‘It’s got a peculiar rattle to it,’ the landlady said. ‘Why don’t you open it?’
But Mick would not touch or even investigate the package until she had left the room. When, with some reluctance, she had gone, he picked it up cautiously. It was light and not solid and as he shook it gently he could hear the contents rattle together. The sound was dry and brittle, unthreatening. Once Mick had removed the brown paper he was not too surprised to find that the package contained a jigsaw puzzle. That was pretty much what it had felt and sounded like. But who the hell would be sending him jigsaws? Who would be sending him anything? He searched the wrapping and found a sliver of paper, a compliment slip from the London Particular with a note that read, ‘Something to do in the evenings besides watching second-rate videos.’
A part of him felt insulted. OK, he realized she thought she was smarter than he was, but did she really need to rub it in like this? What kind of idiot, what kind of child, did she think he was that he’d want to play with a jigsaw? He was about to toss the present away disdainfully when he looked at the box for the first time. It didn’t contain a picture as such, no rural English scene with thatched cottages and a duck pond, instead it showed a highly detailed map of London. He still thought it was a pretty stupid present but at least he could now see the point of it, the joke.
Grudgingly he opened up the box and looked at all the myriad pieces of London meshed together inside, pieces that were asymmetrical yet with a reassuring sort of regularity; distant and diverse parts of the city fragmented and brought into improbable contact. He picked out a couple of pieces at random; on one completely green piece he saw the word Crystal (of Crystal Palace), and another piece, entirely blue, part of Barn Elms Water Works. He let them drop back into the box and they left a few filaments of cardboard dust on his fingers.
He looked at the lid and checked the dimensions of the completed puzzle and saw that it would be much too big for any of the flat surfaces in the room. Having so recently felt insulted he now felt oddly deprived. He wanted to make a start. Regretfully he placed the lid back and gently put the box away in a drawer of the bedside cabinet. He left the brown paper on the floor, but he took the compliment slip, reread it, then folded it carefully and put it in his wallet.
As he left the Dickens a little while later, the landlady was in the hall, dressed now, obviously waiting for him yet wanting the meeting to appear accidental.
‘It’s always nice to get presents, isn’t it?’ she said, and Mick couldn’t disagree.
‘From an admirer?’ she continued.
The word admirer struck him as comically inappropriate. He didn’t believe anyone had ever admired him.
‘Yeah, sure,’ he said.
‘London postmark, I see,’ she said. ‘Only been here five minutes and already he’s breaking hearts. I’ll have to watch myself.’
‘You do that,’ he said.
Mick went into the street and began his day, his work. Things were a little strange at the moment. Since dealing with Justin Carr he had hit a slight hiatus. Revenge on Carr had been so sweet and so appropriate that Mick now wanted to deliver equally fitting acts of vengeance to the four men remaining on the list. Simply tracking them down and giving them a good kicking was no longer enough for him. He had not lost his sense of urgency but there were some things that couldn’t be rushed. They had to be done right.
Days and nights were therefore spent in what Mick liked to think of as reconnaissance. He knew all his victims’ addresses. It was simply a matter of checking them out, seeing how they lived, following them sometimes, seeing how they came and went, what time they left for work, when they got home, seeing what they did in the evenings, determining whether they were married or single, seeing whether they were gregarious or solitary. Sooner or later he knew that in each case the proper opportunity and occasion would present itself, and he’d be there, ready to take it.
The four victims lived some way from each other, one in Chelsea, one in Fitzrovia, one in Docklands and one in Islington, so he found himself covering many miles of the city going from one location to another, still avoiding public transport whenever humanly possible. And he was surprised to discover that he was starting to know his way around parts of London. Sometimes he’d find himself in a place he’d heard of, a famous place, with a recognizable name, familiar from the news or Monopoly, or just from a pop song (Walworth Road, Pentonville Road, Baker Street), and he’d feel simultaneously disorientated and at home. He couldn’t quite square the fact that these places, which to his eyes looked so ordinary, so workaday, also carried such a weight of history and fame with them, and yet he felt good to find himself using such famous streets in his daily wanderings.
Already certain routes through the city were becoming his own. He was discovering the logic and connectedness of the streets, discovering short-cuts, but he would still have been lost without the map he’d bought from Judy. At first he had hated it, had hated having to carry it. Either he tried to cram it into one of his pockets in which case it destroyed the lines of his suit, or he carried it in his hand in which case he looked like a hick from the sticks. But what was the alternative? Wandering around lost.
So he carried his map and soon he didn’t feel too bad about it at all, largely because he saw so many others like himself, also carrying maps. Some of them were obviously tourists and out-of-towners, but he’d see quite ordinary people, people who looked like they belonged here, who looked like Londoners, who also obviously needed to use maps in order to get around. He saw van drivers driving along with maps held open across the steering wheel. He even saw a black-cab driver consulting an A–Z.
Because he was carrying a map, people would sometimes stop him and ask for directions. Suspicious and irritated at first, he gradually took some pleasure in being able to help. People tended to be friendly and open towards him because they wanted something from him and he responded decently to them. Occasionally he found he could help with directions simply from his own knowledge of the city. It was strange how these passing, issueless encounters with strangers could produce an enduring feeling of well-being. Helping people to find their way made him feel oddly at home and accommodated.
