A SECOND PHONECALL HOME
Mick stood in a different phone box, about to ring the same Sheffield number, Gabby’s number. The floor of the phone box was wet and it stank of urine. Was that a thing that happened only in London? Maybe it happened everywhere but he wasn’t sure. He rarely used phone boxes back home but he had no memory of them being as foul as this one.
‘It’s me again,’ he said the moment the line connected.
‘Hello, Mick.”
She sounded bored, weary, not especially pleased to hear from him, as though she found him a bit of a pest.
‘Two down, four to go,’ he said.
‘Really?’ And she perked up considerably. ‘Any trouble?’
‘Not for me,’ Mick said serenely. ‘Do you want to hear some details?’
‘No, not really,’ she replied.
‘No? I thought you might. I mean I’m punishing these guys, but I was thinking you might want to know precisely how I’m doing it.’
‘I’m sure you’ll be doing it just right.’
‘I might be doing it too little or too much.’
‘I don’t think you will be.’
‘These guys walk away after I’ve finished with them, you know. They’re wounded but they’re still walking.’
‘That sounds OK to me,’ Gabby said.
‘If it doesn’t sound right I can fix it so they never walk again.’
‘I don’t mind them walking, I just don’t want them doing what they did to me, not ever again.’
‘That’s a different sort of problem,’ Mick said thoughtfully, ‘and I’ve been giving it some consideration. I mean, here I am beating up these guys, but so far they don’t know why. I reckon they just think I’m some nutter. I could tell them why I’m doing it, of course. I could say it’s because of what they did to you, and there’d be some satisfaction in having them know why it’s happening to them. The downside is that the ones I’d attacked would then be able to warn the others and they’d be ready for me and able to protect themselves and that’s definitely not what we want, is it?’
She was very quiet at the other end of the phone and then she said hesitantly, ‘No, it’s probably better if you don’t tell them. Let them work it out for themselves.’
‘If they worked it out for themselves they’d still be able to forewarn the others, wouldn’t they? So what I’ve been doing is dishing out the punishment in such a way that I don’t think they’re going to be very eager to go telling anybody about it.’
‘I’m sure you’re doing right,’ she said.
It seemed he could do nothing wrong in Gabby’s eyes.
‘What you been up to?’ he asked.
‘Working.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. I thought I’d better get back to it, like when you fall off a horse.’
‘Very brave of you.’
‘It didn’t seem all that brave.’
‘Weren’t you scared?’
‘Of what?’
‘That it might all happen again.’
‘For obvious reasons I tried very hard to put that thought out of my mind, OK?’
‘OK. Which act did you do?’
‘The Beefeater.’
The oldies but goodies,’ he said.
The act went well,’ she said with finality, before he had a chance to ask.
‘I’m glad. No trouble?’
‘No, of course not. This is Sheffield. It’s not like down there in London.’
‘No, it’s certainly not,’ he said.
‘Mick,’ she said, sounding suddenly intimate, ‘I want you to be careful. I want you to hurry up with what you have to do, don’t get into trouble, get it over with and come home.’
‘That’s exactly what I have in mind.’
‘London, it’s a dump, isn’t it?’ she said, and he didn’t really think she meant it but he agreed with her anyway.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It’s a dump, a slum, a zoo, an armpit. Whatever.’
She made a contented noise down the phone.
‘Another thing I was wondering,’ Mick said. ‘When you went through your ordeal, did you recognize any of the guys?’
‘Why do I need to recognize them when you’ve got their names?’
‘I mean, did you recognize any of them at the time, like before they raped you, while they were just watching you strip. Because it turns out one of them’s quite famous. This Justin Carr character; he’s an actor, he makes films, he appears on television. He’s a bit of a sex symbol. He’s a familiar face to some people, apparently.’
‘Not to me.’
