For one joyous moment he heard this as a sentence of praise, as though she loved what he had written, and he was starting to say thank you before he realized that the expression on Anita’s face wasn’t compatible with a demand for more of his prose.
‘What I mean,’ she said, ‘is that if you’ve really been walking ten miles a day, five days a week, and if you’ve now finished, having covered eight and a half thousand miles or so, then there should be a hell of a lot more than this. There would be at least three and a half years’ worth of diary here, probably much more. There should be thousands of pages.’
‘Not necessarily,’ he insisted. ‘There were lots of streets I had nothing to say about. There was no point forcing an observation. In those cases all I did was mark the street in the A–Z.’
‘Ah, yes,’ she said. ‘The famous A–Z.’
Stuart now realized that the blackened A–Z was bulging in his pocket. Anita put out her hand for it and he meekly passed it over. She looked at the pages with even less curiosity than Mick had displayed, and when she was done with it she dropped it on the floor like a discarded banana skin.
‘Yes,’ said Anita, ‘the A–Z is a nice touch but it’s hardly proof of anything is it? Any fool can sit down with a map and pen and black in streets.’
‘Any fool can, but I didn’t,’ he said. He was sounding a little desperate now, a little panicked. He added, ‘Anyway, you’ve only got one disk. There are others.’
‘Are there really?’ she said. ‘I doubt it somehow. I don’t make any claims to be a literary scholar, but I can smell a fake when it’s put under my nose.’
The room felt smaller and hotter than Stuart had ever known it. The ceiling was lower. The whirr of the computer fan filled his ears.
‘Fake?’ he said. ‘No. Absolutely not.’
He looked as though he might make a run for it, but Anita gave him a placatory smile and said, ‘Let me tell you what I think probably happened. I think that in the beginning you genuinely wanted to walk down every street in London. It sounds like you. I’m sure you intended to do it. I’m sure you planned to. But I suspect that before long it got very boring. It was all quite pleasant walking through Hampstead and Richmond and Kensington. And it was just fine walking through Highgate and B1ackheath. Wandsworth and Stoke Newington had their problems, Lewisham and Leytonstone you probably didn’t like at all. And you knew there was going to be worse still: Peckham and Tottenham and Canning Town and God knows where else. I’m sure you weren’t a snob about it, probably you really did visit Brixton and Shoreditch and Wanstead. I’m sure you weren’t too delicate to walk through a bit of urban blight. But I imagine that before long you looked at all those remaining mean streets that led you through depressing council estates, and through boring, boring suburbs, and perhaps even into some dangerous no-go areas, and you thought to yourself, I don’t belong here. This isn’t my manor. This isn’t my London. And so you said to yourself, “Forget it.” And frankly I don’t blame you. Nobody would.’
‘No,’ Stuart insisted. ‘You’re completely, completely wrong.’
Unmoved and unconvinced, she went on, ‘But you couldn’t forget it altogether. You’d set yourself this big target and you didn’t want to miss. But by then something had changed. By then you were really into the diary. You realized that writing was much more fun than walking. So you started inventing. Why not? You walked less and you wrote more. You sat in your car or in a pub or in a library perhaps, and you made it up as you went along. And it shows. The people having sex in public in Fulham, the woman doing the painting in Crystal Palace, some of the overheard conversations. They’re too neat. They’re not quite like life. They’re not part of the London I know.’
Stuart’s face was looking dangerously red and his fists were gripping imaginary dumb bells.
‘Let’s face it, Stuart, large parts of your diary are a shade too literary. The passages about that little Japanese tour guide, the sex passages, they really weren’t very convincing at all, then walking down the street and just happening to see her, the pursuit, her telling you to fuck off and die. I just wasn’t very convinced by that.
‘And really, the suicide stuff,’ she said. ‘I suppose I’m not the best person to judge the literary merits of those passages since I know you too well, but I didn’t buy it at all. You have many surprising qualities, Stuart, but I do believe that you’re completely incapable of killing yourself.’
