Babycakes (14 page)

A long silence followed, during which she remembered the joint in her purse. “I almost forgot,” she told Simon. “You haven’t sampled the Queen Mother yet.”

“I beg your pardon?”

She giggled, holding up the joint. “Mrs. Madrigal’s primo homegrown.”

“Ah.”

She lit the joint, took a toke, and handed it to him. “I rolled a couple for the trip to the airport. Mouse was feeling no pain when he took off.”

He didn’t respond, holding the smoke in his lungs.

She watched him, tickled by his dignity during the performance of this near-ridiculous ritual.

“Very tasty,” he said at last.

“Mmm. Isn’t it?”

“Do you still want that story?”

For a moment, she thought he was accusing her of weakening his resistance with dope. Then she realized the question was in earnest. “Do you mean …?”

“The one about me. ‘Queen’s Officer Jumps Ship in Frisco.’ ”

She smiled. “I think I’d handle it a little more tastefully than that.”

He handed the joint back to her. “Do you want to?”

She hesitated. “Simon, I meant it when I said I wouldn’t do anything if …”

“I know that. You’ve been perfectly honorable.” He retrieved the joint and took another toke off it. “I’ve given this some thought, Mary Ann. Frankly … I don’t see what harm it would do. If you’re still game, that is.”

She said nothing, wondering about his motives.

“Is it what you want?” he asked quietly.

She nodded. “Yes.”

He smiled. “Then it’s what
I
want.”

“Simon …”

“I reserve the right to edit content, of course. I don’t want to embarrass anyone.”

“Of course not.”

Another smile, a little warmer than the last. “Wonderful. It’s settled, then?”

“You bet.”

He returned the joint. “When shall we start?”

Brian materialized under the lych-gate, panting heavily in shorts and a tank top. Simon wasn’t facing the gate, but he detected the change in her expression and turned around. “Oh … hello there.”

“ ‘Lo,” said Brian, running in place.

“We’re trying out the new weed,” she offered cheerfully.

“I see.” He was shaking out his arms now, like a marionette in a high wind.

“Do you run regularly?” asked Simon.

“Fair amount,” Brian answered. He wasn’t wasting an ounce of energy on friendliness.

“You must show me where you do it,” said Simon. “I’ve been frightfully remiss in my own regimen.”

“Sure thing,” said Brian, loping past them into the house.

Simon turned to her with a rueful little smile.

“It isn’t you,” she said.

“I hope not.”

“He’s been … I don’t know … not himself lately.”

“Mmm.”

The joint had gone out, so she lit it again and offered it to Simon. He shook his head. She took a short drag and extinguished it. “So … you’re a runner, huh?”

He nodded. “Second generation.”

“Really?”

“My father and I both ran at Cambridge.”

“How
Chariots of Fire,
” she said.

He laughed. “We weren’t quite that competitive. It was mostly to keep fit. Ill health was considered very poor form in the Bardill family.”

“Was?”

“Well.” His eyes were twinkling again. “There’s not that much left of the family, is there?”

44 Colville Crescent

T
HE RAIN SEEMED TO FOLLOW MICHAEL TO LONDON. IT
clattered like spilled gravel against the great vaulting roof of Victoria Station as he grabbed his suitcase and scrambled toward the first available black cab. His driver, a sixtyish man the color of corned beef, touched the bill of his cap.

“Where to, mate?”

“Uh … Nottingham Gate.”

“Eh?”

“Nottingham Gate.” He said it with more authority this time.

“Sorry, mate. No such place. Now, there’s a Notting
Hill
Gate….”

“The address is Forty-four Colville Crescent.”

The driver nodded. “That’s Notting Hill Gate.”

“Great,” said Michael, sinking down into burnished leather. “Thank God for that.”

The flight had been a living nightmare. Despite the effects of the Queen Mother dope and the ministrations of a chummy gay flight attendant, he had been completely unable to sleep. When he arrived at Gatwick Airport, cotton-mouthed and cranky, he was detained for almost two hours while customs officials ransacked the luggage of three hundred African nationals who had landed at the same time.

After losing another hour as he waited to change money, he had boarded a packed London-bound shuttle train, where he shared litter-strewn compartment with a brassy couple from Texarkana who insisted on talking about the Forty-Niners, despite his fearless display of indifference to the subject.

His driver glanced toward the back seat. “A Yank, eh?”

“Uh … right.”

“See what we done to them Argies?”

RGs? A soccer team, maybe? “Oh, yeah … that was some-thin’.”

A wheezy chuckle. “And we did it without the help of your bloody President.”

It wasn’t sports, then. It was politics.

“Mind you, you Yanks always come in late on the big wars. You come in late, or you don’t come at all. Nothin’ personal,”

The light dawned. The Falklands war. The Argies were Argentines. Americans didn’t call them that, because Americans had never cared. You had to start killing people before you took the trouble to give them nicknames. Japs, Krauts, Commies, Cooks … Argies. He had no intention of prolonging the war by arguing with this man. “I like your battle hymn,” he said.

“Eh?” The driver looked at him as if he were crazy.

“ ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.’ Isn’t that what the troops sang, or something?”

The driver grunted, apparently convinced that Michael
was
crazy. What did a bloody
song
have to do with anything? He stopped talking altogether, and Michael breathed a secret sigh of relief as the cab sped past the pale green blur of Hyde Park.

