SSC (2001) The Dog Catcher (24 page)

‘One
hundred and seventy-five pounds, please. Standard first class return, I’m
surprised you asked for it. Nobody buys them any more. See, what you should
have bought was an Off Peak City Saver or perhaps a Multi Zone Access Pack.’

‘I’m
terribly sorry but I don’t have a hundred and seventy-five pounds with me.’

He didn’t
seem surprised. ‘No, well there aren’t any first class seats on the train
anyway.

He tore
the ticket up and printed Out another. ‘Senior Citizen’s Standard Class
Fast-track Rail Rover? Twenty-two pounds?’

‘I’ll
take it,’ I said.

A train
came in fifteen minutes later. When I had first come to the country I would
still make the occasional disastrous trip back up to town. Then the trains were
a uniform blue and grey, with the gruesome BR logo on the side. Now they weren’t
a uniform anything, seeming to be composed of the rolling stock of five
different companies from a couple of different countries. Nevertheless I
boarded with no trouble and found a seat. We gibbered our way south at only
about half the pace I remembered from thirty years ago.

Our
train snailed into the suburbs of London and the tracks spread out until they
ran like silver streams on each side of us. In a meshed compound I saw Eurostar
trains racked side by side, like a display of some imagined near future in a
science museum. After that, as if in deliberate contrast, we came upon a
district of early Victorian terraces, each backyard a bomb atrocity of disinterred,
unidentifiable shards of wood, plastic, metal and decaying vegetable matter.
Next there was a sky-darkening twist of concrete flyovers serpenting and
intertwining above us, London underground tube stations now mixing with the
suburban lines. Suddenly our train shook to a halt, waited for a few minutes
throbbing quietly to itself, then crept on even more slowly. Out of the window
I saw on the farthest track to us a whole train lying on its side, flame and
black smoke only just starting to flick and lick out of the rends in its torn
lemon-yellow metal. Several bodies hung from the cracked window frames. One
carriage was still the right way up and entirely intact: on the inside
passengers beat with their fists on the window glass, mouthing desperate pleas
at us as we slid by. In the far, far distance there was the wail of fire
engines stuck in unyielding traffic.

A man
in a suit with his feet up on the seats opposite me glanced at the wreck, took
out his mobile phone and dialled. ‘Hi, it’s me,’ he said, ‘yeah, if you’re
thinking of coming into town today I’d take the car, there’s a Hyundai Cotswold
Turbo gone off at Larkmead Junction … Ump … coupla or five dead at least, I’d
say. Yeah, alright, see you this evening … Bye.’

The grand London terminus
that I remembered was now a shopping mall with a big roof and trains in one
self-effacing corner. Bumped and swerving I walked out into the shriek of
traffic.

Unlike
the trains, the bus that I caught was exactly the same as it would have been
thirty years ago, apart from the price of the fare, that is.

London
did not seem so much changed, I suppose if you watch a lot of television you
are kept up with the metamorphoses in the capital, and anyway we’ve got a
Starbucks in Banbury now.

I found
the retro hat shop in Berwick Street Market easily enough, the pattern of the
streets had not changed at all. It was called Girl/Boy/Whatever and apart from
hats of the past it seemed to sell fake fur-covered hand cuffs, whips and
patent leather bikinis for men and women. I went inside.

Behind
the counter was a most lovely girl of perhaps thirty years of age. She wore a
transparent muslin shirt and tight black leather shorts. A y-shaped chain was
connected to each of her breasts by rings through her nipples, the slender
chain joined above the rib cage before disappearing underneath the waist band
of her shorts presumably to end between her legs.

Yet
despite the way she was dressed and despite the scowl on her face, somehow her
decency shone out of her, somehow I was certain here was a big kind girl,
clearly a kind girl, an honest girl. In a previous age, I reflected, she might
have been a servant in a big house or a stenographer riding the tram to work in
a cheap two-piece suit and cloche hat. Now she was serving in a shop in Soho
with a chain clipped to her cunt.

