I slit open a slim package. Another CD from another band. The Kicks.
Might as well start.
I pressed play on the stereo while I opened more mail. The people at Jaffa Cakes had sent a box of Jaffa Cakes and a note all about the future of Jaffa Cakes, and about how popular Jaffa Cakes not only were but are and will be. They were using the words ‘Jaffa Cakes’ quite a lot.
Hey, I thought, flipping round the cover of the CD. This isn’t bad. I studied it.
The Kicks: ‘Uh-Oh’.
It was … good. I mean, I’m no muso. I know the difference between 6Music and Classic; I bought Melody Maker when I was at college; I know who Steve Lamacq is and I once sat quite near Zane Lowe in a pub with copper tables, but I’m not one of those guys who can hear a band and immediately cite their influences and probable heroes. There are guys like that out there. Play them the first drumbeat and they’ll start banging on about Led Zeppelin or Limp Bizkit or how everything can be traced back to the man who wrote the Birdie Song. Dev can do it with videogames. He can take one look at a game and tell you what it’s trying to be, where it got the idea, what it’s been crossed with and how well it’s done, but I just can’t. Because I’m the other sort of person. A Type 2. One that judges everything on its own merits. Not because it’s the right and just and fair thing to do, but because there’s something about me that doesn’t quite have that passion. That need for peripheral knowledge. I like a little of everything; I don’t need it all. It can make conversations with the Type 1s a little strained. A Type 1 will have all his opinions ready to go and probably alphabetised before he even gets near you. A Type 2 will then shrink behind his sandwich.
Maybe Reviews Editor will suit me, I think. Maybe my speciality is not having a speciality. Though I do know quite a bit about Hall & Oates.
(Where it all started? (She) Got Me Bad. Best song? Las Vegas Turnaround. Best album? Big Bam Boom. Best member? Hall. Or Oates, if you prefer him. Best—.)
‘The hell’s this?’ said a voice, suddenly there. I span round in my chair – Rob’s chair, whatever – and turned the music down. It was Zoe.
‘The Kicks,’ I said, trying to sound as instantly knowledgeable and insightful as John Peel. ‘Brighton band, gigging around, this is “Uh-Oh”.’
‘The single or the album?’
Tsk. I’d have to look. John Peel wouldn’t have had to look.
Distract her.
‘Hey, I brought croissants like you said. And some other stuff.’
‘Jaffa Cakes, too?’
‘They’re from … well, they’re from Jaffa Cakes.’
And it was with this inspiring and profound exchange of words that I, Jason Priestley, began my tenure as Reviews Editor of London Now.
I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you as little as possible about my working day for now. You don’t need to know. Not really you don’t. You don’t need to know that I had a Toffee Crisp and an apple at eleven, that I popped back out to Pret at just gone one where I bought myself a crayfish wrap and a Coke. You don’t need to know that Clem was twenty minutes late, or that Zoe said Clem was always twenty minutes late, and you certainly don’t need to know that after I’d sorted out exactly what reviews should go to exactly what reviewers, I played a game of Castle Defence and ate a Twix.
All you need to know is that I was happy. This is what I’d wanted when I’d left St John’s. An office. Somewhere to sit, people to sit with, lunch hours where I’d buy crayfish wraps and Cokes. A little bubble of security and company.
I’d had company at the school, of course. In the staff room. The place we suddenly weren’t teachers any more, the place we didn’t have to be moral arbiters in. It was pretty easy to be cynical there. It was encouraged, if anything. When you’re spending all day telling people how to behave and what not to say, that staff room is a little beacon of beige joy. A release. A glorious place in which the pressure lifts from your shoulders the second you find your mug and pile your instant coffee and sugars in it and you’re suddenly locked in a battle to see who can say the most inappropriate thing about a child. The time it takes the kettle to boil is the time in which you and your colleagues have already put down most of the kids you’ve ever met, and when I say ‘put down’ I think you know what some of them wish they meant. They say only those who’ve seen warfare can ever truly understand each other. It’s much the same with playground duty. And then there was the grim inevitability of the assemblies. Public speaking is not and never will be my thing. I’d managed to sneak out of assembly duty all but once and I’d vowed never to do it again. There is nothing more dispiriting than giving a motivational speech to the terminally unmotivateable. It’s very demotivating. Especially when no one in the room – you, least of all – believes in what you’re saying.
But despite it all – despite the kids, and despite their parents, who could never quite see what the point of teachers was, who seemed to confuse school with daycare – I carried on. I would probably never have left. Not if it weren’t for Dylan Bale.
I shuddered, and put his angry little face out of my head.
Because it was six o’clock, and I didn’t want to think about kids like Dylan Bale.
And anyway. I had somewhere to be.