On one bizarre occasion, as he was approaching Covent Garden tube a woman, also carrying a map, greeted him with a big smile and asked him if he was Emil. He shook his head and quickly said no, but when he thought about it later he realized he’d been needlessly honest. The woman was attractive, and he reckoned she must have been meeting a blind date or a lonely heart, and the map had been some kind of signal. From the way she’d approached him she obviously didn’t mind the look of him, had obviously hoped that he was Emil, and if he’d said yes, then she’d probably have happily gone off with him. It would have been a laugh. Then he remembered he wasn’t in London to have laughs.
He was standing in Chelsea, outside the house of a man called Jonathan Sands, the next most likely candidate on his list, when someone asked him for directions to Hackney. Mick offered the use of his map but the enquirer, a Turkish immigrant by the look of him, saw the length and complexity of the journey and walked off in a mean sulk as though it was Mick’s fault.
Mick was reminded of his own journey home. It was mid-afternoon, cold and dank. His shoulders were soaked with rain. He knew very little about Jonathan Sands, but he knew that despite having a wife and young child he didn’t come home much. He knew that he had a lot of magazines delivered, mostly about things maritime, and that he kept a boat moored in Chelsea Harbour. At present the house was dark and uninhabited. A cleaning lady had come and gone an hour or so earlier but now there was nothing. The wife and child were out. It would be hours before Sands came home from work. Mick decided to return to the Dickens. He knew there’d be better days than this.
He got back to Hackney in late afternoon. It was already dark and he had a long evening ahead of him. These winter days were short and they disappeared all too quickly but sometimes the nights seemed endless and tortu
rous.
As he got close to the Dickens he saw a skip full of building rubbish on the other side of the street. He crossed and dug around in it until he found a big piece of discarded hardboard. It was jagged-edged and irregular and spotted with tacky stains, but it was good enough for what he wanted, for what he now felt he wanted rather badly; a flat surface on which to do a jigsaw.
He took the wood up to his room, laid it on the bed and started the puzzle. He found it totally impossible at first. It entirely dispelled the sense of belonging he had begun to feel. All the streets and place names were suddenly foreign to him. They sounded simultaneously alien yet quaint: Hatch End, Barking, Tooting Graveney. They did not belong to the London he knew. And when he came to locations he’d heard of, places he’d been to, he no longer had any idea where they were in relation to anywhere else. The map was even more confusing than the reality.
But he persevered and gradually found that bits of the completed map were starting to coalesce. The edges were the easiest, followed by the river, and these fixed points seemed to offer clues as to how he might proceed. He put together large patches of recognizable green space, then motorways and arterial roads. He made some progress. But when it came to assembling networks of short, dense city and suburban streets, he had to rely on trial and error and occasional strokes of good luck.
It might have been frustratingly, maddeningly difficult, yet he enjoyed the difficulty. He was glad it wasn’t the child’s play he’d first thought it was going to be. The act of joining up the city, making it: complete and solid, gave him more pleasure than he would have thought possible. As the map came nearer to coherence and completion he felt oddly proud of himself, as though he was gaining mastery over this once wholly unfamiliar territory
He worked on diligently into the evening, and London took shape before his eyes, but eventually a terrible moment came when it dawned on him, with a kind of aching deflation, that there was a piece of the jigsaw missing. He could see there were a dozen holes remaining in London and only eleven pieces left with which to plug them, and as he slotted in each of the eleven, it became clear that the missing piece was the one that had Park Lane, Hackney, on it; his street.
He searched the box, the bed, the floor, but it wasn’t there. He could barely believe the disappointment and depression that overtook him. The piece’s absence seemed to be telling him something, that he had no place here, that he didn’t belong, that he barely existed, that his existence was a blank. This sleazy, crummy place and situation he inhabited was just a hole in the map. Then he realized that the significance must be quite other. The piece’s absence surely could not be accidental.
He was tempted to throw the whole puzzle up in the air, to reduce London to fragments, then put it back in its box. But instead he held himself in check and sat silently and patiently and more than a little dispiritedly, waiting for what he knew would come. Her timing wasn’t bad. He’d only been sitting there for three-quarters of an hour. He had worked more quickly than she’d expected.
And then the knock; cautious, feminine (half-Japanese?), and he opened the door, knowing it would be her, and she stood smiling at him and held out her closed hand. She unfurled her fingers to reveal the jigsaw piece cupped in her pale, flat palm.
‘I thought you might need this,’ she said.
‘Yeah. I’d be lost without it. What if I’d decided not to do the jigsaw?’
‘Then you might still be pleased to see me.’
He reached out to take the piece of jigsaw but she closed her hand and withdrew it. She entered the room and he was so surprised and pleased by her arrival that he didn’t think to be apologetic for his surroundings. She glanced around, interested but uncritical, and then he did feel the need to apologize, or at least explain.
‘You were right,’ she said. ‘It is a slum.’
‘Yeah, well, if I’d known you were coming I’d have had the decorators in.’
‘You’re just passing through,’ she said, quoting him back to himself.
