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excerpts
from
issue#9... Down
the A2 on a dying summer evening, sunset-lit drive-thru
McDonald’s and petrol stations awakening desires for fast
food, drinks sipped from labelled cartons through straws, the carefree
consumerism of a paper bag in the footwell. The boroughs of Greenwich
and Bexley are beautiful in this light, Californian sophistication,
broad roads with high, halogen streetlamps lit against a dark blue and
orange sky. Busy junctions with traffic lights suspended overhead,
sports cars full of girls, lorries with foreign number plates. By the
time we get to Estuary Kent proper this has faded into isolation,
backwardness, the place where Magwitch caught Pip in the graveyard. The
swirling mists and the ague are gone but the atmosphere remains.
Further down the road is Faversham, the last bastion of Estuary poverty
and threat before Canterbury and the Garden of England - but we never
get that far. Our
teacher Grigoriy Alexandrovich resided in the
distant and obscure
suburb of Kholodnaya Gora (“Cold Mountain”). I can
still see his lanky snow-covered frame entering energetically - almost
falling into - our flat. In his battered, capacious briefcase he
carried some faded postcards with coloured views of London. They came
from a hard-to-obtain "Cities of the Capitalist Inferno" (or something
of
that sort) postcard set, shoddily printed by our local “Red
Proletarian” publishing house. These postcards were given out
to us as prizes for diligence in our studies of the English language. I
remember a badly drawn “British worker”, hastily
printed into my Piccadilly Circus picture, probably on the orders of a
vigilant postcard censor, to add a proper political balance to the
otherwise rather decadent “capitalist” view - no
tractors or red banners in sight. With a Soviet-style flat cap on his
head, the “worker” stood on the steps next to the
Eros statue holding a poster that ran simply: “1st of
Mey”. We
press into the market looking for records, clothes, bootleg tapes of
the kinds of gigs we wouldn’t be allowed into, even if we
didn’t have to be on the train by 6.30. Tess, her hair
crimped and teased out around a pale face, fancies herself as a goth -
at school she wears as much black as she can and wanders around with no
shoes on, daring the boys to make fun of her. She loves it here, trying
on net gloves and wristbands and buying black nail varnish that her mum
won’t let her wear. I
was no good at my job. I’d get hopelessly lost, and find
myself - by chains of derelict rooms, cavernous filing stores, enclaves
of secret offices, walkways above chilly crevasses in the
building’s fabric, ancient goods lifts scrawled with Balkan
graffiti - transposed disbelievingly back into a known corridor or
lobby, my mental map disordered, convinced that the hospital had turned
monstrous and rearranged itself about me. My
father, lovely though he was, was a man all too willing to sacrifice
himself on the altar of bewilderment. Decimal coinage, David Bowie,
driving on the left - any of these topics, introduced at dinner, could
leave his face clouded for the rest of the evening by an expression
that only deep consternation or severe constipation might explain. The
one thing Father could never quite fathom above all else, though, was
his darling daughter’s total lack of interest in sport, for a
fierce love of balls and embrocation had coursed through the Bendix
veins since 1896, when my great-grandfather’s unconventional
approach to polo at the Athens Olympics had led not only to a very
literal rewriting of the rulebook, which thereafter explicitly used the
word “horse”, but also to a lifetime of
back-trouble for my great-grandmother. I
see no alternative but to slink about like the slyest of foxes, and
become the enigma I have always yearned to become. From now on, I will
be sneaky; I will be surreptitious. No, I will be *clandestine*. (Oh
my!
I will be *clandestine*. I will wear my long leather coat and my trilby
just so, and hide my dewy eyes behind marvellous sunglasses.) The
idea was a grand one: dig a ditch across Surrey, fill it with
water, and sail boats down it from Epsom to the Thames, bringing
cauliflowers and cabbages to the sooty, scurvy folk of London town. By
1809, they’d got as far as Camberwell. In 1826, a second
branch reached Peckham. It’s hard now, walking up Rye Lane,
to equate Peckham with Antwerp, but when they built the new market
square and library a few years back, those tasteful granite slabs were
laid over a stub of road still defiantly called Quay Head. There was
also, briefly, a link to the Croydon Canal at New Cross Gate. But the
Croydon Canal was always a runt; just 27 years after the first barge
was loaded with lime from the Merstham quarries, the London and Croydon
Railway put down sleepers where the water had been; and in the old
dock’s musty hollow at the southern end, they built West
Croydon station. A
look passed between us, and suddenly I knew. The thousands of people
I had jostled, pushed up against, given coins to, during the sweat of
the city day, now made sense. It was all for this. I touched her thigh.
