Bleeding London

STATION TO STATION

It was late, nearly one in the morning, a cold, hard, winter night, and the lights of Sheffield Midland Station glowed bright and blank. The last train from London was long overdue and Mick Wilton was one of twenty or thirty people waiting to meet it. At the taxi rank at least the same number of Pakistani taxi drivers were sitting in their cabs, a boring wait for a cheap fare. In the car park Mick stood patiently beside his car, an old Mercedes. He was only partly aware of the image he presented, tall, broad, tough-looking, a low-rent character in a high-priced petrol-blue suit, worn now as ever with a spodess white T — shirt. He fought hard not to show the irritation he felt. Waiting was not his style, not in stations or anywhere else.

At last the train slunk on to the platform, indolent and heavy, ground to a halt and disgorged its passengers. Of course she was one of the last to emerge. He saw her coming down the concrete steps, small but conspicuous, a taut redhead in ankle boots, a short skirt and a gold leather jacket. She looked hard, much harder than him. Christ, he thought, she looks like a stripper. Then again, she was; Gabby, his girlfriend, his other half, or whatever you wanted to call it. But tonight there was something not right about her, a stress, a dishevelment that was caused by something more than just tiredness or a lengthy train journey, more even than the drink or drugs he suspected she might have been putting away the moment she was out of his sight. She walked over to the car, scarcely looking at him.

“All right?” he asked.

“No. Not all right.”

She got into the car but she didn’t want him to take her home, not now, not yet, so he drove somewhere they could talk, up on one of the hills above the station where the big high-rises stood.

Gabby said, “So I did the strip like I was supposed to and it went pretty well really. In this sort of club, restaurant, in this private room. It was a stag night and there were six of them and obviously they were rich, stuck-up, posh bastards but at first they didn’t seem too bad really.

“So they gave me some champagne and made me do an encore. And one of them grabbed my arse and another one grabbed my tits, which you know can be all right if it’s done the right way. And in any case, I can handle it. Then one of them tried to kiss me, which is obviously completely out of order, so I smacked him and then another one got into the act and, you knqw, we had a bit of a wrestle and basically they all raped me.”

Mick said nothing. He tried to keep his face as still and inert as a waxwork, but inside his head all kinds of pornographic loops flickered into life; six nameless men in a dark dining room, hunting prints on the walls, masked waiters. Gabby is naked except for a few erotic accessories, suspenders, fishnets, elbow-length gloves, and she’s in tears, pursued by half a dozen savage, thick-necked, in-bred toffs, evening dress in tatters on their bullish frames, trousers down, cocks up.

“All of them?” he asked. “All six?”

“Yeah,” she said. “In turn. While the others held me down. It was pretty much your standard gang-rape.”

He put his hand out to stroke her face. It was meant to be reassuring, unthreatening and unsexual, but she pulled away and shuddered.

“Which act did you do?” he asked.

“Cleopatra.”

“Did you get paid after all this?”

“Yes.”

“That’s something.”

“Not much.”

“Did they hurt you?”

“Yes.”

“Big guys?”

“A couple of them.”

“Not very bright boys obviously. Any-idea who they are? Got any names?”

“Yeah, actually I have.”

She reached into the side pocket of her leather jacket and pulled out a flimsy piece of paper with handwriting on it.

“One of the waitresses saw what happened,” Gabby explained. “She took pity on me. She knew them. They’re regulars.”

Mick looked at the handwriting and saw it was a list of six men’s names.

“Only names,” he said. “No addresses?”

“Won’t that be enough?”

“I hope so,” Mick said.

“I hope so too. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to deal with it, right?”

“Good,” she said, and her whole being softened with relief. “I knew you would.”

♦

He got off the train at St Pancras, a lone man without luggage, the same suit, a new white T — shirt beneath. Pale winter sun leaked in through the grey glass vault overhead and made him feel both depressed and determined. He moved swiftly through the crowd and went out of the station to the open air where the black cabs waited. He got into the first one and said, “Dickens Hotel, Park Lane.”

The couple of days he’d spent in Sheffield getting ready to leave had been bad. There was no living with Gabby. She wouldn’t let him touch her, wouldn’t let him near. He took it for granted that she’d want him to stay with her but she’d sent him back to his own flat, wouldn’t even let him sleep on her couch. He’d tried not to be angry. He wanted to-be sympathetic. He knew that she’d been through a lot and was hurting. But he had feelings too and he was thrown by the way she kept her distance. She said she didn’t want to talk about it, and the sooner he got to London the better.

