TITLE: Soho
AUTHOR: Keith Waterhouse
PUBLISHER: Sceptre
COPYRIGHT: ©2001
ISBN: 0 340 76660 3
ABEB Version: 3.0
Created: 2004/10/23 @ 19:2
An mdf Scan & Proofread.
Sohoor Alex in Wonderland
Keith Waterhouse
Author’s Note
Since this is a work of fiction, I have permitted myself certain inexactitudes. For example, the Soho Waiters’ Race does not immediately precede the Soho Ball.
The setting is obviously real, as are most of the streets, although some are not. Most of the locations are made up; real ones appear only when they have an innocuous role to play. Most of the characters are fictitious and bear the usual non-resemblance to any person living – I will not necessarily add to any person dead. Where real personages appear they have only walk-on parts.
K.W.
Prelude
Except for the City itself, which after working hours is left to the caretakers and the cats and the odd penthouse millionaire, there is no London neighbourhood more resembling the restless downstream tide of the Thames than the ragged square mile of Soho.
Ask Christine. Christine Yardley is literally here today and gone tomorrow.
Here is here and now, but by this hour her five-inch heels are teetering on the threshold of a new day. It is dawn turning to watery sunlight as Christine latchkeys herself through a narrow doorway next to the darkened lobby of a marooned bed show, the last of its line in Soho, in Hog Court off Greek Street. The bank of illuminated doorbells is dimmed now, and all the other girls in the house are asleep. Not that Christine is of their number: she pays her own rent.
She kicks off her crippling shoes and climbs the four near-vertical flights to her room – roomette would be a better word – at the top of the house. She flops down on the unslept-in mattress on a wooden base that passes as a bed and throws back her pretty head to guzzle down the last dribble of Diet Coke from a sticky can on the cluttered bedside table doubling as a dressing-table. She lights a cigarette from a new packet of Benson and Hedges, a little present from an admirer.
She unzips her rubber dress from Zeitgeist in Peter Street and wriggles out of it. She adjusts her magnifying shaving mirror and removes her heavy makeup with Boots’ No. 7, must remember to buy another jar. She takes off her ear-rings, her false eyelashes, and her long blue nail extensions, and pops them in the compartmentalised British Airways foodtray, breakfast size, which is where she keeps her trinkets.
She peels off her stockings and underwear. Perching her cigarette on the ashtray stolen from the ladies’ at Soho House she levers herself into a corner shower cabinet the size of an upright coffin. The trickle of water is near freezing but she is careful to sponge away all traces of her heavy body perfume. She dries herself off and sprays herself with Sport deodorant. She shaves.
She tosses her underwear in the sink to soak. She rolls up her stockings and suspender belt and drops them in a deep cardboard carton, her underwear drawer, in the curtained recess that serves as a wardrobe. From another cardboard box she retrieves St Michael underpants and socks and dons them, then takes a shirt from a wire coat-hanger. She hangs up the rubber dress and takes down a grey business suit.
Soon Christine Yardley is dressed again, but not as Christine Yardley. It is Christopher Yardley who descends the stairs and walks around the corner to the Bar Italia in Frith Street. After a frugal breakfast of a caffè latte and a roll, he strolls along Old Compton Street, across Cambridge Circus to Shaftesbury Avenue and then to Holborn and out of Soho.
It is quite a walk to Fenchurch Street where, a Sohoite no longer until this time next week, he toils on VAT returns and suchlike for a firm of accountants, but he has all the time in the world before he must be at his desk, and he needs this break to adjust from one body to the other. This evening he will go home to his divorced mum in Ruislip, who thinks he spends these weekly nights away working at the firm’s south coast branch in Bournemouth.
Christopher has been shuttling between one life and another in this way for five years now, and so far as he knows no one in the legitimate Square Mile has ever twigged his secret, although there was a narrow shave near Ludgate Circus once when responding to stares he discovered he was still wearing lapis-lazuli drop ear-rings, bad lapse, that. In the illegitimate Square Mile, of course, everyone is perfectly aware that Christine is a Christopher and that Christopher is a Christine, but they neither know nor care what persona he assumes away from Soho.
