Plastic (17 page)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

City Life

D
REAMLESS DARK WAS
lapped by light and the sound of distant morning traffic. Drifting yellow blooms swam across my vision, shrinking to pinholes of dust as I opened my eyes. The rain had stopped, the sun so bright that I was forced to shade my face. The curtains had been left open. The pitiless brown paintings refused love even in sunshine.

I rose and checked my watch – nearly eight. No more pills from now on. I was glad I’d forgotten to empty the contents of the bathroom cabinet into my handbag before leaving Hamingwell. The bathroom water was still scalding hot, powered by the basement gas boilers. I scrubbed out the fuddle of sleep and felt the cool of the morning on my skin. I could no longer smell Stefan on my body.

My first instinct was to cook a breakfast of fried bread, bacon and eggs, but the cupboards had been cleared of perishable food. After years of guilt about my eating habits I wondered if it was possible to change, even though there was something pleasurably obscene about eating a fry-up in such smart surroundings. Searching the shelves I found vacuum-packed fruit, mangoes and peaches.

I slivered soft ripe flesh apart and ate, sad at the thought of leaving all this behind. My case was filled with expensive flower-print clothes that now looked naïve in such a stripped-back setting, so I settled for a grey sweatshirt and jeans before taking a final look around the apartment. I binned the items with bloodstains. I would pack and be gone within the half-hour.

It was almost possible to dismiss the previous night, but for the shears and the man with the stitched head. The world was sharp and bright, strangeness dispelled, rationality returned to its rightful position at the head of my mind’s army. Standing on the balcony nursing a ceramic tub of milky coffee, my unknotted brown hair drifting around my face, I felt a sense of sophistication for the first time in my life, not the bogus sophistication of gold-card credit but something placid inside. Apart from anything else, I had been propositioned by a very attractive young man several years my junior. The thought filled me with new confidence.

Below, matchbox traffic shunted and braked at road junctions. River launches were puttering up the Thames like battered bathtoys. A distant haze presented the London Eye in low resonance, its glinting glass pods imperceptably rotating. The futuristic ferris wheel gave London the air of a half-constructed funfair. I tried to recall Phillip Larkin’s comment about London in the sun – something about ‘its postal districts packed like squares of wheat’. I’d been wasted on the residents of Hamingwell.

A few minutes later, packed and ready, I stood in the hall and took a last look around the apartment. Everything had been returned to its rightful place. I would lose the money I so badly needed, but at least I’d be safe. I ventured back out into the top floor hall with my case and nearly had a heart attack.

‘Jesus, you made me jump!’ The young West Indian woman had a white plastic toilet brush raised in her right hand like a club. ‘I didn’t think there was anyone else here today.’

‘Neither did I.’

The young woman lowered her lavatorial mace. ‘Sorry, I’m cleaning the flat next door. I’m Fragrance.’ She snapped off a glove and shook hands with stiff-armed formality, a member of staff meeting an employer. I noticed we were dressed in almost identical clothes.

‘There’s no-one staying in there at the moment, is there?’

‘No, I don’t think anyone lives here full-time. It’s a contract job. I’ve only been doing the place a month. There’s not much to do, ash-trays, dusting, some washing up, and they’ve got their own linen service. I was told it’s for corporate hospitality.’

‘There’s not a girl staying there, very attractive, slim, about eighteen?’

‘I don’t see anyone, I’m always gone before they return. I’m supposed to do the place on Fridays but I had to take my little boy to St. Thomas’s for his ears. Did Mr. Ashe find you?’

‘Who?’

‘The man from the gas company. I told him I thought someone else was up here. You’re supposed to be out tomorrow night some time.’

‘It’s okay, I’m not going to be here anyway.’

‘It’s just for a couple of hours. He’s shutting down the system, but he’s not allowed to let anyone remain in the building while he’s doing it. I’m sure he’ll be more than happy to explain. It took me ages to get away from him. He’s in the basement, a big bald man in a red hat. You must have heard that weird clanking sound.’

‘No, I’m afraid I’ve been dead to the world.’