At last something they could agree on.
‘The idea worked as a literary conceit,’ Anita said, ‘but not as part of an actual diary. And that’s all right too. Fiction isn’t to be despised. What you were doing was creating a new London, inventing a new city, a city of words, something in your own image.’
Stuart looked angry, frustrated, lost. The years of marriage had taught him how to argue, how to fight and fight back. He knew all about his opponent’s strengths and weaknesses, and often the combat could be a sort of familiar, playful wrestling. But now they were fighting to some new set of rules and Anita was using strange, exotic techniques that left him winded and fumbling.
‘It’s all right,’ she said, warmly. ‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of. You’re looking at me as though I’m your mother and I’ve found the dirty magazines you keep under your bed.’
He actually felt much, much worse than that.
‘You’ve been dabbling in a bit of creative writing,’ Anita said. ‘It’s strange in a man of your age but it’s not so terrible. Look, Stuart, I know things have been tough for you lately. I know you’ve been feeling useless and left out. I realize your current role in the business is no good for any of us. I know that situation has to change.’
Stuart’s head slumped. His body looked defeated. Now it seemed she was going to return to an earlier, more damning humiliation: business.
‘What about Japan?’ she said.
He didn’t respond. He thought she must be about to return to the subject of Judy, though he was quite wrong about that.
‘You’re not the only one who has secrets,’ Anita said. ‘That’s the reason I’m at home. I had some important things I wanted to think about. Here.’
She took a box file from a shelf next to the desk, and opened it to revealed a stash of faxes, plans, maps, business letters, most of them containing Japanese characters.
‘A business expands or it dies,’ Anita said. ‘And I think we’re both agreed that The London Walker really doesn’t have much room to grow. So I’ve been talking to people, specifically to some Japanese backers, people in the tourist industry. They tell me the Japanese really love London, but there are a couple of problems with it. First; it’s too big, dirty, dangerous and expensive, and second, and rather more crucially, it’s too far away from Japan.
‘But the Japanese are inventive. They’ve come up with a solution. They want to build a version of London out there in Japan in a place called Hakkaido, an island up in the north. It will only be a very small version, of course. All the tourist attractions of London will be there on one manageable site. There’ll be Buckingham Palace, St Paul’s Cathedral, Big Ben, all scaled down to about half-size and all within a couple of minutes’ walk of each other. There’ll be a miniature Tower of London with fake crown jewels inside. There’ll be a section of the Thames with an opening Tower Bridge. Maybe we could have a section with replica modern architecture, the Lloyd’s Building or the NatWest Tower, though the Japanese do modern architecture rather better than we do.’
Stuart looked and felt like the hero of a low-budget science fiction movie, the sort where the hero suddenly discovers that an alien intelligence has taken over his wife’s brain. He was speechless.
‘The thing is,’ she continued, ‘people want to shop when they come to London, so there’ll be versions of Harrods and Selfridges and Aspreys and Haden Brothers. There’ll be London buses, London taxis, maybe an underground system with just two or three stops, tour guides dressed up like London bobbies. There’ll be walking tours, o
f course. There could be re-enactments of the Great Fire, the Plague, maybe even the Blitz, although the Japanese are a bit funny about the war, obviously. And they want us to be involved. Because who knows more about London than we do?’
‘Who’s us?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘Who’s we?’
‘The London Walker. You and me,’ she said, and then added as a sweetener, ‘Especially you.’
‘These Japanese people don’t know me.’
‘I’ve told them all about you.’
‘It sounds like hell,’ Stuart said.
‘You’ll come round. I felt that way at first, but before long you start to see it’s a great idea. All London’s attractions in an area not much bigger than Trafalgar Square. You’d be able to walk down every single London street in the course of one afternoon.’
When she looked over at Stuart he was sitting on the floor, his back to the wall, his knees drawn up to his chin, a position that could suggest both prayer and supplication, and he was making a wet throaty sound she had never heard before. She couldn’t tell whether he was laughing or sobbing.
