And then came the next jolt, Camden market itself. At first I wondered whether there’d been an error in geography but Jane assured me we had arrived at the Lock. It wasn’t the Lock I recalled. As soon as we entered I could see that here too familiar coordinates had been erased. Washed out to sea, the treasure troves selling music insignia; in their place, a surf of the tacky and tedious. And just to hammer in the sight of fluorescent T-shirts, spiky club wear and tribal body ornaments, the loud techno and drum & bass emerging from invisible speakers began to pound my temples. People kept bumping into me, changing direction every few seconds in a crisis of indecision, and I stuck as close as I could to Jane, who zigzagged through the market in pursuit of her corset.
Just as I was about to tell her I’d wait outside, I spotted a stall beyond the covered area, there on the periphery, and before even realising whose it was I grabbed Jane’s sleeve and pulled her over. Something glittery had caught my eye, the pin of a scarab, its wings outspread in midflight, one of a dozen pins set in a black velvet board. Alongside this board was another, with silver rings in the shapes of skulls, bats, dragons and spiders.
The drizzle had stopped, the merchandise further polished by the fine drops, and after a quick survey Jane pulled down a thick black scarf that’d been hanging like a dead jackdaw from a pole overhead and I picked up the scarab, its little wings studded with fake diamonds sparkling as I turned it over in my hand.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’
A curl of smoke, a person within. From amidst the scarves and velvety boards emerged a slender figure with jet-black hair, high cheekbones and long lashes. Even without the make-up he was disarmingly handsome. Back in the day, every dame at the Bat Cave would have slept with him. Or had.
‘Lucian,’ I said.
He eyed me suspiciously, crushing a cigarette into the pewter face of a dragon, and reached for his pouch of tobacco.
‘Marie?’
‘Have I changed that much?’
He put down the tobacco and squinted, the cracks in his face deepening, and held out a large hand decked with rings. Within seconds it all came back: the strong grip, the enormous palm, the rings from Great Frog, that venerable institution in Ganton Street where he went for his own skull bibelots. Caricature or embodiment, I could no longer tell.
‘And this is Jane,’ I said.
‘Jane,’ Lucian repeated.
They shook hands, registered one another.
‘How much is this scarab?’ I asked.
‘Twenty. You can have it for fifteen . . . So how are you, Marie? You kind of disappeared. Just like that. Poof.’ He snapped his fingers.
Seeing Lucian there in his skinny black jeans, Birthday Party T-shirt and studded belt wrapped twice round his waist set off vapours of memories. For two years we had shared a flat just off Camden High Street, a grim place but I wouldn’t have wanted to live anywhere else at the time. It was his sole possession in the world, the fifty-six-metre-squared flat inherited from his grandmother, and he rented out the living room to make ends meet. He got the bedroom and I slept in our communal area on a mattress behind a screen. The kitchen had no stove, only a hotplate with two burners, but in those days we lived off pizza and curry. The bathroom was minute, with a shower like an upright coffin and tiles stained with black hair dye.
I’d like to say those were my shape-shifting days but the truth is, I didn’t shift shape that often. Lucian, who was a good decade older, only invited me out with him a handful of times, on nights when he was feeling especially gallant or adrenalised. Yet looking back on those few nights, a crack of darkness between two eternities of light, I’d felt I was somebody, although the reality was, I went as his diluted shadow, always a few steps behind, stopping whenever he stopped to greet people, get drinks from the bar, light a cigarette, fix his hair, or whatever else required immediate attention.
Though they were few and far between, I vibrantly remembered those nights out. To the sound of his favourite tracks, he would prepare for hours as funereal voices mired in synthy graves or guitar riffs wafted out from under his bedroom door and circled the living room, following him to the bathroom as he stood at the mirror teasing his hair into an elaborate cobweb. Face, hair, nails, rings—white, black, black, silver: always in that order.
