London Noir (20 page)
“Hi. Shouldn’t you be in school?”
“What’s it to you? You a teacher?”
A flash of his card. “No, I’m a policeman. And I think you should come with me. Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble. I have a very important job to do, and I need your help. How would you like to ride a white horse?”
Without protest, the girl left with him.
A
s an incomer to London, I have—almost inevitably—found myself enchanted with the city, in more than one sense of the word. I have enthusiastically thrown my hat in with those who purport to read the city; I have picked and hunted for the obscure volumes which I hope will allow me to enter their hallowed halls through recitation of the
Sacred Names of the Lost Rivers,
and gestured endlessly toward the notions which underpin their fictions.
For the most part, my own experiments in drift have been confined to the northern shores and, due to a specific confluence of geographical happenstance and the practicalities of car-engine maintenance, to the mysterious islets of the dead between Maida Vale and Ladbroke Grove; ghost country, the lands of the west. Too dead even for Ballard.
Think London as
Mappa Mundi:
wealth and comfort in the west, wealth and sterility in the far north, squalor and industry in the east (less of the latter these days—heritage docks, churches turned Starbucks), and in the south, a cliché
Heart of Darkness.
Incongruous strips of pristine brickwork along the river, a seething, churning mess we’d rather not think about.
It’s uncharted territory, our own little Third World, just a little too feral for the tame psychogeographer. Not the heritage poverty of the East End, this is the real thing, waving a shattered bottle in your face and ranting a cloud of whiskey fumes before smacking you down and stripping you to your frame. There’s a reason sorcerers don’t cross running water; down here, they’d be trading your scrying glass for rocks within the hour.
But then it hits me, walking from tube to Thameslink at the Elephant, the peak of the delta—Old Kent Road another Nile, tarmac khem, its length vanishing off toward an unknown source in the mythic lands supposed to exist outside the M25. And here at the peak of the delta are the tunnels.
This could have been built for us, the self-styled cultists of the city still reeling from our frantic initiations of acid-fueled underground trips, coke-blasted long marches across the city trailed by gibbering crackheads waiting to fire up the crystal snot on our cast-off tissues, graduation only by turning up some new obscurity to which the metropolisomanc-ers can nail a thousand mad-eyed theses. Here, a series of far-sighted planners, true inheritors of the Dionysiac mantle, conspired or were somehow moved by unseen forces to create a playground for those unable to travel through an underpass without pausing to attempt to decode the hidden patterns brought to half-life by every patch of crumbling concrete and piss stain.
It starts as soon as you vanish back underground after emerging from the tube. (No, it starts with the name: Elephant & Castle. Gnomic, at first quaint, then taking on sinister overtones. The Guild of Cutlers, ivory and steel. Bone and knife blade, a union still celebrated here more nights than not.) The subterranean walkways, with their vandalized or opaque signs, are an immediate hook, an obvious nod to Crete—passages which seem carefully planned to evoke the dread that some bellowing theriomorph might lurk behind each blind turn, pure
panic
.
At some point, in a misguided attempt to defuse these chthonic terrors, murals have been added showing imagined scenes from some non-history of South London, jungle scenes, subaquatic fantasies. Sharks patrol these walls. But the
genius loci
won’t be denied. It rots the cheer, warps it over time into mania. Each grin now takes on a sinister aspect, the jolly street traders and their well-fed horses projecting an air of vague unease, like nursery drawings on the walls of a burned-out house. Crumbling and fading, they have become a desperate illustration of something that can only be hinted at in the most oblique symbolism, a private, autistic blend of Hoffman and Ryder-Waite.
Between the two stations, I stop to talk to a homeless woman sitting cross-legged with her back to one of the walls. She could be five or six years younger than me, but looks ten older. She has an immense paperback open in front of her, and I ask what she’s reading, steeling myself to be polite about Tolkien or worse. Instead, it’s an anthology of classic detective stories—Chandler, Willeford, Himes—with the words
Pulp Fiction
blazing across the cover. She explains that she bought it because she thought it was something to do with the film. She’s about halfway through it now. I give her a pound and tell her to put it toward another book.
A pound’s the least I can do; she’s already shading into fiction, working her way into the web of metaphor, a fate not to be wished on any human or bestowed on them without recompense. It’s a kind of death, after all. There was a real woman sitting in the underpass, reading a real book, I did stop, I did speak to her, I did give her the money, but by reducing her to this incident I triumphantly deny her the rest of her life, all the while patting myself on the back for my razor-sharp literary instincts and dreaming of Mayhew.