SHEFFIELD
Gabby was looking good on the day she met Mick from the London train. There was something newly mature and self-possessed about her. Her hair had been cut into a geometric bob and she wore a tailored, slightly mannish tweed jacket with tight jeans and heels. She hardly looked like a stripper at all.
As Mick detached himself from the rest of the arrivals, he still looked rough. He’d put on a new clean T-shirt but the suit continued to show the effects of his recent skirmishes. He walked stiffly towards her. She went to him, put her arms tightly round him, squeezed and kissed him. The kissing was thorough but it did not seem to Mick as though it was very deeply felt. He was glad. He didn’t want to have to feel too much. Her arms felt strange around him and he ran a hand through her unfamiliar hair. It immediately sprang back into place, neat and unruffled. Mick realized it was no longer the same colour it had been when he’d left. Perhaps she’d dyed it, but perhaps she’d let it return to its natural colour.
‘Did you bring my car?’ he asked.
‘The battery was flat.’
‘Yeah, well, I told you …’
‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a car.’
She took his arm as though he were an invalid or an elderly relative, and walked him across the car-park in the direction of a white BMW.
‘Is that yours?’ he asked, not expecting for a moment that it was.
‘I borrowed it.’
‘What? You hired it?’
‘Whatever,’ she said, and she unlocked the door and got in behind the wheel. She seemed at home, as though the car was very familiar to her. Mick was naturally suspicious, but he folded himself into the passenger seat and prepared for the worst. Without another word she began to drive. Mick had never liked her driving, it was too erratic and it made him nervous, but today she drove fast and purposefully, though she was heading neither in the direction of his flat nor her own. He wondered if she’d booked them into a hotel for their big reunion. That would have been uncharacteristically thoughtful of her.
‘We have a lot to talk about,’ he said, as an early warning to her that she shouldn’t expect this meeting to be too comfortable and easy.
‘Yes, we do,’ she agreed.
Yet for the moment it seemed best if they said nothing, if they let the backdrop of Sheffield roll by, first the terraced houses, then the retail parks, then a bit of greenery, then into the posher areas of the city. At last there was no city at all and they were in the countryside and Mick wondered if Gabby was doing something totally naff like taking him for lunch at a country pub, but that would have been even more uncharacteristic.
After a few more miles Gabby slowed down, turned into a narrow lane where the hedges almost touched the sides of the car, then along a dirt track that Mick could see led to a group of converted farm buildings. This was one version of the Sheffield dream: moving into the country and doing up an old barn. There was a big open-sided structure, maybe once an old cowshed but now a garage that housed a line of fancy cars. Opposite was a house, a big two-storey stone building with rockeries, an ornamental pond and a pair of huge mill stones set either side of the front door. There was a covered swimming pool out the back and beyond that a paddock with a couple of horses.
Gabby parked the car on a turning circle of gravel at the side of the house and got out. Still bewildered and still saying nothing, Mick slowly followed her.
She said, ‘There’s somebody I want you to meet.’ ‘Jesus,’ said Mick. ‘I can’t face meeting anyone. Not now.’ She didn’t stop to argue, just walked up to the front door of the house knowing that Mick would have to follow. She went in without knocking and Mick trailed after her. There was nobody there to meet them, but as he walked through the hall and went into the living room where Gabby was standing he saw that this was the house of a rich man; not London rich like Jonathan Sands or Graham Pryce, but rich nevertheless. It all looked simultaneously antique yet brand new. There were beams, bare stone walls, an inglenook fireplace with a big fire, an oak dresser, rows of copper pans; but they could all have been manufactured yesterday. Everything was spotless, polished, without patina, and there was a snowy white sheepskin rug on the floor. There was also the incongruous smell of cigar smoke in the air
Mick glared at Gabby, trying to convey a whole world of accusation, hostility and suspicion, but she remained perfectly at ease and unruffled. She had the upper hand, if for no other reason than she knew what was coming next.