Live and let live, that’s Soho’s motto, if a pretty sanctimonious one at times. In any case, when it comes to passing off, the illegitimate Square Mile can no more lay claim to being an authentic square mile than Christopher can claim to be an authentic Christine. Nearer half a square mile would be more like it, if you lop off its adjoining territories such as the other side of the Charing Cross Road and bits of Covent Garden and a few streets north of Oxford Street, which are Soho spiritually but not quite geographically.
Not that Soho itself really exists as a map reference. As its self-appointed historian Len Gates points out at length to any tourist he can manage to ensnare whenever he comes across them consulting a map, it is not a borough, merely a parish – the parish of St Anne’s, although the parish church itself was bombed flat in the war and only its tower remains. A parish, and a voting ward – of Westminster City Council, which from time to time in its planning zeal has done its best to remove Soho from the face of the earth.
But if that ever happened – and Len, puffing at his pipe and shaking the dandruff out of his off-white locks, is still full of fears when he sees yet another baker’s shop becoming yet another boutique, just as in the old days it would have become yet another porn shop – Soho would simply spring up somewhere else.
For Soho is fluid. Gerrard Street, where it all began (Len will show you where Dr Johnson and his cronies used to hang out) is now the High Street of Chinatown and but an outpost of Soho, another of those adjoining territories which like Baltic states are of the neighbourhood yet not quite of its nationality. Soho’s own High Street is Old Compton Street, its loose boundaries Oxford Street to the north, Charing Cross Road to the east, Shaftesbury Avenue to the south and Regent Street to the west.
Within these invisible city walls, Soho’s permanent tally of residents these days, the rents being what they are, amounts to probably no more than three thousand souls, most of them living over the shop or more likely over someone else’s shop. The strength of a sizeable village, which is what some of its residents sentimentally claim it to be. It’s a matter of opinion.
Stephan Dance, not his real name but the one he chooses to go by, and the owner of three of Soho’s surviving porn video shops, calls Soho his village because he has his breakfast croissant and cappuccino at Patisserie Valerie in Old Compton Street and buys his charcuterie and cheese from Fratelli Camisa in Berwick Street and his coffee beans from Angelucci in Frith Street. But Stephan takes his groceries home to Monk Wood St Mary’s in Bucks, where he has a substantial ranch-style home, and that really is a village, with approximately the same number of residents. The difference is that while both in Soho and Monk Wood St Mary’s Stephan Dance knows where to borrow a cup of sugar, in Monk Wood St Mary’s he would be hard put to find someone prepared, at a price, to torch one of his three establishments, the loss-leader, for the insurance. Or alternatively, to burn down the rival sex shop over in Frith Place, for the increased turnover.
And something else that doesn’t happen in Monk Wood St Mary’s is that daily, nightly, shift by shift, Soho’s population is swelled twentyfold by immigrants from the suburbs flocking in to work, or if not to work, then to eat, or drink, or loiter. Kitchen staff, bar staff, waiters, casuals, cashiers, cleaners, office workers, shop assistants, film cutters, dress designers, agents, solicitors’ clerks, civil servants, market traders, bookmakers, hairdressers, craftsmen, club hostesses, hustlers, hookers, pimps, pushers and mug punters. People with homes to go to, when Soho has finished with them or they have finished with Soho.
But not all Sohoites are there daily, or nightly, to answer to the roll-call. There are those who are of Soho but, owing to circumstances, not in it. They set up their own Soho colonies in Notting Hill or Highgate or the Fulham Road where, playing by Soho rules – the main one of which is that any visible cashflow is communal – and conducting themselves as Old Compton Street remittance men, they languish in exile until, their sins expunged, their enemies now with fresher grudges, their debts paid off or more likely written off, they are free to edge back to the Old Country. There are pubs ten miles away from Dean Street that are spiritually as Soho as the French House. And doubtless there is a wing of Soho in Wormwood Scrubs.
This breed cross-hatches with another – those who are in Soho but not of it. We could find a good number of this type in and around Wardour Street, where the likes of Ellis Hugo Bell, a.k.a. Bell Famous Productions Ltd, have their offices and cutting rooms, many of them even smaller than the others.
