London Overground (13 page)

It's likely that all the group at the trattoria table wrote about food, cooking, ethnic experiments; about analysing and describing the stuff they put in their mouths, as they did it, pre-digestion. Restaurant as theatre: a period sidebar, along with creative writing, to the freelance life. Nobody has a divine right to indulgence for inflicting contrived fantasies on the public. But somebody has to produce the necessary chaff for academic institutions to winnow: issues, big themes, novel topographies.

The stuff on the plate was fine. London lunchtime-speed service, with tomatoes and curly pasta, as you'd expect, and rich red wine. Did T. S. Eliot pop out from the office around the corner for a morsel of fish? Or did he snap a cream cracker at his desk? If he did not dine, solemnly, at the club. With bishops and bankers. And poets touching him for an advance on their way to Fitzrovia.

I was early, so I had time to think about this. And about the whole late-Bloomsbury/publishing/Hawksmoor church/university nexus. I thought about William Burroughs in his strange, submerged years of London exile, checking out mummies, Mayan glyphs and death cultures in the British Museum. I thought about the film
Deathline
(aka
Raw Meat
), in which
plague-infested cannibals emerge from the tunnels beneath Russell Square to snack on unlucky Tube passengers.

This was not a topic of interest for Susannah Clapp, Carter's editor at the LRB, and another former Bristol student. She was next to arrive. She told me that she was working – the project took many years – on a biography of Bruce Chatwin, a slippery subject.

Angela was the last, a flurry of bags, scarf, hair, bus, bad connections from distant Clapham. But she was the star of the show, the Fevvers figure, settling her invisible wings, amused by everything, talking in eloquent bursts and ripples: the representative of what this literary, serious-fun, periodical-producing coterie should be. Head girl.

I hadn't yet adjusted to the idea that somebody would let me publish a book and pay for it. It felt as if I'd nipped out from one of the Bloomsbury hotel book fairs, for a drink and a sandwich, and stumbled on a table of potential signatures. But, as Angela talked, that new identity settled. It was just a job, like any other. The city, London, was the engine. You could feel the beat of it in the simple exchanges of this restaurant, in the tunnels under us. In the old churches and temples of cultural plunder. Writers writing about writers. Walkers colliding and swerving, drawn by the gravity of power in the fossil-crusted stones.

Memory Lane is a dead end … Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people …
Shortly after this lunch, I heard that Angela Carter was ill, lung cancer. It felt completely wrong. Even the news of it was a physical shock. Recognition had arrived, late, and the work was in flood. The last novel,
Wise Virgins
, lived out, so convincingly, in every creak and jolt, in voice and gesture and bloody-mindedness, the old age in an old city that Angela was never to enjoy. A lovely book that should have flounced off with the Booker. Instead, what is remembered from one of those ceremonies is the episode when the
telegenic person who used to be Selina Scott asks Carter who she is and what she does. Which is not so much a criticism of Scott, caught up in action for which she is ill-prepared, but of the notion that prizes, the winning and losing, are a spectator sport fit for an audience who have no intention of reading the books.

For a few months Carter crossed the river to the Royal Brompton Hospital for treatment. She died in February 1992. Lorna Sage wrote the
Guardian
obituary, telling us how ‘Angela somehow understood, not just theoretically but sensuously and imaginatively, that we were living with constructs of ourselves, neither false nor true but mythical and alterable.' And she was right about that. As those books live and prove. They inform and inspire our city.

At Clapham Junction, we came through an unconvinced retail tunnel, lacking that whiff of open-table stalls, and out into damp air with a promise of river. Transitional malls, such as the shopping centre at Dalston Junction, work a compromise between indoor market and overlit generic shop. Low-paid security guards confirm the impression that the managers and promoters regard all through traffic as potential shoplifters. The smell is: badly cured leather, popcorn varnish, tired feet, acid rain steaming from disnatured wool. The threatened open-air market at Ridley Road is dizzy with forced fruit, glossy bags, meat and fish dicing with food inspectors: it's real, it's loud, it works.

