‘London,’ I said, ‘submits to nightwalkers as to drunks. You get the same blurring at the edges, recklessness in the stride that can leave you flat on your face.’
It had been announced that we could all sleep safer in our beds now: if we could sleep at all for worrying over the possible eviction of Ed Balls from Strictly Come Dancing, a reality programme in which a dumped political bruiser was rebranded as a charmingly incompetent dad-dancer. This was a fitting spectacle, so Tony Hall, Director-General of the BBC, instructed us, to ‘bring the nation together’: in disbelief. United by the shared vision of robotic Salsa hoofing, we were prepared for a massive security upgrade in the vicinity of railway stations.
‘Today,’ the senior copper in the big hat explained, without winking, ‘you will notice dozens of officers in high-visibility clothing handing out leaflets. Tomorrow you might not find a single uniform on the station concourse – but I can assure you, we will be watching. It might be that man in the long black coat. It might be a group of – hem – attractive young women at the coffee stall. It might be a solitary dog. When you don’t see us, we are there. Our men have been trained to identify unusual patterns of behaviour around certain buildings, suspicious characters with digital devices standing too long in one place. We are aware.’
***
Grand-project burrowing makes the approach to Highbury & Islington station a matter of blind rushes and fence-hugging. I posed against a promotional hoarding masking the hole, the portrait of a stern yellow-tabard construction worker like an old Soviet hero given boy-band gloss. I hold up a copy of the Evening Standard. ROYAL LINE: CROSSRAIL NAMED IN HONOUR OF THE QUEEN. I feel like a kidnap victim or Isis captive making an execution video.
Highbury is alert to a Catalan invasion, the presence of Barcelona, who are challenging Arsenal in a Champions League group tie. Trudging down Offord Road, in the direction of Pentonville Prison, and the drones delivering tonight’s ration of chemical pick-me-ups, we hear live groans from the Emirates Stadium – and, at the same time, view segments of the game through consecutive Islington windows. We stand for a few moments to appreciate the intricate patterns woven by pinball-men on a brilliant green lozenge in the electric night.
Up the ramp at Caledonian Road & Barnsbury, Andrew tries to engage a nightworker in the ticket office with football banter, news of the Arsenal score. He has more success with the drinkers outside a pub on Agar Grove.
The Kentish Town moon is a bellying kite threatened by planes that might be meteors. John Rogers tells us that he worked this patch, walking the gap between stations, Kentish Town West and Gospel Oak. Through his special nightvision eyes, we witness properties and dens visited by Russell Brand, snailtrails of expeditions undertaken with Will Self and Nick Papadimitriou. Wasn’t Grafton Road, John reminisced, where Will located the death of one of his serial characters, Dr Shiva Mukti? Or was that another quack, another book?
Hunger barks. No time for a full Indian, leisurely service, Cobra beers – and not enough material gathered to fuel retrospective conversation. Like poor Ruth Ellis, up the hill at the Magdala, but without the gun, Andrew sweeps on a convulsive charge through a public house where it’s far too late to bag a cheese sandwich. John and his camera are about to abandon us. The night is too cold. He is interior-nocturnal: the resting Leytonstone house, the faces and voices to be shaped for tomorrow’s blog.
Now that my duncephone is back on, the calls start coming through from David Erdos. Hard to make him out above the steam and clatter of the kebab house, but he is persistent, clinically so. I met Erdos at a poetry event celebrating another nightwalker, David Gascoyne. Another Londoner who put his amphetamine-fuelled neurosis to good account. Gascoyne, like all of us, recalibrated his memory script to place himself in the crowd, in Cable Street or wherever, at the significant moment: in the Blackheath room when the Mass Observation project was launched, or the Surrealist Exhibition with Dalí and Dylan Thomas. ‘The city’s lack and mine are much the same.’ He spoke of ‘vagrant hope’. And how all great cities, the ones he had seen, become one. ‘Big densely built-up area for a man to wander in / Should he have ceased to find shelter.’
