Charlotte Street (15 page)

Dev would love this stuff. He’d save it; savour it. He’d look forward to wearing his Guinness hat each March, and doubtless would use the fat cotton cat in the Nissan, hoping it might be a conversation starter at traffic lights. I made a note to bring him something back soon as a token of appreciation. He knew I needed to get away. So he’d got me away.

I looked around the office and spotted them. Two giant yellow Hulk Hogan wearable foam fists and a
Hogan Knows Best
DVD.

They were Dev’s. Soon, I mean. Once I’d been here a bit. Once I’d
earned
them.

I sat quietly, like the new boy, not daring to do much else in case I got into trouble, somehow. Yeah, so my name had been a regular fixture in the paper for the past year or so, but I wasn’t one of them. Not yet. I was one of the others. The people drafted in to fill space. The people who usually had some special
little section to work on and file. Like the property girl, who’d write stories either about how property was getting more expensive, or about how property was getting a bit cheaper. The showbiz guru (sample story – and this was an exclusive:
Sienna Miller says she’d love to turn her hand to singing, but she is also happy to concentrate on acting for now
). The weekly gadget round-up (
Kettles are in!
). Motoring. Sport. An uninforming Celebrity Questionnaire (sample question:
If you were a type of fruit, what type of fruit would you be?)
Health. Wealth. And Reviews.
My
section. All of it designed to be read, half-digested and discarded in the time the marketing people had decided was the same as the average tube journey through London: twenty minutes.

I decided to get to work, starting with Rob’s in-tray. There were releases already opened, for film premieres and cocktail parties and album launches. Exciting. Maybe I should throw myself into the scene, become like one of those women you see in films. I could change my outfit every few minutes and buy new shoes and be fabulous as I saunter around Manhattan eating canapés and catching cabs. Except this is Britain. And more specifically, this is Britain on a weeknight. Over here on a Monday, Carrie Bradshaw would have to make do with just changing her cagoule every few minutes, and being fabulous as she saunters around Westfields eating warm sushi and catching colds. Still, I thought, as I opened more mail, where else could she be invited to attend the launch of a new Ryman’s on Kentish Town Road? What was Carrie Bradshaw doing on the 6
^th
of next month? Was she going to the upstairs room of a pub in South West London to watch a bad band called Ogre Face kick off their six-date regional tour of upstairs rooms in pubs? No. But it looked like I would be.

I slit open a slim package. Another CD from another band. The Kicks.

Might as well start.

I pressed play on the stereo while I opened more mail. The people at Jaffa Cakes had sent a box of Jaffa Cakes and a note all about the future of Jaffa Cakes, and about how popular Jaffa Cakes not only were but are and will be. They were using the words ‘Jaffa Cakes’ quite a lot.

Hey, I thought, flipping round the cover of the CD. This isn’t bad. I studied it.

The Kicks: ‘Uh-Oh’.

It was … good. I mean, I’m no muso. I know the difference between 6Music and Classic; I bought Melody Maker when I was at college; I know who Steve Lamacq is and I once sat quite near Zane Lowe in a pub with copper tables, but I’m not one of those guys who can hear a band and immediately cite their influences and probable heroes. There are guys like that out there. Play them the first drumbeat and they’ll start banging on about Led Zeppelin or Limp Bizkit or how everything can be traced back to the man who wrote the Birdie Song. Dev can do it with videogames. He can take one look at a game and tell you what it’s trying to be, where it got the idea, what it’s been crossed with and how well it’s done, but I just can’t. Because I’m the other sort of person. A Type 2. One that judges everything on its own merits. Not because it’s the right and just and fair thing to do, but because there’s something about me that doesn’t quite have that passion. That need for peripheral knowledge. I like a little of everything; I don’t need it all. It can make conversations with the Type 1s a little strained. A Type 1 will have all his opinions ready to go and probably alphabetised before he even gets near you. A Type 2 will then shrink behind his sandwich.

Maybe Reviews Editor will suit me, I think. Maybe my speciality is not having a speciality. Though I do know quite a bit about Hall & Oates.

(Where it all started?
(She) Got Me Bad
. Best song?
Las Vegas Turnaround
. Best album?
Big Bam Boom
. Best member?
Hall. Or Oates, if you prefer him
. Best—.)

