When I went out onto the street, the ape-like messenger was sitting on his bike at the side of the road. ‘I’m Jaz,’ he said. I said hello. In those days I didn’t wear the boots and the white leather jacket. I dressed more quietly in torn jeans and fake Converse All Stars. Jaz had all the proper gear: black Lycra cycle shorts and a black sweat shirt. We wheeled our bikes down Pentonville Road together and he talked to me about City Circle and the creatures that ran it. ‘Apparently they sleep together, those two,’ he said, nodding back in the direction of the office. ‘Horrible idea, isn’t it? I think she joins in sometimes as well. His missus.’ He was cracking jokes like this as soon as I met him. They weren’t especially funny, but that was all right. He was a friendly face when I needed one.
I’d always wanted a brother, someone I could just hang out with. Just go somewhere and sit around with and for there to be no pressure. Someone who would help me out if I needed it. Wouldn’t let me down.
Jaz wasn’t necessarily that person. But the position was vacant.
Jaz showed me a few tricks. He told me never to phone in before I had to. The Thin Controller was not all that clued up and had no idea how long it took to cycle from, say, St Paul’s to Kensington. So you could make the delivery in twenty minutes then have time for a coffee or a beer before calling in. The point was he always shouted at you for taking too long, even when you broke your neck to get somewhere quickly and rang in immediately. So there was no point stretching yourself for him. The incentive for zipping around from one place to another was that you could take a break on company time. The drawback was you got paid per job, so the more rests you took the less money you made, but money wasn’t everything and taking advantage of the Thin Controller’s stupidity was worth it in itself.
Jaz took me to Hanover Square and Soho Square, gathering points for couriers. You could meet people. There was a good atmosphere and a sense of solidarity. Most couriers had some horror story to tell, having narrowly escaped death-by-car-door-opener or themselves avoided killing passengers who stepped off buses in the middle of the road without looking.
I didn’t enjoy the job as such and I hated having to speak to the Thin Controller on the phone but there was an aspect of the work that appealed to me. I had always loved maps, both for practical use and just for the pleasure of losing myself in them. If I wasn’t reading a experimental French novel, then I’d have my nose in a map book. There really isn’t that much difference. A map tells countless stories and, however crap it may sound, the novel — even one by Alain Robbe-Grillet or Michel Butor — can be a sort of large scale map of the human experience. Or maybe I just like the way things fit together. And the way they sometimes don’t quite fit. What I did enjoy about the job were the times when I found myself between districts, leaving Maida Vale but not quite arriving in Kilburn. I could never decide if there was a gap between neighbouring areas or if they overlapped. I learned pretty quickly that they certainly didn’t fit exactly. Borough boundaries might be precise — often running down the middle of a street — but real boundaries, those perceived by the people who live there, are not so fixed.
I pissed the Thin Controller off on only my second day. I’d just delivered a package in Southampton Row — and had a fifteen-minute rest in Russell Square — and I went looking for a phone box so I could call in. This was the summer of ’83, remember, or ’84, when the bookmakers were offering fifty-to-one odds against finding a public phone that worked, so I had to go quite a way. I called him eventually from an old red phone box somewhere east of Queen Square and he asked, ‘Where are you, Two Three?’ My call sign. Alpha Two Three. Jaz had told me the Thin Controller even had a number for the Fat Woman. And one for the dog.
I said, ‘Somewhere between Bloomsbury and Clerkenwell.’
He gave a fruity cough, then said, ‘This isn’t a fucking guessing game, Two Three. Where are you?’
But I genuinely didn’t know where I was. I knew London well. I wasn’t lost. That’s not what I mean. I mean I didn’t know whether I was in Bloomsbury or Clerkenwell. I was too far east still to be in Bloomsbury proper and, surely, this far west I could hardly be in Clerkenwell.
‘I don’t know exactly, TC.’
‘TC?’
‘Er, The Controller.’
‘Two Three, what’s the fucking street called?’
I leaned backwards out of the phone box but couldn’t see a street name. ‘Can’t see it, control. But I’m really quite close to Russell Square. Not far from Gray’s Inn Road, not far from the office actually.’
Something really nasty crept into his voice now. ‘Just find out exactly where you are, Two Three, and ring back. I can’t waste time like this. You must think I’m made of money.’
‘You’re a cunt,’ I said. After I’d hung up. What was he on about — made of money? I was paying for the fucking call.
The nice thing about all this was that I still didn’t know where I was, Bloomsbury or Clerkenwell. Or some weird shadowland between the two, I might well have joked.
I used to wonder about places and how they came to be or ceased to be. There are names that hardly have places to belong to any more. Like Finsbury and Hornsey. There’s a Hornsey High Street, a borough of Hornsey, a Hornsey Road and Hornsey Lane, but where the hell is Hornsey? You get there and all you find is a row of shops. There’s no centre, no focus, no place.
Look down from the bridges you cross, however, and watch the railway lines that are carried over the road you’re walking along. These are the transport routes in and out of places. But that’s obvious. Railway lines, canals, wasteland stretching into the distance. What I’m saying is, so much of what surrounds us is hidden from view. We have to look for it. And if you look hard enough you’ll find it. It’s there. Everything’s there somewhere and anything’s possible. Honestly. I know.
Jaz was still staring at the canal. I lit a cigarette and the flare of the match caught his attention. He went into the kitchen and shouted, ‘Another beer?’ as he opened the fridge door.
‘One more, then I must go,’ I said.
He returned with two beers and sat opposite me in one of the other big chairs. For a moment it seemed as if there was nothing to say.
I hadn’t told Jaz about the incident with the phone in the house and the caller asking for me. In fact, whereas at the time it seemed as if the call were intended for me, by now I was thinking maybe I’d just stumbled across an odd coincidence. And perhaps the reason why I didn’t mention it to Jaz was because of his habit of saying the wrong thing. He might have made some flippant remark which would have irritated me. He often seemed uncomfortable with anything that wasn’t clear-cut and black and white like his photographs. For the time being I put the matter out of my mind.
I left Jaz’s flat soon after the second beer. On my way downstairs I paused at a south-facing window. The sun’s rays struck the gasholders’ cradles almost horizontally and made them glow a deep ruddy gold. I knew that particular angle of light would last no longer than a minute or two. For some reason it seemed like a good omen to have caught it. I thought about standing there and enjoying the view until the sun went down, but decided the omen would lose its potency if I watched the gasholders slip into shadow. I slipped out of the building and crossed to my car, Annie Risk’s phone number in my back pocket.
Chapter Three
That evening when I got back to the flat I was too tired to do anything except collapse in front of the television. I channel-hopped — through an old black and white movie with lots of stark lighting and cigarette smoke, a 70s TV movie featuring actors I recognised but couldn’t put names to, and a political discussion which went around and around and got nowhere — until I settled down to ice-skating coming from somewhere in Europe. In fact, it doesn’t matter where it’s actually coming from because it always seems like Europe, either high in the alps or up in Scandinavia or Russia or somewhere else cold and icy. It’s all quite simple really.