way in. If the spell was ever broken, a good swagger, and the shoes could take over again, recognise a familiar step, find the key to the magic.
So I swaggered, past old schools with portable cabins in the playing fields to make room for big classes pressed into a small space, past a swimming pool smelling even on the outside of thick chlorine, past little roundabouts which every driver swept across, careless of the rules of the road, past clamped vehicles and old broken telephone boxes. There was a bus stop, request; and seeing it I started to run, a strange, sideways lope, that made me feel like I had rickets. You can’t be cool and run for a bus; but I did, and got on it, knowing with absolute certainty that this was the right thing to do.
I swaggered to the back of the bus, the bottom deck, and sat myself in the darkest, hottest corner, knees stuck out, one foot propped up on the seat in front of me, hands draped out across the back of the bus like it was a throne and me the king. It’s easier if your whole body speaks the same language as your shoes; it’s another way to keep the spell.
At Old Street, my feet jerked towards the door and I followed, head bopping to a beat that even I couldn’t hear. I ambled down a long curved ramp, past several beggars, and didn’t give them a single penny. I would have - we would have - but not these shoes; they moved too fast, too cool, they weren’t going to stop.
It was late - rush hour dribbling to an end. I bounded down the escalator, elbowing passengers out of my way, swaggered onto the northbound platform, found a bench, sat on it, legs stretched out to occupy two seats with one movement, waited. The shoes hated waiting, tapped and fidgeted, but it was the Northern Line - waiting was what you did.
Train to King’s Cross; there we changed, going west to Baker Street; there we got out, and bought some kind of pasty that burnt through the paper that held it, ate it, crumbs across the seats, and rode the Jubilee Line north to Dollis Hill.
Dollis Hill. The area round the station felt not so much built as dropped down in a game of Monopoly. White houses too small for the floors they contained, streets too narrow for the cars that crawled through them.
Tired. It is tiring, sharing the journeys of a stranger. Late, now, late and no supper. I forced myself to walk like a human being when I came to the first pizza parlour that was open, ordered food, devoured it. It was past eleven when I finished, and my feet in my borrowed shoes felt like soggy prunes.
I walked again. Swaggered to get back into the feel of it, bobbed my head, twisted my hips, let the rhythm of the movement restore my confidence. We walked . . . miles. I don’t know how many. There were . . . things. Strangenesses. We would come to places and just stop and stare, and our feet would itch and we would see things, that . . . that made us uneasy.
A length of wall beside a quiet pub, where drunken youth should have sat, guffawing at passers-by and scaring the old ladies, and where now there was nothing. Just shadow and empty beer cans.
A skater park beneath a railway bridge, the wooden slopes empty, and on the walls, old graffiti.
Δοσ μου πισο το Καπελο μου
Or:
HMT GMO 2
Or:
FREE PALESTINE
There should have been something more. A “Mo was ’ere” wouldn’t have gone amiss. There was . . . a strangeness. A bite in the air, like the distant taste of the street from inside the tree-sheltered stretches of an urban cemetery. A sense of something that should have been, but wasn’t any more.
So we kept on walking, our swagger losing some of its confidence as the hours rolled by and all the places where there should have been something - the pub showing the football, the empty skater park, the closed off-licence, the houses with their lights turned down - there was nothing.
And then a telephone rang.
It was the small hours of the morning by then, and we were still walking, just walking and walking and the shoes wanted to go further, but a telephone rang, somewhere near Dudden Hill Lane.