‘The hell’s this?’ said a voice, suddenly there. I span round in my chair – Rob’s chair, whatever – and turned the music down. It was Zoe.

‘The Kicks,’ I said, trying to sound as instantly knowledgeable and insightful as John Peel. ‘Brighton band, gigging around, this is “Uh-Oh”.’

‘The single or the album?’

Tsk. I’d have to look. John Peel wouldn’t have had to look.

Distract her.

‘Hey, I brought croissants like you said. And some other stuff.’

‘Jaffa Cakes, too?’

‘They’re from … well, they’re from Jaffa Cakes.’

And it was with this inspiring and profound exchange of words that I, Jason Priestley, began my tenure as Reviews Editor of
London Now
.

I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you as little as possible about my working day for now. You don’t need to know. Not really you don’t. You don’t need to know that I had a Toffee Crisp and an apple at eleven, that I popped back out to Pret at just gone one where I bought myself a crayfish wrap and a Coke. You don’t need to know that Clem was twenty minutes late, or that Zoe said Clem was
always
twenty minutes late, and you certainly don’t need to know that after I’d sorted out exactly what reviews should go to exactly what reviewers, I played a game of
Castle Defence
and ate a Twix.

All you need to know is that I was happy. This is what I’d wanted when I’d left St John’s. An office. Somewhere to sit,
people to sit with, lunch hours where I’d buy crayfish wraps and Cokes. A little bubble of security and company.

I’d had company at the school, of course. In the staff room. The place we suddenly weren’t teachers any more, the place we didn’t have to be moral arbiters in. It was pretty easy to be cynical there. It was encouraged, if anything. When you’re spending all day telling people how to behave and what not to say, that staff room is a little beacon of beige joy. A release. A glorious place in which the pressure lifts from your shoulders the second you find your mug and pile your instant coffee and sugars in it and you’re suddenly locked in a battle to see who can say the most inappropriate thing about a child. The time it takes the kettle to boil is the time in which you and your colleagues have already put down most of the kids you’ve ever met, and when I say ‘put down’ I think you know what some of them
wish
they meant. They say only those who’ve seen warfare can ever truly understand each other. It’s much the same with playground duty. And then there was the grim inevitability of the assemblies. Public speaking is not and never will be my thing. I’d managed to sneak out of assembly duty all but once and I’d vowed never to do it again. There is nothing more dispiriting than giving a motivational speech to the terminally unmotivateable. It’s very demotivating. Especially when no one in the room – you, least of all – believes in what you’re saying.

But despite it all – despite the kids, and despite their parents, who could never quite see what the point of teachers was, who seemed to confuse school with daycare – I carried on. I would probably never have left. Not if it weren’t for Dylan Bale.

I shuddered, and put his angry little face out of my head.

Because it was six o’clock, and I didn’t want to think about kids like Dylan Bale.

And anyway. I had somewhere to be.

Charlotte Street was awash with people like me. Good, honest workers, done for the day, with their manbags and gladrags, spilling out of the Fitzroy and packing the Northumberland, and each of them looking very happy indeed. I’d walked straight past them all. I was round the corner, tucked away in the tiniest pub on Rathbone Street, not feeling I’d quite earned my place amongst the high-achievers with their branded satchels and limited-edition Converse. There were students and men in Chelsea shirts outside the Newman Arms, pointing at the sign that says Percy Passage and laughing, their Peronis and Fosters slopping out of their glasses and slapping onto the pavement every time they did. That was the thing about Fitzrovia. Plenty of sidestreets and passages; the curse of a bunch of minor landowners, each having their say and doing their own unordered thing with their puny part of London, with never a thought to the future. Marylebone or Bloomsbury next door wouldn’t have a Percy Passage. They’d have a Percy Square, or a Percy Buildings.

That’s why Fitzrovia wins.

I kept an eye out for the boys. They’d be here in a minute, with their research.

Matt had been amazed when he’d seen it. He’d just pointed at it, and said, ‘Look!’ And then he’d pointed at it some more, because we were looking – really looking – but all we could see was a car. Turns out it wasn’t just a car to Matt.

‘Ha!’

I turned. Dev had wandered in. He was pointing behind him.

‘Percy Passage!’

