Angels and Visitations Read online

  1:45 Victoria Station. Something must be happening at Victoria . . . nope. A sterile expanse, full of fluorescent ads for things you can’t buy at this time of night. (Prawn Waldorf sandwiches?) My Publisher explains that London pigeons have lost their toes through decades of inbreeding and pollution. Tell him this sounds unlikely.

  2:10 Pass the Hard Rock Café. Nobody’s queuing.

  2:45 Soho. We walk past a street of empty wine bars and book shops, and My Publisher tells me it used to be brothels once, a long time ago; then, Miami Spice and a functioning laserdisc player ahead of him, he tears off into the night.

  I decide that I’m just going to wander aimlessly, resolve not to disappear into any seedy drinking clubs, even if I can find any (like Little Magic Shops, they have a tendency to vanish the next time you want them, replaced by brick walls or closed doors).

  Under the tacky neon glare of Brewer Street a young woman holds a polystyrene head with a red wig on it. The Vintage Magazine Shop has the OZ “schoolkids” issue in the window.

  3:31 At a tacky all-night food place—Mr Pumpernincks—on the corner of Piccadilly, I run into Ella. She’s blonde, with smudged pink lipstick and red pumps, dayglo acidhouse wristbands. Looks fifteen, assures me she’s really nearly nineteen and tells me not to eat the popcorn because it “tastes like ear-wax”.

  Turns out she’s a nightclub hostess. I assume this is my first encounter tonight with the seamy side of London nightlife. She shakes her head. Her job, she explains, is to sell as much champagne as possible on commission, pour her glass on the floor when the customer “goes to the loo”, spill as much as she can. It’s all a con, she sighs: £12 for a salmon sandwich, £12 for a packet of 40 cigarettes, no-one spends less than £100 a night, and last week she was offered £5000 by five Swedish men to sleep with them.

  She said no. She doesn’t think she’s hard enough for this business. Ella comes down to Mr Pumpernincks to drink the rotten coffee and sober up every night. She came up from Bath to the big city a month or so back; her ambition in life is to steal a Porsche 911 Turbo, and possibly even to get a driving license.

  4:30 I’m in Brewer Street again. Six pigeons on the road in front of me; one of them doesn’t have any toes. My Publisher was right.

  In Wardour Street a small heap of Goths huddle together, walking warily. I can’t figure out why: there’s no-one around to menace them, but maybe they don’t know that.

  It’s sort of boring; there’s simply no-one about. I start fantasising a mugging to break up the monotony of empty chill streets; I could probably claim it back on expenses.

  Ella’s gone the next time I pass Piccadilly.

  In one of the back streets behind Shaftesbury Avenue, I walk past some accordion doors with something written on them. Walking toward them it reads OPRIG. Parallel it says NO PARKING. Looking back over my shoulder it reads N AKN. I wonder briefly if somebody is trying to tell me something, then conclude I’m getting tired, or transcendently bored.

  On the Charing Cross Road a little old Chinese lady teeter-totters on the pavement, gesturing at taxis that ignore her. She looks lost. Leicester Square is utterly deserted.

  It’s nearly 5:00AM. I stop a couple of cops I’ve seen across roads all evening. Ask them about the West End—is there anything happening late at night? They say no, say the area’s still cruising on a reputation it hasn’t deserved for over a decade. They sigh, wistfully. “You may get the odd rent boy hanging round Piccadilly, but that’s all they do: hang around.”

  They’d seen three people in their last sweep through every dangerous dead-end alley and mysterious Soho street. They’re almost as bored as I am; I’m probably the most interesting thing that’s happened to them all night. If I had a mobile phone I’d let them play with it. 5:30, they tell me, things hot up; the cleaners begin to come round.

  5:20 I pass a McDonald’s. Already the McPeople who work there are in, McScrubbing the McCounters and unloading McMillions of McBuns from the McTruck.

