‘Dennis, that’s champion. Now you can be a writer, like you said that you were going to be. And as it happens, I’ve come a bit nearer to achieving some of my ambitions, too. There’s this new pitch I’m working up in Soho, not far down the road from where some of the clubs are. I’ve got friendly with a couple of the strippers, and they say there’s always work for anybody decent-looking who can dance. It’s not a job that I’d want to end up in, but I’m thinking it could be a step up on the way there, and it’s better than the work I’m doing now. Oh, I’m so happy, for the both of us.’

  At this point, following an amorous instinct that he did not actually possess, Dennis thought it was now or never and leaned forward with his eyes closed to kiss Grace full on the lips, but, as it turned out, it was never. Forcefully but not unkindly, she placed both hands on his chest and firmly pushed him back. He blushed and started stuttering an apology, which she dismissed with a faint shake of her vermilion locks.

  ‘No, you don’t need to say you’re sorry. You just tried to have a snog, you didn’t grab my tits or anything. But, Dennis love, you have to get it into your thick head that I’m not going to have it off with you. For one thing, I’ve a fair idea I’d be your first time, and I don’t want that responsibility. You’d fall in love with me or something daft like that, you know you would. No matter what you said, give it a month or two, you’d try to rescue me. I’m sorry, Dennis. No.’

  He shook his head in pained denial, although Grace’s rescue in a month or two had in fact been his plan. Attempting to retrieve his dignity, instead he squandered its last shreds.

  ‘It’s not like I’m completely inexperienced. When I was fourteen, this girl pulled me off.’

  Grace gave him a pained look of understanding and compassion.

  ‘Susan Garrett?’

  Slack-jawed and incredulous, he nodded. She did, too, then went to make another cup of tea. While they were sipping that in awkward silence, Dennis tried to salvage his romantic fantasies by framing what had been a flat refusal as a mere postponement. ‘Look, I know there’s an age gap between us, but perhaps in a few years, when I’ve grown up a bit, it won’t seem such a big one.’

  She was looking at him now with a bewildered frown, trying to get his measure.

  ‘Dennis, I’m fifteen.’

  He didn’t have the heart to see Grace after that. He’d done the miserable sums to figure out how old she must have been when she took up her trade, and felt sick to his marrow. Yes, he’d known that these things happened, heard of kids as young as nine out on the game, but those were stories in the foggy, grey newspaper distance and weren’t sat on a collapsing sofa next to him. He thought about the horrors that she must have gone through – she’d have only been eleven, twelve, it was unbearable – and, worse, he felt that he’d come very close to being one of them. She was the nicest, most substantial person that he’d ever met, somebody that he clearly needed as a friend, and, just as clearly, Dennis knew that he was never going to manage that. It wouldn’t be real friendship, would it, if one party was forever hoping, secretly, to get the other into bed? He couldn’t be the pal that she deserved and, with that being so, he thought it better that he wasn’t any kind of pal at all. They parted on good terms later that evening, but with an unspoken sadness gathered on the Spitalfields front doorstep, both aware this was to be their last goodbye without it being said. No farewell kiss.

  The year’s concluding months were mostly empty for him, following that painful Sunday. Dennis drudged his days away in Ada’s shop and only thought about Grace every half an hour or so. His musings on the other London or what had become of Clive were far less frequent, and confined to those occasions when he found himself bolt upright on his clammy bedroll, terrified, with his heart doing a quick march. He couldn’t even find a book in which to lose himself, and had to be contented with the thought that Orwell would be sure to have another corker out in the new year.

  Beyond the listing walls of Lowell’s Books & Magazines, the country licked its wounds and went on, uneventfully, with its recovery. In mid-November, he heard how there were less miners dying since the coal industry had been nationalised a year or two before, and at the month’s end, Winston Churchill gave a speech at Kingsway Hall in Holborn, in which he suggested that a union of European countries might not be a bad idea, although he wasn’t sure if Britain should be in it. By December, there was an announcement that the BBC would be transmitting TV signals to the Midlands, and his Orwell-prompted vision of a population bent beneath their strapped-on walnut-finished sets crept ever closer. Christmas was, predictably, a washout, and left Dennis feeling that the whole of 1949 had been a personal disaster that he couldn’t wait to put behind him.