‘Me neither,’ Mick said. ‘But fame’s an interesting thing isn’t it? I mean if you’d been raped by Roger Moore, you’d have recognized him, wouldn’t you? Or Keanu Reeves or Rowan Atkinson. So he’s not that famous. But I was thinking, he was taking quite a risk, wasn’t he? It wouldn’t have done his career much good if it had got out that he took part in a gang-bang, would it? You could have gone to the papers or anything.’
‘He probably wasn’t thinking very straight at the time,’ Gabby said. ‘He was drunk. He was crazy. The others were egging him on … Look, Mick, I know you’re there sorting this business out for me, but really I find it very difficult to talk about.’
She started to cry loudly and forlornly. Mick had no possible defence against it.
‘I can understand that,’ he said sympathetically. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Isn’t your money running out yet?’
‘Oh yeah, maybe it is. Look, before I go—’
The phone went dead and Mick was left wondering whether the money had really run out or whether Gabby had hung up on him.
JUDY TANAKA REDRAWS THE MAP
Her letter of application had been irresistible; elegantly handwritten on thick, textured paper, and submitted along with one short page of word-processed CV. It said the sorts of thing Stuart wanted to hear, that she’d lived in London all her life, that she’d travelled extensively abroad, that she was an enthusiast for London, its people and its history, that she wanted to share her enthusiasm with the rest of the world.
It sounded to Stuart as if her ambitions might be pitched a little high for someone wanting to be a tour guide with The London Walker, but he recognized that anybody can get carried away when they’re trying to get a job. He wanted to meet her. But it was Anita who got particularly excited by the application. She noted that the girl had an interesting Japanese-sounding name, and she had an idea that finding a Japanese-speaking guide would be a great thing for the business, and she told her husband that he really had to interview Judy Tanaka. Stuart did as he was told.
It was at the time when Stuart was trying hard to ‘redefine his role’ at The London Walker. Anita, by contrast, was looking around desperately, simply trying to find something for him to do. Fortunately she knew that an ad placed in Time Out or the Evening Standard asking for new tour guides could be guaranteed to bring in scores, maybe hundreds, of applications. The job of sifting through the letters, compiling a lengthy shortlist and then interviewing a lot of candidates could be arranged so that it soaked up massive amounts of Stuart’s time. The need for new guides was genuine enough and a truly good one was always worth grabbing even if you weren’t in absolute need at that moment. Anita had felt some relief when Stuart took to the task with enthusiasm. He might not have. He might have thought it was beneath his dignity. She was delighted to see that dignity was no longer part of his make-up.
At the interview Judy Tanaka seemed disappointingly taut and awkward. Her long black hair was scraped back, leaving her forehead vulnerably high and bare. Her clothes were beige and tight, uncomfortable-looking, as though she’d bought or perhaps borrowed them specially for the interview and would never wear them again. Stuart introduced himself and tried to make a little joke about his name, but she didn’t laugh. Yet the moment she began to talk her real self came flooding out, something much looser and livelier than her look suggested. The voice took h
im aback, these very correct English tones coming out of an oriental-looking mouth, but he soon got used to it.
He talked her through her CV and that was all fine by him; in most ways far in excess of requirements. The only disappointment was that she didn’t speak any Japanese. She was only half-Japanese, it turned out, and her Japanese father had discouraged her from learning the language, in some dubious attempt at integration. Stuart wasn’t really disappointed at all, and he thought it served Anita right for jumping to such easy conclusions. What was in a name? He started on some basic questions. He asked what was her favourite London park, and she said Green Park. Her favourite museum, the Horniman. Favourite pub, the Cheshire Cheese. Her favourite mews, Grafton. Her favourite market, Leadenhall.
Before long it didn’t feel like an interview at all, but rather like a conversation between two people who had discovered a shared interest. But it was when they started to talk about London follies that he really lost his heart to her.