She was drawn into the book—her anthology, not this fiction, I’m the only one on this particular voyage just now—expecting something other than what she got, but now realizes that she’s better off with what she did get. Enter the labyrinth and confront … The pat answer is usually some reassuringly bleak psychobabble borrowed from half-heard, never-read Freud or, worse, George Lucas—yourself, your parents, your dark side. The truth is that you’re confronting the labyrinth itself, the ultimate manifestation of the journey that becomes its own destination. Anything you may find is a function of the maze.
An information bauble surfaces from the
Fortean Times
days. A piece by Paul Devereux on a South American temple which was designed as a shaman machine. The initiate would be fed hallucinogenic cactus, then sent into the temple. Each part was set up to accentuate some aspect of the psychedelic experience—walls that went from echoing to acoustically dead, water channels designed to create apparently source-less sounds, weird lights.
The cactus they used, San Pedro, is now widely available in Camden and Portobello Road. But bang a couple of slices of that and venture in here, and I don’t like to think what you’d get. Certainly not the sort of mantic howler in the outer darkness who lands regular spots in the LRB. Any signs one could read here would sear the brain with revelation, a freebase hit of pure kabbalah, rebridging the divisions between left and right cerebral hemispheres and turning the reader into an ambulatory conduit for the voice of the labyrinth.
It continues. I stride edgily through the shopping center to the Thameslink. The whitewashed concrete hallway feels like an abandoned bunker somewhere deep in Eastern Europe. The floor is inches deep in rainwater, with helpful yellow signs to point out this fact. Nobody is there. The nearest thing to human contact comes from the monitors, relaying information keyed in hours ago in some other location, a cathode ray phantom, news from nowhere. I have an hour to wait for the next train. I’ve missed its predecessor by seconds as a consequence of my chat with the homeless woman. (See: She doesn’t even get a name, but the entire narrative really hangs on her; without her, you would not be reading this, or at least not in this form.)
I make for the bus stop, where the bus I need appears within seconds of my discovering that I need it. Another omen, another metaphor. This is a fertile zone; tiny possibility bombs detonating and sending ripples through the various levels of my mind. The people milling around the shopping center (the pink shopping center, a Little England nightmare made of concrete—dusky colonials and the taint of lavender) become a personal message to me from something beyond.
Once on board, I set my eyes on a mysteriously empty seat, one of three unoccupied places around a dozing bulk. It’s a long haul into
terra australis incognita,
and I’ll be needing my strength later. The instant I sit, I realize why the seats have not been taken up by any of my traveling companions. The man at the center of the exclusion zone smells. No, this barely does him justice. A truly heroic stench hangs around him, displaced each time he moves, sweeping out in almost visible curls before and behind him with every disturbance in his dream.
I deal with it for as long as I can, but eventually change seats (being a good middle-class boy, I wait until I am absolutely sure he is asleep; there is, I reason, no possibility that he is unaware of his miasma, and I have no desire to remind him of it again). From my new vantage point, I see that, in fact, the earlier journey through the tunnels was just a decoy, a warm-up. This, though, is the real deal. There are no signs to help me here, no friendly guides clutching books full of familiar names to ground me. I took my eye off the road and left it without even noticing.
I look briefly at each of the other passengers. Eventually, there is no one left to look at and I am compelled to turn my attention to the man in front of me.
He is sitting back yet leaning forward at the same time. A great buffalo hump squats on his back, forcing his head toward the space between his knees. A woolly brown suit of indiscernible vintage helps add to the air of something bovine. Sagging expanses of flesh the colors of corned beef—complete with waxy marbled patches of fat—droop from an acromegalic frame and turn his face into a system of soft caves. His eyes are almost buried beneath overhanging folds of puffed skin, which threaten to fuse with his cheeks: a waxwork Auden rescued, too late, from a conflagration. Messy spikes of hair protrude from his scalp like a crown of feathers. He is between sleep and waking, and the bus’ occasional stops and starts make him jerk, sending a shudder through his body, which is echoed and enlarged by corresponding movements in the mephitic cloud that clings to him like a swarm of locusts. The breath flaps out of him from behind crimson jowls.