He had been away from this city for sixteen years, the longest time he’d been away from any spot on earth. He had lost his innocence here—or, more accurately, found it—at a lime when mod was in flower and the streets were swarming with legions of while-lipped, black-lashed “birds,” He had met a corduroy-clad bricklayer on Hampstead Heath and gone home with him and learned in an instant just how simple and comforting and beautiful real life could actually be.

The bricklayer had resembled a younger, leaner Oliver Reed, and Michael could recall every detail of that distant afternoon: the statue of David next to his bed, the brown sugar crystals he used in his coffee, the physique magazines he left lying around where anyone could see them, the silken feel of his hairless scrotum. Your first stranger, it seemed, is the one you remember for the rest of your life.

Where was he now? How old would he be? Forty-five? Fifty?

The cab veered left at Marble Arch, a landmark he recognized, then they appeared to follow the Bayswater Road along the edge of a large public garden. Which one? He couldn’t remember. He was punch-drunk with fatigue and depressed by the rain, so he seized upon passing English icons to bolster his morale:

A shiny red mailbox.

A zebra crossing like the one on the
Abbey Road
album.

A pub sign banging in the wind.

The game became tougher when the cab moved into a region of plastic Pizza Huts and tawdry ethnic restaurants. It wasn’t an unpleasant district, really, just surprisingly un-English—more akin to the Haight-Ashbury than anything he had experienced during his earlier visit.

Then the landscape became residential again. He caught glimpses of tree-lined streets and oversized Victorian row houses with crumbling plaster facades. Black children romped in the rain beside a yellow brick wall on which someone had spray-painted:
STUFF THE ROYAL WEDDING.

He spotted a street sign that said
COLVILLE
. “Isn’t this it?” he asked the driver.

“That’s Colville Terrace, mate. You want the Crescent. It’s just up the way a bit.”

Three minutes later, the cab came to a stop. Michael peered out the window with mounting dread. “Is this it?” he asked.

The driver looked peeved. “You wanted Number Forty-four, didn’t you?”

“Right.”

“Then that’s it, mate.”

Michael checked the meter (a modern digital one that looked odd in the classic cab) and handed the driver a five-pound note with instructions to keep the change. He was overtipping, but he wanted to prove that a man who knew nothing about wars and streets could be generous just the same.

The driver thanked him and drove off.

Michael stood on the street and gaped at Simon’s house. Its plaster facade, apparently a victim of dry rot, was riddled with huge leprous scabs which had fallen away completely in places to expose the nineteenth-century brick beneath. For some reason, this disfigurement went straight to the pit of his stomach, like bone glimpsed through a bloodless wound.

He dismissed a flickering hope that there might really be a Nottingham Gate and headed past overturned garbage cans (dust bins, the English insisted on calling them) to the front door of the three-story building. His dread became palpable when he found the name
BARDILL
printed on a card by the door buzzers.

He set his suitcase by the door, found the designated key, and wiggled it into the lock. A dark corridor confronted him. He located the light switch—a circular push thing—on a water-stained wail papered with purple roses. The door to Simon’s ground-floor flat was at the end of the corridor on the right. By the time he had found the right key and slipped it into an obstinate lock, he was engulfed in darkness so complete that he thought for a moment he’d gone blind.

The light switch.
Of course. It was on a timer. He recalled this sensible oddity of British engineering from his last visit. It had charmed him at the time, like electric towel warmers and teakettles that shut off automatically as soon as they whistled.

He turned the knob and pushed against the door with his shoulder, causing light to spill into the corridor from Simon’s flat. A vile odor, like the halitosis of an old dog, rolled over him in waves. He held his breath and lunged for the nearest window, cracking it enough to let in a gush of rain-scented air.

As Simon had promised, the living room had fourteen-foot ceilings, which did lend it a certain aura of seedy elegance.
Tatty
was the word he had used, and that was a fair enough description for the lumpy, junkshop furniture grouped around the room’s nonfunctioning fireplace. The pale green walls were dotted with tin engravings from Victorian times, the only visible concession to interior decoration. Simon’s stereo and a stack of records completed the grim tableau.

Michael followed a narrow hallway in search of the bedroom. Once there, he dropped his suitcase and sank numbly to the edge of the bed, ordering himself not to jump to conclusions. He was bone tired from the ten-hour flight, so his mounting despair could well be a function of fatigue, not to mention the airlines Danish that flopped about in his stomach like a dying rodent.

It was noon now, he supposed. What he needed was a hot bath and a good sleep. When he awoke, the old wonderment would be back again, bringing with it his invaluable capacity for finding quaintness in hardship. What had he expected, anyway? Some sanitized, Disney-like version of English charm?

Yes, he decided, when he saw the bathroom. He had expected something along the lines of the cozy town house in
101 Dalmatians.
Something with roses in the garden and mellow paneling and—
yes,
goddamnit—towel warmers in the bathroom. What he found instead was a cramped room smelling of stale pee and painted to simulate blue sky and clouds. Like the ceiling of an organic bakery in Berkeley.

The tub had legs, which scored a few points for quaintness, but the hot water ran out as soon as it reached the top of his knees. He lay there immobile, racked with disillusionment, and chastised himself for ever agreeing to swap apartments with a heterosexual he didn’t know.

Moments later, he collapsed into bed, but he didn’t fall asleep for at least an hour. As he finally drifted off, he had a vague impression of rain pounding on the packed earth of his “garden” and another, more rhythmic sound. Was it … drums?