‘Yeah. Exactly. What?’
‘Students.’
‘Students?’
‘Yeah, it seems to be fashionable to be horrible about the little fuckers, but I think they’re okay. If anything they’re a bit too studious these days, not rebellious enough, but basically they’re all right.’
‘What else?’
‘Cricket. I honestly believe cricket may well be the greatest game in the world. It is total heresy for a Scotsman to admit to this, and I entirely see the point of the American who said that only the English could invent a game that lasts for five days and can still end in a draw, but I just can’t help it; I love it. I don’t completely understand it and I still don’t know all the rules, but there’s something about its bizarrely erratic pace, its sheer complexity, its… psychology that just lifts it above any other sport. Even including golf, which is full of grotesquely over-paid reactionary bastards but is still a thing of skill and craft and beauty, and was, of course, invented in Scotland, like so much other truly neat stuff.’
‘That’s still only two things.’
I clicked my fingers. ‘Liberals. The chattering classes. Political correctness. Basically I’m for ’em. Again, they get a bad press from veracity-challenged moral midgets employed by greedy zillionaires to wank-off bigots, but not me; I stand right by them. They’re my kind of people. Liberals want niceness. What the hell is wrong with that? And, bless them, they do it in the teeth of such adversity! The world, people, are disappointing them all the time, constantly throwing up examples of what total shites human beings can be, but liberals just take it all, they hunker down, they grit their sandals and they keep on going; thinking well of people, reading the Guardian, sending cheques to good causes, turning up at marches, getting politely embarrassed by working-class oafism and just generally getting all hot under the collar when they see people being treated badly. That’s the great thing about liberals; they care for people, not institutions, not nations, not religions, not classes, just people. A good liberal doesn’t care whether it’s their own nation or their own religion or their own class or their own anything that’s being beastly to some other bunch of people; it’s still wrong and they’ll protest about it. I’m telling you, it’s a sick, sick nation that turned the word “liberal” into an expletive. But there you are; the Yanks think basketball is a sport and that there’s nothing cruel and unusual about taking four minutes to kill a man by putting thirty thousand volts through him.’
‘Did you say you liked political correctness? News to me.’
‘Political correctness is what right-wing bigots call what everybody else calls Being polite, or what everybody else calls Not being a right-wing bigot.’
Jo looked at me through narrowed eyes. ‘I bet I could find tapes of you banging on about how political correctness was something else to hate.’
‘Like everybody else, I have my own definitions of what is what, and I would never seek to deny that a few stupid people can take a perfectly good idea too far, but I stand by my contention that political correctness is more sinned against than sinning. Besides, a chap can change his mind. Oh, and journalists. I like them.’
‘What?’ Jo said, incredulous. ‘You hate journalists!’
‘No I don’t, I just hate the ones who make up quotes, subsidise criminals, hound the innocent, collude with the truly talentless and otherwise squander their undoubted gifts on tat. A disgrace they assuredly are. But a journalist determined to get to the truth of a story, expose lies and corruption, to tell people what’s really going on, to make one lot of humanity care for another lot, or even just start thinking about them? Weight-in-gold, they are. In fact, weight-in-microchips. Guardians of liberty. Mean more to democracy than most politicians. Fucking secular saints. Course, it helps if they’re liberal, too. Don’t shake your head at me, young lady. I’m being serious.’
‘Now I know you’re taking the piss.’
‘I swear, I’m not!’ I said, waving my arms. ‘And I just thought of something else I like.’
‘Yeah? What?’
I nodded. ‘This city.’
‘London?’
‘Yep.’
‘But you’re always going on about how the tube is dirty, smelly and dangerous, and the traffic is awful, and the air stinks, and the people aren’t as friendly as they are in Glasgow, and the drinks are too small and expensive, and it’s not as exciting as New York or as civilised as Paris or as clean as Stockholm or as cool as Amsterdam or as groovy as San Francisco or-’
‘Yeah yeah yeah, but just turn and look behind you. Look.’
Jo turned round and looked at the shop window she’d had her back to while we’d being going through all this stuff. We’d included Bond Street in our Sunday after-lunch stroll because I’d wanted to look in some posh jewellers and see if they had my excessive new watch. The shop we’d happened to stop outside was a jewellers. And its window was full of fish slices, suspended in the space behind the glass like a surreal hail of twinkling trowels. It was The Rabinovich Collection of Antique and Modern Silver Fish Slices, to quote the elegant sign in the window (we were a few doors down from a shop called Zilli, which seemed somehow appropriate). ‘How the fuck,’ I asked, ‘can you not love a city that throws up stuff like that?’
Jo was shaking her head. She was blond again, and had taken to teasing her short hair into little meringue-like spikes. She stuck her arm through mine. She was wearing a silver puffa jacket. I wore an old RAF greatcoat an uncle had given me when I was seventeen. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’m getting cold.’ We started walking again, heading south, back towards the river.
‘And music, of course,’ I said. ‘I love music.’
‘But you just said you hated the stuff you have to play.’
‘Yeah, because it’s commercial effluent. It’s the sonic equivalent of a Coke or a McDonald’s; it fills you up but it’s just production-line shit and there’s precious little in there that’s really any good for you. The music I love is the music people make because they have to, because they need to, from their souls, not their wallets.’
‘You don’t believe in souls.’
‘I don’t believe in immortal souls. I just mean the kernel of who you are, not anything superstitious.’
‘Yeah, well, be thankful you just have to play the stuff and don’t need to get involved in the process of making it.’
‘You make it sound like pies.’
‘Pies?’
‘Yeah. You know; that thing about it being a good idea – if you like eating pies – never, ever to see how they were made and what goes into them.’
‘Yeah, well,’ Jo said, hoisting one steel-studded eyebrow, ‘believe me; there are a lot of pie bands out there.’
‘I believe the same applies to sausages.’
‘Ditto.’
I looked over to the far side of the street, at the DKNY shop. I remembered Ceel telling me about its five thousand red twin-towers T-shirts, nearly three months ago. In the December cold I shivered for the dark, baking heat of that hotel room. That had been another, solitary feature of today’s walk, one I couldn’t share with Jo. Our route had taken us past a few of the hotels I’d been in with Ceel. We had passed Claridge’s just ten minutes earlier, and I’d almost suggested that we went in for a drink, or a pot of tea, or just the chance to pretend we were guests and get to ride in a lift that actually had a uniformed lift-operator, but in the end some prophylactic instinct, some grudgingly acknowledged requirement to obey Celia’s stricture about keeping our affair as separate as possible from the rest of our lives, prevented me.
‘Is that your watch?’ Jo said, stopping at another jewellers’ window and nodding at a display of chunkily sparkling Breitlings on a background of piled yellow cloth.
I glanced at the arm-lengthening bracelet of heavy metalwork on my left wrist. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not nearly expensive or complicated enough.’