Clapham Junction is overprescribed, a little shaky on its feet. If we trundled along at this elderly speed in Dalston, we'd be flattened. Everybody up there has learned the art of looking as if they know just where they're going. They're shrugging and twisting and patting themselves down, fresh from the latest stop-and-search confrontation. The twin streams, urban hipster and recent indigenous, don't see each other. They weave, sharp shoes swerving from angry shoulder-rollers who come straight at you. All parties use the width of generous pavements, relics of promenading times, to avoid the sorry legions of substance-abuse beggars and damaged solicitors of single coins. The casualties of cuts and expulsions who are barely tolerated, as invisibles, in the microclimate of station-confirming blocks with pointless water features and thrown-up-overnight estates.

Arding
and Hobbs, an imperious department store, a shopping experience kept at a polite distance from the station, is presently occupied by Debenhams. Who thrive by offering something off everything. And then something off that. And setting up outstations in places like mid-town Hastings. The urban regenerators have used the Ginger Line as the excuse for imposing, right opposite Debenhams, a ginger-themed block with slim window slits and metallic trim:
TRAVELODGE
.

The railway part of Clapham Junction, with coffee outlets, fast-food kiosks, numerous platforms, blue-roof and grey-roof trains hissing and hustling, is immense and relevant and active. Comings and goings between systems: junction and terminal. Achieve Clapham, having come across the Thames from Hackney, and it seems right – like a change of horses – to pause, rest, take refreshment, realign. Before going on over Battersea Reach, by railway bridge, to another kind of London entirely: the pyramid on the tower at Chelsea Harbour, the oligarch's whim of Chelsea FC at Stamford Bridge. Start again. The circuit is broken.

The rear approach to the station, up against an embankment of goose grass, blue cans and empty burger cartons, is secure ground: for cars. Pedestrians are not required. As so often in zones undergoing the blessing of regeneration, the signalled footpath runs straight into mesh, a blocked bridge, an unspoken invitation to step out into headlong traffic. It's fortunate that Clapham is not yet a cycling colony. The pavements, if you make it out of the station, are free of two-wheel racers, and the sort of aggrieved and entitled off-road pedallers who punched a protesting citizen in Bournemouth and killed him.

We're happy with Falcon Road; even under the hoot and snarl of cars and white vans, the falcon can still, if he works at it, hear the falconer. We slouch towards a pit stop on the curve of Battersea High Street. It is coming, the Overground
guarantees it: ranks of Barclays bikes (for which the bankers are no longer footing the bill) will soon be installed. A docking station on Grant Road, a tributary to Falcon Road, is promised. Symbols of future docking stations fall from the map like a shower of hot-air balloons. If the elevated orbital railway were a cycle track it might work. For the moment, ranks of blue, set up to obscure sightlines for motorists, do nothing more useful than clog highways with the support vehicles required to service this monster fleet. They confirm the status of new stations around the Ginger Line. When I paused, back home in Hackney, to inspect the scale of ground given over to empty Barclays docking racks, a neighbour told me that local rumour had container-loads of blue bikes turning up in Africa. Which part of Africa she didn't stipulate. I'd seen a few, in the days of their novelty, being joyridden, two or three up, along the canalbank and through the estates. Now, like everything else, the bikes were an investment opportunity for the export market.

Another kind of bike becomes a topic of conversation: Kötting's motorized steed, the machine on which he ramps out of London and weaves across Romney Marsh in a delirious interval between tasks. Hot-metal release: cold hands, aching back. And the English road. Swaying into bends. On the motorbike you are in landscape, in weather.

So Andrew says. So he promotes the romance.

‘A red BMW R1200GS. German like me.'

Russell Motors on Falcon Road is a riot of folk art and a colourful riposte to the accumulation of generic enterprises around Clapham Junction, station and shopping centre. As ever with these colonized crossroads, the theoretical centre doesn't hold; it's an illusion, a courtesy title. The term ‘centre' when attached to ‘shopping' implies a centripetal force: that everything pours inwards, to a locus that is not really there. The centre has no
centre
, it's all corridor leading to nothing. A chasm
of prostituted windows and secure doors, goods that are like advertisements for digital versions of themselves. You buy into what they represent, not the actual objects – which are inevitably diminished, faded in attraction, by the time you get them home. Very often, addicted shoppers carry the purchase straight back to the store. Another journey, another railway adventure.

