streaks of lightning, accidents waiting to happen, claims waiting to be filed, damages waiting to be spent, while pop music sprays out from the open doors of Megastores, and French and German and Japanese students, with cameras constantly clicking, idle lazily on the steps of an Eros streaked by the dropped bombs of pigeons fat on Starbucks muffin wrappers.
McDonalds and Gap and Body Shop and Virgin. The four corners of the Circus, tomorrow the world …
I’ve lived here for eight years now, and if I was tripping down memory lane as well as Piccadilly I could nod a moment of acknowledgement to most corners of Soho, and Covent Garden, and Bloomsbury, and Marylebone, and Hyde Park, and Knightsbridge. I fell face first onto the pavement on that corner once, at three a.m. with one shoe on and one shoe off, drunkenly unbalanced and confused by the sudden three-inch difference in my leg lengths. And I stood on that corner for half an hour once, trying drunkenly to convince a doorman that he should let me and my rowdy group of actors and ad execs into a lap-dancing club, and that no, I wasn’t drunk, and wasn’t this a meritocracy? I was more impressed with the use of that word than he was, given that it didn’t actually make any sense at the time. London has conspired with me in fun too many nights for me to recall, and it has let me dream, perhaps a little too much. It has never offered me stability, or routine – the trains don’t even run on time and a London crazy can hijack your day by performing a striptease in Leicester Square, and your favourite café can serve you coffee and toast one morning and be an urban jewellery boutique two days later. It’s like a wonderful and exciting but slightly shallow old friend. Some days you feel like you mean everything to it, like it’s protecting you and loving you back, offering up surprises at every turn for your own personal entertainment. Other days you don’t even seem to exist and you get barged off the bus and you lose a heel in a hole in the street, and you can’t get cash from the machine, or a cab in the rain. You just can’t let it disappoint you, you have to see it for what it is. Some days it is simply off finding its fun elsewhere.
As you stare down Piccadilly, Green Park is to your right, the grass occasionally planted with a man in a suit, slumped in a deckchair that you can rent, ten pounds for two hours – who are these men that sit in the park at nine forty on a Monday morning? Why aren’t they walking crazy quickly, breaking a sweat on their freshly shaved upper lips, late for work? There must be something wrong with them, to just be sitting there at this strange working time of day, dressed up to litigate or administrate. Their wife must have left them in the middle of the night. Or they got to work only to be fired for sending too many personal emails, most of which could be classed as pornographic by any HR department worth its salt. Suits look out of place in the park, sitting on the grass, or in their ten-pound deckchairs that slope down the hill, pointing everybody’s feet towards the horses and carriages parked side by side in the Queen’s driveway.
Walk ten paces towards the Circus on Piccadilly and you are sucked into the shade of the Ritz walkway. It’s really a time tunnel. Occasionally, the day after a full moon, plump accountants have been known to enter at one end but never come out of the other. But it’s only ever plump accountants … There are five steps between each column, and on the left two men in peaked hats and expensive overcoats offer to open big gold-plated doors for you, that lead into the most famous hotel in the world. Most days I want to go in, but I never do. I could drown in wealth for a day, or a lifetime. I could live in a lift or a laundry cart. They wouldn’t let you be uncomfortable at the Ritz; it has diamonds for sale in the window that are as big as apples.
Glance around you as you walk diagonally across Albermarle Street. You’ll begin to notice that most faces are bored. Some are as blank as a freshly wiped blackboard. But that’s any city on the way to work. It’s the architecture that makes it magical, and the buildings that breathe. Don’t be confused, that isn’t smog: it’s just Fortnum & Mason letting off some steam. All cities are a mirror of bored faces. The trouble starts when you try to ignore it, or shrug your shoulders and think that it’s okay. If you do, if you accept it, and try to overlook the palpable everything in the air, then somewhere your name gets rubbed off a list. A small part of you doesn’t exist any more, and that’s just the start. Soon you won’t register anything, and they’ll get you, the zombies, the bored, blank faces – that’s what happened to them. They noticed everybody else was bored, and they shrugged and tried to ignore it, and it got them. That night they rolled over in their sleep, and breathed in, part-breath, part-snore, a strange sleeping gasp. And those gasps mean that you have just inhaled something bad. They breathed in boredom that night, and woke up the next day with a blank look on their face. Blank as they poured their coffee, blank as they showered, blank as they locked the door, blank on the train. If I wasn’t so scared of suffocating I’d sleep with tape over my mouth. Ben sleeps with his mouth wide open.
Last Friday Ben offered to cook dinner for us both, if I could get home from work before ten o’clock. He bought two microwave meals. Three years, and that’s what we are – one stringy chicken chow mein, one runny lasagne. Ben has never told me he loves me. He says it doesn’t mean that he won’t.
We live together in Ealing, in a little flat above a shop that sells organic moisturiser, wooden rocking horses and chilli oil. It’s called ‘Plump and Feather’. There are always five people in there, and one of them is always talking animatedly with the lady who runs it, who wears long linen things and has a lazy salt and pepper plait in her hair, and a beatific smile that implies she has just finished teaching a yoga class and she might actually be God herself. And there is always a child. Just one. Not always the same one. I don’t know whose they are.
There is a door at the side of the shop with a worn-out-looking bell. If you press it Ben will answer because he always seems to be in and I always seem to be out. He gets in from work at a quarter to six. He is the manager of an electrical store in the precinct in Ealing. I get in around three a.m. if the shoot I’m working on has run late into the night, or if the actors have insisted I stay until the very end to remove their make-up for them, and not just leave them a bottle of quality cleanser and a stack of cotton wool. Or if we’ve finished on time and then gone for drinks. Mostly shoots don’t finish more than an hour late because they have to pay the crew overtime. Mostly it’s the going for drinks that makes me late home. It hasn’t always been that way. Gradually, like a tap dripping into a bath that will overflow soon, my nights have got longer. I’m not always working, but recently the idea of going home to that flat turns my stomach, like discovering something small and white in a chip-shop sausage.
Only half the bed and a bowl in the kitchen seem like mine, the bowl that I eat my cereal out of, either when I get up at eleven a.m. or when I roll in late at night. Ben does a weekly shop, and buys tins and things – I see them in the cupboards next to my muesli. And he always buys me two more boxes of Alpen. He buys long-life UHT milk. Nothing fresh seems to last more than a day in that flat. I bought some roses from Tesco not long after we’d moved in. I bought a vase as well, and filled it with tepid water and a little sugar like my nanny used to do, and I bashed the stems the way she did, and dropped my orange roses in. They had already wilted the following afternoon, their heads hanging heavily on their stems like starving foreign children without the energy to support their necks. The next morning they were dead. My mother swears by Tesco’s roses, ‘At least two weeks, sometimes more!’ I’m not suspicious, but …
I started an argument with Ben about domestic stuff that night, screaming at him that he had left a ring of filth around the bath. He looked bewildered as I shouted, oblivious to the argument that really raged in my head where I yelled, ‘My flowers died! It’s a sign! No good will come of this!’ I’d thought that Ben might buy me flowers or do something significant on the day that we moved into our flat. Nothing. We didn’t even have sex because he was too tired from lifting boxes. And we didn’t have sex the following morning because his stomach felt bad from the ‘moving in’ curry we’d eaten the night before.
I’m afraid that I have left it too late, made a bad decision, and now I might not find somebody else. I hadn’t said ‘I love you’ for nine years when I said it to Ben. Of course I’d
