A close approach

02Nov06

The Weird Metropolitan is an extremely unusual sandwich invented by Sergio Zacharini, the proprietor of an obscure London eatery called the Cafe Tina. It’s also the title of a novel in progress by Jon Hilltown. That’s me. I’m a regular patron of the cafe and one time secret lover of Tina Zacharini, the cafe owner’s late wife.

Geysers of water vapour and ice particles are erupting on Enceladus, an enchanting and tiny snowy white moon of Saturn. Is there still hope then, that one day a spaceman will come and reintroduce love to this world?

De Quincy tells me that anyone is jealous of his own duplicate. And if I had a doppelganger I might attempt the crime of murder upon him. Genet is haunted by the idea of a murder which cuts him off irremediably from his world. But Chesterton gets it right. The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.

They’ve been together nearly two years. That’s about five years in Alice time. In Alice time hours and minutes and seconds don’t apply; in Alice world the passing of time is measured in drinks drunk, pills taken, punters duped, money spent, cigarettes smoked, eyes blacked…

“What do you believe in Gerry?” she asks him once. And he smiles that smile and tells her in that voice:

“Magic. Magic, that’s all there is, and it’s pure and beautiful and loyal and will never let you down.”

But Gerry isn’t talking about the magic of music halls and cheap illusionists, hocus-pocus conjurers and now you see it now you don’t card sharps. No. What he means is a kind of sorcery. He believes in the occultism of London after dark. Hoodooists hovering in half lighted rooms behind curtained windows in the stolen bodies of drug dealers and gangsters casting curses in soiled wraps, hurling hexes through space via telephone wire. Voodoo medium of instructions for an execution. Every death is magic – especially if it’s premature – every crime hustle and scam. She pouring another drink and taking in every word but understanding nothing.

She loves the way he talks. When Gerry gets on a roll it’s like soft automatic fire. A hundred rounds a second and each one hitting the target. Although she never feels them connect. Just tastes the warm blood spilt and the ecstasy of death in the distance, the exquisite sexual pull of her own ignorance.

“The city’s full of it. It’s in the garbage, the boarded-up store fronts and the courtyards of the estates. It’s in the blood of the people and in their eyes, in the lies of the old men getting pissed in the backstreet bars and in the cries of the alley fights after midnight. It’s there every time a cracked up mother’s baby breathes all the way through until morning and every time strangers meet….” Then he pulls her close and strokes her hair and she smiles and kisses his hand through the strands.

“Did you feel it, Gerry? Did you feel the magic when we met?”

He feels it. Back then before the word-fuck and the ice-ray and the fear of spacemen. That’s what he’s there for, with the tight jeans and the leather and the knife in his boot. Instead he meets Alice, Alice the sex clown, Alice the flesh monkey with that demon in her spleen needing so much care.

Somewhere in the far reaches of the building a door opens and closes loudly. I clench my fists: first the right. One, two, clench and release. And then the left. Seventeen sets per fist. After a few minutes I start to feel better, a common morning beginning with the familiarity of a very close friend.

She stirs and turns to me, smiling through sleep, her breathing soft and soothing and contagious. The patter of rain on the window becomes more intense and I imagine another window in some other place, a window without the rain and with curtains shielding us both from magnified sun. I picture a huge luxurious bed in an air conditioned palace, softly draped french windows beyond which a high secret patio beckons us to breakfast above a screaming city.

It could be anywhere: Athens or Rome, Paris or Geneva, Budapest, Cairo. Anywhere but Stepney. Anywhere but the Whitechapel Road.

In centuries past watchmen heralded the day with GOD GIVE YE GOOD MORROW, MY MASTERS, PAST FIVE O’CLOCK AND A FAIR MORNING but today there’s only the drone of humans waking becoming louder, everywhere escaping, through the windows and doors of their dwellings, all over the city. A cough, a shout, heavy feet clumping across poorly carpeted floorboards, the drone increasing in menace until it threatens to explode like scandal down the stairwells, into the courtyards and away through the side streets to the junctions and the intersections to live and die in the traffic.

The bed disappears and becomes a table separating us. Sergio is busy at the counter. We are no longer lovers. She shakes her head slowly, her eyes full of suppressed tears like a river trapped, suspended in the tarns of her irises. Her face is pale with the fatigue of years but still attractive. Her hair has retained its glisten. I see the film holding back her tears rupture slightly at one corner and a single droplet welling out and nestling in the curvature at the bridge of her nose for a moment before continuing on its path across her cheek.

We’re close to the edge, I can feel that; only have to falter slightly in our steps and we’ll fall. Any loss of concentration, a sneeze, a too vivid memory, some element or aspect of consciousness against our will to the greater good and the years will peel away and she will be mine again and I hers. I light a cigarette and offer her the pack. She refuses.

“You’re absolutely sure?” I ask, my smoke drifting towards her. She nods: “He’s changed, it’s true, and at first by his features alone I could not have been sure, but then… There’s no doubt, I’m certain. It is him.”

There’s a slow thrum of lonely wallpaper jazz: bass and hi-hat with a jagged shadow of a skeleton melody barely visible behind the afternoon bar room torpor. A pint pot rattles on a tap and I  sense a subtle insinuation of deceit beneath the air-con slipstream, a suggestion of slow death by vacuum cleaner. In a corner of the pool room some hooded boys plan another crime of the century as they do every day. The old values have gone and no-one gives a damn.

No-one, that is, except Pete the Feet.

They threaten to break his fingers so he ups and moves his habit to a late night lounge the other side of town. He has drinking partners all over. Yes sir, everybody knows Pete and some people even like him in small doses. Of course Pete’s  a drunk – people who drink all day invariably are – and he’s a little bit cokey, so small doses mean nothing to him. But he sure can play that piano. He could be a big success if…

Strange, I know, that a piano player should call himself “the Feet” but that’s his gimmick — he actually plays with his feet. He lays with his back on the stool, supporting himself with his hands on the floor and his bare toes up there rattling the keys. He can play anything anybody shouts up from the floor: classics, old standards, a selection from the charts, jazz… and all with his feet.

They should break his f**king legs.

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