Once Lucian had donned his sooty threads and I’d put on my make-up and most alluring black clothes, usually a high-necked tunic or netted tanktop, we would jump on the bus to Soho. Occasionally we’d drop by the Intrepid Fox but usually we would head straight to Meard Street, home to the Bat Cave. Past the tattooed man at the door, from Soho into its netherho, I would follow Lucian as he embarked on his well-mapped journey through the insomniac rooms, past glow-worm faces in every nook and sequined Glams with trapeze-artist make-up who emitted sparkles each time they blinked their eyes, waved an arm or crossed their legs, past Goths huddled in corners like packed umbrella stands, every now and then unfolding their wings to dance to one of their anthems.
As we cut through the smoke of each room, billowing curtains parting just for us, Lucian would tip an imaginary hat towards nearly everyone he encountered. He was the Duke of the Bat Cave.
‘And how much would this be?’ Jane timidly held up the scarf.
‘Ten for you,’ Lucian said, staring down at her nails, which were painted a metallic greenish blue, a mermaid’s tail or a drop of petrol.
‘What’s happened to Camden?’ I asked. Before Camden, he’d sold bootlegs at Kensington Market, mostly of gigs he’d gone to himself, but once the place closed and with the days of bootlegs over, he had ‘gone silver’.
Lucian glanced over at Jane before answering, then exhaled a large cloud of smoke.
‘What’s happened to our Camden. Bloody good question. It’s a bloody nightmare. First the Emo kids and the cyber kids and the hippies began setting up, pushing us farther and farther out, and then there was that fire a few years ago. I knew we were finished. After that the developers were all over the place. Now it’s just me and Black Rose and Elysium, those girls with the corsets and stuff, you remember Kate and Jackie, don’t you? Tourists go to them when they come looking for Goth, but it all got a bit carnival if you know what I mean . . . I’m the last one here, and I don’t think for much longer. Last year they moved me to this outside stall, where at least I can smoke, and knocked a hundred quid off the rent. I’m still holding on to the mast but with one hand . . . ’
Jane shook her head in sympathy.
I asked about Louis.
‘Still at the centre of your desk?’
‘Dead centre.’
My first month in the flat, Lucian had spent half a year’s savings on Louis, the skull of a twelve-year-old pickpocket trampled by a horse in 1852, or so the shop owner in Bloomsbury had claimed. Lucian placed him at the centre of his desk, right there between spilt tobacco and overflowing ashtrays, and Louis’ eye sockets would watch as his owner rearranged rings on a board, strung silver bat wings into a bracelet, tightened the catch of a necklace. We always wondered what this little urchin had looked like, what his story had been. Perhaps he was the son of watercress sellers or chimney sweeps, lived in the slums of Bethnal Green or had recently come in from the provinces. Perhaps he’d moonlighted as a mudlark, collecting debris fallen from boats on the river, a splash of the Thames in his veins.
‘And how are the ferrets?’
‘Oh, my boys died long ago, didn’t you know? They don’t live forever.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘Yeah, well, it’s all origami shadows, isn’t it?’
I nodded as if I understood.
Lucian’s other great loves, apart from Louis, had been his two ferrets. They had the run of the flat and slept curled up in his armpits or, if he had a woman over, in a shallow hamper by the bed. Once they nearly drowned, when he took them to his friend Vince’s and left the cage in the bathtub—it was only because one of them got up to use the bathroom that they discovered the ferrets’ home flo
ating in bathwater, their pointy ringed faces held just above the waterline. No one ever found out who’d turned on the tap since neither Lucian nor Vince had budged from the sofa where they’d been watching a film, and neither would have wished for that cruel burial at sea.
Conversation came to a standstill. Lucian looked at Jane again.
We said goodbye and started to walk away, back into the market’s sacrificial heart.
‘Marie,’ Lucian called out, ‘don’t you want the pin?’
I returned to the stand and bought the little scarab. Jane didn’t buy the scarf, however: an unspoken promise to return.