  5:40 Ponder the touching concern in My Editor’s voice when I told her I’d wander the streets, her obvious worry that terrible things were going to happen to me. I should have been so lucky.

  6:02 I’m in the taxi going home. I tell the driver about my abortive evening. “Fing is,” he explains, “Everybody relates to Wardour Street, Brewer Street, Greek Street as where the action is. They fink people hang round the ‘Dilly still, addicts waiting for their scrips. Fuck me man, you’re going back twenty years. Notting Hill, that’s where it’s all at these days. The action’s always there. It just moves. And the West End’s been cleaned up so hard it’s dead.”

  Conclusion: (Statistical breakdown)

  murders seen

  0

  car chases involved in

  0

  adventures had

  0

  foreign spies encountered

  0

  ladies of the night ditto

  1/2 (Ella)

  rock stars encountered (in Café München)

  1

  encounters with police

  2

  A PROLOGUE

  AN INTRODUCTION TO MARY GENTLE’S SCHOLARS & SOLDIERS

  Scene: A fairground. Persons of anachronistic but stylish demeanour and dress walk back and forth, juggling fire, elegant cats, faster-than-light drives and extremely sharp blades. Dancing bears tread lumbering pavanes, and hawkers sell candied plums and overspiced cuts of roast lizard.

  In the centre of the fair is a brightly coloured tent, and in front of that, a raised platform. From the tent steps a Prologue, in black motley, carrying a scroll. He unrolls it, and commences to read:

  “The author bade me come to introduce her tales—” He pauses. Pulls out a quill pen, scritches out a word or two, begins again. “Now, Mistress Gentle bade me come to introduce her tales (which follow this) to all of you . . .”

  A soldier in the crowd, her fancy-boy on one arm, waves at him, and shouts, “This Mistress Gentle. She’s an author, then?”

  The Prologue nods.

  “I always thought that authors were fabulous beasts,” says the soldier, with the air of someone misquoting deliberately (proving herself, perhaps, something of a scholar).

  “Some of us are, some of us aren’t,” says the Prologue, preening slightly.

  The soldier frowns, “So. This author of yours, Mistress, urn . . .”

  “Gentle.”

  “Right. Mistress Gentle. What kind of an author is she?”

  The Prologue lays down his scroll regretfully, and sighs. “The better sort. Like all the very best authors she dresses in black, reads comics—Love and Rockets, for preference—devoured an unhealthy amount of science fiction (and everything else) as a kid, knows her way around Croydon . . .”

  “Is that important?” asks the soldier.

  “Essential.” The Prologue takes up his scroll, and is about to begin once more, when the soldier asks:

  “But what kind of an author is she?”

  The Prologue hesitates.

  Another member of the audience (fat, huge as Chesterton or Aquinas, with globs of lizard-fat still adhering to his chin) chips in: “The way I see it, she’s part of the late-twentieth-century cultural fusion. The melting pot (in its true meaning as crucible) that brings forth, occasionally, gold from dross. In the stories that follow we can see her gradually assimilating her influences: from glittery SF to Restoration Drama, from Low Tragedy to High Comedy, from punk comic books to Hermetic philosophy, from courtly fantasy to uncouth horror (and, given her cultural parameters, vice versa), finally producing something distinctly, uniquely her own.”

  “Yeah. What he said,” agrees the Prologue, picking up his scroll, and clearing his throat. “Ahem! Mistress Gentle bade me come this day to introduce her stories to you all. For here are knights and gallants, and alarums, and here are fantasies and flights historical, futurities (the fair, the dark, the lost), and—”

  “Look, that’s quite enough of that,” interru
pts the soldier, her hand on her sword hilt. “What kind of an author is she?”

  The Prologue puts his scroll inside his battered black leather jacket; asks testily, “What exactly are you asking?”

  “Just what I said.”

