At this time in the evening, the Docklands Light Railway trains are not crowded. Tony and Pete sit facing each other, each of them taking up one-and-a-half of the undersized seats.
Nearly dusk. A glorious, mid-summer’s day nears its end. Some clouds are already purpling, but for now the sun is holding on to its fiery redness. Still lurid, it complements the pungent aroma of cleaning fluid in the carriage.
As they trundle alongside the waterfront, looking across Albert Dock towards City Airport, Tony looks out of the window and clocks a new school, the rowing club with a Chinese restaurant built on top of it, and an enormous office block (only recently, partially occupied), constructed almost entirely of glass.
Some people are still at work there. You can see them sitting at their screens, like figures in a doll’s house with the front wall taken out.
Tony becomes expansive: ‘Look at all this. It’s got to mean something. There is positive development.
Really, there is, if only you don’t...’
With Pete in attendance, Tony has been feeling more on top of things.
With my old partner here to help... well, just him being here is helping.
Carry on like this and Tony could blow the typhoon of disaster images – 2012: the memorable year when London became forgettable – right back into the box they came from.
Pete, you,ll always be there for me, won,t you? Won,t you?
‘The regeneration game,’ Pete interjects, ‘is not panning out as planned.’
Dr Fercoughsey will be playing the cynic. Dealing in damaged gods. Man on ground with feet of clay.
‘Recent surveys of travel to work patterns’, continues Pete, ‘show East Londoners continuing to go West for work, returning to their East London homes in the evening. Or later in the morning, if they are office cleaners, for example. The East London area now offers fewer permanent jobs than it did in the 1960s, during the heyday of Ford’s Dagenham.’
In university seminars and public consultations, Pete would have softened this bald statement with something about plans for future regeneration, the legacy of 2012, expectations of inward investment, and widening the range of participating stakeholders (he might have baulked at ‘stakeholders’, then said it anyway). But Tony of all people was not going to taken in by that kind of impression management: he practically wrote the book.
At Canning Town interchange they turn their backs on the harbour master’s launch. From the platform they can see it making stately progress up the River Lee.
Or is it the River Lea? Answer: it depends how far up the river you are.
Tony and Pete run down the escalator in pursuit of a Jubilee Line train to whisk them up West. But the doors-closing sound – beep, beep, beep – has stopped even before their feet touch the platform. Three minutes till the next one.
Tony produces a bottle of the palest, amber liquid, uncaps it and thrusts it at Pete. ‘Quick,’ he insists, ‘before the camera finds us.’
When Pete put the bottle to his mouth and felt whisky at the back of his throat, he thought it would be like white noise, a shouting, heckling effect. But it’s not the loudmouthed firewater he was expecting. Oh, there is fire in it, all right.
A straight, true flame with all distortion distilled out of it. Now, miraculously, Tony’s dram-to-share is tickling his neck and walking down his spine, taking all the time in the world.
Yes, there is time, there will be time, Pete thinks. After all we have been through, us two, there is still time to get it right.
Pete feels his lower back...lowering itself. For a second he acts taller, like he was seven years old, playing at Randy Yates in Rawhide. Then he remembers how many years have passed and pulls himself back in. At least for the now.
(8) Oversharing
Games Makers: A London Satire Page 6