After Jane bought her corset at Elysium, so stirred up she didn’t even bother trying it on and just held it up to her body for measure, we found the nearest exit from the market and were released. Questions and daydream all the way up the high street. She demanded to hear about Lucian. It’s true I’d hardly mentioned him during my four years living with her, and certainly never in detail. Once that chapter in Camden, wedged between a flat share in King’s Cross and our home in Essex Road, was over, I hadn’t wanted to revisit.
It was a lifetime ago, at the end of a corridor past many shut doors, and I preferred to leave those doors shut and the corridor unlit.
Now I’d have to explain the longing that for two years often kept me awake behind my screen, the twitches of desire as I watched my handsome flatmate seduce everyone around, not to mention the few times I brought someone home myself, usually emotional boys from the bookshop or café, Lucian would stop speaking to me for days.
And once he began dating Sue, I knew I had to leave. Sue and Maxine, two tiger-eyed dames from the Bat Cave; once they appeared on the scene, the curtain fell. The cigaretted sisters we called them, or the Sisters of Mercy. They too had remained at the end of this corridor behind many shut doors, but now that I thought back on those days the image of them came quivering back in a waft of sulphur. Lucian had Sue, and his friend Perce got Maxine, at least on nights when Maxine felt like throwing someone a bone. They were two dark-haired beauties, candle white and always lit, one with her Dunhills and the other her Silk Cuts, and once they walked through the door I knew I could never compete.
So with Sue came the end of my life under the same roof as two ferrets, a Victorian pickpocket and a Camden Goth, and though Lucian could never understand why, he handled my decision to leave in an elegant way and even helped carry my two suitcases, books and hatbox down to the minicab waiting outside.
After witnessing the tiny flashes of desire between my former flatmate and my current one, new territory being tentatively marked out before my eyes, my only impulse—and a strong one—was to go and see Daniel. I rang and he was in, had finished writing for the day, and open to company. Jane and I said goodbye at the station. I watched her walk off clutching the plastic bag with her corset, mission accomplished though it seemed she might’ve just found the next one.
On the bus from Camden to Hackney, checking every now and then that the scarab was still affixed to my lapel, I thought back on the scene. For the first time in Jane’s presence I’d felt like a shadow. At home she would be the one more likely to climb the walls or fall across a page, but there at the market it was I who lost substance. Even after all those years of not seeing Lucian he had, within minutes, sent me back to that insecure place, though at least I was no longer his shadow, maybe just a stray one, and solid enough anyway to carry a pin.
Daniel rented his flat in Hackney from two brothers who’d converted an old slipper factory into twenty spaces, either as work units or as residential flats they let out to artists, DJs and graphic designers. Daniel didn’t fall into any of these categories but with the help of a friend he was able to secure a good deal and had been living there for nearly six years. As luck would have it, the one and only vestige from the building’s previous incarnation happened to be nailed to the floor of his living room: a peculiar mediumsized contraption with a wooden foot on which workers used to stretch or model slippers. The foot looked like that of a small adult, its heel attached to a pedestal on the machine and its smooth, toeless summit pointing towards the ceiling.
When I’d first gone over, I’d expected to stumble into an overgrowth of books, paper and objects, the sort of disorder within which I imagined every writer cocooned himself in order to write, yet when I arrived I was surprised to find austerity and restraint. Or maybe it was just laziness. No pictures on the walls, no objects on the shelves, no curtains on the windows apart from a large piece of cardboard he’d prop up at night. The furniture was sparse and mismatched, the only items with personality a long busy bookcase and a sagging maroon armchair where I’d deposit my things since the hooks by the door were taken up with dozens of scarves and coats he’d found at Oxfam.
Daniel buzzed me into the building and was waiting in the doorway of his flat when I reached the top of the stairs. He was in what he called his writing clothes, baggy cotton trousers and a blue T-shirt, his hair unevenly swept to one side, dark fronds falling on to his forehead. The familiar odour of coffee and pencil shavings hung in the air. After I’d tapped the slipper machine’s wooden foot in a tiny concession to superstition and settled into the seat I always took by the window, he disappeared into the kitchen and came back out with tea and wine.