Charlotte Street was awash with people like me. Good, honest workers, done for the day, with their manbags and gladrags, spilling out of the Fitzroy and packing the Northumberland, and each of them looking very happy indeed. I’d walked straight past them all. I was round the corner, tucked away in the tiniest pub on Rathbone Street, not feeling I’d quite earned my place amongst the high-achievers with their branded satchels and limited-edition Converse. There were students and men in Chelsea shirts outside the Newman Arms, pointing at the sign that says Percy Passage and laughing, their Peronis and Fosters slopping out of their glasses and slapping onto the pavement every time they did. That was the thing about Fitzrovia. Plenty of sidestreets and passages; the curse of a bunch of minor landowners, each having their say and doing their own unordered thing with their puny part of London, with never a thought to the future. Marylebone or Bloomsbury next door wouldn’t have a Percy Passage. They’d have a Percy Square, or a Percy Buildings.
That’s why Fitzrovia wins.
I kept an eye out for the boys. They’d be here in a minute, with their research.
Matt had been amazed when he’d seen it. He’d just pointed at it, and said, ‘Look!’ And then he’d pointed at it some more, because we were looking – really looking – but all we could see was a car. Turns out it wasn’t just a car to Matt.
‘Ha!’
I turned. Dev had wandered in. He was pointing behind him.
‘Percy Passage!’
I could sense the barman tensing. I wondered how many times he’d heard that today. I wondered after how many years exactly it had lost its charm.
‘How was your first day at big school?’ said Dev, sitting down.
‘It was good.’
‘Did you tell them about the Level Up section?’
‘I thought you were calling it Game Over?’
‘Level Up is far more powerful. Game Over sounds like something kids would read.’
‘Well, I’ve not mentioned it. I didn’t want to come in and start proposing new features just yet.’
‘You should! Prove your worth! Put ideas forward! People love that! Our jobs revolve around ideas.’
‘You work in a videogame shop.’
‘Dreams, Jase! I deal in dreams! I can make you a pilot. A tank commander. A superhero. I can make you a little blue hedgehog. I am like a wizard, or a dreamweaver, or a more masculine version of that girl out of Bewitched. Just this morning I made someone into Daley Thompson.’
He sipped at his pint and made an important face, like not just anyone in North London could make someone into Daley Thompson.
‘I was right,’ were the words I heard next. ‘The car.’
Matt sat down heavily beside us.
‘It’s
rare. Really rare.’
He looked excited, and brought the photo out from his pocket. His fingers were oily and I was annoyed to register his hands were far more manly than mine.
‘Bryn from work reckons only twelve were ever made but he thought it was a Facel Vega Excellence. It’s actually not.’
‘Well, that helps.’
‘It’s a Facel Vega something, though, and it’s from the 60s,’ said Matt, maybe pleased to be teaching me something. ‘Only eleven hundred made. Dunno how many are left.’
I looked again at the photo. The car was green, and well-looked-after, and other than that there wasn’t much I could tell you. It had some wheels. But in the foreground, there she was, looking delighted. A delighted girl, under a bruised sky, near a green car. This was like Cluedo for oddballs.
‘I’m not really sure where this is getting me,’ I said.
‘You could find her, man! It’s another clue! Like Whitby! Find the car, find The Girl!’
‘She’s only standing near it. And not even very near it. It’s over her shoulder. And it’s not like we have access to police files, is it?’
‘It’s a clue, man!’
He laughed, incredulously, and a moment later, Dev did too, but then he shrugged at me.
‘I dunno, maybe there’s a classic cars club where this is registered,’ said Dev. ‘Maybe it belongs to a neighbour of hers. Or her … friend.’
Yeah. The chunky watch tan man. Of course he’d have a classic car. One of only twelve. That was just like this man I didn’t know.
I picked up the photo again.
‘I suppose it’s a clue,’ I said.
‘Of course it’s a clue!’ said Dev. ‘Look, this car might be a red herring, but it’s something. It’s—’
‘A fish,’ I said, reminded of something. ‘It’s a fish.’
There was an awkward moment.
‘Look,’ I said, quietly, pointing at something I’d just noticed in the photo. There was a building behind them. A huge, white building, at the very end of the road they were on. And, just near the top, you could make out half a word. The bottom half.
‘Alaska,’ said Dev, taking it from me.
‘Can’t be – that’s a right-hand drive car. British made. S’pose import’s an option, but—’
‘It’s not in Alaska,’ I said. ‘It must just be the name of the building. What is it, a factory? Maybe it’s a factory. Maybe she works at the factory.’
‘What would they make there?’ said Dev. ‘No one makes Alaskans. They’re just … Alaskans.’
‘I dunno,’ I said, because suddenly my mind was racing, and I picked up the other photos and started rifling through them, too, and an odd thought occurred to me: I’d learnt how to see.
I read this book once, called Your Inner Fish. It was about a scientist who became obsessed with finding a 375-million-year-old fossil of a fish he reckoned we all came from. It was halfway between the journey from speck of dust to chest-thumping monkey, and it was a fish with a neck, and the beginnings of wrists. It was the fish that made it out of the confusion of the water, and into the vast unknown of the world. And without that fish, that world would always remain unknown. We’d have no world. No things to do or places to be. No girls in cabs, no Percy Passage, no straight, no gay, no soup of the day, no nothing. This man, he ended up in the Canadian Arctic, with a bunch of other scientists, all also looking for the same fossils, and he spent weeks following them about, despairing every time they spotted one and he didn’t. What did other people have that he didn’t? What was missing?
