Кейт Уотерхаус: Soho or Alex in Wonderland

Since this is a work of fiction, I have permitted myself certain inexactitudes. For example, the Soho Waiters’ Race does not immediately precede the Soho Ball.

The setting is obviously real, as are most of the streets, although some are not. Most of the locations are made up; real ones appear only when they have an innocuous role to play. Most of the characters are fictitious and bear the usual non-resemblance to any person living — I will not necessarily add to any person dead. Where real personages appear they have only walk-on parts.

K.W.

Except for the City itself, which after working hours is left to the caretakers and the cats and the odd penthouse millionaire, there is no London neighbourhood more resembling the restless downstream tide of the Thames than the ragged square mile of Soho.

Ask Christine. Christine Yardley is literally here today and gone tomorrow.

Here is here and now, but by this hour her five-inch heels are teetering on the threshold of a new day. It is dawn turning to watery sunlight as Christine latchkeys herself through a narrow doorway next to the darkened lobby of a marooned bed show, the last of its line in Soho, in Hog Court off Greek Street. The bank of illuminated doorbells is dimmed now, and all the other girls in the house are asleep. Not that Christine is of their number: she pays her own rent.

She kicks off her crippling shoes and climbs the four near-vertical flights to her room — roomette would be a better word — at the top of the house. She flops down on the unslept-in mattress on a wooden base that passes as a bed and throws back her pretty head to guzzle down the last dribble of Diet Coke from a sticky can on the cluttered bedside table doubling as a dressing-table. She lights a cigarette from a new packet of Benson and Hedges, a little present from an admirer.

She unzips her rubber dress from Zeitgeist in Peter Street and wriggles out of it. She adjusts her magnifying shaving mirror and removes her heavy makeup with Boots’ No. 7, must remember to buy another jar. She takes off her ear-rings, her false eyelashes, and her long blue nail extensions, and pops them in the compartmentalised British Airways foodtray, breakfast size, which is where she keeps her trinkets.

She peels off her stockings and underwear. Perching her cigarette on the ashtray stolen from the ladies’ at Soho House she levers herself into a corner shower cabinet the size of an upright coffin. The trickle of water is near freezing but she is careful to sponge away all traces of her heavy body perfume. She dries herself off and sprays herself with Sport deodorant. She shaves.

She tosses her underwear in the sink to soak. She rolls up her stockings and suspender belt and drops them in a deep cardboard carton, her underwear drawer, in the curtained recess that serves as a wardrobe. From another cardboard box she retrieves St Michael underpants and socks and dons them, then takes a shirt from a wire coat-hanger. She hangs up the rubber dress and takes down a grey business suit.

Soon Christine Yardley is dressed again, but not as Christine Yardley. It is Christopher Yardley who descends the stairs and walks around the corner to the Bar Italia in Frith Street. After a frugal breakfast of a caffè latte and a roll, he strolls along Old Compton Street, across Cambridge Circus to Shaftesbury Avenue and then to Holborn and out of Soho.

It is quite a walk to Fenchurch Street where, a Sohoite no longer until this time next week, he toils on VAT returns and suchlike for a firm of accountants, but he has all the time in the world before he must be at his desk, and he needs this break to adjust from one body to the other. This evening he will go home to his divorced mum in Ruislip, who thinks he spends these weekly nights away working at the firm’s south coast branch in Bournemouth.

Christopher has been shuttling between one life and another in this way for five years now, and so far as he knows no one in the legitimate Square Mile has ever twigged his secret, although there was a narrow shave near Ludgate Circus once when responding to stares he discovered he was still wearing lapis-lazuli drop ear-rings, bad lapse, that. In the illegitimate Square Mile, of course, everyone is perfectly aware that Christine is a Christopher and that Christopher is a Christine, but they neither know nor care what persona he assumes away from Soho.

Live and let live, that’s Soho’s motto, if a pretty sanctimonious one at times. In any case, when it comes to passing off, the illegitimate Square Mile can no more lay claim to being an authentic square mile than Christopher can claim to be an authentic Christine. Nearer half a square mile would be more like it, if you lop off its adjoining territories such as the other side of the Charing Cross Road and bits of Covent Garden and a few streets north of Oxford Street, which are Soho spiritually but not quite geographically.

Not that Soho itself really exists as a map reference. As its self-appointed historian Len Gates points out at length to any tourist he can manage to ensnare whenever he comes across them consulting a map, it is not a borough, merely a parish — the parish of St Anne’s, although the parish church itself was bombed flat in the war and only its tower remains. A parish, and a voting ward — of Westminster City Council, which from time to time in its planning zeal has done its best to remove Soho from the face of the earth.

But if that ever happened — and Len, puffing at his pipe and shaking the dandruff out of his off-white locks, is still full of fears when he sees yet another baker’s shop becoming yet another boutique, just as in the old days it would have become yet another porn shop — Soho would simply spring up somewhere else.

For Soho is fluid. Gerrard Street, where it all began (Len will show you where Dr Johnson and his cronies used to hang out) is now the High Street of Chinatown and but an outpost of Soho, another of those adjoining territories which like Baltic states are of the neighbourhood yet not quite of its nationality. Soho’s own High Street is Old Compton Street, its loose boundaries Oxford Street to the north, Charing Cross Road to the east, Shaftesbury Avenue to the south and Regent Street to the west.

Within these invisible city walls, Soho’s permanent tally of residents these days, the rents being what they are, amounts to probably no more than three thousand souls, most of them living over the shop or more likely over someone else’s shop. The strength of a sizeable village, which is what some of its residents sentimentally claim it to be. It’s a matter of opinion.

Stephan Dance, not his real name but the one he chooses to go by, and the owner of three of Soho’s surviving porn video shops, calls Soho his village because he has his breakfast croissant and cappuccino at Patisserie Valerie in Old Compton Street and buys his charcuterie and cheese from Fratelli Camisa in Berwick Street and his coffee beans from Angelucci in Frith Street. But Stephan takes his groceries home to Monk Wood St Mary’s in Bucks, where he has a substantial ranch-style home, and that really is a village, with approximately the same number of residents. The difference is that while both in Soho and Monk Wood St Mary’s Stephan Dance knows where to borrow a cup of sugar, in Monk Wood St Mary’s he would be hard put to find someone prepared, at a price, to torch one of his three establishments, the loss-leader, for the insurance. Or alternatively, to burn down the rival sex shop over in Frith Place, for the increased turnover.

And something else that doesn’t happen in Monk Wood St Mary’s is that daily, nightly, shift by shift, Soho’s population is swelled twentyfold by immigrants from the suburbs flocking in to work, or if not to work, then to eat, or drink, or loiter. Kitchen staff, bar staff, waiters, casuals, cashiers, cleaners, office workers, shop assistants, film cutters, dress designers, agents, solicitors’ clerks, civil servants, market traders, bookmakers, hairdressers, craftsmen, club hostesses, hustlers, hookers, pimps, pushers and mug punters. People with homes to go to, when Soho has finished with them or they have finished with Soho.