‘I have as much respect for them as they have for themselves.’
‘Don’t you worry about them, don’t you ever think what you might be doing to them?’
‘What is this? Do you know those girls? Are you a boyfriend or brother or something?’
Mick made a gesture that said neither yes nor no. He was happy to have Sands remain uncertain.
‘I mean, if you are, then what can I say except sorry.’
‘Sorry’s not enough,’ said Mick. ‘Now, question four: what is the origin of the place name Soho?’
‘I know that,’ Sands said. ‘It’s a hunting cry, like tally-ho, from the days when the area was still parkland and used for hunting.’
‘That’s amazing,’ Mick said. ‘It’s an amazing fact, and it’s even more amazing that you should know it. So, what about your wife? What would she say if she knew what you’d been up to with those two girls?’
‘She’d be very glad that I’d had sex with somebody else so that I stopped bothering her.’
‘It’s like that, is it?’
‘As a matter of fact, it is.’
‘Have you tried charm and drugs on her?’
‘Not recently, no. But I know what the result would be. You’re not a friend of my wife’s, for Christ’s sake, are you?’
‘I’m everybody’s friend,’ Mick said. ‘I seem to be able to establish this easy rapport with people. They tell me all sorts of things. I mean, you’re probably wondering why you’re bothering to answer these questions about your sex life. Is it because you’re scared I might kill you?’
Being killed was not one of the options Sands had so far considered. He fought against it but he couldn’t stop a shudder running through his body. Mick pretended not to notice.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think that’s the reason. I think the real answer is that you realize how good confession is for the soul.’
‘I’ll remember that,’ Sands said.
‘OK, question five: what was the subject of John Evelyn’s Fumifugium, written in 1661?’
‘I don’t know. Smog, fogs, London particulars?’
‘I can only accept one answer,’ Mick said.
‘London fogs,’ Sands said, sorry to be dealing with an idiot.
‘Very good. I didn’t think you were going to get it. What were you going on about London Particulars? That’s a bookshop.’
‘It’s also a name given to London fogs.’
‘Get away!’
Sands looked exasperated as well as scared. Mick wondered if it was time to hit him again in order to make him more compliant, but he decided to wait a little longer, see how it went. He moved the toy boat one bridge up the river.
‘Question six: the name of which London district contains six consecutive consonants, one after the other?’
Sands looked at him as though he was being ridiculous, as though there was no way any English place name could possibly contain such a configuration. Then suddenly it came to him.
‘Knightsbridge,’ he said triumphantly.
‘Very good.’
‘It’s a bit of a cheat actually,’ Sands pointed out. ‘I mean, obviously it was once two separate words and the s would have had an apostrophe.’
‘What does it matter?’ Mick said. ‘You got it right. You ever paid for sex?’
No longer surprised by the turns of Mick’s mind, Sands replied, ‘Only when I was very young and living abroad.’
‘Doesn’t count then. You ever forced yourself on somebody? You know, like date-rape or whatever they call it.’
‘Of course not.’
‘How about when not on a date, just straightforward rape?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘OK, question seven: whose last twelve symphonies, and that’s numbers ninety-three to one hundred and four, are known as the London Symphonies?’
‘That’s Haydn,’ Sands said immediately.
‘Very good. Haydn it is. Twelve symphonies written between 1791 and 1795. I don’t suppose you can whistle any of them.’
Sands made a brave attempt to whistle a passage from one of the symphonies.
‘That’s good,’ said Mick. ‘I’m tempted to give you a bonus mark, but no, I’ve got to be fair. You’re still doing amazingly well. You’re at Westminster Bridge already. Let’s hope you can keep it up, as the Chelsea girls said to the man in marine insurance. Right, question eight: who, in a song, didn’t want to go to Chelsea?’
‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ Sands said.
‘Oh, come on, everybody knows that.’
‘Not me.’
‘Of course you do.’
‘I’ve said I don’t.’