It was somehow allowed. “I’m so sorry.” In
fact, such is the neighbourhood’s reputation for gun crime
and general mayhem that the estate agent who rented me a flat there
refused even to use the word Harlesden. Instead, the area was referred
to in his office as “H”, as though it were a
proscribed substance. My next-door neighbour told me that, when she
moved in in 2000, there was a man in a black leather trenchcoat
who’d spend long hours pacing up and down the pavement
outside her house. Once she overheard him having a conversation with a
man in a car, the most readily audible words of which were:
“No, boss - please, boss - no!” Walking
up Middlesex Street between Aldgate and Bishopsgate, you could
be forgiven for thinking the medieval wall was never pulled down, such
is the towering domination of one side of the street over the other. On
its western side, the concrete mock-ramparts of Middlesex Street
Housing Estate and the marble of banks and offices. On its eastern
side, Jack the Ripper territory - all ragged market stalls, Victorian
tenements and converted warehouses. On this street, too, are sites of
confusion and convergence. In the Market Trader, on the corner of New
Goulston Street, traders from the clothes market mix with City slickers
working the international currency market. So,
yes, St Giles has a bit of previous when it comes to grimness: it
was a leper colony, it was a slum, it was where Newgate’s
losers slugged a last anaesthetic swig of grog before going west to
Tyburn, it was where the Plague’s first bubo bulged; even in
Hogarth’s time, when it was still Gin Lane not Junkie Alley,
estate agents were calling it Holborn Borders. All this used-up history
swirls round Centre Point’s grubby white needle like ketchupy
Big Mac wrappers. But to blame spooky psychic vibes for the
area’s serial misfortune is deterministic hippy nonsense. St
Giles is simply a bit of a no-man’s-land, a dumping ground
between City and Westminster - that’s why they shoved the
lepers here. The
Sign of Four is one of a surprising number of stories that locate
part or all of their action in the south London suburbs of Camberwell,
Brixton, Streatham, Beckenham, Norwood, Kennington, Norbury, Sydenham
and, more rarely, Lewisham and Blackheath. Visiting Thaddeus Sholto in
Coldharbour Lane, Holmes comments to Watson, "Our quest does not appear
to take us to very fashionable regions." The lack of obvious bohemian
culture in the south London suburbs is part of what makes such
locations appealing to Doyle. Whether commercial or countrified, they
are home alike to the reputable middle-classes and the
déclassé criminals who pray on them: a perfect
backdrop, indeed, for intrigue, confidence trickery and murder most
foul. The
No. 6 swung round Marble Arch and set out up Edgware Road.
Foolishly, I’d resumed gazing out of the window, my eye
having been caught by the dazzling lights of the Odeon cinema, which
was advertising a saucy new blockbuster where bodices were ripped and
cherries popped. I say “foolishly” because, when I
turned back, I was both stunned and impressed to see the newly-formed
friendship in front of me had progressed to kissing across the aisle.
With steadfast British stoicism, my fellow passengers were burying
their heads in their Standards, turning up their iPods, and giggling
behind their hands; but I, as a diehard romantic, was gripped. I’ve
planned it all out. I will say “hi”
and he will ask me what I do and where I live. Then I will say
“nowhere and nothing” and he will give me a house.
A big beautiful house in the country, but not too big and it will be
brick and slightly fallen down. Sometimes I will see him and one day he
will put a ring on the third finger of my left hand and will say to me
“never lose it”. I will take in its beauty, just
for a moment, the emeralds and that, and then I will toss it into the
sea, like in that film. He will be distraught and ask
“why?” And I will reply: “Now I can never
lose it and I will always know where it is.” Paranoia
kicks in. Are they following me? Has anyone else seen me? Do
any of the others on the bus know I’m a thief? At the same
time that I’m thinking all this, I’m assessing the
booty. We were right. This isn’t nothing. The bag’s
got bulk and weight. There’s a cover over the top where
another bag’s been upended over the contents.
Whatever’s inside has give; pressing my leg against the side
of the carrier, there’s the feel of something interesting. This
time we meet in the Bierodrome - concrete temple to Belgian beer.
It is always Tuesday; and always somewhere we will not be known, always
somewhere different. He arranges the place. Sends me a text message
with a new name, new location, each Tuesday morning. Each week I head
across London to a new destination and stare at the scars of previous
assignations that mar my A-Z. In the mornings as I sit on the tube to
work, my cheeks stain red as I look up at the tube map. Each line is a
fiery flame of erotic memory. Yet I do not know him. I cannot know a
man who shares my bed but once a week, whose words are either honeyed
compliments or evasive answers. But I cannot let go until I do. So
from lampposts Dewey starts climbing trees in stinking summer heat.
Kate likes the skinny muscles, she don’t care so much,
whipcord-thin like the dog. She sits under the tree after school and
writes out pop songs in her homework, pretending all the while she
likes smoking. The dog don’t have a name, least if he does he
ain’t saying, and he don’t climb lampposts, he
likes the trees more anyhow. He smiles at Kate and Dewey. Those kids
are pretty good together, but I think they will maybe always be writing
pop songs at the bottom of trees and the top of lampposts. The
river spread below them, choked with ugly pleasure boats of varying
size, shape and riverworthiness. Two boats chugged towards the bridge.
Alice made a mental note of which she’d pick for a
super-sized game of Pooh Sticks. She definitely didn’t want
the one that gave out branded, transparent pac-a-macs to its customers.
Passengers. Annoyed at her 1980s corporate style slip, she watched the
pac-a-macs race ahead and tried to think no more of it. Just
up Coldharbour Lane is Southwyck House, the Barrier Block. Built
to bounce back the noise of London’s inner motorway ring, its
big brown cliff is where all the junkies used to nest. It’s
all clean now, though; take a shufty from the cat-flap windows and you
won’t clock no needles or six-lanes of blacktop - they never
built the motorway, only the soundproofing - just Walton Lodge,
Sanitary Steam Laundry, 1904 and still steaming away. plus lots of other things that
don't lend
themselves to being butchered or which just look better on a slightly
glossy A5 piece of paper... |