North-South Read online

  Clapham Common. 1987. I walked out of the station. It was evening. A hot day, the sky overcast and gloomy. A bag slung over my shoulder. I would change in my friend’s flat, then walk to the all-weather pitch. All-weather meaning hard. Meaning made out of fine grit. We were to play under floodlights. The opposition were Blackheath rugby team. They had a football team culled from their five rugby fifteens – the First Fifteen being big beefy guys who are really good at rugby, pure muscle and raptor reflexes, the Fifth Fifteen being big beefy guys who were quite good at rugby. We changed. We walked to the pitch. It was made of grit. It was getting dark. The floodlights were on. The Blackheath guys were wearing their red rugby shirts. Some of them looked overweight. Later, somebody told me that most of them were from the Second and Third Fifteens. Beefy, competitive guys, seeking more game-time. I looked at our guys. Intellectuals. Teachers and lecturers. A slightly overweight actor. A couple of writers. A guy who worked for an architecture magazine. Thirty per cent of us wore glasses on the pitch. But we were good. We were the Holland team from 1974. Total football. Great movement off the ball. Passes you wouldn’t believe – passes we didn’t believe. A coin was tossed. We would kick off.

  As the striker, I would have the first touch of the ball. We had this move. I passed to the guy next to me, and then took off, heading in the direction of the goalpost to the right of the goalkeeper. The guy next to me passed it back to the actor. The actor gave it a touch or two – and then I jinked across the penalty area, heading diagonally in the direction of the other goalpost. The actor looped the ball in my direction. I turned, and – bang! It almost never worked. In fact, it never worked, except in theory.

  The whistle went. I touched the ball and took off, drawing a couple of beefy guys. The actor had the ball. I jinked. The ball came towards me. All this happened in three or four seconds. I could see, exactly, what to do – catch the ball on the tip of my right foot, cushion it, bring my right foot, with the ball, backwards, beyond my left heel, slide the ball sideways – the Cruyff move – and bang the ball at the goal. This was it! I was moving backwards and to my right, to wrong-foot the guy behind me. I could feel his beefy presence. If you could read my thoughts at that moment, they would have been: prepare to witness some real class, Mr Beefy! The ball was nearing my foot. The move, its absolute precision and perfection, existed Platonically in my mind.

  And then the ball touched my foot.

  Somehow, I didn’t have time to change my body-shape, catch the ball on my toe, drag it back and to the side, turn, and then shoot. I had time – just – to touch the ball with my toe. The beefy guy smashed into me from behind. I don’t know exactly what he did. He ran through me. The force of his body lifted me and somehow carried me. He must have been psyching himself up, I thought later. I was flying through the air. I can remember being up there, moving in an arc, unsupported. I also remember the feeling, quite unusual, of falling from a height, and not being at all prepared – no arms in a position to cushion my fall, no flexed feet. Just flying through the air in a random position. And then I was down. The ground had attacked every part of me along one side. As if someone had taken a hammer to my head, my shoulder, my ribcage, my pelvis, and my ankle. The whistle did not go. This was a fair tackle. I started to get up. Seven seconds of the game had elapsed.

  We lost, of course. I was hammered, in the same fashion, perhaps fifteen times. Afterwards, I hobbled to a pub and drank four or five pints of beer. When the pub closed, I tried to walk back to my friend’s flat. I succeeded. I slept on his sofa. I was not badly injured. Nothing was broken. Nothing was even torn. In the morning, I could not walk very well. I got to Clapham Common Station. This would be my most painful ride on the Underground. The bag with my football gear in it, which I would never wear again, was slung around my shoulder.

