Bleeding London

by Geoff Nicholson

  The next time they met she invited him to her flat. He had offered to pay for a hotel room but she found that inappropriate. They went by taxi to Bethnal Green and he had stepped into her small attic room with some trepidation. The horrors of cheap, rented London accommodation were behind him, though not so far behind that he didn’t have horrible memories of rooms and shared flats in places like Bethnal Green. But the room was nice enough, and Judy was there in it and, in any case, as soon as they entered the room she had his clothes off and was humping him ruthlessly on the thin nylon carpet.

  She reacted so intensely, so passionately when he made love to her that he knew it couldn’t simply be a matter of his touch or his personality or technique. She was reacting to something in herself, a need and a hunger that was largely independent of him.

  Afterwards as she lay panting on her back, still naked, legs still splayed, she said, ‘I want to be fucked everywhere. In every hole. In every position. In every London borough. In every postal district.’

  Stuart grunted uncomprehendingly.

  ‘You know, when sex is good,’ she continued, ‘when it’s really, really good, I feel as though I’m disappearing, being pulverized, being fucked into oblivion, so that I’m nothing, just particles of air pollution, debris, smog, particles of soot and skin floating through the air and settling on the city.’

  Stuart didn’t know what to say. He dressed slowly and went to the kitchenette to make coffee. As Mick would do later, he had noticed the wall map of London the moment they’d walked into the room but hadn’t had much time to comment on it. Now he could look at it more closely and see that there was a sheet of transparent plastic hanging in front of it, marked with a series of hand-drawn coloured crosses. When he’d made the coffee, when Judy had put some clothes on, he asked her what the map was all about.

  She didn’t give a direct answer. Instead she took down the existing plastic sheet and replaced it with another that hadn’t been drawn on. She got a couple of coloured marker pens, a red and a blue, and handed him the latter. Then she asked him to make a cross at every spot on the map where he’d ever lived.

  He considered that by most people’s standards he’d moved around a lot in London, especially in his early years there, and had lived all over the place. That fact seemed to please Judy. He stood in front of the map and found himself making a dozen or so crosses. The pen skidded over the slick plastic surface leaving behind thick, rather imprecise marks. There were some strange, distant scatterings, one in East Dulwich, one in Lee, one in Hendon. Even while he was living in these places they’d seemed wrong, like excursions away from the locations where he really belonged. However, there was a definite clustering around west London, half a dozen or so crosses within a trapezoid that had Notting Hill, Marylebone, West Hampstead and Swiss Cottage as its corners, what he thought of as his area, the place where he now lived with his wife. A dust cloud of guilt suddenly blew through his mind and he had to fight hard to sweep it away.

  Then Judy gave him the red pen and told him to mark the transparent sheet with all the places he’d ever had sex. Only slightly embarrassed, he did as asked. Initially the pattern was the same as the previous one. With the exception of one rough, shared flat off the Goldhawk Road, where he’d only stayed for a couple of weeks, he’d managed to have sex in all the places he’d lived. But soon the pattern became very different indeed. There were now marks in all sorts of outlying districts, places where girlfriends had lived: places like Gipsy Hill, Crouch End, Elephant and Castle. There were occasions when he had slept with women on other people’s floors, after parties in Brixton and the Old Kent Road. He had a clear but disconnected memory of being at a very dull dinner party, and of slipping into one of the bedrooms for a tremendous quickie with a woman called Lynn. He was fairly sure this had been in Acton and he drew a cross accordingly, but its positioning was necessarily vague.

  By now there appeared to be no patterning at all in the placement of his crosses. A truly critical eye might still have seen a preference for west London and for north of the river, but it was only a slight preference. Beyond that, the marks looked as though they might have been made more or less at random.

  Stuart counted up the crosses and discovered that he’d had sex with women in twenty-six separate locations around London: not twenty-six different women, he was quick to tell Judy (he hadn’t changed girlfriends nearly as often as he’d changed flats), though he had no idea whether she’d consider that many or few. And he really had no idea why he was counting, why he was making these maps, except that Judy had asked him to.

