Bleeding London

MISGUIDED

Once Judy had gone, and after he’d seen her car drive away, Mick went out, found a phone box and called Gabby. He knew she wouldn’t be best pleased to hear from him at this time of day. It was still only eight o’clock and she wasn’t an early riser, but that didn’t seem to matter right now. There were other issues. He was the one on his own, the one away from home, the one with needs, and he needed to speak to her. He felt dislocated, not like himself, and he wanted her to offer him something familiar and reassuring, even if it was only a familiar sleep-soaked sulkiness. He wanted to tell her he missed her. He wanted to tell her how guilty he felt about having slept with somebody else, but he would not be doing that. More likely he might have done something silly like tell Gabby he loved her, but he didn’t get the chance to do that either. The phone rang and rang, and remained unanswered.

As he walked back to the Dickens from the phone box he thought of all the innocent reasons Gabby might have for not answering her phone. Many of them were quite plausible but he failed to convince himself. When he walked in the door of the hotel he was confronted by the landlady. She was standing in the hall, supposedly sorting out the post, but he knew she was there waiting for him. She was wearing a scarlet jogging suit this morning, though the gold mules on her feet suggested she wasn’t going to jog very far.

“Had some company last night, did you?” she said.

“That’s right,” he replied. He had no intention of lying about it.

“One of our little Chinese friends?”

“Japanese,” he corrected her. “Half-Japanese.” Then he wondered why he was bothering to set her straight.

“Maybe you’re too young to remember what went on in those camps,” she said. “But I’m not.”

He pushed past her and started up the stairs. He could hear her still speaking, though now more to herself than to him.

“I don’t object to a young man bringing a girl back, but there are plenty of local girls without having to resort to the yellow peril.”

Back in his room Mick looked around for something belonging to the landlady that was worth stealing or smashing, but he could find nothing. He did his best to pace the room but it was too small for that. He had to get out again, immediately. He stormed down the stairs and through the hall where the landlady was still in occupation, and left the hotel in a fury. He was in such a demented state that when he found himself next to a bus that had stopped at traffic lights he leapt on and headed for the West End.

An hour later he was walking along Oxford Street, a place he had been before, a name that he recognized, and at first all he noticed was the rubbish. Not the rubbish in the streets, there was surprisingly little of that. It was more the rubbish in the shops, tacky souvenirs: snow domes, plastic policeman’s helmets, T — shirts that said, “Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go to London.” There were clothes shops selling cheap tat that he wouldn’t be seen dead in. London was supposed to be this slick, fashionable place, but he thought he was far too cool for most of these shops.

Then there were all the junk food restaurants, not even English junk but American junk, Dunkin Donuts and Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Some of the architecture was impressive, big solid buildings with columns and arches and ornate stonework, but at ground level they always turned into C&A or Shelley’s or Mr Byrite.

There were men on the pavement selling fake perfume from suitcases, pretending it was stolen. And there were people who wanted to give Mick things: flyers advertising shoe shops and warehouse outlets situated off the main drag, cards for dodgy colleges and language schools, free papers and mags with jobs for secretaries and computer nerds. He accepted everything he was given, looked at it, then placed it carefully in the next bin.

Mick didn’t know what he was doing here. He couldn’t pretend that this was any sort of reconnaissance. He was just walking. He wasn’t even doing very much thinking. He’d done his best to shrug offjudy. OK, so they’d slept together. No big deal, and there wasn’t any reason why Gabby should ever hear about it. He also tried to shrug off Cabby’s failure to answer the phone. Forget it, he told himself, get on with the job.

But he couldn’t do that either. He couldn’t concentrate. He’d slept badly having Judy in his bed. He felt tired and out of shape. For now he just continued wandering, looking in the shop windows, at the streets, at the people.

He came to the eastern end of Oxford Street and he let his feet carry him into the narrow webbing of streets around the British Museum. They were unfamiliar, yet not unwelcoming, and the buildings were big but human. He found himself in a Georgian square, tall town houses around its edges, a locked garden at its centre, and there was a group of people gathering in the far corner. He walked towards them and he could tell they were tourists. He would have walked right past but one of them, an old American dude with half a dozen industrial size cameras strapped around him, called out, “Are you part of criminal London?”

Mick stopped, wondered what he was being accused of here and who by, then it all fell into place. He was witnessing the start of a guided walking tour. If Judy hadn’t told him the previous night that she’d once been a tour guide he would never have recognized it. He stopped, looked at the gang of tourists and said, “London, no. Criminal Sheffield, maybe.”

