeling Inside of Me

  Stripping

  A Second Phonecall Home

  Judy Tanaka Redraws The Map

  The Walker’s Diary the First Entry

  Jigsaw

  Marina

  Mash

  Mr and Mrs Lonely Hearts

  The Walker’s Diary the Vast and the Detailed

  Japanese Lunch

  Blitz

  Eating Out

  Yellow

  The Walker’s Diary Wraparound

  Misguided

  Pepys

  Fire

  Doctor

  Work

  Addiction

  The Suicide Tour

  Cottage

  The Walker’s Diary the Knowledge

  Ready

  Tube

  The Last Flashback

  Mouth

  Backers

  Sheffield

  New Therapy

  Boadicea’s London

  STRANGE MEETING

  It is shortly after midday on one of those slate-grey, mid-January days when it seems never to become fully light, when dusk starts to coalesce in mid-afternoon. The cold, sheer air is pierced with panels of artificial light, and a forty-year-old man in a cashmere overcoat walks beneath a railway bridge in this frayed, nondescript part of east London. Water runs down from the girders overhead. He sees the yard belonging to a car dismantler, some of its stock parked in the road. He sees an off-licence with bars on the windows, a minicab office as narrow as a corridor. It is all alien territory and yet he is not in any ordinary sense lost. He looks pleased with himself, as though he has something to celebrate, as though he might already have been drinking; but above all else he looks out of place. The wrong man on the wrong street at the wrong time; a confluence of errors, of bad luck and hard lines.

  Suddenly someone speaks to him. At first he’s too self-absorbed to take any notice but then he sees that the speaker is one of six boys, men, who are walking along in the same direction as him: three black, three white, three beside him, three hanging back. He sees that they’re younger than he thought, very big, dressed in slick clothes that are encoded with American names, references to basketball and gridiron teams, and a voice repeats, ‘I said I think you’re lost.’

  ‘No,’ the man says firmly and advances his pace, enough to show determination but not, he hopes, panic.

  ‘Yeah, I really think you’re lost.’

  Two boys behind him each grab an arm, restraining and immobilizing him, and the one who spoke, a black kid with a big, broad, intelligent face, wiry adolescent fluff on his top lip, starts going through his pockets. The man in cashmere looks unusually philosophical, as if he has no objections to being mugged as though he has been expecting this, as though it is what he’s been waiting for. He stands still, doesn’t struggle, lets them get on with it, whatever it is they have in mind. He doesn’t even bother to look at his assailants. Instead his eyes stare off into the distance. The street appears utterly, improbably empty, not that he believes the presence of other people would help him.

  And then he realizes he is wrong. The street isn’t empty at all. He sees someone else, someone standing in the shadow of the railway bridge, just another mugger, he thinks at first, a lookout maybe. But as strange hands invade his clothes and body, removing objects – keys, a handkerchief, a London A–Z – and throwing aside those things that are judged valueless, this new character steps forward. He looks bad, as though he has been in the wars, in a serious fight that he did not necessarily win.

  He is a white man, maybe twenty-five years old, tall, broad, tough-looking. But his face is roughed up, the integrity of the skin broken through, made ragged and livid; a cut lip, an eye bruised black, raw grazes on all the face’s hard, sharp, vulnerable edges. He’s wearing a petrol-blue suit that once must have looked immaculately sharp. Now it’s flayed out of shape, torn at the knees, streaked and clotted with ominous substances. And under the suit there’s a white T-shirt stained with dark islands and archipelagos of what can only be blood.

  The bloody man is watching the mugging with a weary interest, walking towards it, involved yet bored by the spectacle. The black kid now has a wallet in his hands and is examining its contents with a quick, dismissive precision.

  The bloody man says loudly in a northern accent, ‘Give him his wallet back, there’s a good kid.’

  The six muggers hear and laugh. Partly it’s the accent, partly it’s the absurdity of the request. They turn, let go of their victim having winkled out his valuables. That’s over. They’re on to a new, more compelling engagement.

  ‘Say that again,’ says the boy with the wallet.

  ‘I said give him his wallet back, there’s a good darkie.’

  The silence seems bottomless.

  Then one of the white guys says, ‘Are you insulting my friend, you racist cunt?’

  ‘I don’t think he’s much of a friend.’

  By this time they’ve taken in the appearance of the new arrival, read at least some of its meaning: the suit, the face, the blood. One of them, more observant or less brave than the rest, sensing something dangerous and feral, says to the others, ‘We don’t have to get involved with this, you know.’

  But the holder of the wallet isn’t listening and says, ‘Why don’t you make me give it back?’

  The man runs his hand through his hair, pulls a face that conveys mostly ennui.

  ‘I’m really so tired of all this,’ the man says, referring to a history they cannot know. ‘All this macho, violent nonsense. I don’t need it. Neither do you.’