He seems not to belong here, a refugee from a Grosz painting suppressed as too terrible for public consumption. There would be something comical about him were it not for his awesome vastness and the animal reek around him. It’s an
ur
-stench, building from base notes of piss, shit, and sweat to encompass subtle undertones of days-old baby vomit and rank meat that linger in the brain much longer than in the nostrils.
I find myself rapt with wonder at him, barely able to contain my authorial glee. I am working heavy
juju
here; I set out telling myself that something worth putting down on the page would happen tonight, and it seems that I have managed to conjure this flesh golem out of pure narrative requirement—a notional space hitherto marked
LOCAL COLOR HERE
fills out with something truly strange, an authentic and unfake-able encounter that a better author would have the sense to condense to a paragraph or even a phrase.
But I can’t leave well enough alone, and my mind races to find some way I can steal this creature and tame him for my own purposes. The fact that he is clearly dreaming, his physical appearance, his foulness, these are all good. I wonder for a moment if there is some way he can be shoe-horned into some sort of fiction, some easy way I can turn this to my own advantage.
As I wonder on all this, he stirs and begins to gather his belongings to leave the bus at the next stop. Assaulted by the inevitable accompanying spread of his insulating cloud, I turn back to the book I’ve been concealing myself behind (Maurice Leitch,
The Smoke King
) and desperately try to avoid attracting his attention. He is, after all, my creation and I do not want to be held responsible for the consequences should such a perfect beast gaze by accident into the eyes of his creator.
The bus stops, and as the doors open he shudders toward them, white plastic bags flapping from each wrist, stirring up tornadoes which disperse his spoor to the four corners of the vehicle. I steal a sideways glance at him when he blusters out onto the pavement. As he steadies himself from a sideways lurch, one of the bags swings and hits the glass beside me with with a noise I do not like. A pattern of darkness within momentarily resolves itself into what I pray is not a face, and the minotaur is gone.
R
ight,” I said, and phoned the cops.
“May I ask who’s calling?” she says.
“Edgar Lustgarten,” I said. “You might remember me from
Scales of Justice
. Then again, you mightn’t.”
“No, as a matter of fact, I don’t,” she says.
Not that it mattered, for I was gone.
The next thing you know, there’s Feane on the
Daily
Mirror
with an anorak over his head. But it was him all right—the two-tone shoes.
The worst thing about Mickey Feane was his relentless bragging. “Look at me—
I’m super-volunteer.”
Never liked them Belfast bastards. Too cocksure.
He’d have all the time he wanted to brag now—any amount in Brixton prison.
Poor old Feane—yet another in a long line of slope-shouldered Irish felons in Albion, detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure.
In the beginning it had been good—there can’t be any denying that.
I think I’ll go to London, I thought. Off I’ll go and I won’t come back.
“Goodbye cows,” I said, “and streets—farewell.”
Up your arse may they happily go and the rest of this miserable country as well.
After all, it was 1973. The whole fucking place was an outhouse deserted.
“Goodbye, Daddy, Mammy. Goodbye other kiddies. I hope you die,” I said as I skipped.
I had met some very good friends indeed. They really were quite jolly good fellows. They wore zig-zag tops and half-mast jeans.
The very first day I arrived in off the boat, Harrods blew up. Two cops stopped me and said, “Hello, hello.” Believe it or believe it not, it’s absolutely true. I gave them an envelope with the old man’s name on it. They weren’t too happy with that, they declared.
“You could get into a lot of trouble over here,” they went on. “These are odd and hair-raising times, my wide-eyed little Irish friend.”
I was tripped out of my skull for most of the journey. I drank a few pints with an old chap sporting a face like a ripe tomato.
“Do you know what the English did?” he said to me. “Hung decent fellows outside their own doors.”
I had never in my life quite seen such a face.
The Incredible
Melting Man from Tipperary,
that was the only name I could think of which might suit.
“I’ll tell you something about London,” he says, but I never heard what it was, for the next thing,
slurp,
down he goes right into the ashtray with a sprig of red hair sticking up like a flower.
As soon as I was sure there was no one looking, I reached into his inside pocket and effortlessly removed his bulging wallet. Inside there’s a bunch of
in memoriam
cards with a small square picture of this big farmer smiling. That, I assumed, was the recently deceased brother.
There was a good fat roll of money in there—all tied up with an elastic band. Consummate cattle-dealer style.