‘I told him if I saw anyone I’d tell them. Save him coming up. I’ve got to go back to the hospital, so I’ll finish here tomorrow. Don’t worry if you hear someone moving around, it’ll just be me.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind.’ Perhaps it was better for someone to think I was still in the building. Fragrance’s description of the gas-fitter in the basement sounded close to that of Stitch-Head. The best thing, I decided, would be to take a look from a distance. I slipped my case back into the apartment and went downstairs.

I found Ashe up an aluminium ladder hammering on a steel cylinder with the end of a spanner. Ashe was bigger. The fat at the base of his neck formed a crease beneath his shaved head, and his stomach stretched a vast oily vest over the belt of his jeans. On top of his toolbox were six pairs of pliers with different coloured handles. Gordon used to lay out his drill-bits like that. Men are genetically programmed to display tools in obscure groupings. Then they draw lines around them on peg boards. Go figure.

‘You’re not supposed to be down here,’ he called, attacking the pipe more violently. ‘You the lady in one of the penthouses?’

‘I’m just staying for the weekend,’ I lied.

‘Can’t be here tomorrow night between ten and eleven. We’re shutting the system down to install new valves, and we can only do it while the electricity is turned off otherwise it’ll trigger automatic ignition while the pipes are full of gas, and you don’t want that. Look at this.’ He pulled out a yard of paperwork covered in spidery diagrams. ‘There’s lads out there with degrees who can’t tell you what this lot means, and I’ve only got an hour to sort it out.’ I was already losing interest. ‘The power’s back on at midnight, and I don’t want to leave unignited gas building up. Health and Safety.’

‘Does that mean it’s dangerous?’

‘No, love, this electronic stuff’s state-of-the-art, which means I can’t thrash it with my spanner to get it working. I’ve never seen a place like this, everything’s arse-backwards. The workmanship’s slick but it’s all too complicated. I tell you, I wouldn’t want to live here.’

‘Why not?’

‘Microchips. Nothing’s built to a standard gauge, so you can’t fix anything yourself. Couldn’t have kids here, either, because of the low balconies, the unsupervised pool and gym, the easy-access garbage chutes to the incinerator. Doesn’t conform to Health and Safety if you ask me, but there’s ways of getting round these things. They don’t want families here, just rich singles who’ll pay the service charges and be happy to live alone with a lot of high-tech gadgets. I tried to talk to that mad French woman about it but she didn’t seem to understand, just screamed her head off at me.’ He shrugged and returned to hammering his pipe.

I was going to leave, but the day outside looked so inviting that I decided to take a walk around the neighbourhood first. I didn’t want to have to carry my case with me, so I slipped it behind a table in the foyer. As I left the Ziggurat and walked from Lambeth towards Waterloo, the morning felt freer, lighter, a gold mirror-image to those rare days before pleasure relied on spending. The city looked different at pedestrian height. You saw another London when you walked it. The atmosphere changed from one road to the next. In the most derelict areas of London perfectly preserved terraces were tucked from the view of cars and buses, so that there was hardly a part of the metropolis that didn’t hide secret streets, parks, tunnels or gardens.

I watched and listened. And I talked to a cab driver as he leaned against his cab, drinking tea on his break.

‘Oh yeah, College Place N1, Fournier Street E1, Markham Street SW3, Kelly Street NW5, parts of Commercial Road, the backstreets of Whitechapel, behind St. Bart’s, off Hatton Garden, bits of New Cross, Southwark, Tooting, there’s what I call nice roads all over, but I’ll tell you what.’ He stuck a Kit-Kat into his tea and noisily sucked the chocolate off. ‘The posher the area gets, the more crap it becomes. Chelsea, Barnsbury, Hampstead, Highgate, they all full of bankers pretending they’re living in little villages with their organic fucking bakeries and craft fairs, and it’s bollocks. They scream blue murder if McDonalds opens in their high street, but drive through a shit part of town and you’ll see KFC bunging up takeaways that look like clown’s houses. Go to any rough area and have a look around, you soon find canals and alleys, parks, footbridges, tunnels, all kinds of hidden stuff.’ He drained his tea and smacked his lips, chucking the cup into the gutter. ‘This was a right trouble area, and now all of a sudden it’s professional. There’s people paying six million quid for a luxury flat, and they find themselves living next door to a hostel full of alkies. I’m not sure who it’s worse for. Then there’s your immigrants scratching about to make a living, just like the old lurks and sewer-hunters. We don’t have any cats-meat men no more, but we got every other bugger. Right, I’m back on duty. But I’ll tell you, anyone who says London is like everywhere else now has never done The Knowledge.’