Bell rather despises Soho, actually. Spent force. While he lives and works in a fourth-floor walk-up in Crispin’s Yard off Wardour Street, where he rents a chamber the size of a restaurant cloakroom lobby which is his home, his office, and more importantly, his W1 postal address, he dreams of an apartment in New York City and another in Beverly Hills.
This will be when he has got his screenplay Kill Me Nicely, working title, off the ground. Kill Me, as it is colloquially known, at least to Bell, is based on an unpublished novel by a former flatmate, Kim Grizzard, a fact of which the author is as yet unaware since to acquaint him with the news would possibly involve Bell in paying for an option on the film rights, which he is not only unwilling but unable to do until he has got his deal together.
In any case, having changed not only the title but the storyline and the sex of the protagonist, he is in with a sporting chance of Kim never recognising it as his own work, especially if he is on one of his drinking jags when the movie is released. Kim’s novel has a masochistic gay Soho waiter, a resting actor really, wanting to be strangled for fun and succeeding in this ambition. Bell has a masochistic cocktail waitress trying unsuccessfully to get herself murdered for kicks, being saved by the bell when her hired would-be killer falls in love with her.
He sees Madonna in the part, or maybe she is too old by now. All right, then he is thinking Demi Moore, he is thinking Sharon Stone, he is thinking Brooke Shields, he is thinking Linda Evangelista, he is thinking that stunning chick in the drinking-chocolate commercial, what’s her name again?, if she isn’t star material then Bell is no judge. To play opposite her he is thinking Leonardo DiCaprio, he is thinking Tom Cruise. At this moment in time it is all up in the air. Anything could happen. If he could get Daniel Auteuil then he would transfer the action to Paris. Take an apartment there. Rewrite the screenplay there. Or rather, write the screenplay there, since it has yet to be developed from a three-page outline.
And then – tomorrow the world. The penthouse. The platinum credit cards. The Porsches, plural. The membership of the kind of clubs that give you a gold key.
But first Ellis Hugo Bell of Bell Famous Productions Ltd has got to raise the sum of four hundred pounds, before he is once again welcome to cross the threshold of the Choosers Club in Greek Street, where you don’t need a gold key or any kind of key but where your bar bill has to be paid up to date, and so does your dealer’s. Bell owes a bar bill of nearly two hundred pounds, and the same amount, in exact figures, to his dealer, Danny.
Cashflow-wise, Bell Famous Productions has been going through a bad patch. There have been times when even though its chairman, managing director and principal shareholder has got the requisite gear, on credit, he has not been able to lay his hands on the equally essential ten-pound note to roll up for snorting purposes. Not that he really needs to snort, until he is seriously working on the screenplay, but to operate as a producer-writer-director (maybe not director: he is thinking one or two guys whose names he cannot currently remember, but who appreciated the pitched outline) he needs to hang out with the kind of guys he needs to hang out with, and where are they to be found except in the Choosers? The Groucho? Soho House? No way. Wankers all – Bell has been there.
But the Choosers has begun to shake its head at him, and Danny, at the end of the bar, if that’s where he is, or downstairs in the marble-flanked washroom if he happens to be doing business at the moment, has taken to holding up two fingers. Bell Famous Productions is – only temporarily, of course – in hiccup mode. Two fingers means two hundred and it has to be found twice over, before he can even begin to dream.
Unsentimental Ellis Hugo Bell, who is not strong on research, either into his own mercurial projects or the mercurial mini-planet he finds himself inhabiting, wouldn’t properly realise that even beyond the chrome and glass confines of the Choosers Club (known to Private Eye, inevitably, as the Losers Club), he walks in a realm of dreamers. Had he ever allowed Len Gates to grasp his sharp lapel, he would have known that it has been so ever since Soho was invented, with the ultimate purpose of accommodating, in the fullness of time, the likes of Bell Famous Productions Ltd.