  Now the train lurches, and begins to move. Then stops. This is the moment that, if I had to bet, I would bet that something really was wrong. But I still don’t know for sure. I’m entering a zone of hope. I’m still trying to believe that the burning smell, which has not got worse, and which nobody else seems to have noticed, signifies nothing much. Yet a cold sensation lurches downwards through my body, moving deeper, kicking in my stomach, diving. And then it’s gone. Still, the train does not move. The man opposite me does not move either. He retains his resolute, or alternatively horrified, posture. I can see the hairs on his ankles, below the cuffs of his trousers, above the sock-line. One of the women to my left is wearing black trousers, a white blouse, and sandals; the other, an office combo of black skirt, black tights, black shoes. The shoes have a low, clumpy heel. I slide my right hand into my plastic bag, in order to grab my book, in case I need some comfort in the next few moments, and I grab the book, and find that there is not just one book in the bag. There are two. Somehow the idea of taking the second book out, to see what it is, makes me feel nauseous; I think I know what the book is, and it creeps me out. The cogs of my mind are grinding, and beginning to spin.

  I often think about the man who was talking to himself on the platform at Warren Street. I know many people talk to themselves – or, at least, speak without addressing their words to anybody in particular. There was a man I saw quite often in the street, I would say he was about eighty, and every time I saw him, he was alone, and also speaking out loud. One day, I slowed down as he approached, to see if I could hear what he said: there was an odd moment as I inclined myself towards him, and I could hear four words. They were: ‘hammer to the head’. This man was shabby; he slouched and shambled. But the Warren Street man was quite different. I have never seen a self-talker who was better presented. I sometimes see another guy who talks to himself, and wears a suit, but he also wears an admiral’s cap. The Warren Street guy looked like a politician. When I got to the platform, the display box said: ‘Edgware 4 mins’. So I knew I had five or six minutes to wait; a Northern Line minute is a fungible amount of time, but, in my experience, it’s never less than a minute. A thin crowd had gathered on the platform. This particular guy was on the edge of the platform. He wore a dark suit, very shiny black shoes, and a red tie. He was handsome. He had black hair with a side parting. He might have been a politician. And he was talking to himself.

  For the next six minutes, he walked up and down the platform, right on the edge, which made you think he might fall on to the line. He was speechifying. What he was saying was beautifully spoken. He was talking about dates and times. He was making points – semi-coherent points – about how he could remember certain things, but not others. He looked as if he had done what he was doing many times before. Everybody tried not to look at him. Then we got on the train. I didn’t see him get on the train.

  Once, at Camden Town, I saw that somebody had defecated at the very end of the carriage. There are no toilets on the Northern Line. There are no toilets on the Underground, full stop. I guess it must happen. I was the only person in the carriage. I wondered when the act had taken place. It looked fresh. The smell was awful. I wondered if it had been a man or a woman. I guessed a man.

  I remember getting out at Bank Station, in 1990; remember walking up the stairs and along the street, and meeting my friend, the trader, in a bar. He introduced me to the other traders. They wore dark, very expensive suits, the sort of suits Bret Easton Ellis would describe in American Psycho: Armani, Cerruti, Valentino. Beautiful shirts and Gucci loafers. We sat at a table and drank lager. As if on cue, four of them walked up to the bar, with empty glasses, held the glasses below the level of the bar, unzipped their flies and started pissing into the glasses. At the same time, one of them ordered four pints of lager. When the fresh pints arrived, they each grabbed a pint of lager in one hand, and replaced it on the bar with a pint of piss. They zipped their flies, turned, and walked back to the table. Then they sat down.

  Later, we went to a girly bar in Mayfair. There was a lot of red velvet. The girls were in their underwear. They kept approaching our table and asking us to buy them Champagne. Each time a girl
approached, one of the traders, I’ll call him Charlie, beckoned her towards him; when she bent down, he said, ‘Eat my plop.’ After the fourth or fifth girl, the manager came to the table. He said he understood that Mr McKenzie was a good customer, but could he please be more courteous to the girls.

  ‘Eat my plop,’ Charlie said.

  The manager stood there. He waited a moment. Then he said that, all things considered, it might be a good idea if Mr McKenzie called it a night. He said that Mr McKenzie would be welcome to come back to the establishment any time he liked, but maybe tonight, he’d like to consider going home. The manager said he would have no problem calling Mr McKenzie a taxi.

  ‘Eat my plop.’

  The manager went away and returned with two bouncers. He said that, if Mr McKenzie had any difficulty standing up, he had brought some gentlemen to assist him.

  ‘Eat my plop.’