At that moment an unhappy-looking woman announced herself as Anita, their tour leader. She smiled, trying hard to appear pleasant, but Mick reckoned she thought she was too good for this sort of work.

“Are you coming on the tour or not?” she demanded officiously.

He shook his head.

“No, but if anybody wants a crash course in GBH, let me know.”

Anita didn’t smile and Mick slipped away. He wondered if he should have gone on the tour, but no, it wasn’t his style. He wondered if it would have been more his style if Judy Tanaka had been leading it, and then with dismay he realized he was thinking about her again. He sat on a bench for a while and felt sorry for himself. He was bored and lonely and the day was far too long. It took a lot of self-control not to invent some reason for going back to the London Particular but he just managed it.

♦

After she left Mick’s bed that morning Judy drove her car home from the Dickens and only had time for a quick shower before work. All day as she unpacked books and helped with customer enquiries she thought about Mick. She didn’t think she wanted anything from him and she didn’t even intend to see him again unless he initiated it. She knew he had a girlfriend back home, that he would have no use for her.

All the same, she kept wondering where he was, whether he was on the trail of his next victim, whether he was even now engaged in beating somebody up. She knew she shouldn’t ‘approve’ of Mick’s violence and yet she was aware that her approval was irrelevant. She didn’t for a moment think that he was simply a criminal sadist. She knew he must have his reasons for what he was doing, and if the reasons were good enough for him they were good enough for her.

The working day was long and she was eager to get home.

She managed to escape half an hour early and she hurried back to her flat where she had important things to do. She took out her map of London and one of the transparent sheets. It was the one that charted her own sexual progress through the city. She added one new cross, placing it carefully in Park Lane, Hackney, in an area of the map that was otherwise quite free of such crosses. Then she took a brand-new overlay sheet, put Mick’s name at the top and drew a cross on that too, a single mark that coincided exacdy with the new cross of her own.

♦

In the evening Mick finally got through to Gabby. He didn’t mention that he’d called that morning and he made no attempt to find out where she’d been. In fact they were both lost for conversation. The urgency he’d felt that morning had completely disappeared.

He told her he’d dealt with the fourth of her violators, though he didn’t tell her what he’d done, and she said she was pleased, although she sounded indifferent. Then, only because he didn’t know what else to talk about, he told her he’d been walking around Oxford Street, had considered going on a walking tour, and she exploded with anger. What the fuck did he think he was doing there enjoying himself and having a good time? Why wasn’t he out doing what he was supposed to be doing, taking revenge?

He took it on the chin, didn’t argue, didn’t apologize, admitted that he’d been wasting time. Her rage seemed appropriate, something apt and deserved, even if her actual reasons for raging at him seemed hopelessly out of kilter. He promised he’d get back to work without delay. That was all it took to pacify Gabby. The phonecall ended on a note of complete and completely misguided serenity.

♦

After she’d put the maps away Judy felt very, very lonely. She put on a CD but it bored her and made her feel melancholy. She thought of phoning her parents but they would guess something was wrong and how could she possibly explain what? Then she remembered it was time for the sexy phone-in programme. She turned the dial, tried for half an hour to find the station, but the programme wasn’t there. It had been replaced by a sombre programme about community needs in London. Judy lay on her back on the bed and dealt with her own needs as best she could, but it only brought temporary relief.

Next morning, on her way to work, between the tube station and the shop she saw Stuart. That was typical. That was all she needed. What was he doing in this area of town? He couldn’t be following her could he? And why was he carrying an A — Z? There was no getting away from him. The creep had even gone so far as to chase after her and grab her. Her decision to scream and shout obscenities at him had been calculated but quite unforced. It was genuine emotion.

Her ploy had succeeded in getting rid of him but when she got to work she was still shaking with anger. She realized that very little had changed so far as Stuart and she were concerned. She still hated him profoundly. She still wanted to hurt him, to see him suffer. He had always made her feel weak and impotent, and the ways of hurting him seemed so few. Maybe she could have told his wife about their affair, yet she suspected that the cold, business-like Anita would have taken it in her stride, shrugged and got on with making a few work calls.

She’d much rather have punched him with her bare fists, broken a few teeth and bones, smashed his nose open, left him in the gutter, cut and bruised and splitting blood. It was a nice thought, but she knew she was no good at that kind of thing. However, as she unlocked the doors of the London Particular and opened for the day, a blindingly obvious realization came to her: she had just slept with a man who was very good indeed at that kind of thing.