Away I went in the direction of Piccadilly. I turned a corner and there it flashed—
CINZANO
, on-off.
I stood there looking at it—truly mesmerized. The reason for that was, it was on our mantelpiece at home. As a matter of fact, it was the last thing I had laid eyes on before departing.
“You’re a bad boy, Emmet,” Daddy had said.
I had expected the entire town to turn out to bear witness to my leavetaking. They didn’t. It was, I’m afraid, a damp squib of an event.
I just pulled the door after me, and who comes flying right off the fanlight but his holiness—the Infant of Prague.
For the benefit of English people who never go to Mass, the Infant of Prague is a holy young boy who stands guard over doors with a gleaming golden crown and a sceptre in his hand. Sadly, on this occasion, his head had got broken. Which upset Mammy because she loved him so.
“Don’t come back!” I heard her shouting.
Then I saw Daddy glaring from the shadows.
“Don’t worry,” I told him. “You’ll be able to give her a proper kicking now.”
He had always been very fond of football—especially whenever the ball was Mammy.
He always liked a game at the weekend. And maybe, if he’d the money, after the pub on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays—and Tuesdays.
I went into the great big neon-lit shop. A rubber girl, Rita, who’ll never say no. A woman in a mask belting the lard out of a crawling-around city gent clad in a bowler.
“I’ll teach you some manners,” she says, and she means it.
“Oh no,” he says, “please don’t do it, but do it.”
That would keep me warm, I thought, a good skelp like that, as I retired to my chambers along the banks of the Thames.
I thought of them all the way back there at home—all my turf-molded fellow country-compatriots. By now they would have realized my featherbed had not been slept in. And great consternation would take hold in the midlands.
Little would those gormless fools know just what the true nature of my visit to London was to be. I shivered gleefully as I thought:
The London Assignment. A British cabinet minister is
gunned down by an IRA assassin. It’s a race against the clock
and one false move will be enough to leave him dead before he
reaches his target.
I lovingly stroked the butt of my Smith & Wesson .686—four inches, with Hogue grips—which lay nestled deep in the pocket of my jacket. My shiny jacket of soft black leather—standard-issue terrorist fare, perhaps, but comfortable and stylish nonetheless. What the well-dressed volunteer is wearing this autumn in the mid-1970s.
“Get out of the car,” I heard myself say, “I’m requisitioning this vehicle on behalf of the Irish Republican Army.
One-Shot Emmet,
they call me, friend—for one shot is all it takes.”
There was a big fat moon swelling above the gasworks, looking like the loveliest floaty balloon. The old man knew a song about that moon. I remembered it well. It went:
When the harvest moon is shining, Molly dear.
Once I had heard him singing it to the old lady. One night in the kitchen not long after Christmas. Long ago. Or at least I thought I had. Then I fell asleep with my hotshot volunteer’s jacket pulled good and tight around me.
So off I went—puff-puff on the train. All the way to Epsom in Surrey. What a spot that turned out to be—a hotel, a kind of club for dilapidated colonels. How many Jimmy Edwards moustaches would you say there were there to be seen?
At least, I would estimate, seventeen examples.
Big potted plants and women like vampires, Epsom Association Dawn of the Dead.
Sitting there yakking about gout and begonias.
“You’re not very fond of work, are you?” says the boss. He had apprehended me sleeping under boxes.
I took in everything in the office. The barometer on the wall reading
mild,
the bird creature on the mantelpiece dipping its beak in a jar. Lovely shiny polished-leather furniture—with buttons.
“It seems quite extraordinary but you don’t appear ashamed in any way.”
I was going to tell him nothing. Mahoney—my officer-in-command—had always said if arrested to focus your attention on a spot on the wall.
He fired me. “Get out,” he says. Well, fuck that for a game of cowboys.
By the time I got back to London I was edgy and tired.
Outside a Wimpy, I saw a woman with blood streaming down her face being led away by a man in a raincoat. For no reason at all I stood there for a minute looking in the window of a telly rental shop, and there on the screen is this fellow saying: “I was just coming out of my office when I heard the most frightful bang.” The policemen were still shouting: “Will you please clear the area!” All of the pubs were closing their doors. I heard someone running past, shouting: “Murdering bastards!” I hid my face and found a hostel.
