Sam turned back round.
‘You should’ve seen your face!’ he said, back on me. ‘You keep setting them up, son, I’ll keep knocking them in!’
I gave him a thumbs up and sat down.
Clem stared into space, his mouth reaching for something funny to say about thumbs.
I started to write my review.
‘Brighton’s Brightest’, I called it.
I put a
lot
of effort in.
Lunchtime. Postman’s Park. A crayfish wrap, a can of Coke, and an excited Dev.
‘It hit me just after you left!’ he said.
‘What did?’
‘You. The Girl. The potential. You have everything at your disposal to make this work!’
I stared at him and tried to subtly work out if I could smell
Jezynowka
. We started to walk.
‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘You have an audience. An audience you can utilise to find her!’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘There are things you can do. You’ve got the whole place at your disposal!’
‘What place?’
‘London.’
‘More specifically?’
‘
London Now
!’
No. No, thanks, Dev. Not to say I hadn’t considered it. A feature in the paper would have its effects, but it would be too exposing. Too embarrassing. Too needy and too desperate. I’ve seen those articles written by journos in which they immerse themselves in something, like speed dating or whatever, always written with that same knowing, ironic smirk, and I want no part of it.
‘I don’t think it’s the way to go,’ I said. ‘I don’t think she’d like it.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Too much attention. Who knows what her situation is?’
‘What? I’m not talking about some big exposé. I’m saying there are tools you can use. Those pictures, right? We agree they’re full of clues. A background, a shop, a fancy car outside a big building marked Alaska.’
I kept quiet about my trip to Bermondsey.
‘You don’t know what that place is so you ask the readers. Hidden London, call it. Offer a small prize. Can You Identify This Piece of Hidden London?’
I started to smile, despite myself. This wasn’t bad.
‘Why are you so keen?’ I said.
‘It gets you out of the flat,’ he said. ‘Or how about this? You don’t know who she is so again you ask the readers. Print a photo, one where there are other people around, then pretend like it’s a random shot and the random person circled wins a random prize. She rings up, and Bob’s your uncle!’
‘What if she doesn’t see it?’
‘Then someone she knows will see it! And they’ll be like, Susan, or whatever her name is, Susan you’re in the paper and you’ve won five quid!’
I pretended I was thinking about it. But I already had, and this could work. Plus, it was charming, somehow. Less stalky. More … imaginative.
We stopped walking.
‘
London Now
isn’t just
London Now
,’ he said. ‘It’s
your
London.
Now
.’
He looked pleased with himself.
‘You should suggest that as a slogan.’
Over his shoulder, I could just make out a tile.
Ernest Benning, compositor, aged 22. Upset from a boat one dark night off Pimlico Pier, grasped an oar with one hand supporting a woman with the other, but sank as she was rescued
.
‘Use the moment!’ he said.
‘Yeah, maybe,’ said Zoe. ‘It’s a bit local newspaper, though.’
‘But we
are
a local newspaper,’ I said. ‘You know. London’s just a place, isn’t it? I know most of the paper’s done up in Manchester, but the bits we do should be for the audience we have. Londoners. It’s better than another bought-in quiz, y’know? And I don’t mind sourcing the images.’
‘From?’
‘Well, not a picture library, so there’s a saving already! No, I’ll just take some snaps. I’m trying to get to know London a bit better anyway. It’ll do me good. Getting out there. Seeing things. Bit of fresh air.’
She thought about it.
‘We’ll give it a go for a couple of weeks. Could always ask the readers to send stuff in, too.’
‘Great!’ I said. ‘Right, so … I’ll find a picture.’
This was good. This was doing something. Something less weird than another hour staring at The Girl’s photos and then driving off to Whitby or Bermondsey or wherever. And these snaps … these were largely London snaps. Or looked to be. Dev’s idea had legs. I just had to choose the right shot and unleash an army of London-based researchers upon it.
I laid them out on my desk and quietly flicked through them. Most of them weren’t suitable. A shot of the man with the chunky watch eating scallops in a restaurant, for example. That did nothing for me. But others did. There she was, walking through some kind of park, two stone doorways behind her with huge triangular pedestals above them, green leaves tickling the lip. We could just zoom in on the doorways. That was hidden London. Someone would know where that was. Or this one, the inside of a cinema. An old one, the kind you’d expect an organist to suddenly shoot through the floor of, playing ‘We’ll Meet Again’ just before the Saturday matinees kick in. She looks happy in this one. A bag of popcorn, a bottle of water, the glow of an evening about to begin. I wonder where this is. I wonder what was going on, that night. I wonder if …
‘Scallops?’
