Justin Cartwright

Born in South Africa, Justin Cartwright lived in Britain after studying at Trinity College, Oxford. He worked in advertising and directed documentaries, films and television commercials, and wrote seventeen novels. They include the Booker-shortlisted In Every Face I Meet, the Whitbread Novel Award-winner Leading the Cheers and the acclaimed White Lightning, shortlisted for the 2002 Whitbread Novel Award. His novel Look At It This Way was made into a three-part drama by the BBC in 1992, and he also published three works of non-fiction. He died in December 2018.

Also by Justin Cartwright

Interior

Masai Dreaming

In Every Face I Meet

Leading the Cheers

Half in Love

White Lightning

Look At It This Way

Justin Cartwright

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 1990 by Macmillan London Limited

This edition published in 2000 and reissued in 2020 by Sceptre

An Imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Justin Cartwright 1990

The right of Justin Cartwright to be identified as the Author of the

Work has been asserted by him in accordance with

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be

otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that

in which it is published and without a similar condition being

imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Paperback ISBN  9780340768358

eBook ISBN  9781529340310

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.sceptrebooks.co.uk

For my old friend Garry Southern

Et saves bien qu’il fut contrefaise al vif

(You must understand that it was drawn from life)

– Villard de Honnecourt, 1235,

of his drawing of a lion

Contents

THE INDEPENDENT

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

THE INDEPENDENT
Lion’s Victim Identified

Police today issued a statement identifying the body found in Regent’s Park, believed to have been a victim of the lion which was recaptured yesterday after disappearing for four weeks from London Zoo.

The victim was Mr Miles Goodall, 31, unemployed City dealer. A police surgeon confirmed that Mr Goodall’s injuries were consistent with having been severely mauled and partially eaten by a lion.

Police have not confirmed an earlier report by park attendant, Mr Abdul Dunwoody, who first discovered the body, that the victim had a hand-gun on him when found. Any connection between this incident and Vice-President Danforth Quayle’s private stay at Winfield House, the US Ambassador’s residence, was pure speculation at this stage, said a police spokesman. None the less, reliable sources confirmed, an urgent internal enquiry is being launched into security at Winfield House, which occupies twelve acres bordering on Regent’s Park.

A friend of the victim, Mrs Joyce Rolfe, of Windy Corner, Farnham, Surrey, said that Mr Goodall had been suffering from considerable stress since losing his job at First West City Merchant Bank some weeks ago.

Chapter 1

The sky is the colour of a mullet’s skin, grey with flecks of minerals. Outside my windows, the park is subdued. It’s been trying to rain all day, as they say around here.

I am faxing a message to New York:

Bums. Arses. Fannies. Tushies. Sit-upons. Derrières. Khyber Passes. Botties.

I believe you can chart a nation’s social history by the shape of the nation’s bottom. In Victorian times there was a theory that the criminal classes could easily be identified by the science of phrenology. Their eyes were set too close together; their occipital lobes were constricted; their rational impulses were squeezed out by poor development of the skull. It was scientific. In this spirit I launch my enquiry into the disappearance of the small and wiry Londoner. The jockey-shaped Cockney, he of the fast fingers and the pipe-cleaner limbs, is an endangered species. Bottoms, and breasts (bristols, boobs, knockers, etc.) are growing unchecked. Londoners are eating McDonald’s, Burger Kings and Kentucky Fried Chicken. They live entirely on these protein-packed foods with the consequence that they are becoming bulky. The little pickpockets, purse snatchers, chimney sweeps, and sneak thieves have vanished in one generation. Like much of London, they will only be a memory soon.

Boys tower over their traditionally formed parents and grandparents. They have muscles and bellies where their parents were held together with bits of string. And the girls! They are ballooning into fantastic shapes. The fattest of them have huge pear-shaped butts, which they none the less compress into stone-washed jeans or short black skirts. Even the least stout have ducks’ bottoms waggling beneath them as their legs struggle to carry the additional weight. They seldom run, but when they do the whole construction totters dangerously. And they are always eating. If they are not actually sitting to eat, they are snacking on bags of cheese-and-onion-flavoured potato chips, or ‘crisps’ as they call them. Even children on the way to school carry these little bags of poison.