We have to go back in time, and then fast-forward. Seen through a camera’s viewfinder, Soho (as it would not occur to the pedestrian Len Gates, to whom history is buildings, to look at it), has known three periods – sepia, black and white, and colour. For anything earlier you would have to look in a print gallery, at those so-elegant, so Len Gates engravings of grandees in their grand town houses in grand squares, before the refugees came teeming in from every ghetto in Europe, with their shoemakers’ lasts and tailors’ thimbles and lacemaking machines and carpenters’ tools and watchmakers’ lenses and jewellers’ scales, to transform the parish of St Anne’s into the seething mini-cosmopolis it has ever since been.
In its sepia days Soho was a honeycomb of one-room workshops, delicatessens, charcuteries, coffee blenders, newsagents, cheese importers, wine shops, barber shops, shoemakers, jewellers, pubs, tobacconists, open-fronted greengrocers whose pyramids of oranges spilled down into the gutters, and dozens, no, scores, of cramped little cafés and restaurants, French, Italian, Greek and German. Old Jakie, selling his Evening Standards at the side of the Prince Edward Theatre, a pitch he has known since it was the old London Casino, remembers eating three courses for one and thruppence in those sepia days, when the riot of bleached shop blinds gave the corner of Old Compton Street and Dean Street the look of a three-masted schooner in full sail.
There is a touch of the sepia about Old Jakie himself. Nobody knows quite how old he is but he goes so far back that when he was born over the Welsh Dairy in Romilly Street it wasn’t yet called Romilly Street, but Church Street. Old Jakie’s first job on leaving Soho Parish School in Great Windmill Street was delivering milk to the cafés and tavernas from that same Welsh Dairy. Then he sold papers, as he does now. Then he was a market porter in Berwick Street, scene-shifter at the Apollo Theatre, window-cleaner, bookie’s runner, three-card-trick frontman (the ostentatious “winner” who pulls in the punters), amusement-arcade minder – and all without setting foot outside Soho. Then the Welsh Dairy was turned into a sex shop and he worked there for a spell too – back to square one, as he used to say.
Old Jakie is so ancient, and so sepia, he can remember your so-called Bohemians trickling across into Soho from what they used to call Fitzrovia, after the Fitzroy Tavern – North Soho or NoHo as some of them call it now, or NoGo as irreverent Soho has it. Artists, poets, that crowd. That Augustus John. That Dylan Thomas, piss artist he was supposed to have been. But Old Jakie had never seen him handle more than a half, and that he made last all night. The French pub he used to use, they all did. And there was one reason and one reason only why they deserted Fitzrovia and took up Soho in Old Jakie’s opinion, and that was because south of Oxford Street the pubs in those days stayed open half an hour later. And that was why they came, for that last half-hour. And when the pubs closed they either went on to the old Gargoyle Club or the Café Royal, where so long as you had a sandwich in front of you, you could drink till all hours. Old Jakie knew that for a certain fact because he had worked in the Café Royal kitchens, washer-up, ten bob for the night, and come closing time the waiters would barge in through the green baize door with these plates of sandwiches the punters had left, because all they wanted was the drink; and that would be Old Jakie’s supper.
There were many other things Old Jakie could remember, including how long since he had been barred from the Coach and Horses for doing so at length. These days he reminisces only briefly, and by request. This is seldom forthcoming, for considering its colourful past Soho is surprisingly unnostalgic – it has always lived for the day.
Black and white Soho comes next in the album – its best days, according to some. The war years and beyond, when the whole neighbourhood was seen through a pall of cigarette smoke (it has since become a “City of Westminster Air Quality Improvement Area”), and the girls, or Fifis as they were known, were as thick on the pavements as the pigeons in Trafalgar Square. All street life was there. Archer Street seethed with out-of-work musicians hanging around outside their union offices, hoping for session jobs. The shop doorways, where they didn’t harbour hookers, accommodated chefs and their commis coming up for a breath of coffee-scented air. Skulking dirty macs in search of what Soho calls “the Vice” contrasted with expensive camelhair overcoats draped across Italian shoulders. Clusters of drinkers, like witnesses to an accident, would congregate outside the French House – still, then, called the York Minster – and the Coach and Horses. Everyone wore a hat, and everyone was smoking.