The Gascoyne poem commissioned by the BBC’s Third Programme, for broadcast in December 1955, was called Night Thoughts. And like the more popular Under Milk Wood, this was a dream play, a nocturnal reverie, an ‘encounter with silence’. The poet recalls his own nights wandering beside the Thames, imagining power stations as temples of some ‘sacrificial rite’. The impulse, as in the expedition described by Will Self as an Afterword to Matthew Beaumont’s Nightwalking, is always centrifugal: a jittery trudge through coshed suburbs to shake free of habit, then the fields, ‘an open hillside’. There has to be: ‘A public park space from which one looks down / Upon the mighty Nocturne of the Capital.’ At this point of vantage, the pilgrim is somehow redeemed.
My Hampstead burger was related to no animal that walked this earth, no substance beyond scrapings from the sole of a shoe. Chips as in wood: curled chippings, off-cuts from a sawmill, macerated in linseed oil. The ruined wing of some horribly tortured chickenthing is like a bite of deep-fried umbrella. Better, after squirting all the sachets of rancid mayonnaise, the plasma bags of ersatz tomato, to eat the polystyrene carton. Our digestive tubes have accepted a challenge that will take many London miles to break down. But David Erdos is still there, still hot. Still talking.
What is lovely about this night kitchen, far beyond the incidental food substitutes, is the grace with which the plates are served. The proprietor has a genuine calling. He is a missionary of the Heath fringes, running a late-night soup-kitchen for Gascoyne vagrants and random derelicts of no fixed abode. He smiles his saintly smile. And gifts us with complimentary fizzy drinks, sugar rushes to carry us over the Hampstead massif, the cabins and colonies of psychiatrists and anti-psychiatrists.
The faithful penitents of the burger chapel are lovely people too. They come in with nods and salutes. Do they think I’m a surgeon or an escaped patient from the Royal Free Hospital? This is where exhausted nurses, prostitutes between shifts, rambling junkies, take a break. And drop the regulated behaviour patterns of their professions for a sociable exchange over hot sweet tea and buttered slabs. We are not the connections they are waiting for, but it doesn’t signify. Unlike the football men outside the pub and the workers guarding holes in the road, they have absolutely no curiosity about what we are doing or where we are going. All that is left outside. Left with the hogs tossing in their beds.
David Erdos is a compact package, inky haired, close-cropped and fast-talking, spinning names: a child of the northwest suburbs. He is writing producing performing and emailing by the yard. A restless particle. Reading viewing visiting. He wants to walk by my side, it doesn’t matter where, to gather up the sentences for an online piece that might become print in a revived underground newspaper. I try to explain that my walks are ordinary, solitary. And silent. He persists, he batters me with repeated expressions of his extreme sensitivity to the fate of being a professional nuisance. I like him. Of course there are other walks that are strategic, collaborative. Like this one. It might be to our mutual benefit. David could become a character in the night, yeast to a flagging paragraph. A bridge between the burger hospice and the wilds of Willesden.
‘Right, David. If you must have a pedestrian interview, fine. Tonight. 10.30pm. Outside Finchley Road & Frognal Overground station.’
‘Ah! Yes!’ he said. ‘I’m just coming down with a heavy cold. Boils on the fundament. A new play to see and critique. Another time?’
But the calls keep coming, one every fifteen minutes. David is conflicted, he can’t let it go. And, sure enough, the man is there, waiting patiently, as we approach. A scholar-hitman of the shadows in long grey business coat, blue-grey turtleneck. He is mouthy like Mick in The Caretaker. But smart and sensitive too. And he falls, immediately, into lockstep, bouncing, alongside one and then the other; so that, descending towards West Hampste
ad, we can no longer see where we are. David directs us through repeated disclaimers. He is not worthy of the task. Andrew becomes Davies with his Sidcup routines. And I am the brain-burnt mute, Aston. Fiddling with a screwdriver. And waiting to deliver the killer monologue.
‘I had worried about interrupting the rhythm and flow not only of the night long walk… but also of their friendship, but both men were welcoming and as generous as you would wish and want them to be,’ Erdos wrote in his report, entitled Kensal Rising. Of course we were. David was fresh content. Voice of place.
In his nice, well-mothered, Jewish fashion, Erdos has gifts for both of us. For Andrew, the script of Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits. And for me, the darker fare of Ingmar Bergman’s Serpent’s Egg, his tax-exile German film. ‘Paranoia runs dementedly and tediously out of control in this Grand Guignol recreation of 1923 Berlin as a studio set,’ said Jan Dawson in the Time Out Film Guide. Spot on.