Stuart mentioned the Pagoda at Kew and wondered if she preferred the Peace Pagoda in Battersea Park built by some Japanese Buddhist sect. The Nipponzan Myohoji, she said. But no, she didn’t love it particularly. She said that when it came to phallic excrescences she was more partial to the Walthamstow ‘land lighthouse’, built by the United Methodist Free Church in the nineteenth century, as a source of spiritual light. He’d heard of it but never seen it. He asked her if she knew the folly tower off Clapton Common, formerly in the grounds of Craven Lodge, and he felt a certain relief when she didn’t. He had started to fear he would have nothing to teach her, that she might know more than him.
Together they fretted about the fate of the Roundhouse and of Battersea Power Station. They wondered whether Marble Arch could now be considered a folly. Or how about the new MI5 building? She said that perhaps ‘folly’ referred not to any real or imagined lack of utility but rather to the kind of imagination that designed and produced a certain sort of architectural style.
The conversation flowed, went back and forth, and before long Stuart had no doubt that she should be offered a job, though he had some doubts about whether or not she would take it. The role of tour guide seemed far beneath her, and the pay was insulting. He was reluctant even to make the offer in case she turned him down, because, strange as it might be, he would have found that hurtful. He didn’t want the interview to end but there was no point delaying or pretending that he had to think about it or consult with somebody else. He offered her the job there and then, and could hardly believe how good he felt when she immediately accepted. Having Judy Tanaka as one of his employees felt like a great step forward, and not simply in the life of the company.
‘The people who come on these tours,’ he explained, ‘they’re here to see sights, the Tower of London, Big Ben, Nelson’s Column, and in one sense, of course, they’ve already seen them. They’ve seen them in books and on postcards and on television, and most importantly they’ve seen them in their mind. What they’re usually doing when they come on a tour is having those images reinforced, making sure that the Tower of London is the way they always imagined it. And in most cases it will be. You may regard that as unfortunate or you may not.’
‘I think it’s sort of sad,’ she said.
‘I knew you would,’ he replied. He felt that he already knew how she would feel about a lot of things. ‘There will be times when you may find yourself unable to resist subverting those easy expectations.’
He smiled and she smiled back, though she didn’t really understand what he meant.
Stuart decided to start her on the Whitechapel Walk. This was generally regarded by the other guides as a hardship posting. The number of people on the tour tended to be small, hence there was less chance of making good money from tips. And the people who took the tour were an odd bunch. Some were Jack the Ripper freaks with all the weirdness that involved. Others were genuine East End enthusiasts who often wanted more information than the guides could provide. Others still had simply signed up for the wrong tour, or taken a chance because the Royal London Walk was full, or they had mistaken Whitechapel for Whitehall. Furthermore, the streets of Whitechapel contained plenty of local people who thought the spectacle of someone guiding a group of tourists through their manor was an absurd and offensive one that deserved to be loudly mocked and shouted and laughed at.
These competing forms of difficulty could be tricky to deal with, but Stuart didn’t doubt that Judy would be able to cope. He knew she had the right stuff. But she still needed to be trained and that was his responsibility too. Sometimes training could take place in batches. If two or three new guides started at the same time, then they could be taught simultaneously. But there was nobody starting at the same time as Judy, so Stuart had her all to himself. He wanted it that way. He looked forward to seeing her again, and spending time with her. In fact he knew that he was looking forward to it far too much. When the morning came to train her he was in a state of ridiculous nervous excitement, an excitement that he hoped he was managing to hide from Anita.
He met Judy at Aldgate East tube station on a chilly April morning. She had abandoned her prim interview clothes and looked much happier in jeans and a stylishly battered suede jacket. He walked her round the prescribed tour route and gave her the script that he’d written for the walk. If a newly recruited guide was awkward or apprehensive he would tell him or her to stick to the script as though it were holy writ. In Judy’s case he told her to use it only as a jumping-off point.
