Bleeding London

by Geoff Nicholson

  Lawton, naturally, did as he was told, smiled coquettishly, shuffled across the room. He knelt in front of Mick, head down, buttocks raised and spread, and Mick took the telephone receiver and slapped Lawton on the backside with it. Mick could sense Lawton’s disappointment. He had anticipated much more and much worse.

  ‘Actually,’ Mick said, ‘I think some of this furniture’s quite good.’ Seconds later he was out of the building, while in Sheffield Gabby was left wondering how she’d got cut off.

  THE WALKER’S DIARY

  THE KNOWLEDGE

  I think I have at last discovered my real reason for walking the streets of London. Perhaps it should have been obvious all along. It seems I am not looking for adventure, for love, for sex. I am not trying to satisfy my curiosity, not trying to reclaim the city. And ultimately, despite my hopes for posterity, I am not walking London in order to create a literary work. No. Quite simply, I am looking for death: my own.

  [Anita laughed like a drain as she read these words.]

  Lightermen operating in the Port of London, ferrying cargoes by tug or barge, the aristocracy of the docks, seven thousand of them employed after the war. Large sacks of animal bones, donkey, cow, camel, sent in from North Africa heading for the mills at Bow to be crushed into fertilizer. Sacks bursting open, bones picked clean, alive with green beetles.

  A herd of cattle thundering up York Way from King’s Cross, being driven to the slaughterhouses in Market Road.

  Antique shops, museums, flea markets, boot sales: windows through to the past, conduits through which history leaks out.

  Boadicea’s Hill, a mound on top of Parliament Hill, said to be where Boadicea was buried, although scholars differ on this one. St Paul’s Cathedral built on the site of a pagan temple dedicated to Diana. When Wren built St Paul’s he found remnants of a circular temple and ox bones used in sacrifices.

  The Tower of London built on a holy hill, Bryn Gwyn, the severed head of the hero-god Bran supposedly buried there.

  Mudlarks wading through the Thames, often children, searching for salvage. Shoremen working in gangs down the sewers. Couldn’t work singly because of the killer rats. Coins dropped down. Sometimes when it rained the sewers would fill to the top with water. The story of the Hampstead monsters – the offspring of a sow who wandered into the open end of a sewer, found a spot she liked, gave birth to her litter, created a subterranean herd, living in stench and darkness, feeding off sewage, breeding.

  I stopped for lunch in a greasy spoon. Behind me there were three young people, at least they looked young to me, two men, one woman. They looked stylish and moneyed as though they might work for a record or video company.

  One of the men said, ‘So I’m trying to get off the tube, right, and there’s this man blocking my way, so I push past him, you know, the way you do on the tube, it was no big deal, and after I’ve got past him he punches me really hard in the back and says, “Learn to say excuse me, shithead.” I was worried. He looked as though he would have killed me soon as look at me.’

  Then the other man said, ‘Well, I got mugged coming through Soho last week. It was late. I was fairly drunk. I guess I must have looked a bit of a target. These three really young kids appeared out of nowhere, surrounded me and one of them said, “Give me your wallet or I’ll kill you.” So obviously I handed over my wallet. I mean, I don’t think he really would have killed me, but you can’t take any chances in London these days, can you?’

  Then the woman said, ‘Well, a friend of mine, in Putney, a burglar got into her bedroom while she was asleep, held a gun to her head, kept her captive till the next morning and raped her half a dozen times. She’s still in therapy.’

  There was a short silence then the two men said simultaneously, ‘You win, we can’t compete with that,’ and all three of them laughed very, very loudly.

  The coronation of Richard I. The Jews have been forbidden to enter the Abbey and take part in the celebrations. They may be essential to the wealth of the country, their presence may have been encouraged by William I because of their financial acumen, but they are still not like us, and they demand a high price for the help. They are usurers. Their religion demands strange rituals. Their exclusion seems only natural. However, one or two of them, apparently more knowing than the rest, have come to the celebrations, believing that they will be tolerated given that they have come with expensive gifts. And sure enough the king himself is prepared to be tolerant. He indulges them quite willingly, enjoys their company, but he has reckoned without certain zealous elements in the court, who, discovering this Jewish presence, immediately seek physical retribution. A good beating is administered to the Jews right there at the coronation, and what happens in the Abbey soon spreads to the world at large.