I jolted, and tried to collect my photos together.
Her
photos. Not mine.
‘Eh?’
‘Scallops!’ said Clem, picking the photo up. ‘Sounds rude when you say it like that, doesn’t it? Who’s this handsome fella?’
‘That’s …’ Well, how did I explain it? How did I explain why I had a photo of a handsome man eating scallops? ‘That’s my brother.’ I lied.
‘Is it?’
Shit. Actually. Zoe. Where was Zoe? She knows I have a brother. Mind you, I’d kept the details scant, probably to make myself seem more special, more unique, less one-of-two. Everything else we’d discussed and dissected. Where we came from, where we hoped to be, how we saw our futures going, where ten years might take us. We’d talked about it too much, if anything.
I cast my eye quickly around the office. I was safe. Zoe was by the printer, swearing. Thank God for cheap refills. Thank
God ten years had taken her to an office that wouldn’t pay out for the good stuff.
‘Don’t see the resemblance,’ said Clem. ‘What does he do?’
‘He is … an orthodontist.’
Clem looked impressed.
‘He has his own practice,’ I said. ‘In … Wandsworth. He is married to a lady called Lilian and they have no pets.’
I couldn’t stop.
‘Lilian is an industrial engineer. She’s got yellow hair.’
Wish I had.
‘Finchley Road,’ said Clem, distracted.
‘What is?’ I said.
He pointed at the photo, and smiled.
‘That restaurant.’
What? How did he know?
He leaned closer, and pointed at the menu in the handsome man’s hands.
‘Where are you taking me?’ said Dev. ‘What’s all this about scallops?’
‘There,’ I said, as the cab passed Swiss Cottage.
We were headed to Prince Albert Street not far from St John’s Wood, and Dev’s not used to being anywhere a Prince or a Saint might have been.
‘I’m taking you
there
,’ I said, pointing at the tower block, when finally we pulled up.
‘A tower block?’
‘It’s not just a tower block. There’s a restaurant at the bottom. One you wouldn’t know was there. Not unless you were Clem.’
‘So it’s a scallop restaurant?’
‘No. I mean, I don’t know. Maybe. We’re reviewing it. That’s what they’re expecting, anyway. In reality, we’re casing the joint.’
‘You’re getting into this,’ he said, delighted, taking the photo from my hand and now understanding. ‘She looks a little masculine in this photo, though.’
‘That’s Chunk, as he will now be known.’
‘I know who Chunk is. So what if we bump into him?’
‘It’s very unlikely he’ll be here. But we can see how the place suits us. Get a measure of it. And maybe ask the maître d’ if he’s seen The Girl.’
‘Look at you. Saying “maître d’”. Will you be telling the maître d’ about your cosy home in the spare room above a shop next to a place everyone thought was a brothel but wasn’t?’
‘A professional maître d’ has no interest in such matters,’ I said. ‘Come on.’
Oslo Court is an old-fashioned kind of a restaurant, it turns out. Old-fashioned decor. Old-fashioned men in old-fashioned clothes wheeling old-fashioned dessert trolleys round to people who like things old-fashioned.
‘This is a bit weird,’ said Dev, taking in the pink and frilly curtains. ‘Why would Chunk take her here? This is just someone’s flat on the ground floor of a council house.’
‘No, it’s not. And maybe he didn’t,’ I said. ‘Maybe—’
But I couldn’t think of another reason why two people would have ended up here. Thing is, it didn’t exactly scream ‘date’. It screamed ‘entertaining a corporate client’. So maybe that was it. Maybe The Girl was a corporate client. Or he was. And they’d simply decided to spend the entire week together, going on walks in parks and to bars and to places like Oslo Court. Because that’s what platonic business people do. Platonically.
‘Have you decided what you’d like to eat?’ asked a waiter.
‘I’ll have the scallops!’ said Dev. ‘And so will my friend!’
‘Actually, I’ll—’
‘Come on! We came here because of the scallops, didn’t we?’