In the more expensive parts of town, women are working their bodies. In these areas they eat sensibly – fish, salad, pasta with fresh tomato sauce – and they have their hair done frequently. Hairdressers in high-rent Chelsea specialize in the glossy look. The women with the tight, under-control bottoms also have gleaming, under-control hair. In the other, and more numerous, neighborhoods – dreadful places like Peckham, Kilburn and Holloway – perhaps despairing of their unmanageable bottoms, women are tormenting their hair. They want to look (like Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics) interesting and independent. But they forget la loi du canard: short hair emphasizes the burgeoning backside. No matter: they shave the area above their ears, they tickle the front up into little spikes, they wear crew cuts, brush cuts and table cuts. Out in the suburbs, the encircling darkness, they still tease their hair into ringlets so that it flaps all over their heads like a poodle’s on retrieval duty.

The City is changing too. The streets are a bedlam of building works and excavation. ‘Cladding’ is all the rage. Brutal sixties office blocks of leprous concrete with blue panels of a plastic compound called ‘quartzite,’ once fashionable, are being ‘re-clad.’ This requires a glamorous new glass skin and a pediment on top of the building to hide the lift shaft and services. On ground level the building must now ‘interact’ with the passers-by. The theory of noted London architect, Richard Rogers, that essential services should not be denied but exhibited – like breast-feeding in public – finds no favor with the corporate mind. The corporate person is still in the ascendancy. He is in league with the real world; he uses the expensive seats on airplanes; he eats at restaurants which set a lot of store by ‘presentation.’ This presentation involves fancy work with ingredients, forced marriages between fruit and flesh, the pressing into service of obscure berries and arson with expensive liqueurs.

Other, older buildings are becoming penthouses, lofts, workspaces, drawing stations. The emphasis here is on brightly colored beams and exposed brickwork. (I have a former hayloft myself.) Wonder of wonders: After all these years of neglect it has been discovered that London has thousands of acres of derelict warehouses, chapels, smokehouses, rope factories, chandlers, pulley makers and grain stores. Professional people are moving into these spaces – ‘space’ is a big word – previously occupied by barometer makers, brewers, unitarians, sea captains, fishmongers, watchmakers, shipbuilders, lascars, rice merchants, spice traders (‘the smell of cinnamon pervades the place’), coopers and a myriad more, all forgotten. The river is making a comeback. Colorful galleries (aka ‘galleria’), harbors, marinas and wharves are appearing everywhere. Little waterbuses skim up and down the Thames from Docklands to Chelsea. There are regattas of ancient barges and steam vessels. Old things are in, but they must be fully restored. ‘Restoration’ is a big word too. It is surprising, therefore, that the mania for restoring the body has not taken more of a hold. The body is enjoying the benefit of affluence all too clearly.

That’s enough. They’ll cut it anyway. I write for Manhattan magazine every fortnight on London: arts, theatre, politics, literature and restaurants. It’s a great job; reasonably well paid, amusing, and with (free) entry to almost anything or anybody in town. At the same time I am free to pursue my private thoughts.

I have become a minor celebrity back home, a bush league Alistair Cooke or Garrison Keillor, mildly ironic but at the same time essentially reassuring. This celebrity has allowed me to appear in a commercial for American Eagle credit cards. (I have to be careful: they are litigious to the point of madness.) In my role as Euro-savant I am supposed to lend lustre to this crude computer credit operation. The thesis is simple: by using this card, you too can be accepted all over the world – like me – in places where you really have no business poking your nose. The world is changing fast. Instant acceptance can be purchased. People are no longer willing to wait a few generations. The folks from Cedar Rapids feel more relaxed in the Ritz with this little plastic card in their wallets.

The seagulls wheeled curiously as I stood on the balcony of a penthouse apartment (previously a brewery), overlooking Tower Bridge. I said the following words to the camera, while walking awkwardly past the skyline with my neck craned at forty-five degrees:

‘London. My kind of town, for the last ten years now, and it’s still just as full of surprises. So I always take my American Eagle card with me whenever I leave home.’

(Shot of me leaving picturesque mews cottage in Belgravia in a taxi.)

‘You never know when you may need it.’

(Shot of me being confronted by flower seller in Edwardian dress.)