  He sighs. “Okay. Her hair is currently reddish . . .” An idea strikes him. He reaches back into his jacket pocket, pulls out a first quartro of Antony and Cleopatra, leafs through it, cracked, yellowed paper falling like confetti, and reads:

  Lepidus: What manner of thing is your crocodile?

  Antony: It is shaped, sir, just like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth; it is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs; it lives by that which nourisheth it; and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates.

  Lepidus: What colour is it of?

  Antony: Of its own colour too.

  Lepidus: ‘Tis a strange serpent.

  Antony: ‘Tis so; and the tears of it are wet.

  He puts the script away, adjusts his shades. “There.”

  The soldier sighs, tiring of this discussion, eager to be off. “So Mistress Gentle . . . ?”

  “Is a strange serpent, yes.”

  She turns on her heel, pauses, turns her head, and says, “There’s still one question you haven’t answered.”

  “And that is?”

  “What kind of an author is she?”

  The Prologue grins. “Prologues never tell you. For that you gotta read the stories.”

  The soldier nods, curtly, and leaves.

  The Prologue walks back into his tent, and he too is gone.

  Outside the hawkers offer passers-by sweetmeats and roasted lizards, the tumblers continue to tumble, the small animals, coloured balls, asteroids and dice follow each other through the air, the courtesans (of all sexes) continue to ply their trade, and the bears still dance; the soldiers and the scholars walk together and in the gathering dusk it is increasingly difficult to tell them apart . . .

  FOREIGN PARTS

  The VENEREAL DISEASE is a disease contracted as a consequence of impure connexion. The fearful constitutional consequences which may result from this affection,—consequences, the fear of which may haunt the mind for years, which may taint the whole springs of health, and be transmitted to circulate in the young blood of innocent offspring,—are indeed terrible considerations, too terrible not to render the disease one of those which must unhesitatingly be placed under medical care.

  Spencer Thomas, M.D., L.R.C.S. (Edin.)

  A Dictionary of Domestic Medicine and Household Surgery: 1882.

  SIMON POWERS DIDN’T LIKE SEX. Not really.

  He disliked having someone else in the same bed as himself; he suspected that he came too soon; he always felt uncomfortably that his performance was in some way being graded, like a driving test, or a practical examination.

  He had got laid in college a few times, and once, three years ago, after the office New Year’s party. But that had been that, and as far as Simon was concerned he was well out of it.

  It occurred to him once, during a slack time at the office, that he would have liked to have lived in the days of Queen Victoria, where well brought up women were no more than resentful sex-dolls in the bedroom: they’d unlace their stays, loosen their petticoats (revealing pinkish-white flesh), then lie back and suffer the indignities of the carnal act—an indignity it would never even occur to them that they were meant to enjoy.

  He filed it away for later, another masturbatory fantasy.

  Simon masturbated a great deal. Every night—sometimes more than that, if he was unable to sleep. He could take as long, or as short, a time to climax as he wished. And in his mind, he had had them all. Film and television stars; women from the office; schoolgirls; the naked models who pouted from the crumpled pages of Fiesta; faceless slaves in chains; tanned boys with bodies like Greek gods . . .

  Night after night they paraded in front of him.

  It was safer that way.

  In his mind.

  And afterward he’d fall asleep, comfortable and safe in a world he controlled, and he’d sleep without dreaming. Or at least, he never remembered his dreams in the morning.

  The morning it started he was woken by the radio (“. . . two hundred killed and many others believed to be injured; and now over to Jack for the weather and traffic news . . .”), dragged himself out of bed, and stumbled, bladder aching, into the bathroom.

  He pulled up the toilet seat, and urinated. It felt like he was pissing needles.

  He needed to urinate again after breakfast—less painfully, since the flow was not as heavy—and three more times before lunch.

  Each time it hurt.

  He told himself that it couldn’t be a venereal disease. That was something that other people got, and something (he thought of his last sexual encounter, three years in the past) that you got from other people. You couldn’t really catch it from toilet seats, could you? Wasn’t that just a joke?

