Geoff Nicholson - Bleeding London

♦

He soon stopped running. Running was no more his style than waiting, but he continued to cover ground, walking fast, determinedly, foolishly, lost. He had no idea where he was or where he was going. He felt furious and humiliated, and for a while at least the simple performance of looking as though he knew where he was heading was enough to help disperse the anger. The streets of Mayfair confused him. He had imagined that every street in London seethed with activity and population, yet these streets were more or less empty. The buildings were big and imposing but they had sucked in all the crowds from the pavement.

He walked for half an hour or more, in a straight line when he could. His sense of direction was good enough to make sure that he made some progress and didn’t backtrack on himself, but whether that progress was any use to him, whether his sense of direction was taking him anywhere worth going, he didn’t know. At last, his anger all but gone, his pace slowing, Hackney still an undiscovered country, he grasped that he was truly lost.

He asked one or two people for directions, but they had no idea what he was talking about and he wasn’t sure whether it was their foreignness to blame or his. The people he asked had no idea how to get to Hackney. It was a distant province, a place beyond the remit of cartographers, off the edge of the known world. At last he settled for asking a simpler question. “Do you know where I can buy a map? A newsagent or something?”

He was addressing a tweedy, bearded, middle-aged man. He looked like a Londoner (whatever that meant), that was why Mick had chosen him. The man said, “You’re only round the corner from one of my favourite shops, the London Particular. They’ll be able to sort you out.” And he gave directions that even Mick could follow.

Mick arrived at the London Particular, a bookshop of sorts, an old — fashioned, bay-windowed place, narrow at the front but opening out into a large, deep, sky-lit area at the rear. Mick went in a bit reluctantly. He sensed he was entering a specialist establishment. A newsagent would have been more welcoming and easier to deal with. The sheer quantity and density of stock in the shop was overwhelming; books, maps and guides, new and secondhand, were crammed into bookshelves of immense height and depth. They towered up to the ceiling, higher than a man could reach, and they were stacked two rows deep on some of the shelves. On the floor there were boxes, crates and sometimes just loose piles of guide books and magazines. In the centre of the shop was a table stacked high with precarious piles of books. He felt clumsy, out of place, his every movement threatening to knock over some carefully arranged construction.

There were a couple of browsers inside but he could see no assistant. He was tempted to walk out, but where would he walk to? He would wait until someone appeared. Meanwhile he continued to look at the stock, and only slowly and belatedly did it dawn on him that every single book, guide, map and magazine in the place had London as its subject. There were history books, memoirs, biographies, books on London architecture, on town planning, on immigration and riots and insurrection. The guide books, plenty of which were antique or written in foreign languages, offered specific and specialized routes through London. There were guides for rock music fans, for lesbians, for cemetery enthusiasts. Even the maps were specialized, being designated for walkers or motorists, parking maps, 3-D maps, ‘murder’ maps. A simple map, capable of getting him from A to B, from wherever he was now, to the Dickens Hotel, Hackney, seemed simultaneously too much and too little to ask for.

Then an assistant appeared and Mick’s heart sank. There behind the counter was a Japanese-looking woman, young, attractive, smart, but very, very foreign. Mick shook his head, not at all surprised by his bad luck, and was heading for the door when he heard her call after him, “Can I help you, sir?”

The voice didn’t sound as though it could possibly have come from her. It was clipped and projected, without any trace of a foreign accent. In fact it was a posh, English, upper-class voice, far more pukka and correct than his own. It was the kind of voice he had been taught to dismiss and distrust: superior, middle class, southern.

He turned to her and said, “You speak English.”

“Just a tad,” she replied.

“I’m lost,” he said. “I need a map.”

Given the number of maps to choose from it would have been easy for her to treat his request dismissively, but she didn’t. She was helpful, easygoing, not at all the snotty bitch that her voice had made Mick expect. She set him up with an A — Z , even showing him the pages on which Hackney was to be found.

“First time in London?” she asked.

“No,” Mick said proudly. “Third.”

“Do you think you might need a guide book?”

Well, he was going to need guidance, though he couldn’t see exactly what kind of guide book would offer the sort of information he wanted. He said, “Maybe,” and she directed him to the modern guide book section where he was duly baffled.

“Any recommendations?”

“How about this one?” she said.

She handed him a book called Complete London .

“Complete?” he queried.

“Yes.”

He looked puzzled and doubtful.

“Well, how can it be?” he said. “If it was really complete it’d have to contain all the information in all these other books, wouldn’t it? In fact, it’d have to contain all the information in all the books in the whole shop. Right?”

“I suppose that’s true,” she admitted graciously.

“And all the information in all the books on London that you don’t have in the shop. The book’d have to be bigger than the shop. In fact the book would probably have to be bigger than London itself, wouldn’t it?”

“I’d never thought about it in quite that way,” she said.

“Well, think about it,” he said.

She pretended to think, but she did not pretend very hard.

“Maybe I should just pick one at random,” he said.

She bowed her head a little, submissively; the customer was right. She watched as without looking he reached out towards the bookcase. His fingers riffled the air and landed on the spine of a book called Unreliable London and he hooked it out. He stared at it curiously. Although it wasn’t a secondhand book it was well battered as though it had sat neglected on the shelf for a very long time. The photograph on the cover, which was a little faded and a little out of focus, showed a dull shot of Tower Bridge.

“I can’t vouch for that particular volume,” she said. “Perhaps you should choose again.”

“No,” said Mick. “I’ve made my choice. I was obviously meant to have this book.”

He said it with complete earnestness, but she wasn’t sure whether he was joking or not. An English trait. They both smiled uncertainly at each other.

“What’s your name?” Mick asked.

She hesitated before saying, “Judy. Judy Tanaka.”

“Very exotic,” he said.

“Not really. In Japan, Tanaka is the equivalent of Smith.”

“But we’re not in Japan, so it’s still exotic, OK?”

“Fine,” she said, and she took the book and the map from him, rang them into the till and put them in a bag.

As he was paying he said, “And where are you from?”

“Streatham,” she replied.

“Oh, right,” said Mick, as though the name meant something to him. It didn’t, of course. It was just a foreign place that he’d never heard of. It might have been in Japan for all he knew.

♦

A long time later, footsore but refusing to acknowledge it, he arrived at the Dickens Hotel, Park Lane, Hackney. It had been a long walk and he had passed a number of hotels on the way. A part of him had thought about abandoning the Dickens and checking into one of these. But he’d decided against it. You had to be careful in London. There were serious rip-offs waiting round every comer. A bloke he knew in Sheffield had recommended the Dickens, and that was good enough for him. You didn’t want to go somewhere you didn’t know and where they didn’t want you.