‘That’s right,’ he said.
‘Working away from home.’
‘Yeah.’
‘And what kind of work do you do exactly, Mick?’
It was a difficult question, one he didn’t welcome, but if she was so determined to know how he lived, Mick had no intention of deceiving her. Patiently and not untruthfully he said, ‘I do security, protection, debt-collecting, bouncer work. It’s not that exciting.’
‘You’re a bad guy?’
‘Not that bad.’
‘You’re a crook?’
‘Well, the judge said I was a petty criminal, which I thought was a bit unnecessary. Obviously I was a criminal otherwise I wouldn’t have been in court, but petty, I mean, there was no need to be hurtful, was there?’
She smiled, sure that there was at least some truth in what he was saying, but sure too that his way of telling it hid more than it revealed.
‘And how are your reunions going?’ she asked.
‘OK,’ he said.
‘I thought maybe you’d be out celebrating with your old friends.’
‘No, you didn’t,’ he said.
‘You’re right,’ she agreed. ‘I didn’t. I thought you’d be home.’
‘This isn’t home,’ he insisted. ‘This is how I live in London, but it’s not my real life.’
‘I know. Your real life’s in Sheffield,’ she said. ‘You probably have a mansion there, and a doting wife and two lovely children and a dog and a pony.’
‘Got it in one,’ he said.
She smiled. ‘Married?’ she asked.
‘No. I’ve got a girlfriend.’
‘Is it serious?’
‘What is this?’
‘Just a question.’
‘Yes, it’s serious. I take these things seriously.’
‘And are you faithful to her?’
There was no simple answer to that question and in the time it took him to come up with a complex one she drew her own conclusions.
‘Tell me, Mick, have you ever slept with a foreign woman?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Have you ever slept with a Sheffielder?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘I don’t blame you. They’re overrated.’
She liked that. She liked self-deprecation, especially in someone who looked like a bad guy.
Mick asked, ‘Which half of you is Japanese?’
Playing it straight she replied, ‘My father. My mother comes from Streatham. Like me. My father’s an artist. He teaches art. He was a sort of performance artist. He was famous for about three months in the seventies. He’ll tell you he’s a footnote in art history. The bigger the history, the bigger the footnote.’
‘Yeah?’ said Mick. The idea of having a father who was an artist seemed at least as strange as having a father who was Japanese.
‘His best-known work,’ Judy continued, ‘was sending three hundred anonymous love letters to women all over London, women he’d never met, complete strangers whose names he’d got out of the telephone directory, telling them that he was their secret admirer and too shy to speak to them. But if they’d meet him under the clock at Waterloo Station at seven p.m. on a specified Friday he’d reveal himself. When the women got to Waterloo on the appointed day they found a dozen Japanese men, heads shaved, their bodies painted grey, naked except for loin-cloths, singing, “I’m in the mood for love”.’
‘How many women turned up?’
‘A lot. There were several arrests.’
‘Yeah?’ said Mick.
‘The newspapers said it was a piece of art commemorating the bombing of Hiroshima, but that was only partly true. My father was born in August 1945, the same month the allies dropped the bomb, but he was a long way from Hiroshima. His parents were in a transit camp in California. That’s where he was born.’
‘So he’s really a Californian.’
‘No, he’s really, really Japanese. Like I’m really a Londoner.’
‘Why d
id you send me the jigsaw?’
‘Because I wanted you to have something to do in the evenings.’
‘Why did you bring the missing piece? Why are you here now?’
‘Because I wanted you to have something else to do in the evenings. I came because I wanted to sleep with you.’
‘That’s nice,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘But I don’t think I can.’
‘Because of your serious girlfriend?’
He thought about explaining the whole damn thing, the rape, the nature of his reunions, how difficult it was to think about having sex with anybody while ever his head was full of imaginary pictures of Gabby being gang-banged by six chinless wonders. But he couldn’t. He said, ‘The landlady doesn’t allow strange women in the rooms.’
She said, ‘That’s the worst excuse I’ve ever heard.’
‘It’s the best I’ve got.’
She sprang up, angry and insulted, and started to leave.
‘Fine,’ she spat. ‘We’ll do lunch some time.’
‘That’d be nice,’ he said as she slammed the door behind her, and she found herself standing in the corridor, unsure of whether he’d really meant it.
After she’d gone he looked at the jigsaw and saw that it still had a hole in it. She’d taken the missing piece away with her. He turned on the radio and found himself again listening to the phone-in programme where Londoners discussed prurient details of their love lives and sex lives. The tone of the programme was different from the last time he’d heard it. It was now more serious, mostly anxieties and complaints. There were men and women who didn’t like oral sex, but whose partners did, or they liked to give but not receive or they would like to give but weren’t sure of the correct method. Girls of fifteen called in, worried because they were still virgins, men of a much greater age called in with exactly the same problem. There were men whose penises were too small or too large, women whose breasts ditto. There were people who fancied their boss, or their same-sex best friend, or their doctors, or who fancied group sex. Women called in who’d lost their husbands, their sex drives, their G spots. Men called who’d lost potency, erections and hope.
Bleeding London Page 15