‘From the opera (shot of me at Royal Opera House for Pavarotti) to fish and chips (shot of me with rubber-faced character actor called Bernie, as he dips cod inexpertly into bubbling oil) you know you are in good company with the American Eagle card.’

(Close with shot of me escorting sophisticated woman into the Savoy. Her motivation not explained.)

For the thirty seconds, which took five days to film, I was paid $375,000. It turns out I could have got more. American Eagle’s advertising agency lied. They said they were negotiating with John le Carré for this slot, and I accepted too quickly. I could have got half a million. I bought a Mercedes. It is one of the new S series, costing £48,000. It has changed my view of London: I seldom use the Underground or the buses now and I see people – my fellow Londoners – from within its warm embrace.

Bernie’s line was severely cut in the editing. He had to say: ‘Coming up in half a tick, guv, every one a little beauty’, as he retrieved the fish from the lethally hot oil. This was, I could tell, far too complex for our little saga, even before they recorded the line. Bernie had plenty of suggestions for alternative lines, which he tried out on Ed Kaplan, the director.

‘How about “Every one a coconut”, Ed?’ he said desperately. ‘That’s a bit shorter.’

‘It’s not working. Bernard,’ said Ed.

And later: ‘This is good, Ed. Me mum used to say this: “This’ll put ’airs on yer chest, me little darlin’.” ’

And then, desperately, ‘“’Ere’s a little of what yer fancy, guv.” That’s short. Do you like it more?’

In lieu of dialogue, Bernie was reduced to using his vast range of facial expressions but Ed Kaplan was not really paying attention. He was wondering if he still had time, as the shoot was running over, to get up to Newport Pagnell to find some parts for his 1964 Aston Martin DB5 which was on blocks in Bridgehampton. He was keen to get it going for the summer. Ed had been a Rhodes scholar back in sixty-nine, but somewhere along the way he had got lost in advertising. Ed remembered taxi drivers with woolly mufflers and flat caps, and policemen who smiled; it was his familiarity with all things British which had secured him the job. Anyway, Ed got the rocker arm and the tappets for his Aston Martin, I got my Mercedes and Bernie scalded his hand in the oil. He tried to sue American Eagle, with predictable results: lawyers’ letters as thick as scripts showered upon him. He enjoyed the attention. An actor’s life can be lonely.

After the film-gypsies departed – their encampment of Winnebagos, catering trucks, generators, camera cars and support vehicles mysteriously dispersed – I felt lost for a few days. I now understood Fellini’s love of his crew: his ordered, busy world with its own hierarchy and its own jokes. Perhaps a fish in an aquarium feels the same way about the lack of reality outside.

Whenever my daughter Gemma is in town, I take her to the aquarium at London Zoo; it is one of her favourite places. It is a gloomy cavern under the goat mountain. We ignore the goats and head straight for the small, bright tank which houses the coral reef effect. The fish there are as bright and virulent as tropical fruit.

Sometimes as we leave the aquarium we hear the lions roaring. Lions, it seems, are not very intelligent. They roar to announce that they are going hunting, even though their evening meal, donkey quarters, is about to be delivered in a wheelbarrow by an assistant keeper. Their roars reverberate none the less across the goat mountain, but the goats are too astute to worry about empty threats and the people in the expensive Palladian villas are seldom at home.

Chapter 2

William ‘Simba’ Cochrane had once been famous for having been attacked by a lion. He had been dragged from his horse, severely mauled and survived. Even that was perhaps not enough to ensure his fame. What had clinched it was the fact that as the lion was eyeing him contemplatively, holding him pinioned with one massive paw, he had managed to release his penknife from its sheath. At the very moment the lion rasped his face with its huge tongue, as a prelude to its first serious mouthful (the way people will toy with the olives and the breadrolls) and its carnivorous breath – rotten gas swirling round an empty stomach – played on his face and its huge teeth (yellow with leonine plaque) prepared to bite into his throat (rather red from the sun), Cochrane plunged the penknife into the lion’s hairy neck. The lion grunted, but seemed merely surprised at first until its dark blood began to pump fiercely through the thick black ruff which decorated its head and leaked on to Cochrane’s shoulder.

‘What did you think then?’

‘I was frightened the bugger was going to get really angry …’

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘But ’e didn’t nor nuffink. ’E looked sad. And then ’e walked orf. Then me ’orse got up. ’E was just stunned like, and I caught ’im as fast as I blooming well could and I buggered orf, I can tell you.’