‘Hey, don’t get stroppy, Jonathan,’ said Mick, and he punched him twice, once in the face, once in the stomach. He felt they were both overdue. Sands’ stroppiness disappeared, but from then on things started to go marginally less well for him. As well as not knowing that it was Elvis Costello who didn’t want to go to Chelsea, he didn’t know that Charles II first met Nell Gwyn in the Dove Inn at Hammersmith. Equally he had no idea that Crouch End derived its name from crux, the Roman word for a cross. He made a stab at guessing the population of London at the time of the Norman conquest, but he was nowhere near the right answer, which was somewhere between fourteen and eighteen thousand.
After eleven questions he was still at Westminster Bridge, still some way from the Thames Barrier, and Mick belted him across the face a couple of times in order to encourage him, help him to concentrate, and this time it did seem to help. Things started to get better for him. He knew that Woolwich was the site of the first London McDonald’s. He knew that the Marylebone line was the first tube line. He knew that Christopher Wren was a professor of astronomy at the time he drew up his plans for rebuilding London after the Great Fire. To Mick’s amazement he also knew that London’s Dog Cemetery was to be found in the north-east corner of Kensington Gardens, behind Victoria Lodge.
‘Hey, this is too easy for you,’ Mick said. ‘Maybe I should change the rules, have you go back a bridge for every answer you get wrong.’
‘No,’ Sands insisted loudly. ‘You set the rules at the beginning, now you stick by them.’
‘OK, OK,’ said Mick. ‘Don’t get so excited. It’s only a game. Question sixteen: whose grave at the church of St Mary Magdalene in Mortlake is in the form of an eighteen-foot-high stone Bedouin tent?’
‘Oh shit,’ Sands said, angry at himself ‘I ought to know that. Damn it. De Quincey?’
‘Well, it says here, Sir Richard Burton and his wife Isabel, which seems a bit rum to me, because I thought Richard Burton was buried in Wales and I didn’t know he was ever knighted, and I thought his wife was Elizabeth Taylor, and I suppose that could be a misprint but I didn’t think she was dead. Still, you live and learn.’
Sands shook his head; he was not going to educate Mick about Sir Richard Burton. Mick thumbed through the little book, halted at one page, was about to ask a question, then changed his mind, and kept looking.
‘Hey, what are you doing?’ Sands demanded. ‘Are you trying to find an impossibly difficult question to ask me?’
‘I can ask you any question I like,’ Mick said.
‘Yes, well.’ Sands hesitated, realizing the truth of what Mick was saying, realizing the absurd weakness of his own position. ‘Well, anyway,’ he added, ‘just ask me questions that I have some hope of answering.’
‘Sure,’ said Mick. ‘Question seventeen: in The Young Ones Cliff Richard is the leader of a youth club in which area of London?’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ said Sands. ‘I don’t know that. How would anybody know a thing like that?’ He took a wild guess and said, ‘Paddington.’
‘Yes!’ Mick said, and they both let out a sort of a whoop, prolonged in Mick’s case, instantly stifled in Sands’. Mick moved the toy boat up the river to Tower Bridge.
‘Hey,’ said Mick, ‘you’re going to walk this. Three questions le
ft. Get any of them right and you’re there. OK, where in London would you find the death mask of Tom Paine and a lock of his hair?’
‘Oh, come on,’ Sands said, genuinely angry. ‘How am I supposed to know something like that?’
‘Maybe you’re not,’ Mick replied. The answer is they’re in the National Museum of Labour History, Limehouse Town Hall, E14.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Sands.
‘Yeah, doesn’t exactly sound like a white-knuckle ride, does it? But it’s all right, no need to panic, here’s question nineteen: what’s the name of Boadicea’s father?’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’
‘What’s the matter? You wouldn’t want me to make it too easy for you, would you?’
‘This is insane. Why don’t you just say I’ve lost and have done with it?’
‘Come on, try. It says here he died and had his estate taken away from him by the Romans and that was why Boadicea revolted. Does that help at all?’