  Then, as if absent-mindedly, he pulls a gun out of his pocket. It could be real, it could be a replica, but the young muggers will barely have time to wonder about that. The man with the gun looks unsteady on his feet, faltering, unstable. Then he says, ‘Actually I don’t need this gun either.’

  He drops the gun thoughtlessly towards the pavement and as it lands it goes off. A single shot is unleashed, the violent noise amplified and made metallic by the confines of the bridge. The bullet lodges in one of the parked cars but it could have gone anywhere, into flesh and bone. The muggers make a run for it but
the bloody man grabs the nearest one and hits him across the face with the back of his hand, then repeats the action five or six times.

  ‘Don’t you dare accuse me of racism, you stupid little piece of dung,’ he says.

  And then he hits the boy again before tossing him down on to the pavement in front of him, as though dealing with a bag of household waste. He starts kicking the boy, but then feels an intrusive presence at his shoulder. He turns, ready to deal with whoever, whatever it is, but it’s only the man who was mugged, the victim.

  ‘Stop it,’ he’s saying. ‘What are you doing? You’re going to kill him.’

  As though this is a brand-new thought, the man stops his kicking. He composes himself, straightens his unstraightenable jacket, and takes half a dozen paces away from where the boy is lying. The boy warily reassembles himself, drags his body across the pavement, gets to his feet and starts to run. The two men watch him go.

  ‘You’re right. He’s not the one I want to kill. Let’s get out of here. Where are we?’

  The man who was mugged bends down to the pavement and gathers up his keys and handkerchief, redistributing them around his pockets. Meanwhile his saviour picks up his gun, the stolen wallet, which the muggers abandoned in their flight, and the A–Z. He peers around him, looking for a street sign to tell him where he is. He finds nothing, but opens the man’s A–Z nevertheless. It doesn’t help. The map itself is an absurd puzzle, a conundrum, a maze. Thick black lines have been drawn through every single street, through every single road, avenue, place, bridge, mews, on every single page of the map. By this method every street name has been made illegible as if the whole of London has been scored through and obliterated, made theoretical and anonymous. The map has been reduced to a pattern, to decoration and ornament, an abstract design with London as its distant organic inspiration. It will not guide them home. Far away a police siren claws through the air.

  The man in the bloody T-shirt looks at the man in the cashmere overcoat, the owner of the useless map, and says, ‘You’re going to tell me there’s a really simple explanation for this, aren’t you?’

  THERAPY

  Judy Tanaka and her therapist sat in an awkward though not especially hostile silence for almost all the first half of the session. Winter sun streamed into the basement room, and the shadows cast by the window frames cut the carpeted floor into sharp, bright diamonds of light. Judy’s therapist, a slender, youthful but grey-haired woman who wore big rings and yellow silk stockings, stared out of the window at the overgrown Kentish Town garden beyond, but she had the trick of letting her clients know that her attention was still in the room with them should it be required.

  Judy Tanaka had spent a lot of time wondering about her therapist, chiefly about her sexual orientation, whether or not she was gay, and whether or not there was some sort of unprofessional hostility to be found in the cold way she greeted Judy at the beginning of each session. Maybe the therapist hated her because she wasn’t gay, because she had a lively hetero sex life that the therapist couldn’t hope to emulate. Maybe she was jealous. Maybe she wanted to seduce her patient. But Judy had concluded that this sort of speculation was an understandable but nevertheless irrelevant and all too obvious evasion of the matters at hand. She did her best to stop thinking about her therapist and start talking about herself.

  At long last she said, ‘I think something very strange is happening to me.’

  ‘Something good?’ the therapist asked, slowly turning her head towards Judy, and untangling her attention from the garden.

  ‘I don’t know exactly,’ Judy replied. ‘But I definitely think I’m changing.’

  ‘And in what way or ways are you changing?’

  Judy wriggled in the big, creased, leather chair and thought hard before answering.

  ‘I think I’m becoming more complex,’ she said. ‘More dense, more full of noise and pollution, more beset by problems of organization and infrastructure.’

  The therapist looked at Judy dumbly, suspiciously, and Judy was dismayed by her unconcealed lack of interest and understanding.

  ‘Sometimes I feel bombed and blitzed,’ Judy said. ‘And sometimes I feel plagued. Sometimes I feel like I’m on fire, and other times like I’m lost in a fog, in a real old-fashioned pea-souper.’

  ‘I think you’re a little young to remember pea-soupers, Judy,’ the therapist said, kindly enough. ‘The necessary clean air legislation was passed well before your time.’

  ‘Maybe I have a race memory,’ Judy insisted.

  ‘What race would that be?’

  Oh dear. Here they went again. Judy was used to this tactic. It had been tried often enough before. People, even professional helpers, wanted to believe that all her angst and confusion stemmed from the simple fact of her foreignness, from being half-Japanese, a stranger in a familiar London landscape. Judy regularly dismissed such cheap and easy explanations.