  She looked at the finished map, apparently approvingly, and said, ‘I think we’ve still got a lot of ground to cover.’

  He liked the way she said ‘we’.

  One day she showed him some other plastic sheets, maps that had been drawn on by other visitors to her room, by other lovers, for all he knew. He saw how the city was overlaid with the patterns of where other people had lived and had sex. And he saw how these patterns resembled or differed from his, how they sometimes intersected his own map, sometimes seemed to complement it, other times seemed to have been drawn in strict opposition. There were people whose maps centred intensely around Kensington or Belsize Park, others who were concentrated on south London, others who had lived and fucked all over London at every point of the compass. In one or two cases the patterns appeared to be not merely promiscuous but systematic and exhaustive. He wasn’t sure whether he found this depressing or not.

  Soon, not much to Stuart’s surprise, Judy turned herself into a valuable and well-liked employee. Even Anita liked her, though she continued to show a slight and totally unreasonable resentment because Judy didn’t speak Japanese. Stuart took a certain pleasure in his wife’s resentment. On the other hand he sometimes felt acute pangs of jealousy. It was strange to think of Judy going around London with groups of strangers, leading them, talking to them, performing for them, charming them. He thought it wouldn’t take much for some single male tourist to entice her into conversation about art or history or architecture and then offer to buy her a drink and say that he was alone and lonely in London, in need of company, and then … Stuart tried hard not to think about it. He knew what a wasteful, hopeless emotion jealousy was.

  He had never imagined that an affair with Judy would be useful as a piece of industrial sabotage and yet she was able to enlighten him about all sorts of things that went on in his business. Most of it was fairly tame stuff, tour guides who cut corners, who found ways of taking money from tourists without issuing tickets. But the thing he liked best was hearing how much the employees disliked Anita, and hearing that they had a pet name for her: Boadicea.

  Several times he asked to see Judy’s own personal ‘map’ of London, the plastic sheet that showed where she’d lived and fucked. She was uncharacteristically coy but immovable. She wouldn’t show him. And yet in the weeks that followed, Judy did reveal her own personal, singular version of London to him. She took him by way of the Piccadilly Line to try to locate the pissoir in the Holloway Road that Joe Orton wrote about in his diaries. By his account it was ‘the scene of a frenzied homosexual saturnalia’ on at least one occasion some time in 1967, and presumably far more often than that. The diary said the toilet was under a bridge, but they failed to find anything that could be positively identified as Orton’s old haunt.

  ‘Thirty years is a long time in the life of a cottage,’ Judy said philosophically.

  More satisfactorily they went to 28 Charlotte Street, the home of an eighteenth-century whipping brothel presided over by a Mrs Theresa Berkeley. It was a place where, in general, customers were flogged with birches, cat-o’-nine-tails, and even fresh nettles. But customers could give as well as receive. There were prostitutes there who were prepared to be whipped, including, for two hundred guineas, Mrs Berkeley herself.

  They found two doors in Charlotte Street, both marked with the number 28. One belonged to offices on the upper floors of the building, and th
e other was the door to a bookshop called the Index Bookcentre. A copy of Trotsky’s In Defence of Marxism was displayed in the window. They browsed briefly in the bookshop and afterwards had a Greek meal at the Venus Kebab House.

  They took Stuart’s car and drove to Waterloo Road and Judy recalled a passage from Flora Tristan’s Promenades dans Londres, in which she describes how in the late 1830s the entire road was filled with prostitutes, leaning out of windows, sitting on doorsteps, many of them bare-breasted, raucous and cheerful, arguing with each other and their pimps. Judy took Stuart to Waterloo Bridge where Tristan had later stood and watched as a great tide of women crossed the river, heading into town for the brothels, the parks and theatres and ‘finishes’ of central London, where they would stay and be debauched till morning, when they would return south of the river, used and sated.

  One day Judy and Stuart went to Fleet Street and looked for Fleet Alley where on 23 July 1664 Samuel Pepys took ‘a turn or two with a most pretty wench’ in one of the doorways. But Fleet Alley was not to be found. It appeared no longer to exist. Similarly there was no sign of Axe Yard in Westminster where he had lived.