Sands was livid at the difficulty of the question. ‘This has nothing to do with London,’ he insisted. ‘Boadicea was queen out in the wilds of East Anglia somewhere. She only came to London to burn it down and as for her fucking father—’
‘No,’ said Mick, ‘I don’t think you’re going to get it. His name was Prasutagus.’
Sands took a deep, chest-puffing breath. He was frustrated and hugely angry, yet determined to retain some dignity.
‘Well, that’s really good to know,’ he said.
‘So, the moment of truth, the final question,’ said Mick. ‘And I want you to know I’m on your side, Jonathan. I really want you to get this right. OK, question twenty: who wrote those immortal words, “Earth has not anything to show more fair”?’
‘Wordsworth,’ said Sands at once with a kind of adolescent glee, and he let out a long sigh of relief.
‘Oh, Jonathan, that’s such a shame,’ said Mick. ‘I really thought you were going to do it, but I’m afraid the answer’s Flanders and Swann. They’re talking about London buses.’
‘No, no,’ Sands screeched. The original line is from “Composed on Westminster Bridge” by William Wordsworth. The line in Flanders and Swann is a parody, a deliberate reference to the Wordsworth.’
Mick looked at Sands disapprovingly.
‘Now come on, old chap, play the game. It’s here in the book in black and white.’
‘Then the book’s wrong,’ Sands shouted.
‘Well, it is called Unreliable London,’ Mick said. ‘But you know this is the book we’re using. This is my authority.’
‘Then the book’s a piece of idiocy. A piece of crap. Ask anybody. Wordsworth wrote “Earth has not anything to show more fair”. Ask anyone.’
He was sounding desperate to the point of hysteria. Mick slapped him again to calm him down. Then he slapped him again for luck.
‘You’ll have noticed,’ said Mick, ‘that until now I’ve been very careful not to tell you what I’d do if you failed to get to the Thames Barrier by the twentieth question …’
‘This is a fix,’ said Sands. ‘This isn’t fair. It never was.’
Mick listened carefully to what Sands had to say, then shook his head sadly, as though disappointed that he was being such a bad sport.
He said, ‘It’s true that the evening really hasn’t turned out as planned. Not for either of us. By rights we should be out on the water by now, somewhere not too far from the Thames Barrier. I really wanted to go there and see it and have a memorable experience. But anyway, it didn’t pan out. You were expecting something different too. But the fact is, what I always intended to do if you got the answers wrong was take this gun,’ and he showed Sands his gun, ‘and I was going to load it with a new magazine …’ He loaded it with a new magazine.
‘Ask me another question,’ Sands shouted. ‘You nearly gave me a bonus point for whistling Haydn. Come on, be reasonable …’
‘And I was going to pull the trigger a few times and empty the magazine, not into you, you’ll be pleased to hear, but into the bottom of your boat.’
‘No,’ Sands screamed. ‘This isn’t right. You know that. Ask me another question. A decider. Double or quits. Please.’
‘And you know the other thing?’ Mick said. ‘You’re right. This isn’t fair. It was never meant to be fair. It was meant to torture you a little. The truth is, whether we’d got to the Thames Barrier or not, I was still going to empty the gun into the bottom of your boat.’
‘No,’ Sands cried out.
Mick was as good as his word, and he was a long way from Chelsea Harbour, and Sands’ sinking boat was a terrible, terrible mess, before any of the sluggish security guards arrived to see what the noise was all about.
MASH
Mick called home again from a pay phone in the corner of an eel and pie shop where he’d just left most of a plate of pie and mash. It was early evening and the place looked ready to close. Gabby’s phone rang for a long time, its tone thin and very far away. When she answered her voice sounded breathless and guilty and there was music playing in the background that she made no attempt to turn down.
‘I was exercising,’ she said.
‘Yeah?’ said Mick.
