Ghostwritten (36 page)

“You
sure
you’re all right, love? No knocks on the head now?”

“No, no, I’m quite all right. But can you give me a ride in your cab?”

“I give rides in my cab to anybody with the fare, love. But look ‘ere—”

“I must look a pretty sight, but so would you if you’d … never mind. I’m sane, and solvent. Please take me to the airport.”

He was suspicious, but she was serious. “Well, I suppose as long as you’re inside my taxi, you can’t try and kill yourself under it. Heathrow, Gatwick, or London City?”

“Gatwick, please.”

The taxi driver looked at me. “You all right, son?”

I looked around for somebody to tell me the answer but there was nobody. “I guess so.”

The taxi driver looked back at the woman. “Then climb in.”

They got in and drove off.

“Well,” said the leggy woman, “how frightfully bizarre!”

I picked myself up and walked away from the little cluster of passersby that was threatening to gather. Weird. If that chair hadn’t arrived when it did, and Katy hadn’t flipped out and asked me to leave, then I wouldn’t have been at that precise spot to stop that woman being flattened. I’ve never saved anyone’s life before. It felt as ordinary as collecting photographs from Boots the Chemist. Slightly exciting beforehand, but basically a let-down. I walked past a phone box and thought about calling Poppy to tell her what had just happened. Nah. She might think I was boasting.
I was already thinking about other things. I went over the zebra crossing outside Highbury and Islington tube station, the one by the roundabout, and was searching my coat for a fiver that I hoped I’d put there for emergencies when the same three men in black suits I’d seen earlier hustled me away from the ticket machine and around the corner, behind a newspaper kiosk. I was still shaken from my rugby tackle, so it took me a few moments to realize what was happening. People in the background were deliberately not noticing. Bloody Islington.

I almost saw the funny side of it. “If you want to mug me and take my money, you’ve really chosen the wrong—”

“WewannAweewordAboo’ tha’ the’ wurmansonny!”

Was I being mugged in Kurdish? “I’m terribly sorry?”

He jabbed my sternum with an iron forefinger. “About—that—woman—” Oh, a Scot. Which woman? Katy Forbes? Were these her boyfriends?

The next one drawled. “That lady in the orange raincoat, boy.” A Texan? A Texan and a Scot. This was sounding like the first line of a joke. These people weren’t joking, though. They looked like they had never joked since kindergarten. Debt collectors? “The woman you just pulled from in front of that there taxi. There were witnesses.”

“Oh. Her. Yes.”

“We’re policemen.” Did I have anything illegal on me? No … The Scot flashed his ID for a moment. “Where did she say she was going?”

“I, er—”

“The lady with the legs and the dawgie said she was going to an airport. Now all we want to know from you is
which
airport she was heading for.”

“Heathrow.” I still have no idea why I lied, but once the lie was out it was too dangerous to try to recapture it.

“Ye quite sure aboot that noo, laddie?”

“Oh yes. Quite sure.”

They looked at me like executioners. The third one who hadn’t said anything spat. Then they turned and piled into a Jaguar with smoked glass windows that was waiting behind the
flower stall. It screeched off, leaving people staring at me. I can’t blame them. I would have stared at me, too.

————

As the fine denizens of London Town know, each tube line has a distinct personality and range of mood swings. The Victoria Line for example, breezy and reliable. The Jubilee Line, the young disappointment of the family, branching out to the suburbs, eternally having extensions planned, twisting round to Greenwich, and back under the river out east somewhere. The District and Circle Line, well, even Death would rather fork out for a taxi if he’s in a hurry. Crammed with commuters for King’s Cross or Padding-ton, and crammed with museum-bound tourists who don’t know the craftier short cuts, it’s as bad as how I imagine Tokyo. I had a professor once who asked us to prove that the Circle Line really does go around in a circle. Nobody could. I was dead impressed at the time. Now what impresses me is that he’d persuaded somebody to pay him to come up with that sort of tosh. Docklands Light Railway, the nouveau riche neighbor, with its Prince Regent, its West India Quay, and its Gallions Reach and its Royal Albert. Stentorian Piccadilly wouldn’t approve of such artyfartyness, and neither would his twin uncle, Bakerloo. Central, the middle-aged cousin, matter-of-fact, direct, no forking off or going the long way round. That’s about it for the main lines, except the Metropolitan, which is too boring to mention, except that it’s a nice fuchsia color and you take it to visit the dying.