Somewhere in that black and white montage you should find Else – Else for Elsie? Else for Elspeth? No one has ever known her first name, let alone her second – probably lighting one of her customary panatellas from the gasolier on the mahogany counter of the old cigar store on Old Compton Street. It’s a boutique now. As is Old Jakie’s Welsh Dairy, which first became a sex shop.
Soho wasn’t Soho without Else. And, even more alarmingly, still isn’t. She is one of the fixtures, a kind of human bollard.
She was a pretty young thing in those black and white days, Else. She always claims to have modelled for Francis Bacon and maybe she did, though nobody has ever seen the end result – it would probably look nothing like her, by the time he’d finished – which she says is owned by a rich New York collector. Augustus John she sat for: that’s well known. There are sketches and photographs of Else by lesser lights, when she was young and beautiful. Trouble is, she’s barred from most of the places that have them on their walls.
Even back in that black and white era, you couldn’t take Else anywhere. But then you didn’t have to – she was everywhere. If you went into the Coach, she was in the Coach. If you left the Coach and went into the French, she was in the French. These days, of course, you won’t find her in either place, or in any other pub that has seen her coming. That’s because over the years Else has got into the unfortunate habit of incontinence. So if she has managed to get into one or other pub while the guvnor’s back was turned, you can always tell she’s been by the faint whiff of panatella smoke, the faint whiff of Else, and the little damp patch on the bar stool where a cat with kidney trouble might have been dozing.
But that’s now, with Soho in living colour, when the likes of Else are not wanted. Then was then. In the black and white days Else was the life and soul of the party. A fixture in Aux Caves de France, but if you got fed up of buying her drinks – she was rarely in a position to buy drinks herself: no money, honey – and took yourself off to the Colony Room Club two doors away, she would have got there before you. The Colony Room, still known as Muriel’s although it’s years now since Muriel went under the sod. The Gargoyle. The Kismet, a.k.a. the Iron Lung. Why did they have all those clubs – over four hundred of them in and around the district at the height – when Soho itself was one big club?
We move on. The old Iron Lung is now a pizza parlour. The butcher’s in Brewer Street has become a champagne and oyster bar. Ten years ago it would have become a sex shop. Nowadays in Soho it is easier to buy a Filofax than a filthy mag, and easier to get a vodka martini than have your clock repaired, and the girls sipping their house bubbly in Kettner’s Champagne Bar who call themselves models, really are models this time round, limbering up for the Soho Fashion Fair at the Café Royal. We are in colour.
Most of Old Jakie’s distantly remembered Bohemians are long gone, dead of cirrhosis of the liver or retired to the country or gone legit with Arts Council grants and BBC contracts. Ellis Hugo Bell, thinking Courtney Love, thinking Minnie Driver, is, along with his Wardour Street friends and enemies, a more typical Soho habitué these days; and the state-of-the-art chrome and glass restaurants and open-fronted cafés, with their tiled floors and bentwood tables, more typical than the nicotine-drenched wining and dining garrets of Soho’s black and white and sepia periods.
As Old Jakie tells it, a local authority which once actively encouraged the bulldozing of Soho, to replace it with thirty-storey bleeding tower blocks, a six-lane bleeding highway and elevated bleeding concrete walkways from Oxford Street to Shaftesbury Avenue, finally decided that if it couldn’t beat them it would join them, and after initially resisting the spread of pavement cafés on the grounds that they would impede any two handicapped people trying to pass one another in wheelchairs (only Jeffrey Bernard was passing by in a wheelchair, and he didn’t mind), it eagerly did its best, as is the way of city councils after the reprieve of a disastrous planning decision, to back-pedal by gentrifying the area to within an inch of its life, with hanging flower baskets, cobbled pedestrian areas, and a sanitised street market. Len Gates approves: he calls it regeneration. Old Jakie has another view: “If they can’t fuck it up in one way, they’ll fuck it up in another.”