The London
Assignment
was the name of my book. The book I’d invented to get me to sleep. I was on the cover in a parka—looking dark and mean. Behind me, a mystical pair of old-country hills. The old-timer next to me said: “What time is it now?”
It’s the time of Gog and Magog, my friend, when the cloud covers the sun and the moon no longer gives forth any light.
I’d read that in a Gideon’s Bible some other old tramp had left on my locker. He must have been unhappy for I could hear him crying.
I don’t know why his whimperings should have done it but they got me thinking about Ma and Da. I got up to try and stop their faces coming. Then I saw the two of them—him just standing there with his hand held in hers.
“Ma,” I gasped, “Da.”
They were dressed in the clothes of all the old-time photographs. There was a picture on the hostel wall of a dancehall in London and somehow it all got mixed up with that. It wasn’t a modern dancehall—one from the ’40s or perhaps the early ’50s. It was called THE PALAIS—with its string of lights waltzing above the heads of the fresh-faced queue. You’d think to see them that they’d all won the pools. I’ve never seen people look as happy as that. I could see the inside in my mind—palm trees painted over a tropical ocean and the two of them waltzing. Him with his hair oiled and her with a great big brooch pinned onto her lapel.
“I love you,” I heard her say.
It was in those couple of years just before I was born. In the time of the famous detective Lustgarten, when all the cars were fat and black and nobody said
fuck
or visited dirty neon-lit shops. When everyone was happy because at last the war was over. We hadn’t been in the war. Eamon de Valera kept us out of it. The old man revered de Valera. Talked about him all the time. He was probably talking about him now—to her. But she wouldn’t want to hear about history. She’d simply want to be kissed by him. The history of that kiss would do her just fine. She needed no more than that to look back on.
The doors of the dancehall were swinging open now and assorted couples were drifting out into the night in the loveliest of white dresses and old-style gray suits with big lapels.
Ma was lying back on the bonnet of a car. She put her arms around him and said she wasn’t worried about a single thing in the whole world. Her laughter sailed away and I heard her saying that history was a cod, that the only thing that mattered was two people loving one another. He asked her would she love an Englishman, and she said yes she would just so long as it was him. Which was the greatest laugh of the whole of all time—the idea of her husband, Tom Spicer, being an Englishman.
“London,” she whispered then, and whatever way she said it, it made the whole place just spread out before me like some truly fabulous palace of stars. Songs that I had only half-remembered seemed to fill themselves out now and take on an entirely new life as they threaded themselves in and out of the most magnificent white buildings of solid Portland stone.
A nightingale, I thought, sang in Berkeley Square and it made me feel good for I knew that Da had liked it once upon a time. No, still did.
“Don’t I?” he said as he tilted her pale chin upwards.
“Stardust,”
she smiled, and I knew she meant Nat King Cole.
With the shimmering sky over London reflected in her eyes.
When I looked again, they were standing in some anonymous part of the city and it wasn’t pleasant—there was this aura of threat or unease hanging around them. I wanted it to go away but it wouldn’t. Ma was more surprised than anyone when he drew back his cuff and punched her in the face.
A spot of blood went sailing across the Thames. Faraway I saw
CINZANO
, just winking away there, on and off. On and off. On and off. On and—
I heard a scream. I woke up.
I didn’t manage to get back to sleep.
Noon, I went into Joe’s Café. There was only one thing and it prevailed in my mind. That was the dancehall whose name was THE PALAIS, with its colored lights strung above the door. That was my
London Assignment.
To, once and for all, locate that building. I swore I’d do it—or die in the process.
I smiled as I thought of Mahoney and his reaction. He was standing by the window back at HQ, with both arms folded as he unflinchingly gazed out into the street.
“You were sent over there for one express purpose!” he snapped. “And it’s got nothing to do with fucking dance-halls!”
I took out my revolver and placed it on the table.
“So be it,” I said. “Then I’m out.”
“You’re out when I say you’re out,” replied Mahoney.
I could see a nerve throbbing in his neck. Mahoney had been over the previous summer with an active service unit that had caused mayhem. He was a legend in the movement. His London exploits had passed into history. He would have had no problem coming over himself and filling me in. Taping my confession and leaving me there in some dingy Kilburn flat, with a black plastic bag pulled down over my head.
“The organization is bigger than any one man,” he said. “Or any,” he sneered “fucking dancehall.”
I finished my tea and got up from my chair, swinging from Joe’s out into the street.