Then you have the oddball lines, like Shakespeare’s oddball plays. Pericles, Hammersmith and City, East Verona Line, Titus of Waterloo.

The Northern Line is black on the maps. It’s the deepest. It has the most suicides, you’re most likely to get mugged on it, and its art students are most likely to be future Bond Girls. There’s something doom-laden about the Northern Line. Its station names: Morden, Brent Cross, Goodge Street, Archway, Elephant and Castle, the resurrected Mornington Crescent. It was closed for years: I remember imagining I was on a probe peering into the
Titanic
as the train passed through. Yep, the Northern Line is
the psycho of the family. Those bare-walled stations south of the Thames that can’t attract advertisers. Not even stair-lift manufacturers will advertise in Kennington tube station. I’ve never been to Kennington but if I did I bet there’d be nothing but run-down fifties housing blocks, closed-down bingo halls, and a used-car place where tatty plastic banners fluppetty-flup in the homeless wind. The sort of place where best-forgotten films starring British rock stars as working-class antiheroes are set. There but for the grace of my credit cards go I.

London is a language. I guess all places are.

I catch a good rhythm in the swaying of the carriages. A blues riff on top of it … or maybe something Iranian … I note it down on the back of my hand. A pong of salt marshes and meadows … ah yes, Katy Forbes’s perfume.

Look at her! Look at that woman. Febrile. Corvine. Black velvet clothes, not an ounce of sluttiness about her. Intelligent and alert, what’s that book she’s reading? And her skin—that perfect West African black, so black it has a bluish tinge. Those gorgeous, proud lips. What’s she reading? Tilt it this way a bit, love.… Nabokov! I knew it. She has a brain! But if I break that rule and talk to her, even if I break the middle-way seating rule and sit one seat nearer to her than I need to, she’ll think I’m threatening her and the defenses will slam down. None of these problems would exist if we had just met by chance at a party. Same her, same me. But chance brings us together here, where we cannot meet.

Still, it’s a fine morning, up on the surface of the world. I saved somebody’s life forty minutes ago. The universe owes me one. I stand up and walk towards her before I think about it anymore.

I’m about to say “Excuse me” when the door from the next compartment opens and a homeless guy walks in. His eyes have seen things that I hope mine never do. He has a big gash where half of his eyebrow should be. There’s a lot of frauds around, but this guy isn’t one. Even so. There are so many thousands of genuine homeless people, if you give even a little to each you’ll end
up on the street yourself. When you’re a Marco your last defense against destitution is selfishness.

“Excuse me.” His voice has a hollow fatigue that cannot be faked. “I’m very sorry to bother everyone, I know it’s embarrassing for us all. But I have nowhere to sleep tonight, and it’s going to be another freezing one. There’s a bed in the Summerford Hostel, but I need to get £12.50 by tonight to be allowed in. If you can help, please do. I know you all just want to go about your business, and I’m very sorry. I just don’t know what else to say to people.…”

People stare at the floor. Even to look at a homeless person is to sign a contract with them. I dabbled with joining the Samaritans once. The supervisor had been homeless for three years. I remember him saying that the worst thing was the invisibility. That and not being able to go anywhere where nobody else could go. Imagine that, owning nothing with a lock, except a toilet cubicle in King’s Cross Station, with a junkie on one side and a pimp on the other.

Sod it. Roy will give me some money later.

I give the man a couple of quid I was going to get a cappuccino with, but coffee’s bad for you anyway, and I was still buzzing from Katy’s percolator.

“Thank you very much,” he says. I nod, our eyes meeting just for a moment. He’s in a bad way. He shuffles into the next carriage. “Excuse me everyone, I’m very sorry to bother you.…”

The girl in black velvet gets off at the next station. Now I’ll never get to taste oysters sliding down the chute of my tongue with her.

I couldn’t hack the Samaritans, by the way. I couldn’t get to sleep afterwards, worrying about the possible endings of the stories that had been started. Maybe that’s why I’m a ghostwriter. The endings have nothing to do with me.

There’s one decent place on the Northern Line. That’s where I’m heading now: Hampstead. The elevator lugs you back up to street level in less than a minute. Don’t try taking the spiral stairs to save time. Take it from me. It’s quicker to dig your way up.