The driver started the meter and the cab chugged into life. The driver was not a talker and Mick was glad of that. He looked at the adverts lining the inside of the cab, one for a laptop computer, one for a plastic surgery clinic. Then he looked out of the cab window at the thick traffic, the motorbikes weaving in and out, at the blurred air, the people hurrying along the pavements, late for something. He hated everything he saw, and he allowed an expression of condescending disgust to settle on his face. London.

It felt strange to be here but it also felt inevitable, as though he’d had no choice in the matter. If somebody you cared about got hurt, then you did something about it. You came to their assistance. You protected them if you could, but if it was too late for that then you took your revenge. You handed out punishment. You made sure it would never happen again. It wasn’t some complex code. There was no sense of chivalry or honour involved. It was just cause and effect. You did what needed doing. And when you got right down to it, maybe it didn’t even have all that much to do with Gabby being ‘his’, with affection or attachment Probably he’d have done the same for someone he cared for much less than he cared for Gabby. He might even have done it for a bloke.

He wanted to keep it simple and efficient. He didn’t want to involve innocent people. He didn’t want to prolong the agony. He just wanted to get the job done. There were six men out there who had it coming to them, and it was coming express delivery. The only thing that threatened to delay him, to make his life unnecessarily difficult, was the nature and complex unfamiliarity of London itself. If those six bastards had been Sheffield lads he’d already have finished the job by now.

At last the cab driver spoke. He said, “What hotel did you say, mate?”

“The Dickens,” Mick replied.

The driver scratched the rolls of flesh at the back of his neck. “I don’t know that one.”

“I thought you London taxi drivers knew everything.”

The driver seemed undecided whether or not to take offence, but simply said, “I know Park Lane but I don’t know any Dickens Hotel.”

“Is that right?” Mick said, unhelpfully.

“OK,” the driver said, “we’ll find it when we get there.”

They got there and Mick was quietly impressed. This looked much better. This was a more pleasant version of London. There was still too much traffic but at least there was a park and the hotels looked moneyed and comfortable. He looked at their names, and they all seemed vaguely familiar, places heard about on television or read about in the papers: the Dorchester, the Inn on the Park, the Hilton, but there was no Dickens. The driver stopped the cab before the road dragged him into the currents of traffic swirling round Hyde Park Corner.

“I didn’t like to say anything,” he said, “but I didn’t think there was a Dickens Hotel here.”

Mick sat impassively.

“I don’t suppose you know what number Park Lane?” the driver asked.

As a matter of fact Mick did. He had a business card from the hotel. He took it out of his breast pocket and without saying a word handed it to the driver who looked at it for less than a second and then shook his head in mocking, disbelieving sympathy.

“You from out of town?” he asked.

“So?”

“You want bloody Park Lane, Hackney.”

“Do I?” said Mick. “Take me there then.”

“I’m not going to bloody Hackney.”

“What’s wrong with Hackney?”

“When you find someone to take you there, you’ll find out. That’s a tenner you owe me. Now on your way.”

“You’re taking me there,” Mick said.

“No, I’m not, pal.”

Mick sat still and imperious. He wasn’t going to lose his first argument in the big city.

“Out,” said the driver and he stepped from his cab. He opened the rear door and Mick could see he was carrying a baseball bat. That amused him.

“I said out. Or else.”

Mick, unruffled, said, “You’ll need more than a baseball bat,” and he exploded into violence. He grabbed the bat from the driver’s hands, swirled it round and hit him across the nose twice. He leapt out of the cab, knocked the driver aside and went to the front where he kicked in both headlights. He was thinking of smashing the windows with the bat, puncturing the radiator, thinking of giving the driver a proper going over, when a sudden change came over him, as though a fatherly restraining hand had been put on his shoulder, sanity returning. He threw the bat aside and began to walk slowly away. “I hate this town,” he said, and he broke into a run, dashing into the streets behind the big hotels before the driver could find any allies.

♦

He soon stopped running. Running was no more his style than waiting, but he continued to cover ground, walking fast, determinedly, foolishly, lost. He had no idea where he was or where he was going. He felt furious and humiliated, and for a while at least the simple performance of looking as though he knew where he was heading was enough to help disperse the anger. The streets of Mayfair confused him. He had imagined that every street in London seethed with activity and population, yet these streets were more or less empty. The buildings were big and imposing but they had sucked in all the crowds from the pavement.