Kensal Rise and the avenues of cemetery suburbs loomed on the western horizon. David talked of the burial ground where ‘Pinter’s personal silence is held.’
Not wanting to be left out of this bookish chat, Andrew swooped on a box of discarded stock still on the pavement after the protests around the closure of Kensal Rise Library. He chose a ballet girl romance, defaced it liberally in the spirit of Joe Orton, and doubled back at a brisk jog to post it through the letterbox of a sleeping friend in Bathurst Gardens. David saw the gesture as ‘a true and touching manly sentiment’.
Erdos was game. The boil at his trouserline had rubbed raw with the miles of unlit houses, the disappearance of all other walkers, visible café life, pub life and football hysteria. The qualitative difference in the two Overground circuits, night to day, was palpable. When we set out towards the river on our clockwise circuit, we were coming fresh from sleep, our sluggish bed-senses were beginning to fire. The optimism of a new day was an extension of that body-to-body cycle of half-waking reverie, shared with a partner who stayed just where she was, before rolling across to settle in the warm, vacated indentation. At night, heavy-footed, responses running down, we were already sliding towards sleep. Or the denial of sleep. We were dreaming ourselves into London. ‘Wilting areas of opaque obscurity,’ David Gascoyne wrote. Brondesbury Park to Willesden Junction.
Matthew Beaumont told me that he was considering Gascoyne for a sequel to Nightwalking, provisionally titled Midnight Sun. The nightwalker is an insomniac whose blind wanderings are a ‘metaphor for the crisis of Reason’. Gascoyne, hepped on Benzedrine, is a precursor to the thumb-twitchers of Olympicopolis; the addicted screensavers who doze in a pulsing ring of electronic devices, knowing that the world will not wait. It is bleeping its insect chorus as you snore. It is devouring its own resources. Somatic phantoms ripple across the railway map of London; dream-spectres jump from sleeper to sleeper, dragging trains of association and metaphor. District to district, infection is transmitted. The panic, the dread. The existential horror. The ghosts are talking back.
‘Many’s the night when I witness the hoi gloriously polloiing while I seek comfort in my singular tread,’ David Erdos said. ‘Listen to the future, now. Its bass notes are there in the past.’
A bitter future is encroaching on Willesden Junction and the hinterlands between railway and canal. Huge new development schemes for the west. In scratchy woods on the perimeter of the wilds of Wormwood Scrubs, we halt for lukewarm coffee from the thermos and a gargle of Spanish airport brandy. David does not partake. But he accepts a single communion square of Kendal Mint Cake. ‘It tasted, not of victory, but of rejuvenation, not only of my small spirit, but of general possibility.’
Before we reach the Westway, we register our first cop car, parked and avoiding surveillance. The stilted highway is obedient to the accepted Ballard vision, but the planners have got it all wrong. Like commentators who employ the adjective – Ballardian – without reading the books.
A university campus slap on the road. Rolling screens of videos with sculpted faces looking vaguely like dead movie stars to divert motorists. A part-demolished media centre where art projections from North Africa illuminate the ruins: like the wrecked teeth of an Aleppo atrocity supervised by guerrilla film students.
Ballard hymned the Westway – speed now limited to 40 mph – as archaeology from a past that never was, Angkor Wat. ‘A stone dream that will never awaken.’ With no surveillance cameras. A fragment riding high, for three miles, above ‘crowded nineteenth-century squares and grim stucco terraces’. Those squares, as we now observe, are deserted. Occupied terraces are coming down to make way for another culture quarter. A pseudo suburb. Where only construction workers are in residence.
We’ve had no talk with any such workers or figures of the night since Hampstead Heath. And they were indoors, smelling faintly of the street, of smoke and bodies. David has reached the limit of his self-allocated permissions. He will jump a night bus to Uxbridge. ‘It was a rite of passage I hope I passed, if not at the time then in reflection… We peered over a railway bridge to gaze at the stabled mastodons of iron and rust. I felt the flame of happiness. I had bettered the darkness and my spirit has started to rise.’
