Geoff Nicholson - Bleeding London

The car was a wreck and as he settled himself in the seat it jerked back and slid out of its runners. He was going to make a remark about the shittiness of Japanese cars, but he stopped himself. Instead he said, “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Where should I be?” Judy asked, as she set the car in motion.

“Tucked up in bed with a good jigsaw,” he said.

“Alone or with others?”

“Alone. Definitely.”

“Actually, I was in a restaurant.”

“Which restaurant?”

“You know which,” she said irritatedly. “The Morel, where Slater was eating. I saw him arrive. I watched. I waited. I thought you’d be coming too. I thought you’d do whatever you had to do at the restaurant.”

“Oh sure. Very discreet.”

“I didn’t know discretion came into it.”

“You don’t know anything, and I like it that way.”

“I know a lot more now than I did a few hours ago. As a matter of fact I thought you did a very good job.”

At first he didn’t understand the implication of what she was saying. Only slowly did it dawn on him that she was passing judgement on the competence of his work, that she must have seen him operate.

“I saw it all,” she said. “You’re not the only one who can spy on people. I followed Slater home from the restaurant. I saw him go into the house. I sneaked round the back, looked in through the window and saw you waiting for him in the kitchen. Then I saw what you did to him.”

“It’s not meant to be a spectator sport,” Mick said.

“No? It was quite a spectacle. I could tell you were saying a lot to him and obviously I missed that. It was like watching a movie without a soundtrack, and it’s all the more compelling because you don’t know exactly what’s being said.”

Mick had no time for her interesting little analogy. This wasn’t a movie, silent or otherwise. She wasn’t taking him seriously enough.

“OK, so you saw me,” he said. “You wanted to know what I do, and now you know. Happy?”

Mick sounded defiant. He was embarrassed and maybe even a little ashamed, but he refused to be apologetic. He was ready for an argument, ready to attack in order to defend his indefensible position.

Judy stopped the car, turned to him, smiled at him sweetly and said, “It’s fine. I liked what I saw. I like what you do.”

He had no answer to that, nothing up his sleeve with which to defend himself. Nor could he do anything when she leaned over and stroked his face and started kissing him. He was thrown and confused, and he resisted for as long as he could, but before long he found himself kissing back.

The rest of the night fell into place from then on. She drove them to the Dickens. Mick wanted to go to her place, but she wouldn’t have that. They spent the night in his bed, wrapped together on the slopes and faces of the crummy mattress. Her body was alien in all sorts of ways, novel because of unfamiliar-ity, but also obeying a geometry and proportion that was different from the white English girls he’d slept with. The skin looked and felt different, smoother with a different grain, the buttocks and breasts seemed to join the body differently.

She could feel him revelling in the newness and she said, “So now you’ve slept with a half-Japanese woman. And with a Londoner.”

And he replied, “And you’ve slept with a Sheffielder.”

“And a petty criminal.”

Mick laughed. In one way he didn’t find it particularly strange that Judy was turned on by the fact that he was a bit of a villain, by what he’d done to Slater. Women were turned on by the strangest things, attracted to the oddest, most unattractive men. Even when they liked you, you were always surprised at what it was they liked. But he was glad that Judy wasn’t appalled, that she didn’t condemn him.

It would have been easy enough to tell her everything then, and a part of him wanted to. It wasn’t precisely a desire for confession, more the need to explain to someone else what he was doing, and have that person confirm that it had at least an internal logic, that it still made some sort of sense. But he didn’t take the opportunity to explain. It would have been too difficult. He would have had to tell Judy about Gabby and this wasn’t the right moment. He doubted whether any such right moment would ever come.

Instead they talked about cities. It was easier for her. She was well-travelled. She talked about her tourist adventures in Paris, Prague, Athens, Florence, Vienna. It meant nothing to him, this stream of incidents, these tales of lost luggage, of flea-bag hotels, of visits to art galleries and museums, of strange sleazy men who tried to pick her up. He asked why she only travelled to cities, why she didn’t go to the beach, to the mountains, and all she could say was that cities were where the life was. He countered with stories about Sheffield, Doncaster, Barnsley, Chesterfield, and she was amused by his sense of the ridiculous, by his refusal to take seriously her attempts at cosmopolitanism. She said she’d like to visit all his places if he’d come with her as a guide. And she told him about the job she’d had with The London Walker, although she made no mention of her affair with the boss. He said it sounded like money for old rope.

She stroked his chest, pressed her fingers into the depressions between his ribs. Her hands felt cool and long and precise. She said, “If you’re ever present at a nuclear attack, make sure you’re wearing long-sleeved white clothing.”

“What?” he asked.

“Obviously if you’re at the centre of the heat flash it really doesn’t make much difference what you’re wearing, because at that range your internal organs just boil. But let’s say you’re a mile or so away; if your skin’s uncovered it’ll be stripped away from the flesh like orange peel. If you’re wearing a black shirt that’s just as bad. The dark material attracts the heat, it chars, probably catches fire, the skin underneath burns. But white clothes reflect the heat. They really do give you a chance of survival.

“And definitely don’t wear a white shirt that has a dark pattern on it, because the heat will burn through the pattern. Imagine you were wearing one of those T — shirts with a map of the London Underground, then you’d have the design of the tube lines burned into your chest forever.”

“Are you making this up?” Mick asked.

“It happened in Hiroshima.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. I read about it.”

She moved her fingertips over his chest again, this time tracing invisible tube lines.

♦

Mick woke next morning, found Judy still sleeping soundly on his shoulder and felt above all else surprised. It took a while for the events of the previous night to rearrange themselves in his mind. Then he started to feel awkward. He also felt that he’d been seduced and coerced. He hadn’t wanted this woman in his bed, hadn’t wanted even to kiss her, hadn’t even wanted to get in her car. He felt guilty that he was betraying Gabby, being unfaithful to her, and guilty too that in sleeping with Judy he was being diverted. This was not what he was here for. The purity of his mission was being subverted. He was wasting time. But what he felt worst about, what made him feel especially bad and especially guilty, was the fact that despite everything he was still very glad to have slept with Judy.

When she woke up he was civil to her, kissed her chastely, told her he had no way of making breakfast in his room, not even coffee. She didn’t seem bothered by his distance and he felt some relief that she wasn’t being demanding or romantic. Maybe, he thought, her feelings were as complex as his.

It was only after she’d gone that he looked around his room, noticed the sheet of jagged-edged hardboard lying on the floor and saw that the final piece had been added to his jigsaw puzzle of London.