Raw and primitive:
RED!
A hand-painted, heart's-blood splash. Surrounding a leathered and helmeted biker hurtling through a laurel wreath. Heroic British names in traditional calligraphy:
NORTON
,
BSA, ARIEL. MOTOR CYCLES
&
SPARES.
It makes you proud to be on the loose in the city. On the wrong side of the river. We are experiencing the buzz Antonioni located in places like Stockwell, when he discovered blocks of Mediterranean colour on grey English walls, for the driving sequences of
Blow-Up
. Submerged areas of South London, for their own reasons, commercial or mundane, love to enhance brick, to challenge the prevailing drizzle and drudgery of endless pavements with slaps of Iberian red, midnight blue. Intimations of the Portuguese immigrant communities Patrick Keiller identifies and salutes. Tribalists dug in among driving schools and flying-saucer spotters.

Russell Motors is a proper family business in a proper London street. A street that is ordinary and exotic, spillage of infinite cultures. The shop was established half a century ago, a few years before I moved to Hackney. I've never needed it, but it's been there from around the time I left South London. The founder, Bill Myers, came out of the RAF in 1945. He specialized, so he says, ‘in ex-war-department spares'. A trade operated, with less legitimacy, by many others on this side of the river; some of whom rose to be notable scrap dealers and property speculators; some of whom employed Kötting and spare brothers as painters and decorators.

Afghan
Road. Khyber Road. Cabul Road. We're tramping through the high passes of imperial history, the old mistakes and fated incursions dignified with real-estate speculations; desirable terraces thrown up against the curve of the railway as it slides towards Battersea Creek.

Hunger calls up recollections of previous pit stops, memorable coffees; hard crumbs of biscuit, lodged between the teeth, remind us of past pleasures. I had a place called Mazar in mind for lunch: Lebanese and Continental Cuisine. It was on Battersea Square and it suited me very well; quiet, roomy, with friendly unobtrusive service, rich thick treacle coffee in decorative silver-thimble cups. My consoling reverie lifted me above present discomfort, the regular thud of Andrew's heavy tread. I recalled another excursion, a view on a conceptual square, like a vision of something in a French provincial town rudely sliced by through traffic, with just enough going on to tease your interest.

A young woman on her mobile phone, in light drizzle, described a generous circle around the paved pedestrian area. Her attitude was initially playful. Orbital loops: clockwise, then counterclockwise. After perhaps five or ten minutes, the circles tightened. There was more tension in the shoulders, kabuki gestures of exasperation. Where the early circuits were flirtatious, and took in the potentialities of the entire square, the new loops favoured the south side: round and round a parked car. Soon I felt, now wholly engrossed in this movie, she would beat on the bonnet. The circuits straightened into lines about half the length of a cricket pitch. Like being condemned to pace a cell instead of the prison yard, the nunnery garden. I pictured relationships crumbling, betrayal, tearful confession. I pictured the phone dialogue as a grinding Ingmar Bergman breakdown, detail by remorseless detail, existential and unforgiving. She might have been enjoying a
coffee in Mazar when the phone shrilled. She stepped outside, pleased at first, to be in the sunlight, then concerned, alarmed, furious.

A regular came in, distracting me with her chat, blocking my sightline as she gossiped with the obliging manager.

‘He gave me some unusual Christmas presents: a lunch box and two tea towels. Then for my birthday he got a bumbag. And books.
Books.
He's got no idea.'

She moved, just in time to allow me to see the irate, possibly suicidal phone victim dart through a door. When I paid my bill and headed back out, I couldn't resist crossing the square to see where the woman had gone, half expecting the door to be still open.

An estate agent.

Another Battersea estate agent! The woman was at her desk. Some hot deal had fallen through. A victim of one of those personally addressed ‘we have several serious buyers actively looking for properties in your area' letters changing his or her mind, pulling out, staying put. ‘You might be surprised to find out just how much your property is worth today.'
Without you in it.