He walked for half an hour or more, in a straight line when he could. His sense of direction was good enough to make sure that he made some progress and didn’t backtrack on himself, but whether that progress was any use to him, whether his sense of direction was taking him anywhere worth going, he didn’t know. At last, his anger all but gone, his pace slowing, Hackney still an undiscovered country, he grasped that he was truly lost.

He asked one or two people for directions, but they had no idea what he was talking about and he wasn’t sure whether it was their foreignness to blame or his. The people he asked had no idea how to get to Hackney. It was a distant province, a place beyond the remit of cartographers, off the edge of the known world. At last he settled for asking a simpler question. “Do you know where I can buy a map? A newsagent or something?”

He was addressing a tweedy, bearded, middle-aged man. He looked like a Londoner (whatever that meant), that was why Mick had chosen him. The man said, “You’re only round the corner from one of my favourite shops, the London Particular. They’ll be able to sort you out.” And he gave directions that even Mick could follow.

Mick arrived at the London Particular, a bookshop of sorts, an old — fashioned, bay-windowed place, narrow at the front but opening out into a large, deep, sky-lit area at the rear. Mick went in a bit reluctantly. He sensed he was entering a specialist establishment. A newsagent would have been more welcoming and easier to deal with. The sheer quantity and density of stock in the shop was overwhelming; books, maps and guides, new and secondhand, were crammed into bookshelves of immense height and depth. They towered up to the ceiling, higher than a man could reach, and they were stacked two rows deep on some of the shelves. On the floor there were boxes, crates and sometimes just loose piles of guide books and magazines. In the centre of the shop was a table stacked high with precarious piles of books. He felt clumsy, out of place, his every movement threatening to knock over some carefully arranged construction.

There were a couple of browsers inside but he could see no assistant. He was tempted to walk out, but where would he walk to? He would wait until someone appeared. Meanwhile he continued to look at the stock, and only slowly and belatedly did it dawn on him that every single book, guide, map and magazine in the place had London as its subject. There were history books, memoirs, biographies, books on London architecture, on town planning, on immigration and riots and insurrection. The guide books, plenty of which were antique or written in foreign languages, offered specific and specialized routes through London. There were guides for rock music fans, for lesbians, for cemetery enthusiasts. Even the maps were specialized, being designated for walkers or motorists, parking maps, 3-D maps, ‘murder’ maps. A simple map, capable of getting him from A to B, from wherever he was now, to the Dickens Hotel, Hackney, seemed simultaneously too much and too little to ask for.

Then an assistant appeared and Mick’s heart sank. There behind the counter was a Japanese-looking woman, young, attractive, smart, but very, very foreign. Mick shook his head, not at all surprised by his bad luck, and was heading for the door when he heard her call after him, “Can I help you, sir?”

The voice didn’t sound as though it could possibly have come from her. It was clipped and projected, without any trace of a foreign accent. In fact it was a posh, English, upper-class voice, far more pukka and correct than his own. It was the kind of voice he had been taught to dismiss and distrust: superior, middle class, southern.

He turned to her and said, “You speak English.”

“Just a tad,” she replied.

“I’m lost,” he said. “I need a map.”

Given the number of maps to choose from it would have been easy for her to treat his request dismissively, but she didn’t. She was helpful, easygoing, not at all the snotty bitch that her voice had made Mick expect. She set him up with an A — Z, even showing him the pages on which Hackney was to be found.

“First time in London?” she asked.

“No,” Mick said proudly. “Third.”

“Do you think you might need a guide book?”

Well, he was going to need guidance, though he couldn’t see exactly what kind of guide book would offer the sort of information he wanted. He said, “Maybe,” and she directed him to the modern guide book section where he was duly baffled.

“Any recommendations?”

“How about this one?” she said.

She handed him a book called Complete London.

“Complete?” he queried.

“Yes.”

He looked puzzled and doubtful.

“Well, how can it be?” he said. “If it was really complete it’d have to contain all the information in all these other books, wouldn’t it? In fact, it’d have to contain all the information in all the books in the whole shop. Right?”

“I suppose that’s true,” she admitted graciously.

“And all the information in all the books on London that you don’t have in the shop. The book’d have to be bigger than the shop. In fact the book would probably have to be bigger than London itself, wouldn’t it?”

“I’d never thought about it in quite that way,” she said.

“Well, think about it,” he said.

She pretended to think, but she did not pretend very hard.

“Maybe I should just pick one at random,” he said.

She bowed her head a little, submissively; the customer was right. She watched as without looking he reached out towards the bookcase. His fingers riffled the air and landed on the spine of a book called Unreliable London and he hooked it out. He stared at it curiously. Although it wasn’t a secondhand book it was well battered as though it had sat neglected on the shelf for a very long time. The photograph on the cover, which was a little faded and a little out of focus, showed a dull shot of Tower Bridge.