  What better way to celebrate a new reign than to take part in a pogrom? Soon a full-scale purge is taking place in the streets of London. While coronation celebrations continue in the Abbey, a mob outside is setting fire to the houses of Jewish settlers and murdering the occupants as they run out in terror. The king does his best to ignore what he knows is taking place, and he doesn’t find it so hard. After all, the Jews are not true citizens. They do not have the full protection of his laws. And yet the noise from the streets, the baying of the mob and the screams of the victims, is loud enough to quite put a damper on the festivities. The king does what any man might do in that situation. He tells his minstrels to play louder and drown the terrible noise from outside.

  Postman’s Park, the former churchyard of St Botolph, Alders-gate, and on the wall a series of plaques commemorating heroic but ordinary deaths: Alice Ayres, who saved three children from a burning house in Union Street, Borough, but died in the process. Thomas Simpson, who died of exhaustion after rescuing people who’d fallen through the ice on Highgate Ponds. Mary Rogers, a stewardess on the Stella who gave up her life belt and voluntarily went down with her ship.

  I look at the Millbank Tower and Centrepoint and I wonder why we in London have never dreamed up a Godzilla, a cheap science fiction destroyer of cities.

  John Alington, a British farmer and altruist, took seriously his role as educator of his workers. He created a model of the world in his farm pond and used it to teach his employees geography. Then in 1851 he said he would take them to the Great Exhibition, but before they went he instructed them to build a large-scale model of the streets from Fling’s Cross to Hyde Park, so they’d know the route when they arrived in London. The model was a complete failure, out of scale, the workmanship shoddy. It scarcely at all resembled the London that Alington knew. It was clear to him that if his men were not capable of building a model of the city, they would be quite incapable of finding their way around it. He summarily cancelled their trip to London.

  At the top of a distant staircase in the Victoria and Albert, there’s an intricate scale model of Vauxhall Gardens. The reality is gone. A hundred years of pleasure, of promenading and feasting, of nightingales and fountains, pavilions and statuary, temples, fireworks and on one occasion a re-staging of the Battle of Waterloo.

  In the Museum of London, a model of mid-seventeenth-century London, and as a crowd gathers round the model the lights go down and a voice on tape starts reading from Pepys’ Diary, describing the Fire, and gradually all over the darkened city little electrical lights begin to flicker, impersonating fire.

  Another town with fire gaps. After the American firestorm raid on Tokyo, Hiroshima prepares itself for the worst. Expecting incendiary raids they create a series of fire gaps in the town. Wooden buildings are demolished to leave large blank areas cleared of debris, places where there is nothing to burn. They think they are ready for the coming fire. They have no idea. Oh, Judy.

  In Lamb’s Conduit Street, an undertaker’s. I can see that undertakers must always have trouble deciding what to put in their shop windows: flowers? marble headstones? skulls and old bones? This one had solved the problem neatly; antique maps of old London.

  I thought of Xanadu and T
roy and Babylon and Manhattan, those mythical cities with their palaces and their projects, their structurings and enfoldings. And I thought that London is mythical too, created in the image of each of its inhabitants, newly imagined with each new citizen, with each new attempt to describe it.

  As I walk I realize I am no longer the person I was. The middle-aged man in the cashmere overcoat who looks at his reflection in the shop window would be unrecognizable to the boy, the youth, the young man he has previously been. I think that these younger selves would have been contemptuous of that man, complacently certain that they would never end up like him. Probably I’m no longer even the man that Judy fell in love with. I’m certainly not the man that Anita married.