‘Were you in pain?’

‘I felt nothing (nuffink) at all as a matter of fact. Not a dicky bird. Not till later nohow.’

This was the interesting part. He had felt no pain at all even though the lion had bitten right through his shoulder blade and gouged away a section of his chest; the scars, sixty-one years old, he showed me now, pulling up his shirt and the yellowing undershirt. They had done a neat job at the surgery, considering it had taken a day and a half to get him there, delirious but determined to retrieve his penknife. Looking at the scars was part of the ritual of an interview with Cochrane. Interviews with Cochrane had become scarce in the last thirty years, but he knew the form. His chest was lopsided, as though he had been pared, like a potato peeled carelessly.

That’s where the bugger bit me first, after ’e ’ad knocked me ’orse over. You can still see the perfect teeth marks. Like a dental plate said this young girl what come to see me from the television. The knockers on ’er, you shoulda seen ’em, like ripe bloody cantaloupes. You ever eat a cantaloupe? Lovely. Juicy. We used to eat them for breakfast out in Africa. And watermelons. A penny each. Bloody great whoppers, like ’er tits.’

He bared his gums in a lewd chewing motion. He was a difficult man to like unreservedly; old age had not lent him charm. Instead his semi-celebrity had left him with an inappropriate little legacy of self-regard.

‘It’s five pounds for an interview,’ he said, suddenly. ‘Fifteen dollars in your money.’

The exchange rate had obviously stayed fixed for some time in his mind, perfectly set like the dental record the lion had left on his back.

The building Cochrane lived in was suppurating. The walls outside were oozing; the rainwater pipes had spawned strange chemical florescences, like the crystals which children grow in jars, on the brickwork around them; inside his flat the wallpaper, which was heavy and florid, bulged uneasily as though something biological was striving to be born behind it, and the linoleum on the floor bubbled uneasily with the effects of damp. The building was owned by an obscure charitable trust which had neither the right to sell for redevelopment nor the ability to raise money to improve it. In this chemically impure building huddled a few hundred elderly people in their crepuscular apartments which mirrored – I was well away – the twilight of their lives and the world in which they lived.

William Cochrane, the man who escaped becoming a lion’s breakfast by such a narrow margin, was the most celebrated of these residents, although (as I had found when I asked the lady caretaker for his whereabouts) not the most popular.

‘You interested in that cock-and-bull lion story too? What a load of rubbish. Six D. If you ask me the closest ’e ever come to a lion was at Regent’s Park Zoo … Still that’s just my opinion. Six D. ’E never goes nowhere.’

The caretaker had a terrible mortal cough. Like Cochrane she belonged to an era that was passing, an era of saturated food, sixty cigarettes a day and damp apartments, heated by prudent use of gas fires. All around the tenement, old buildings were undergoing wonderful transformations into more desirable and up-to-date accommodation. But in Jubilee Buildings the old ways were alive, at a subdued level, certainly, but with a quiet persistence, like the fungus growths on the skirting boards.

Cochrane’s horse had been retired after the incident. It had suffered an equine nervous breakdown. The slightest noise frightened it and it shied at bushes. This, I could well understand, was a considerable handicap out in Africa. Cochrane had worked for the ‘PWD’. It took me a while to figure out that PWD meant Public Works Department. He had been in waterworks, so the damp of his present abode was perhaps not as noticeable to him as it was to the visitor. Actually horses had soon afterwards been withdrawn from active service in the Public Works Department. The mounted water worker had been eliminated by a decree from the Colonial Office, so no one in the PWD was ever able to duplicate Simba Cochrane’s extraordinary adventure. None the less other people have been taken from horses by lions.

A German professional hunter, Fritz von Schindler, was taken in Kenya from his polo pony while flushing lions and killed.

After recovering from his encounter with the lion, Cochrane had been given a small disability pension and a desk job back in London with the Metropolitan Water Board. It had not suited him. Nothing in his subsequent life had been as much fun as being eaten by a lion.

‘It didn’t hurt at all?’ I asked again.

‘Didn’t feel a thing. What I remember most is ’is awful foul breath (bref) breathing on me face. It were disgusting.’