But you can’t keep old Soho down. Behind the designer glitz and the chrome and the black leather armchairs there still survives more than a goodly handful of sex shops and strip shows – ask Stephan Dance, although he’ll say the game is finished; and models of the old sort still occupy second-floor walk-ups in the newly cobbled alleys, although more discreetly nowadays, behind their lit-up doorbells. And there are still a few of the old Soho drinking clubs. The Colony Room is still there. Gerry’s Club is there, and thriving. So is Kemble’s, the rival actors’ club, and struggling. The old Kismet Club in Great Newport Street is, as we know, no more, but the new Kismet Club at the end of Frith Place, no relation, staggers on.
According to Mabel, who owns the place, there won’t be any drinking clubs like the New Kismet still going a year or two from now, not the way the licensing laws are being liberalised. There aren’t all that many of them left now – a dozen, perhaps, if you’re talking about ordinary drinking clubs, places you’d once go to when the pubs had to close in the afternoons, as against gambling clubs, most of them in Chinatown, or clubs for specialised trades such as waiters or chefs or criminals.
Golden days, Mabel calls that wonderfully repressive era when you couldn’t get a drink legally for fourteen and a half hours out of the twenty-four. Her membership register was like a starstruck fan’s autograph book – Charlie Chaplin, Bing Crosby, Humphrey Bogart, Laurence Olivier. And then there were even those who came off the street and signed themselves in under their own names, for some strange reason. Genuine addresses too, in some cases. You’d think they wanted to be arrested.
Mabel had opened the New Kismet when the old Kismet in Great Newport Street had closed, and she had never looked back until just lately. Afternoons only the New Kismet was these days, three till seven, that was enough for Mabel at her age, then they could bugger off back to the French or the Coach or wherever they wanted. It is getting so it is all the same to Mabel whether they come down or not. Time to be putting her feet up. Little place in Brighton. Soho by the Sea.
“Are you a member, sir? Go on, then, fuck off, this is a private club,” she calls mechanically as young James Flood tentatively rounds the bend in the shabby staircase. Mabel models herself on the legendary Muriel Belcher, of the Colony Room Club, for whom she did the odd stint as a barmaid back in the old black and white days. The cattier members say she has borrowed Muriel’s pugnaciousness but none of her personality.
Too late James Flood recalls that he really is a member – one of a tiny select band who have actually paid over their twenty-five pounds dues and received a grubby pasteboard oblong in return. Too late Mabel remembers it also – he has bolted.
Poor James is too young and too nervous to be working in Fleet Street – certainly too young and too green to be on the Soho beat. The Soho beat is a new venture for the daily London Examiner. Its editor Jane Rich, herself newish, was dining in the Groucho Club one evening when the celebrated television personality Brendan Barton was escorted out for urinating into a plantpot. It occurred to her that there must be a thousand news stories in Soho. There are indeed, but none of them has as yet been divulged to young James, who has been assigned to the task of finding them. Soho knows how to keep its secrets.
Certainly there would have been nothing for him in the New Kismet where the only other customer, at this hour, getting on for seven, is Jenny Wise, actress, nursing her last triple brandy, no ice, no soda. If young Flood watched more old films on the box he might just have recognised her. He would half know the name, anyway. In her day Jenny Wise was going to be another Julie Christie, but then she didn’t quite become it. She did get some star billing back in the mid-sixties, though. Big mates with Diana Dors, Bonar Colleano, that crowd, she was. Invites to all the openings at the Odeon, Leicester Square. No stranger to the White Elephant, where Rex Harrison once blew her a kiss.
Jenny, now, is a bit of a link between the Soho of Old Jakie and the Soho of Bell Famous Productions Ltd. Old Jakie, from his flyman days, remembers her playing the juve lead in some play or other at the Apollo – always very nice to him, she was, gave him many a fag. Ellis Hugo Bell, for all that he is definitely not thinking Jenny Wise – he is thinking Kate Winslet, he is thinking some of these new models, that’s if they can act – knows her from Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s Companion and the Sky Movie channels. That Tell Me Tomorrow was her big break, playing opposite James Mason. Then a couple of others, more downmarket, more B-feature, you were then thinking Eric Portman, you were thinking that fellow who finished up doing voiceovers. And then nothing. The usual route. Arms like a dartboard by the time she’d finished, silly bitch – not that Hugo hadn’t tried shooting up, but he didn’t have to be at Shepperton at six the next morning, did he? – and then when she’d got herself weaned off that, the booze. The hard stuff. Still not yet sixty, still keeping her looks although she’s getting fleshy with it, she has her regular stool at the end of the bar in the New Kismet, the one always occupied in Soho clubs by ladies of a certain age who seem to celebrate a lot of birthdays.