  It was possibly this fervent wish that found him staggering through London on the last night of the month, making a futile stab at celebrating the new year while hopefully extinguishing the old one. Stubbornly determined not to drink too much, he limited himself to just a solitary pint in every pub he visited and, after five of these, convinced himself that it would be a fine idea to venture into Soho and to demonstrate, once and for all, that he was over all that nonsense now. Admittedly, the thought that he might catch a glimpse of Grace was almost certainly there somewhere in the slosh of his unconscious half a mind, but this was not his main objective and, anyway, didn’t happen.

  New Year’s Eve in the notorious district turned out not to be the best idea he’d ever had. Jostling through the steep streets clogged by cheery revellers, he couldn’t stop his inner slide show flashing up bright, garish snapshots of the Soho hiding behind this one, couldn’t help but wonder what, if anything, would be left of Clive Amery on the teeming, breeding, feeding gold expanse of a superior Bateman Street. Dennis had scanned the newspapers since the end of October without finding any mention of a dead or disappeared young legal brief. He hoped things stayed that way, but knew his footsteps from then on would always have a guilty echo; something following him at a discreet distance that he’d be forevermore afraid might catch him up.

  It was in this beer-sodden and obscurely anxious state that Dennis found himself emerging from the press of opportunist gropes and noisily unfurling paper squeakers into the celebratory embrace of Berwick Street where, at the bottom, he bumped into Jack Neave and Gog Blincoe. They were stood together in the middle of the vehicle-free road, amongst the weaving conga lines and other terminal convulsions of the 1940s, both appearing to be slightly drunk despite the fact that only Ironfoot, swigging from a flask, seemed to be drinking. Both of them cheered heartily at Dennis’s unsteady, stumbling approach. Gog Blincoe slapped him on his back and nearly broke it.

  ‘Why, Jack, look who we’ve got here! It’s our young Mister Knuckleyard, come by to see the old year out with us! Give him a pull on that there flask o’ yours, so that he don’t go thirsty.’

  Grinning, Neave held out the metal canister and brushed aside Dennis’s protests that this wouldn’t leave enough for Jack and Gog. ‘Don’t worry about this great pile o’ lumber. ’e don’t touch a drop, because ’e can get plastered manufacturin’ a sort o’ turpentine in what ’e’s got instead of innards. When ’e’s pissed, ’is knot’oles ’ave a faraway look, if you ’adn’t noticed.’

  Not wishing to appear less than fellowly, Dennis obligingly knocked back enough of the flask’s contents to deduce, from a scorched larynx, that it must be rum. The three fell into boozy conversation, swaying slightly in the tilted street, bumped into by a tipsy tumbril mob turned out to witness the beheading of a tyrant decade. Ironfoot passed on the news that things were looking up for ‘Awstin’ following his exhibition at the Temple Bar and that, at this rate, he might soon be raking in enough to move upstairs, out of that rotten basement in Wynne Road. Their talk, despite being conducted at the centre of a raucous hokey-cokey, grew more downcast when it turned to Monolulu, who’d apparently meant what he said about avoiding the Great When after his brush with Charming Peter. Blincoe sighed and shook his huge stump of a head.

  ‘I have impressed upon him that the London Cat may break a man with words to spare his claws the effort, but the Ras Prince will have none of it. It is the creature’s mention of black magic that has done for him, I fear, this being something he is mightily afraid of.’ Caught up in the bass creak of the market-trader’s voice, Dennis ventured a question that he might have hesitated to submit had he been sober.

  ‘Gog, look, no offence, but … Gog, what are you?’

  Blincoe’s rumbling laugh, when Dennis thought about it, definitely smelled of turps.

  ‘Huhur. I’m carved out of a gatepost, lad, and my old mum, she’s carved out of another.’

