Geoff Nicholson - Bleeding London

“No,” Stuart insisted. “You’re completely, completely wrong.”

Unmoved and unconvinced, she went on, “But you couldn’t forget it altogether. You’d set yourself this big target and you didn’t want to miss. But by then something had changed. By then you were really into the diary. You realized that writing was much more fun than walking. So you started inventing. Why not? You walked less and you wrote more. You sat in your car or in a pub or in a library perhaps, and you made it up as you went along. And it shows. The people having sex in public in Fulham, the woman doing the painting in Crystal Palace, some of the overheard conversations. They’re too neat. They’re not quite like life. They’re not part of the London I know.”

Stuart’s face was looking dangerously red and his fists were gripping imaginary dumb bells.

“Let’s face it, Stuart, large parts of your diary are a shade too literary. The passages about that little Japanese tour guide, the sex passages, they really weren’t very convincing at all, then walking down the street and just happening to see her, the pursuit, her telling you to fuck off and die. I just wasn’t very convinced by that.

“And really, the suicide stuff,” she said. “I suppose I’m not the best person to judge the literary merits of those passages since I know you too well, but I didn’t buy it at all. You have many surprising qualities, Stuart, but I do believe that you’re completely incapable of killing yourself.”

At last something they could agree on.

“The idea worked as a literary conceit,” Anita said, “but not as part of an actual diary. And that’s all right too. Fiction isn’t to be despised. What you were doing was creating a new London, inventing a new city, a city of words, something in your own image.”

Stuart looked angry, frustrated, lost. The years of marriage had taught him how to argue, how to fight and fight back. He knew all about his opponent’s strengths and weaknesses, and often the combat could be a sort of familiar, playful wrestling. But now they were fighting to some new set of rules and Anita was using strange, exotic techniques that left him winded and fumbling.

“It’s all right,” she said, warmly. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of. You’re looking at me as though I’m your mother and I’ve found the dirty magazines you keep under your bed.”

He actually felt much, much worse than that.

“You’ve been dabbling in a bit of creative writing,” Anita said. “It’s strange in a man of your age but it’s not so terrible. Look, Stuart, I know things have been tough for you lately. I know you’ve been feeling useless and left out. I realize your current role in the business is no good for any of us. I know that situation has to change.”

Stuart’s head slumped. His body looked defeated. Now it seemed she was going to return to an earlier, more damning humiliation: business.

“What about Japan?” she said.

He didn’t respond. He thought she must be about to return to the subject of Judy, though he was quite wrong about that.

“You’re not the only one who has secrets,” Anita said. “That’s the reason I’m at home. I had some important things I wanted to think about. Here.”

She took a box file from a shelf next to the desk, and opened it to revealed a stash of faxes, plans, maps, business letters, most of them containing Japanese characters.

“A business expands or it dies,” Anita said. “And I think we’re both agreed that The London Walker really doesn’t have much room to grow. So I’ve been talking to people, specifically to some Japanese backers, people in the tourist industry. They tell me the Japanese really love London, but there are a couple of problems with it. First; it’s too big, dirty, dangerous and expensive, and second, and rather more crucially, it’s too far away from Japan.

“But the Japanese are inventive. They’ve come up with a solution. They want to build a version of London out there in Japan in a place called Hakkaido, an island up in the north. It will only be a very small version, of course. All the tourist attractions of London will be there on one manageable site. There’ll be Buckingham Palace, St Paul’s Cathedral, Big Ben, all scaled down to about half-size and all within a couple of minutes’ walk of each other. There’ll be a miniature Tower of London with fake crown jewels inside. There’ll be a section of the Thames with an opening Tower Bridge. Maybe we could have a section with replica modern architecture, the Lloyd’s Building or the NatWest Tower, though the Japanese do modern architecture rather better than we do.”

Stuart looked and felt like the hero of a low-budget science fiction movie, the sort where the hero suddenly discovers that an alien intelligence has taken over his wife’s brain. He was speechless.

“The thing is,” she continued, “people want to shop when they come to London, so there’ll be versions of Harrods and Selfridges and Aspreys and Haden Brothers. There’ll be London buses, London taxis, maybe an underground system with just two or three stops, tour guides dressed up like London bobbies. There’ll be walking tours, of course. There could be re-enactments of the Great Fire, the Plague, maybe even the Blitz, although the Japanese are a bit funny about the war, obviously. And they want us to be involved. Because who knows more about London than we do?”

“Who’s us?” he asked suspiciously. “Who’s we?”

“The London Walker. You and me,” she said, and then added as a sweetener, “Especially you.”

“These Japanese people don’t know me.”

“I’ve told them all about you.”

“It sounds like hell,” Stuart said.

“You’ll come round. I felt that way at first, but before long you start to see it’s a great idea. All London’s attractions in an area not much bigger than Trafalgar Square. You’d be able to walk down every single London street in the course of one afternoon.”

When she looked over at Stuart he was sitting on the floor, his back to the wall, his knees drawn up to his chin, a position that could suggest both prayer and supplication, and he was making a wet throaty sound she had never heard before. She couldn’t tell whether he was laughing or sobbing.

Gabby was looking good on the day she met Mick from the London train. There was something newly mature and self-possessed about her. Her hair had been cut into a geometric bob and she wore a tailored, slightly mannish tweed jacket with tight jeans and heels. She hardly looked like a stripper at all.

As Mick detached himself from the rest of the arrivals, he still looked rough. He’d put on a new clean T — shirt but the suit continued to show the effects of his recent skirmishes. He walked stiffly towards her. She went to him, put her arms tightly round him, squeezed and kissed him. The kissing was thorough but it did not seem to Mick as though it was very deeply felt. He was glad. He didn’t want to have to feel too much. Her arms felt strange around him and he ran a hand through her unfamiliar hair. It immediately sprang back into place, neat and unruffled. Mick realized it was no longer the same colour it had been when he’d left. Perhaps she’d dyed it, but perhaps she’d let it return to its natural colour.

“Did you bring my car?” he asked.

“The battery was flat.”

“Yeah, well, I told you…”

“It’s OK,” she said. “I’ve got a car.”

She took his arm as though he were an invalid or an elderly relative, and walked him across the car-park in the direction of a white BMW.

“Is that yours?” he asked, not expecting for a moment that it was.

“I borrowed it.”