‘Like aerobics. Got to keep in trim.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Well yes, and keep in practice, like rehearsing. I’ve got a couple more gigs at the weekend.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘You know, at first I thought it was very brave of you to go back on stage after the gang-bang, because I thought you’d be scared of the same thing happening again. But I realized that’d be crazy. What are the chances of it happening twice? I mean, if it had happened again, if you’d got gang-banged again, well, it’d be a hell of a coincidence, wouldn’t it? In fact, I think you’d have to say it was more than a coincidence. You’d have to say there was something about your dancing that drove men mad and turned them into rapists.’
‘Are you trying to be funny?’ Gabby snapped.
‘No.’
‘Are you trying to say that my being raped is some kind of dirty joke?’
‘I would never say a thing like that.’
‘Then stop sounding as though you’re taking the piss.’
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’
It was not normally part of Mick’s nature to say sorry. She was surprised and appreciative.
‘What’s your problem, Mick?’
She meant it to sound concerned, but Mick didn’t hear it that way. Slowly, deliberately, he said, ‘I think the problem may be something to do with the fact that I’m down in London trying to sort out the blokes who raped my girlfriend, while at the same time my girlfriend’s taking her clothes off for strange men back in Sheffield. I think that’s the sort of general area where the problem might be.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s what I do.’
‘I know, but I don’t have to like it.’
‘You never objected before.’
‘No, I didn’t.’
They slipped into silence, neither of them rash enough to want to open up that particular can of worms.
Then Mick said, ‘Actually, I rang up to tell you that number three has been dealt with.’
‘Good,’ she said.
‘Yeah. It was a pleasure, basically. I mean the guy’s scum. He’s got all that money. He’s got a lovely wife, lovely kid, lovely house. He used to have a lovely boat too.’
‘What?’
‘Never mind. Anyway, he’s got all that and he goes around picking up pairs of tarts. He deserves all he gets.’
‘What are you talking about? He deserves what he gets because he raped me.’
‘Of course he does,’ Mick said. ‘Of course.’
There was another silence, longer and clumsier than before. Mick knew it wasn’t meant to be like this. A phonecall home was supposed to be reassuring, nourishing. Perhaps it would have been better if he’d broken all contact until the job was completed, gone underground, but that would have b
een stupid. Besides, there were things that he couldn’t help asking.
‘They’re a rum bunch, these men,’ he said, articulating something that had been on his mind for a while. ‘I mean, I’ve met three of them now and they’re very different from each other. They don’t seem to have much in common. They don’t look like the sort of men who’d all be friends with each other.’
‘What are you saying? That you think you’ve got the wrong men?’
‘They’re the ones on your list,’ he said.
‘Then they’re the right men.’
‘Yeah, well, maybe I’m mistaken. Maybe gang-rape has this funny way of bringing people together.’
‘Is that another joke, Mick?’
‘No,’ he said, being more placatory than he really wanted to be. ‘No way.’
‘How much longer before you’re finished?’
‘I don’t know, not long.’
‘I’ll be glad when you’re finished,’ she said. ‘I miss you, you know.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Of course I do.’
Mick had no reason to think she was lying and yet she sounded unconvincing. Mick wondered if perhaps he no longer wanted to be convinced.
‘You could come down to London,’ he said. ‘We could have a weekend here together.’
‘I hate London.’
‘It’s all right when you get used to it.’
‘I’ve got a particularly good reason for hating it.’
‘It wasn’t London that raped you.’
‘Well, it feels that way.’
Mick could see there was no point arguing. ‘Look, the money’s running out,’ he said, although this wasn’t true. ‘I’ll go. I’ll phone you after I’ve done the next one.’
Before she could answer he hooked the receiver into place and some coins rattled into the change cup. The owner of the shop was tidying up the chairs, sweeping the floor, ready to close for the night. He looked at Mick disapprovingly though Mick couldn’t tell why. Was it because Mick had left the food or because he’d been listening in to the phone conversation?
Mick walked over to his former table and his abandoned plate, looked down at the food and said to the shop owner, ‘You know how you could sell more food around here?’
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