  ‘Very well,’ said the manager, ‘I have no alternative but to instruct my colleagues to assist you to the door.’

  Charlie McKenzie stood up. His eyes were blazing with fury. He walked towards the door. When he got to the door, everybody was watching him. He bowed, a formal sort of bow. He said, ‘Eat my plop.’ Then he was gone.

  A few weeks later, asleep in my bed in north London, I thought I heard something; I was sure I heard something. It had a specific sound that, it seemed at the time, couldn’t have been anything else. It was the sound of a political statement, of one side of a political argument. It made me sit up in bed.

  Do you know what that sounds like? Believe me, you would if you’d heard it. It had an exact tone, a certain ring to it – not like a car backfiring, or a low-flying jet, or a thunderclap. This was a far deeper, much more percussive sound, a celebrity in the drab crowd of squawks and thuds and wails, of everyday noise pollution. It came from two miles away. It imprinted itself on my distant ears, carrying with it innuendoes about our history, our foreign policy, our economy.

  Boof! That’s what it sounded like. Of course, one italicized word can’t do it justice – this noise had amazing qualities. It was, actually, the sound of thousands of skyscraper windows, and the windows of bars and restaurants and shops, being broken simultaneously in the vicinity of Bank Underground Station, of a church being de-materialized, of tables and chairs being fragmented into tiny pieces, of the table that Charlie McKenzie’s friends were sitting at, and the bar where they ordered their pints of lager, being vaporized, of a crater being forced fifteen feet into the earth. I got out of bed, and thought: right now, at this moment, people will be caught in the teeth of it, this noise, this message – they’ll be bracing themselves against it, against the bricks, the shards of glass, the paving stones, the office equipment, the stationery, the bits of cars flying through the air. I went downstairs and switched on the radio.

  Mad with excitement, the commentators talked it up – they told me about the bomb, the damage, the casualties; as the day went on, and they grew calmer, they sharpened up on their figures, spoke fewer words per minute. They talked about the bomb, carefully avoiding the important subject – the significance of the bomb. It was as if they had received a letter and were telling us about the design of the envelope, the watermark on the writing paper, the colour of the ink the letter was written in. And then, a few days later, the story just stopped, and passed into the category of things that have happened, and are no longer happening – the bomb was upstaged by the shuffling of politicians, the Danish referendum, the Sterling exchange rate, Clinton’s haircut; it was over.

  Then I went to see the damage. The place was far more smashed up than you would imagine, much more deeply scarred. The bombed area, a great big chunk of London’s financial zone, was on the edge of losing its identity. I looked at the pavements, covered in an unfamiliar silt, a post-terrorist topsoil; little lumps of glass, concrete, plaster, chips of wood, cigarette butts and Styrofoam cups. When the wind got up, you saw little eddies of yellow-and-black plastic tape, the sort of tape they use to stretch across the entrances to forbidden places. The litter was printed, not with advertising slogans, but with warnings – flyers with the words ‘No hard hat, no entry’; plastic stickers telling you to keep away, to bugger off. But it was a while before I got round to thinking about anything but the surface detail, anything like: what have we done to other people, to make them do this to us? And how can we stop people, if they want to terrorize us?

  Well, I thought, we can’t. We bombed the Germans. The Germans bombed us. The IRA are bombing us. We bombed Saddam. Then we stopped bombing Saddam. What did the future hold? I had no idea. My mind’s eye was always being drawn back towards the thinkable, the prosaic details of the damage.

  The trashed area, about the size of the centre of a market town, a few blocks to the east of Bank Station, looked, at best, like a ghetto, and, like a ghetto, it was picking up bad habits – when piles of stuff block the walkways of a place, people don’t respect them; stacked planks provide a refuge for less legitimate trash. Blind shopfronts, boarded up with corrugated iron and plywood, attract the eye upwards, to the dull, grotty-looking upper halves of the buildings.

  The trauma of the explosion did plenty of mechanical damage, but it also attacked the City’s modesty: the blast was prying; it was prurient. Stacked on the pavement, you could see the cheap, bulk-bought office furniture of the financial community: the plastic-covered chairs, the low, stained sofas, the sheets of A4 printed with columns of numbers – all the prosaic truth behind the reflecting glass.