  ‘The race memory would be English,’ she insisted to her therapist. ‘I was born in south London, for Christ’s sake.’

  The therapist demurred and Judy continued, ‘And these problems I have with men. Out-of-towners. They’re all just tourists, just day-trippers. They come and gawp at my tourist attractions, leave a pile of litter, then go on their way.’

  ‘It’s an apt metaphor,’ the therapist said.

  ‘It’s not just a metaphor,’ Judy insisted. ‘Look at me. Don’t I remind you of anything? I display signs of both renewal and decay. Strange sensations commute across my skin. There is vice and crime and migration. My veins throb as though with the passage of underground trains. My digestive tract is sometimes clogged. There are security alerts. There’s congestion, bottlenecks. Some of me is common, some of me is restricted. I have flats and high-rises. It doesn’t need a genius to see what’s going on. Greater London, c’est moi.’

  The therapist coughed to hide a snigger of derision, but she failed to hide it completely. Judy knew she was foolish to come here to these expensive sessions in a part of town she never otherwise frequented to be mocked by a woman she neither knew nor trusted.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the therapist said. ‘I don’t mean to be insulting, but I’m used to dealing with people who are disturbed or dysfunctional, not with people who fear they are turning into major world cities.’

  ‘Then it appears I may be with the wrong therapist.’

  ‘That may very well be true,’ she agreed. ‘Perhaps you should think about what kind of therapist might serve you better: a town planner, a local government official, a property developer.’

  Judy started to cry. This too was a regular occurrence at these sessions, and in a way she welcomed it since it helped her to feel that they must at least be fiddling around in the right general area. The session was nearing its end and Judy could sense the therapist wanting to draw things to a professionally reassuring close.

  ‘Judy,’ she said, and she seemed to be doing her best to sound like a favourite, kindly aunt, ‘it’s always very pleasant to talk to you at these sessions of ours, and I would never turn you away if I thought you were in serious need of my services. But frankly, you’re one of the saner people I’ve met in this insane city. And I’m not just talking about my clients now, I mean everyone, the entire population.

  ‘So why not save yourself some money? Why not stop trying to invent interesting symptoms for yourself? Why not cancel next week’s appointment, and the one after that? And why don’t we agree that you’ll only come back to see me when there’s something really dramatically, spectacularly wrong with you?’

  STATION TO STATION

  It was late, nearly one in the morning, a cold, hard, winter night, and the lights of Sheffield Midland Station glowed bright and blank. The last train from London was long overdue and Mick Wilton was one of twenty or thirty people waiting to meet it. At the taxi rank at least the same number of Pakistani taxi drivers were sitting in their cabs, a boring wait for a cheap fare. In the car park Mick stood patiently beside his car, an old Mer
cedes. He was only partly aware of the image he presented, tall, broad, tough-looking, a low-rent character in a high-priced petrol-blue suit, worn now as ever with a spotless white T-shirt. He fought hard not to show the irritation he felt. Waiting was not his style, not in stations or anywhere else.

  At last the train slunk on to the platform, indolent and heavy, ground to a halt and disgorged its passengers. Of course she was one of the last to emerge. He saw her coming down the concrete steps, small but conspicuous, a taut redhead in ankle boots, a short skirt and a gold leather jacket. She looked hard, much harder than him. Christ, he thought, she looks like a stripper. Then again, she was; Gabby, his girlfriend, his other half, or whatever you wanted to call it. But tonight there was something not right about her, a stress, a dishevelment that was caused by something more than just tiredness or a lengthy train journey, more even than the drink or drugs he suspected she might have been putting away the moment she was out of his sight. She walked over to the car, scarcely looking at him.

  ‘All right?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Not all right.’

  She got into the car but she didn’t want him to take her home, not now, not yet, so he drove somewhere they could talk, up on one of the hills above the station where the big high-rises stood.

  Gabby said, ‘So I did the strip like I was supposed to and it went pretty well really. In this sort of club, restaurant, in this private room. It was a stag night and there were six of them and obviously they were rich, stuck-up, posh bastards but at first they didn’t seem too bad really.

  ‘So they gave me some champagne and made me do an encore. And one of them grabbed my arse and another one grabbed my tits, which you know can be all right if it’s done the right way. And in any case, I can handle it. Then one of them tried to kiss me, which is obviously completely out of order, so I smacked him and then another one got into the act and, you know, we had a bit of a wrestle and basically they all raped me.’

  Mick said nothing. He tried to keep his face as still and inert as a waxwork, but inside his head all kinds of pornographic loops flickered into life; six nameless men in a dark dining room, hunting prints on the walls, masked waiters. Gabby is naked except for a few erotic accessories, suspenders, fishnets, elbow-length gloves, and she’s in tears, pursued by half a dozen savage, thick-necked, in-bred toffs, evening dress in tatters on their bullish frames, trousers down, cocks up.