He stressed how easy it all was, how basic the level of information had to be. Of course, Jack the Ripper had to be dealt with but Stuart told her he wanted it to be only a small part of the tour. There was more to Whitechapel than that. He said she should quote Charles Booth who in the nineteenth century called Whitechapel the Eldorado of the East, then she should move swiftly on to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which had been making bells for Westminster Abbey since 1565. She should take the group to Cable Street, talk briefly about Mosley, and say something bland about continuing racial tensions. He said it was worth mentioning that the Spitting Image workshops were nearby.
If the tour took place on a Sunday morning, then it would include Brick Lane market; the only place Stuart had ever seen a stall selling secondhand, partly used candles. If the group was interested in art and if there was a free exhibition on, they could be taken to the Whitechapel Art Gallery. If she liked she could mention the literary connections with Whitechapel: Walter Besant, Peter Ackroyd, lain Sinclair, but she should go easy on this, since she could be certain that nobody on the tour would ever have heard of any of these people.
Stuart’s attitude towards tourists had hardened considerably over the years. He was sure most of them were perfectly sane and rational when they were at home, but there was something about becoming a tourist that robbed them of their basic common sense. There’d been a woman on one of his tours, for instance, who’d asked him where she should go to see the Fire of London.
He told Judy that ending a tour wasn’t always easy. Finding the right note of finality could be strangely difficult. There would always be those walkers who lingered on and asked a lot of questions at the end simply because they wanted to prolong the tour in order to feel they were getting more for their money.
If the group had been a particularly hideous one, he recommended taking them to a pub in Commercial Road called, inevitably, Jack the Ripper, a sort of theme pub with murder and sexual mutilation as its subject. If the guide did it just right he or she could slip away quietly before the group realized they’d been dumped in a strip pub.
At the end of this particular morning, however, Stuart took Judy to the Blind Beggar, up the far end of Whitechapel Road, the pub in which Ronald Kray committed the murder which eventually led to his downfall.
‘The dangers of telling the truth,’ Stuart said enigmatically. ‘George Cornell called Ronnie Kray a fat poof, so Ronnie and Reg tracked him down to this pub and Ronnie shot him dead. But George Cornell wasn�
��t lying. What did Ronnie object to? To being called fat or to being called a poof? In fact he was both.’
‘Maybe he wanted to be called a big-boned poof,’ Judy said.
They had a couple of drinks and they ate their ploughman’s lunches and Stuart continued to talk about the joys or otherwise of being a tour guide, and more enthusiastically to talk about the joys and otherwise of living in London. Judy was attentive in a professional sort of way but to Stuart she felt like a longtime colleague, not a raw trainee.
They were getting along better than he could ever have hoped for, and he was not sure whether it was courage or recklessness or simply impatience that drew him on and led him, as if inadvertently, to say, ‘Look, this has nothing to do with work, it’s not any sort of blackmail, or coercion or sexual harassment or whatever, but something tells me you and I might find ourselves having an affair, don’t you think?’
Having said it, he clenched himself, his whole body tensing up, waiting for the terrible consequences, the slap in the face the drink poured over his head, the sound of breaking glass.
But she said, ‘I think so, yes.’
He wanted to cheer, to punch the air like a goal scorer but instead he said, ‘I don’t know if it’s altogether wise or sensible. Obviously I’m married, very married, and it’s not as if I can really offer or promise you anything or …’ ‘Let’s just get on with it, shall we?’ she said. He nodded and smiled, and began running through his mental diary to see when and where the consummation might be arranged, but Judy was settling for nothing so organized or so delayed. She stood up, took his hand and pulled him out of his seat and started to walk towards the Ladies. The pub was empty, nobody was looking, and she dragged him in after her, into a cubicle, where she slipped down his trousers and her jeans, and they had rapid, raging and not really all that satisfactory or comfortable sex, but to a large extent it was the thought that counted, and the thought was pretty terrific. Stuart didn’t know what had hit him, but it was something big and powerful, like a speedboat.
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