  Simon Powers was twenty-six, and he worked in a large London bank, in the securities division. He had few friends at work. His only real friend, Nick Lawrence, a lonely Canadian, had recently transferred to another branch, and Simon sat by himself in the staff canteen, staring out at the Docklands Lego landscape, picking at a limp green salad.

  Someone tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Simon, I heard a good one today. Wanna hear?” Jim Jones was the office clown, a dark-haired, intense young man, who claimed he had a special pocket on his boxer shorts, for condoms.

  “Um. Sure.”

  “Here you go. What’s the collective noun for people who work in banks?”

  “The what?”

  “Collective noun. You know, like a flock of sheep, a pride of lions. Give up?”

  Simon nodded.

  “A Wunch of Bankers.”

  Simon must have looked puzzled, because Jim sighed and said, “Wunch of Bankers. Bunch of Wankers. God, you’re slow. . . .” Then, spotting a group of young women at a far table, Jim straightened his tie, and carried his tray over to them.

  He could hear Jim telling his joke to the women, this time with added hand movements.

  They all got it immediately.

  Simon left his salad on the table, and went back to work.

  That night he sat in his chair, in his bedsitter flat, with the television turned off, and he tried to remember what he knew about venereal diseases.

  There was syphilis, that pocked your face and drove the Kings of England mad; gonorrhea—the clap—a green oozing, and more madness; crabs, little pubic lice, which nested and itched (he inspected his pubic hairs through a magnifying glass, but nothing moved); AIDS, the eighties plague, a plea for clean needles and safer sexual habits (but what could be safer than a clean wank for one into a fresh handful of white tissues?); herpes, which had something to do with cold sores (he checked his lips in the mirror, they looked fine). That was all he knew.

  And he went to bed, and fretted himself to sleep, without daring to masturbate.

  That night he dreamed of tiny women with blank faces, walking in endless rows between gargantuan office blocks, like an army of soldier ants.

  Simon did nothing about the pain for another two days. He hoped it would go away, or get better on its own. It didn’t. It got worse. The pain continued for up to an hour after urination; his penis felt raw and bruised inside.

  And on the third day, he phoned his doctor’s surgery to make an appointment. He had dreaded having to tell the woman who answered the phone what the problem was, and so he was relieved, and perhaps just a little disappointed, when she didn’t ask, but simply made an appointment for the following day.

  He told his senior at the bank that he had a sore throat, and would need to see the doctor about it. He could feel his cheeks burn as he told her, but she did not remark on this, merely told him that that would be fine.

  When he left her office he found that he was shaking.

  It was a grey, wet day when he arrived at the doct
or’s surgery. There was no queue, and he went straight in to the doctor. Not his regular doctor, Simon was comforted to see. This was a young Pakistani, of about Simon’s age, who interrupted Simon’s stammered recitation of symptoms to ask:

  “Urinating more than usual, are we?”

  Simon nodded.

  “Any discharge?”

  Simon shook his head.

  “Right ho. I’d like you to take down your trousers, if you don’t mind.”

  Simon took them down. The doctor peered at his penis. “You do have a discharge, you know,” he said.

  Simon did himself up again.

  “Now, Mr Powers, tell me, do you think it possible that you might have picked up from someone, a, uh, venereal disease?”

  Simon shook his head vigorously. “I haven’t had sex with anyone—” he had almost said, ‘anyone else’ “—in almost three years.”

  “No?” The doctor obviously didn’t believe him. He smelled of exotic spices, and had the whitest teeth Simon had ever seen. “Well, you have either contracted gonorrhea or NSU. Probably NSU: Non Specific Urethritis. Which is less famous and less painful than gonorrhea, but it can be a bit of an old bastard to treat. You can get rid of gonorrhea with one big dose of antibiotics. Kills the bugger off . . .” He clapped his hands, twice. Loudly. “Just like that.”