Ghostwritten (36 page)

‘Stone the crows,’ she said. Irish. Middle aged. The lollipop stick dropped off.

The taxi driver was standing over us, a fat Cockney. Santa Claus without the beard or the love of humanity. I heard his engine, still running. He was deciding whether to be irate or compassionate. ‘Ruddy Bleedin’ Nora, love! Why didn’t you look where you was going?’

‘I—’ Her eyes looked around like a puppet’s. ‘I wasn’t looking where I was going.’

‘Any bones broken?’ The question was to both of us.

My leg was still complaining loudly, but I found I could stand and wiggle my toes. The woman picked herself up.

‘I saw everything,’ said the leggy woman with the flopsy dog and a Sloaney accent. ‘He rugby tackled her out of the way of the taxi. And they tumbled over and over. I’m sure he saved her life, you know.’ There was no one else to tell but the taxi driver who wasn’t listening to her.

‘I’m much obliged to you,’ said the anorak woman, getting up and dusting herself down, as if I’d just handed her a cup of tea. Her eye socket was already reddening.

‘You’re welcome,’ I said, in the same way. ‘You’re going to have a black eye.’

‘The least of my troubles. Is your taxi free?’ the anorak woman asked the taxi driver.

‘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 passers-by 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 realise 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—’

‘WewannaAweewordAboo’ 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 dame 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 dame 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 Paddington, 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 neighbour, with its Prince Regent, West India Quay and its Gallions Reach and its Royal Albert. Stentorian Piccadilly wouldn’t approve of such artyfartyness, and nor 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 colour 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 anti-heroes 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 defences 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 any more.

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 defence 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 pair of cottagers 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 womanisers are victims.

‘Victims of what?’

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

I was oddly narked. ‘So the womaniser 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 centre 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 Wilson 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 materialises in the gloom. He sees it’s me, smiles, and readjusts his hair-piece. He shoves open the door and almost shears off the tip of my nose. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘hi! Come in . . . uh . . .’ I realise 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?’