Geoff Nicholson - Bleeding London

Lawton opened his mouth to say something but Mick wouldn’t let him speak.

“I know what you’re going to say,” Mick said. “You’re going to say that some people like being degraded. Now that’s a tough one.”

“Oh dear,” Lawton said. “I suspect you’re going to be a bit of a disappointment to me, aren’t you?”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Mick said, and he walked away from Lawton and prowled around the room in search of a telephone. He found one. It was surprisingly plain and orthodox given the location, and he tapped in Cabby’s number. The phone rang a dozen times before it was answered.

“Oh, Mick,” she said, startled. “Hello. I was just on my way out.”

She could hardly be so very surprised that he was ringing her, yet she sounded astonished, as though he was a long-lost boyfriend calling from Australia after years of absence.

“Going anywhere nice?” he asked.

“Just work,” she said, and he could tell at once she was lying.

“Then I’ll’not keep you,” he said. “But before you go, I’ve just got a couple more questions to ask you.”

“Not again,” Gabby said, and she let out a fake, weary, overstated sigh that accused him of being thick and tiresome, but Mick wasn’t going to fall for it.

“These guys who raped you,” he said. “Was one of them a skinny little guy, cropped grey hair, moustache, say fifty years old?”

“Possibly,” she said angrily.

“You’re not telling me you don’t remember.”

“No, I’m not telling you that.”

“And maybe he was a little bit camp-looking,” Mick continued.

“Camp?”

“You know, like a homosexual.”

“I know what camp means, all right? Look, this man raped me.”

“Yeah, well, maybe he was having a night off from being a homosexual.”

“Are you trying to make some sick joke?”

“It’s no joke. It’s just that I’ve got him here and—”

“You’ve got him where?”

“Here. We’re in his flat. It’s a right fun house. He’s on his knees, just spitting distance away, and you know, I’ve hit him a couple of times and that’s gone fairly well, but I’m not all that sure I’m doing the right thing. You see he really doesn’t fit the bill as your typical rapist.”

“He was on the list, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah, but couldn’t the list be wrong?”

“I don’t think so.”

“OK then, but just to make me feel better, just to put my mind at rest, I was wondering if maybe you’d like to have a word with him, see if you recognize the voice.”

“You want me to talk to him?” she yelled. “Are you out of your fuckin’ mind?”

“OK, sorry, I can see why you wouldn’t want to talk to him.” Mick was trying hard to sound sane and reasonable, and was well aware he was neither of those things. “So how about this, since he’s the last one on the list, I thought maybe you’d have some special requests, some special punishments you’d like me to hand out to him, because this is your big chance. He’s game for anything this boy, and actually he’s got some scars you’d be bound to recognize, and I thought you could listen in while I get to work, get the foil flavour of the event.”

“What’s the matter with you, Mick? Have you snapped or what?”

“Not me,” Mick said, making a great effort to hold himself in check, to prove her wrong. But he didn’t find it easy to keep this whole performance together, and part of him suspected she was right. Something had snapped, or at least been stretched permanently out of shape. It would have been easy enough to scream down the phone at Gabby, easier still to work out his frustrations on the poor wretch who was kneeling a couple of yards away just waiting for some more punishment. Nevertheless he spoke calmly into the phone.

“I have some doubts, Gabby,” he said. “I have some doubts about this list of yours. I have doubts about what went on with you and these six men. I have serious doubts about whether I’ve been doing the right thing here in London. I think maybe you think I’m an idiot, or maybe somebody else does. One thing I’m sure of, if this guy here raped you then I’m a…”

He didn’t get to finish the sentence. What he’d said had made a big impact down the end of the line in Sheffield. It had caused a transformation. Gabby was suddenly very talkative, very concerned, very eager to be nice to him, to smooth his feathers. He could hear a whole flurry of tender coercion coming from her, and although he wasn’t listening very closely he heard her say something about love. He covered the mouthpiece and said to Lawton, “Bring your arse over here.”

Lawton, naturally, did as he was told, smiled coquettishly, shuffled across the room. He knelt in front of Mick, head down, buttocks raised and spread, and Mick took the telephone receiver and slapped Lawton on the backside with it. Mick could sense Lawton’s disappointment. He had anticipated much more and much worse.

“Actually,” Mick said, “I think some of this furniture’s quite good.” Seconds later he was out of the building, while in Sheffield Gabby was left wondering how she’d got cut off.

Ithink I have at last discovered my real reason for walking the streets of London. Perhaps it should have been obvious all along. It seems I am not looking for adventure, for love, for sex. I am not trying to satisfy my curiosity, not trying to reclaim the city. And ultimately, despite my hopes for posterity, I am not walking London in order to create a literary work. No. Quite simply, I am looking for death: my own.

[Anita laughed like a drain as she read these words.]

♦

Lightermen operating in the Port of London, ferrying cargoes by tug or barge, the aristocracy of the docks, seven thousand of them employed after the war. Large sacks of animal bones, donkey, cow, camel, sent in from North Africa heading for the mills at Bow to be crushed into fertilizer. Sacks bursting open, bones picked clean, alive with green beetles.

A herd of cattle thundering up York Way from King’s Cross, being driven to the slaughterhouses in Market Road.

Antique shops, museums, flea markets, boot sales: windows through to the past, conduits through which history leaks out.

Boadicea’s Hill, a mound on top of Parliament Hill, said to be where Boadicea was buried, although scholars differ on this one. St Paul’s Cathedral built on the site of a pagan temple dedicated to Diana. When Wren built St Paul’s he found remnants of a circular temple and ox bones used in sacrifices.

The Tower of London built on a holy hill, Bryn Gwyn, the severed head of the hero-god Bran supposedly buried there.

Mudlarks wading through the Thames, often children, searching for salvage. Shoremen working in gangs down the sewers. Couldn’t work singly because of the killer rats. Coins dropped down. Sometimes when it rained the sewers would fill to the top with water. The story of the Hampstead monsters — the offspring of a sow who wandered into the open end of a sewer, found a spot she liked, gave birth to her litter, created a subterranean herd, living in stench and darkness, feeding off sewage, breeding.

♦

I stopped for lunch in a greasy spoon. Behind me there were three young people, at least they looked young to me, two men, one woman. They looked stylish and moneyed as though they might work for a record or video company.

One of the men said, “So I’m trying to get off the tube, right, and there’s this man blocking my way, so I push past him, you know, the way you do on the tube, it was no big deal, and after I’ve got past him he punches me really hard in the back and says, “Learn to say excuse me, shithead.” I was worried. He looked as though he would have killed me soon as look at me.”