A city is a sea that you lose things in. You only find things that other people have lost.
‘Wonderful, isn’t it?’ I say to a man walking his red setter.
‘Fackin’ shithole innit?’
Londoners slag off London because, deep down, we know we are living in the greatest city in the world.
Oxford Street was heaving when I got off the bus. Oxford Street is one of those sold-out-past-its-best things, like Glastonbury Rock Festival or Harrison Ford. You can taste the metallic tang of pollution here. The Doctor Marten boot shops depress me. The gargantuan CD shops preclude any surprise discoveries. The department stores are full of things for people who never have to lift anything when they move house: Neroesque bath tubs with gold-plated handles and life-size porcelain collie dogs. The fast-food restaurants towards Marble Arch leave you hungrier than you were when you went in. The only good thing about Oxford Street are the Spanish girls who pay for their English lessons by handing out leaflets for cut-price language schools around Tottenham Court Road. Gibreel got his rocks off with one once, by pretending to spik no Eenglish and be just off the boat from Lebanon. I bought a T-shirt from a stall near Oxford Circus with a pig on it to cheer Poppy up, big enough for her to use as a night-shirt. Then I walked past a poster in a travel agent’s, or rather I was crushed against it by a sudden surge of bodies, and I felt small and older than my years and losing sight of the strip of sky far above, and—
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
You know the real drag about being a ghostwriter? You never get to write anything that beautiful. And even if you did, nobody would ever believe it was you.
I had to wait eight minutes to use my bank machine, and in that time I counted eleven different languages walking past. I think they were different, I get fuzzy around the middle east. I blew my nose. Gravelly London mucus showed up on my snot analysis. Mmm. Lovely. Next to the bank was a shop that only sold televisions. Wide ones, cuboid ones, spherical ones, ones that let you see what crap you were missing on thirty other channels while you were watching the crap on this one. I watched the All-Blacks score three tries against England, and formulated the Marco Chance versus Fate Videoed Sports Match Analogy. It goes like this: when the players are out there the game is a sealed arena of interbombarding chance. But when the game is on video then every tiniest action already exists. The past, present and future exist at the same time: all the tape is there, in your hand. There can be no chance, for every human decision and random fall of the ball is already fated. Therefore, does chance or fate control our lives? Well, the answer is as relative as time. If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading, it’s fate all the way.
Now I don’t know about you, but my life is a well and I’m right down there in it. Neck deep, and I still can’t touch the bottom.
I had a strong desire to jump in a taxi, tell him to take me to Heathrow and get on a plane to somewhere empty and far away. Mongolia would suit me fine. But I can’t even afford the tube fare to Heathrow.
I inserted my bank card, and prayed to the Fickle God of Autobanking for twenty-five quid, the minimum amount necessary to get drunk with Gibreel. The bloody machine swallowed my card and told me to contact my branch. I said something like ‘Gah!’ and punched the screen. What’s the point of Yeats if you can’t buy a few rounds?
A round Indian lady behind me with a magenta dot on her forehead growled in a Brooklyn accent, ‘Real bummer, huh kid?’
Before I could answer a pigeon from the ledge above crapped on me.
‘Better go back to bed... Here’s a tissue...’
The Tim Cavendish Literary Agency is down a murky sidestreet near Haymarket. It’s on the third floor. From the outside, the building is quite swanky. There’s a revolving door, and a flagpole jutting out from above the lobby roof. It should house a wing of the Admiralty, or some other silly club that bars female members. But no, it houses Tim Cavendish.
‘Marco! Wonderful you could drop in!’
Too much enthusiasm is much more offputting than not enough. ‘Afternoon, Tim. I’ve brought you the last three chapters.’
‘Top hole.’
Glance at Tim’s desk and you’ll see everything you need to know. The desk itself was owned by Charles Dickens. Well, that’s what Tim says and I have no reason to disbelieve him. Terminally overpopulated by piles of files and manuscripts, a glass of Glenfiddich that you could mistake for a goldfish bowl of Glenfiddich, three pairs of glasses, a word processor I’ve never seen him use, an overflowing ashtray and a copy of A–Z Guide to Nineveh and Ur and the Racing Post. ‘Come in and have a glass, why don’t you? I showed the first three chapters to Lavenda Vilnius on Monday. She’s very excited. I haven’t seen Lavenda so fluttery about a work in progress since Rodney’s biography of Princess Margarine.’
I chose the least piled-up-on chair and started unloading its cargo of shiny hardbacks. They still smelt of print.
‘Dump those dratted things on the floor, Marco. In fact fly to Japan and dump them on the bastard they’re about.’
I looked at the cover. The Sacred Revelations of His Serendipity — A New Vision, A New Peace, A New Earth. Translated by Beryl Brain. There was a picture of an Oriental Jesus gazing into the centre of a buttercup with a golden-haired kid gazing up at him. ‘Didn’t know this was your usual line, Tim?’
‘It isn’t. I was handling it for an old Eton chum who runs a flaky New Age imprint on the side. Warning bells went off, Marco. Warning bells. But I didn’t listen to them. My Eton man thought the market was ripe for a bit of Oriental wisdom in the new millennium. Beryl Brain is his part-time girlfriend. “Beryl” is just about right, but “Brain” she is not. Anyway. We’d just got the first consignment back from the printers when His Serendipity decided to hurry his vision along and gas the Tokyo underground with a lethal chemical. I’m sure you saw it on the news earlier this year. ’Twas ’im.’
‘How... horrific!’
‘You’re telling me it was horrific. We only got a fraction of the costs off the bleeders before they had their assets frozen! I ask you, Marco, I ask you. We’re stuck with a print run of fifteen hundred hardbacks. We’ve sold a handful as curios to True Crime Freaks, but those apart we’re up Shit Creek without a spatula. Can you believe those cultists? As if the end of the world needs to be hurried along...’ Tim handed me the biggest glass of whisky I’d ever seen or heard of.
‘What’s the book itself like?’
‘Well, some of it’s twaddle, but mostly it’s just piffle. Cheers! Down the hatch.’