And then one day, it hit him. He hadn’t been focusing properly. His priorities were out. He didn’t know what to look for. He didn’t know how to see. And the second he did – the very second he saw that first fish – the ground lit up for miles around with the glint of fossils in the morning sun. I’m paraphrasing, slightly, maybe even romanticising it a bit, but that’s how it sounded to me. Suddenly, as soon as he realised, as soon as he opened up those eyes, those fossils were everywhere, winking at him, waving at him, congratulating him for finally being able to see, and sparkling like diamonds in the ground. That’s what it felt like. These photos were packed with diamonds in the ground.
Maybe I had found my inner fish.
I was impressed. It had taken that other bloke nine years and hundreds of pages.
Whenever I’d looked at the photos, I’d only really looked at The Girl. Not even when I was standing in the place one of them was taken had it truly hit me that all these photos must have actually been taken somewhere. It sounds crazy, but because they weren’t mine, the places didn’t seem real places. Real places I could go to, or might have walked past, or – in the case of Café Roma – might even have been in.
‘What we need to do,’ said Dev, trying to take the photos from me, ‘is establish a link. A common theme.’
I scrunched my nose up.
‘That’s not how photos work, is it?’ I said. ‘You don’t take them by theme. You just take them.’
‘Yes,’ said Dev. ‘Agreed. But that’s with digital stuff. We are talking about the psychology of the disposable.’
‘Why can’t it just be chaos?’ said Matt, and I felt proud, like a teacher again.
‘Because disposable pictures are actually anything but,’ said Dev, sounding like he’d rehearsed this.
He made a wise face and sat back in his chair. Me and Matt leant towards him, but then realised our faces were a bit close, so sat back again.
‘The thing about disposables is, they’re special pictures. You delete pictures normally, because you know you can, so you fire them off with no thought or regard to quality or timing. You take one look, and you decide you look too drunk or puffy or tired and you take another, using your special picture face. But these—’
He picked them up, and waved the packet in the air.
‘These are proper snapshots. Snapshots of life. Happy moments, or special ones, and you have to decide to take them. You have to plan them. Because you’re running out of moments. You’re always running out of moments.’
‘What’re you on about?’ said Matt, but now I did lean in, because I got what Dev was saying.
Lately, that’s just how I’d felt. Like I was running out of moments.
‘You have twelve exposures,’ he said. ‘Twelve moments to capture. It’s finite. So every time you capture one in that little box, you’ve got one less to spare. By the time you get to that last one, you better be sure that moment is special, because what if the next one comes along and you’ve got to let it go?’
What a terrible thing, I thought, to let a moment go.
‘With a disposable, you want to complete your little story. End on an ending. Or a new beginning. A dot-dot-dot to take you into the next roll.’
This is where Dev’s theory started to falter a little for me.
‘Hang on. That last shot was of me.’
And Dev just smiled.
‘That’s just the thing,’ he said. ‘You’re already part of her story. Now you get to make her part of yours.’
And he reached into his pocket, and he slid the new, blue disposable across the table.
I looked at it.
I picked it up, and put it in a pocket of my own.
And as we sat there, and drank some more, and the excitement built as we pointed out new clues from previously unseen backgrounds or foregrounds or bent and ripped corners, I started to wonder if I should tell them. Tell them what I’d already done today. That no matter how inspiring this moment was for me, I’d already created a little moment of my own.
After the crayfish wrap, after the Castle Defence and the Twix, the thing I’d done that I’d tried to avoid telling you by blaming boring work and assuring you it held no interest.
Because I’d already done one thing today to bring me and The Girl one step closer.
TEN
Or ‘She’s Pretty’
Thursday, 8 a.m. I sat on the number 91 to King’s
Cross with something approaching nervous excitement in my stomach.
Since I’d decided to do this – to crawl out of the water, try and catch that moment before it faded entirely, become my inner fish – I’d begun to feel eerily comfortable with it. That I deserved this. That you never know, it might lead me somewhere. Dev mentioned destiny. I used to believe in destiny. Until destiny tripped me up and pushed me into a flat with Dev. That my destiny could be living in a flat with a man who talks a lot about destiny seems too cruel to be feasible as a concept.
I looked up and saw the yellow-jacketed men and women, standing outside the station, stamping their feet to keep warm, trying to shift as many complimentary copies of London Now as they could before the rush was over.
‘Complimentary’ is what they’re trained to call them, by the way, not ‘free’; same way some men are trained to call themselves ‘sharp shooters’, not ‘snipers’. They both mean the same, of course, but I know which one I’d rather sit next to at a dinner party.
So I grabbed my complimentary copy of London Now and made a point of thanking the man who gave it to me, thinking this might make his day, but he was onto the next person already and so I kept my head down and walked into the ticket hall, then down into the depths of London, below everyone and everything and everywhere else, and where I could read my paper without anyone knowing.
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