I could sense the barman tensing. I wondered how many times he’d heard that today. I wondered after how many years exactly it had lost its charm.

‘How was your first day at big school?’ said Dev, sitting down.

‘It was good.’

‘Did you tell them about the Level Up section?’

‘I thought you were calling it Game Over?’

‘Level Up is far more powerful. Game Over sounds like something kids would read.’

‘Well, I’ve not mentioned it. I didn’t want to come in and start proposing new features just yet.’

‘You should! Prove your worth! Put ideas forward! People love that! Our jobs
revolve
around ideas.’

‘You work in a videogame shop.’

‘Dreams, Jase! I deal in dreams! I can make you a pilot. A tank commander. A superhero. I can make you a little blue hedgehog. I am like a wizard, or a dreamweaver, or a more masculine version of that girl out of
Bewitched
. Just this morning I made someone into Daley Thompson.’

He sipped at his pint and made an important face, like not just anyone in North London could make someone into Daley Thompson.

‘I was right,’ were the words I heard next. ‘The car.’

Matt sat down heavily beside us.

‘It’s rare.
Really
rare.’

He looked excited, and brought the photo out from his pocket. His fingers were oily and I was annoyed to register his hands were far more manly than mine.

‘Bryn from work reckons only twelve were ever made but he thought it was a Facel Vega Excellence. It’s actually not.’

‘Well, that helps.’

‘It’s a Facel Vega
something
, though, and it’s from the 60s,’ said Matt, maybe pleased to be teaching
me
something. ‘Only eleven hundred made. Dunno how many are left.’

I looked again at the photo. The car was green, and well-looked-after,
and other than that there wasn’t much I could tell you. It had some wheels. But in the foreground, there she was, looking delighted. A delighted girl, under a bruised sky, near a green car. This was like Cluedo for oddballs.

‘I’m not really sure where this is getting me,’ I said.

‘You could find her, man! It’s another clue! Like Whitby! Find the car, find The Girl!’

‘She’s only standing near it. And not even
very
near it. It’s over her shoulder. And it’s not like we have access to police files, is it?’

‘It’s a clue, man!’

He laughed, incredulously, and a moment later, Dev did too, but then he shrugged at me.

‘I dunno, maybe there’s a classic cars club where this is registered,’ said Dev. ‘Maybe it belongs to a neighbour of hers. Or her … friend.’

Yeah. The chunky watch tan man. Of course he’d have a classic car. One of only twelve. That was
just
like this man I didn’t know.

I picked up the photo again.

‘I
suppose
it’s a clue,’ I said.

‘Of course it’s a clue!’ said Dev. ‘Look, this car might be a red herring, but it’s something. It’s—’

‘A fish,’ I said, reminded of something. ‘It’s a fish.’

There was an awkward moment.

‘Look,’ I said, quietly, pointing at something I’d just noticed in the photo. There was a building behind them. A huge, white building, at the very end of the road they were on. And, just near the top, you could make out half a word. The bottom half.

‘Alaska,’ said Dev, taking it from me.

‘Can’t be – that’s a right-hand drive car. British made. S’pose import’s an option, but—’

‘It’s not
in
Alaska,’ I said. ‘It must just be the name of the building. What is it, a factory? Maybe it’s a factory. Maybe she works at the factory.’

‘What would they make there?’ said Dev. ‘No one makes Alaskans. They’re just … Alaskans.’

‘I dunno,’ I said, because suddenly my mind was racing, and I picked up the other photos and started rifling through them, too, and an odd thought occurred to me: I’d learnt how to see.

I read this book once, called
Your Inner Fish
. It was about a scientist who became obsessed with finding a 375-million-year-old fossil of a fish he reckoned we all came from. It was halfway between the journey from speck of dust to chest-thumping monkey, and it was a fish with a neck, and the beginnings of wrists. It was the fish that made it out of the confusion of the water, and into the vast unknown of the world. And without that fish, that world would always
remain
unknown. We’d
have
no world. No things to do or places to be. No girls in cabs, no Percy Passage, no straight, no gay, no soup of the day, no nothing. This man, he ended up in the Canadian Arctic, with a bunch of other scientists, all also looking for the same fossils, and he spent weeks following them about, despairing every time they spotted one and he didn’t. What did other people have that he didn’t? What was missing?