Worked on, there could be a story after all in Jenny Wise for the Soho correspondent of the Examiner, if only she wasn’t speechless. By this time of the evening, Jenny can only slur.
“Come on, Jen, let’s have you pissed off up them stairs to Bedfordshire,” says Mabel, not unkindly. As always, she asks: “Now are you going to be all right?”
Yes, Jenny will be all right as she pushes her brandy aside for tomorrow, gathers up her bits and pieces and gropes her way up the stairs, with Mabel behind her to put the chain on the door and catch her if she falls. She’s only to get across to her little flat in Charing Cross Road where she will crash down until three in the morning, breakfast time.
As Jenny’s day ends, so Soho’s begins. Ronnie Scott’s will be tuning up by now, and the Raymond Revuebar throwing open its doors. Give the drag haunt Madame Jo-Jo’s, a favourite with Christine a.k.a. Christopher, a couple of hours yet, but most of the club bars and pubs have already filled up. Soon the greeters will be taking up their posts in the smart new brasseries, and the waiters will hover anxiously in the doorways of the dingy old restaurants as if fearing they will never see a customer again. There is not a table to be had in the pavement cafés, the human flotsam and jetsam are crowding the streets now, the traffic is crawling, the discreet illuminated doorbells glow as dusk closes in.
It is another day beginning in Soho, one day like any other day – that is to say, different from every other one.
1
Butterfield’s Rhubarb Farms Ltd, of South Higginshaw, just outside Leeds, had a firm policy guideline for its truckers: no hitch-hikers.
This was because one of its lorries, in the old pre-refrigeration days, had been hijacked at air-pistol point and made to drive across the Pennines to Rochdale, where the gunman’s auntie, from whom he had expectations, was terminally poorly. By the time thirty tons of rhubarb finally made it down south it had gone limp and the wholesaler was not best pleased.
But Dave Boothroyd, driving an articulated eighteen-wheeler down to New Covent Garden, liked a bit of company, what with the terrible reception he was getting on Radio 5 Live, the only station he ever listened to. Even in this high-tech age the tachograph didn’t show if you stopped to give some poor bugger a lift, and another thing: there was an old Spanish custom that the hitcher stood you a fry-up at the Happy Eater south of Doncaster.
“Don’t see you in the Miners much these days, kidder,” said Dave over two rashers, egg, sausage, beans, black pudding and fried slice. The Miners Arms, South Higginshaw. Changed its name to the Cross-eyed Beagle after a makeover, but was still, to its regulars, the Miners.
“No, I been spending moster my time in Leeds,” said Alex Singer. Alexander to his mum, Alex to his muckers, Al to close friends, Ali to the girl-friend. “Did do, before she pissed off.”
“You’re at the uni, aren’t you, Alex?”
“Metro, yeh.” Leeds Metropolitan University, third year, media studies.
“I might be wrong, kidder, but didn’t you have a bit of a beard, last time I saw you? Little goatee?”
“Chin beard, yeh yeh yeh.”
“Excuse me, Alex, but I was under the distinct impression that the biggest majority of beards grew on chins. As I say, I could be wrong.”
“It’s what they’re called, Dave – chin beards. They’re like a style statement.”
“So what happened to it?”
“Shaved it off, didn’t I? She didn’t like it. In fact she blurry hated it.”
“Why – tickled her muff when you went down on her, did it?”
Alex thought this a touch offensive, coming from someone he barely knew, in fact had never spoken a word to until he’d thumbed a lift on the South Higginshaw slip road. On the other hand, he had to get to London. Urgent. Top priority. Alex said nothing.
Dave mopped up egg yolk and tomato pips with a morsel of fried bread. “So what’s she called, this lasser yours?”
“Selby.”
“Selby!” echoed Da...
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