and then greyness became sullen blue that picked out the difference between a satellite dish and an air-conditioning vent, pointed out the rooftop apparatus of the buildings in the centre of town, raised up chimneys and revealed roof tiles facing the sky. Then came texture on the tiles; and the brightness of the streetlamps began to diminish, became merely the reflection of starlight on water, rather than the stars themselves, then vanished as the lamps began to flicker and whir out, a few bulbs at a time.
With each turn of my head to scan the city, more streets were in darkness and light all at once, the night-time lamps being replaced by the cold washing pallor of the day, that brightened further now in the east, spread blueness up towards the sky, filling in between the grey puffs of the retreating night clouds, and hinted, maybe hinted, at a bright white-silver sunlight on the horizon that came in sideways at the streets, burst out from behind the haze a dozen times only to fade away coldly, as if embarrassed by its own attempts, before finally making that great bold leap and declaring to every eye that dared to look, GET UP YOU LAZY BASTARDS! and pulling great thin shadows from end to end of every street.
This being winter, and this being London, by the time the sun was properly up, the shops were already open and doing busy trade.
I went to get Nair’s sim card unlocked.
Tottenham Court Road was a strip of overpriced not-quite-illegality slammed into the heaving retail heart of London. The offices of Euston Road lay to the north, the great sprawl of University College and its teaching hospital dominated every grand building to the east, the restaurant-crammed backstreets of Fitzrovia ran behind squares and reconstructed Georgian terraces to the west, and to the south was Oxford Street, shopping hub of the city. And like all good shopping hubs, both it and Tottenham Court Road had learnt two important commercial lessons: 1. Looks aren’t everything, location is.
2. If someone wants it, sell it.
What people wanted who went to Tottenham Court Road was electronics and electronic junk, with a side order of bedsteads and coffee.
As a result, computer shops selling the latest ultra-shiny, zappyzoomy model for a mere grand or a contract on your granny’s soul were crammed into a mixture of ancient buildings and concrete slabs, wedged together with the all the tact of rush-hour commuters piling onto the last train before a strike began. Speakers next to hi-fi next to games next to stereos next to furniture next to TVs next to mobile phones next to futons next to DVDs: this was the order of the street, competing for the know-it-all market that came for its slightly seedy but within-the-law shopping experience.
Almost within the law.
Go a few streets back from Tottenham Court Road, and the haziness of just what the law meant led to the other kind of electronics shop. The kind where you didn’t buy an ink cartridge for your printer at £25 a throw, you bought an ink bottle and a very strong hypodermic needle for £5, and let’s not ask too many questions about the patent. Where the windows were full of hard drives on special offer, wiped clean, one careful owner. Where, if you knew the right place to go and didn’t mind paying cash, a sim card from a stranger’s phone might be reactivated into a new handset, and all its secrets revealed.
Not quite illegal.
Not quite.
The legal system has always been a little behind the times.
The shop I chose was run by two men, one with no hair and the other with so much he’d stuck it in a woven balloon, carrying the colours of the Ethiopian flag and large enough to refashion as a decent-sized skirt. I gave him Nair’s sim card and told him what I wanted.
He didn’t ask questions, I didn’t ask questions.
“Yeah, man, yeah, come back in like, twenty-four hours. Fifty quid, yeah, and twenty for the set?”
“A hundred and twenty and I’ll come back in two hours.”
Around Tottenham Court Road there are a thousand different places waiting to be waited in, at no great cost. The University of London Union offered services including free toilets, if you knew where to look, a gym if you felt in a guilty mood and hadn’t found religion, a variety of pubs, and above all, cafés where no one would bother a guy who looked lived in and where the feeble