  Dennis was about to ask the apron-clad colossus what he meant by this unusual metaphor, when everything was interrupted by some sort of a commotion at the lane’s top end, a susurrus of gasps that seemed to move down Berwick Street towards them, awestruck merrymakers falling back to open up a path for the phenomenon, whatever it might be. At last, just as a nearby church began to sound its midnight chimes and shook the crowd from their brief hush into a slurred cacophony of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, a thing unprecedented stepped from out the caterwauling throng and opened its immaculately tailored arms in greeting to Neave, Knuckleyard and Blincoe. It was a blue rectangle held up by twig-thin legs which terminated in big, heavy shoes with crêpe soles almost thicker than their mock-croc uppers. It had several feet of keychain looping from its waistcoat, and upon its head a glistening wedge of moulded gelatine, coal black, that overhung the pallid forehead in a slippery twizzle. It was Maurice Calendar. He’d hatched.

  ‘Get with it, dad! I got the drape shape, powder blue, long as me fingertips, wi’ raindrop spots, Huddersfield worsted silk this is, an’ pepper in the pockets. Three-inch lapels, velvet collar, an’ the lining’s by Gillette. Four buttons and a link, fifteen-inch bottoms on me drainpipes, it’s Edwardian! I’m slashin’ seats an’ creepin’ in the brothels, wi’ white socks on an’ a slim jim round me shirt neck. You can stick yer frothy coffee! Giddy-up a ding-dong! Sharpened up me comb an’ got me clever stick, I’m fit to rock around the clock. Shakin’ all over, mate, know what I mean?’

  Nobody knew what Maurice meant, or, at least, not for a few years.

  By the time that he’d veered and zigzagged back to Shoreditch, Dennis’s protective alcoholic haze had almost dissipated, shrivelled up to nothing after no more than an hour or two of 1950. In the dusty silence of his room, he sat there on the edge of the pretended mattress, in his underpants, lit by the parchment aura of a too small bedside lamp. Shivering from the cold at intervals, he stared, without even a half pint of illusion, into the bare hallways of his future.

  For a moment there, he’d thought that he had possibilities. He’d felt like he was on the brink of a new world, with life’s big secrets opening before him, but all that had done was nearly send him mad. He’d had a new career in mind, he’d nearly had a girlfriend, but John might have been too generous about his prospects as a writer, and, as for the girlfriend, Grace was gone. He wasn’t ever going to sit and talk with her again, and that alone was more than he could take. In fact, his situation now was worse than it had been before he’d laid eyes on A London Walk, when he’d at least believed he’d got two friends, before he’d had to murder one of them. The only person he had standing between him and homelessness, grim unemployment or conscription, was his dreadful landlady.

  Despite the fact she dominated and controlled his life, for all of the grey slavery she represented, she was all he had. She was his only option, and the sooner he accepted that, the sooner he learned to surrender all hope and ambition to her greater will, the better it would be for him. He made his mind up there and then to drown his dreams in an insensate servitude, happy and willing.

  He loved Coffin Ada.

  The Old Man at the End

  Across the street, down on its wind-scraped corner, sodium lamps have wrapped the night with yellow cellophane. A hoarding board is colonised by handbill barnacles, blink-and-you’ll-miss-them venues starring last-but-one big things as paste-up palimpsest, torn wallpaper of the millennium. Framed in the upstairs window opposite, this small-hours urban vista is deserted, motionless save polystyrene beakers scuttling in gusty gutters, looks submerged and drowning in the piss light.

  Turns away from a reflection in the double glazing that seems worryingly spectral, creaks back to the leather chair and paperback biography of Joe Meek resting open on its arm, and makes the usual alarming outcries in the course of sitting down. At this age, the career arc stands revealed as a V-2 parabola, its many questions now reduced to time and place of impact. Functions of the body once as unremarkable as waking in the morning are made hard-fought victories and thus a cause for celebration, like, for instance, waking in the morning. Every day, the future seems a shorter street, just as the lists of gone acquaintances and things that won’t be done again seem longer. Even though this outcome is the one that everybody, surely, was expecting, it appears to always come as a surprise, like snow in February, or long nights in October.

  Personally, this isolate condition – banishment for the last twenty years without hope of reprieve – is probably no worse than that experienced by any individual at the business end of their existence, where the times and world that were their birthplace are demolished so that everyone ends up an exile, cast up half-dead and uncomprehending on the shores of countries they don’t recognise. On the way up by cab from Blackfriars Bridge the other afternoon, out through the grubby glass, there – at the bottom of New Bridge Street – was an eight-floor office complex, sprouted from the city’s last remaining bombsite which, last August, had been finally cleared for development. Getting on half a century, then, it’s taken the metropolis to heal the scathes of Hitler, to rise tall and confident from ruin while its older population execute exactly the reverse trajectory. This is the major difference that exists between the lives of buildings and the life of beef and bone.