The obligatory silence of elevators. Could be a Music of Chance song title.

It’s a chance to have a think. Even Gibreel shuts up in elevators.

Poppy once said to me that womanizers are victims.

“Victims of what?”

“An inability to communicate with women in any other way.” She added that womanizers either never knew their mother, or never had a good relationship with their mother.

I was oddly annoyed. “So the womanizer wants every woman he sleeps with to be his surrogate mother?”

“No,” said Poppy, reasoning when she should be defending. “I don’t quite know what you want from us. But it’s something to do with approval.”

The elevator doors open and you’re suddenly out into a leafy street where even McDonald’s had to tone down their red and yellow for black and gold, to help it blend in with the bookshops. Old money lives in Hampstead. The last of the empire money. They take their grandchildren on birthday trips to the British Museum, and poison one another’s spouses in elegant ways. When I worked as a delivery boy for a garden center I had a woman here, once, called Samantha or Anthea or Panthea. She lived in a house opposite her mother, and not only loved her pony more than me, which I can understand, but she even loved repairing wicker-seated chairs more than me. My, my, Marco, that was a long time ago.

The sky was clouding over, groily clouds the dunnish white of dug-up porcelain. I sighed quite involuntarily. The whole world was about to cry. I’d had a sexy little umbrella last night, but I’d left it at Katy’s or the gallery or somewhere. Oh well, I’d found it lying forgotten somewhere myself. The wind was picking up, and big leaves were flying over the chimneys like items of washing on the run. All these Edwardian streets I’d probably never go down.

The first raindrops were dappling the tarmac and scenting the gardens by the time I got to Alfred’s.

•  •  •

Alfred’s house is one of those bookend houses, tall, with a tower on the corner where you can imagine literary evenings being conducted. In fact, they used to be. The young Derek Jarman paid tribute here, and Francis Bacon, and Joe Orton before he made it big, along with a stream of minor philosophers and once-famous literati. Visitors to Alfred’s place are like the bands that play the university circuit: only the will-be-famous and the once-were-famous perform. Has-beens and might-bes. Alfred tried to start a humanist movement here in the sixties. Its idealism doomed it. Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament bishops and that Colin Winsom bloke still drop by. Heard of him? See what I mean? …

It usually takes a long time before anyone answers the door. Roy is too otherworldly to notice things like doorbells, especially while he’s composing. Alfred is too deaf. I ring a polite five times, watching the weeds coming up through the cracks in the steps, before I start banging.

Roy’s face materializes in the gloom. He sees it’s me, smiles, and readjusts his hairpiece. He shoves open the door and almost shears off the tip of my nose. “Oh,” he says, “hi! Come in … uh …” I realize he has the same problem with names as me. “Marco!”

“Hello, Roy. How are you this week?”

Roy has one of those Andy Warhol accents. He speaks as though receiving words from far beyond Andromeda. “Jeez, Marco … you’re sounding like a doctor. You’re not a doctor … are you?”

I laugh.

Roy insists on helping me off with my coat, and slings it over the pineapple-shaped knob of the banister. I must look up the correct word for that knob. “How’s The Music of Chance? All you young things, playing together and inspiring one another.… We just love it.”

“We laid down a couple of tracks two weeks ago, but now we’re back to rehearsing in Gloria’s uncle’s warehouse.” Due to a chronic lack of anything to pay with. “Our bassist’s new girlfriend plays the handbells, so we’re trying to expand our repertoire a little.… How’s your composing?”

“Not so good. Everything I do ends up turning into ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier.’ ”

“What’s wrong with Bach?”

“Nothing, except it always makes me dream about a team of synchronized tail-chasing Escher cats. Now what do you think of this? It’s from a wicked young friend of mine named Clem.” He hands me a postcard of Earth. On the back I turn it over and read the message: “Wish you were here. Clem.”

Roy never makes himself laugh, only others. But he smiles timidly. “Now. You’re good with your hands. Can you work out how our percolator works? It’s through in the kitchen here. I’ve just been having no luck at all with it. It’s German. They make North American–proof percolators in Germany. Do you think they’ve forgiven us for the war yet?”

“What seems to be the problem with it?”