Andrew couldn't wait for Mazar. My stories of previous walks carried no conviction when set against the now-rapturous pangs of hunger. Falcon Road narrowed into Battersea High Street with a demographic shift of gear, a few paces closer to Chelsea. Refuelling was a necessity, before we detoured to Battersea Bridge for our river crossing. Galapagos Foods seemed to fit the bill. I wasn't altogether convinced. The name was too overtly Darwinian: would they be serving giant turtle or other prehistoric evolutionary accidents?

A pint of fruit crush with ginger and a well-stuffed crayfish baguette with all the trimmings will have to hold the man in
the steaming tweed suit. Dew drips from his stubble as he shakes himself down, salty droplets ping into the surface of my soup. The food is excellent and will carry us on towards the twilight of Willesden. The owner, challenged by the intrepid Kötting, Chatwin paperback in fist, says that he is from Ecuador. Quito. Have we heard of it?

‘My favourite city in the world!' Andrew seizes him in a thornproof embrace, a scrape of sandpaper cheek.

Bonded! Memories pour out from both sides of the counter. The South American expedition with Leila, country to country, city to city, mountain to desert to surf-crashed shore. The Ecuadorian replies with a tale of a cult in his home country, a tribal group who dress in white trousers and sandals made from adobe. They weave textiles from llama wool and sell them to Gucci and Prada.

Back at our perch in the window, I begin to appreciate how a day's random tramp around London turns into a travel journal: tourism without the air miles. Werner Herzog would approve. I heard the reed pipes of Patrick Keiller's strolling musicians from
London.
The most valuable imports are exchanges in cafés and launderettes. Quito imposed on Battersea. Without the intrusive heliport. They say the pilot in the fatal Vauxhall crash was reaching across to his laptop.

Enough miles have been covered in this half-day's walk to call up a discussion about circularity, the Homeric voyage of adventure and return, against the grander reach of the diurnal cycle, an eternal and unchanging figure. Night chasing day chasing night. The abacus of the stars. The eye of heaven orbiting
under
the dish of ocean, as Charles Olson says in his
Maximus Poems
: ‘through which (inside of which) the sun passes'. The drawing together of the circle is our faith in that model of the universe. And our love of it.

Kötting wipes his lips. And gives my stumbling justifications
for the miles over which I am dragging him a Beckettian spin. ‘Life's an interval between whatever and wherever. Every day away from the sea is a day lost.'

On a wall, suspended from barbed wire, is a book that the scavenging Kötting pounces on:
London Falling
by Paul Cornell. ‘Only they can see the evil.' A red pentagram for a cover. Not only is London falling but this paperback looks as if it's been bombed from a helicopter or flung from a train. A forensic analyst discovers the ability to see ghosts. This gift or curse, known as ‘The Sight', initiates four police officers into a ‘metaphysical' parallel world. The sort of hallucination that often occurs for walkers on motorway verges heady with diesel fumes. The author emerged from his own parallel world, television, where he found employment hacking at
Dr Who
,
Coronation Street
,
Holby City
. Andrew slips the Cornell into his poacher's sack alongside the Chatwin.
London Falling
had been positioned quite artfully above a crude aerosol graffito:
TORY SCUM
.

Battersea High Street is now the kind of place where house-movers stencil
FURNITURE LOGISTICS
on the sides of their vans. The elevated tracks of the Overground are having an immediate effect. We pass a couple of young bucks in quilted jackets who look ready for presenting a programme about renovating country houses. A handsome redbrick mansion is in the process of being adapted into a holding facility for ‘eligible' infants.
OPENING SEPTEMBER: RAILWAY CHILDREN.
This is the first establishment, crèche, nursery, playpen, we've noticed that is specifically targeted at the new railway demographic. The poster depicts a set of smiling pink-faced, golden-haired blobs waving from the windows of toy-town carriages on a bumpy track. Here, in prospect, are the first children of the railway, the Midwich Cuckoos of London Overground.