  I know too that it is not merely a question of change and growth, not even of decay, but rather of demolitions, regroupings, blottings out. The opinions, the tastes, the most passionately held beliefs have all disappeared in a blitz of slum clearance and redevelopment. Yes, a man is like a city, a site of erasures, of subsidence, in-fill, subdivision and occasional preservation orders. But there is no blueprint, no foolproof map, no essential guide book.

  I feel at home in the city, I feel part of its fabric. It feels as alive as I do, but with a much longer life-span. London wasn’t built in a day, and I know that it will long outlive me, though in what, and how recognizable a form, I have no idea.

  What do people do when they’ve fulfilled their ambitions? When they’ve sailed the Atlantic, or made their millions, won the World Cup, or settled down happily with a wife who loves them? Well, in some cases they do it all over again, so that they achieve extra satisfaction from having sailed the Atlantic in both directions, from multiplying their millions, from having retained the World Cup. But to be settled with a wife and a job and way of life is not simply an act of achievement, not a one-off, rather it’s a balancing act, an on-going achievement, a feat of management, maintenance and continuity. And I am no longer capable of balancing.

  What could possibly replace my walking? If my walks around London were designed to fill some spiritual void, then what would fill it when the task was at last completed? What can a man do when he’s done London? Death seems like an attractive option. Actually, it seems like the only option.

  I’d been walking in Southfields and was completely worn out and couldn’t face public transport, so I hailed a taxi to go home. He was a talkative driver and I wasn’t strong enough or brave enough to tell him to shut up. And after a while he’d obviously convinced himself that I was a man he could share his innermost thoughts with.

  He said, ‘Supposing a man breaks into your house, a man with a gun, a madman. You’re at home, sitting quietly with your wife and one of your kids. The madman makes you an offer, gives you a choice. He tells you he’s going to kill someone, either your wife or your kid. But he’s not sure which, it’s all the same to him. And so he wants you to decide for him.’

  ‘Is this a joke?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said the driver. ‘It’s a moral conundrum. You have the choice of losing a spouse or a child: which do you go for?’

  ‘What if I don’t make a choice?’

  ‘Then he’ll kill both of them.’

  ‘What if I don’t have any children?’

  ‘Then you have to imagine.’

  I imagined, and said, ‘I’d let him kill me.’

  ‘No, no, no.’ The driver was getting quite irritated. That’s not an option. You have to live knowing that you’re responsible for the death of either your missus or your child. And you mightn’t have all this time to think about it.’

  I gave the appearance of thinking long and hard about it, and then I said, ‘You know, I think it’s precisely because I’ve wanted to avoid having to make such a moral decision that my wife and I have never had children.’

  He turned round and said sarcastically, ‘You’re a funny man, aren’t you?’

  I tried to look as though I saw nothing remotely funny about what I’d said, hoping that would shut him up. But instead he started telling me his views on the problem, which of course was all he’d ever wanted to do in the first place. It had something to do with wives being more easily replaceable than children. I wasn’t listening. I was thinking how great it would be to find someone who could end it all for me. I was thinking that I might go home now, walk into my house and there he’d be, this madman with a gun, offering me absurd choices, and I’d say, ‘OK, go ahead, pull the trigger. Thanks.’

  What would the intruder look like? Big, of course, young probably, demented-looking, cropped hair, low forehead, bulldog neck. Black or white? Wearing jeans and T-shirt? Leather jacket? A suit? Terrorist gear? And what does he say? Is he chatty in his madness? Does he have an accent? South London? East End? Estuary?

  I found it all too easy to picture the scene, but I had no ending for it, no punchline. Did the madman really pull the trigger? Was the gun really loaded? Was it even a real gun? Or was he just using it for effect? Was he just another London loser with an image problem and a chip on his shoulder? I hoped not. I wanted him to be real. I needed him to be efficient.

  I realized that the end of my wandering should be, not simply the blotting out of the city, but also the blotting out of the self. When the map was all blacked in I’d be ready to be snuffed out. And I know I don’t have to plan it. It’s there waiting for me, something suicidal, although the inquest won’t call it that, but something that gets the job done just the same. Tomorrow I take to the streets for one last time, the last stretch, the last ten miles. And when it’s done he’ll be there waiting for me, my fate, my killer. Hello, there. Good to see you. Been waiting long?