The scars showed pink where the lion had bitten him and white where the doctor had sewn him up, so that his torso, with its little squiggles and hieroglyphs, looked like a painting by Miró. And on his back the perfect dental impression – which had so enthused the ample television researcher – showed a faint blue.

The lion had died soon after the encounter. Trackers had recovered the knife which was displayed in various exhibitions around the world. There was not much call for it now and Cochrane had recently offered it to the Guinness Book of Records exhibition in Piccadilly Circus for a modest sum, but they had rejected it on the grounds that it was not a record.

‘It was unique that’s all. The one and only, that’s all it bloody was. Stupid gits.’

Waning celebrity, Cochrane had discovered at leisure, was not much of a commodity. It wasn’t much of a penknife, as a matter of fact, with a white inlay of bone on the handle and some crude chasing. On the blade were the words: With this knife, William F. Cochrane killed a lion, Oct 5, 1931.

The engraving took up most of the space on the blade, which Cochrane had great difficulty closing with his knotted fingers.

‘It’s me arthritis (arthuritis). These bloody flats should have been condemned years ago. I applied to the council but they don’t take no notice of us. They give all their flats to unemployed lesbians and darkies. It’s the damp. It’s gone right into me bones.’

I helped him do up his shirt. The leering boastfulness had gone now. He lit a cigarette which clung to the damp on his lips like a gecko to a wall.

‘When did you feel the pain?’

‘Not until I woke up in the ’ospital in Thompson’s Falls. Then they gave me morphine. It’s lucky I’m not one of them junkies as a result.’

The way Cochrane spoke was dying too. It was Cockney of the music-hall variety which became moribund – along with cab drivers in flat caps – about fifteen or twenty years ago. The new Cockney was just as rich a language, but its focus had moved. It was concerned with easy money and fancy cars and it took a less romantic view of life in the smoke. The word ‘fucking’ had entered the vocabulary in a big way. In fact it was moving into all sorts of territory previously thought to be immune. Perfectly ordinary conversation in the street employed the word constantly. On the way to see Cochrane I heard a mother say to her child: ‘You left your fucking brains indoors again (leftyer fu-u-k-kin brains indoors agen)?’ for some small misdemeanour.

Cochrane’s little flat smelled of defunct aromas too, like carbolic soap, eucalyptus chest rub, throat linctus, sweet sherry, fishermen’s cough drops and overcooked vegetables. His face, at this lull in the conversation, crumbled. Confusion not so much reigned as camped there. His body and his face were almost hairless, yet his head was covered in a baby fuzz as if his hair was making a return after many years of absence. The language was changing, but the facial types persisted; this was the small, wiry, humorous type. Although the faces were still around, the bodies of their grandchildren had grown larger and fleshier, the legs longer and straighter and their hair permanently barbered and dyed. Indeed some of them seemed to have microwaved their hair, subjecting it to harmful rays so that it appeared to have been scorched or fried unnaturally. Whenever I go to the airport in the summer, I see groups of these people who have taken their hair in for drastic treatment in preparation for their holidays. To me these faces and bodies do not go together, like old master painters who started a portrait and left the pupils to fill in the hands, torsos, spaniels and hawks.

The flats were dark. We had not been talking for long but it had grown even darker. Thicker cloud, I guessed, had passed over the habitually grey ceiling outside bringing with it the spitting of rain – like an old man trying to piss – which in turn caused the bricks and stones to suppurate, the water leaching out the salts, the spores and the mineral deposits which had accumulated there.

Cochrane had a photograph of the lion’s corpse. It was huge. The head was propped up on a rock and its mane was thick and dark. It was a miracle that the knife had gone through this hedge at all. The askari stood next to the lion in the photo with his .303 rifle on his shoulder, rigidly to attention, whether out of respect for the late monarch of the jungle or at the behest of the photographer (a senior waterworks official known as ‘Stinker’ Forsythe because of his legendary expertise with sewers), I had no way of guessing.

‘Stinker was a dab ’and with (wif) a camera. He took pictures of most everything (everyfink) what we done out there.’

Cochrane let me look at his newspaper cuttings. His brush with death – his good long look right into the face of mortality (with its halitosis) – had been big news in East Africa. But it had also found its way by the wire services to all the papers of the Empire and beyond to New York and Paris. He had been given an Atlantic crossing on the Queen Mary. He had been awarded a medal in Canada. He had met the Duke of York. He had made a guest appearance at Barnum and Bailey’s circus at Flushing Meadow, even entering the ring with the lion act for a stake of $500.