‘Well …’
‘It’s
because
of the scallops we’re here …’
I looked at my scallops with disdain, and I’d swear they did the same back. Dev got out the disposable and snapped a picture of me pretending to make one talk.
I’m not sure I should be a professional restaurant reviewer.
‘So did you do it?’ said Dev. ‘The Hidden London thing?’
‘I did, sir.’
‘What shot?’
‘This one.’
I took the photos out of my inside pocket and found the right one. I bristled slightly as Dev watched me do it. I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking, ‘Oh, he carries them round now, does he?’
It was taken on a cold day, it seemed, this one. Her cheeks were red and her breath hung in the air.
‘A Walk in the Park,’ said Dev. ‘That’s what I’d call this photo if I were an important artist.’
‘See these doorways? We zoomed in on them. Just used a detail. They look pretty distinct.’
‘Be embarrassing if they weren’t in London,’ said Dev. ‘Wouldn’t set a good precedent for this whole Hidden London thing if someone went, “Actually, that’s Russell Watson’s house in Plymouth”.’
‘That’s no one’s house. That’s … a park. A London park. You can tell, because it’s wet.’
We stared at each other.
Dev looked proud of me.
Hidden London ran in that week’s paper. I suppose it was a bit cheeky, hijacking these few inches of the paper, thrusting it in Londoner’s faces just because I could. To anyone else, of
course, it would have meant nothing. A small box on a page of bought-in crosswords and sudoku and cartoons that never ever seemed to have a punchline, no matter how hard you looked.
But to me, well, it was a little Trojan horse. And hey, the £25 prize for the correct answer wasn’t bad either. I mean, it’s not like we were cheating the reader. They just needed the correct answer.
Only problem was, of course, that I didn’t know the correct answer. And people would expect the correct answer. That’s really the minimum requirement of a quiz like this: that there’s actually an answer to get right.
Still. It’ll be fine, I thought. Surely there’ll be a consensus. Maybe by now, sixty or seventy avid
London Now
readers would’ve emailed in their correct answers, each of them certain and confident and right.
I logged in at the office.
Apparently not.
Well. It was only 7.30 a.m. I’d come in a little early today. I clicked refresh and refresh and refresh, and then made a coffee.
By midday, there were three guesses.
I toasted myself with a cup of tea. I had just successfully launched
London
Now’s least-successful feature of all time.
Zoe laughed when I told her, and said to just use a picture of Big Ben next time, but I already knew what I’d be using next time. The cinema. The old, and battered cinema with its velvet and popcorn and dark, purple glow.
‘Any of them get it right, at least?’ asked Zoe, and I made a face that started off as ‘yes’ and ended up as ‘no’, because really, I hadn’t worked out my approach on this yet.
I looked again at the guesses, and wondered whether any of them were right.
I guess I’d have to check and see.
London in the summer can’t be beaten. It’s like it comes out of hiding in the sun. The things you notice, the people you see, the instant calm that soothes the city and slows a lunchtime down.
I’d seen it in Soho Square already today, as I searched out Len from Greenwich’s first guess at Hidden London (sorry, Len: way off). The workers and the homeless all, at the first real sign of sun, apparently taking a day off from their very different activities, basking in the heat, opening plastic sandwich boxes or bright red smoothies, or shuffling about by the bins finding dog-ends to crumble into rollies, depending on which group you were concentrating on. A large group of girls, head-to-toe in white and from the hairdressing college down the street eyed the pub on the corner, wondering if they could sneak in a large rosé before curling class.
And the trees. I’d never noticed the trees in Soho Square before. Were they new? Had they always been there? Large and long and looping, perhaps the council wheel them out during heatwaves, or maybe it’s only when you need the shade you start noticing its protection.
And now, here I was in Highgate: a place I’d only been once or twice to visit an old girlfriend who’d tell me of the vampires and ghouls that are said to roam the streets at night. There’d been some kind of nobleman, brought to England in his coffin sometime at the beginning of the eighteenth century, buried in Highgate Cemetery but later roused by Satanists, and who then became the King Vampire of the Undead. I suppose it is sad that some people only discover their true vocation
when it’s too late. Many people said that the right way to handle suddenly having a King Vampire move in to the local area would be to dig him up, put a stake through him, behead him and then burn him, but as others pointed out at the time, this was illegal and rude. This type of thing makes me feel warm about Britain. Even if it does mean we’re overrun by Vampire Kings.