  When a man is tired of London he’s ready for a bullet.

  READY

  Anita rubbed her eyes, turned away from the screen and experienced what she would later describe as a failure of the emotions. So that was meant to be the answer, was it, the supposed ‘reason’ for Stuart’s new-found serenity? He was content because he had no more worries, and he had no more worries because he had decided to kill himself He was on the way to a suicide. He was indulging his own mortality.

  She was unsure what her reaction should be. She knew she could have been furious. Suicide wasn’t at all the simple, easy thing that Stuart had described. It was always a big, ugly explosion in the life of those who were left behind. How could he do that to her? How could he abandon her? The simple way out for him would be impossibly difficult for her. And how could he find her so easy to abandon? Their marriage wasn’t plain sailing, but leaving your wife behind should be a cause for some regret, some pain. Her existence might not be enough to keep him here, but it ought surely to be enough to make the leaving that much more difficult. Yes, she might have reacted that way.

  And she knew that she might have felt sorry for him. Anyone who contemplates suicide must, by definition, be in terrible pain. She genuinely did not want Stuart to be in that state. How could she not be saddened? How could she not feel a sense of guilt that her own love and concern weren’t sufficient to staunch that pain?

  Or perhaps she could have felt worse still that she’d had no inkling of how Stuart was feeling, of what a desperate state he was in. She might have recognized this as a failure in herself, as an inability to know what her husband was feeling, and worse, an inability to be able to do anything about it.

  She might have had her own suicidal feelings. She might have felt like a murderess. She might have looked at that last entry and been terrified. The tomorrow to which it referred was now upon them. Stuart was out there somewhere in London, concluding and completing his task; looking for trouble, for a way out, for someone to kill him. She might have feared that London was only too full of such people. And she might have thought it was not too late. She might have thought that she still had time to save him. She might have got in her car and driven wildly, recklessly, hopelessly, across the city, trying to find him and save him.

  But in the event she felt and did none of these things. She felt no
anger, no sympathy, no guilt, no sense of failure. She simply went back to the computer, checked the list of files in order to make certain that she’d found them all, printed them out, and sure enough she had. The full story, such as it was, was in front of her. She gathered the printed sheets together, stacked them neatly on the desk, lined up the edges carefully. So there it was, her husband’s secret diary, his great unfinished work, his confession and suicide note, and she realized that she didn’t believe a word of it. She looked at her watch. She calculated that he’d be home soon and she’d be more than ready for him.

  TUBE

  Mick sat on the bed in his room at the Dickens. The old melancholy eddied around him. The window was open and the cold air prickled the skin on his bare arms. He looked at his watch. It was late morning. He had been there all night, not sleeping, not even dozing, just listening to the sounds of the city. It had been depressingly quiet. He had wanted to hear the squeal of car tyres, police sirens, screams, gunshots, signs of life, but all he’d heard were a couple of far-away radios and the noise of cats fighting or mating.

  He had done what he came to London to do. It was over. He knew he ought to be feeling many things: relief, release, contentment at a job well done. In fact he felt nothing. He was beyond feeling. As soon as he could stir himself he would leave this hotel, leave London and go back to Sheffield, though he knew that things there would not be as he had left them. Still, that was where he came from, and it was the place he had to go back to.

  He struggled to pull himself together. He wanted some air. He got up from the bed, put on his jacket and went out of the hotel, and as he hit the pavement he realized he didn’t have to go back there at all. He could walk to St Pancras, get on a train and that would be it. His gun was still in the bedside cupboard but it could stay there. He didn’t need it. In a way he never had. It had done a job but he felt good to know that he’d never had to fire it at anyone. The gun had been a persuader but everything he’d done, he’d done himself, through his own ability and wit. There was a jigsaw and an A–Z in his room too, and a book called Unreliable London, but he wouldn’t be needing those either.