  Glass. Walking around, I kept wondering about the constant scraping noise: it was men with dustpans and brushes, working on every floor of every building in a place the size of a small town, sweeping bits of broken glass off the floor. The buildings suddenly looked terrible, now their bluff had been called – now they didn’t reflect. They looked like poor people’s buildings.

  ‘Nobody knows what they’re doing,’ a man told me. He was wearing a hard hat and goggles. He was a member of a gang clearing ‘confidential material’ – important documents – from the buildings. His face was covered with a fine layer of plaster dust. ‘Up there,’ he said, pointing up at one of the wrecked buildings, ‘it’s bloody awful. Nobody’s had any experience of this. Can you imagine being in that place, twenty storeys up, with no windows, when the wind gets up? The floor is just covered with plaster and little bits of glass.’

  Yes, I thought, it takes a bit of effort to think of this as part of a political debate. I kept wanting to think about something else. Like the sale they had in a shoe shop after hundreds of pairs of shoes were hurled out into the street. Like the traffic lights that still blinked in the blocked, useless streets.

  Boof! What was that? It was lots of things. It was a huge bomb in the City. It was placed in a truck by two men, caught on security cameras, sneaking away from the truck early in the morning, their faces deep in the hoods of their tracksuits. One man died. Important documents were blown all over town. The damage cost a billion pounds. It was all over in a Northern Line minute.

  I must not, must not, think about the fact that I’m stuck in a tunnel in a train that is, just possibly, on fire. I simply refuse to do this. I’d rather take out one of my books, and plunge into the world of a maniac financier – or even the other one, which creeps me out. I have to face the fact that I keep on reading this book because it creeps me out. I’d rather turn out my pockets and examine their contents. I’d rather think about the time I ran the wrong way up the escalator at Angel Station in 1978 – traumatic at the time, but now such a happy, happy thought. It reminds me of something that happened to me in 1987, just before my last competitive game of football. I was moving house – from south-east London, beyond the reach of the Underground, to the centre of town, actually in the shadow of Centre Point. Tottenham Court Road would be my local station! I hired a van. It was a Luton van, the biggest thing I’d ever driven. I had to make two trips. By the evening, my driving was sketchy. I was tired. The novelty of moving, of driving a big v
an, had faded. I loaded the van up for my second trip. It was getting dark. I drifted west, and found myself on a ramp, which led to an elevated dual carriageway. I took the ramp – and, at last, I could see where I was going.

  The first strange thing I noticed was that a car was coming at me, very fast, in the wrong direction, and in my lane. The car honked at me and swooped away at the last moment. And then: a coincidence. Another car, again fast, again in my lane, again honking. These drivers! Driving in London might be the only time I feel any positivity towards the Underground. Next: a batch of cars and vans, all driving fast, all honking – what were the chances of that? They were flashing their lights at me. That made me think. I looked across at the other part of the elevated dual carriageway. A car, going in what looked like the wrong direction – the same direction as me. Unless, of course …

  1978. The guy, Bradley, gives me two sets of documents. We are in a big warehouse beside a canal in Islington. A ten-minute walk from Angel Station. It’s a Friday evening. My task is easy. I must take the documents to a printing firm. A man will be waiting. One document contains the closing prices for thousands of shares on the London Stock Exchange. The printing firm will run off hundreds of copies; a copy will be on every trader’s desk in many, many buildings in the City of London by Monday morning. This is the important document. Bradley cannot stress how important this document is. This is a time before email, before fax. You have to take hard copy across town. You entrust the job to a courier. I’m a courier. This is my first important job. Up to now, I’ve been delivering proofs of birthday and Christmas cards, and get-well cards. Bradley tells me that the other documents are not so important. But I might as well take them anyway. This is his mistake. The other documents are the proofs for Christmas cards. There is a robin on a tree. Bradley marks the important envelope with an ‘X’. Otherwise the envelopes are the same. Once again, he tells me of the importance of my task. I shake his hand. I am eighteen.