Angel on the Inside (13 page)

I was about to protest, or rather get the people in the queue to protest, except that most of them were Japanese and far too polite to cause a fuss, but then we were over the yellow line and through the gates with the attendants waving us through to the curved landing platform.

‘Come on, lovely boys, you're just in time. This one's ours.'

Up that close, you can't help but feel dominated by the Eye as it towers above you, and especially when one of the capsules inches in along the loading platform. You automatically look straight up to the capsule over 400 feet directly above at the top of the arc and you think that in 15 minutes you'll be up there hanging in the air with people down here staring up your trouser leg through the transparent capsule walls. The big difference between the Eye and the amusement park rides called ‘Terminator' or ‘Scream Machine' is that
they
don't give you time to think.

I tried to spot where the voice had come from, and through a melee of disembarking passengers (all chattering happily and none of them even the slightest bit green) and bustling attendants, I saw its owner.

He was a small man, no more than five foot four, stocky but not particularly fat, and balding, the skin on the top of his head glowing pink where he'd caught the sun, though not enough to persuade him to take off his raincoat. He was of at least pensionable age and he had a hearing-aid plugged into his right ear. He waved an arm to hurry us on, and almost did a jig with excitement. I bet his eyes twinkled when he smiled and he was somebody's favourite grandad.

Immediately behind him, hands clasped together near his groin in classic bouncer posture, was a much taller, younger version of the old man. This one was somewhere around the mid-forties, built like a rugby prop-forward, and his eyes scanned the crowd like an American secret serviceman guarding a President. He wasn't wearing a raincoat, just a denim blouson jacket – he was that hard.

Even as I was hustled towards them, I noticed the family resemblance. The middle-aged bouncer was almost certainly the son of the old man and, after a quick look left then right, was probably the father of Barry and Huw. That made the old man their favourite grandad.

Up close, the old man beamed at me, and when he spoke, he leaned slightly to his left so he could catch what I said in his hearing aid ear.

‘Ah, Mr Angel, so glad you could join us. I've been looking forward to this.'

I put on my best bemused expression, somewhere between a drunk after ten pints of snakebite and a rabbit caught in headlights.

‘I'm sorry? Who did you say?'

It was worth a shot. After all, neither Barry nor Huw had actually asked me who I was.

It fooled Grandad for about two seconds.

‘Oh, very good, Mr Angel. You did that with a straight face.' He pointed a finger at me, then wagged it. ‘You could have had me going there, but you see, I know who you are. Now, come for a ride on this wonderful contraption with us.'

‘I'm scared of heights,' I tried.

‘Don't be, Mr Angel,' smiled Grandad, taking me by the arm. ‘There are plenty of other things you ought to be frightened of before you worry about heights. But do bear in mind, Mr Angel, that just because I'm up in the big city for the day, it doesn't mean there's a village somewhere that's deprived of an idiot. You with me?'

‘Absolutely,' I said. ‘Don't we need a ticket?'

‘All done and dusted,' he said proudly, steering me to the platform edge, where a capsule had seemingly come to rest, though they never actually do. ‘Private Capsule Hire, that's the name of the game, though I wish they'd called them carriages. Capsules sounds like a suppository, don't you think?'

Once the last of the passengers was out of the capsule, two attendants dived in armed with short sticks or wands with mirrors on the end. They homed in on the central light fitting of the capsule and held up the mirrors along either side, checking in case the previous occupants had left a bomb.

‘I think the security's a bit amateur –' the old man said in a stage whisper, pronouncing it ‘ammerchewer' ‘– if you ask me.'

I agreed silently with the old man, thinking about the gun Barry had shown me in Armstrong.

Then I was distracted by another attendant, who clambered on board the slowly moving capsule with a small metal trolley loaded with trays covered with white cloths, ice buckets, glasses and three bottles of champagne.

‘Thought a snack might be called for whilst we chat,' said Grandad. ‘It's only £155 plus VAT on top of the £300 for the private hire, and if you're going to do things, you might as well do them right, mightn't you?'

‘You really have hired this?'

‘Oh yes. Private hire, and you can take up to ten people with the buffet. Funnily enough, they do a thing called “Cupid's Capsule”, which costs £50 more, but you and a lady friend get the whole thing to yourselves. Goodness knows what people get up to on those trips. I bet those mirror-on-a-stick boys find plenty of unpleasantness after one of them. Come on, climb aboard.'

I stopped automatically as my feet reached the edge of the platform. I wasn't consciously trying to resist – there didn't seem much point, as I could feel Barry and Huw and the other one right behind me shepherding me into the nine-tonne transparent egg-shaped cell.

Grandad tightened his grip on my arm and looked up into my face. There was no expression of concern on his.

‘Who are you?' I asked.

The question seemed to surprise him.

‘I'm Len Turner. Haven't you heard of me?'

‘No, can't say I have,' I said apologetically.

‘Well, that's probably been for the best for you. Up until now of course.'

I stepped in and we went up.

 

It had been a bit of a miscalculation on my part that nothing untoward would happen to me in a see-through cage rotating ever-so-slowly through 360 degrees in full view of 11 million Londoners. Correction, 11 million people, which is reckoned to be the day-time population during the tourist season, though not all of them are Londoners. And not all Londoners can actually
see
the Eye – surprisingly few of them, actually – as, though it dominates the skyline, the natural inclination is to live nearer the Earth, and then the buildings tend to get in the way. And even if a fair proportion of the, say, eight million residents were actually looking in the right direction and upward to a point about 300 feet in the air and did in fact catch a glimpse of me having my face smashed against the inside of the plexiglass capsule, would they give a shit? Probably not.