‘Were you frightened?’

‘Frightened? Terrified more like. This lion tamer geezer, ’e said the lions could smell fear. ’E was dead worried, ’e was, in case they went for ’im an’ all.’

Here he sat in the damp twilight as I leafed through his cuttings. The moisture had got into the scrapbooks too, so that the pages were covered with a soft green powdery mildew. Maybe the growth on Cochrane’s head was mildew. The one small window was running half-heartedly with sulphurous rain. I thought of Barnum and Bailey’s, all colour and light and girls with thunderthighs doing those curious little leaps and emitting muted shrieks, as though they had been goosed by a bat, and I imagined the intrepid Simba Cochrane, lopsided but plucky, entering the lion cage and scuttling behind Salvatore Corleone’s, the lion tamer’s, back, the whip snaking through the air, the lions snarling, wondering who this bow-legged little interloper was (and whether he was edible) and Cochrane getting a whiff of their meaty breath (donkey offal) at the same time as the lions got a whiff of his overactive sebaceous glands.

‘It would have looked well ’ere on the floor, the lion skin. Unfortunately as it appeared it was too far gone (gorn).’

By the time Stinker and his askaris had reached the lion’s body it was beyond redemption even by the Indian taxidermist, who took care of hunting trophies. It was difficult to imagine what an enormous lion skin would have looked like here, head raised, glass eyes flickering malevolently – if intermittently – in the weak flame of the single gas heater. Old people become very attached to the most dilapidated furniture. It seems to acquire a comforting value in their estimation; but Cochrane’s furniture – a small spindly table, a kitchen chair and a heavily pockmarked armchair – in his imagination would have been shown to good advantage by the lion skin. There was also a glass-fronted cabinet which displayed Cochrane’s memorabilia, and a carpet of brown and orange dahlias. Cochrane offered me tea, but I had experienced elderly English people offering to make tea before: a long interval was punctuated by the clashing of chipped cups before the eventual appearance of a teapot, formally dressed in a woolly outer garment, an ecological nirvana for mites and spores, then an orthopaedically clamorous period of pouring and anxiety about the sending in of depth charges of sugar lumps. One lump or two? You did say two? Oh no sugar. I can always make some more. Oh I am a silly billy. These old people take an immense amount of sugar. Cochrane probably ate it by the bagful, judging by the state of his mouth. The tea ritual, as with the Japanese, has deep symbolic meaning. I declined.

‘When the lion knocked you off your horse did you think you had a chance?’

Cochrane’s features sprang to action stations. The lion world was the real world. His small, jockey’s body leaned forward as if he were in the starting stalls on Epsom Downs. I sympathised with the little man with breadmould on his head. There are periods in my own life – in everybody’s life probably – which seem more vital and therefore more real. He had feared that our conversation about the limpid past had ended.

‘I didn’t feel nothing (nuffink) at all except I was winded so as I couldn’t breathe (breeve) nor nothing. That may of saved me life.’

‘Were you frightened?’

‘I’ve often given that some thought. Turned it over in me mind like, and I can honestly say,’ (he aspirated the ‘h’) ‘I weren’t frightened at all.’

‘Even when he bit you?’

‘It was a dream. I was thinking (finking) clearly like in a dream.’

Shock. The sudden constriction of the blood vessels, so strong it completely blotted out the pain and the fear of that moist mouth and its three-inch teeth, every one a canine (or perhaps a feline) and the indolent eyes, the colour of corn stubble, apparently fixed negligently on something distant, the paws the size of designer dinner plates, the thick mane, darkening with age, the looming muzzle scarred by a hundred fights, each whisker as thick as a piece of mackerel line, and the warm, sullen, poisoned breath, coming in short, searing blasts after the exertion of leaping on to the horse and detaching this monkey from its perch. And the little man, despite the blood and the crushed shoulder and the pain in his face which was being rasped by a huge tongue, quickly unsheathing his cheap knife and plunging it through the thicket around the lion’s neck with such force and accuracy that the brute bled to death, its paws – like Androcles’s lion – ill-equipped to deal with a medical emergency as the blood pumped on to the dry, sandy soil. It was shock, the chemical surge, the magic mushroom, the dervish, the Gurkha, the frenzy which the little people of this country must have within them; which sent them over the top at Ypres, or into the Zulu assegais, disdaining fear, feeling no pain. To feel no pain is to be drunk in Cockney.