  On another occasion they went to Gray’s Inn Road, to a distinguished, four-square, redbrick building now called Churston Mansions. In a previous incarnation it was Clevelly Mansions and had been the home of Katherine Mansfield and her lover Ida Constance Baker, known as L. M. Here, in a three-roomed flat that had as its centrepiece a stone Buddha surrounded by bronze lizards, Mansfield and Baker had committed sexual acts that were for the times, and in the public imagination, genuinely shocking. Here too, at least one of Mansfield’s male suitors had threatened to shoot himself for love of her.

  Judy and Stuart walked the streets of London trying to pick up on the mass of erotic energy, the afterglow of these coming togethers, these acts of desire, of love and transgression; acts of defloration and perversion, acts stemming from diverse needs, psyches, cultures. But it wasn’t just sexual tourism. Judy did her best to participate in this afterglow, to make it glow that little bit brighter, and Stuart was her willing, if somewhat self-conscious, accomplice.

  Whenever they visited one of these places with an erotic history, Judy insisted that they make love, if not actually there on the very spot, then in a park nearby, or in a dark corner, or at the very least in the back of Stuart’s car. Stuart found himself in a state of horny amazement. He didn’t think he was the sort of man who did things like this. He was also aware that these acts, these couplings, were changing the shape of the maps that could be drawn for them. Each time he returned to Judy’s flat he added a cross or two to his map, but Judy still refused to reveal hers.

  She said, ‘There are an infinite number of maps that could be drawn of London; not just sex maps but death maps, crime maps, drug maps, maps of resistance and insurrection, of liberation and oppression, murder maps, suicide maps.’

  ‘Walking maps,’ he said.

  ‘Imagine being blind in London,’ she continued. ‘Imagine having to negotiate the streets, or travel on the tube, having to listen to all the noise, the traffic, the building work, the buskers and beggars. What kind of map would a blind man use? How would he use it?’

  Stuart shrugged to show his ignorance about these things, although he did vaguely remember reading about someone who’d made a sort of ‘sound map’ to help the blind recognize parts of the tube system.

  ‘Sometimes I think I’d like to be tattooed,’ Judy said. ‘All across my back. With a map of the London Underground system. Or perhaps not just a tattoo, more a form of scarification, so that the scar tissue would be raised, a little like Braille, to represent the lines and the stations. And I could stand naked in the entrance halls of tube stations and blind men and women would come up to me, and run their hands over me, over the tattoos, until they’d worked out their routes. Maybe they wouldn’t even need to be blind.’

  She made him stand naked in the centre of her room, a map of London placed on the floor at his feet. He looked down at the shadow he cast over the city. She stood behind him and her hands curled around him, caressed his chest and his belly, then found their way to his cock. With a few strong, rapid strokes she made him come. His semen eased out of him, seemed to float above London for a moment, like liquid bombs, then fell to earth in thick, scattered splashes. She knelt down and peered at the map. In the places where his semen had landed she could just read through the cloudy translucent liquid the names of Belgravia, Walworth, Angell Town, Brockwell Park.

  ‘More places we have to visit,’ she said. Then she lowered her head, snaked out her tongue and meticulously licked his semen from all the places it had fallen.

  Stuart had never imagined it would be like this. He felt that things were getting out of hand. He had seen something attractive and vital and, of course, sexual, in Judy Tanaka. He had not thought she was an ice-maiden but neither had he imagined she would be nearly so wild and rash. A part of him was thrilled by it, but increasingly it worried him. He feared that her recklessness might produce a similar recklessness in himself and that was no part of his plans. He didn’t want to get into trouble. He had every intention of remaining completely in control, and above all of remaining married.

  Meanwhile Judy revelled in being indiscreet. A woman who dragged you into the Ladies at the Blind Beggar or who insisted that you have sex with her in an alleyway off Tottenham Court Road in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, or who insisted on delivering blow jobs while you sat in your car at a parking meter in Jermyn Street, was not someone who would be very understanding when you explained to her how you needed to be careful in order to protect your marriage.