I
approached the counter. I suppose I must have presented an odd sight in that
shop: several of the items I was wearing had been present at the fateful
meeting with Blink all those years ago. The silver cufflinks from Aspreys, the
cashmere navy-blue overcoat, my father’s old Smiths watch. Not present at that
lunch in the past were the white Egyptian cotton shirt from Turnbull and Asser,
the dark-blue silk tie, the white crepe de Chine monogrammed handkerchief, or
the forty-five-year-old double-breasted pin-stripe suit, teamed with a pair of
black brogues that I had bought from Shoe Express in Northampton the year
before for nineteen pounds and ninety-nine pence. In deference to the fact that
we were now in the twenty-first century I had decided not to wear a hat.

‘Excuse
me,’ I said to the serving girl, ‘I was wondering whether you have a grey Mau
Mau hat in stock?’

‘Mau
Mau?’ she said. ‘Mau Mau. They haven’t made those for years. We do get a few in
but not at the moment.’

‘Oh,’ I
said, disappointment settling on me, ‘I was hoping you’d have one, I’ve a…
friend who’s desperate. I don’t know what to do. Can you perhaps … um suggest
another retro hat shop?’

She
looked a little concerned at my agitation but replied, ‘I can’t fink of another
place, no.’

‘I don’t
know what to do, I live in a little village in Northamptonshire, this is the
first time I’ve come up to town in decades …’

‘Sorry.’

As she
raised her arms in a shrug the sleeves of her muslin top fell back to the
elbow. I saw that almost the whole length of both her arms were covered in
distinctive small puncture marks and longer red weals. Some of the cuts were
old and almost shadows but others, around her wrists especially, were fresh and
deep and rimmed with dried blood. I recognised the wounds immediately, they
were familiar to me.

‘Those
marks on your arms,’ I said.

‘Yeah?’
she replied looking sullenly at me with lowered eyes, instinctively tugging on
the thin transparent material of her sleeve to cover the scars. I dropped my
voice to show that I understood the situation she was in, and looked her
directly in the face.

‘You’ve
…’ I paused, ‘you’ve … got a cat haven’t you?’

She
looked embarrassed for a second then spoke in a smaller voice.

‘Yeah,’
she said again, trying to remain cool but the light of enthusiasm fired up in
her brown eyes.

‘What’s
its name?’ I asked.

‘He’s
called Adrian,’ she said, excited now, speaking quickly, her voice full of
remembered love. ‘He’s got this squeaky toy on a string that he likes to play
with, he likes me to dangle it over him but sometimes he gets carried away and
claws my arm … and, well, sometimes he claws my arm because he’s hungry and
sometimes he just claws my arm because he wants to. It’s their nature, though,
isn’t it? You got a cat?’

‘Not
now. In my time, many, yes.’ I sighed and was silent for a second before
continuing. ‘It’s one of the terrible sadnesses of ageing, how many of them you
outlive; in the end it becomes too hard. They have such short lives, while ours
seem so long, it’s like having a succession of children with rare diseases that
you know are going to polish them off in ten, fifteen years.’

‘Yeah,’
she said, ‘but what about the pleasure they give, the companionship, the
company, simply having another heartbeat about the house.’

‘Oh I
know, I know and I miss it terribly. But over the years losing each cat becomes
harder and harder. It’s a sort of cumulative thing and finally there comes a
time when one particular cat dies and you realise that all the pleasure they
have given you does not compensate for the terrible pain their death causes.
You realise that, bleak and miserable as it may be, you are still going to be
marginally better off without another cat — you will have no pleasure but at
least you won’t suffer.’

Though
I meant all that I was saying there was also an element of calculation in it. I
knew nobody else in London, or anywhere else for that matter, who might be
familiar with the retro hat world and also … I don’t know what I thought I
was doing flirting with a girl forty years younger than me, but I was. I
suppose it was something to do with what the Million Pound Poet had told me
about him living with two women. If he could do that why couldn’t I at least
flirt with a young attractive woman? Anything seemed possible. Actually picking
her up, of course, that didn’t really seem possible. After all what I would do
with her once I had picked her up?

‘Oh you
know, better to have loved and lost and all that …’ she said, idly flicking
at the silver ring that went through her navel and via which the chain ran on
its way to the heart of darkness.