It all started innocently enough.

Our private capsule inched its way into the air and Len Turner – whatever and whoever he was – made a fair fist of being the genial host. He even introduced the big bouncer type as his son Ron, who was indeed the ‘Da' of Barry and Huw, whom I'd already met, hadn't I? Boxers all three of them, they were, he'd told me proudly, and I'd said yes, I'd noticed.

‘Now that down there, that'd be Westminster Bridge, wouldn't it? I recognise that one from the telly.' He pointed just like a tourist would. ‘And that's the Houses of Parliament, or the English Parliament as we have to say these days. So what's that one?'

It seemed to be up to me to do the guided tour bit as our London Eye attendant was busying himself with his trolley, laying out aluminium plates of canapés and sandwiches on the wooden bench that ran down the middle of the capsule.

‘That's Lambeth Bridge,' I said cautiously, just in case it was a slap-earning trick question, ‘and the next one down is Vauxhall Bridge.'

‘And the other way?' He turned and pointed down river.

‘That's Hungerford Bridge right there, or rather Bridges: the railway one and the new footbridge. Then it goes Waterloo, Blackfriars, Southwark, London, Tower and eventually the Thames Flood Barrier but I don't know if we'll see that.'

‘Tower Bridge. That was the one the youngsters wanted to see.'

He thought for a moment then added: ‘And who forgot to bring the binoculars out of the car?'

There was a silence and then a shot rang out and my heart stopped. What kind of man would shoot his grandsons for forgetting the binoculars?

‘At last, lunch is served,' he boomed.

My heart started going again as a glass was thrust into my hand and our ‘Flight Attendant' began to share out the champagne from the bottle he'd just popped.

‘Let's drink to London,' said Len Turner, raising his glass. ‘London all around us, but most importantly, below us.'

Why not? I thought. I had to get through the next 25 minutes somehow, and the Thames looked an awful long way down already.

‘Look at it, boys, all laid out below you.'

The diminutive Len Turner was waxing lyrical, taking a dramatic turn so that his initially friendly gnome-like face was morphing into evil-troll. If we'd been in a pub, I would have started to back towards the door. But once you're on the Eye, there's nowhere to run.

‘All below us, the result of two thousand years of invasion, feudalism, civil war, social evils, plague, fire, imperialism, political turmoil and corruption, and what does it produce? Chaucer, Shakespeare, parliamentary democracy, Christopher Wren, the Great Exhibition, Karl Marx, Churchill, the Trades Union Congress, the British Museum and the
Carry On
films.'

He flung out a hand in no particular direction, but as it held an empty glass the Flight Attendant filled it and started work opening another bottle.

‘And somewhere over there: Switzerland.' He paused for dramatic effect, but wisely not for too long. ‘Four hundred years of peace and brotherly love and what does
it
produce? Cuckoo clocks.'

His chest inflated as he reached his conclusion and he beamed at his family and at me.

‘And Toblerones,' said Huw.

I bit my tongue.

‘And watches, good watches,' said Barry.

‘And bobsleighs, like at the Winter Olympics,' added Barry.

I started to chew the lining of my cheeks.

‘I was
paraphrasing
,' stormed Len. ‘I was quoting from a famous film, you morons!
The Thin Man.
A very famous film. Haven't you lot ever seen a film in black and white? No, you wouldn't have, would you? Beneath you, it would be.'

I was beginning to see where the idea for the voice of Yoda in
Star Wars
came from but I couldn't trust myself to say anything.

‘Know who wrote that?' Len rounded on his grandkids. ‘‘Course you don't. It was Graham Greene. A bloody fine writer for an Englishman. And a Catholic at that.'

Len drained his glass and handed it to his son Ron.

‘Get us a refill, Ron, and you two, you might as well get stuck into the grub. It's paid for.'

Barry and Huw didn't need a second telling. They sat down on the central bench and began to hoover up small triangular sandwiches three at a time. Nobody offered me anything, and as I put my glass down on the floor, I could feel the champagne refermenting in my empty stomach.

‘Better take care of the Trolley Dolly whilst you're at it, Ron.'

Ron grunted as he handed over his dad's refill, then stepped towards Barry and held out his hand for something. Barry dug into the flaps of his raincoat, and for one awful moment I thought he was going to produce the revolver he'd shown me earlier and Big Ron was going to take care of our Flight Attendant permanently. But whatever it was he did pass over fitted easily into the palm of Ron's large paw.

I don't know what Ron said to the Flight Attendant and I couldn't see his expression, as he was hidden by Ron's shoulders, but I could see two £20 notes being slipped into the Attendant's jacket pocket. And then the Attendant had turned around to face the glass at the far end of the capsule and was busy screwing in a set of earplugs.

I watched fascinated by the unreality of it all as more of London unfolded beneath us, the human figures rapidly turning into ants and not one of them concerned with what was happening up here. With our personal Trolley Dolly now bribed, deaf and effectively blind, I was on my own with three generations of inbred Welsh nastiness.

‘We could do with one of these in Cardiff, you know,' said the elder Turner, squinting towards the west as if to check you really could see Heathrow on a clear day, should you want to. ‘Put it somewhere down Queen Alexandra docks and you could see up to the valleys and Caerphilly or across the Channel, maybe as far as Bristol.'

That sounded cruel to me, like the prisoners on Alcatraz being able to see the lights and night-life of San Francisco without being able to touch it.

‘You got the Millennium Stadium, we got the Eye,' I said.

‘That's true,' he agreed, ‘and the English football teams have to come cap in hand to play their big matches there, not that they're grateful, mind you.'