The lion recognises the true prince,’ I said.

He didn’t hear.

‘It was a dream. To be honest when I woke in the ’ospital I was not one hundred per cent sure what ’ad ’appened to me. I thought (fought) I had as like as not dreamed the ’ole business, particularly (partikerly) wif the morphine and all.’

Some dream.

The streets outside are not dreaming. They are like a wet dog anxiously trying to shake off the moisture. The lights from the Masonic Lodge, where bank managers and senior policemen are gathering for a gin and tonic, are shining yellow against the gaseous backcloth of the City. I should never have brought the car. It will have been vandalised in the onrushing gloom. But now I find it unmolested, no ticket although time was up hours ago, no mazy screwdriver lines down the side, in fact all its handsome Teutonic features intact. As I unlock the doors, above me in the Lodge I can see them: their faces are the faces of butchers, bakers and candlestickmakers, as they bask in the warm conviviality of a world without the poor and black. Not that I can talk. In ten years here I have hardly met a person of colour. None of my friends is starving. You can’t go out looking for these people; they live on another planet but pass around the edge of our lives occasionally. No point in feeling guilty about it; that way lies madness.

As if in response to my thoughts a group of tall black boys come shambling along the kerb, holding a black dustbin liner over their heads, like those Ashanti chiefs. They walk like moonwalkers with exaggerated bend and lift, as though the damp streets are sticky and walking is somehow demeaning. They would rather be in a car like mine, although they favour the bad man’s wagon, the BMW, given a choice. Three of the five have Walkmans. I get into the car quickly and light up the space-age controls, ready, if necessary to get going. They pass, the tinkling from their headsets, like small scratchy wind-up toys, left behind them. I lurch out into the damp road. I haven’t quite got the hang of the power steering. Someone is shouting at me: ‘Why don’t you look where you’re fucking going you fucking dickhead?’ I shrug Italian style. He’s a minicab driver. This métier seems to attract the psychically disturbed. With one push on the pedal I leave his old Ford Granada trailing. No doubt he’s still in there screaming away. It’s mostly ritual, but you have to be careful. Somebody was thrown under the wheels of a huge truck the other day after a minor altercation. The driver is probably a Greek Cypriot. If you took a snapshot of a London street any day, you wouldn’t find a scene from Dickens, that’s for sure. You would find neat Chinese nurses, Rastas in knitted caps, Pakistanis in shiny leather jackets, Japanese tourists in matching raincoats, backpacking students and the occasional Arab in a burnouse – outnumbering the natives.

I set off down Farringdon Road past the Guardian. The dome of St Paul’s, the grey streaked with copper slug-trails, is briefly visible, like an umbrella held up against the rain. The five-speed wipers (there may be more) make light of the rain. There are little wipers on the headlights too, going like the clappers. I pass the bookstall on its iron wheels where Guardian journalists, I imagine, go to buy second-hand books. The man who runs the stall is packing up, disconsolate. He has this pitch on a busy street once a week; it must be an ancient licence. I know where he keeps the books; it’s a little warehouse near the church in Clerkenwell. It would make a great apartment. I’ve honestly thought about asking him if he wants to sell. I’ve caught the itch now; wherever I go I think about buying some property and doing it up. It’s not a disease, it’s more a fungus, a sort of mildew of the soul, like the stuff that’s squatting on Cochrane, the lion killer’s head.

I fight my way down towards Fleet Street, past the site of the Fleet Prison, now the Memorial Hall, past the defunct newspaper buildings, past the Law Courts with their menacing gothic turrets and spires, past the little Air Force church marooned in the middle of the road, past the Indian High Commissioner just climbing into his Ashoka limousine at the back of India House, a couple of bodyguards moving sideways like hermit crabs on either side of the car, and down the wide stretch at Charing Cross Station and out into Trafalgar Square. The huge lions which lie there are wet; the bronze is showing green in patches so that they, too, appear to have mildew. When Landseer cast them he made only one body and two heads.