After what felt like an age, a door opened in a corner of the room and a man came in. There was an arrogant bounce in his step. The way he entered the room showed that he owned all this and much more besides. He was a broad man, tall and big-chested. He could have been most ages between thirty and fifty, though Mick would have estimated the upper end. The image was somewhere between a bouncer and an ageing rock star. The hair was receding but long and meticulously laundered. The clothes were casually flash, a silk shirt, an embroidered waistcoat, a thick, studded belt. He looked like a hard man, a rough diamond, but not particularly thuggish, more the sort who gets other people to do his thuggery for him. Before Mick could weigh him up any further the guy was shaking him by the hand, putting an arm round his shoulder and laughing as though they shared a long and hilarious acquaintanceship.
‘Good to see you, Mick,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard a fuck of a lot about you.’
The voice was rough and local, though it had had a few edges rounded off. He was a Sheffield lad but he’d been around a bit.
‘This is Ross,’ Gabby said quietly. ‘Ross McLennan.’
Mick did not look impressed, not even interested, and he said nothing, but that didn’t matter to his host who was now going round the room stoking the fire, adjusting chairs, forcing Mick to have a drink. Reluctantly Mick accepted a beer and declined a glass.
‘Why am I here?’ Mick asked.
‘Because Gabby brought you here.’
‘And why did she do that?’
‘Because I told her to.’
‘It’s like that, is it?’ Mick said haggardly.
‘Yeah, it’s exactly like that.’
Mick sat back with his beer and decided to let McLennan make the running. For the moment he appeared to have no other option.
‘I hear you’ve been in London,’ McLennan said. Terrible place, isn’t it?’
‘Some of it.’
‘And I also hear you did a pretty good job while you were down there.’
‘Who’d you hear it from?’
‘Word travels,’ said McLennan.
Mick didn’t like the idea that anybody was talking about what he’d got up to in London, certainly not to some man in Sheffield he’d never met or heard of.
‘Gabby tells me everything,’ McLennan added.
‘Is that right?’ Mick said. ‘How do you two come to be such good friends?’
He could see Gabby tensing up
but McLennan answered evenly enough. ‘Through business,’ he said.
‘What business?’
‘You’re a nosy bugger aren’t you?’ he said, but he was amused, not angry. ‘I do all sorts of business. I do some promoting. I saw Gabby’s act. I thought she was too good for that game.’
He was sitting close to her and he reached out a hand and stroked her knee. Mick felt it was being mostly done for his benefit, to test his reaction, see if he’d get angry. In fact he felt a great surge of relief. For a moment he thought maybe that’s all this was, an unnecessarily elaborate way for Gabby to dump him, a way of showing him that in his absence she had found a new man, someone older, richer and fancier than him. But he didn’t believe it could be that simple.
‘I admire what you’ve done for Gabby,’ McLennan continued. ‘You saw what needed doing and you went and did it.’
‘Yeah, I’m good at that,’ Mick said. If McLennan wanted to detect a threat in his reply he was welcome to.
‘Defending a woman’s honour,’ McLennan said. ‘That’s very chivalrous, very Lancelot. Those bastards deserved everything they got.’
‘You think so?’ Mick asked.
‘After what they did to Gabby, I’d say so, yes.’
Mick took a mouthful of beer before saying, ‘I don’t know what they did and I don’t know who they did it to, but I don’t think they raped Gabby.’
The statement hung in the air like the smell of yesterday’s chip fat. Mick turned towards Gabby who briefly looked as though she was going to protest, but then she stopped herself. It was as though she couldn’t be bothered any more, that there was no longer a need to pretend. She wouldn’t look at him and she turned in her chair so that the back of one shoulder was facing him.
‘Are you calling Gabby a liar?’ McLennan asked.
‘She’s been called worse things,’ Mick said.
McLennan laughed. It didn’t even sound particularly forced. McLennan was easily amused and he didn’t seem to mind at all having his woman insulted.
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