I thought about what he’d said as I passed a bow-windowed Victorian house with a stucco façade and an overgrown front garden, standing in melancholy isolation behind lanes of stalled traffic.

I started to notice other people, and watched where they were going. A group of Asian women were heading for the gates of a small factory, their grey raincoats, headscarves and jumpers pulled on the top of bright embroidered sarees, British clothes smothering rich colours with dull common sense. They stepped into the road to pass around some teenaged girls in short-sleeved T-shirts and microskirts on their way home. A night shelter was discharging a line of homeless men wrapped in identical tartan travel blankets. A private development had two new silver-blue Ferraris on a chained-off forecourt.

I walked, I watched.

Strange run-down shops of a kind I had never seen before: a pet store selling snakes and iguanas, its overheated interior causing its filmy windows to run with condensation, a shop that only sold gargantuan trophies and plaques ‘For All Occasions’. Motorcycle Repair & Bespoke Leather Goods, Jamaican Patties, Jerk Chicken, Shawarmas, Violin-makers, Knives & Luggage, Nightclub Lighting & Deck Rental, Curry In A Hurry, The Kite Shop, Halal Butchers, a barbershop with a yellowed photograph of George Michael in the window. It was virgin territory for me, the stores filled with alien items, most still shut at ten in the morning, the pavements plastered with chicken boxes, the dirt washed into beach-patterns by the night’s rain. Flats above shops, Indian beats wafting down from rows of opened windows, music to accompany the slow stretching of limbs, like the opening of flowers.

I saw bad things, too. A yellow plastic police cordon around a pub, officers interviewing kids on the street, plastic-wrapped flowers stacked against the bar doors in an impromptu tribute to a fatally stabbed boy. A phonebox covered by adverts for luxury chocolate desserts that afforded its junkie occupant the perfect spot to shoot up. A row of dirty blue nylon sleeping bags laid end to end like giant caterpillars waiting to pupate, silted up with windblown trash. Blood smeared on the spiderwebbed glass door of a fried chicken outlet. Two desolate, shabby men drinking at the road edge who could have stepped from the pages of Henry Mayhew’s journals.

I counted the loose change left in my shoulder-bag, not even enough for a sandwich, so I drank a mug of fierce orange tea in a supermarket café. It scalded, tasting better than any I’d had in the restaurants of expensive department stores. I made a mental note of my change. It was odd to feel so many small coins in my hand.

The supermarket was hemmed in by a twenty-foot chicken-wire fence that wouldn’t have appeared on its original design. If you had to come up with a picture of a really frightening place, it’s what you would have drawn, a cross between a concentration camp and a slaughterhouse. It made my skin crawl, but I didn’t have enough money to go somewhere nicer.

My attention was distracted by a woman in the high street who had just called me a cunt. Before I could wonder how I had offended her the woman had lost interest and was now calling the derelict phone box next to her a cunt.

Does Nigella Lawson have this problem when she goes to shop?
I wondered.
When she’s striding sturdily along a country lane with a wicker basket on her arm, do people call her a cunt? Presumably her nearest village is typical of those all around the country, with a one-way system and a Post Office that is now a Chinese restaurant, or does it have a wool shop and a chemist with a weighing machine and tall glass bottles filled with coloured water and a newsagent who stocks sherbet dabs, jars of boiled winter mixture twists, practical jokes and postcards on a revolving stand? In Nigella-land it’s always 1962, which means that the lucky bitch can still have live eels from MacFisheries dropped straight into her shopping bag and doesn’t have to take cover every time an engine backfires in case it’s the start of a gang war.

I rang Lou’s house from my mobile but got Lou’s monosyllabic son. Hadrian seemed to have trouble recalling that he lived with his parents, and could not volunteer information as to their whereabouts. His mother had gone to the gym early, perhaps she was shopping, perhaps she had run off to join a Balkan circus.

I tried Lou’s mobile, no answer, and resisted the impulse to call Gordon. He certainly hadn’t tried calling me. One bar left on the Nokia. I’d forgotten to bring the charger with me, not that it would have done much good, given the number of friends I had managed to accumulate in a decade of marriage.