‘How’s your day been?’ he asked, laying out mugs, pot and bottle.
‘Just went to Camden with Jane and ran into Lucian.’
‘Who?’
‘Lucian. You remember, my old flatmate, the handsome Goth.’
‘Oh yeah . . . And?’
‘I guess it was nice to see him again. He’s kind of unchanged. I think he really struck a chord in Jane.’
Daniel smiled. ‘That makes sense.’ He returned to the kitchen for wine glasses.
As I helped myself to the tea I realised I’d hardly eaten since breakfast. ‘You wouldn’t have anything small to eat, would you?’
‘Not really. I need to do a big shop . . . But we can order in later.’
First, however, I knew I had to indulge the host, the rule whenever I went over. Before we spoke about our day or our week, before we ate or watched a film, Daniel would reach for a stack of letters, usually the most recent, and with the customary fervour read a few out to me. The only thing he would offer beforehand were liquids. And cigarettes, depending on whether I happened to be smoking at the time.
Along with his poems he had another collection—an ever growing, almost compulsive, correspondence with poets from around the world. One poet would introduce him to another, that one to another, and so on. Never by Internet, always by post: otherwise, the notion of country would mean so little. He had met only a handful of them, and preferred it that way. There were regular letters from a poet in Zagreb, from a Romanian translator in Stockholm named Pierre Zekeli, from someone in Rio de Janeiro. He knew little about their personal lives; many of these individuals, mostly men, were immensely shy, especially the Scandinavians. They would write frequently but get frantic should anyone but mention they were passing through their city. Then suddenly they were nowhere to be found, had to leave the country on urgent business, etc. But that suited him fine—with the few individuals he did meet, the correspondence suffered afterwards and in some cases even shrivelled up.
Inevitably, Daniel liked some of their work more than others’. But one should always be generous with one’s colleagues, he would say, and he’d try to find something worthy in everything. The letters themselves were sometimes much more interesting than the poems. There was the German from Baden-Württemberg, for instance, who after learning that Daniel lived in a former slipper factory wrote to him about a fox on the wooded estate of a count who, over the course of two years, had amassed 300 pairs of shoes and slippers, predominantly leather slippers, since foxes, he explained, had a taste for leather and liked to sharpen their teeth on slippers in particular. This German poet had put out his own slippers one night when he went to stay at a nearby chalet, half hoping to be able to
write himself into the story and, sure enough, in the morning his slippers had vanished.
Then there was the Austrian poet who suffered from lung disease, an ailment inseparable from his run-on sentences and never-ending paragraphs, as if each phrase were his last, a certain breathlessness in every letter, you could almost feel his lungs exerting themselves, Daniel said, trying to keep up with the velocity of his thought without losing momentum, and each time he received a missive from him he wondered whether it would be his last. Yet the letters kept coming.
The definition of the poet’s solitude, Daniel would quote every now and then, is a circus number not announced in the programme.
Yet in my eyes he wasn’t that alone.
Apart from the slipper machine, the flat’s most intriguing item was an enormous nautilus shell so heavy I was never able to shift it a centimetre, and it was into the immense open ear of this shell, whose thick outer lip gave it the simultaneous appearance of a mouth, that Daniel read out his latest letters that evening. I poured myself some wine and tried to find a comfortable position in the chair, suddenly aware of its unyielding wood.
The first was from Medellin, a city teeming with poets apparently, and from its multitude one poet had become Daniel’s friend. In his letter the man described a small scientific press he’d launched with a few university professors and also two new poems, and how inspiration came to him most mornings between 7.23 and 10.56.
Towards the end of the letter, the Colombian mentioned his brother, who’d recently moved to London with a woman from Uttar Pradesh. They had just opened a restaurant serving southern Indian cuisine. Would Daniel be so kind, the poet asked, to drop by for dinner one evening? If he mentioned his name he would surely get a discount. The instructions were vague—location: the second floor of a building above a porn shop in an alleyway in Soho—but, confident we would find it and always ready for a local adventure, we made a plan to go the following week.
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