  Picks up the Meek biography but then remembers why it had been put down in the first place, in a spasm of anxiety caused by the anecdote about a Bible and a mortice key in chapter five. That had been what provoked the groan-fraught crossing of this cosy room, the nervous peering at the Lucozade cascade outside. More moments like that all the time these days, jumpy and fearfully expectant. Perhaps better read by light of day, The Legendary Joe Meek – The Telstar Man returns to its position on the chair arm where the dead producer grimaces from its front cover, trapped eyes shiny with amphetamines.

  Once more considering that extinct bombsite down at Blackfriars Court, the thought occurs that London wears her rubble on the inside now: behind a smooth white concrete and black glass façade, the city’s themes and ideologies are broken into irrecoverable pieces. A decade of Thatcher has hamstrung the unions and dismantled the post-war consensus on a fairer England; Blair has swept to power by renouncing socialism and rebranding Labour as the Cool Conservatives; both church and monarchy look to be self-destructing, then that inexplicable convulsion when Diana died. Kensington Palace had been buried in bouquets, improvised tributes and stunned messages that were all asking the same thing, asking, ‘Where are we?’ London’s underlying landscape of ideas and visions, the essential character and meaning of the place, all this is wreckage tangled up in bunting from forgotten jubilees.

  Sits upright for a while, reclines, but either way, the backache doesn’t care. Maybe a Lemsip later, a requirement of this current life stage and this new, old body; this pre-carcass with its surprise catalogue of bruises, burns, and yet no tactile memory of where they came from. And the mind, of course, the mind is worse. Denied recourse to crutches, splints or plaster casts, it can at last collapse into whatever crumpled shape it wants, its memory a string bag, panic button jammed continually down by rust of habit, an increasing inability to differentiate between real life, TV and dreams. Imagination doesn’t work the way it used to, with those threads of speculation that were once so pleasurable to pursue become a sticky spider silk of paranoia, each thought leading to a worse one.

  Twenty long years of exclusion, since the fatal blunder and the fall from grace. The futile hope, back then, that contact might one day resume has been replaced by a devout wish that it doesn’t, that it mustn’t. Far too vulnerable to fight, with the idea of running anywhere patently laughable, insistence that the bad thing isn’t going to happen is the only strategy available, a papier mâché last line of defence that’s no defence at all. Denial isn’t any kind of barricade, is too easily punctured by occurrences that call to mind whatever is least wanted there; the unexamined awfulness dredged up by nudges and reminders out of a blue sky. Only a week ago there’d been that young Brazilian woman at the door, waving her bulky, complete paperback edition and enquiring plaintively if Richard Ramsey was at home. ‘No, sorry, love. Can’t help you. There’s no Richard Ramsey here.’ All true enough, but that does not displace the sinking guilt which comes with watching as, dejectedly, they walk away. One every month or two, it seems like, bearing intimations that this isn’t over yet; this isn’t done.

  Restless and shifting in the squeaky seat, unable to get comfortable despite a constantly downgraded definition of that term, there comes the thought of slipping a prismatic coaster in the CD player’s elegantly gliding tray, as if to bring a change of air by lacing it with music and so possibly arrest the threatened mood slide. Although what is there to listen to that won’t just emphasise this feeling of estrangement from a past no longer reachable? Maybe some Prefab Sprout but, no, that would be taking refuge in heroic modern heartbreak; dressing up in a world-wise persona that no longer fits around the waistband; wallowing in brave, tear-stained relationships that are, at this age, never going to be relatable. It’s not the album’s fault, but rather that of the decrepit listener with a scratched vinyl soul that crackles, sticks, repeats and has disturbing messages recorded backwards in its lead-out groove. The only discs to hand are old ones anyway, and it’s the year 2000 in a few months’ time. So, then, silence it is, Cage’s 4'33" on infinite repeat, which, basically, has been this place’s playlist for the last year and a half, a soundtrack ambient in its absence.