Andrew crashes the Westfield mall at Shepherd’s Bush. Lights are blazing in the sterile night, but there is nobody at home. If this retail labyrinth were a true city, it would never shut. The roofed and rainless avenue of street food from every culture would be available at all times. And to all cultures. Now there are only tired Balkan hygiene operatives on cherrypickers polishing the glass, scrubbing at faux-marble. Barging his way inside the vaulted atrium, Kötting shouts: ‘You’ve missed a bit.’
David, who has been good company, is still apologising for his intrusion, as the bus, peopled by vacancies, pulls away. Maintenance crews with their heavy plant clog up the detours around the supermall. In their yellow overskins and hard hats, they are uninterested in conversation, or banter, ashamed to be found labouring in the still dead hours.
Now, all company dispersed. Streets of achieved silence. Now synchronised footfall. Now light sours and puddles around our swollen feet. Now we are carrying invisible corpse candles towards Brompton Cemetery. We are no longer talking, performing, sharing anecdotes. The stucco terraces, spurned by Ballard as a diseased pathology, are hollow, bereft of the communal ripple of swinish dream that followed us through North London. Frosted cliffs in multiple occupation by absentees.
The cemetery gates are locked. We find ourselves adrift, losing the railway thread, doubling back, risking useless circuits of echoing gulches between extinguished investments. There is nobody to put us right. My blisters, modest on the daylight circuit, now crop like mushrooms anticipating a new day. An Asian convenience store, backed against the cemetery, supplies cheap sticking-plasters and a necessary hit of Red Bull for Andrew. He drains a couple of cans and the light in his eyes comes back on like a transformed superhero.
Squatting on the kerb, I struggle to pull my boots off, to make an attempt at padding the worst of the damage. Out of nowhere, perhaps from the padlocked cemetery, a tall elegant black woman, a lamia from a superior class of sepulchre, appears at my shoulder. She gestures with an open hand. She sways towards the solidity of the wall, but does not touch it. She smiles. And passes through. I can hear her high heels ringing on the pavement, but she is not there.
The broad dark river. The moment on Battersea Bridge when we halt, shoulder to shoulder, to appreciate the ripples of reflected lights. The sense of a city willing itself into existence for another day.
We sat on a bench by St Mary’s church, emptied the pink brandy flask, watched the Thames, and took the measure of what we had achieved and what lay ahead. In recent times, I had been reading nothing but Simenon. That was my nocturnal addiction. The formula worked so well: movement and stillness, punctuated by prodigious quantities of alcohol. Cool white country wines, beers, cognac – and disgusting liqueurs gulped down for strategic reasons. Maigret often walked the sleeping city. ‘It’s hard to bel
ieve he would have spent the night tramping around “just for the fun of it”.’ Maigret’s Dead Man. Stalking and stopping, watching and waiting: centre to suburb, leftbank to right, river to zinc bar, and round again. Hour after tedious hour.
Andrew wanted to crap among the gravestones of the church where William Blake married Catherine Boucher, but thought better of it. He held on under a swollen moon. Staring at the Thames, he drifted into reverie, a vision from Hastings. Figures emerging from the water.‘I was sitting on a shelf, under the pier, in pouring rain, raging seas, when two utterly gorgeous naked nubiles braved the misbehaving waves with a bottle of brandy. They were knocked right over. Which sent them into fits of giggling hysteria. I could see myself blundering in to save them, when they crawled out, unaided, with just one small towel between them and the now empty bottle. I returned to the spot for three more nights, to no avail.’
This was Andrew’s attempt to raise the temperature. And our spirits. But the very same thing had happened to me, years back, on one of my initial evenings on the coast. Close to the original St Leonard’s pier, where pioneer showmen showed the first films in the town. I felt that my vision was a detached celluloid splinter, looping out there. My back fitted so comfortably to the seawall.
Two young women, one with notably red hair, walked with purpose down the left margin of the beach. They knew exactly what they were doing. They will never see this day again. The taller girl, the one I took for Russian or Polish, stripped, briskly. She marched into the sea. Her shorter, sturdier friend was already naked. Warning lights flashed on the western horizon. The tall one tumbled, lost her footing on the shingle. When they emerged, they rubbed each other down, dressed without talking, and passed where I was sitting in the shadows, and away along the promenade. Then other, hidden figures emerged, to come together, debating and discussing what they thought they had just seen. And how this place adapted so well to visitations.
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