“I can’t vouch for that particular volume,” she said. “Perhaps you should choose again.”

“No,” said Mick. “I’ve made my choice. I was obviously meant to have this book.”

He said it with complete earnestness, but she wasn’t sure whether he was joking or not. An English trait. They both smiled uncertainly at each other.

“What’s your name?” Mick asked.

She hesitated before saying, “Judy. Judy Tanaka.”

“Very exotic,” he said.

“Not really. In Japan, Tanaka is the equivalent of Smith.”

“But we’re not in Japan, so it’s still exotic, OK?”

“Fine,” she said, and she took the book and the map from him, rang them into the till and put them in a bag.

As he was paying he said, “And where are you from?”

“Streatham,” she replied.

“Oh, right,” said Mick, as though the name meant something to him. It didn’t, of course. It was just a foreign place that he’d never heard of. It might have been in Japan for all he knew.

♦

A long time later, footsore but refusing to acknowledge it, he arrived at the Dickens Hotel, Park Lane, Hackney. It had been a long walk and he had passed a number of hotels on the way. A part of him had thought about abandoning the Dickens and checking into one of these. But he’d decided against it. You had to be careful in London. There were serious rip-offs waiting round every comer. A bloke he knew in Sheffield had recommended the Dickens, and that was good enough for him. You didn’t want to go somewhere you didn’t know and where they didn’t want you.

Park Lane was a wide, busy, residential street, full of potholes and jammed with parked cars, although from what Mick had seen so far most London streets were like that. There was a boarded-up pub on the comer and a take-away offering dumplings and fritters.

It didn’t look the kind of street that would contain a hotel. The houses were tall four-storey buildings that must once have belonged to the rich, but a look at the long row of doorbells outside each front door confirmed their rabid subdivision into flats.

A part of him would have been happy to know that he’d come to the wrong place for a second time but on the front of one of the houses he saw a polished brass plaque that said ‘Dickens Hotel’. He had arrived. Yet it took more than a plaque to make a hotel and this place looking like nothing more than a boarding-house with misplaced and unconvincing pretensions. And after he’d climbed the half-dozen steps to the front door and rung a bell, he was immediately confronted by a woman who could only be a landlady.

Her age was hard to guess and you could tell she wanted to make guessing difficult. The hair was dyed jet black, the clothes could have belonged to a brash eighteen-year-old. The makeup was plentiful and a little old — fashioned, suitable, say, for a forties Hollywood musical. He couldn’t stop staring at the beauty spot that he felt sure had been painted on her right cheek.

In return she looked at him only fleetingly, then said, “I was expecting you hours ago.”

“I came by the scenic route,” he said.

“What?”

“I walked.”

The entrance hall wasn’t badly kept. The carpet and wallpaper were new, there was a big gold-framed mirror and a couple of reproduction chairs. But Mick was taken to the third floor, a place of streaked walls and lino and chipped paintwork. His room, situated next to the shared bathroom, was small, with a candlewick bedspread and wallpaper that erupted with pink roses. There were only a few stains on the carpet, only a couple of cigarette burns on the bedside table. The mirror on the wardrobe had only a small crack and the lace curtain across the window had definitely been washed within living memory. He pushed it aside and looked down into the street.

The woman said, “You must be very fit if you walked all the way from St Pancras.”

“Yeah, I’m in training.”

She was impressed. Mick viewed the street scene with disdain. Across the road a man was committing major surgery on a collision-damaged BMW. A female crustie was walking down the street dragging a skinny, grubby Dalmatian behind her. It was a struggle since the dog was doing its best to shit as it walked and was leaving a line of long slender turds along the centre of the pavement.

“What do you call this area?” Mick asked.

“I like to call it Stoke Newington,” said the landlady. “Why?”

“I wanted to make sure I hadn’t entered the twilight zone,” Mick replied.

But he took the room. What else was he going to do? It was just a room. It held no horrors, and he wasn’t planning to be there long. Night was falling. He sat on the bed and watched the gathering darkness drain the pink roses of their violent hue. He wondered if he could face fritters and dumplings. He opened the door of the wardrobe and found that someone had left a girlie mag lying there face up. He thought the model on the cover looked strangely like Gabby. He slammed the wardrobe door shut, spread himself out on the bed and stared up at the cracks in the ceiling. Before long he could make out faces and the outlines of mythical countries.