  Of course he hadn’t told Anita about Judy; Stuart and Anita had a frank and civilized marriage, but it wasn’t quite as frank and civilized as that. Stuart was careful to cover his tracks. Discovery mightn’t spell total disaster. Anita was tolerant, forgiving, actually not all that concerned with sexual faithfulness, but she wouldn’t stand for a fuss, for being made to look a fool. Being betrayed by her husband and a junior tour guide would not go down well.

  Once, to Stuart’s almost heart-stopping alarm, Judy stripped her clothes off in the corner of a not particularly deserted churchyard in Clerkenwell. He had tried to cover her up but she was determined not to be covered.

  ‘Which way round is it?’ she asked as she stood there naked. ‘Is the body like a city or is the city like a body? Which is the metaphor? Which is the real subject?’

  Stuart was far too embarrassed to offer an answer.

  ‘There are some cities you wouldn’t want your body to resemble,’ she went on. ‘Pompeii, Coventry, Milton Keynes. Hiroshima.’

  He felt oddly offended. He walked off, left her to her nakedness. It was a bad joke, if she had intended it as a joke.

  ‘Sorry,’ she called after him. ‘I guess you can’t joke about Hiroshima. Not even if you’re half-Japanese. Not even if you’re naked.’

  The affair continued for a good few months. Stuart savoured all the usual excitements and guilts, the usual pleasures and the usual sense of risk, but with Judy everything was heightened, as though she was constantly wanting to raise the stakes. He did what he could to avoid analysing his feelings, and he had no urge to categorize the nature of their affair. It was more complex than lust, less nourishing than love. There was respect for the other partner and yet a dizzying sense of transgression, of doing wrong, of going to hell in a basket.

  But even though the affair took him all over London it was obviously, in the most colloquial sense, going nowhere. He knew it would have to end sooner rather than later, that the end would be sweetly painful, and that the decision to end would be his not Judy’s. Yet he still surprised himself when he suddenly, abruptly decided it was over.

  Judy had taken him to Hampstead Heath, scene of all sorts of sexual encounters, perhaps rather few of them heterosexual. Stuart and Judy were tangled together, standing up, only semi naked, in a copse that promised to provide adequate cover. Sudden
ly a small black dog, rapidly followed by its owner, discovered them. The dog owner, a lean, white-haired, soldierly-looking man, stared at them with as much pity as disgust and said, ‘You dirty buggers. You deserve all you get.’

  It seemed an odd thing for him to have said, but in a peculiar way it struck home with Stuart. As he buttoned and zipped himself up he knew that his affair with Judy had finished. Comic and trivial though this particular discovery had been, he realized they’d been lucky to get away with it for as long as they had. Discovery by the man with the dog had been somehow symbolic. If it went on much longer it would be Anita doing the discovering, and the consequences of that could be far more terrible than the simple pains of an ended affair.

  The next time he saw her he told Judy as swiftly, as diplomatically as he could that it was all over. She did not take it well. She screamed at him, called him every bad thing she could think of, threatened obscure and terrible revenges. He told her she was being absurd. It had been an affair, he said, nothing more, fun while it lasted and surely not so terrible now it was over. But Judy wasn’t having any of that. She was wounded in a way he had never imagined, never bargained for. All he could do was say he was sorry, even though he wasn’t particularly. And when she began to say that she thought she was deeply, desperately in love with him, he was more convinced than ever that he’d done the right thing by ending it.

  Judy Tanaka disappeared out of his life, left the job at The London Walker without giving any notice, something that both infuriated and perplexed Anita. Judy hadn’t seemed the kind to leave them in the lurch like that. It was said by other members of staff that there must surely be some pressing reason for her departure, and perhaps she’d return one day with a full explanation.

  For his part, Stuart spent several weeks thinking Judy might exact some terrible revenge on him. The most likely, he thought, would be telling Anita about the affair. But it never happened. She was gone for good. Only months later did Stuart hear that she was working in a bookshop, a job that seemed far too dull and undemanding for someone of Judy’s talents.