‘Not
after you’ve lost the fifteenth pet …’ I said. ‘I’ve measured out my life in
Pollies and Princes and Bingos …

‘T.S.
Eliot, innit?’

‘Sort
of.’

‘He
wrote a lot of poems about cats, didn’t he?’

‘Yes
indeed, though that was my feline adaptation of “The Waste Land”. Do you like
poetry?’ I asked her.

‘Only
if it’s about cats.’

‘Um.’

‘No, I’m
only joking with you. I like some stuff from like the last hundred years. Owen,
Auden, MacNeice, Betjeman, John Hegley. Before that I don’t get it.’

I hadn’t
expected any mention of me but it was still depressing when I didn’t get it. I
said, ‘There’s poems about cats before then. Thomas Gray’s “Ode on the Death of
a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes” springs to mind.’

She
thought about it. ‘Nawww. Sounds depressing.’ Then she said, ‘Look do you
really, really have to have a Mau Mau hat?’

I said,
‘There’s a fellow who feels he really, really has to have one, yes.

‘Well,
there’s a stall at Camden Market on Sundays, guy I know who might have one. I
could take you there tomorrow if you want … I was going to go up there
anyway, so it’s no big thing.’

‘Yes
alright, that would be terrific. Where shall we meet?’

‘Outside
Camden Town tube at one?’

‘Smashing.
What’s your name?’

‘Mercy,
Mercy Rush. What’s yours?’ ‘Hillary Wheat.’

‘See
you at one tomorrow, Hillary.’

‘See
you at one, Mercy.’

I felt silly with
excitement and had walked half-way back to the station before I came around. I
really needed to talk myself down from this ledge of giddiness; she was only
being kind, she’d show me the stall then leave me, she’d invite me to a tango
club where we’d … stop it, stop it, you silly old man.

Which
left me with a choice. What was I going to do for the rest of the day? I
supposed I could get back to Northamptonshire tonight easy enough. A newspaper
hoarding saved me the trouble of considering that option:

‘Horrendous
Rail Crash, Services Disrupted’, it shouted with glee. So I was stuck up in
town on a Saturday evening.

Saturday
evening has always seemed to me to be the most melancholy time to be alone in a
strange town. Everybody else seems to be going home to have a bath before they
attend huge dinners with their laughing, adoring families as you stand in the
rain outside their houses looking through the windows into their fire-lit
happiness.

Fortunately
I had kept on paying the fifty pounds a year it took to be a country member of
the Kensington Arts Club so I had a bed for the night and somewhere to eat my
dinner at the large round table they kept for members who were dining on their
own. I was glad to see that the Kensington Arts was still a bastion of
disreputable elderly behaviour with no concession made to the modern
puritanism. In the bar, hung from floor to ceiling with proper paintings of
things and people and animals in gilded frames, everybody smoked and many who
were my age or older were dazzlingly drunk. An old man was telling a story
about golf which required him to roll about on the floor, a good-looking woman
of forty with long dark hair took her top and bra off then danced on the mini
grand piano while a man with an eye patch and a Van Dyke beard played jellyroll
jazz, another older woman bit me on the arm while I was at the bar getting a
drink at pub prices.

Say what you like about
crack dealers they are not ageist: I was offered rock three times in the twenty
minutes I stood outside Camden Town tube station waiting for Mercy. When I had
last seen Camden Town it was a district of glum Irish drinking holes, black
canals, economy cash butchers, Shirley Conran and Dr Jonathan Miller. Now it
was as if all the various young peoples of the world had decided to come to
this place in order to wear each other’s clothes and to talk in each other’s
languages. Thus I saw what I took to be Nepalese boys in the garb of urban
American blacks talking to each other in Spanish, four Japanese girls wearing
Andean headgear yabbering to each other in Magreb Arabic, Saree-covered
Tolchucks conversing in Cantonese, Malay-speaking Rastafarians,
Portuguese-giggling Sikhs, English-speaking Hindu Swedes, Urdu-chattering
Nigerian Orthodox Rabbis.